Djinn and Tonic (10 page)

A few minutes later we pull up in front of my condo building. “Well,” I say, “thanks for the ride. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.” I get out and shut the door, not waiting for a reply.
 

My condo stinks from being closed up during the heat of the past few days—an old, empty smell. There are dishes in the sink, half a pot of coffee still in the glass carafe, and a Styrofoam take-out container on the coffee table with week-old food in it that looks as if it has developed its own ecology.
 

I curse it all and get out the cleaning supplies. I get to work, needing something to do to get my mind working. I scrub the dishes by hand before running them through the dishwasher, gather several bags of garbage and carry them out to the dumpster, then I vacuum the tiny living room.
 

While I clean, my mind is whirling, questions burning through my brain. Why is Leila lying to me? What is it she’s so afraid of? What doesn’t she want me to find out? Every instinct I have is telling me that she’s not just lying to me. I think she’s withholding some major information, something about herself, or her past, or her family. And whatever her secret is, it was enough to make her walk away from me, despite the obvious attraction between us.
 

The look in her eyes when she said goodbye is something I will never forget. There was a finality there, a sense of permanent farewell. And behind the sadness was the terror—a bone-deep fear of doing something she really, deeply did not want to do.

The memory of the fear in her gorgeous brown eyes sends my urge to protect her into overdrive. I want to hunt her down and take this on for her. Or, barring that, at least be there with her to help in any way I can.
 

But I can’t. It’s not my place to protect her. She’s not my girlfriend, and it’s looking like she never will be. If she wanted my help, she’d have told me the truth.

Cleaning my apartment only takes an hour, and the need to distract myself wins out over prudence. I walk to the gym—just a few blocks away—and start a workout that is harder than is probably advisable. My still-mending ribs scream, but I ignore them and pound out rep after rep, until I’m shaking with exhaustion. Finally, the pain forces me to step away from the weight machine and slump over, chest heaving, muscles aching. I try to clear my mind and focus on the burning of my muscles, but Leila is all I can think about.
 

I fantasize about sliding my hands under those tiny shorts, picture what it would feel like to pull them down around her thighs, pushing them away until they drop to the floor, leaving her skin bare to my touch. I imagine her wrapping those long tan legs around my waist and kissing me like she can’t get enough. I can hear her moaning, a breathless whimper of ragged desire.
 

I close my eyes and I can almost see her right now, naked and wet, just out of the bath, maybe. Her hair is thick and dripping wet, her skin beaded with droplets of water. I can almost taste her skin, can almost feel the heavy weight of her breasts in my hands.
 

I growl and lift the bar off the hooks, lower it to my chest and then slowly push it up, holding it until my arms tremble, and then lower it again. Rep after rep, until my arms are jelly, and then I move to the leg press and pound out set after set until I can barely walk, my abused muscles on fire.
 

The pain is my friend, though. It gives me something to think about besides Leila. When I’m done punishing my body I go back home and order take-out and watch TV and try not to think about her.

I dream of her, though, and they aren’t innocent dreams.
 

*
 
*
 
*

I go into work the next day and begin sorting through the piled-up paperwork.

Captain Archer swings by my desk. “Hale, my office,” she barks, and I follow her down the hall. She leans back in her chair and sighs. “Listen, Carson, I think you need to take some time off.”

I stare at her. “You’re taking me off the case? What do you mean?”

“No,” Archer shakes her head. “I’m sending you on vacation, because there
is
no case.”
 

“Wait,” I say. “Are we talking about the al-Mansour case?”

Archer shakes her head. “Unless you came up with something new that I don’t know about yet, then that case is dead.” She eyes me, waiting.

The moment of truth. I consider for a moment, but I know there’s nothing else to say. “No. There was nothing. It went nowhere.”

She nods. “All right then. That’s closed.”

“Then what case am I off of?”

