Chill Factor (10 page)

‘Well? What’re you waiting for? Go. I’m ordering you to…you know…go!’ Kevin made a shooing motion. If it hadn’t been so pathetic, I’d have laughed.

‘I can’t. Not a Djinn anymore, and I don’t happen to have one on me, either.’ My mind was racing like an engine on idle, making lots of noise and going nowhere. ‘Hey, you want to send me packing, use your own.’

‘Who? Him?’ Without looking up, Kevin made a little circle in the air with his finger in the general direction of the roof.

I figured he wasn’t talking about God. ‘Jonathan,’ I clarified. His hand dropped back to his side, but there was a flash in his eyes that might well have been fear.

‘You don’t want that. Maybe you should just take a bus or something. But you’d better get moving, or I
will
tell him you’re here, and tell him what to do with you.’

‘Is he in the bottle?’ I asked. Kevin scuffed a shoe on tile and looked surly. ‘C’mon, Kev, be a sport. Is
he running around loose or did you seal him up?’

‘He told me if I stuck him in the bottle one more time he’d cream me.’ The prominent ball of Kevin’s Adam’s apple worked up and down. ‘Not like I can’t handle him, but shit. Let the old geezer have some fun, you know?’

‘If he’s out of the bottle, he already knows I’m here,’ I said. ‘Look, Kevin, I never hurt you. I tried to help you. You know that, don’t you?’

‘You’ve been trying to bust down the door ever since I came here. You and all of
them
.’ He jerked his chin in the general direction of nowhere, referring to the Wardens, I was sure. ‘Well, you’re here now. Hope you liked the ride.’

I took a step towards him. Just one. His head jerked up, and so did his hand, pointing at me in some awkward parody of a stage magician.
Theatrics
, part of my mind reported dryly.
He
probably has incantations to go along with it
. Kevin had power, and he’d rubbed elbows with trained professionals, but I was pretty sure his entire understanding of how magic worked had more to do with Saturday-morning cartoons than quantum physics. He had power of his own – fire, as I recalled, and a pretty sizeable talent – but by himself, he wouldn’t be hard to defeat.

But he wasn’t alone, and if I started a fight I wasn’t going to win. Lewis wanted me here, and he’d gone to amazing lengths to get me in position; it’d be a shame
to waste a perfectly good murder on something so stupid as picking a fight with Superpsycho.

I stopped, folded my hands like a good girl, and waited for him to make some kind of rational decision.

His eyes swept over me, and I was sorry again that I hadn’t dressed for the occasion – if you’re going to risk your life, you ought to at least look good doing it. The shoes weren’t holding up well under the abuse, and they’d been no-name knockoffs to begin with – I’d blown out of New York with no time for quality shopping. Ah, for the good old days of Djinnhood, when I’d been able to conjure Manolo Blahniks out of the aetheric… What did heroic last stands call for, anyway? Versace? Jimmy Choo? I was still steaming over Lel’s last jibe at my shoe savvy. Those had
definitely
been knockoffs.

‘Come with me,’ Kevin said. He shot me a brief, hot sideways look. ‘You try any shit with me, I’ll do you like I did…Yvette.’ He had trouble calling her
Mom
these days. I was amazed that he’d ever been able to choke the name out, the kind of hell she’d put him through. My sympathy for him didn’t make him any less threatening.

I had a vivid red memory of what had happened to Yvette. I didn’t think I’d ever really be able to forget the sound of her skull crushing. ‘I’ll be good.’

He started to turn away, hesitated, and said,
‘What’s your name? For real, yo. None of that Lilith bullshit you pulled last time.’

‘Joanne.’

‘Oh.’ A frown layered his forehead. ‘For real? Huh. I thought you had a better one than that.’

‘Better?’

A vague gesture. ‘You know. Hotter.’

I took offence. ‘You mean like Vanna LaTramp or something? Some pole-dancer name?’

Shrug, and two hot little circles in his cheeks. ‘You don’t look like no Joanne to me.’

‘Yeah, well, you don’t look like a Kevin. OK, you would if you had a haircut and some decent clothes…’ I knew my mouth was running off with me, but I couldn’t stop it, and then he was turning on me, hand raised.

I froze. He didn’t hit me, but it was a close thing.

