Chill Factor (12 page)

Kevin was thinking it over. ‘You swear? You’ll let me go?’

‘Absolutely,’ I lied without a qualm. ‘Trust me.’

He was going for it; I could see it in his eyes.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the bottle. You stay right here.’

He took a couple of steps away, faltered, turned back.

‘Oops,’ Jonathan said. He took another drink of beer.

‘What?’ I asked, and then I felt the air go odd and dead in the room.

I sucked in a startled breath, saw Kevin’s eyes widen, and he asked, ‘You
bitch
, I said I’d let you—’ He broke off into a sickening gagging sound and reached for his throat, whooping in a deep breath. I felt a burning, clawing sting in the back of my mouth, tried to scream, and realised that if I did I was dead. I turned towards Jonathan, who was watching us with mild interest.

‘Can’t let him do that,’ Jonathan said. ‘I’ve got things to do. People to see. If you know what’s smart, Joanne, you’ll stay the hell out of my way.’

‘Help—’ I croaked. He shrugged.

‘You’re a Warden. Help yourself.’

Kevin was already passing out. He pitched to his knees, clawing at his throat. His face was scarlet.

In seconds, he was down. Unconscious or dying.

I needed to breathe, and breathing wasn’t an option at the moment. A stupid little rhyme ran through my mind, the punch line of which was
what he thought was H
₂
0 was H
₂
S0
₄
. Chemical humour. My brain cascading uncontrollably, trying to find the answer in the rummage cupboard of my memory.

I let go of my body and felt it thump down on the expensive burgundy carpet, thick enough to qualify for mattress status, and launched myself hard into the aetheric. Reached for clarity. The air turned solid around me in a three-dimensional glittering cube, and I plunged deeper, deeper, hunting for what I knew would be there.

Two molecules added to the complex chain that made air breathable. Just two.

No problem, I could do that. I was good under pressure.

I stretched out power like a thousand hands and began crushing those molecules – or, more accurately, shaking them up like soda pop,
changing their electromagnetic signature and rendering them unstable. Crushing them would have meant too much energy being released, and with the kind of poison that had been formed around us, that would have killed us just as fast. Us and most of the top three floors of the hotel.

This shit was extremely flammable. Jonathan really didn’t care, did he? This was just another exercise for him; he wanted to see me jump through hoops. Maybe he was mad because I’d actually made Kevin agree…

Quit dicking around and work fast
. That voice in my head was entirely unnecessary; I knew how little time I had before either Kevin or I sucked down too much of this crap to survive it. I wasn’t enough of a biology geek to know what it would do to me, but I figured it would be fatal and it probably wouldn’t be an easy way to go.
Come on, move it
…

God, I needed David…

No, you don’t. You did this fine on your own
before. It’s not big enough to need a Djinn
. Need was such a subjective thing.
You did this in training,
remember?

Yeah, well, in training sessions I wasn’t trying to breathe it while I was altering it.

I realised that my fingers – at least the aetheric representation of them – were getting clumsy, and I dropped down partly into Real World land to form a pocket of pure oxygen around my body, then
around Kevin’s. I felt myself gasp, felt the rush of relief that followed, and went back up to patiently continue the work.

Something prickled along the back of my neck, which up there wasn’t really my neck, or really a prickle; if Jonathan had done this to us, why wasn’t he trying to stop me from fixing the problem? And why go to such lengths? He could have just put Kevin to sleep if he’d wanted.

I abandoned the repairs, which were mostly complete anyway, and dropped down into my body like a speeding bullet, breathlessly fast, got to my feet and stumbled for the door…

…and ran into a man coming into the room.

A man with a gun.

I’d describe him, but really, the only thing in focus for me was the gun. I knew some fancy Fire Wardens who claimed to be able to block the ignition sequence in the firing chamber of a gun, but that took guts, mad skill, and a liberal dose of luck, none of which I had at the moment, and besides, I wasn’t even a Fire Warden. My lungs and exposed skin were still aching from exposure to the poison-soup air.

I put my hands up and considered knocking him over with a gust of wind, but the steady stare of the gun made me abandon the idea. He looked like a guy who could shoot straight through a hurricane, if necessary.

He gestured silently. Sign language for
get your
ass out here
. I shuffled cautiously out, hugged the wall, and stared at the gun some more. It was an automatic, I knew that much. It looked black, angular, and deadly efficient.

‘You Joanne Baldwin?’ he asked me. He had a nothing kind of a voice, not deep, not high, not impressive. A trace of a West Coast drawl, maybe. I nodded. I couldn’t seem to take my hand away from my aching throat. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘You got the bottle?’

