Heat Stroke (2 page)

“So we should get a room,” he finished, and when he met my eyes again, the heart I didn't really have skipped a beat or two.

“Oh,” I breathed. “A room. Sure. Absolutely.”

He kept hold of my hand, and his index finger traced light whorls over my palm, teasing what I
supposed wasn't really a lifeline anymore. The finger moved slowly up over the translucent skin of my wrist, waking shivers.
God.
I didn't even mean to, but somehow I was seeing him on the aetheric level, that altered plane of reality where certain people, like Wardens and Djinn, can read energy patterns and see things in an entirely different spectrum.

He was pure fire, shifting and flaring and burning with the intensity of a star.

“You're feeling better,” I said. No way to read expressions, on the aetheric, but I could almost feel the shape of his smile.

“A little,” he agreed. “And you do have things to learn.”

“You're going to teach me?”

His voice went deep and husky. “Absolutely. As soon as we have some privacy.”

I retrieved my hand, jammed Mona into first gear, and peeled rubber.

 

We picked an upper-class hotel in Manhattan, valeted Mona into a parking garage with rates so high it had to be run by the Mafia. I wondered how much ransom we were going to have to pay Guido to get her back. We strolled into the high-class marble and mahogany lobby brazenly unconcerned by our lack of luggage.

“Wow,” I said, and looked around appreciatively. “Sweet.” It had that old-rich ambiance that most places try to create with knockoff antiques and reproduction rugs, but as I trailed my fingers over a mahogany side table I could feel the depth of history in it, stretching back to the generations of maids who'd
polished it, to the eighteenth-century worker who'd planed the wood, to the tree that stood tall in the forest.

Nothing fake about this place. Well, okay, the couches were modern, but you have to prefer comfort over authenticity in some things. The giant Persian rug was certainly real enough to make up the difference.

The place smelled of that best incense of all—old money.

David waited in line patiently at the long marble counter while the business travelers ahead of him presented American Express cards and listened to voice mail on cell phones. A thought occurred to me, and I tugged at the sleeve of his olive drab coat. “Hey. Why—”

“—check in?” he finished for me. “Two reasons. First, it's easier, and you'll find that the less power you use unnecessarily, the better off you are. Second, I don't think you're ready to be living my life quite yet. One step at a time.”

He reached into his pocket and came out with—an American Express card. I blinked at it. It said
DAVID L PRINCE
in raised letters. “Cool. Is that real?” I said it too loudly.

His eyes widened behind concealing little round glasses. “Not a great question when we're about to use it to pay for the room, is it?”

Oh. I'd been figuring we were still in some unnoticeable fog, but clearly not; the guy in line ahead of me was distracted enough from the cell phone glued to his ear to throw us a suspicious look. True, we didn't have the glossy spa-treated look of the rich,
or the unlimited-expense-account confidence of the corporate, but we weren't exactly looking like homeless, either. I shot him a sarcastic smile. He turned back to his business.

“Sorry,” I said, more softly, to David. “Obviously, yes, it's real, of course. I mean—hell, I don't know what I mean. Sorry. Um . . . where do they send the bills?”

“Not to me.”

His smile made my train of thought derail and crash. Cell Phone Guy in front of us picked up his room key and got out of line; David and I moved up to the counter, where a highly polished young lady too nice for New York did all the check-in things, issued us plastic key cards, and fired off amenities too fast for me to follow. A uniformed bellman veered out of our path when he saw we were bag-free and gave us a look that meant he was no stranger to couples arriving for short, intense bursts of time.

David took my arm and walked me to the elevators, across the huge Persian rug, past a silent piano and a muted big-screen TV that was showing some morning show with perfect people interviewing more perfect people. We rode the elevator with Cell Phone Guy, who was still connected and chatting about market share and a corporate vice president's affair with the wife of a global board member. The latter sounded interesting. As it happened, we were both on the same floor—twelve—and he looked at us like we might be after his wallet or his life, but before long he peeled away to a room and we continued
on, down a long hallway and to a bright-polished wooden door with the number 1215 on it.