‘Bitch, don’t act like my fucking
mother
unless you want to die like her.’
Ouch
. His tone had gone opaque and steel-cold, edged with fury. So much for the light conversation. He was trying to be those dangerous, badass villains he’d watched in movies. The problem was that he
was
dangerous, and I knew it better than anybody. The image of Yvette Prentiss came back to me as she screamed out her last moments of life. Kevin had watched her die without so much as a blink. However much he might
look
like just another Generation X punk, he was more than that. Worse.

She’d made him that way.

I didn’t dare push him. I gestured politely and said, ‘After you.’

He grabbed my arm and towed me towards the lobby of the Bellagio.

With enough money,
everything
can be made tasteful. The lobby of the Bellagio was a good case in point. I couldn’t imagine the mind-boggling amounts spent on this place…the fantastically ornate blown-glass floral ceiling for a start, which would have been beautiful if it had been two feet across, but at forty feet was so overwhelming it nearly whited out the mind. Soft, soothing carpet underfoot, edged with bright, shiny marble. Well-scrubbed tailored staffers. Endless rows of counters waiting to do nothing but serve paying customers. The place was thick with tourists, most outfitted in whatever the latest Abercrombie & Fitch ad told them would make them cool.

Too bad for me that nobody seemed to notice me, Kevin, or the way he was twisting my arm to get me to keep up with him. I wasn’t sure if it was a standard don’t-see-me glamour or just people minding their own damn business.

‘Like it?’ Kevin had noticed my look around. He sounded proud, as if he’d designed it. ‘I coulda stayed anywhere, but this was the best.’

Like he was paying for it. ‘How do you know?’ I asked him.

‘Cabdriver said.’

If there was anything that spoilt the elegance of the Bellagio’s image, it was the constant musical chatter of slot machines. Beyond the lobby stretched the casino…and it
stretched
, filling a mall-like expanse with a sea of multicoloured flashing slots and quiet harbours of blackjack tables, roulette. Dark panelling gave the place a quiet nineteenth-century elegance. Lack of windows made it eternal early evening. Bars – and there were three I could immediately spot – were doing a brisk business. The thought of a steadying drink made the back of my throat ache.
C’mon, Lewis, help me
out here. Throw me a bone
. I had one faint hope: Lewis had some kind of clever, deeply ingenious plan for getting me out of this alive.

Yeah, right. You
are
the bone that got thrown.
My snarky superego was probably right; the Wardens – including Lewis – weren’t interested in my troubles at the moment. I was a distraction, and I was on my own.

People everywhere, moving with a purpose. This was a very bad place to try a confrontation, which was probably Kevin’s point in choosing it. Or Jonathan’s. Sounded like Jonathan logic to me; Kevin would have probably crawled into some hole in the ground and pulled it in after him, like a kid
hiding his head from the bogeyman. Jonathan was the one who’d think of all of the defensive possibilities of a very public, high-profile establishment.

Kevin steered me off into the casino area, and we strolled past one bar, heading past slots, more slots, keno, blackjack. We passed a room marked P
RIVATE
, where, when the door opened and closed, I caught a glimpse of a poker table and some intensely silent men hunched around it.
And you
think
you’re
playing for high stakes, pals. Try my
game.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked. Kevin didn’t answer. We turned left at the T intersection, away from the casino area and into what looked like (to my instant, back-brained delight) a shopping mall. A
high-class
shopping mall. Only he didn’t lead me that direction; he steered me towards a massive bank of elevators, complete with polite and flinty-eyed security men who waved us through when I fumbled out my card key.

We stepped into the lift and enjoyed a silent, efficient ride up into the stratosphere.

‘How’d you get in?’ Kevin finally asked, as the lights flickered past the twenty-fifth floor. ‘Just curious.’

‘I was dead.’

‘Oh.’ He stared, waiting for the punch line. ‘Kind of extreme.’

‘You’re telling me.’

He couldn’t decide whether or not I was lying, but it didn’t much matter; the elevator topped out, and we exited one floor from the top.

It was a long walk down an elegant hallway big enough for the chariot race from
Ben
-
Hur
. The last door on the left was his.

It swung open for him at a touch, and I felt the dim, out-of-focus surge of power. Fire, this time; he’d just fooled the locking mechanism with an electric charge. Nice bit of control, that; he’d been largely untrained last time I’d seen him, mostly in the smash-and-grab phase of things.

I took a step in and realised that Kevin had appropriated the presidential suite, or at least the vice-presidential one. It was huge, sumptuous to the point of pastiche, but never over the edge. I was pretty sure the furniture was antique, for the most part; if it was reproduction, it was in the best of taste.

