Chill Factor

and hoppy, but acceptably cold and refreshing.

'Nice cuts and bruises,' Jonathan said pleasantly. 'How's it going?'

'Good. You?'

'Can't complain.' His eyes were dark, dark like the space no stars could ever shine. 'And that takes care of the small talk. You do understand that I'm going to kill you if you so much as think about getting in my way, right?'

'I don't want much. I want a halfway decent massage, an herbal scrub, and to put a stop to this before we all get killed.' I leaned back and kicked a leg over the arm of the chair, casual as could be. After the night I'd had, Jonathan didn't really bother me all that much. 'You knew about the Djinn with the Demon Mark. You let Kevin set him free.'

He didn't confirm or deny. He just tilted his beer bottle slightly in my direction, and I saw the Djinn's past go by in a blur. Enslaved to a bottle. Working for a hated master. Being called one day and commanded to stretch out its hand…

… and take a black scorched Mark on its master's chest as its own.

Locked away in a bottle, sealed for all eternity with an enemy it couldn't defeat and couldn't ever surrender to. Dying, but never dead. Infected.

The bottle being grabbed and stuffed in Kevin's pocket, at the Wardens Association vault in New York. A distorted, wavering view of Kevin, Jonathan, David, Lewis…

… me.

'Not that you care,' he said remotely, 'but that's a friend of mine trapped and dying.'

'I can't save him.'

'No,' he agreed. 'You can't. Neither can I. Sucks, right?'

He tipped his beer back upright and took a sip. Dark eyes never leaving me.

I sighed. 'Come on, Jonathan, let's quit playing games. What do you want from me?'

'You trying out the Rule of Three? I wouldn't.' His smile warned me of all kinds of unpleasantness. 'How's it feel when the chickens come home to crap all over you?'

I leaned forward, rolling the beer bottle between my palms, and looked him directly in the eye. 'David's here. In Las Vegas.'

'Bullshit. You don't have his bottle.'

'Somebody does. Maybe it's the same guy who's been bogarting Djinn for the past decade. You know, the one you're looking for?'

'You're lying.'

'I could be.' I deliberately upended my beer and drained it dry. Burped. 'Explain something to me. You didn't give a shit about freeing him the whole time he was Bad Bob's property.' The second the words left my mouth I wished I could rewind the tape, but he didn't react. Much. 'You didn't rescue him when Bad Bob was whoring him out to Yvette Prentiss for her little games. It occurs to me to wonder why you're so hot to protect him from me. Who doesn't mean him any harm, as well you know.'

He shrugged and took a pull off of his own beer.

His eyes never left me. 'He hated Bad Bob,' Jonathan said. 'He hated Yvette. You…' He kept the heat off the words, but the air felt electric and harsh. 'I can deal with the others. They only enslaved his body. You've gutted him.'

'And you want things back the way they were?' I set the bottle down on the shiny antique side table. 'That's not mine to give, Big J. Take it up with him. Oh, wait, you did, right? And when you told him to choose, he picked me. Wow. Bummer.'

I felt a sharp pain go through my chest. Arrhythmia. Jonathan took another casual sip of beer.

'How's it feel, being back in the old body again? Working out for ya?'

'Famously.' I wasn't going to beg. Another stab of agony, this one longer. 'I need your help.'

'Kinda figured you might.'

'If you care about this kid at all, you need to help me get your bottle away from him.'

Jonathan raised his eyebrows. 'So you can be my new owner? Sorry, I dance with the one that brung me.'

'You mean that you're not through with him yet.'

'You've got to admit, the kid has talent. And one hell of a lot of power.'

'Which he stole.'

'Some of it.' Jonathan shrugged. 'Hey, his idea, not mine. Don't shoot the messenger.'

'Not that it'd do any good to shoot you.'

'There's that… The Ma'at are ready to move, is that what you're telling me?' Jonathan adjusted his position slightly, rolled his head to the side, but kept me pinned in his stare. 'Time's up?'

'They'll kill him,' I said softly. 'You know they won't hesitate if they think there's no alternative.'

No answer. He tipped his beer up, and his throat worked.

And he smiled.

'Hey, kid,' he said, and put the bottle aside. 'You're awake.'

I looked around to see Kevin standing in the bedroom doorway. He looked pale and nervous and small, hair stuck up at odd angles as if it had never seen the toothy side of a comb. Next to him stood the thin tattooed girl, her short red hair gleaming, her hands clasped around Kevin's arm. Siobhan. The hooker.

Kevin stared at me with dead eyes. 'I thought I told you to kill her,' he said.

'Didn't tell me when,' Jonathan pointed out, and when Kevin opened his mouth to rectify the mistake, Jonathan held up a single finger and waggled it.

Kevin shut up.

'Hey!' Siobhan glared, and took a step forward. She had cheap plastic high-heeled hooker shoes, but great balance, and the orange toenail polish was all that. She was too sharp in the chin, too narrow in the eyes, but the whole package was effective as hell in a knit top and low-rise jeans. 'He owns you, man! You have to do what he says!'

'Siobhan,' Kevin said quietly. 'Don't.'

'Yeah. Don't.' Jonathan's tolerance for Kevin clearly didn't extend to girlfriends. 'Butt out, Red, and I won't feel the need to show you the curb the hard way.'

That gave me a nice, cold shiver. When Siobhan started to fire back a retort, I shook my head. 'No,' I said. 'He's not kidding. Just relax, okay?'

'Like you care.' She had a glare identical to Kevin's. Interesting. Maybe he actually had found a soul mate, all the way out here. A soul mate with her picture plastered on call-girl cards all over the street, but hey, it wasn't like Kevin was fresh out of the Innocent Academy. Kevin would find someone more screwed up than himself to fall for. It was inevitable. Since he'd been powerless for so long, someone in worse shape than him would have a powerful appeal.

'I care,' I said gently. 'I'm trying to keep him alive. Just do what this guy tells you, okay? And let me handle the witty banter.'

Jonathan was looking bored. When I turned my attention back to him, he did an exaggerated lift of his eyebrows to indicate just how extreme his ennui was.

'What do you want?' I asked.

His eyes flickered, and for a second I thought he really was going to swat me like a fly. And then he smiled. 'Okay. Here's the truth: I want you to be careful.'

'And you care because…?'

His eyes focused briefly and pointedly where the warm spark of life fluttered inside me. 'Got reasons.'

'I'm not naming him after you, if that's what you're thinking.'

Jonathan's lips curled into a deeper smile. A real one, nothing sinister or sarcastic about it. When he looked at me like that-no, at what was in me-I felt faint. He had the same supernatural power David possessed to make women's clothes fall off; he just rarely bothered to show it. I was grateful. If he'd looked at me like that before, I might've handed over David's bottle without a fight.

Well, not really. But I would've thought about it.

'Because of Imara,' Jonathan said. Purred, actually. It was that kind of a word.