There were keys hanging on hooks behind the counters. I grabbed three and tossed one each to Kevin and Cherise. “Be careful,” I said. “Could be anybody out there. Make sure you lock the doors once you’re inside.”
Kevin cast a significant look at the busted office door. “Yeah,” he said. “That’ll help. What do they make these things out of, cardboard? An arthritic eighty-year-old on a walker could kick these things down.”
“Your body odor could knock it down faster,” Cherise said crisply. “I cannot wait for a shower. They want to go all Psycho on me, fine. At least I’ll die clean.”
She held out her arms, and Kevin passed her the toddler, who was awake, alert, and watching me with shining black eyes. He was drooling on himself. I didn’t take it as a compliment. “Come on, Herbert.”
“You are not calling him Herbert,” Kevin said, as Cherise got the boy situated on her hip.
“Okay, how about Ronald? I’m trying to go with a dead president theme, here.”
“He’s too good looking. Go with Thomas.”
“Tommy,” Cherise said immediately. “Jefferson. Yeah, okay. How’s that, Tommy? You like that, big man?” She made nonsense sounds to him, and Tommy laughed and clapped his hands. “Tommy it is. Awesome. Tommy and I are going to get clean.”
“Enjoy,” I said. I was going to be in hot pursuit of that shower, but first I wanted to go through the office. The looters had probably taken everything of value, but I wasn’t looking for things to pawn or spend.
Kevin hesitated at the door. “You going to be okay?”
I flipped a hand at him without looking up from the contents of a drawer. He shrugged and went away.
The drawer seemed heavy, although there wasn’t much in it. I frowned playing with it, and realized that it had a false bottom. I pressed on the back, and the front popped up.
Underneath that lay a big, black semiautomatic pistol, with two full clips and a box of bullets . . . and a sawed-off shotgun, and shells.
“Sweet,” I said, and stuffed it all into a recyclable shopping bag that was lying on the floor. Small-business owners. Like Boy Scouts, always prepared.
I also found a private stash of alcohol, which I left, except for one bottle I planned to use for first aid. Or morale emergencies, whichever came first. There was also a pretty significant first aid kit, well stocked, and some shelf-stable cookies, power bars, and chips that I put into another bag.
I was feeling pretty good by the time I locked the flimsy door on my motel room. The room was clean and empty, and as far as I could tell, nobody had bothered to loot it. The bathroom still had soap and shampoo. With the power off, it was dark as a cave, but I’d brought a flashlight from the office, and set it up to shine on the shower area. I dumped my filthy clothes in the sink to soak. The water was lukewarm, but that was better than nothing.
The shower started out lukewarm, then turned cold, but I didn’t care; feeling clean again was an intense relief. I could have hope again. Hope that if I had to die, at least I would do it with shiny, bouncy hair.
Something flashed across the glow from the flashlight. I gasped, got soap in my eyes, and rinsed as fast as I could. It’s a moth, I told myself. A moth flying around in front of the light. You’d have heard somebody come in.
I listened. The falling water drowned out any sound of an intruder.
“It’s a moth,” I breathed, willing myself to believe it. Okay, I was in a creepy deserted motel with no lights. Okay, I was in a horror movie cliché, naked in a shower in a creepy deserted motel with no lights.
But dammit, I wasn’t going to be some horror movie damsel who got killed naked in a shower in a creepy deserted motel. With no lights.
I shut off the water with a firm twist of the knobs, grabbed the thin shower curtain, and rattled it back. Water trickled ice-cold down my back from my wet hair and brought up chill bumps all over my skin.
Nobody there.
I grabbed a towel, dried off, and wrapped it spa- style around my body, then used the second one to do the turban thing. This wasn’t the kind of place that provided free plush robes, or even paper-thin ones. I stood on the cold tile, picked up the flashlight, and angled it around in every corner of the small room.
Nothing.
“Moth,” I said, triumphantly, and propped up the light to help me see what I was doing as I scrubbed my clothes with bath soap. I refilled the sink several times, finished by wringing it all out, and hanging it up on the side of the tub and the shower rod.
Then I walked out into the main room, which was flooded with light from the opened curtains, and saw the Djinn sitting on my bed waiting for me.
And not just any Djinn.
Rahel.
Rahel was back to her old self—beautiful, sharp-edged, dressed in a neon yellow tailored pantsuit with a plunging neckline white shirt. Cornrowed hair, with amber and gold beads woven throughout. Her long pointed fingernails matched her outfit, and her eyes were a pure, luminous white.
I stopped in the doorway and braced myself with one hand. Rahel didn’t move. She didn’t speak. She didn’t seem to even know I was there.
I licked my lips and said, “Rahel?”
For a moment, nothing happened, and then her head tilted, very slowly, to one side. Beads clicked together with a dry-bones rattle like the warning of a rattlesnake in slow motion.
I stood there waiting for it, but she didn’t move again. I took a tentative step forward, then another one. No reaction. I made it to the rickety side chair that came with the “office table” and its cheap lamp, and sat down because I wasn’t sure if my legs would hold me for too long. She didn’t feel like Rahel. She looked the part, but Rahel would already have fired off some snarky, lazy insult or threat, clicked her fingernails, tried to kill me, laughed . . . something.
What was wearing Rahel right now was very far from the Djinn I knew.
“Who are you?” I whispered. Those white eyes stared at me, unblinking, but blind. I just happened to be the direction in which they stared; it didn’t feel like focus. “Is this—are you—”
I couldn’t exactly come out with it, but I understood, on a very primal level, who was looking out through that blank gaze. An intelligence so vast that it couldn’t possibly understand me. So huge that it was trying to make sense of something impossibly tiny to it. . . . As if by staring unaided at the surface of the table, I could see the molecules that made it up. She was trying to understand. But I didn’t think she did. Or could. And that was . . . alarming.
“Can you let me talk to Rahel?” I asked, in the softest, most respectful voice I could manage. “I just—she can translate for you. Help you understand.” Although how that was going to get across I couldn’t imagine. It was like an ant trying to communicate with me by the pheromones and scents that made up its language. I couldn’t detect it, much less understand it.
So much easier to squash the bug, especially when the hive was so, so large.
I was screwed.
Rahel stared through me for what seemed like an hour, but couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes, and then suddenly her head snapped back upright, and she surged up to her feet, took two steps forward, and her hand went around my throat. I yelped, trying to press backward; the chair tipped against the wall, pinning me in place. I kicked at her, for all the good it did. It was like kicking bare toes into solid rock. I felt the sharp, biting sting as her fingernails pressed in, and I had a grim, graphic vision of how it would look when she flexed her hand and drove those nails into soft flesh and ripped my throat out in a spray of blood. . . .
But that didn’t happen. Rahel froze, our faces inches away. This close, the white glow in her eyes broke up into a coruscating brilliance—every color, all colors, flickering by at such speed that only the constant white glow was left. I was looking into something that humans should never see, and I felt parts of my mind giving up, shutting down, refusing to hold the information flooding into them. I could hear that awful shrieking again, just as I had on board the ship, and I couldn’t shut it out.