“What now?” Kevin asked me. He avoided the bloodstains and went around to the other side of the couch, where he wouldn’t have to look at what he’d done. “She’ll come after us, you know. She’s not going to let us go. All she has to do is tell him to find us.”
He had the perfume vial in his pocket, stuffed in among a pack of condoms that at this rate he probably would never need. Nothing hard enough for me to shatter the glass against. Pure luck, probably. He wasn’t clever enough to protect it on purpose.
I stayed where I was, in a crouch, touching the evidence of his guilt. “Yeah, well, if you still want me to kill her, I’m up for it.”
“Really?” Hope and dread, all packed into one word. “Holy shit.”
Lewis, where the hell are you? I really didn’t feel well. Maybe it was the cost of David’s deconstruction of my body. Dying had to come with a price. I needed Lewis, not just because I was worried, but because as a human he could physically take the bottle away from Kevin and shatter it. Lewis was my only real hope of freedom, unless Kevin made a monumental error. Which was not beyond the realm of possibility, if I stayed alert.
Speaking of being alert… my brain finally caught up with the fact that Kevin wasn’t giving me orders, he was listeningto me. And my clothing had stayed the way I’d chosen.
He wasn’t seeing me as a slave just now. He was seeing me as a friend.
“I need some help,” I said aloud. “Your stepmother’s got power, and now that she has David, she can do a lot more. We need to talk to the Wardens. They can help neutralize her without too much of a fight.”
All true, again. I was trying not to lie to him, because I knew it would come back to haunt me later.
The blood told me that Lewis had lain here unconscious for a long time—hours, maybe—before he’d finally come to his senses and left. Things were vague, from then on. He might not have been thinking clearly. Still alive, though. That came through with a clarity that eased a knot deep inside of me. I’d really feared that we’d left him here to die.
“The Wardens would never take my side,” Kevin said. He flopped down on the leather couch, folded his hands on his chest and stared up at the mullioned ceiling that had previously been far too X-rated for a kid his age. “They’d kill me. The old guy said so.”
“Bad Bob wasn’t exactly a paragon of truth and virtue,” I told him. “He lied to me, too, lots of times. Look, you can trust me, Kevin. I promise that I won’t try to hurt you.”
I came around to the other side and sat down on the edge of the couch, looking down at him. He kept staring at the ceiling, but there was a suspiciously bright shine in his eyes.
“I can’t go home,” he said. “She’ll kill me now. She really will.”
“I won’t let her.”
“Yeah?” A hot, burning flick of those miserable eyes. “Like you could stop her. At least while she has that guyof yours.”
“I’ll fight if you will,” I said. “Come on, Kevin. You told me you wanted her dead. How about just removed? Taken away? Unable to hurt you again? What about that?”
He thought about it, fiddled with the loose riveted button of his jeans, and finally nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Just so long as I never have to see her again.”
I sucked in a deep breath, closed my eyes, and let it out. I propped myself in a chair and dialed a number from memory. As my fingers moved, I saw them picking up blue sparks, and shook them to get the crap off—not that I could feel it, but it creeped me out. I’d seen for myself how the stuff was drawn to the use of power, back in Seacasket—we’d been swarming with sparks.
Paul Giancarlo’s rough, Jersey-flavored voice said, “Yes?” The tone was sharp and impatient. Maybe he’d been dealing with telemarketers all day.
I opened my mouth, started to speak, and suddenly hesitated. This was a step I hadn’t expected to take, and I sensed that it was a big one. Maybe the kind you couldn’t take back later.
Things would never be the same.
“Hello?” He sounded pissed, and two seconds from slamming down a hangup.
“Paul?” I said. My voice shook a little. “It’s Jo.”
Silence. I couldn’t tell what was happening on the other end. Then, very quietly, “Jesus.”
“No, just Joanne, although I can see how you might make the mistake, coming back from the dead and all.” I sounded too maniacally cheerful. “It’s a long story, and I don’t think we have time right now.”
“You’re alive?”
“Again, yes, and we don’t have time. I need to find Lewis—”
“Lewis?” Paul had recovered fast. His tone was back to crisp and businesslike, at least so far as I could tell. “Yeah. He came here. Had one hell of a head wound. I tried to get him to let an Earth Warden take a look at him, but no way would he do it. He took off about an hour ago, maybe less.”
“Did he remember what happened?”
“Do you?” Paul countered. “He said your name, but I figured… you know…”
“Head injury, yeah.” I rubbed numbed fingertips together. “Things have gotten complicated.”
“More than you with a Demon Mark?”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck me running… okay. How much trouble are you in right now?”
“About all there is.” I closed my eyes, went up briefly into the aetheric, then back down, fast. “Not just me, though. All of us.”
He grunted. “I don’t have time for coming-back-from-the-dead riddle hour. You got some ghostly warning to deliver, just do it—there’s a storm off the Atlantic seaboard that’s going nuts—”
“And a fire in Yellowstone, and tectonic pressure in California,” I said. “I know. And it’s worse than you think. Way worse.”
That got a moment of silence. Paul was a pessimist. If it was worse than he thought, it was pretty damn bad, and he knew it.
“Jesus, Jo, what the hell are you into now?” he asked.
“Favor for a favor. You do for me, I’ll tell you. You’ve got a Warden working for you named Yvette Prentiss?”
He made a sour noise. “Nominally. I’ve got an allhands call out right now, and she ain’t even picking up the phone. She’s fired, soon as I get the time to sign the paper. Not that I shouldn’t have fired the crazy bitch years ago, but she had some friends—”
“Yeah, Bad Bob, I know. Listen, I need you to get Miriam and the Power Rangers over to her place. Now. She’s broken just about every Warden’s code there is, and what’s left won’t last the night.”
“Look, I don’t have a lot of time for disciplinary—”
“She’s stolen a Djinn,” I said flatly. “She’s torturing him. Paul. She’s going to destroy him.”
Silence, again. Long, crackling silence.
“Paul?” I prompted.
“Lewis already asked me for her address. Shit, Jo, I can’t do this right now. We’ve got all hell breaking loose around here. I’m sorry about Yvette, and yeah, we’ll take care of her as soon as we can, but right now we’ve got innocent lives to save, and three fronts to fight on. So it’ll just have to wait.” He sounded grim, but determined. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” I tasted ashes. “I understand. Thanks.”
“Wait, tell me—”
I hung up on him. Immediately, the phone began to ring. Caller ID, auto callback, something like that. I let it clamor for attention and sat, thinking hard.
“They’re not gonna help,” Kevin said. He was sitting up, draped over the back of the couch, acne-spotted chin propped on thin arms. “I knew it. Nobody ever helps. Well, fuck her anyway. We can go anywhere, right? Do anything? I don’t need her. She can just do whatever.”
Lewis had asked for the address. He knew that Yvette was involved. But he was going over there hurt, disadvantaged, and she had David to use as a weapon…
“We’re going back,” I said.
Even from across the room, I saw Kevin’s morose expression turn mulish. “In your dreams.”