Thin Air (30 page)

That got a definitely odd look. “Of course I dance.”

“Have we ever danced?”

He braced himself against the bulkhead, turned sideways in the seat toward me, and extended both his hands. “Find out,” he said.

I didn't move. “I'm not sure if this is a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Because…it just feels—it feels wrong. I don't want an info-dump of how I feel about you.”

He lowered his hands to rest on his thighs as he considered that. “You're not sure how you feel.”

“Yes—no. No, I am, I just—look, I want to build memories, not just stuff myself full of how other people see me. It's confusing. And it's kind of painful.” I met his eyes directly. “And it would be cheating for you to show me how deep this goes for you right now. It could scare me off. I don't want to be scared off.”

I bit my lip in agitation as the plane's engines shifted to a deeper thrum. We hit a patch of slick-as-glass air, then steadied out. For the moment.

He didn't seem to have a response to any of that. I pulled in a deep breath and said, in a rush, “Did you sleep with her?”

“Who?” His expression went from blank to shocked. “You mean Helen?”

“No! No, I—wait, did you?”

He ignored that, finally getting my point. “You mean, did I sleep with the other you. The Demon.”

I nodded. For a few long seconds, there was nothing but the sound of the aircraft, the distant buzz of what other people were saying, and the pounding of my heart.

“Even if I did,” he said carefully, “it was because I thought she was you.”

“And you didn't know the
difference
?”

He had the grace to look ashamed, and a little sick. “I didn't have a lot of time to think it through. And to be honest, I don't think I wanted to question it. Not when…”

“Not when you'd been bracing yourself to lose me forever,” I said. “Right?”

“Right.”

I felt my lips curve into a smile I couldn't control. “You sure you've got the right one now?”

His eyebrows slowly rose. “Fairly sure.”

“Maybe soon we can upgrade that to completely sure.”

“Maybe?”

“Well,” I said, “privacy's an issue.”

He gave me a slow, wicked smile. “It really isn't,” he said, “if that's all that's stopping you. I'm fully capable of giving us all the privacy we want. Right here. Right now.”

I had to admit that kick-started my heart into a whole different speed. I looked around at the cabin mutely. “They're Wardens,” I pointed out. “Well, except for Cherise.”

“So they are.” He didn't seem much concerned. “Trust me. They wouldn't notice a thing.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He looked very seductive all of a sudden—it was indefinable, how he shifted from business to pleasure, but it was a definite and unmistakable change in his body language. All of a sudden I was hyperaware of the clean, cool lines of him, the way his black T-shirt hugged his chest…the full, rich softness of his mouth.

“You're doing this,” I murmured. “No fair.”

“Doing what?”

My attention fixed on his lips. I wetted my own lips with my tongue, suddenly remembering a ghostly echo of how he tasted. Half-remembering, anyway. I definitely needed a reminder. “Djinn charisma,” I said. “You'd better have a good excuse.”

“Oh, I promise you, it'll be good,” he said.
Bastard.
I caught myself leaning forward and thought about stopping myself, but there didn't seem to be all that much reason, and deep down, I didn't want to even try.

So, I kissed him.

He tasted rich and warm and real. His lips were damp and firm, smooth as silk, warm as sunlight, and I sank against him with a moan. I'd missed this. My
body
had missed it, not just my mind, and my body stuck my mind in the backseat, bound and gagged it, and took the wheel.

David's kiss filled me with an exhilaration and heat that my skin could only barely contain, and when I opened my mouth to the gentle stroke of his tongue on my lips, he bent me back, cupped my head in his large hand, and got down to business. The boy knew what he was doing, and French was definitely something in which he was fluent. The warmth in me coalesced into specific aching places.

I don't know exactly how it happened, but I was on his lap by that time, feeling thoroughly and satisfyingly ravished, and his hands started to roam. Innocently at first, fingers dragging down the line of my throat to my collarbone, tracing curves and lines. Then down. As he felt the resistance of each button on my shirt, it gave without a whimper of friction.

Had I ever been magically undressed before? If I had, it was a memory worth keeping. There was a breathtaking sense of being out of control, but utterly safe in his hands. By the time he'd worked his way down to my waist, the shirt was open and loose, and my bra underneath seemed more like a display case than a cover.

Because he'd made it transparent.

“Um…” I pulled back, cheeks flaming. I could still hear the other Wardens talking, moving around, coughing. Somebody was playing a personal stereo at high volume to be heard over the turbulence and engine noise.

Surely
someone
—probably Lewis, with my luck—was going to look back and get the topless show. Not that I minded making extra money, but it seemed excessive. Not to mention unprofessional, if I had to work with these people later.

“They can't see or hear us,” David said. “What they'll see, if they actually do look, is the two of us talking. It's what they expect to see.”

