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“It’s not a matter of recovery,” he said. “She’ll learn to live with it, or she’ll become more and more unpredictable and unstable. If that happens, the Wardens will have to remove her powers. God help whoever gets that job. It’s risky enough with an adult.”

There was a small, elite force of Wardens devoted to tracking down those who were, or became, dangerous and bringing them back for that process, which was a kind of psychic surgery performed only by the most expert Earth Wardens. There was every chance of leaving someone scarred, psychically crippled, insane, or dead.

Yet some Wardens actually chose to take the risk, rather than continue as they were.

And some had to be treated by force.

“I hope that will not be necessary,” I said. I put the glass on the coffee table and felt my whole body relax as I curled in on the couch, knees up, body turned toward him. My head rested against the cushions.

“Yeah,” Luis agreed. He hesitated, then leaned over and put his own glass down. “You want another shot?”

I glanced at the bottle. “No,” I said. “Do you?”

“Can’t,” he said. “I set my limits, and I stick to them.”

Limits. That was a concept unfamiliar to most Djinn; we had few limits, and those few were imposed on us by the immutable laws of the universe. Still, I understood him; I had imposed rules on myself here, in this place, simply by agreeing to live as a human instead of perishing as an outcast Djinn.

Some of the limits were even my own choice.

I realized that I hadn’t spoken, and Luis had fallen silent, and we were still looking at each other. I had noticed that humans did not typically gaze steadily at each other, unless they were seeking confrontation; glances were more common, polite and fleeting.

This was different. Luis watched me as if he had forgotten how to blink. There were thoughts behind this, thoughts I could not understand easily, having little experience of the human condition.

I understood my reaction, however. Deep within my body, warmth was blooming, spreading, and my blood was moving faster through my body. My breathing had deepened. My pupils, I suspected, had widened.

Arousal—deep, violent, and primal.

And hotly enjoyable.

“I should get you home,” he said, finally. His voice sounded different—deeper, slightly rougher, as if he had to force the words out.

“You can’t drive,” I said, and looked at the bottle on the table. “Three drinks would be too many, correct?” Except that as an Earth Warden he could easily control that; he could dismiss the alcohol from his system with a simple pulse of power, or at least minimize its effects.

If he wished.

“That’s true,” he said, in a neutral voice. “I should probably wait a while.” He picked up the bottle and looked at it with dark, narrowed eyes, then slowly uncapped it and tipped another splash of amber into his glass, then my own. He didn’t speak. I didn’t either. We sipped the whiskey, intensely aware of each other’s presence, and when I had finished the glass I felt stickily warm, impulsive, aware of every nerve in my body.

I sat up abruptly and stripped off the pale leather jacket, dropping it onto a nearby chair with a heavy thump. Beneath it I wore a thin pale pink cotton top, sleeveless. I had not bothered with the inconvenience of a bra; my body was not built in such a way as to make it structurally necessary, although I sometimes wore one for comfort, or to satisfy societal expectations.

But not today.

As I sank down on the couch again, skin lightly flushed and damp, Luis looked sideways toward me. Not toward my face. Toward the thin cotton fabric, where my nipples were hardening in reaction to the cooler air, and responding to his rapt attention.

Still, I said nothing. Neither did he. He raised his eyebrows and took a last sip of his drink, then put the glass down.

“Cass,” he said then, very softly. “I’m not sure we ought to be doing this.”

“Why?” I asked. I angled my body sideways on the soft cushions, and met his eyes directly. “You want me to be human. Yet you resist when I try.”

Luis let out a shaky laugh. “Yeah, I’m resisting all over the place, here. Lady, if I was resisting, I would have stopped at half a glass of whiskey and booted you the hell out of my house.”

I frowned, trying to work it out through the warm hazy pleasure that was coursing through my body. “But you didn’t.”

“You noticed.”

“But you are not sure—”

“Indecision. It’s the human condition, Cass. Get used to it. Although they’re going to kick me the fuck out of the Guy Club if I go all virtuous right now, with a drunk hot woman trying to get in my pants.”

