Chill Factor (24 page)

She wasn’t more than she seemed. Just a girl, nothing special, no Warden powers, no Ma’at glyphs. The longer I stared at her, the more I saw…a fragile blush of gold in her aura, like soft morning. Black slashes beneath of greed and pain. She had a bad history, but so did Kevin…that was what drew the two of them together. The dark gravity of desperation.

‘You’re running from something,’ I said to her, and saw her flinch in both the real world and the aetheric. ‘Someone.’

‘Maybe.’ Bravado wasn’t her strong suit. ‘None of your business.’

‘Someone here in town? Who is it?’ I had an instinct, and followed it. ‘Quinn. Quinn has something on you.’

No answer. Siobhan stared at me with pretty, empty eyes, and I switched back to Kevin. He’d reached out for her hand, like a boyfriend, not a trick. And I saw the corresponding flicker and glow of her aura.

True love. How romantic.

Kevin took in a deep breath, glanced at his girl, then back at me. ‘You’re right,’ he said. It was the most adult tone I’d ever heard him use. ‘I got stupid. I shouldn’t have taken that guy Lewis’s powers… Hell, I don’t even know how to, you know, do stuff with them. Well…I did some things…’

‘Like what?’

‘You know. Things. Like…made girls’ T-shirts see-through. And there was this flower garden – I made it grow and gave Siobhan a rose.’

‘That was nice,’ she said.

He shrugged, indifferent. Only someone his age could be bored by ultimate power. He brightened up and continued, ‘I got GWAR to do a free concert downstairs, you know, in the lobby. With the blood and everything. It was cool, especially when they were cleaning it up later – they all kept yelling at each other about who let it happen. Pretty funny.’

That was the human race, all right; a thrash-metal band shows up, plays at ear-bleeding volume, and everybody blames the next guy. Management was probably still shaking in their Bruno Maglis. I wondered why security hadn’t put a stop to it, and realised that Jonathan had probably found it just as funny as Kevin.

Guys. What can you do?

‘And there was that fire; that was cool.’ Siobhan
said, eyes gleaming. Kevin shot her a look, and she got off the subject fast. ‘I said he should rub the lamp or whatever and say he never wants to work again, but he said that was stupid, that he’d end up paralysed or dead or something.’

Which was what I’d threatened him with, back in the bad old days of Kevin being my lord and master. I couldn’t restrain a smile. Kevin’s answering one was thin and fragile, and shattered when a far-off rumble of thunder sounded. He turned his face to the windows and looked out.

Even tired and drained as I was, I felt the pulse of power that went out of him – unfocused, overdone, like a cruise missile swatting a gnat. The clouds literally exploded into vapour, veiling the sun, and then vanished completely.

In three seconds, it was hot and clear as far as the eye could see.

Kevin turned back to me and saw me staring, lips parted.

‘I don’t like rain,’ he said flatly.

He’d always had Fire Warden powers, but it was surprising he was doing this kind of weather manipulation with Lewis’s stolen bag of tricks. And that he was learning to use it without Jonathan’s tutelage. No, on reflection, not surprising: alarming. ‘You shouldn’t—’

He interrupted. ‘You don’t tell me what to do.
Nobody
gets to tell me what to do, ever again.’

I shut my mouth. No percentage in arguing with him, not now. His mood had changed again, just like the weather – gone dark and morose, in contrast to the bright shininess beyond the glass – and I’d seen Kevin in dark moods before. Not good. When he was scared he lashed out, and right now I didn’t have the strength or the ability to go toe-to-toe with the little jerk.

We stared at each other in silence for a few long seconds, and then Kevin blinked and, still surly, said, ‘You want I should fix that stuff?’

‘What stuff?’

For answer, he reached out and took hold of my wrist. I tried to pull back, but he was stronger than he looked – weedy, but roped with muscle – and then I felt the hot tingle and knew what he was doing.

I stared down at my exposed skin as the cuts turned pink, puckered closed, and sealed up. I felt things shifting inside, healing. The heat made me break out in a fast sweat, and the tingle turned to a more localised heat. Deep down.
Really
deep.

‘Stop,’ I panted. Kevin kept holding on. ‘Stop it!’ I yanked free, breaking contact, and knew my face was flushed. He’d been healing me, but he’d also been playing with me. Siobhan had taught him some tricks, consciously or not. He gave me a smug grin and settled back with a proprietary arm around his girl.

I wiped blood and sweat from my arms with the blanket and saw that he’d done it perfectly – no cuts, not even faint scars to mark where they’d been. I even felt energised. He’d pumped up my blood supply, too, made my bone marrow go into overdrive. Dangerous, but effective.