I shook my head and coughed. My lungs throbbed.

The gunman reached over and shut the door. ‘Poison gas, right?’ he asked. ‘Damn. Guess it’s not a good idea to go in there and toss the room just now.’

I shook my head. He holstered the gun and held out his hand, and just like that, he came into focus for me. A wallpaper kind of guy with black hair, a clever face, and light brown eyes. Two-day growth of beard.

‘Nice to meet you. My name’s Quinn,’ he said. ‘I’m here to rescue you.’

Some rescue.

When it became clear I wasn’t the damsel in distress – or at least not the kind Quinn could save me from with his heroic .45 – he grabbed me by the elbow and hustled me down the hall, into the elevator, and out through the casino in record time.

I was getting tired of being hustled.

As we stepped outside onto the wide portico, with its huge sweep of overhang and constant stream of limos and taxis dropping off money, I yanked myself loose and stepped back, hands in fists at my sides.
At last.
Out in the open – more or less – and breathing natural air.

‘Hey!’ I snarled. Quinn’s eyebrows did a funny little up-and-down jerk, and then his face went reflectively impassive. ‘Pal! Back off, will you? I don’t need your damn help! I had things under control!’

‘Yeah, it really looked like it,’ Quinn said. He calmly reached into his pocket and took out the gun
again, in full view of the uniformed doormen. One of them looked alarmed and reached for a phone; Quinn also moved his coat and revealed an official-looking gold badge in a black holder snapped over his belt.

Quinn was a cop.

‘Let’s take a drive, sunshine,’ he told me, and steered me out into a holding pen reserved for taxis and cars for hire. A dark brown Ford Taurus sat among them, shiny as a roach, and Quinn popped open doors and put me in like a criminal with a hand on my head, into the back seat. I immediately tried the door, but of course it didn’t open. Childproof locks had a lot to answer for.

Quinn’s driver’s-side door opened, and he bent over to fix me with a look out of those light toffee-brown eyes. ‘Play nice,’ he said. ‘Don’t make me cuff you.’

I put my hands pointedly in my lap. The car’s upholstery groaned slightly as he got in, and then the engine fired and we were moving down the long driveway into blinding Las Vegas sun, heading for a huge sign that spelt out the current Bellagio attractions in glowing starlike lights.

‘I’m under arrest?’ I asked. ‘What’s the charge?’

‘Criminal stupidity,’ Quinn said.

‘And you’re full of shit. I told you, I didn’t need rescuing, and if I’m not under arrest, Detective Quinn—’

‘Consider yourself a material witness in an ongoing investigation.’

‘An investigation of what, exactly?’

He took a right turn onto Flamingo Road, negotiated with a Lexus for a lane change, and headed the car down Las Vegas Boulevard. ‘Murder,’ he said. ‘I had a guy pitched out of that window about a week ago, you know. Messed up my sidewalk something terrible. I guess you know that nobody else can see those knuckleheads up there. You must be a Warden, right? Wardens can see them.’

Now that the panic was starting to subside, I felt tired and achy. Groggy with leftover adrenaline. ‘And you? You’re a Warden?’

He held up his right hand. I made a pass in the air, concentrated, and saw the telltale sparkle of wards reflected on his skin. Quinn’s aetheric tattoo was an ankh, the Egyptian symbol for life. Which didn’t match the stylised sunburst I’d expected to see.

‘
Not
a Warden. What the hell are you?’

‘Need to know, sunshine.’

‘As in, I don’t need to?’

‘I know you thought you were being all clever and shit, but the kid wasn’t giving you Jonathan’s bottle. Oh, he was going to give you a bottle, but it was one with a nasty toy surprise inside. He already pulled that on one other poor bastard.’ Quinn’s
glance in the rearview mirror was grim and assessing. ‘I take it you have some experience with Demon Marks.’

Where the
hell
had he heard that? Not even the Wardens knew much about it. The Djinn knew, but this guy wasn’t Djinn; I’d have been able to tell that much. Not a Warden, not Djinn, but
something
.

And yet, when I took a look at him in Oversight, he was just a guy. Nothing special. Not even any powers to speak of.

Quinn could tell I wasn’t going to offer any colour commentary. ‘If he’d given you the bottle, you’d have uncorked it to order Jonathan in,’ he said. ‘Only problem is, that would have let something else
out
, and we’ve got quite enough of that kind of problem going around right now. So sorry, but I had to stop you.’