Maybe, but still…I found myself gathering up the gaping halves of my shirt and pulling it together. “Sorry,” I said. “But this is just too strange. It's not that they might see me; it's that I can see them. It's distracting.”

“Oh.” David looked briefly chagrined. “Sorry. I didn't think about it. You always—” He broke off before uttering whatever sordid bit of my personality he was about to disclose, and instead vaguely nodded toward the rest of the plane.

Which disappeared behind a milky white wall. I reached out and touched it, and my fingers registered a cool surface, not quite solid.

“Soundproofed,” he said. “But if you want out, all you have to do is push.”

I took my hand away and looked at him. “I don't want out,” I said. I meant that in so many ways. “Any chance these seats fold out into a bed?”

“There is now,” he said, and his eyes sparked to a hot, swirling bronze.

He put his hands behind my back and lowered me. Slowly. The seats dissolved into a soft, firm expanse of what felt like a real bed. My head encountered the airy softness of a feather pillow, and I couldn't help but sigh in true happiness.

David was watching me, his eyes half-closed. Braced above me on stiffened arms.

Not touching me in any way. Not yet.

My breath caught helplessly in my throat as his elbows bent, as his shoulders flexed and the muscles slid under that smooth, matte-velvet skin. I bit my lip as I felt his lips touch my trembling midsection. A burst of warmth zipped up my spine from down low, then exploded outward and inward like an echo.
Oh.

His lips traveled down, and his tongue trailed gently over the inward slope of my belly button. My bitten lip started to hurt, but when I let go, I moaned. I couldn't help it. I couldn't help my body from lifting toward him, either.

He put one large, warm hand just under my breasts and pushed me back down. “Not yet,” he murmured, with his lips brushing my skin. His gaze was dark and wicked and intensely sexual. “We have a long, long way to go. Can't have you going off just yet.”

“Then you'd better stop touching me,” I said breathlessly. “Because if you don't, I'm going to go off like a Roman candle any second.”

His eyebrows canted upward. He dragged his fingertips over the center of the thin fabric of my bra, and it just…dissolved. Then he folded the two halves back from my body, along with my shirt. “Then I'd better make it worth your while,” he said, and moved up to trail his tongue over my right nipple.

His hair was warm and silky under my fingers, and for a while I just whited out, flying on sensation. When he touched the waistband of my pants, and I felt the button and zippers giving up to him, I knew I was lost. Deliriously, deliciously, wonderfully lost.

I didn't lie to him. I did come like a Roman candle, bursting into waves of light and shuddering pleasure, striving against his hands and his lips, long before we got to the main course.

That didn't mean I was finished, though.

And he'd known that all along.

It felt like too short a flight, since we spent it horizontal, naked, and blissful under silken covers, protected and secluded by a swirling bubble of opal energy. David's body fit perfectly under my hands, as though it had been made to match me. In theory I was a virgin, but in practice, memory wasn't a barrier to this at all. There wasn't any pain, there wasn't any hesitation, and there was certainly no trace of shame, no matter what I felt moved to do with him, or for him. It felt like the world had opened up to me for the first time, channeled through his lips, his hands, his firm, warm skin, the urgent and careful strength he used in every touch. There was a kind of fever-dream delirium to it, because surely real life wasn't like this. Couldn't be like this. If it was, how had I ever gotten out of his bed?

If he was using any kind of Djinn magic, I was all for the practice. Practice, practice, practice.

As we lay in a dreamy, disheveled state of paradise, twisted together in the sheets, I traced letters on his chest like a lovesick kid. “Do you know what I'm writing?” I asked, and had a sudden dizzying idea that he'd seen lovers play that game back when writing was still in hieroglyphics. Or cuneiform.

“Tell me,” he whispered, and pressed his lips to a particularly sensitive spot at my temple. I shivered.

“I…L…O…V…E…”

“Chocolate,” he said. “Fast cars. Dangerously expensive shoes.”

I drew a single letter—U.

He didn't speak. He traced with one warm finger the spot on my temple he'd kissed, drawing something that was more abstract than letters, more direct.

“You don't have to stay with me,” he said. “It's true that once Djinn let ourselves…feel things like this, we can't turn it off. But we
can
turn away. And I would. If you asked.”

I put my head down on his chest. He might not have been human, but his body felt that way. His heart thumped gently under my hand, and I felt the elastic movement of his lungs. His arms went around me and cradled me there.

“Venna said this makes you weak,” I said. “Does it?”

“Don't worry about me.”

“I do. I will. Does it?”

I felt his sigh stir the damp hair around my forehead. “I think the more connection the Djinn have to the human world, the better off we all are,” he said. “Personally. Politically. In every way. So, no. It's a different kind of strength; that's all. I just have to make them believe it.”

“But the Old Ones won't. Like Venna.”

