Cape Storm Page 0,10

Which meant none of mine. "So what's the plan? You guys coming with?"

"Some are," David said. "This is obviously our fight as well as yours. He has Rahel prisoner.

Even Ashan agrees that we can't let this go without an answer." Just as David was in charge of the New Djinn, the ones who traced their origins to human ancestry, Ashan was the Mack Daddy of the Old Djinn... who liked to refer to themselves as the True Djinn. You see where this is going, because if half the Djinn are "true," then the other half must be, well, "false." It's the equivalent of racial prejudice, among supernatural beings.

Most Djinn I've ever met are about seventy percent arrogance, twenty-eight percent altruism, and two percent compassion. David blew the curve; he was the least arrogant Djinn I'd ever met, and he maxed out on compassion. That made him incredibly hot to me, but it also made him vulnerable. Ashan buried the needle on the other end; he didn't know the meaning of altruism, and he couldn't care less about compassion. All arrogance, all the time.

He and David got along about as well as you'd expect, when they were actually talking at all.

"And is the great Ashan going to grace us with his presence?" I asked. I wasn't exactly looking forward to it.

"He'll be around," David answered, which was a typically Djinn sort of evasion. Around could mean anything, and nothing. "He's sending a delegation of four of his own, though."

" Four?He did get the memo, right? World ending, danger, et cetera?"

"Four of his most powerful," David clarified. "One of them is Venna." Oh. Well, that was all right, then; Venna, I trusted. For an Old Djinn, she was a-okay; she even displayed an interest in regular folks, in the way a kid develops a fascination with an ant farm. She didn't consider us equals, but she thought we were kind of cool in a science-lab sort of way.

She liked to walk around in the guise of a child, but in no way could you classify Venna as vulnerable. Terrifying, yes. Frail, no.

David looked over my shoulder, and I followed his gaze. There at the other end of the hallway stood Venna, with three other, much taller Djinn. The expressions on the faces of the other three Djinn, whom I didn't know, were identical: pricelessly annoyed. Not here by choice, I gathered. Their smelling-something-bad scowls could have shattered titanium.

Venna, however, waved cheerfully. She was dressed in child-sized pants and a cute little pink top with a sparkly rainbow. She'd largely given up her predilection for dressing as Alice from Alice in Wonderland, but she'd kept the long blond hair and innocent blue eyes.

I waved back. Venna said something to her fellow Old Djinn, and the four of them promptly vanished, misted away on the air like a mirage. Heading for their own quarters, I assumed, if they cared about such things.

"I've brought ten of the New Djinn," David said.

"In case something happens, I've also left someone at Jonathan's house who can take over as Conduit, at least temporarily."

David, in other words, had made arrangements in the event of his own death. Jonathan's house - Jonathan had been his friend, and the leader of the Djinn for thousands of years -

existed in a kind of pocket universe, apart from both the human world and the other planes of reality where the Djinn could travel. It was the equivalent of a defensive bunker.

If David thought this was dire enough to name a successor and stash him away in the ultimate Undisclosed Location, then things were really not at all good.

"David - " I didn't know what I wanted to say, except that I wanted it to all be okay. For once.

His fingers squeezed mine, very lightly. "I know," he said. "But we're in this together. For life. Whatever may happen."

He meant it.

My husband.

I blinked back a sudden irrational flood of tears and hugged him, hard, until the impulse to weep passed. "Okay," I said, and cleared my throat to bring my voice back to its normal steady range. "Want to help us out with something really, really trivial?"

"Always."

"In the first-class lounge, you'll find a couple of stewards, a couple of security guards, and a bunch of very rich jerks who don't want to take orders and are probably giving the staff a very hard time. It might speed things along if they had something more to be afraid of than their platinum card getting