Chill Factor Page 0,45

stops that your brain gets the signal and you feel the pain.

The second the current cut out I pitched forward, gasping in great whoops of air, shuddering, feeling as if I'd dived into a lake of fire. Someone's hands kept me from sliding out of the chair. Not Quinn's. He was still across the room, doing an imitation of a statue. I felt a bright sting of panic inside at the thought that they might do that to me again, but I kept myself from babbling. Somehow. I just panted and shuddered and tried to keep my muscles from twitching.

Myron blew out smoke, took another leisurely drag on his cigarette, and said, "I really don't think you should concern yourself with Kevin Prentiss just now, my dear. Please attend to the matter at hand. Charles really has very little patience."

"Tell me how you killed my son." Ashworth's voice had dropped lower, gone gravelly.

I looked at him from underneath tear-matted lashes. "Trust me when I say you don't want to know."

They were going to do it again. No problem. All I had to do was control the situation... disrupt the particle chains as they formed, kill the electric charge and dissipate it, preferably through the carpeting so that it would shock the crap out of all these self-righteous little-

I thought I was prepared for it, but I wasn't. The hands on my shoulders released, and before I could get hold of the whip-fast chain of linking charges the banquet chair became ol' Sparky again, and I was riding the lightning. I wish I could say that my mind whited out but it wasn't like that. When it was over, I felt every frying nerve and misfiring cell. I couldn't hold back the tears and the sharp-edged whimpers, any more than I could stop the involuntary convulsions that continued in my back, legs, and arms. I smelled something burning. It was probably me. They held me upright in the chair.

And in my ringing ears, Charles Ashworth's calm order came like the voice of doom. "Tell me how you killed my son."

"I'm not a fucking Djinn; the Rule of Three won't work. And I'm not telling you a thing, you son of a bitch," I managed to gasp.

Quinn spoke from across the room. "Joanne, just tell the man. He really will kill you."

"It would be a shame," Lazlo said. He'd stubbed out his cigarette sometime during the last eternity, and was staring down at his clasped hands.

The others around the table looked to be in various stages of discomfort, but nobody was banging a fist and demanding for my torture to be stopped. Even the bartender was still as a ghost in the corner. The duties of the silent employees might even cover body disposal.

I tried to bring myself under control, and reached for wind...

... and slammed hard into a barrier that was as complete as anything I'd ever encountered. Somebody had this place locked down. Tight. It had the smell of Djinn to it.

"Please," Lazlo said. "There is no need for this unpleasantness. All you have to do is tell us what happened. Surely there's nothing you object to in that. I'm certain you already told the story to the Wardens. Why not to us?"

Because I didn't want to remember it.

There was a warning zap through the chair, just enough to sting and make the tears in my eyes break free. I gasped in shallow breaths. Hell, they probably already knew the story, I told myself. They knew everything else. Clearly, fighting wasn't getting me anywhere except a fast trip to a largely hypothetical afterlife. I wasn't ready to die again. Not yet.

I sucked in a deep breath, managed to straighten myself up, and tried my voice. It sounded weak, but steady.

"I'll tell you," I said. "But don't blame me if you don't like it."

I hated Chaz from the first moment I laid eyes on him, and I couldn't really say why. Ever have that happen? Makes you feel ridiculous and prejudicial, but it's nothing you can help. It's some cellular process of repulsion that you have no control over.

That was me and Chaz. Repulsion at first sight. The act of being pleasant to him for more than a minute at a time made me ache like I'd been mining granite with a teaspoon. After an entire day of poking through the chaotic mess of Chaz's confiscated records, enduring enough paper cuts that it constituted human rights violations, I called back to