David didn't bother with the key card. He touched the door with his finger, and it just swung open.

I looked at him. “What happened to ‘the less you use, the better'?”

He scooped me up in his arms and carried me over the threshold. Gravity slipped sideways, and I put my arms around his neck until he settled me down with my feet on the carpet.

“What was that for?” I asked. He felt fever-hot against me, and those eyes—God. Intense, focused, hungry.

“Luck,” he said, and kissed me. I felt instant heat slam through me, liquefying me in equal proportion to how incredibly
real
he felt against me, and I felt a feverish urge to be naked with this man,
right now,
to be sure that all of this wasn't just a particularly lovely dream on the way to the grave and oh
God
his hands burned right through my clothes like they weren't there.

And then, as his palms glided up my sides, wrinkling fabric, the cloth melted away and disappeared, and then it was just flesh, and fire, and the taste of David's lips and tongue. I felt myself burn and go faint with heat stroke, revived with the cool relief of his skin.

And if it was a dream, it was the best I'd ever had.

 

In the morning, we got down to the work of teaching me to be a Djinn.

I'm not what you could call spiritual, so learning
how to
be
spiritual—in the true spirit sense of the word—was a challenge. Sure, I'd been a Warden, but calling the wind and calming storms was all about science for me. I understood it in the way a child of the atomic age would, which meant subatomic particles and chaos theory and wave motion. Hell, I'd been a weather-controlling
bureaucrat,
when you came right down to it. Nothing that you might call preparation for being granted power on a legendary scale.

David started me out with that night of incredible, unbelievable sex, and the next morning when I woke up it felt like it was still going on. I mean, senses locked wide open. Chakras at full power. Every touch, every taste, every random sensation echoed through me like a struck bell. It was fun at first.

Then it got to be painful.

“Turn it off,” I groaned, and hid my head under a down pillow. David's fingers traced the bumps of my spine, dragging down the sheet in slow, cool increments. “Oh, God, please, I can't stand it!”

He made a sound, low in his throat, and let his touch glide down over my buttocks, down the backs of my thighs. “You'll need to learn how to shut off your senses,” he said. “Can't walk around like this all the time, can you?”

I knotted my fists in the pillow and screamed into the mattress. Not that he was particularly trying to drive me nuts, it was just part of the overload.
Everything
was sexual. The sheet, sliding over the backs of my legs. His fingertips firing nerves. The smell of him, the taste of him still tingling on my lips, the sound of his breath in my ear.

“I don't know how,” I whispered, when I'd stopped shaking. “Tell me how.”

“You have to learn how to choose what level of sensation and perception to use,” he said. “To start with, I want you to meditate and block out what's around you.”

“Meditate?” I took my head out from under the pillow, shook dark hair back from my face, and rolled over on my side to look at him. “Excuse me, but the closest I ever got to having a spiritual awakening was dating a yoga instructor. Once.”

David propped himself up on one elbow, looking down at me. No mistaking it; he was enjoying this a little too much. And I was enjoying the bird's-wing graceful sweep of his pecs. “You're underestimating yourself. You're highly spiritual, Joanne. You just don't know it. Just clear your mind and meditate.”

Meditate. Right. I took a deep breath and tried to relax muscles I no longer actually had. Which was more than a little confusing, even in the abstract.

“Focus,” David's voice said next to my ear, and of course, it was instantly impossible to stay anything like on track. His voice got inside me in places that nice girls don't mention. His breath stirred warm on my skin, and there went that potential orgasm thing again, a little earthquake of sheer pleasure that completely sabotaged any chance of achieving my center.

I didn't open my eyes, but I said, “I could focus a lot better if you were somewhere else.”

“Sorry.” He didn't sound sorry. That velvet-smooth tenor sounded smug. “I'll be quiet.”

He was. I concentrated on visualizing something calming—in my case, it was the ocean—but the
whole wave-and-surf vibe fell apart when I heard him rustling pages. I sighed and opened my eyes, propped myself up on my elbows, and looked over at him.

