She vaulted up to the roof of the white van, where Detective Rodriguez might have noticed a slight weight displacement but wouldn’t have seen a thing even if he’d looked out. She ran the length of it, then planted her feet and arced gracefully up into the air, heading straight for Ashan…
… who knocked her out of the air as easily as Babe Ruth swinging for the bleachers.
I could feel the disordered currents of energy in the air around me. The Djinn were causing instability, and dammit, there was nothing I could do about it.
Whatever damage had been done to my powers when I’d overextended and David had … changed… wasn’t fixing itself, and the energy Jonathan had thrust into me wasn’t made for weather work.
Rahel flew bonelessly through the air, crashed to the pavement of the parking lot, and rolled about fifteen feet, arms and legs flopping.
And then she vanished into mist.
Poof.
Ashan turned his attention back to me.
I gulped and stood up, backing away. Not a lot of escape opportunities on the balcony.
“You know what I want,” Ashan said, and held out his hand. His fingernails gleamed a kind of opal-silver in the twilight, and his eyes were as bright as moons. He might have been wearing a designer suit, but he was no kind of human. “Get the bottle.”
“You can’t even touch the bottle,” I said. I meant it to come out cool and logical, but it sounded shaky. “Djinn can’t—”
“Little girl, don’t presume to tell me what Djinn can or can’t do,” he interrupted in a voice so low and cold that I felt ice form along my backbone. “I said get it.”
“Or?”
“You don’t want to test me.” He took a measured step forward. I felt the ozone crackling in the air, felt the menace in the clouds overhead. Wispy things, but firming up as the disruptions in the aetheric mirrored themselves into the physical world… whipping, uncontrolled winds in the mesosphere; cold spots; a streak of heat from Ashan that cut through weather patterns like a spearhead.
I could feel the electricity in the air trying to find a way to ground itself.
He could fry me right here on the patio, and with my powers currently registering somewhere from zero to dead, I couldn’t even defend myself. “David is fond of humans. I’m not. I don’t care if I level this entire building to make my point.”
“Djinn,” I said, and forced a grin. “No sense of proportion.”
I didn’t see him move, but I felt the blow—hard enough to temporarily white out my nervous system and send me reeling to slam back against stucco and brick. I’d missed the plate-glass doors, at least. That was a relief. When sensation came flooding back, it brought with it a tide of stinging-hot ache along the side of my face. It had been an open-handed slap, but damn, he hadn’t pulled it. I put my hand to my cheek and felt heat. My eyes were watering.
Ashan took another step forward. “I’m not interested in how clever you imagine yourself to be, and if you think your human body interests me, you’re deluded,” he said. “I only find it interesting in how many creative ways I might be able to take it apart. Now, go and get the bottle.”
He couldn’t touch the bottle. He couldn’t take it away from me. Even Jonathan hadn’t been able to do that. Was it a bluff? Or did he just want to know where it was?
I slipped open the sliding glass door and backed inside, then slammed it shut.
For all the good it would do, of course. Outside, Ashan stood silhouetted against the failing twilight, gray as a dead man, with those eyes swirling cold and silver.
“Hey,” Sarah said. She was still deep in her culinary trance, doing something now involving bread and the oven. The kitchen smelled like rosemary and olive oil and roasting chicken. Heaven. I wished I could appreciate it; I was shaking, shaken, and scared. I watched her slide the tray into the slot and close the oven door, then strip off oven mitts and turn toward me with a smile. “It’s nice out there, isn’t it? Kind of peaceful. Maybe we can have dinner out there…”
“Yeah,” I said. “Great. Okay.” What a horrible idea. I started to move past her to the bedroom.
She reached out and grabbed my arms, pulling me to a stop. Her frown creased into faint lines. “Jo? What happened to your face?”
“Um…” I was drawing a blank. “I tripped.”
“Tripped?”
“It’s nothing, Sarah.” I tried to pull free. My sister was stronger than she looked.
“Bullshit, nothing. You look spooked, Jo. Is it that guy? That van guy?” Now she looked angry as well. “Dammit… I’m calling the police. Right now.”
“No! No, look, it’s nothing like that—” This was all getting way too complicated. I yanked free of her grip. She lunged for the phone. I grabbed it away from her and slammed it down hard on the table. “Sarah! It’s my business, all right? And the guy in the van is a cop!”
She stared at me, astonished. “He’s what?”
“A cop.” I had trouble controlling my breathing. Panic was getting the better of me. “I had some trouble in Las Vegas a couple of months ago. It’s temporary.”
“Jesus Christ, what did you do? Kill somebody?”
“Do I look like a murderer to you? You’re my sister! You’re supposed to believe in me!”
I hadn’t answered the question, but luckily I’d hit the right guilt buttons. “Jo …” Sarah flapped her manicured hands helplessly. “Fine. All right. I believe you. But why is he following you?”
“He thinks I know something about a crime that happened while I was—before you ask, no. I didn’t.” She opened her mouth to fire off another question, and I hastily searched for an excuse to escape. “Sorry. I have to use the bathroom.”
Even persistent people don’t want to argue with full bladders. She let me go. I hurried through the doorway into the living room, heading for my closed private space, and… the doorbell rang.
JESUS! “Get that!” I yelled over my shoulder, and kept moving. I ran into the bedroom, slid open the bedside table, and grabbed David’s blue glass bottle. My heart was hammering. I was about to take a huge gamble, and it was likely to get me hurt or killed in the process. I went back out into the living room, passing Sarah on her way to answer the doorbell, frowning at me; she’d taken the time to remove her apron and fluff her hair.
I slid the sliding glass door open and stepped out onto the patio. Ashan turned from contemplation of the ocean to stare at me. His eyes flicked toward the bottle in my hand.
“At least you take direction properly,” he said. “Call him.”
“You don’t want me to do that,” I said.
Ashan’s eyes went stormcloud-dark, tinged with lightning blue. “I won’t tell you again.”
“You want to kill him.”
Ashan smiled. Not nicely.
I closed my eyes, opened them, and said, “David, come out of the bottle.”
For a long second I was sure that I’d made a terrible mistake, that he’d never gone back in the bottle at all, and then a shadow detached itself from the corner and stood, swaying and angular, at my side. It wasn’t David. It wasn’t … anything I could recognize. But it answered to the name, and evidently I still had some control over it.
Ashan took a step back. That predatory smile went south, fast.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him, and this time, my voice stayed steady and cool. “You wanted David. Here he is.”
“Ifrit.”
“Oh, now that’s just mean. You shouldn’t judge a Djinn by the color of his …” Before I could finish what was admittedly a very weak joke, I lost whatever control of the situation I had, as the Ifrit formerly known as David lunged, fastened himself around Ashan, and began to feed.