He said
woman,
not
Djinn.
That was somehow significant to me. Some barrier between us that I’d barely been aware of had fallen away, and I didn’t know why. It could have been the alcohol, of course, but I didn’t think so. It might have equally been the extreme focus of the two of us working to save the small child in the hospital . . . or, simply, that we had both been thinking of this moment for some time, and denying it was so.

I slid off of the couch again, shoved the coffee table back so violently that the open bottle of whiskey teetered in an unsteady dance on its surface, and I reached out to catch it and center it before it could tip. Then I lifted it to my lips and tilted it, my gaze still hard- locked with Luis’s. Silky, liquid heat poured into my mouth, and I held it for a moment in savor before swallowing.

Then I put the bottle down and knelt astride Luis on the couch. My weight came down on his tensed body, and I settled against him in intimate contact—closer than I had ever been to him, in fact.

He made a startled sound, low in his throat, and I felt his muscles go tight all over his body, as if he was fighting his own impulses at a well-nigh-cellular level.

“If you don’t find me attractive,” I said, “tell me to go.”

It was patently evident that he found me attractive. With my weight pressed hard against his hips, it was very difficult to argue the point.

He closed his eyes and pulled in a deep breath. I could feel his heart pounding. I could see the pulse throbbing in his temple. A drop of sweat slid down the gleaming flesh of his throat, and I watched its glide with single-minded intensity. I strongly considered licking it.

“It’s the whiskey talking,” he said. “You’re going to hate us both tomorrow.”

I laughed softly. “I don’t need whiskey to make me hate anyone,” I said. “It is my natural state. As you very well know.”

Luis pounded his head backwards against the soft cushions of the couch, twice, then opened his eyes to look at me. The distance between us seemed to contract, even though neither of us moved.

“I wanted to hate you right back,” he said. “I tried. When Manny died—”

He’d been right to loathe me. I had seen Manny and Angela fall, fatally wounded, and instead of leaping to save their lives as Luis had done, I ran after those who had harmed my friends. I had selected vengeance over mercy. That was Djinn instinct, and it was still a raw wound inside of me.

But complicating that pain was the knowledge that even had I done as Luis had, even had I applied all my skill and power to my two fallen friends, they would almost certainly still have died. And Luis knew that as well.

“I wanted to hate you,” he continued softly, “but I couldn’t. You’re just . . . baffling.”

“Baffling,” I repeated. I rather enjoyed that description. “How so? I try to speak my mind.”

“No shit.” He pulled in a breath as I circled my hips on his. “Holy crap, don’t do that.”

“Is it because I wish to touch you? To remove your clothes and touch you everywhere, to know you completely?” I was not certain of human protocols in these matters, but Luis didn’t seem offended. I leaned closer, slowly, and settled my arms around his neck. His skin felt hot and firm. “Because I wish to feel your body on mine? Your needs pounding through your veins?”

“Cass,” he said faintly, and then took a deep breath and said, in an entirely different tone, “Oh, what the hell, anyway.”

And he kissed me.

I didn’t know what I’d expected from this meeting of skins, but my body clearly did. In an instant, my mind blazed white, and I thought of nothing, nothing but the warm, damp glide of his lips, his hands gripping my waist and pulling me hard against him. It was challenge. It was surrender. It was an intoxicating brew of instinct and need and emotion, and I shuddered and opened my lips to the stroke of his tongue. One of his hands stroked slowly up the bumps of my spine, brushed the tender skin at the base of my neck, and cradled the back of my head in primal warmth.

I had been holding myself suspended, just a little, above his body, but now my knees seemed to spread of their own accord, lowering me the last half inch. He groaned breathlessly into my mouth, and I moved my hips back and forth against his. Pure, wild instinct, springing from the body I wore, from a hundred thousand years of human coupling hardwired into my DNA.

It took my breath away, as well.

The kiss deepened, and time stretched, measured in racing heartbeats. He was flesh and bone and muscle, all of it suddenly, insanely new to me. My hands stroked over him, sensing where he was hotter, colder, softer, firmer. I explored the long sweep of his arms, feeling the knotted cords of muscles moving beneath.

