“There is now,” he said, and his eyes sparked to a hot, swirling bronze.
He put his hands behind my back and lowered me. Slowly. The seats dissolved into a soft, firm expanse of what felt like a real bed. My head encountered the airy softness of a feather pillow, and I couldn’t help but sigh in true happiness.
David was watching me, his eyes half-closed. Braced above me on stiffened arms.
Not touching me in any way. Not yet.
My breath caught helplessly in my throat as his elbows bent, as his shoulders flexed and the muscles slid under that smooth, matte-velvet skin. I bit my lip as I felt his lips touch my trembling midsection. A burst of warmth zipped up my spine from down low, then exploded outward and inward like an echo.
His lips traveled down, and his tongue trailed gently over the inward slope of my belly button. My bitten lip started to hurt, but when I let go, I moaned. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help my body from lifting toward him, either.
He put one large, warm hand just under my breasts and pushed me back down. “Not yet,” he murmured, with his lips brushing my skin. His gaze was dark and wicked and intensely sexual. “We have a long, long way to go. Can’t have you going off just yet.”
“Then you’d better stop touching me,” I said breathlessly. “Because if you don’t, I’m going to go off like a Roman candle any second.”
His eyebrows canted upward. He dragged his fingertips over the center of the thin fabric of my bra, and it just…dissolved. Then he folded the two halves back from my body, along with my shirt. “Then I’d better make it worth your while,” he said, and moved up to trail his tongue over my right nipple.
His hair was warm and silky under my fingers, and for a while I just whited out, flying on sensation. When he touched the waistband of my pants, and I felt the button and zippers giving up to him, I knew I was lost. Deliriously, deliciously, wonderfully lost.
I didn’t lie to him. I did come like a Roman candle, bursting into waves of light and shuddering pleasure, striving against his hands and his lips, long before we got to the main course.
That didn’t mean I was finished, though.
And he’d known that all along.
FIFTEEN
It felt like too short a flight, since we spent it horizontal, naked, and blissful under silken covers, protected and secluded by a swirling bubble of opal energy. David’s body fit perfectly under my hands, as though it had been made to match me. In theory I was a virgin, but in practice, memory wasn’t a barrier to this at all. There wasn’t any pain, there wasn’t any hesitation, and there was certainly no trace of shame, no matter what I felt moved to do with him, or for him. It felt like the world had opened up to me for the first time, channeled through his lips, his hands, his firm, warm skin, the urgent and careful strength he used in every touch. There was a kind of fever-dream delirium to it, because surely real life wasn’t like this. Couldn’t be like this. If it was, how had I ever gotten out of his bed?
If he was using any kind of Djinn magic, I was all for the practice. Practice, practice, practice.
As we lay in a dreamy, disheveled state of paradise, twisted together in the sheets, I traced letters on his chest like a lovesick kid. “Do you know what I’m writing?” I asked, and had a sudden dizzying idea that he’d seen lovers play that game back when writing was still in hieroglyphics. Or cuneiform.
“Tell me,” he whispered, and pressed his lips to a particularly sensitive spot at my temple. I shivered.
“I…L…O…V…E…”
“Chocolate,” he said. “Fast cars. Dangerously expensive shoes.”
I drew a single letter-U.
He didn’t speak. He traced with one warm finger the spot on my temple he’d kissed, drawing something that was more abstract than letters, more direct.
“You don’t have to stay with me,” he said. “It’s true that once Djinn let ourselves…feel things like this, we can’t turn it off. But we
I put my head down on his chest. He might not have been human, but his body felt that way. His heart thumped gently under my hand, and I felt the elastic movement of his lungs. His arms went around me and cradled me there.
“Venna said this makes you weak,” I said. “Does it?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“I do. I will. Does it?”
I felt his sigh stir the damp hair around my forehead. “I think the more connection the Djinn have to the human world, the better off we all are,” he said. “Personally. Politically. In every way. So, no. It’s a different kind of strength; that’s all. I just have to make them believe it.”
“But the Old Ones won’t. Like Venna.”
“Not your problem,” he said in a gentle but subject-is-closed kind of way. “Life over on the Djinn side of things isn’t any more predictable than it is on the human side. We only seem stable because we don’t let the kids see the grown-ups fight.”
I laughed, then fell silent. I never wanted to move. Never wanted to arrive. I wanted this breathlessly perfect time to simply freeze.
But I heard the engines change pitch, and David’s hand stroked gently down my spine. “We’re descending,” he said.
“If you mean we’re going down, I could make some jokes.”
“Stop.” There was a bright edge of laughter in the word, though. I’d made a Djinn laugh. That was…an accomplishment. “Time to get serious.”
“This isn’t serious? Because I kind of thought-”
“Stop,” he said again, this time more soberly. “You need to know what’s going to happen when we land.”
I acknowledged that with a single nod, not raising my head.
“We’ll be met by another Djinn. Rahel. She’s already waiting. She’ll meet you there and guide you to Seacasket. She’s been watching, but she says there’s no sign of the Demon yet. We may have guessed wrong.”
I closed my eyes and reached for that strange vibration I’d felt when I’d been in Kevin’s mind. It was still there, and getting stronger. “No, I don’t think so. I think she’s there, or she’s close. David-what the hell is in Seacasket?”
And he told me about the Fire Oracle. Like Imara, in Sedona, it was a higher order of Djinn, a kind of living embodiment of one of the three major powers. The Djinn revered it, though few of them could actually communicate with it.
By the time he was finished, he’d silently urged me to sit up, and he’d handed me my clothes. They felt wrong, awkward against my skin. It occurred to me, as I fastened the last button on my shirt, that dressing must be a lot faster as a Djinn. I hadn’t even seen him put on his pants, but he was fully clothed.
“You expecting trouble with the Oracle?” I asked.
“No.”
“Well, you sent for Rahel as backup…”
“About that.” He took in a breath and let it out slowly. “I’m not going with you.”
That set up a cold, liquid sensation in my stomach. “You’re…what?”
“There’s something I have to do,” he said. “It’s important. I’ll join you when I can. Rahel won’t abandon you.”
“Venna did. And you’re about to.” That was blunt, but I was feeling a little bit peeved. You didn’t do the things we’d done together and just split up, did you? I wanted him with me.
Always.
“Jo.” He squeezed my hand. “Trust me.”
Couldn’t argue with that, although I wanted to.
