“If you don’t,” she said, “then I’ll make you, brother.”
Brother? I didn’t know if that was literal or figurative, but either way, it worked; Ashan climbed silently to his feet and walked down the steps without trying to run, pitch headlong to his death, or take me with him. I looked back up at the Chapel of the Holy Cross; it was quiet, no signs of life. No sign of my daughter haunting its warm, incense-scented shadows.
I wanted to run back up the steps and throw my arms around her, but somehow I knew that it wasn’t the time. Not here. Not now.
Not until this was over.
Venna saw me looking, and said, “We should go.”
Ashan coughed, and spit a mouthful of blood at Venna’s feet. She raised one eyebrow and made it disappear. Just like that.
I raised the Taser and activated it, letting him get a good look at the jumping spark. “Get in the car, Ashan.”
He slid into the backseat. I pointed a finger at Venna. “Watch him,” I said.
“Of course.” She gave me a cool raise of her eyebrows, as if I were being completely stupid, and climbed in the passenger seat.
I stood there for a few seconds with my hand on the car door, looking up at the chapel. For a second, I thought I saw…something. A flicker of red, a dress fluttering in the wind.
A smile.
“I’ll see you soon,” I promised her, and got in the driver’s seat.
We drove out toward the main road, and when I reached an intersection I idled and waited for traffic. Venna seemed lost in thought, but she finally said, “I can conceal us from most, but he is going to be a problem.”
“Venna, could you ever once in a while use a name? Would it kill you? He, who? Ashan?”
“David,” she said, with a little too much enunciative precision. “He’s been looking for you. I can keep him from finding us for now, but I’m not sure I can do it for long. He’s very smart.”
“He’s looking for me?” I felt a surge of gratitude and relief, and then I remembered that it wasn’t a good thing. “Oh. Looking for me because he thinks I’m the wrong one. The fake Joanne.”
“Yes.”
“And where is he?”
She shrugged. “I said I could hide us from him, not keep track of him. It’s not that simple. You’d better get going.”
“Do you think this is going to work?”
Venna looked suddenly very young, and very uncertain. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s never been done before. And I didn’t expect that the Earth Oracle would be Imara. That complicates things.”
I swallowed, suddenly very cold. “What if it doesn’t work?”
“Eventually,” Venna said, “the Demon will win. And I don’t know what will happen then. I really don’t.”
We looked at each other in silence for a second.
“Go east,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
I love to drive, but this wasn’t driving, it was being trapped in a car with a crazy man (who kept muttering things in a language that I didn’t understand), a Djinn who was by turns cute and creepy, and constantly operating under the threat of impending, though nonspecific, doom. It was the Paranoia Ride, which I was sure wasn’t going to catch on at Disney World. Venna wasn’t exactly comforting company, and Ashan…I hadn’t liked him at first sight, I’d begun to hate him when I’d realized what he’d done, and now I outright loathed him. Venna had, at my request, dumped him into a shower at a roadside motel, and I’d bought him some fresh clothes to replace the filthy suit he’d been wearing. Clean, he looked and smelled better.
It didn’t help his attitude at all. Venna’s calm, menacing presence kept him from trying to bash my head in, but there was nothing she could do to make him any less of an asshole. I couldn’t keep him in the trunk; that would be emotionally satisfying, but morally questionable. Still, keeping him in the backseat was no picnic. Every muscle in my body ached with tension, and when I managed to pull over to sleep (catnaps, at best) I woke up more tired than ever. Ashan never stopped watching me. He was crazy as a rat on LSD, and I thought I could understand why; having spent time with Venna, seen how different she was from human, I could imagine the shock of being busted from Djinn back to merely mortal. Be enough to drive anybody mad-and I wasn’t convinced that he hadn’t been a little mad to start with. If what he’d done to me was, in fact, forbidden, he’d been playing with fire. When the old commercials said, “It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature,” they hadn’t exactly been kidding around.
I wondered what he’d been like before. Maybe Venna inferred that from my frequent, nervous glances in the rearview mirror, because she said about fourteen hours into the drive, “He didn’t hate you at first, you know. You weren’t more than an annoyance to him. It was all because of David-Ashan was jealous, and he wanted to be Jonathan’s heir. You were David’s weakness, so Ashan exploited that, because he wanted to destroy David before he got too powerful.”
All politics. “Funny,” I said. “It feels personal now.”
“Now it is,” she agreed. “You’re like a virus, you humans. You get under our skins.”
“Flattering.”
She frowned. “Was it? I didn’t mean it to be.”
I resisted the urge to explain sarcasm to her. Barely. “What about memories? Are you going to give me his since he’s human?”
She looked away. “Do you think you want them?”
“Just the ones about me.”
This time, she looked at me straight on. “Do you really want them?”
I realized then what I was asking for. Not just memories of me as Ashan saw me, but the things Ashan might have done to me. To other people I loved.
To my daughter.
I cleared my throat. “Let me think about it.”
She nodded. From the backseat Ashan said, in a low, harsh voice that didn’t sound like it got much use, “You can’t be saved, you know. Whether you die today or in fifty years, you still die.”
Cheery little fella. “I’ll take surviving the fifty years, if I have a choice.”
He smiled thinly. “You don’t.” His eyes were bright-not Djinn bright, which was a whole order of magnitude weirder, but plenty bright enough to indicate crazy. “I’ll freely give you my memories, meat. I want you to know everything. It would please me if you went to your death remembering every painful second of what I did to her.”
I thought longingly about the Taser, then deliberately relaxed. “Can’t you shut him up?” I asked Venna.
She glanced over the seat at Ashan. “I don’t like to keep him unconscious all the time. It’s not good for him.”
“Like I care.”
Venna giggled. I nearly drove off the road. “Sorry,” she immediately said, subdued. “Was that wrong? I don’t usually try to laugh. I never was human, you know. I never learned.”
“Really? What a shock, you seem like such a regular kid.” I checked the map. We were making good time, and the lodge that Venna had indicated was our stopping point for the day was only about an hour’s drive down the road.
I was starting to feel pretty good about the possibilities when I felt the engine give the tiniest little hitch.
“No,” I whispered.
There it was again. Stronger. It sent a shudder through the car.
“No!”
The third time, the whole engine seized up with a clatter of valves. Great. “Venna! Little help!”
But she wasn’t looking at me. I wasn’t even sure if she’d realized we were coasting to a stop at the side of the road.
“She’s found you,” said Ashan, and smiled coldly. “They may kill me, but I think they’ll kill you, too. And that would be worth my death.”
“Venna!” I pumped my foot on the gas, but it was stupid; the car wasn’t going anywhere, not without supernatural repairs. “Dammit-”
“He’s right,” Venna said. Her voice sounded colorless, emotionless, but there was a bright spark of fear in her eyes. “David broke my shields. He must know I was hiding you. They’re coming, and they’ll kill Ashan. I can’t risk that.”