Chill Factor

longing and power.

This was what I'd been fighting for. What I'd fight for with every breath, every remaining day of my life.

'Anything I can do for you, master?' he whispered to me. 'Or to you, anyway?'

I sucked in a superheated breath, trembling, and managed to be practical. 'A purse to put this bottle in would be great, actually.'

He reached under the table and pulled out a black leather bag, nothing designer-my bad for not specifying properly, really-and he'd thoughtfully included padding material. I slid the bottle inside and zipped it shut, then looped it bandolier-fashion over my head. I was not losing him. Not again. I'd break his bottle when we were out of this mess; I didn't like keeping him prisoner, but right now having David's power amplifying mine might keep us alive.

'Joanne?' Marion's distant voice. I blinked and pulled my attention away from David; it was like ripping off a limb, but I managed. Absence didn't make the heart grow fonder; it created a kind of magnetic lock that didn't seem humanly possible to break. 'Jonathan's bottle, if you please.'

Oh. Right.

Jonathan had given up on slot machines and had wandered back. He was standing behind my chair, and without turning around I knew that he was watching David. I could feel the crackle of power in the air. They weren't speaking, but there was conversation going on. Levels of power, emotion, give and take.

'Glad to get rid of it,' I said sincerely, and held it out for Marion to accept.

Kevin had been waiting, and he took advantage of the chance. He slapped my hand, and the bottle went spinning out of control across the tabletop, skittering and bouncing, straight toward David-who, being Djinn, couldn't physically or aetherically touch it. He reached out for it, but his hand went right through it as if it didn't exist, or he didn't, or some combination of the two; the bottle slid through him and disappeared. I heard the muffled thud of it hitting carpet.

'Jump ball,' Jonathan murmured, and then turned serious again. 'Crap.'

I felt the surge at almost exactly the same time, and so did David, who threw himself over me. Something was coming. Something big. I could see it blowing up in the aetheric, big as a dragon and twice as fiery-no idea what it was, but it was huge and very, very scary.

'Get down!' Jonathan's voice roared through the casino, supernaturally loud, like an enraged drill instructor on the world's largest loudspeaker, and it wasn't surprising that every single person in sight who wasn't Jonathan dropped to the carpet like they'd been chopped off at the knees. There was some muffled screaming, but surprisingly little. I started worming my way across the floor toward where Jonathan's bottle had fallen, but David was in the way, and Kevin was elbow-walking that way, too. I lunged across David at the faint sparkle of glass in shadow, but I was too late; a hand was there before me.

Siobhan. She grabbed it and stuffed the bottle into the pocket of her jeans.

Jonathan had turned, watching her with narrow, dark eyes, like a predator about to eat something. I grabbed the girl's wrist. 'Siobhan. He'll kill you. Give it to me!'

She went very pale. She hesitated, then pulled it out of her pocket and handed it over just as Kevin got into position to try to snatch it away. We had an undignified little wrestling match, which consisted of me yanking my hands away from his and him trying to pry my fingers open, muttering things about my mother that weren't very complimentary. Siobhan crab-walked backward, away from the fray.

'Quiet!' Jonathan snapped at us. We all froze. Then there was a surprisingly weighty, profound silence. And then there was the faintest tinkle of glasses on tables, going on for a few delicate seconds.

And then an earthquake hit like a bomb.

Maybe people screamed, I don't know; the first tremor rippled through the floor like a wave through a stormy ocean, and I was tossed sideways, rolled, fetched up against a railing that I grabbed onto for dear life as the building continued to pitch and roll. It was too loud to hear screaming over the jangling of alarms and bells and dying slot machines and breaking glass and shattering steel.

I had a lot of power. It was all useless. Weather was an ephemeral power; this was something deep, strong, relentless. I caught a flash of someone moving faster, coat flying, and saw David leaping over the rolling, rippling floor to land hard beside me. He threw himself on top of me, smothering my scream-I had been screaming, I realized from the raw ache in my throat-and I felt impacts against his body. Things hitting him. Things that would have crushed me.

Even a minor earthquake has a deeply unsettling effect, but a major one, like this, robs you of the ability to do anything but hang on and pray. I prayed, my hand locked a vise around the wrought-iron railing, and I heard David whispering in that liquid language of the Djinn. It might have been a prayer, too, for all I knew.

And then I realized that I had the power to stop it. My left hand, the one not holding on in a death grip, was clutching Jonathan's bottle-which was, thankfully, still intact.

'Get off!' I yelled in David's ear. 'Off!'

He rolled away into a fluid, inhuman crouch-the first time I'd really seen him betray his Djinn nature in body language. He was moving like Rahel now, like something built out of alien parts into the semblance of a human body. His eyes were blazing so brightly it was like they'd caught fire.

I held up Jonathan's bottle, coughed against a choking cloud of crumbling dry wall, and yelled, 'Jonathan! I command you to stop this earthquake, now!'

He was the only one still upright. Tall, slim, untouched by the shattering concrete and flying debris as the hotel ripped itself apart. Marion was motionless at his feet. Kevin. Siobhan.

He looked utterly composed as he turned toward me and said, 'I can't.'

The wave of disbelief almost drowned me. I hadn't left him any room for equivocation; I was holding his damn bottle. …

He nodded toward it.

'That's not my bottle, kiddo,' he said. 'Sorry. Nice wording, though. Eight out of ten for style.'

I stupidly shook the bottle in my hand-why, I have no idea; trying to make it work?-and before I could get my head around it, the moment was past. Jonathan was doing something. Not what I'd wanted him to do, of course, but something, which was more than the rest of us were capable of trying.

He grabbed Kevin by the scruff of the neck, yanked him to his feet, and yelled something in his ear. Then he grabbed Marion, got her standing, and yelled something to her, too.

Then he steadied the ground under them. I could see it, even in this reality-a golden shimmer, spreading out around him in concentric, growing circles, and inside the gold, a small island of calm. Marion and Kevin were talking, or rather yelling; I couldn't hear a thing. I couldn't even hear David now, who was wrapped around me-he shoved me back into a thick recessed doorway and braced himself there, holding me in. I peered over his shoulder at what was happening.

Marion had taken Kevin's hand. The two of them were facing each other now, and as I watched she went into a trance state, eyes slowly closing. She took the kid with her. As his face went smooth and calm, he looked ten years older and, at the same time, amazingly childlike.

Alight with power.

This was a shallow quake, I knew that much; deeper-seated disturbances usually do less damage, because the energy gets absorbed by the bedrock on the way. Shallow ones are much more dangerous to the surface, and this one was a doozy. No way to objectively measure it by Richter scale standards, but I'd been taught the Mercalli intensity scale, and this was damn sure an IX. The damage was being caused by exactly the same things that happen when you drop a stone into a pool of water-waves bouncing back from harder objects, then from other waves of greater intensity. Energy in dissonance, deflected constantly back against itself. It ripped things apart in its madness.

I felt the shaking and rolling subside to a mere sickening tilt and jerk and shudder. As it did, sounds became clearer again-screaming, crashing, slot machines tipping, walls collapsing.

And in the circle of gold, Marion and Kevin opened their eyes and smiled at each other. Pure smiles of delight and pride.

The shaking stopped. One last sifting of dust from above, and then it was over. What emergency lighting there was flickered on, bathing everything in a sickly halogen glow, but the shadows stayed deep and secret.

Marion let go of Kevin's hands and reached up to put her palms on his cheeks. She leaned him closer and kissed