Rachel Caine: Heat Stroke

Across the room, Yvette Prentiss laughed. She had a sweet little-girl laugh that no doubt charmed the pants off of rich old guys arrogant enough to believe she loved them for their personalities. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought there was a deep, midnight black thread of darkness in it.

I felt the laugh rip into David like a claw, and did the only thing I could.

I said, “Let’s blow this place and go home.”

Two days passed. Nice days. There’s nothing bad about lazing around a fancy hotel room with the sexiest guy in the world and unlimited pay-per-view movies.

Not that it was all fun and games. I was learning things, like the physics of being a Djinn. They were entirely different than the physics I’d learned as a human being, and believe me, I’d been a specialist. Handling the weather with any degree of skill requires an absolute knowledge of little rules like conservation of energy, and it was full of detail work. I can’t even count how many times disarming hurricane-force winds boiled down to something as simple as turning down the subatomic thermostat, changing the world one whirling atom at a time.

But operating as a Djinn was the difference between a two-dimensional game of tic-tac-toe, and a three-dimensional Rubik’s Cube of consequences. There were still scales, and they still had to balance— if I wanted to control the weather, I could still reach up into the aetheric and create a little warm air cushion moving counter to the cold-air mass streaming in from the sea, and voila, rain. In human terms, that would have cost me personal energy.

As a Djinn, I had to balance the physical world, the aetheric, and about ten other planes of existence to create that rain, all without pulling anything out of my own essence. Because, as a Djinn, I didn’t have any essence, really. I drew power from the earth, the sun, the life around me. It was surprisingly difficult to do.

And, I discovered, I was pulling power from David. Lots of it. A big silvery conduit of it, flowing from him into me up on the aetheric plane, like a sleek, barely visible umbilical cord.

“It’s nothing,” he said, when I brought it up. “Training wheels. Once you start feeding yourself from other sources, it’ll stop.”

It was a lot of power. I wondered how hard he was having to work to keep himself strong. The image of a transfusion kept occurring to me—blood flowing out faster than the body could replenish it. Juice and cookies probably wouldn’t be enough, not when he kept bleeding like that.

All this learning was tiring. And Djinn, I found, really did need sleep—not as much of it as humans, or in the same physical ways, but the pull still existed, and on the seventh evening I fell asleep in David’s arms to the comforting flicker of Jay Leno telling political jokes. It was the first time I’d slept since I’d died.

I woke up with a shock, jerking myself out of a dream. Nightmare. A burning house, pain, screaming, my soul being shredded and consumed…

“Shhhhh.” David turned on his side and raised up on an elbow to look down on me. It was dark in the room, although I could see gray fingers of light curling around the edges of the blackout curtains. Dawn, it looked like. How long had I been asleep? “You’re dreaming.”

I blinked and focused on him, wondering how he knew. I had a heartbeat—or at least, I did because I believed that I did—and maybe that was it, maybe he could feel the fast, panicked tap of my pulse in my skin. Or maybe he knew because he just knew . I had no idea really how powerful David was; I was barely starting to realize how powerful I was, come to think of it. Or, to be more accurate, how helpless, at my level of development.

“Dreaming,” I repeated, and had a surprising thought. “Djinn dream?”

“Sure.” His eyebrows arched, thick and expressive. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“Oh, I don’t know… You don’t really have brains?”

“We,” he corrected. Yeah, I kept forgetting that Djinn included me, now. “Dreaming isn’t a function of an organ—or of the body. It’s a function of the soul. Like…” He moved the sheet and put his palm flat over my heart, but he never looked away from my eyes. “Like this,” he finished. “Understand?”

“No.”

“Let go.” I wasn’t holding anything. I opened my hands anyway. He shook his head. “No, let go of your body.”

“Um… okay…” I’d just spent the last seven days learning how to stay in my body. “Hang on a second…”

He dissolved into mist before I got the last word out of my mouth.

I could still feel his hand warm on my skin.

I slowly relaxed my grip on the world and let it blur around me, let myself slide up into the aetheric, where the world took on different spectra and realities and possibilities. I was real here, too, but different.

David was still with me, still holding his hand on my chest, but neither of us were flesh.

Understand ? he asked again. Not a physical voice, not a mental one—kind of a vibration that translated itself into words somewhere in my head. It was dim and distant, but I could still understand it. Oddly, it felt like it was vibrating through that silver power connection between us.

How can I feel that without having —

A body ? I couldn’t see him, but I could still sense him, and what I sensed translated to me as a smile. You always have a body. Come on, Jo, you know physics. Matter into energy. Matter exists in three states…

Solid, liquid, gas.

At least in the physical world. And does the form of the matter make matter less real?

That doesn’t explain how I can feel you touching me.

You think touch is a sense that’s hardwired into nerve endings ? He did highly inappropriate things to areas of my body that didn’t exist in any corporeal way. I still felt heat inside, felt parts of myself that no longer strictly existed start to ache and need. You think any of this has anything to do with bodies ?

Well, I don’t think I’m ready for making love with you as a gas.

Too bad . His voice—or my interpretation of it— vibrated inside me, intimately. What about liquid? Want to get wet ?

You’re a very bad influence, did you know that?

I felt his smile like lips against my skin. It’s been said .

Would you stop that?

Stop what? If you don’t have nerve endings…

All right, I get the… the point… How can you gasp for breath when you aren’t breathing? Can we go back now ?

I was starting to adjust my senses to the aetheric; it wasn’t that I could see him exactly, but I still sensed him. It was a little like night vision—an outline that glimmered in a there-not-there kind of fog, in silvery shifting layers. Beautiful. Ghostly. I’d spent a lot of time on the aetheric level as a human, and I’d never seen anything like him up here. But then maybe my eyes—even my eyes in Oversight— hadn’t been equipped to view the spectra on which the Djinn radiated.

Speaking of which, the plane stretched on, unbroken to the limits of perception, and it was… beautiful. Even more beautiful than before. Where, as a living breathing girl, I’d seen things in Kirlian outlines of reds and greens and blues and golds, in Djinn-sight the aetheric was deeper, richer, and more complex. Layers of colors, swirling together like oil on water. Outlines were both more and less distinct—still familiar, but more difficult to recognize because of their depth. I wasn’t seeing the skin of things anymore. I was seeing the skin, the muscles, the bones, the organs. The very heart of life.