Rachel Caine - Thin Air

Didn’t seem prudent to mention her.

“Complete destruction,” Eamon said, and seemed utterly satisfied. “You are a one-woman wrecking crew, love.”

“Thanks,” I said with an ice edge of chill. “We done now?”

“Done?” His eyes were preoccupied, and it took him a second to pull his attention away from the human aftermath on the beach to focus on me completely. “Ah, yes. I did say that I wanted only this one thing from you, didn’t I?”

Bad feeling bad feeling bad feeling. “That’s what you said.”

“I don’t think that will be possible after all,” Eamon said, and smiled just a bit. Just enough to keep me from killing him. “This is the start of a beautiful and very profitable relationship, Jo. After I marry your sister-”

“After you what ?” I blurted. “Time-out! Nobody’s getting married. Especially not to you .”

Sarah didn’t even look up to meet my fierce stare. Haggard and strung out, but my sister, dammit. My family. “You can’t tell me what to do,” she said.

“Sarah, wake up! He’s a criminal! And he’s a murderer !”

“Yeah, well, what about you?” she flung back. “You think you’re not guilty of things? You think you aren’t just as bad? Don’t you dare lecture me!”

“Keep your voice down!”

“Or what? You’ll call the cops? Go right ahead, Jo; they’re right over there!”

Sure enough, two uniformed cops standing next to their cruiser were looking in our direction. I swallowed and tried to moderate my own voice to something in the range of reasonable. “Sarah, you do not want to jump into this. Really. You don’t know this man. You don’t know what he’s capable of doing.”

Eamon took her hand. His long, lovely fingers curled around hers, and then he kissed her fingers, staring at me with bright, challenging eyes the whole time. “She’s not jumping into anything,” he murmured. “And really, Joanne, you’re making far too big an issue out of this. I only want to make her happy.”

“You want to use her,” I said. “You want to threaten her to get me to do whatever you want. Trust you to find a way to make money off of disaster.”

He made a tsk ing sound. “Construction companies, insurance companies, cleanup crews, police, fire, ambulance, paramedics, hospitals, doctors, funeral parlors, coffin makers…all those people make money off of disaster. And thousands more. I’m merely a novice.”

“You want to cause them!”

“Don’t be so negative,” he said. “Freak accidents happen. No reason not to arrange them to our benefit once in a while.”

Venna hadn’t moved. She continued sitting on the wall, neat and prim, kicking her black patent-leather shoes like a kid, watching the emergency crews with every evidence of total fascination. I shot her an exasperated look. “Help me out here.”

“It’s human stuff. I can’t,” she said serenely. “Besides, they can’t see or hear me. I’m a figment of your imagination, Joanne.”

Hardly. My imagination would have conjured up a hunky, half-naked guy Djinn, preferably one who looked like David. I glared at her.

“Do you want me to kill him?” Venna asked, and met my eyes. It was a shock, seeing the complete flat disinterest in them. “I can, you know. I can kill anyone I want. Any human, anyway. Then you don’t have to worry about him anymore. I could make it fast. He wouldn’t even feel it.”

I stared at her for a long, silent second, and then shook my head. No, I wasn’t prepared to do that. Not even to Eamon.

Venna sighed again, jumped down off the wall, and looked up into my face. “It’s been long enough,” she said. “We should think about going now. Do you want their memories before we go?”

“Do I…what?” I was aware it looked to Eamon and Sarah like I was talking to empty child-sized space, because they were exchanging a look. The she’s-lost-her-mind kind of look.

“Like what you did before, although you didn’t do it very well,” Venna said. “I can take their memories and give them to you. If you want. But you may not like it. Decide now, because we can’t stay here much longer.”

Memories. Sarah was the key to a lot of my childhood, wasn’t she? Who else would I get that kind of thing from?

I nodded.

“Oh, you don’t want hers,” Venna said. “Hers won’t be very good for you. You want his .”

Venna didn’t even bother touching me. She just turned those incandescent blue eyes on Eamon, and I was sucked into a different world.

Eamon was thinking about murder, in an abstract kind of way. He had no real objection to killing, but he did dislike complications, and he was, at that moment, royally pissed about just how complicated a perfectly simple scheme had become.

“All you had to do was pay her off,” he said, staring at his business associate. Thomas Orenthal Quinn-Orry to his less than savory friends-shrugged. They were sitting at a café near the Las Vegas Strip, surrounded by noise and color, an island of calm in a sea of frantic activity. Eamon was sipping tea. Whatever Orry was drinking, it wasn’t quite that English.

“Look at it this way,” Orry said, and stirred the thick, dark drink in front of him. “She was badass enough to kill poor old Chaz. You should’ve seen what was left of him; Christ, it was disgusting. I couldn’t take the chance she might come back for more. Dead is simple, right?”

“Generally,” Eamon agreed. “Dead Wardens, not so simple. They’ll investigate. I don’t want them finding any link to you, forensically or otherwise.” He glanced around-habit-although he was certain nobody was within earshot. Amazing what people would ignore. “You’re sure she’s out of the picture?”

“I’m sure.” Orry gave him a tight, unpleasant smile. He was a nondescript man, and few who met him seemed to understand what lay underneath that unremarkable exterior. Eamon knew, and respected it. He might have been insane, but he was definitely not insane enough to cross Thomas Quinn without cause. “Unless she can breathe underwater, she’s not bothering us again.”

“You need to be sure.”

Orry shrugged. “Let’s go. I’ll show you.”

I felt that slippery fast-forward sensation, and fought to hold on to the memory. Eamon’s filthy, cold mind made me shiver, but at the same time it was real, it was life , and I wanted more.

Even though I felt a sick sensation of dread at what he was heading toward on this particular trip down memory lane.

I watched as Eamon and Orry drove into the desert, taking unfamiliar roads deeper into the wilderness. When Orry finally pulled the car off the road, Eamon was bored, thirsty, and regretting the idea, but he followed Orry up the hill and into the darkness of a cave.

It stank, but it wasn’t the stink of decomposition. Orry switched on a flashlight and led him through a series of narrow passages. Boxes stacked against the wall- Product , Eamon thought, and made a mental note to move it when this was done. It was a filthy place to store anything. He heard a cold chatter of bats overhead, and thought again about murder. Orry, dead, would solve so many of his issues.

“Fuck,” Orry said tonelessly. His flashlight played over a milky pool of water, its surface placid and undisturbed. “She was right here. Right here.”

Eamon hated being right. “And you were certain she was dead.”

“Yeah. Christ, I strangled her before I drowned her. What is she, a goddamn superhero?”

If she was, Eamon thought, they were in for a great deal of trouble. “Anything else?”

“Such as?” Orry was poker-faced, but Eamon knew his weaknesses too well.