Heat Stroke (22 page)

I looked at him in Oversight and saw him outlined
in pale, shimmering orange, a color that felt like suffering, weakness, approaching death. When I extended my hand toward him, I could see the same color drifting around me.

This was killing both of us. I was draining my master Kevin at the same time,
three
of us going down . . .

Stop me,
I said again. The silver rope binding us together was pale now, pulsing in time with our shared heartbeats.
God, David, please, I don't know how . . .

I know,
he said.
She just wanted to get my attention.

I didn't see him move, but he was suddenly there, tackling me violently backwards to the ground, away from the children and the wildly yapping beagle. Overhead, the sun exploded into a white-hot fury, but I didn't see, couldn't see, because we were falling through the ground and into the aetheric, racing back along the invisible path I'd taken to get here.
No!
I battered at him, tried to get free, tried to warn him that he was killing us both. He didn't respond. Faster. Faster. The whole thing was a blur of lights, color, motion, whispers, screams . . .

. . . and the two of us fell with a hard thump onto the pale champagne carpet of Yvette Prentiss's living room. Before I could even register where we were, David was already rolling away, reaching for the open perfume vial that lay on the table, but before he could reach it Kevin's grubby hand snatched it up.

I felt the fury in David at the sight of her smug smile. He was going to rip her apart. There was no softness in him now, no consideration, no humanity. He was nothing but fire, ready to burn.

And then he shuddered, staggered, and collapsed to his knees. I could already feel it happening inside of him. Death. Coming fast. He'd poured so much out in stopping me that he had nothing left, nothing to draw on but me and he was refusing to do that . . .

I could feel it in myself, too. I turned and screamed at Kevin,
“Order me to heal him! Now!”

I had no idea I could produce a voice like that, so utterly sure of obedience. Kevin instantly complied. “Heal him.”

“No!” Yvette shrieked, but it was too late, and I was already pulling on Kevin's store to replenish the failing energy levels in myself. David collapsed over on his back, fading into mist and reforming with every breath, and I poured life back into him with everything I had.

Close. So very close.

David groaned and rolled over to hands and knees, then managed to get to his feet. Swayed like a three-day drunk. His eyes flared bright orange, and he looked straight at Yvette Prentiss.

And then he lunged for her.

“Don't let him hurt my mother! Hold him still!” Kevin yelled. Direct command, no equivocation. I had no choice.

I turned, grabbed David and held on as he tried to throw me off. I wasn't stronger than he was, not normally, but with Kevin's power pouring into me there was no stopping me. And he was weak, and tired, and hurting.

I pinned him against the wall of her house, rested my head against his and whispered, “I'm sorry, I'm
so sorry, David—” I felt the hand trying to shove me away change to a caress. No words. We didn't need any. “You shouldn't have done this. Oh God, please, please go, I can't stop you if you go . . .”

Yvette had another bottle ready. This one was dark blue, oblong, some kind of fancy kitchen bottle built more for display than actual containment, but it had a rubber stopper and it would do the job. She uncorked it and put it on the coffee table next to my tiny open perfume vial.

Where her hand moved, I saw a flicker of blue, falsely cheerful glitter. It had followed us here, too. I could see it shimmering around us, darting like fireflies.

David's eyes met mine. Still flecks of copper swirling in his irises, but he'd never looked so human to me, so precious, so vulnerable.

“I can't go,” he said. His voice was soft, sweet, forgiving.

This was my fault, all my fault, oh God . . .

He put his hand on my cheek. I turned blindly into the warmth, wanted to cry but no longer knew how.

“Be thou bound to my service.” Yvette's voice was low, seductive, and charged with triumph.

“No matter what happens . . .” David whispered against my skin.

“Be thou bound to my service.”

“. . . I love you. Remember that.”

“Be thou bound to my service.”

He kissed me, one last time, our lips meeting and burning, our souls mingling through the touch, and then I felt him torn apart, ripped away.

I felt him die.

I turned and watched the mist stream across the room, coil into the bottle, and watched Yvette slam the cork down in place.

The sense of David's presence vanished instantly. Gone.