“Not your problem,” he said in a gentle but subject-is-closed kind of way. “Life over on the Djinn side of things isn't any more predictable than it is on the human side. We only seem stable because we don't let the kids see the grown-ups fight.”

I laughed, then fell silent. I never wanted to move. Never wanted to arrive. I wanted this breathlessly perfect time to simply freeze.

But I heard the engines change pitch, and David's hand stroked gently down my spine. “We're descending,” he said.

“If you mean we're going down, I could make some jokes.”

“Stop.” There was a bright edge of laughter in the word, though. I'd made a Djinn laugh. That was…an accomplishment. “Time to get serious.”

“This isn't serious? Because I kind of thought—”

“Stop,” he said again, this time more soberly. “You need to know what's going to happen when we land.”

I acknowledged that with a single nod, not raising my head.

“We'll be met by another Djinn. Rahel. She's already waiting. She'll meet you there and guide you to Seacasket. She's been watching, but she says there's no sign of the Demon yet. We may have guessed wrong.”

I closed my eyes and reached for that strange vibration I'd felt when I'd been in Kevin's mind. It was still there, and getting stronger. “No, I don't think so. I think she's there, or she's close. David—what the hell is in Seacasket?”

And he told me about the Fire Oracle. Like Imara, in Sedona, it was a higher order of Djinn, a kind of living embodiment of one of the three major powers. The Djinn revered it, though few of them could actually communicate with it.

By the time he was finished, he'd silently urged me to sit up, and he'd handed me my clothes. They felt wrong, awkward against my skin. It occurred to me, as I fastened the last button on my shirt, that dressing must be a lot faster as a Djinn. I hadn't even seen him put on his pants, but he was fully clothed.

“You expecting trouble with the Oracle?” I asked.

“No.”

“Well, you sent for Rahel as backup….”

“About that.” He took in a breath and let it out slowly. “I'm not going with you.”

That set up a cold, liquid sensation in my stomach. “You're…what?”

“There's something I have to do,” he said. “It's important. I'll join you when I can. Rahel won't abandon you.”

“Venna did. And you're about to.” That was blunt, but I was feeling a little bit peeved. You didn't do the things we'd done together and just split up, did you? I wanted him with me.

Always.

“Jo.” He squeezed my hand. “Trust me.”

Couldn't argue with that, although I wanted to.

The pilot's cheerful voice came on to tell us to put our tray tables and flight attendants in the upright position, and the opal shield faded around us. The bed became seats, and we were back to reality. It hadn't been a dream. My whole body was relaxed, languorous with warmth, deliciously sore.

“I love you,” David said. He said it quietly, without any drama, as if it were part of normal conversation. Which maybe it was, for us. Or could be. “No matter how this goes, that doesn't change.”

I closed my eyes as the plane began a terrifying, jerky descent toward New Jersey.

He stayed with me until we touched down on the tarmac, but by the time I opened my eyes again, my hand was empty of his, and David's seat was vacant.

He was gone. We were on our own.

 

The Demon was in Seacasket. Somewhere. I could feel that noise in my head, like subtle static on a channel I'd never known my radio had received before.

The process of shuttling my little raiding party from planeside to Seacasket wasn't short, but it was fairly efficient; the Wardens, it seemed, excelled in logistics. That meant a passenger van, complete with communications gear and a hotline that Lewis immediately used to chat with somebody in an office. He hadn't commented on David's disappearance, which seemed odd to me until I realized that he probably knew where David had gone, and why.

Or maybe he was just distracted by Rahel, who'd shown up in the van without preamble or introduction, scaring the holy crap out of at least some of the Wardens, including Paul, who'd nearly jumped out of his seat. “Post-traumatic fucking stress,” he'd growled at me, and thumped down hard. “Last time a Djinn popped in on me like that, she was trying to rip my head off.”

Rahel raised one sharp eyebrow, elegant and amused. “I can't imagine why,” she said coolly. She was in neon orange today, a beautifully tailored pantsuit with a tangerine sheer top layered over neon yellow. Matching fingernails that looked sharp enough to slice paper. She'd jazzed up her multitude of black braids with tiny gold bells and glowing orange beads, and she gave off a very faint chime when she moved. “You've treated the Djinn so well during your partnership with us, Warden.”

“Hey. This particular Djinn wasn't trying to kill the
institution.
”

They exchanged the kind of look reserved for respected adversaries, and went to their separate corners, metaphorically. In actuality, the van wasn't that big.

“I should help the driver,” Rahel said, and moved up a row to lean over to touch him on the shoulder. She didn't speak, though, that I could see. I wondered what kind of “help” she was providing, and decided that maybe sometimes it was just better not to ask.

“It's the town,” Lewis said, following my gaze. “I've tried to send Wardens here for more than six months. They never make it within twenty miles before they turn around.”

“That bad?” I asked.

