Chill Factor

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 spoiled 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 multicolored flashing slots and quiet harbors of blackjack tables, roulette. Dark paneling 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 axe 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 private, 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 toward 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 realized 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-colored 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 midthroat. 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 gray. 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 okay?'

'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 normalcy; 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.

'The Wardens have him,' I said. 'It's out of my hands. You'll have to provoke a full-out war to get him back now.'