She shrugs. “I’m not taking you off a case, Carson, because there’s no case to take you off of. I put Jackson and Roberts on it, and they came up with nothing. No signs of anything that would make me think it was foul play. So officially, whatever happened at that bar was a freak accident. I can’t afford to waste any more manpower on it. We’ve got too many other cases that
do
have leads to follow.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense! I saw the photographs—”

“It’s
closed
, Hale,” Archer interrupts. “You’re on vacation for two weeks, as of this moment. You don’t have a choice. You haven’t taken a single day off in four years, and you were just injured. You need a vacation. Go to California and learn how to surf. Sit in your apartment alone and get drunk. I don’t care. What you do with your time is up to you, but I don’t want to see you back here for two weeks, you hear me?”

I nod. “Yes, ma’am.”

She leans forward and jabs at me with a pen. “And you better not try to investigate it on your own, either.”
 

Shit, well, there goes that idea. “Take all the fun out of vacation, why don’t you.” I try to make it a joke, but the captain just stares at me impassively.
 

“Go on, now. Git. Try and relax, Hale. Find yourself a girl or something.” Archer waves a hand and turns to her computer screen, dismissing me.

Find a girl? Now there’s an idea.
 

There’s not much in the way of paperwork on the Old Shillelagh case, but there is Leila’s statement, along with her contact information. I copy her phone number and address into my phone, and then leave the precinct.
 

Ten digits.
 

Call her? Text her? Just show up at her front door?
 

I’m off the case, or rather, there
is
no case to be off of, so there’s no conflict of interest, professionally.
 

But personally?
 

I don’t even know.

*
 
*
 
*

I end up perched on a bar stool, a drink in hand, watching baseball highlights and trying not to think about Leila.
 

That lasts for all of two innings.
 

By the time I’m crunching the ice at the bottom of my glass, my phone is out and I’m staring at her number. All I have to do is press the call button.
 

What am I going to say? She seemed pretty final in the way she’d said goodbye; maybe she really doesn’t want to see me. Maybe I’m imagining a connection between us that isn’t really there.
 

But no. She kissed me back, not just once, but twice. She wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t want me, on some level at least.
 

The fear I’d seen in her eyes gives me pause. What is she afraid of? Me? The possibility of us? Herself? Someone else?

There’s only one way to find out.

I touch the green button.

Chapter 8: Maelstrom

Leila

I’m going crazy.
 

Hassan is calling me nonstop, leaving threatening voicemails. Classic Hassan. It’s his way of intimidating me. Hassan is an extremely powerful fire-elemental and has consummate control over his powers. As if that’s not enough, he’s the heir to one of the most powerful ifrit clans in the world, which gives him access to essentially unlimited funds and somehow endless ranks of both mortal and ifrit henchmen. And, oh yeah, he’s a bloodthirsty sociopath with zero compunction about killing anyone who gets in his way.
 

And I’m supposed to marry him? If it weren’t so serious, it would be laughable.
 

Then there’s my father. He sounded frightened at the end of my conversation with him. My father is not an easy man to frighten. He’s thousands of years old and immensely powerful. He’s watched empires rise and fall. But now he’s going on the defensive because of Hassan al-Jabiri? Something is wrong, but I can’t figure out what. Sure, a deal might have gone wrong, but it was just one of hundreds of deals. Surely it can’t mean
that
much to my father. Hassan must have some kind of chokehold on my father’s business; it’s got to be something like that. There’s no other way he’d let an arrogant, evil excuse for a man like Hassan threaten his family without severe retaliation.
 

But my father will never tell me what’s going on, not in a thousand years. I’m a woman, and his daughter, and men do not discuss business with mere
females
, not in his chauvinistic, patriarchal world.
 

I don’t know what to do about Hassan, or about Father, so I push them out of my head…and, of course, my thoughts turn back to Carson. I never gave him my phone number or address, but I keep hoping he’ll show up. I glance at my phone every five minutes, and find myself listening for the doorbell. He’s a cop; he can find me if he really wants to.
 

