I didn’t need to make any pantomime to Lewis; he’d already seen the newcomer, and his face had gone… still. Expressionless. Paul turned to look, too.
“Gentlemen,” she said, and she had a soft Southern accent, made the word into a complicated, caressing drawl. “I was hoping to catch up to you, Paul.”
“Having a private moment here,” Paul said. His voice was flat, cold, not at all the warm purr he usually reserved for beautiful women. “Wait outside, will you?”
She was tough, I had to give her that. The warm, inviting smile didn’t waver. The big doe eyes—up close, they were a particularly interesting shade of moss green—took on a brighter shine. “All I want is a minute, Paul.”
“Can’t have it right now. Out.”
Lewis said, “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
“And you’re not going to be,” Paul said flatly. “Yvette. Out.”
She held out a delicate, perfectly manicured hand to Lewis and notched the smile up another few degrees on the seduction scale. “Yvette Prentiss,” she said. “I work with Paul.”
“No, she works forPaul, and she’s not going to be working for Paul much longer if she doesn’t turn her ass around and march out of here.” Paul’s tone had gone dangerously dark, with a hard New York edge. “Get the point?”
“Sure.” She let her eyebrows form, a comment, lowered her hand and held the smile—and eye contact with Lewis—ten seconds too long for my comfort. “I’ll be outside, then.”
The two men watched her walk away, hips swaying, graceful and sleek and sexy. Paul’s expression was murderous. Lewis’s was still blank, like he’d been hit by a very large truck.
She passed within two inches of David, and I could see the effort it took him not to reach out and do something fatal to her.
Lewis asked, “Who the hell was that?”
Paul sighed. “Trust me. You reallydon’t want to know. And you reallyneed to get the fuck out of here before somebody who knows your face takes a look in here. You’re just lucky she hasn’t got a frickin‘ clue who you are. Believe me, there are black widow spiders, and then there’s Yvette. She might be totally fuckable, but you probably wouldn’t survive the night.”
Guy talk. Jeez. What I’d missed when I’d been corporeal.
Lewis nodded, stuck his hands in his pants pockets, and walked toward me. I stayed in his way, willing him to say something, anything. He adjusted course to miss me by an inch or so.
As he passed, he whispered, “Find me. We need to talk.”
I could tell you about the memorial service, but really, you know how it went. People got up, in varying degrees of discomfort, and said nice things about me. Some of them were actually heartfelt, like Paul’s; some were political correctness gone wild. I mean, to hear some of these people talk, I made Mother Teresa look self-centered. Truth was, I’d never been what you could call a saint—mouthy, attitude-challenged, headstrong, and with a love of the bad-girl side of life. Give me a choice between serving at the soup kitchen and a night slamming down tequila shots with hard-bodied guys, and I’d be reaching for the salt and lime every time.
About the time I heard the fourth person I barely knew use words like heroicand selflessI had to take a walk outside to clear my head. A few people were still milling around the reception area, gobbling up the rest of the shrimp and ladyfingers. One of them was the walking hormone factory who’d introduced herself as Yvette Prentiss. She wasn’t wasting her time listening to the fictional story of Joanne Baldwin; she was bending the ear of a middle-aged, very rich-looking gentleman with a London suit and an Eastern European accent.
David appeared next to me. Literally appeared. I almost knocked over a spindly-legged table holding a discreet black-bordered stand announcing that my memorial service was By Invitation Only.
I put my lips close to his ear and whispered, “So? How do you know her?”
He shook his head. “Later.”
“Uh-uh. Now.”
He gave me a resigned look and guided us to a small alcove near the back, where we’d be out of the way of foot traffic. Also well away from any potential eavesdroppers, who might have found a conversation coming out of empty space disturbing.
The fire had faded out of his eyes, but he was still wired; I could feel it coming off of him in waves of static. He said, “Her name is Yvette Prentiss.”
“Heard that the first time. Evidently there’s more to the you-and-her than introductions.”
“A little.” He looked past me, toward her, then quickly away. “She was a friend of Bad Bob’s.”
David’s former sick, demented master. Okay, I could believe that, and it didn’t raise her in my estimation. “How good a friend? The come-on-over-and-watch-a-movie kind of friend, or the come-on-over-and-sweat-up-the-sheets kind?”
David avoided my eyes. “Let’s just say they had appetites in common.”
“Let’s say a little more than that.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s creeping me out that she’s in mourning and I’ve never met her.”
He focused back on her with that scary intensity. “Oh, she’s not in mourning.” Which I could believe, seeing her flirt and tease at the other end of the room. She was currently sucking sauce off of a shrimp, to the delight of the middle-aged guy hovering near her like a bee on a flower. “She’s hunting. Bad Bob paid her bills. She’s looking for a new source of income.”
“David.” I drew his eyes back to me. “What’s with the two of you?”
“There are things I don’t want to remember about my time with him. She’s one.”
That sounded dry and uninformative, but he was shaking. Shaking. “David?”
He reached for me and captured my face between his hands, leaned his forehead against mine. Lips close enough to taste. “You’re an innocent,” he said. “I want you to stay that way. Don’t let her near you, and whatever you do, don’tlet her know you’re Djinn. There are things—I can’t tell you. And I hope you’ll never know.”
Across the room, Yvette Prentiss laughed. She had a sweet little-girl laugh that no doubt charmed the pants off of rich old guys arrogant enough to believe she loved them for their personalities. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought there was a deep, midnight black thread of darkness in it.
I felt the laugh rip into David like a claw, and did the only thing I could.
I said, “Let’s blow this place and go home.”
Two days passed. Nice days. There’s nothing bad about lazing around a fancy hotel room with the sexiest guy in the world and unlimited pay-per-view movies.
Not that it was all fun and games. I was learning things, like the physics of being a Djinn. They were entirely different than the physics I’d learned as a human being, and believe me, I’d been a specialist. Handling the weather with any degree of skill requires an absolute knowledge of little rules like conservation of energy, and it was full of detail work. I can’t even count how many times disarming hurricane-force winds boiled down to something as simple as turning down the subatomic thermostat, changing the world one whirling atom at a time.
But operating as a Djinn was the difference between a two-dimensional game of tic-tac-toe, and a three-dimensional Rubik’s Cube of consequences. There were still scales, and they still had to balance— if I wanted to control the weather, I could still reach up into the aetheric and create a little warm air cushion moving counter to the cold-air mass streaming in from the sea, and voila, rain. In human terms, that would have cost me personal energy.
As a Djinn, I had to balance the physical world, the aetheric, and about ten other planes of existence to create that rain, all without pulling anything out of my own essence. Because, as a Djinn, I didn’t haveany essence, really. I drew power from the earth, the sun, the life around me. It was surprisingly difficult to do.