Rachel Caine: Chill Factor

"He's got a rifle," Lewis warned me. "Let Rahel do this."

Rahel, in fact, was already out of the silver Viper and moving fast as a blur toward the house. She didn't pause for the door. It blasted open ahead of her, and we sat tensely, in silence, waiting.

She appeared in the doorway a few minutes later and shook her head. I let out an aching breath.

"He's gone."

"Looks like." Lewis popped the passenger door. I found myself looking at the separated garage off to the side; the doors were rolled up, and Quinn had left behind a dirty green Cherokee and a black Explorer. The Explorer had boxes in the back window, neatly stacked, labeled glass, fragile.

They were full of sealed bottles. I turned them over in my hands, wondering, but Rahel wandered over and checked them out simply by reaching over to pick one up.

"Decoys," she said. "There are many like these inside. He hid the priceless among the cheap. He's been gone for a while."

I dumped the box over, furious. "How are we going to find him? Can you track him?"

Her eyes were dark and serious. "I can try. It's difficult. Jonathan is masking their movements."

"Try." I kicked the scattered bottles. "Let's move it."

Back on the road. Rahel and Marion led the way this time, and I concentrated on staying right on the gleaming silver bumper, drafting. We were back on the freeway, and then made an abrupt turn to a farm-to-market road that wasn't built for speed. We were forced to slow down.

"Jo," Lewis said. "You need to accept that he may get away, for now."

"Bullshit. He's not getting away. No way in hell."

I kept a paranoid watch, but there was no sign of Quinn trying to pick us off with a sniper rifle. Although I doubted even Quinn could have made a hero shot at this speed. There was nothing to do but think, or talk, and neither one of us seemed to want to do much talking. The sun crawled over the sky, and we were losing time.

Rahel directed us down another road, this one heading into the desert. It was a little better. We edged the speed higher, heading for what looked like even more deserted country.

Lewis said, "Let me have David's bottle. Maybe there's something I can do to help him."

The purse was still slung across my body, under the seat belt. I resisted the urge to clutch it close and settled for a quick, definite headshake. "He's sick, Lewis. You can't take him out of the bottle right now. If he isn't an Ifrit, he's close. Just… leave him alone."

"Do you trust me?"

"Don't start."

"Do you?" He reached over and unzipped the compartment.

"Swear to God, Lewis, if you touch that bottle I'll rip your fingers off."

"I'm trying to help," he said, and reached inside.

I grabbed his wrist. It was like grabbing a ground wire-enough power to make me jerk and swear and have to quickly put both hands back on the wheel so that we didn't veer sideways around the tractor-trailer rig to our left, spin out, and flip like some Hollywood stunt gone horribly right. As it was, Mona fought me. She was stubborn, like my lovely Delilah, scrapped back in Oklahoma and still bitterly mourned. At this speed, steering was razor-sharp and as temperamental as a bipolar opera singer. Her tires were shrieking against the urge to turn. I held her straight, blindly concentrating, and didn't let my breath out until I felt her unclench first.

And then I remembered what had set things off.

David's bottle was in Lewis's hands. Held casually, catching the light through the tinted window in a pretty home-decorating sparkle. It looked empty, but then, it always did. What David was had no weight in the aetheric state, and when encased in glass, failed to even register at all on any plane of existence we could reach.

"It took a human death and Jonathan's and David's power to bring Rahel back," he said. "It'll take Jonathan's power and more death to bring David back. Are you prepared to pay that price?"

"Sure," I said grimly. "Quinn might as well serve some useful purpose. And hey, Mr. Morality, you were willing to sanction Quinn's putting a bullet through Kevin's head, as I recall. Don't break anything climbing off that soapbox; it's awfully high."

Lewis kept turning the bottle in his hands. "Does he make you happy?"

I didn't answer. I didn't have to. Lewis knew well enough. "Put it back, Lewis. Don't make me hurt you."

"I have an idea-"

"I have an idea that you're going to put that back right n -"

I never finished that, because all of a sudden I was just simply… not there. I'd been yanked out of the car with tremendous, magical force, far up into the sky. Below me, a dot of a blue car veered wildly, corrected, and shuddered to a screeching halt. The silver one braked after a two-second delay.

Then I was spinning out of control, heading…

… down.

Thump .

I landed in a dusty sprawl, out of breath, sweating, gasping, and blind. I clawed hair back from my eyes and saw that I was in shadow, lying on a soft bed of sand. To either side of me, canyon walls crawled up hand over hand toward the sky. They were astonishing… harvest gold shading to brick red shading to dull brown, a muted but glorious rainbow of layers. Overhead, the sky was the perfect, supernaturally bright blue of a Djinn's eyes. Where the sunlight hit, it hit hard and woke glassy sparkles from the sand.

The place wasn't completely devoid of life; there was a raw scuttling in a thin, straggly cactus that probably meant either a lizard or a rabbit, or both. It wasn't even devoid of hints of human visitation. There was a cool silver moon slice of a beer can partially visible near the canyon wall.

But nobody in sight.

I licked dry lips and called, "Jonathan?" I couldn't think who else would have had the ability to yank me out of the driver's seat and deliver me here without also delivering me in pieces. I got up and slapped dust from my jeans-what use it was, I have no idea, since the rest of me was thoroughly caked. I ached. I stank. I was grimy and horribly itchy and pissed off as hell.

I was also scared to death.

"Quinn?" I tried. "Hello?"

His voice came down to me like God from the mountain, amplified into a divine echo. "Shouldn't have come after me, Joanne. I didn't come after you."

Like hell . "You tried to shoot me!"

"You wouldn't leave well enough alone," he said. His voice sounded hollow but self-satisfied; I couldn't see a thing, couldn't tell if he was up at the top leaning over or standing on some concealed ledge. "Sooner or later, you'd have figured it out. You're like a bulldog. I respect that. I was just removing a risk. And now you just won't leave me the fuck alone, will you? I'm just trying to leave, you know. Get on with my life."

"News flash, now the Ma'at know. And the Wardens will know. And whether you've got Jonathan or not, there's no place you can hide. They'll hunt you down and-"

"And kill me, yeah, I know. Very dramatic."

An explosion echoed through the canyon, louder than a scream; I felt stone chips dig hot into my shoulder, and dived for the dirt again. As if that would help. He was shooting down at me, and I had no place to hide. But then, if he'd been all about the shooting of me, he could have easily put one or two through my head.

"What do you want?" I yelled, and spat sand. "Hey, grab a knife, come down here, and stage a rematch, you bastard! I'll give you a really good time!"

"You know, I used to just want to get away with this, but you're pissing me off. Now I'm thinking, maybe I need a little recreation before I hit the road."

Another shot pinned me to the sand. He could drill me anytime he wanted; I knew it. And there wasn't a lot I could do to stop him.

"You remember what I asked you at the end? In the cave?" His voice sounded worse than hollow now. It sounded like a shell, and something lived in it that wasn't human. I stayed very still. "Joanne?"