I felt a flush of cold through my veins. It was
possible
Quinn was right; Kevin’s brain worked that way. If he could have found a way to screw things up, he’d have done it. And giving up…it wasn’t really his style, was it? Taking out the enemy in the most horrifically violent way possible,
that
was his style. And if there really had been a booby-trapped bottle…

During Kevin’s escape in New York three weeks ago, he and Jonathan had released from their bottles at least three Djinn who were infected with Demon Marks, which meant that they were
clinically insane, at the mildest interpretation; I knew that two of them had been located and recaptured, safely labelled as hazardous materials, and stored in some underground vault in Colorado. The third remained on the loose. It figured that Kevin might have grabbed up one of the other unbroken bottles as insurance. He could have passed one of those to me, and that would have meant passing me the Demon Mark when I opened up the bottle. Yippee. Been there, done that. Really didn’t care for a return engagement.

‘Where are you taking me?’ I asked. Useless question. He didn’t even bother to glance in the rearview. There was no plastic divider between me and Quinn, and I was starting to wonder what the effects of a decent wind gust would be inside the passenger area of a Taurus, but then Quinn took an abrupt right turn, up a long, wide drive.

Towards the gleaming glass pyramid of the Luxor Hotel, guarded by the massive golden bulk of the Sphinx.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Cool. I always wanted to stay there.’

The Luxor was like the Bellagio, only different. I kind of liked the Egyptian theme better, but then I’ve always been pretty ostentatious in my fashion sense, and besides, in the cluster of high-end shops by the entrance I spotted evidence of Jimmy Choo, Prada,
and
Kate Spade. That plus all the
ornamental gold and enamel…well, I almost forgot about Quinn’s gun and badge and hand on my arm.

For a minute.

The gaming area was virtually identical to the Bellagio’s; only the wallpaper and carpeting and uniforms were different. The money was universal, and so was the mingled, vibrating sense of euphoria and desperation. I couldn’t resist; I let myself slip the leash of the material world a little and rose up into the aetheric, just enough to catch a peek.

When I was a Djinn, the aetheric had registered in patterns and wavelengths of light. These days, human senses limited me to the surfaces of things, and a kind of broad psychological interpretation of auras. On the aetheric plane, the casino was almost a photonegative of how it appeared on earth. Instead of brilliant and glittering, it was dark, shadowy, peopled by ghosts whose auras fired in flares of manic excitement or despair. I don’t mean that everybody there was addicted…far from it. But there was a
shine
to it that reminded me unsettlingly of the way the blue sparklies had looked, up on the aetheric, when the route had been open from the Demon Realms into our own.

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I decided I didn’t have time to solve the world’s problems, anyway. One problem at a time, and mine was towing me through the casino at a relentless pace.

‘Hey, you’re not going to take me back to your
presidential suite and hang me out a window, are you? Because that’s so last half-hour ago…’

‘Quiet,’ Quinn said absently. He strong-armed me up to one of those areas labelled P
RIVATE
, guarded by not one but two strong-looking guys in discreet blazers with not-so-discreet bulges under their arms. They nodded to him. He nodded back. One of them jerked a chin at me. They all gave me the once-over.

All in silence.

I gave myself the once-over, too. Clingy shirt, short skirt, high heels that were just short of being quality…

‘In your dreams, guys,’ I said. ‘It’s not what it looks like.’

‘She’s with me,’ Quinn said.

‘Watch it, Quinn,’ one of them warned. They were virtually identical – Buzz Cut Number One, Buzz Cut Number Two. Number Two had a slightly thicker neck. Number One had cool, chilly grey eyes. ‘Don’t make us come in there.’

Quinn fixed them each with a look, and I mean a
look
. Whatever he’d been using with me had been his friendly puppy act, because that look was outright scary, promising evil and death in man-sized portions.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and Buzz Cut Number One slid a key card through a slot and opened the door for us.

Beyond was a small, smoky room. In another setting it might have been labelled
intimate
, but in this one it was just small. Low lighting in the faux-Egyptian sconces along the wall, plush dark carpeting underfoot. A full bar at one end, with a uniformed bartender on duty.

In the centre of the room, a round table, and five men sitting around it.

Playing cards.

The cards were floating in mid-air in front of each player; as I watched, an older gentleman who looked like he’d been made a CPA in the days of the pharaohs decided to fold, and lowered his hand face-down to the green baize surface. The room smelt of cigar smoke and sweat-soaked money. I didn’t know how much the pile of chips on the table represented, but it was a lot. A
lot
. I didn’t dare peek into the aetheric this time. Some things – I knew this instinctively – really shouldn’t be seen.

