Heat Stroke (25 page)

“Oh,” he said, and straightened up. He prodded me with the toe of a particularly crappy-looking sneaker. This close, the smell of his feet was rancid, like mold-ridden buttermilk. “She got to you, huh? Yeah. Thought so. So, can you fix yourself?”

I blinked again. If ever I needed the kid to catch aclue . . .

“You can't, can you? You need me for that.” He crouched down, staring down at me. “You
need
me. How about that? Not so high and mighty now, are we?” A thick finger prodded at my flaccid arm, and broken bones grated together. “What if I just leave you here, huh? What's your game plan then, bitch? Lay there and bleed on me? Some fucking guardian you are.”

He sounded surly, but there was a tremor deep down. He was scared, all right. Not of me. He knew what she was capable of, and he wanted a friend. Protection.
Something.

I tried to move my lips, but it was useless. I couldn't even blink anymore. My eyes were fixed
and staring. I heard my heart murmur one last, regretful beat, and then the blood in my veins slowed and stopped.

Death was anticlimactic, as a Djinn. I kept waiting for something, anything. I still had senses—I could hear the rustle of Kevin's baggy jeans as he paced back and forth, could smell the unwashed aroma that eddied off of him through the room. Under the bed, the cockroach emerged from the pizza box with a couple of its friends, paused, and tried to figure me out. I must not have looked tasty. They went the other way.

Kevin's bedroom door suddenly blew open. Locks tore off of the frame and hit the far wall with enough force to put holes in the Sheetrock. I didn't have a good view, but I heard Kevin's pacing stop and stagger backward. He stumbled right into me, lost his balance, and fell. I felt him roll across me, hot and sweaty and tense with panic.

The swirl of power that went through the room was unmistakable.

David was here.

Kevin grabbed my limp, broken hand and yelled, “Fix yourself, dammit! Stop him! Don't let him hurt me!”

Game on.

I felt my body instantly begin to heal, drinking in power from him to rebuild itself, and before I was anywhere near better I rolled away from him, away from his grip, and came fluidly to my feet to stand between him and David. Blue sparkles flashed all over me with false Vegas cheer.

Yvette was with him, of course. Still smiling.

“You left.” She pouted. “It was just getting interesting. We're going to have
lots
of fun, sweetie, aren't we?” The butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth tone turned cold and cutting as she focused past me, on her stepson. “Tell her to submit.”

“Yeah?” His voice wavered, but didn't break. “Maybe I won't.”

Why the hell had she ever taken a chance and given him a Djinn? No, I knew why . . . because she thought he was completely under her control, and she knew that having two Djinn under her direct control could be dangerous. Well, arrogance was part of her pathology.

David moved a step closer. I matched him like a mirror image. Kevin's order had me, of course. If David made any aggressive moves at all, I was free to stop him, and to use every ounce of power Kevin possessed to do it.

“News flash,” I said aloud, straight to her. “Not the submitting type. You want to take me, you can try, but it's going to be one hell of a fight, and believe me, the damage won't be anything you can patch up with base makeup and a couple of Band-Aids. I
will
hurt you.”

“Yeah,” Kevin agreed. “And I'll let her. No, I'll
order
her to do it.”

Her green eyes flicked to him, and the look on her face . . . If I'd had any doubt that she'd played her sick little games with him, that put them to rest. The pure, nauseating hatred made me feel filthy to see it.

“You stupid little bastard. I give you a toy, and you try to
threaten
me with it? You're pathetic. David, I want you to—”

“Kevin, I want to take you out of here,” I interrupted her, and looked straight at the kid. “I'll take you out of here if you want me to.”

He was no fool, even with the obvious social handicaps. He smiled, showing me crappy dental hygiene, and said, “Yeah. Take me somewhere. Somewhere else.”

It meant leaving David, oh God, I didn't want to do that, but I didn't have a choice. I had to do what I could. Patrick had said it.
First, preserve your life.
I didn't think I could die here, but I'd damn sure wish I could.

I grabbed Kevin, wrapped him in my arms, and pulled on that vast pool of energy stored inside of him to take him . . .

. . . back to Patrick's apartment.

 

Not a smooth ride through the aetheric. I tried to avoid the worst of the blue flares, but it was worse now, burning everywhere. A cheery fairy-dust snowstorm.

Patrick's apartment place was empty. Bloodstains on the carpet, already dried. No sign of Lewis, or Patrick, or Sara. No sign that Rahel had ever returned.

I let Kevin go, shook off another thick moving layer of sparklies, and knelt down to touch the stiff brown-soaked fibers on the floor. Lewis's essence. Through it, I could trace him. Find him . . .

“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
listening
to 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
guy
of 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
all-hands 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.”

“Kevin, we have to go back. It's up to us to stop her—”

“From screwing your boyfriend?” He blew a raspberry and flopped back down on the couch, out of sight. His voice stayed annoyingly stubborn. “No. Not gonna happen.”

“She'll come after you.”

“No she won't. She's got what she wanted. Me, she's just as happy to be rid of.” Leather creaked as he stretched. “You know what this place needs? A bitchen big-screen TV. With adult channels.”

Indirect. I ignored it. “Kevin—”

“I want a big-screen TV. With adult channels.”

I screamed inside with frustration. I could have wasted time optioning him to death—
Standard or widescreen? Brand name? Model number?
—but time was something I no longer had. I just used the power he poured inside of me to find the biggest, most ostentatious TV I could find and transport it to an empty wall in the apartment. Plugged it into main power. Created an invisible satellite hookup. Materialized a remote control on the coffee table. “Anything else?”