I looked down at the rest of me, sighing at the oversize T-shirt and too-large black leggings, and Siobhan – who had a professional understanding of the importance of wardrobe – jumped up and ran to the closet. She dug around and pulled out a pair of low-rise blue jeans and a crop top that would, with imagination, just barely manage to be decent.

I accepted the jeans, and found a red mesh T-shirt with a Chinese design to cover up the crop top. Since I’d gone without a bra this morning, and rejected the sweaty jog bra from the car, some layering was going to be crucial.

The Bellagio had thoughtfully provided a lovely stained-glass screen in the corner, probably just for decoration, but I went behind it and changed. The jeans fit, barely; I had to bite my lips and suck in a breath to get them zipped up. The crop top felt like hookerwear, but the mesh top redeemed it. When I stepped back out, Kevin had turned on the plasma TV again and was watching a writhing knot of bodies on screen.

‘Get your head out of
Penthouse Letters
; it’s never gonna happen,’ I said, and reclaimed the remote to
flick the power button again. I sat again, leant elbows on blue-jeaned knees, and looked from one of them to the other. ‘Here’s the deal, kids. You’ve got exactly three options. You can give up—’

‘Never gonna happen,’ Kevin said.

‘Or you can die, because those guys out there, they
will
kill you. And believe me, they want to do it sooner rather than later.’

Kevin’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. He must have read the sincerity in my eyes. ‘You said there were three options.’

‘Yeah.’ I leant back. ‘You can help me.’

‘Help you do what?’

I smiled slowly. ‘Save the world.’

He hesitated just exactly the right amount of time to indicate how cool he was, and then said, ‘Yeah, whatever.’

First things first. I picked up the hotel phone, dialled a number from memory, and when Marion answered, I said, ‘Hello, pizza delivery? I’d like to order a large special.’

I listened to the buzz of cell phone static for a few seconds, and then she said, ‘Are you in trouble?’

‘Ain’t I always? Just look for the biggest pile of crap; I’m usually neck-deep in it. You know that.’ I rolled my eyes, for Kevin and Siobhan’s benefit. ‘You never answered me earlier. How’d you get into Las Vegas?’

‘The same way you did,’ she said crisply. ‘I died. And, I might add, I’m not doing it again. It disagrees with me.’

I smiled; there was something about her that I just couldn’t help but like. ‘I’m in the Bellagio, and Kevin’s ready to talk. Look for us downstairs in the casino, the far end near the restaurants. It’s quieter there.’

‘Fifteen minutes,’ she promised, and hung up.

I replaced the phone in the cradle and looked over at Kevin. ‘Don’t start anything,’ I warned him. ‘And give me the stopper.’

‘What?’

‘The stopper for Jonathan’s bottle.’ He looked wary, but there was nothing to be gained from holding it back. He fumbled in his pants pocket and found a little plastic thing. It hardly seemed big enough to hold in something like Jonathan.

‘You’re not gonna screw me, right?’ he asked. I shook my head. He dropped the stopper into my hand. ‘Better not, or I’ll go nuclear on your ass.’

I walked out into the living area again, which was drenched in early-morning butterscotch sunlight. The place smelt faintly stale; they hadn’t let the maids in for days, maybe weeks. I walked straight for the wet bar, picked up the bottle of Jim Beam, and poured myself a splash in a crystal tumbler. Kevin appeared in the doorway, and I saw him go pallid – more than usual – and then try to cover up.

‘Pour me one, too,’ he said, and swaggered over.

I gave him a lovely, warm smile. ‘No.’ I screwed the cap back on the whiskey and put it aside, turned to the bar, and let my eyes sweep over the glittering array of crystal. ‘Your idea? It’s not a bad one, kid, really. Purloined-letter stuff. Classic.’

‘Jonathan!’ he yelled, and I hardened the air in a
thick shell around him, creating a thick, opaque bubble that kept sound from penetrating. He’d break it, but it would take him a few seconds to figure out how; that was the advantage I still had over him. Training. I started pulling out decanters, one after another, and shaking them. No, no, no, no…

Yes.

The muffled rattle of glass on crystal. I put the decanter down, took a firm grip, and held my fingers over the mouth as a rough sieve as I poured the (no doubt expensive) booze down the stainless-steel sink.

A glass bottle hit my fingers with a wet, heavy impact.

Kevin snapped the bubble around him with a wild flare of power, wild enough to shatter the mirror behind the bar and send heavy furniture tumbling. I ducked, almost fumbled the heavy, slick crystal, and heard him yelling Jonathan’s name again.

Not that Jonathan could respond. Kevin had clearly told him,
Don’t come out until I say so
, and he hadn’t said so, not in so many words. It would require a direct command to counteract his previous instructions, and that gave me precious seconds.

