Rachel Caine: Firestorm

Jonathan muttered what might have been a curse, if I'd understood Djinn, and he spun me around to face him. The whole house around us was moving, breathing. Seduced by the power of the song outside. Longing to join with it, lose itself in that joyous, terrifying chorus.

Pieces of it were whirling away. Jonathan stayed focused on my face. "You've got to leave," he said.

"Am I going to see you again?" I asked, weirdly calm now, drugged by the sound . He smiled slightly and touched his fingertips to the tip of my chin.

"Didn't see me this time," he said, and without any warning at all, gave me a right cross that snapped my head back with overwhelming force. Pain blocked out even the screaming of that song. . . .

I sailed backward into the dark, falling, lost in shrieking winds and wind that grabbed and tore at me…

The song turned into a shrill ringing in my ears.

I jerked awake on the bed in the infirmary, felt my heart racing uncontrollably, and fumbled for the clock on the table next to me. Its reassuring green glow told me that I'd been asleep for exactly six hours.

I sank back with a sigh, cradling the clock and hitting the buttons, and then realized that it wasn't the alarm going off. It was my cell phone shrilling for attention. Damn. I needed to go with a much more amusing ringtone.

I fumbled it out of my purse and flipped it open. "Yeah?" I sounded as drugged and disoriented as I felt.

"You stupid slag ." I knew that rich tenor voice, sharpened now with anger. "You called the police on me."

I flopped back into the comfort of the pillow and threw an arm over my eyes. "Yes, Eamon, I called the police on you. You threatened my life, tried to kill me, and abducted my sister—"

"I saved your bloody life!" He sounded livid. I could almost see the veins pulsing in his neck. "I could've left you out in that hurricane to die, you know. I put myself out for you!"

"Yeah, you're a prince—Please tell me you're not, by the way. I mean, my opinion of British royalty isn't that high, but—"

"Shut it," he snarled. "Alerting the local constabulary isn't going to get your sister back."

"Can make your life damn inconvenient, though, I'll bet."

Silence. I could hear him breathing. I could picture him standing there, phone gripped in those long pianist's fingers. The inner Eamon didn't match the sensitive hands, though he could pretend with the best of them.

Deep down, he wasn't elegant, and he wasn't cultured. He was a total bastard, and the fact that my sister had been enthralled with him—and might still be, for all I knew—made me feel more than a little nauseated.

"Look," I said. "I know that you expect me to be your costar in this little drama you're playing, but I'm busy. Get to the point, Eamon. You going to kill me? Come on and get in line. I haven't got time to screw around with you."

Silence, for a long few beats, and then, "Is there a problem?" he asked. Which wasn't what I'd expected.

"Why do you care?"

"Because—" He paused for several long beats. "Because what I want from you is a Djinn. If there's anything happening that affects that goal, I need to know."

"You have no idea how much I wish I'd given you one back home, and gotten you the hell out of our lives," I said. I remembered the bloodstains in the conference room. Not that I wished dismemberment on anyone, but with Eamon my moral high ground was somewhere about the elevation of a sand dune, and eroding fast. "The situation has changed. I can't get my hands on a Djinn anymore. No one can."

"Won't, you mean."

"I don't have time to explain it to you, but even if I gave you a Djinn bottle, it wouldn't do you any good. The—the master agreement's been broken. They don't obey us anymore. And they damn sure wouldn't obey you."

"I see," he said slowly. "That's… very unfortunate. For your sister, at any rate."

"Where's Sarah? If you've hurt her—"

"Don't be ridiculous. Why would I hurt lovely Sarah?" That sly hint of amusement was back in his voice. "Much more rewarding to play along with her fantasies. You'd be amazed what kind of thing that woman gets up to in the privacy of her—"

"Shut up !" I shouted it, heard my heart thudding in my ears, and forced myself to relax. He liked sticking in the knife. It was part of his game. No matter what he said, I'd seen the way he'd touched her, and his hands didn't lie about that, at least. He was gentle with her. Gentler than he had any reason to be. It was even possible he really liked her, as much as he liked anyone. "Look, just let her go. There's no reason to keep her. I already told you, I can't give you a Djinn. Please. Just—let her go."

"Are you completely sure you can't give me what I want? Because if you are , there's no reason for me not to put a bullet in the head of your beautiful sister, pose her in a compromising position for the delight of the tabloid media, and be on my merry way." He listened to my furious silence. I could feel a grin coming off the phone, like radiant heat. "I was thinking something from the oeuvre of the Hillside Strangler. Nothing like the classics."

"You fucking son of a—"

" I want a Djinn . I don't care about your technical issues. You're thoroughly resourceful when you need to be—I've seen that firsthand. No, your lovely sister stays with me until you come through for me. In the meantime, she suffers whatever I see fit to make her suffer, which I promise you will get progressively worse the longer you take to satisfy me. And if I feel you haven't done your level best to get me what I want, well… you'll follow the breathless coverage about her bad, sad end on the news."

My free hand was in a fist, clenched tight. I didn't remember doing it, and deliberately relaxed until the white knuckles loosened up. "You won't get anything by threatening her. There are other things happening, in case you're not aware. Bad things. I can't just—"

"Yeah," he interrupted. "Dead Wardens littering the landscape, very sad, I'm devastated, et cetera. But in short, bugger your problems, darling, because my problems are the priority. I'll give you exactly two days to settle your little difficulties and make arrangements to get me what I want, and no tricks, or I swear to you, your sister will not leave a pretty corpse, are we understood?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes, we're understood."

"Then it's been a slice, love, and you watch yourself. Wouldn't want anything to happen to you before I get what I want. Now, if you'll excuse me, I hear the water shutting off in the bath. I have to go do your sister."

He hung up before I could fire off anything I'd regret later. The number was blocked, of course. I sank down on the bed again, exhausted and aching and angry as hell, with nowhere to put all that nervous dread. Not like my sister's life could count for any more than the hundreds of thousands of people who were in danger, or the millions—billions—in the balance if we didn't figure out how to make things right again.

Bones and dust, corpses turning to petroleum. Sunflowers nodding placidly over a graveyard. Had I just been dreaming? Or was Jonathan—the spirit of Jonathan, anyway—trying to tell me something important?

Two days. Not enough time. Not enough time for anything.

I felt tears coming, and choked them back furiously. I was not going to let that bastard make me cry, and I was not going to think about him standing in that steam-fogged bathroom, wiping beads of water from my sister's naked back while she smiled innocently at him in the mirror.

No, I wasn't going to think about that at all.

Okay, maybe I was.

I curled up on the bed, hurled the alarm clock across the room in a satisfying crunch of plastic, and put my pillow over my head to sob out my fury and pain. That was supposed to be cathartic, but mostly it seemed to result in aching muscles, sinuses packed with fluid, and raw, abused eyeballs.