The sun beat down like a yellow hammer on the top of my head. I remembered what sunlight had felt like as a Djinn-that incredible sense of pure power soaking into me. As a human, it just made me feel overheated and exhausted.
"Okay, hold it," Lel said.
"I can keep walking; I'm not really tired," I offered; my voice sounded squeaky, full of bravado. Hiking was not my fave, but it was better than... well, a hole in the head.
Lel ignored me. She glanced over at Carl, who was on his cell phone, turned away from us, talking softly. The wind was staying still, thankfully; I didn't doubt that she was paying attention to that. Or that she'd shoot me if she suspected I was trying something tricky.
We waited. I shifted nervously from one foot to the other, watching the clear skies, feeling exposed and all too defenseless. "Look," I said. "I don't know what's going on, but if it's a matter of money..." Not that I had it, but I'd figure something out.
She gave me a beatific smile, waking dimples in her cheeks, and smoothed her perfectly behaved hair as a very slight breeze drifted by us, trailing the sharp, hot smell of mesquite. Carl finished his phone call and turned back to us. Lel handed him the gun. No words between them; they were obviously a tightly rehearsed act.
"Um... what now?" I asked.
"Now we wait."
"For...?"
No answer. The sun got hotter. Despite the chill that continued to pebble my skin into gooseflesh, I was sweating buckets, and I didn't dare wipe my face. My arms were getting tired from their half-mast position of surrender.
We heard the faint growl of an engine. Lel's eyes turned toward the direction of the highway as it revved and died away.
It appeared the criminal mastermind had arrived. I waited, sweating and worrying, until a tall, lanky form limped slowly toward us from the maze of dunes and spiked thornbushes.
"Lewis!" I blurted, and felt a spurt of relief like ice water... just as I realized that neither Lel nor Carl looked surprised to see him.
Oh, fuck.
"You look bad," Lel said to him-clinical analysis, not concern. "You sure you're up for this?"
"Yes," Lewis said. He had his cane again, and he was gripping it in a white-knuckled hand as he leaned his weight on it. His color was an unhealthy yellow-gray, and there were hard lines of pain around his eyes and mouth. Pale lips that nearly vanished, they were so colorless. "Just don't take long."
My hands had come down. A jerk from the gun made them go back up again, grabbing sky. "Lewis?" I asked it very softly, watching his face. He looked at me for a few long seconds, then down at the sand.
"It's the way it has to be, Jo."
"Wait-"
He nodded to the Terror Twins. Lel removed a test tube-shaped bottle from her coat pocket. Now there was a bottle I wouldn't have put a Djinn into, under any circumstances. One roll off of a table, and poof... unfortunately, I was all out of tables, and Carl was holding the gun like he seriously meant to use it.
"Lewis! Just tell me what the hell's going on! Look, I can help-"
"You are helping," he said without looking up. "Lel. Do it."
She popped the cork, and a Djinn misted into being next to her. Tall, dark-haired, kind of a business-class version of Raquel Welch. The Djinn's eyes had a distinct reddish tinge to them, which was unsettlingly demonic, and the red-painted nails on her flawless hands had definite talon potential. She was wearing a suit that damn sure looked like Prada to me, sleek and dark and elegant.
No shoes, disappointingly. Her legs misted down around calf level, in the traditional Djinn way. She didn't waste her energy on anything as human as feet.
I waited for Lewis to say something. Anything. To goddamn well look at me.
He moved the cane in front of him and braced himself with both hands, staring down. Absolving himself of responsibility.
"I swear to God, Lewis, I won't forget this," I said. "Whatever you're doing-"
Lel cut me off with a simple, direct command to her Djinn. "Stop her heart."
I sucked in a fast, hard breath, not really expecting to finish it, but then my lungs were full and I was holding my breath and still nothing was happening. The Djinn in Prada and Lel were exchanging looks like nuclear weapons.
"Did you hear me?" Lel asked through gritted teeth.
"Clarification is required," Prada said. Ah, it was like that. Apparently, Lel had done something to get on the wrong side of this Djinn. Bad timing: Djinn liked to toy with people, especially ones they didn't like. And they really didn't like to be used as cheap executioners.