‘Quinn,’ the accountant grunted, and the rest of the players looked up. I was staring at the hand of the man directly in front of me; the floating cards showed he had eights over queens.

‘Sir.’ Quinn’s demeanour had changed again, this time to the respectful public servant. He let go of my arm. ‘Joanne Baldwin. Joanne, this is Myron Lazlo.’

‘Charmed,’ the accountant said, and nodded in
my direction without getting up. ‘You’re a Warden, correct?’

‘Weather,’ I said. ‘You?’

He had a lived-in face, lined around the eyes. High cheekbones that made him look like he’d stored a couple of tight, small apples in them for the winter. The suit – what I could see of it – was easily a four-grand tailored job, probably from Saville Row or Rome. Beautiful grey wool. The tie was a Villa Bolgheri silk, knotted to perfection.

I revised my estimate of his total net worth up by seven figures.

‘I’m not a Warden,’ Myron Lazlo said. ‘Neither are these other gentlemen, I assure you.’

‘So you’re what, ankh guys? What’s up with that?’

He gave me an unamused, unwelcoming smile. ‘Quinn, you’re being unmannerly. Bring a chair for the lady, please.’

Quinn moved without comment, came up with a straight-backed chair, and moved it into position away from the table.

‘If you’d be so kind as to wait a moment,’ Lazlo said. ‘We’re almost finished with this hand.’

I sat down, crossed my legs, folded my hands, and waited. Quinn and his gun and his dead-eyed stare kept me honest, as did the idea of the Buzz Cut twins outside the door. Plus, whether they wanted to call themselves Wardens or not, these guys had
something…defying gravity wasn’t something that most people, not even
my
people, casually went around doing. I had the unsettling feeling this was just a parlour trick, so far as they were concerned. I spent my time trying to figure out how they did it. No Djinn in evidence. I concentrated on the air, but it was following the normal flow patterns dictated by the forces of the room – the silent current of the air-conditioning coming from the top left-hand corner, swirling into corkscrew eddies as it was drawn down by gravity towards the floor. The hotter flow was a shimmer of yellow, filtering the opposite direction. Some kind of filter system in operation, technology I didn’t recognise that attracted the chemical chains of the smoke in the air and funnelled it away. As smoky as this room was, I realised it could have been much worse. Five men, each puffing away on cigarettes or twenty-dollar cigars for hours on end…made me gag nicotine to think of it.

I didn’t see any signal, but a sigh went through the four remaining players, and three folded and one raked in chips. Lazlo gathered the cards and neatly shuffled them back together before handing them off to a Luxor-uniformed factotum. The dealer put the cards into an envelope, pulled a self-seal, and labelled the outside of the envelope with the date, time, and some kind of code number. So there could be analysis done later, I assumed, in case
of an allegation of cheating. Nice.

He put a fresh, unbroken deck on the table and stepped away to stand like a statue in the corner, near the bartender.

‘Now,’ Myron said, and gave me that parsimonious smile again, ‘let’s talk about you, Ms Baldwin. What brings you to Las Vegas?’

If he could ante up that fake a smile, I could see it and raise him on wattage. ‘Sun, fun, shopping…’

‘Could it be that you’re here to make a deal with Mr Prentiss on behalf of the Wardens?’

I looked at Quinn. He was leaning up against the wall, arms folded, watching me with bright, uninformative eyes.

‘Could be,’ I said. ‘Could be I’m here to kill him. Could be I’m just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That happens more than you’d think.’

Myron laughed. ‘My dear lady, I can also see into the aetheric, you know. And while you are intemperate and occasionally unwise, you lack the necessary ruthless detachment to be able to execute young boys. Even in pursuit of the greater good. And besides that, the Djinn would stop you, you know. However, I think you actually believe you might do it, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and not consider it a lie.’ The laughter faded out of his eyes and left them chilled and scary. ‘You do not want to lie to me, my dear. Really, you do not.’

OK, now I had a creepy bad feeling. They knew
about the Wardens. They knew about Kevin. They knew about
Jonathan
. Was there anything these guys didn’t know?

‘Your attempt to stop him is foolish,’ one of the others continued. He was a short, gnarly looking little man, approaching middle age but not yet arrived: slicked-back black hair, rimless glasses, eyes of no immediate impact behind them. ‘The Wardens need to stay out of this. They caused this mess, just as they’ve caused hundreds more in the past thousand years.’