Rachel Caine: Heat Stroke

Lewis was standing, utterly still, with his hand wrapped around a blue glass bottle. It was still stoppered. David… Across from him, Kevin was on his knees, being held there by a hand around his throat. He looked unconscious. At the very least, he was too scared to fight.

The hand that held him was big, square, and covered with blood.

I moved forward, trying to get in, and came right up against a barrier, like a thick pane of glass. A Djinn barrier. I’d have to be in a bottle to pass through it, and once inside… shit . My bottle must be on the other side, with Kevin. Probably stuffed in his pants pockets, along with his condoms.

“Please,” Lewis said, and worked the glass bottle nervously against his pants leg. He looked awful. Bruises covered half his face like an elaborate tribal tattoo—courtesy of Kevin’s kicks in the head—and where he wasn’t bruised he was pale, with a sick oatmeal tinge. “You have a choice. Don’t choose to do this. There’s no going back.”

“There never is.” The hand holding Kevin was a man’s, right down to the hair on the wrist and the big, blunt fingers, but the voice was a woman’s, and it issued from somewhere on the other side, where I couldn’t see. I didn’t need to. I knew who she was, that voice was never going to leave my nightmares. Yvette . Of course… if Lewis had been there, they would have confiscated David’s bottle and taken Yvette in for interrogation, too. Which meant that somewhere in the confusion upstairs, she’d escaped and come down here to rifle the vault for her favorite slave.

Over my not-quite-dead body, bitch . I tried the barrier again, searching for a weakness, but it was slick and perfect. I didn’t think any of them had noticed me. I was staying just out of sight, misting where I had to in order to stay unnoticed. Mist, solid, didn’t matter. I wasn’t getting through to the other side. I’d have to wait for them to come out.

She said, in a voice as sweet and hard as petrified honey, “Give me the bottle, Lewis. I might just let you live.”

He kept rubbing the bottle against the side of his leg, and I figured out what he was doing. It had a rubber stopper. He was slowly working it out, giving David a chance to escape. “Tempting.” His voice cracked, and he swallowed hard and wet his lips. “Look, not that I don’t think that as psychos go you’re a really lovely woman, but the last thing I want to do is give you a Djinn. So I think you’d better think about—”

“Kill him,” Yvette said.

The hand holding Kevin clenched, and I heard bone pop with a crunch like glass in plastic. Lewis yelled, stretched out his hand, and white fire flared from him to bathe Kevin as he was allowed to fall limp to the ground. Oh God . His neck, that sound had been the kid’s neck breaking.

I didn’t feel any release. Kevin wasn’t dead. Lewis was keeping him alive, at least for the moment, but Lewis only looked a shade or two better than a corpse himself.

The Djinn who’d just killed Kevin—even if it was happening in slow motion—moved to the side, and I saw his face.

It was Jonathan. He looked blank, hard, as impenetrable as frosted glass. Nothing there of the humor or assurance I’d come to expect… he was wiped clean. Made something else.

He’d been claimed.

Yvette came into view. She didn’t look so fresh, either—bruised along the side of her face, hair disarranged. Her eyes had a werewolf shine, and she no longer was hiding behind that fragile pretty shell. She looked bone hard, tough, and ready to kill. Not that she’d had to get her French-manicured hands dirty. She’d used (oh God) Jonathan for that.

She was holding a small glass bottle in her hands, something all-purpose, cheap but sturdy. Jonathan’s prison. I remembered David telling me that he’d never been claimed. What was it like, to be so powerful, so old, and have to submit to this? I could barely stand it, and I was just days old. For him, it must be like…

… rape , David had said. And it was. Just like that.

“Give it up,” she said to Lewis. “Believe me, he’s not worth it. He’s a cheap, mean, arrogant little son of a bitch, and he’ll never amount to anything. In fact, you’ll probably be better off with him dead. Count on it.”

He didn’t listen, or if he listened, he didn’t stop pouring energy into the boy.

I might have been the only one who noticed the rubber cap of the blue bottle in his hand fall out and bounce away into the shadows… but no, I saw something in Jonathan’s eyes, a shift, a kind of blind focus. He knew.

David was out.

Lewis was panting now, slicked with sweat; he was pouring his life out to keep Kevin alive. And he couldn’t possibly keep it up.

Yvette was moving toward him with that same hunting-tiger grace she’d used against David, and I wanted more than anything in my life to rip my way through this wall, drill diamond-hard claws into her heart and rip it out.

Lewis shifted his gaze and looked right at me. Fierce, utterly committed eyes. My throat went dry.

“Go fix the rift,” he said. It looked like he was talking to me, but I knew he wasn’t. It was a direct order, and it was given to a Djinn who’d just come out of a bottle and was still mist… a Djinn whose bottle he held in his hand.

I felt David began to rise up through the aetheric. Leaving without me.

Yvette laid a hand on Lewis, and it was like watching a roach crawl across the face of the Mona Lisa.

He formed the word with his lips, silently, where she couldn’t see. Still holding my eyes prisoner. Go .

He’d die if I left him. Hell, he’d probably die if I didn’t leave him, but at least he wouldn’t die alone, unwitnessed…

I felt the cord between myself and David stretch and grow thin under the strain.

Yvette’s hand slid insinuatingly along Lewis’s sweat-damp neck as he poured his concentration into keeping her last victim breathing.

Go.

Lewis didn’t have my bottle. He couldn’t command me. With Kevin all but dead, nobody else could, either.

I whispered, at a pitch I knew only he could hear, I love you .

And I shot up like a burning arrow into the aetheric, mourning.

I found David one level above the aetheric. No words. We melted, merged, our auras shifting and blending. I remembered what he’d told me once about making love as a gas, and felt a smile bloom sad and warm inside. Even in the disembodied state, he was as familiar to me as my human heartbeat had once been, and just as necessary.

Jo… A whisper through the empty spaces, a caress without skin or body or words. The purest form of love I had ever felt. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t let you die, but I didn’t want to die, either. And that’s the only way to make a Djinn. Through sacrifice. I tried to cheat. This is what comes out of it .

He could feel the mourning in me, and the guilt, and the horrible weight of responsibility. His touch made it easier. Nothing could make it easy.

He was already moving again, rising, driven by the compulsion Lewis had placed on him to close the rift. So long as he was moving up, I knew Lewis was still alive. There was that, at least.

I went with him. The coldlight was almost solid now, energy made matter. The image came to me that it was antibodies, that we were the invaders here, and this excess of them meant the universe was sick, maybe dying.

Up. I don’t know if there were other Djinn there, because all I could see was coldlight, a continuous blizzard of sparks surrounding us like a hot blue shell. I kept bleeding them off of David. They rolled harmlessly off of me.

Up.

We slowed and stopped, and although I couldn’t see anything I knew we’d arrived. David’s compulsion would have delivered us to the right place. When I stretched out my senses I could feel the rift, turning slowly like a slow-motion whirlpool as it sucked the coldlight from the demon reality into ours.