So long as I didn’t drop anything…

…which, of course, I did, as Siobhan tackled me from the side. We both tumbled. I fetched up
against the hard edge of a cabinet, the crystal decanter thumped to the carpet, spraying the last amber drops, and a glass bottle about as big as a purse-sized perfume slid halfway out the round mouth.

Siobhan lunged for it. My turn to tackle. She pulled my hair, which hurt, and I rolled her over and reached for the crystal. It slid greasily under my fingers, scooting another four inches away. Kevin was still desperately yelling for Jonathan, not quite comprehending what was going on except that there was a girlfight on the floor and he was kind of liking it.

I kicked loose of Siobhan’s grabbing hands, rolled, and took the decanter with me.

‘Jonathan, come here!’ Kevin yelled frantically, and jumped over Siobhan to come at me with a swinging fist. I upended the decanter.

My fingers closed around the slick, wet glass of Jonathan’s bottle, and the world…changed.

He was now
my
Djinn.

Everything stopped, crystal-clear – Kevin, suspended in mid-swing; Siobhan, clawing her way across the carpet towards me; the discarded liquor decanter, heading for the floor.

Everything…just…stopped.

I sucked in a deep breath and held it, felt my muscles and tendons and blood and bone and tissue as if they were all new, brand-new, made in this
second. Then the world formed around me. Air, in its complex and beautiful lattice of molecules, moving in waves and eddies, a life-form of its own. The stunning crystal perfection of the bottle in my hand. The world, God,
the world
, so huge, so astonishing, so wondrous in its clockwork precision.

The enormous, dreaming strength of the world living in every pulse beat, every breath.

And there was Jonathan, standing before me. Not in his normal human form, with its easy-to-underestimate casual grace; no, this was something else, something bright and unknowable and wild in its magic.

The seduction of it…

The next breath, Jonathan was back in human disguise, staring at Siobhan and Kevin, who were still frozen in time. Light gleamed in his brown-and-silver hair, and the darkness of his eyes was the darkness of the end of things.

‘I don’t like you,’ he said, without even glancing my way. ‘You know that.’

‘I know.’ My mouth felt strange, my voice even stranger. ‘Sorry.’

He shrugged. ‘Well, that’s the way the world crumbles. Sometimes you get surprised.’

And he turned and pulled me close to him. His touch was fire – not the soothing heat of David’s skin, but the scalding burn of an open flame. I tried
to pull away, but that wasn’t possible here, now. He put one hand at the small of my back and moved the other to splay an open palm across my stomach.

Too close. Too intimate.
Very
personal.

Stars in those eyes, like an endless sky. Unknown and unknowable, to anything human. And there was passion in there, too, the passion of gods that insects would never know or understand.

‘This saves you,’ he whispered, and put his lips very gently against mine. A closed-mouth kiss, but it set my blood on fire, made my knees weak and rubbery. ‘
She
saves you. Count your blessings, Jo. This could have had a different ending.’

…and time snapped back together. Jonathan stepped back, smiling.

And Kevin’s fist hit my chin, snapped my head back, and instead of visions of mountains and gods I saw stars, but I hung on grimly to what was in my hand, even as his fingers scrabbled at it to take it away.

I slid sideways to the carpet, worked my jaw experimentally, and said, ‘Jonathan, restrain them, please.’

When I opened my eyes and blinked away the blurring, he was holding Kevin by the scruff of the neck and Siobhan by the arm. They were both struggling – Kevin was screaming curses, mostly
directed at me – but they weren’t going anywhere.

Jonathan raised his eyebrows in my direction. ‘Nice bruise you’re going to have.’

I glared. ‘Let’s get this over with,’ I said. ‘Take the powers Kevin stole from Lewis, and put them back where they belong.’ He just stared at me. We did several long seconds’ worth of that. ‘I said, take the powers Kevin stole from Lewis, and—’

‘Heard you,’ Jonathan interrupted me. ‘You don’t want me to do that right now.’

‘You want to play Rule of Three with me?’

‘Trust me, you
really
don’t want me to do what you just said.’

‘I—’ I shut up and looked at him, deeply, and changed my mind. ‘OK, I’ll play. Why not?’

He gave me a Djinn smile, all slyness and misinformation. ‘I thought you wanted to save the world.’

‘Meaning what?’

He shrugged. Siobhan was trying to bite his hand. He gave her one sidelong look, and she went limp and fell to the carpet.