I lunged at Yvette, forming steel-hard claws from the fingers of my right hand, and I was halfway to her throat when Kevin screamed, “Stop!”

I did. Instantly. Fighting with every twitching nerve, but losing against the overwhelming force of his command.

“You can't hurt my mother.” He sounded spooked. “Or me.”

I felt the claws misting away from my hand. Yvette raised her chin and exposed that fragile, perfect throat to me, and I wanted more than anything to wipe that smug, was-it-good-for-you smirk off her face.

And I couldn't. Son of a bitch!

She said, “Don't be a fool. You won't be the first Djinn that I've had to teach a lesson.”

I remembered David's near-pathological hatred of her, and felt it burning hot as acid in my stomach, too. Oh, this wasn't going to end well. Not if I had anything at all to say about it.

She turned to her son. Kevin was staring at me, mesmerized. He licked his lips nervously and said, “Did you really destroy that town?”

I didn't feel compelled to answer—Rule of Three—so I just stared at him with my burning silver eyes. Had I? I hoped to hell not. But I wasn't really sure.

My rescue came from an unexpected source. Yvette said, “David stopped her. But then, he had good
enough reason. Seacasket has something in it he'd kill to protect.” She got up off the sofa and walked around to face me, insinuated sharp-nailed fingers through my hair and arranged it to her liking around my shoulders. “You're very striking, did you know that? He must feel something incredible for you, to have done that. Believe me, David's long ago learned the value of self-preservation. The fact that he's so devoted to you is truly amazing.”

I gave her a smile. “He just wants me for the sex.”

She gave me a smile right back. “He could get that anywhere.” Her raised eyebrow strongly implied he could get it from her, at better rates, at higher quality. “I know who you are, you know.”

Of course she did. She'd been at my funeral, stood there looking at the enormous overblown photo of me wreathed by flowers. Her fingernail tapped my cheek, hard enough to sting.

“You killed a friend of mine,” she said. Her voice had dropped down into that throaty, seductive range again. I wondered if she always used that when she talked about killing. “He was a very special man.”

“Bad Bob? Oh, yeah, I heard he was keeping you in condoms and rent money. Sorry for your loss.” Bad Bob had put a demon down my throat. I had no fond memories.

She slapped me. Well, tried to. I went to vapor and reformed immediately after her hand sailed through the space where I'd been. That was kind of fun. She stumbled into the coffee table from the force of the swing, and for a second the fury in her made her ugly. Uglier than anyone I'd ever seen.
Whoa.
There was the real Yvette Prentiss, the one who hid behind
the pretty soft skin and silk-smooth hair and mouth-watering figure.

It was gone so fast I couldn't be absolutely sure I'd even seen it, until I looked over at Kevin. The fear in his eyes told me everything.

“Bob Biringanine was a
visionary
!” she snapped at me. “You're an ant crawling on the corpse of greatness. Kevin! Tell her not to do that again!”

“Do what?” he asked. She rounded on him, and I saw the flinch from ten feet away. “Tell her, uh, not to do that vanishing thing?”

“Yes.” She hissed it, like an angry snake. He swallowed twice, rapidly, and looked over at me.

“Uh, don't do that vanishing thing anymore. Making yourself all misty. Unless I tell you to.” He didn't look back at Yvette, stared at the carpet and his ragged tennis shoes instead. “Can I go now?”

She continued to stare at him, and I didn't like the light in her eyes. Not good. Definitely not good.

“Yes.” She flipped him the perfume vial. He nearly fumbled it, and I felt the Djinn circuitry heating up with anticipation. Of course! Any chance there was that he might drop it . . . I couldn't do much, but I could nudge it along once it was out of his hands, make sure it hit the sharp edge of the coffee table with enough force to smash it into oblivion . . .

He held on to it. Damn.

Yvette nodded toward me. “Take her with you.”

“Yeah, okay. You. Come with me.”

I didn't want to go. I wanted to stay here, guarding that blue bottle that held all that remained of David, but I couldn't disobey a direct order. Kevin walked out of the living room, and I had to follow him.

