Chill Factor (30 page)

‘Any kind.’ No, that wasn’t true. ‘Glass bottles. Crystal. Has to be breakable.’

He made a gratified sound. The knife moved away. Where it had touched me, I felt a core of cold that stung hot after a few seconds.

‘How do you use one?’

I licked my lips with a dry, rough tongue. ‘First you have to have the scroll—’

The knife plunged into my skin. I screamed. It was buried about a half an inch deep in my arm, and he kept moving it. Cutting. When he finally stopped, I didn’t; the screaming dissolved to helpless sobs, but I couldn’t shut up until I felt him prick me in another place with the sharp, merciless tip of it.

‘There’s no scroll,’ he said. ‘Right?’

‘Right.’ I swallowed tears. ‘You’re right, you son of a bitch.’

He seemed to like that; I heard him chuckle. A warm, friendly sound. He patted my cheek.

‘Tell me the truth,’ he said. ‘We got all the time in the world to cut through the lies.’

‘Quinn’s been stealing them for six years,’ I said aloud. The road was blurring in front of my eyes.

‘What?’ Lewis had drifted off into a twilight state, nearly asleep; he jerked back awake at the sound of my voice. We were about two hours outside of Vegas, heading north. Mona was running at close to top speed. We were lucky in a lot of ways, but mostly because Rahel was keeping us off the radar, both literally and figuratively.

I swallowed and felt my throat click. ‘The Djinn. They’ve been disappearing for six years, and that’s exactly when…when I told Quinn about the Djinn. That’s how he found them. He gave up drug running to take up black-market Djinn, and I’m the one who taught him how to do it.’

Lewis listened to me as it poured out – the fear, the pain, the dark, Quinn’s questions. When I stopped, the air tasted poisonous. He didn’t look at me.

‘You don’t know how much Chaz told him,’ he said. ‘Don’t assume this is your fault, Jo.’

‘It’s very much my fault, Lewis, and you know it.
Chaz was a low-level functionary; he knew the basics of the Djinn but nothing else. I’d got the advanced-level training because they were grooming me for bigger things. I had the practical info he needed.’

‘Theoretical,’ Lewis pointed out. ‘You didn’t own one. You’d never worked with one. You were telling him what everybody knew.’

‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t matter. If he’d got the information from Chaz, he might have blown it off as the bullshit of an amateur. Chaz couldn’t back it up, after all. But I confirmed it, and that means he started to take it seriously based on what I said. That means I’m to blame. This happened because I cracked.’

He looked sombre. ‘Everybody cracks. You stayed alive. That matters.’

I didn’t think so, at the moment.

Lewis checked the side mirror to make sure that the silver Viper was still behind us, then glanced at the speedometer. It registered two hundred, but I was pretty sure we were doing better than that. I’d helped us with a strong tailwind, and screw the balance. The headwind was a bitch, and it kept trying to shove the car sideways. My arm was getting tired, and my whole body was vibrating with tension.

I kept waiting for something, anything to stop us, but it was clear sailing all the way to White Ridge.

The gates to the Fantasy Ranch were wide open when we arrived, tarnished silver girls arching their backs to the sky; I pulled the Viper in cautiously, alert for trouble from any direction, but apart from the creak of iron and the skitter of tumbleweeds, the place was utterly still.

‘He’s got a rifle,’ Lewis warned me. ‘Let Rahel do this.’

Rahel, in fact, was already out of the silver Viper and moving fast as a blur towards the house. She didn’t pause for the door. It blasted open ahead of her, and we sat tensely, in silence, waiting.

She appeared in the doorway a few minutes later and shook her head. I let out an aching breath.

‘He’s gone.’

‘Looks like.’ Lewis popped the passenger door. I found myself looking at the separated garage off to the side; the doors were rolled up, and Quinn had left behind a dirty green Cherokee and a black Explorer. The Explorer had boxes in the back window, neatly stacked, labelled G
LASS, FRAGILE
.

They were full of sealed bottles. I turned them over in my hands, wondering, but Rahel wandered over and checked them out simply by reaching over to pick one up.

‘Decoys,’ she said. ‘There are many like these inside. He hid the priceless among the cheap. He’s been gone for a while.’

I dumped the box over, furious. ‘How are we going to find him? Can you track him?’