‘Hey!’ I protested, and scrambled over next to her. She was still breathing. In fact, she had a sweet little smile, when she lost the ’tude. She was a natural redhead, with the soft pink skin to match, and the light was kinder to her than the world. ‘Watch it, buster. I’m the one with the—’

‘You got nothing,’ Jonathan said. ‘We both know
you can’t make me do a damn thing I don’t want to do. Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed glumly. ‘So why don’t you want to return Lewis’s powers? What’s the point in that? He’ll
die
!’

The smile continued on Jonathan’s sharp, handsome face, but there wasn’t any amusement in his eyes.

‘Trust me,’ he replied. ‘It’s better this way. Just for a while.’

We could have played the game for hours, I knew that; I had Jonathan’s bottle, but I didn’t have Jonathan himself, not by any stretch of the imagination. He’d been newly under thrall when Yvette had him, and he hadn’t figured out the boundaries properly in the heat of the moment; otherwise, he never would have carried out half the commands she’d given him.

Lucky me, I got him farther along the learning curve.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Wake Siobhan up. We’re all going downstairs.’

He didn’t so much as glance at her, but the girl came straight up, gasping, and immediately launched herself at me again. Jonathan rolled his eyes and, without my asking, stopped her in mid-lunge.

Freeze-frame.

He shook Kevin by the scruff of the neck and
said, ‘Explain to your girlfriend how stupid that is.’

Kevin licked his lips, darted glances from Jonathan to me and back again. ‘Can she hear me?’

‘Sure.’

‘Siobhan…uh…cool it, OK? It’s not like this is a bad thing. Maybe they’ll all quit chasing us now.’

Jonathan released her from the pause button. Siobhan, off balance, windmilled her arms and legs but stayed upright.

And a pout. ‘You don’t want it back?’

‘His bottle?’ Kevin gave Jonathan another cautious look. ‘Uh, no.’

‘Loser,’ she muttered. She threw up her hands and scooted her butt up on a bar stool. ‘Coulda been rich, you know. Living in some big white mansion with servants and shit. Swimming pool.’

I didn’t dare leave her behind; she knew too much. ‘OK, kids, let’s go. Play nice and maybe I’ll give you some good toys.’

Siobhan, no fool, lowered her mascara-thick eyelashes. ‘Like a big white mansion?’

I reached out and shoved her off the bar stool. ‘Don’t push your luck.’ I nodded at Jonathan. ‘Let him go.’

‘You’re a bitch,’ Kevin said.

‘And you say that like it’s a bad thing.’ I grabbed Kevin by the shoulder and steered him and Siobhan in the direction of the door. ‘Move it.’

I took Jonathan aside in the elevator, turned our backs to Kevin and Siobhan, and whispered, ‘The Ma’at have a sniper on call. He’s under orders to take Kevin out. I need you to make sure that doesn’t happen.’ No change in Jonathan’s expression. No acknowledgement, either. I sighed. ‘Can we agree to a decent working rapport, here? Because I really don’t have time for this, and I can always stuff you back in the bottle and shove a tampon in the top instead of a stopper, and all the other Djinn will point and laugh—’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure Kevin doesn’t get shot.’

I smelt a rat. ‘I’d rather not be shot, either.’

Jonathan shrugged. I took it as a gift and saw that Kevin and his girlfriend had taken the opportunity to whisper together, too…probably not soft little nothings, from the glances they were tossing us. Great. Now I had to worry about treachery from Jonathan
and
the simpleminded scheming of the juvenile Bonnie and Clyde.

The elevator glided to a smooth, elegant halt and deposited us back in the marble hallways, rows and rows of doors all opening and closing, people always moving. They say New York is the city that doesn’t sleep; Las Vegas doesn’t even
nap
. I wondered when they got the basic cleaning done. Even Disneyland closes long enough to empty the trash and polish the brass.

We joined the flow out into the main concourse, turned left, and went past the cashier stand, into the wilderness of gently chiming slots. To our right were trendy restaurants – the kind that didn’t post prices – and somewhere at the back was a walkway that led to Caesar’s Palace next door.
Next door
, in Las Vegas terms, meant about a ten-minute walk through a sky bridge that seemed to go on forever.

I halted us near a bar at the back corner, chose a table, and got everyone to sit. Everyone except Jonathan, who was examining slot machines and entertaining himself by making random ones spit coins. Kevin watched him raptly. I could tell by the greedy flare in his eyes that he’d figured out what the Djinn was doing.

‘Don’t even,’ I said. The security cameras wouldn’t see Jonathan at all, most likely; they’d just see machines randomly vomiting tokens…but if Kevin started flouncing around making the bells ring, there’d be a fast, heavily muscled presence and a windowless office, followed by some harshly worded questions we couldn’t afford to avoid just now. ‘Play later. Just sit.’