The last sight I had was her sitting down on the sofa again, picking up the blue stoppered bottle and holding it between her hands.

The expression on her face—avid, delighted, anticipatory—made me go arctic cold inside.

Kevin walked through a door that read
KEVIN
'
S ROOM DO NOT ENTER OR ELSE
! It was decorated with skull-and-crossbones decals, pentagrams, line drawings of naked girls grabbing their ankles.

Ah. Home rancid home. He shut the door behind me, stared at me for a couple of seconds, and put the perfume vial down in a nasty-looking ashtray filled with candy wrappers and what strongly resembled the butt ends of a few joints. I looked around. Kevin's room wasn't any more attractive on second viewing than on first. There was no place to sit, other than the dingy rumpled bed, and I was
not
going there.

Kevin flung himself down full length, staring up at the pinup on the ceiling. Hands behind his head. “Did you really almost kill those people?”

“Did you want me to?” I countered, and crossed my arms. He shrugged, as much of a shrug as he could manage lying down.

“Probably would have been kind of a mercy, living in a podunk town like that and all.”

“Why Seacasket?” I asked. He continued to stare up at the centerfold, who pouted and simpered in a frozen second of humiliation. “Something special about that town?”

“Something about it being important to him. You know.
David.
” He gave the name a contemptuous twist of his lips. “She's had a hard-on for him for
years. Tried to get him before, but Bad Bob wouldn't let her have him for more than a couple of hours. Said she might break him.”

Too much information . . . I tried not to think about what it meant. “What now?” I asked.

Another horizontally muted shrug. “Don't know. Not like she tells me shit.” Definitely more than a little resentment there. This kid was turning out to be interesting. Maybe there was a way to use him . . .

I stopped the thought train with a squeal of brakes when he suddenly shifted his gaze to stare directly at me. “I like the other outfit better.”

Crap. I tried not to let him see how much that alarmed me. “Which one?”

“The one you had on before. With the, you know—” He mimed breasts. “And the stockings. The one with the apron.”

He still hadn't told me to put it on. “Wouldn't you like something a little classier?” Dumb question. I was surrounded by glossy photos of women wearing stupid smiles and strips of cloth no bigger than Band-Aids.
Classy
didn't enter into it.

His dark eyes went hard. “I don't give a shit if you like it or not. Just put it on.”

Well, that was direct. I had no room to maneuver. The peachskin pantsuit vanished, replaced with the Frederick's of Hollywood French Maid Nightmare. Truthfully, I kind of liked the shoes, in a trashy, over-the-top kind of way, and I might not have minded putting the thing on to see the look in David's eyes, but to see it in this kid's . . . worthy of a shudder. Or two.

The corset top definitely lifted and didn't separate.
I looked down at my bulging décolletage and saw I'd been given something new. A classy-looking upside-down pentagram tattoo, just over my left breast.

Unsettlingly close to where there'd once been the black stain of a Demon Mark.

I looked up. Kevin was sitting up in bed, watching me. He licked his lips and said, “Turn around.”

I did. All the way, back to face him.

“I thought you said I only had three wishes?”

I kept quiet. He wasn't stupid. He knew I'd lied.

“You got any idea what my mom's doing out there to your friend? He is your friend, right?” Kevin studied me with too-intelligent eyes, looking for sore spots. “More than a friend? You fucking him?”

“You're way too young to ask that question,” I said primly. The Julie Andrews tone didn't go with the blow-up doll outfit.

“You'll tell me. You have to.”

“Why do you want to know?” I asked. Which threw him, a bit. “And anyway, how do you know how many wishes you get? Maybe it's ten. Maybe it's twenty. Maybe the next one is your last, and then I get to rip you into little screaming shreds. Care to try your luck?”

I smiled when I said it. Friendly. Warm. Inviting.

He pressed himself back against the headboard, where Miss July of 2003 was squashing her bare breasts together for his inspection.

“What's the use of having you if I can't do anything with you?” he asked. Petulant little jerk. “I mean, maybe I'll just do it anyway. Wish for what I want most.”