Kevin let go of me, shut the door, and shuffled over the wine-coloured Aubusson to a fully appointed bar. He poured himself a straight glass of Jim Beam. I refrained from lecturing him about the evils of distilled spirits or reminding him of the legal drinking age.

I looked around. ‘Where’s Jonathan?’

He rattled crystal. ‘Around.’ Which meant he had no idea, probably.

‘You keep his bottle on you?’

‘You smoking crack? I’m not telling you where I keep it.’

‘Not asking you to,’ I said. ‘Hey, would you mind…’ I mimed pouring. Kevin splashed some JB in another glass and handed it over, and I took a sip.
Wow
. Liquid heat, turning into burning lava somewhere mid-throat. Well, it was happy hour somewhere in the world.

I nearly spluttered my drink when a new voice said, ‘Enjoying your stay?’ It came from the corner of the room, where a big leather armchair sat facing a broad plate-glass window overlooking the white spray of fountains. I set the glass down and took a couple of steps to my left to get a better look.

Not that it was any surprise, really, to see Jonathan sitting there. He looked relaxed. Fully at home. Head back, eyes half-shut, feet up on a virtually priceless Federal table that really shouldn’t have been mistaken for a footstool under any circumstances. I let myself stare at him for a few long seconds. It wasn’t a chore or anything; he appeared middle-aged, light brown hair liberally scattered with grey. The wiry, strong build of a habitual runner, dressed in faded blue jeans and a forest-green fleece pullover. Some kind of deck shoes on long feet. The kind of casual cool that the trend-driven shoppers downstairs could never hope to imitate.

He was the only Djinn I’d ever met who had humanlike eyes, at least at first glance. His were dark. I happened to know, because I’d looked pretty deeply into them at one point, that they weren’t just dark; they were black, they were infinite, and they were
dangerous
.

Jonathan didn’t have to work to impress anyone. All he had to do was show up.

‘Well,’ he said without looking in my direction. ‘I leave you for a little while, and you go all human on me. You really know how to survive, I’ll give you that. So. Life treating you OK?’

‘Yeah, not too bad.’ I was shaking inside, vibrating on levels I didn’t know I could still feel. Maybe there was some Djinn left in me, after all. ‘You?’

He quirked a funny little smile. ‘Fine. Hey, about all this, it’s nothing personal. You know. And incidentally, way to work the angles. He said I couldn’t let in any living Warden. Dying for the cause…strategically sweet.’ He tipped back a bottle and swallowed a mouthful of beer. ‘They give you some kind of performance bonus for that?’

‘Gift certificates and a special parking space,’ I said. ‘Mind if I sit?’

He shrugged and indicated an elegant brocade chair a few feet away. I eased down on it, smoothing my skirt with sweaty palms. Over at the bar, Kevin was drinking his Jim Beam and looking defiant about it.

‘So,’ Jonathan said, and smiled. I didn’t like the smile; it was cold and hard as a glacier. ‘I guess they sent you here to make a deal. What’ve you got that I might want?’

As if his master – his
nominal
master – weren’t even present. That gave me the shivers. I’d known the kid wasn’t up to the task of owning and operating a border collie, much less a Djinn, but…

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Except I can call off the Wardens and give Kevin a chance. A better one, anyway, because you and I both know that his days of surviving this are shorter than the shelf life of a loaf of bread.’

Preaching to the choir. Nothing moved in Jonathan’s pleasant expression, in the impenetrable depths of his eyes.

‘You’re assuming I care about that,’ he said. ‘Maybe there’s something else we can talk about.’

I could guess. ‘You still want David’s bottle. I don’t have it anymore.’

It occurred to me, rather too late, that if I didn’t have David, Jonathan had no reason to keep me breathing. In fact, he had a pretty nice incentive to make sure I stopped. David would grieve, he would get over it, things would – on the Djinn scale – go back to relative normality; eventually Jonathan would be able to rescue him, and without the distraction of me, David would willingly go.

‘I know you didn’t give him up on purpose,’ he
said. ‘Who’s got him? Where is he?’ Jonathan asked. He looked relaxed, but I wasn’t deceived; I also felt something weird in the air. Kevin was standing motionless, staring at the Djinn. Like he was waiting for some kind of direction. Yeah, the whole master-servant thing was topsy-turvy on this one.