Lel's fingers tightened around the test tube, then relaxed; she couldn't risk even a hairline crack in it. Her dimples started looking hollow instead of cute, and her eyes took on a hard, sharp shine. "Stop her heart from beating. How much more clarification can you need?" Lel's eyes cut to Lewis, but he didn't comment or move. His head was still down, his shoulders tensed.
Prada had a cruel tilt of a smile. "Specify," she purred. Carl muttered a soft, exasperated "Fuck me!" and the Djinn's smile gathered force, as if she were really very amused. I glanced frantically from Prada to Lel to Lewis, and felt a scream building somewhere like fizzy soda at the back of my throat.
"Lewis, help me," I whispered. I got an involuntary look from him, a flash of dark eyes that betrayed how much this was costing him, this stillness and silence.
And he looked away again, leaving me to my fate. My heart was hammering so fast and hard I thought it was shaking me apart; I was trembling all over, and my knees had gone the consistency of rubber bands. There was some panicked screaming going on in the back of my head, along the lines of I don't want to die! and if this went on any longer, I wasn't going to be able to keep my cool.
"If you're going to do it," I said in a surprisingly steady voice, "don't screw around. I'm not going to beg." Unless it went on another thirty seconds.
For the first time, Prada's reddish eyes flicked toward me. Read me like a book. I saw her face go still and blank, and then those flawlessly made-up eyelids went to half-mast and she held out a hand toward me. An open hand.
I felt her power reach out and fold around me, sink deep into my skin, my muscles, my bones. It kept moving, tightening, focusing around the panicked thick drumming of my heart.
"No," I whispered, and tried to back up.
No use. There was a second's pain, and then my heart just... stopped.
So much silence. I never knew how quiet it could be. The wind whispered over me, brushed black hair over my shoulders, and I knew I should breathe but breathing didn't seem that important now. Listening was important. There was so much to hear...
I fell to my knees. I know that because I heard it happen, heard the heavy, fleshy thump and each individual grain of sand rolling and scraping.
Lel bent over me. The sun gave her a completely inappropriate and undeserved halo. "By the way, they're not knockoffs, bitch."
Prada kept squeezing the life out of me. I wanted to say something, but I had no idea what, and anyway, there was nothing left now, nothing but the vast silence and a burning desire to see David, one more time...
It all happened so fast.
The cold black glitter of an Ifrit launched itself over me and battened on Prada like a glittering black second skin. It began to feed. Prada reflexively did the only thing that would save her... she translocated. Because she was still sunk elbow deep in me, stopping my heart, I felt the drag as she towed me with her.
"No!" That was Lewis, yelling. "No, not yet, not yet-"
I felt Lel reaching out, but it was too late; we were already moving, already in that not there space between worlds.
My last thought was, Oh shit, my heart isn't beating...
And then I hit something, hard, and that all stopped mattering.
FOUR
I was lying on a tiled floor. It was hard, warm, and damp. The air smelled hot and moist, earthy, heady with the perfumes of a hundred flowers. I saw blackness and star fields streaming away from me, and people were running toward me.
Being dead was oddly painless. Oh, wait, I wasn't dead yet, was I? Just dying. Takes minutes for the brain to shut down, and meanwhile, I had a fixed-stare view of thick-leafed succulents rustling overhead, of a tracery of milky glass and black iron beyond that. Faces kept appearing and disappearing. They all looked alarmed.
One of them leaned over me and did something that made my ribs creak. As he leaned over, I thought, I did not give you permission to French me, and then I realized what was happening.
I was being revived. Chest compressions. Mouth-to-mouth.
I choked, and felt something flutter in my chest under the painful stiff-armed pumping someone was giving me. The first hint of a heartbeat.
"She's coming back!" My rescuer had turned away, yelling; he was young, African-American, wearing what looked like an official-type security blazer with a logo on it. Nice cologne. When he turned back, I offered him a loopy smile. "Hey, just stay still, okay? We've got an ambulance coming."
"I'm fine," I said, and tried to get up. He was as strong as he looked, and I felt a good deal weaker than I should have. "What happened?"