He was lying next to me in bed, propped up, reading the newspaper.

“You're kidding,” I said. He gave me one of those
What?
looks and went back to the Metro section. “I'm trying to meditate, here! Give me a break. At least
help
.”

“I am helping,” he said. “I'm distracting myself so I don't distract you.”

I glared. It had absolutely no effect. He sighed, put the paper at half-staff, and looked at me gravely over newsprint. “Fine. What would you like me to do?”

“I don't know! Something!”

“I can't meditate for you, Joanne.”

“Well, you can . . . encourage me!”

He folded the
New York Times
and put it down on the side table. “Oh, I'd
like
to encourage you. I just don't think it would help you focus. Unless . . .”

“What?” I asked. He turned on his side and reached out, trailed a single fingertip over the curve of my shoulder and down my arm. Little earthquakes, building to a major seismic event inside . . .

“Never mind.” It wasn't nothing, I could tell. He wasn't trying to distract me, he really
was
trying to distract himself. From me. “Meditate for another half hour, and I'll tell you.”

My entire attention fixed on the square half-inch of skin his finger was touching. “Half an hour?”

“Half an hour.”

“I can do that.”

Sheer bravado, but now I was motivated. I flopped back flat on the pillow, closed my eyes, and concentrated hard on that ocean . . . blue-green waves rolling in from a misty horizon . . . churning to pale lace as they crashed on the shore . . . whispers of mist cool on my skin . . . a fine, endless white sand beach that glittered in sunlight . . .

I felt like I was actually achieving something—clearing my mind of the idea of him lying beside me, anyway—when he blew it for me by talking again.

“Joanne,” he said. “Quit hovering.”

I opened my eyes and realized I was looking at the motel room ceiling. White spackled moonscape broken up by a dusty ice sculpture of a light fixture two inches from my nose.

Oh. When he said hovering, he meant
hovering.
As in seven feet above the bed.

“Crap,” I said, and looked over my shoulder. “I went all
Exorcist
.”

“Actually, it wasn't a bad try. I felt you go quiet for a few minutes.”

“How many minutes?” I rotated myself in midair to face him.
Ha!
Managed it gracefully, in a controlled weightless spin, which was nice; control had been kind of a problem. Obviously. My hair spoiled the effect by flopping forward, and I tried shoving it back over my shoulders. It repeated the flopping thing.

“Let's call it . . . thirty.” David's smile turned dangerously amused, and he reached down and pulled the sheet away from the rest of him. I stopped messing with my hair and lived for the moment, because like me, David hadn't bothered with pajamas. He
patted the Joanne-shaped hollow in the bed next to him.

I tried to get down. Really. But whatever switch I'd thrown to get up here, I couldn't seem to find it again. I kept hovering. “Um, not that I'm not motivated, but . . .”

“You're stuck.”

“Kind of a yes, bordering on an
oh, crap
.” I tried to make it funny, but truth was, it scared me. All this power, none of the control I so obviously needed just to get through what was for David nothing but an autonomic function. “You forgot to tell me about the gravity-being-optional part of this exercise.”

He levitated up, an inch at a time, and when he was still a foot away I felt the summer heat of his skin. He smelled like warm cinnamon and peaches, and it made my mouth water and my body go golden.

He stopped with a cool two-inch cushion of air between us.

“I didn't forget,” he said. “I just didn't think you'd be able to do this for a while. Don't worry, it's normal.”

“Normal? I'm halfway into the bed of the guy upstairs!”

“I'd rather you were more than halfway into the bed down here.” That look on his face—naked, powerful, proprietary—sent a pulse of sheer need through me.

“Tease,” I said. He made a sound in his throat that wasn't quite a laugh.

“Come back to bed and we'll see.” He lowered
himself by a couple of inches. I tried to follow. Failed. He drifted back up. “Want me to help you?”

“No. Yes. Hell. I don't know, what's the right answer?”