Mud squeezed into the mouth of the bottle three inches deep. I let go of the rain and bled the energy off into sheet lightning, white flares across the sky.
Static electricity crawled power lines and hummed, but the rain stopped.
Clouds swirled, confused, and the sun burned through in a matter of minutes.
Only the sun was eternal, out here.
I didn't have power over that, but I did over the water; I concentrated on the bottle and yanked the moisture out of the mud packing the mouth and neck of it, jamming it tight as concrete.
And then I remembered to breathe. Ow. It hurt.
David got me up to my feet, mainly by supernatural strength. "Tell me to heal you," he said.
"Yeah, good idea. Heal me, would you?"
I felt it come over me in a hot golden rush, the feeling of his power moving through me — or my own power, amplified and changed through him. Given form.
The grating agony of ribs went away with sharp little glasslike stabs as bones knitted. I coughed and spat blood, wiped my mouth and looked at the innocent-seeming bottle in my hand. Sealed, it felt like any other bottle half-full of dry mud. I could toss it at the side of the road and nobody would pay any attention.
But something like this shouldn't ever be broken again.
I shook my head and focused on David. He looked — well, like David. With just an unsettling, unfamiliar trace of exhaustion in his face, and a shadow in his eyes.
"Where were you?" I asked. He shook his head. "No bullshit, David. Where were you? Where were you?"
Rule of three. His eyes flared for a second, and then he said, "Talking to Jonathan. Trying to — trying to find a way for this to work."
"Any luck with that?"
I already knew the answer, from the frustration I could feel radiating off of him. "No."
I nodded wearily, and looked past him at Brian McCall, who'd evidently decided not to shoot us.
"What," McCall asked in a very reasonable voice, "the fuck was that?"
I looked at David. David looked at me, raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
"That," I answered, "was a Djinn. So's this. And trust me, you're not going to want to talk about any of it."
###
It took a little bit of time. I'm not an Earth Warden; altering memories isn't all that easy, even for Djinn, and it sure wasn't in my normal skill set.
David fetched a second wrecked car (and that nearly wiped out what power reserves I had left) and we arranged the poor dead guy from the Dairy Queen in the wreckage, then woke up the cop from the police cruiser, who'd fortunately benefited from the presence of airbags and seat belts. I patiently, fraudulently explained the accident. Luckily, the girl had been too panicked to give anything like a rational explanation on the phone, and with the DQ sparkly-clean and nobody backing her hysterical story of finding him dead inside, the cop went with the obvious.
I might have helped that along a little by depleting the oxygen around her and letting her hyperventilate and pass out in the middle of her story.
McCall didn't say a thing to contradict me. His shotgun back in the trunk, he was the picture of innocence, his scrapes and bruises explained by his efforts to get inside the wreckage and save the dead man.
Once the excitement was over, we watched the wrecker clear everything away, and I said to McCall, "We need to talk."
"Figured that," he said. "You going to do some voodoo on me?"
I turned to face him. The sun was up and in full fury now; sweat stung my eyes, and I reached up to tie my hair back with a rubber band from the pocket of my jeans. Possibly in deference to the fact that David was standing next to me, looking human but entirely dangerous, McCall didn't lower his stare to my breasts while I did that.
"Why did you come here?" I asked. "You were tracking it, right?"
He shrugged. "Nobody believed me. Series of mutilations through the Southwest, heading this way — I thought it was some kind of werewolf, actually. Never thought it'd be — what was it?"
"A Djinn."
"Right. Always thought of those as being cute, dressed in pink and purple …"
"Too much television," I said. "How long has this been happening?"
"I tracked it from Michigan," he said.
"Show me on a map."
He traced the roads we'd taken. Dammit. This thing had followed me. If it had just been heading for the same destination, it could have easily beaten us there. It had been stalking me, and I'd finally allowed it to close in.
When I looked up, he was staring at me with nothing at all in his face or his eyes. "It killed a friend of mine," he said. "I watched her die, and I couldn't stop it. It tore her apart right in front of me."
"I'm — I'm sorry."
He ignored that. "Is it dead?"
I exchanged a look with David. "Not — dead exactly. But confined. It's not getting out."
"I want it dead, not confined."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"No, you don't know. I want it dead, do you understand? I want its guts strewn over half the county. I want its fucking head on a pike!" The sudden burst of fury out of him was unexpected and shocking, because he did such a good job of hiding it behind that casual toughness. I swallowed, but didn't flinch. He balled up his fists at his sides and took a step into my space. "Now you let it out of whatever prison it's in and give it to me. I'll — "
"You'll end up dead," David said flatly. He hadn't moved, but there was a sense that he had, that he'd gotten larger, somehow. "Guts strewn over half the county. And it wouldn't bother to stop and put your head on a pike, because you wouldn't matter enough. People don't matter. They're only vessels, or meat.
What's in that bottle is insane, and it's powerful, and it's far out of your ability to destroy." His eyes went dark. "Now you need to take a step back, because I promise you, I'm not going to let you touch her."
McCall said nothing. His eyes burned, but they were just human eyes, after all.
He didn't strike me as the type to step off from a fight, but this time, he did.
He must have had the sense to know that David wasn't kidding.
I cleared my throat. "Look, McCall — you have to trust me. I'm not letting this thing go, all right? But you have to do something for me. You have to stay quiet about it."
He pulled his stare from David to lock it on me. There was a bleak fury in him, but a bleak humor, too. "Fuck. I look like the chatty type to you?" he asked, and jammed his hands in his pockets. "In my line of work, keeping your mouth shut is a condition of continued breathing." He shook his head and walked away.
I watched as he got into the dusty Cadillac and drove it off the lot. No good-bye wave. Not even a glance back.
When I turned back to David and took his hand, I caught sight of the proprietor of the Desert Inn standing in his doorway, watching us. Amazing. He hadn't bothered to come out for the excitement, but now he was watching.
He tapped his watch. "Eleven thirty," he yelled. "You owe me for another day."
I blinked. "What about him?" I gestured at McCall's Cadillac as it crested the hill and disappeared into the vastness of the desert.
"What about him? That bastard's dangerous, I ain't asking him for money. You, you got to pay another seventy dollars. Plus damages for all those doors you broke in."
Some days, being heroic really doesn't pay.
###
We negotiated it down to an even hundred, and got Mona back out on the road in half an hour. Heading for Las Vegas. Since the motel owner was ripping me off anyway, I'd borrowed a couple of pillows, and they were tightly tied around the beer bottle. As soon as I had a chance, I'd hand it over to a Warden, who could get it back to New York to put into the vault.
David was characteristically silent as I drove, the sun flickering over his skin and hair. He wasn't reading. He was watching the landscape slide by outside the window. Sand, cactus, more sand. Not a lot to see.