"You collapsed, ma'am. Look, don't move. Everything's-"
Definitely not okay, I saw as I pushed myself up on my elbows. Prada was down flat on the tile a few feet away, and a black, sharp-edged shadow was crouched on top of her like some hideous gargoyle.
"Hey! Stop it!" I tried to sit up. I'd been locked in a struggle with an Ifrit when I'd been a Djinn myself; I knew how terrible it felt to have the life torn out of you... "Rahel, stop!"
The Djinn was eerily silent, but the Ifrit was making noises-eager, whimpering noises, like a starvation victim at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Prada's face was turned away from me, so I couldn't see the agony in her expression, but I could see her whole body trembling. Shaking apart. Misting at the edges, sublimating into the aetheric.
The Ifrit began to change. Take on shape and form and texture.
Take on color.
Lel must have finally mastered her confusion and ordered the Djinn back in the bottle, because suddenly there was a sensation of vacuum, and she was gone. The Ifrit, deprived of her feast, fell to humanlike hands and knees on tile, still making those raw, wretched noises. Her form wavered, solidified, became... Rahel.
"She's not making any sense," my savior in the security blazer said to an army of paramedics, who arrived wielding tackle boxes and professionally bored expressions. One had a gurney. Not that a bed didn't look good, but I really didn't have time for this.
I swatted aside his hand. "Am too." And then it came to me, why he thought I was crazy. I was watching Rahel, and Rahel didn't exist for them. They couldn't see her. I blinked and fell back flat, being obliging for all the nice medical folks who took BP and pulse and talked about various things that I didn't understand but which sounded very official. The world slowly came into focus around me, now that the crisis was passing. We were in a huge greenhouse, a Victorian monstrosity that stretched up at least two or three stories in graceful arches of wrought iron and frosted glass. The place was delirious with flowers and lousy with plants, but every single one was perfectly groomed. Not a speck of dirt out of place. I couldn't tell if the birdsong and insect hum were real or prerecorded; this was so perfect it was more like a simulation of nature than nature itself. We were in the center of the garden, near the picturesque, dignified gazebo where tourists by the millions had no doubt taken blurry photos to commemorate losing their shirts. I smelled food, and spotted a restaurant about twenty feet away. At the far end of the indoor garden, there was a hallway leading into the hotel lobby.
This all looked familiar. Really familiar.
The paramedics and security were keeping gawkers at bay, but there were lots of them. People of all ages, races, classes. Tourists in tacky shirts and walking shorts, complete with fanny packs. Guys in hand-tailored $5,000 suits talking on cell phones. One woman in a dress far too cool to be anything but couture, carrying a Fendi bag and wearing a selection from the Miu Miu fall collection on her feet. Kids in Rugrats T-shirts.
Holy shit. I was in Las Vegas.
It took me the better part of an hour to get rid of the various forms they wanted me to sign. I also had to appease grimly unhappy officials, and discovered I was now a guest of the Bellagio Hotel, courtesy of scaring the crap out of them by dropping dead in their conservatory. They had no way of knowing that I'd been dumped there out of the aetheric, and I didn't see any reason to explain it. I whipped up a quick story about coming to town and looking for a good hotel, and they bought it; I accepted a complimentary key card and escaped back to the conservatory as quickly as I could, hoping she'd still be there.
And there she was. Rahel. Sitting on a park bench, waiting. She rose gracefully to a standing position, brushed nonexistent dust from the neon-yellow pant-suit she favored, and straightened to look down at me as I walked up. Her head tilted to one side, cornrows rustling like dry leaves, and in that beautiful, dark-skinned face her eyes blazed yellow as summer suns.
"Snow White," Rahel greeted me. Her voice still sounded strained, as if she'd spent hours screaming. "Feeling better?"
"Not very." I extended my hand. She looked at it as if she had to decide whether or not to snap it off, then took it in hers, shook, and dropped it. Her skin felt hot and dry, perfectly solid. "Thanks for waiting."
"I was about to abandon you. I don't have long." She looked peeved at the reminder. "She was weak." Meaning the power she'd drained from Prada wouldn't last long, and then she'd start to revert back to the shadows. "I did what I could for you. Be mindful, sistah. You owe me."