Her eyes were dark and serious. ‘I can try. It’s difficult. Jonathan is masking their movements.’

‘Try.’ I kicked the scattered bottles. ‘Let’s move it.’

Back on the road. Rahel and Marion led the way this time, and I concentrated on staying right on the gleaming silver bumper, drafting. We were back on the freeway, and then made an abrupt turn to a farm-to-market road that wasn’t built for speed. We were forced to slow down.

‘Jo,’ Lewis said. ‘You need to accept that he may get away, for now.’

‘Bullshit. He’s not getting away. No way in hell.’

I kept a paranoid watch, but there was no sign of Quinn trying to pick us off with a sniper rifle. Although I doubted even Quinn could have made a hero shot at this speed. There was nothing to do but think, or talk, and neither one of us seemed to want to do much talking. The sun crawled over the sky, and we were losing time.

Rahel directed us down another road, this one heading into the desert. It was a little better. We edged the speed higher, heading for what looked like even more deserted country.

Lewis said, ‘Let me have David’s bottle. Maybe there’s something I can do to help him.’

The purse was still slung across my body, under
the seat belt. I resisted the urge to clutch it close and settled for a quick, definite headshake. ‘He’s sick, Lewis. You can’t take him out of the bottle right now. If he isn’t an Ifrit, he’s close. Just…leave him alone.’

‘Do you trust me?’

‘Don’t start.’

‘Do you?’ He reached over and unzipped the compartment.

‘Swear to God, Lewis, if you touch that bottle I’ll rip your fingers off.’

‘I’m trying to help,’ he said, and reached inside.

I grabbed his wrist. It was like grabbing a ground wire – enough power to make me jerk and swear and have to quickly put both hands back on the wheel so that we didn’t veer sideways around the tractor-trailer rig to our left, spin out, and flip like some Hollywood stunt gone horribly right. As it was, Mona fought me. She was stubborn, like my lovely Delilah, scrapped back in Oklahoma and still bitterly mourned. At this speed, steering was razor-sharp and as temperamental as a bipolar opera singer. Her tyres were shrieking against the urge to turn. I held her straight, blindly concentrating, and didn’t let my breath out until I felt her unclench first.

And then I remembered what had set things off.

David’s bottle was in Lewis’s hands. Held
casually, catching the light through the tinted window in a pretty home-decorating sparkle. It looked empty, but then, it always did. What David was had no weight in the aetheric state, and when encased in glass, failed to even register at all on any plane of existence we could reach.

‘It took a human death and Jonathan’s and David’s power to bring Rahel back,’ he said. ‘It’ll take Jonathan’s power and more death to bring David back. Are you prepared to pay that price?’

‘Sure,’ I said grimly. ‘Quinn might as well serve some useful purpose. And hey, Mr Morality, you were willing to sanction Quinn’s putting a bullet through Kevin’s head, as I recall. Don’t break anything climbing off that soapbox; it’s awfully high.’

Lewis kept turning the bottle in his hands. ‘Does he make you happy?’

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. Lewis knew well enough. ‘Put it back, Lewis. Don’t make me hurt you.’

‘I have an idea—’

‘I have an idea that you’re going to put that back
right n
—’

I never finished that, because all of a sudden I was just simply…not there. I’d been yanked out of the car with tremendous, magical force, far up into the sky. Below me, a dot of a blue car veered
wildly, corrected, and shuddered to a screeching halt. The silver one braked after a two-second delay.

Then I was spinning out of control, heading…

…down.

Thump
.

I landed in a dusty sprawl, out of breath, sweating, gasping, and blind. I clawed hair back from my eyes and saw that I was in shadow, lying on a soft bed of sand. To either side of me, canyon walls crawled up hand over hand towards the sky. They were astonishing…harvest gold shading to brick red shading to dull brown, a muted but glorious rainbow of layers. Overhead, the sky was the perfect, supernaturally bright blue of a Djinn’s eyes. Where the sunlight hit, it hit hard and woke glassy sparkles from the sand.

The place wasn’t completely devoid of life; there was a raw scuttling in a thin, straggly cactus that probably meant either a lizard or a rabbit, or both. It wasn’t even devoid of hints of human visitation. There was a cool silver moon slice of a beer can partially visible near the canyon wall.

But nobody in sight.