I felt an alien heat moving through me now, something coming not from my own waking human desires, but from his, bleeding over through the link that sustained my life and power. Coursing through the white-hot network of nerves, pooling and triggering pleasures that made me moan into his mouth, lost and only half-aware. The bliss was extreme, and dangerous—not because Luis’s Earth-based powers were in any sense overwhelming me, but because I felt his own precise control eroding.

“Is it always like this?” I asked him, between gasps. It took him a long time to form words for an answer.

“Sometimes,” he managed to reply. “Between—really strong Wardens—but different.”

That was nondescriptive, but interesting to me. I traced a fingertip over the strong muscles of his shoulders, and I actually
saw
power moving between us, strong enough to manifest in a golden afterimage where I touched.

I laughed, took hold of his shirt collar, and pulled the knitted fabric over his head to bare his chest to me. The color of his skin was like the darkest honey, the muscles strong and tensed beneath. He had more tattoos than those on his arms, I discovered, though the tribal symbols meant little to me except in sharp indigo contrast to the rest of him.

I felt his hands on me now, restlessly moving, finally coming to rest around my waist on either side.

Moving up and in, to cover my small breasts in warmth through the thin material of the shirt.

Without breaking his intense, dark gaze, I pulled the shirt from my body and dropped it on the floor to mix with his. The difference in our skin tones was startling, and beautiful to me . . . my milk to his honey, and mine was beginning to pulse with opalescent colors that I was not sure really existed in the human realm. He looked down to the place where his hands now cupped my breasts. His thumbs stroked over the hardened tips, bringing a shudder through me that started from somewhere deeper than I could explain.

Bodies. Instincts. It was all frighteningly uncontrollable.

“Cass,” he whispered. I sensed the fight in his voice, the struggle to contain the same instincts that haunted me. “Cassiel—”

I kissed him, and we melted together, one constant ecstasy of light and sound, power and bodies, and yet

I knew there was more to this; my body craved it, demanded it, screamed for it.

Luis twisted and took me down to the couch in one swift, almost violent movement. My hands struggled to reach the fastenings of my pants, because I knew only one thing now, and that was how much I wanted to feel his skin everywhere, hot and damp against mine.

The air around us suddenly chilled, and I felt a crackle of energy that pierced even the fog of desire around us as heat was forcibly ripped from the air and coalesced together. I felt it before Luis, and I was able to shove him bodily out of the way of the strike, rolling him up and over the top of the couch.

He yelled in surprise. Before his body hit the floor on the other side, I was rolling the other direction, off the couch and to the floor, shoving the coffee table as I did. The bottle of whiskey tipped and spilled.

Lightning tore through the room, exploding from every electrical socket, stabbing toward a central point—the couch. It was a one-shot attack; the forces channeled through the lines overloaded the fuses almost instantly, but the convergence of the four-direction attack left deep, smoldering burns the length of the sofa.

Before the blue-white afterimages faded, I rolled to my feet, glanced at the burning couch, and reached down for my shirt. I pulled it on, then yanked on the leather jacket as Luis scrambled up on the other side, breathing hard, eyes wide with surprise.

“Someone just tried to kill us,” I said.

“No shit. Really?” He came around the couch, took up his own shirt, and tugged it over his head. “Weather Warden, right?”

“Most likely.”

“That won’t be their only shot.” He looked at the couch, charred and smoking, and then at the blackened outlets on the walls. The power was out in the house, of course. “Fuck, there goes my insurance premiums. You got any direction on this asshole?”

We had effortlessly shifted from intimacy to professional alertness, and I felt Luis burning the intoxication out of his blood, then out of mine, ensuring we were both perfectly prepared for battle. I crossed to the window, but I saw nothing amiss on the street outside; Luis launched his awareness out of his body and into the next plane of reality, which both the Wardens and the Djinn call the aetheric. Because I was linked to him, I was able to follow, and I did, rising up into a realm of existence that was less rooted in physical reality, and more in the reality of power. All things in the human world are invested, to some extent, with power; whether it is a faint spark or a flood depends strongly on its history and heritage. Humans tend to manifest strongly in the aetheric; after all, they come from long, long lines of ancestors, many wielding extraordinary energies, whether they know it or not. They also manifest themselves unconsciously, so what is seen on the aetheric tends to be more revealing than their physical forms.