I want him to come after me; I can admit that much to myself. I’d tell him everything, if he were to show up right now.
 

I would risk my family’s wrath to be with him. The strange thing is, though, I have a feeling he’d protect them, if he were to know the truth. There’s a sense of restrained power about him, a kind of primal strength that’s part of the reason he makes my knees weak when I’m around him. It’s impossible, though. Even as much as Carson can undoubtedly take care of himself, Hassan would torch him to a crisp without breaking a sweat.
 

I can’t help remembering the way he touched me in the hospital. I wanted so badly for him to slide his fingers inside me; my legs were shaking as he moved his touch from knee to thigh to groin, and I had to tense all my muscles to keep them from quivering like some virginal schoolgirl. Quivering…I was actually quivering.
 

It would’ve been embarrassing, but I could see very clearly how it affected Carson. It took even more self-control to keep my hands under the blanket, to restrain myself from touching the source of his desire. In that moment, I was willing to let him do whatever he wanted; I’m not a public-display-of-affection kind of girl, but something about Carson Hale destroys my inhibitions. We were in a hospital room with the privacy curtain open, his fingers less than an inch away from my core.
 

The memory has me hot all over again. If he showed up right now, I’d jump him. Literally, I’d dive-tackle him and tear off his clothes, kiss every inch of his muscular body and beg him to take me, right here on the living room floor.
 

And I realize something even more frightening: if Carson doesn’t at least call me before Hassan drags me back to Chicago, I’ll be heartbroken.
 

Which tells me how far this has gone between us: he’s a cop, and I’m falling head over heels for him.
 

Me, the daughter of Ibrahim Najafi, ifrit patriarch and underworld crime boss. Falling in love with a human cop.

I chew on the thought; I’m in love with Carson Hale.

God, I’m in so much trouble.
 

I’m falling in love, but I’m supposed to marry a sociopathic ifrit killer?

What do I do?
 

I retreat to the kitchen and make tea, hoping it will calm me down, but I’m so distracted and upset that I leave the silverware drawer open. When I notice it, I can’t be bothered to close it. I lean back against the island and sip at the scalding liquid, thinking about Carson and hating Hassan and resenting my father. I don’t even feel the power leaking out at first. I’m so lost in the tangled mess of my life that the vortex whirling around me doesn’t register until a steak knife flies past my face to impale itself into the drywall beside the fridge, leaving a stinging scratch on my cheek where the blade grazed my face. My powers have gone haywire. A tornado is howling around my head, catching silverware from the drawer and tangling my hair in a wind-tossed halo. Knives, forks, spoons, chopsticks, all hurtle around me in gale-force winds, tearing the tiny kitchen apart. Cabinets are ripped off their hinges, drawers are pulled free and thrown across the room, bottles of spices smash against the walls, sending cardamom and cinnamon and garlic and salt and pepper and paprika into the tornado. A stream of plates hurtles across the kitchen, smashing against the wall and cracking the drywall one after the other in a ceramic hailstorm.
 

I close my eyes and focus on calming the raging hurricane of emotion within me, on bottling my powers before I destroy the entire building. When the winds are quiet once more, I open my eyes and curse weakly. The walls and ceiling and floor around me are peppered with silverware, dishes lay smashed in piles all over the floor, herbs and spices float to the floor in a choking, scented cloud, cabinet doors are cracked and hanging loose…there’s a plate lodged in the ceiling tiles, somehow still intact.
 

The scene would be comical if it didn’t mean losing my damage deposit and possibly even being evicted. I spend an hour and a half cleaning, sweeping up broken flatware and spices, dislodging silverware from the ceiling and the walls, closing the cabinet doors that will close and removing the ones too broken to close. I haul a garbage bag full of smashed plates and bent silverware and broken cabinet doors to the dumpster, and then slump onto the couch, sweaty and irritated.
 

Just then, my phone rings.