“No. They just forget where they're going. It's part of the protections the Djinn put in place ages ago.” He nodded toward Rahel. “She's navigating for him.”

The closer we got, the stranger the weather seemed. It had been cold and windy in Newark, with that chilly, damp edge that could only mean snow on the way. But as we moved toward Seacasket, everything went quiet, smooth as glass. Like weather simply didn't exist, or was artificially flattened out to some even balance.

I put my hand up against the van's window. Cool, but not frigid outside. The clouds had swirled away, and the sunshine seemed brighter than it should. The fall colors were gorgeous, and the leaves fluttered in a very slight, decorative breeze.

We passed a sign that announced we were entering the historic town of Seacasket, and I felt a shudder go through every one of us—not a reaction to what we were reading, but something else. Some force dragging over us like a curtain.

Rahel continued to sit quietly, communing with the van driver, as we drove through town. I stared out at what looked like a normal place, normal buildings, normal people. It looked
too
normal, in fact, a Norman Rockwell perfection that existed all too rarely in reality. Kids in this town would be happy and well-adjusted, with just enough spice of harmless rebellion for flavor. Adults would be content and well-grounded, going about their productive and busy lives. Crime would be low. Lawns would be perennially neat.

Too good to be true, although it
was
true at the level most people lived.

But up on the aetheric, it was different. There was a kind of illumination to everything that spun it just slightly toward the positive, and it was easier here than anywhere I'd ever been to move from the real world into Oversight—it happened in an effortless slide.

The veils were definitely thin here.

We parked on a main street next to what looked like the most picturesque town graveyard I'd ever seen, all gracefully sculpted willow trees, manicured grass, artfully aged tombstones. Ethereal. If I had to pick any place to get my bones planted, well, I could certainly do worse.

I tried not to think that it could happen sooner than I thought.

We filed out of the van onto the sidewalk, moved around in the Brownian motion of people who didn't have any idea where they were going, and Rahel emerged last. She swept us with a look that clearly said,
Hopeless
, and turned to Lewis. “Perhaps you'd like to deploy them,” she said. “Unless you think they look less suspicious this way.”

I covered a snort of laughter with a cough.

“It's Joanne's show,” he said, which made the laugh on me. “We're here for muscle, not brains.”

I smiled thinly. He smiled back in a way that made me paranoid about just how solid David's privacy bubble had been on the plane. Surely I was imagining things.

Dear God, let me be imagining things.

“Spread out,” I said. “Rahel, Lewis, maybe you should each take a corner. The rest of you, find someplace to blend.”

There was a general shuffle, and then people broke up to assume their chosen locations. Except for Lewis, who was waiting for something else from me, and Rahel, who just wasn't going to be given orders by some mere human anyway.

“Where are you going?” Lewis asked. I nodded at the open gates of the cemetery.

“I need to go in there,” I said. “Right?”

He exchanged a glance with Rahel, who inclined her head silently.

“I've been here before,” I said. “The other me, she remembers everything, including how to reach the Oracle.”

That made some fierce golden fire light up in Rahel's eyes, and she looked hard all of a sudden. Cutting edges and slicing angles.

“Is the Demon here?” she asked. “Inside?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. At least, I don't think so. It doesn't feel that specific. But she's got to be close.”

My own voice said, from right behind me, “She is close,” and something hit me with stunning force. I was tossed forward and collided with the stately brick wall. I somehow managed to get my arms in front of me, which resulted in some bad bruises but no broken bones, and tried to summon powers to fight.

I had nothing. It was the same eerie, dead flatness, so far as access to power went, that I'd experienced in Sedona when I'd tried to fight Ashan.
Oh, boy.
Not so good, because although
my
powers were on the wane, my evil twin's supernatural abilities weren't.

Because, of course, she
was
supernatural. Like the Djinn. It was in whatever passed for her DNA.

Well, one thing she wasn't, was immune to a punch.

Lewis stepped up and gave her a solid right cross, snapping her head back with real violence. But even as she staggered backward, I heard Rahel scream, “Lewis,
no
!” and saw that Evil Twin, who looked more like me than I did with her glossy, sleek hair and vibrant, glittering eyes and perfect skin, had grabbed hold of his wrist.

She yanked him forward, body-to-body, and met his eyes with hers, staring deep.

Rahel paused in the act of moving toward them. I shook the stars and explosions out of my head, trying to see what the hell was happening, and felt Lewis doing the impossible: pulling power in a place where power was locked off tight. Seacasket was a town in the aetheric equivalent of an airless, vacuum-sealed iron vault.

And he was ripping the vault door off its metaphorical hinges, as if it were
nothing.

I'd never fully appreciated what Lewis was, and what he could do, until that moment. He wanted her to let him go, and she was either going to do it or be blasted into so many tiny pieces that even a Demon would have a hard time surviving it.