I licked dry lips and called, ‘Jonathan?’ I couldn’t think who else would have had the ability to yank me out of the driver’s seat and deliver me here without also delivering me in pieces. I got up and
slapped dust from my jeans – what use it was, I have no idea, since the rest of me was thoroughly caked. I ached. I stank. I was grimy and horribly itchy and pissed off as hell.

I was also scared to death.

‘Quinn?’ I tried. ‘Hello?’

His voice came down to me like God from the mountain, amplified into a divine echo. ‘Shouldn’t have come after me, Joanne. I didn’t come after you.’

Like hell
. ‘You tried to
shoot
me!’

‘You wouldn’t leave well enough alone,’ he said. His voice sounded hollow but self-satisfied; I couldn’t see a thing, couldn’t tell if he was up at the top leaning over or standing on some concealed ledge. ‘Sooner or later, you’d have figured it out. You’re like a bulldog. I respect that. I was just removing a risk. And now you just won’t leave me the fuck alone, will you? I’m just trying to leave, you know. Get on with my life.’

‘News flash, now the Ma’at know. And the Wardens will know. And whether you’ve got Jonathan or not, there’s no place you can hide. They’ll hunt you down and—’

‘And kill me, yeah, I know. Very dramatic.’

An explosion echoed through the canyon, louder than a scream; I felt stone chips dig hot into my shoulder, and dived for the dirt again. As if that would help. He was shooting down at me, and I
had no place to hide. But then, if he’d been all about the shooting of me, he could have easily put one or two through my head.

‘What do you want?’ I yelled, and spat sand. ‘Hey, grab a knife, come down here, and stage a rematch, you bastard! I’ll give you a really good time!’

‘You know, I used to just want to get away with this, but you’re pissing me off. Now I’m thinking, maybe I need a little recreation before I hit the road.’

Another shot pinned me to the sand. He could drill me anytime he wanted; I knew it. And there wasn’t a lot I could do to stop him.

‘You remember what I asked you at the end? In the cave?’ His voice sounded worse than hollow now. It sounded like a shell, and something lived in it that wasn’t human. I stayed very still. ‘Joanne?’

‘I remember,’ I said. I didn’t know if he could hear me.

‘Is it still what you’re most afraid of?’

I felt the vibration coming up through the rocks. Next to my eyeline, sand jittered madly, and I felt a sudden cool, damp breeze.

I clawed my way up to my feet and looked at the canyon walls. Far, far up at the top, I saw a black dot of a head looking down.

I knew how he was going to kill me.

Fuck him. I wasn’t going to die like this. Not like this.

I kicked off my shoes, ran for the wall, and grabbed for my first handhold.

I’m going to ask you one last question
, he’d said, there in the dark, when all my screaming had died down to whispers, when he’d stopped cutting me and left me to bleed for a while. The scrape of his fingertips over my sweaty, bloody face had made me want to crawl away, but I’d been too weak. Too afraid.

What are you most afraid of? What’s the one way
you don’t want to die?

And because I’d been too numbed to lie, I’d whispered,
Drowning
. As soon as I’d let myself say it, I’d tried to take it back, tried to pretend I’d lied, but he knew.

Orry knew fear when he heard it.

He’d dragged me to the edge of the pool, and he’d held me underwater until I’d stopped moving.

I’d had just enough power left, just enough skill, to keep the oxygen in my lungs refreshed as his hand shoved my face down to the bottom of that shallow pool and held me there with his fist knotted in my hair.

He was careful. Let me stay under for a full two minutes before he let go, and he left me there, floating face-down.

When I was sure he’d gone, I’d rolled out of the water and huddled in the dark, trembling. Weeping without sound and without tears. Then crawling, inch by torturous inch, back out of the caves into the hot sunlight.

Four hours later, I’d made my way outside to the highway, where a passing motorist had found me.

Just another victim.

What are you most afraid of?

I’d told him, and now he was going to use it against me again.

Son of a bitch, screw you, I’m not dying like this.

I hauled myself up with my right hand, found a grip for my left, and jammed fingers in. Nails broke, but I barely felt it. My bare toes scrabbled at the rock wall and clung to a tiny outcropping.

Three feet up. I found the next handhold, and hauled against the shattering strain in my arms and shoulders.
Need to lose some weight
. That was the crazy, insane, stupidly optimistic part of my brain that just never quite failed to see the funny side of dying horribly.