Chill Factor Page 0,76

I thought, but I didn't have enough time to say it, because a face roared down from the circling clouds and headed straight for me, accompanied by a curtain of sideways-blown rain that felt like tiny silver nails on my cold skin.

It opened its mouth, and I saw the demon in it, staring out, hungry for warm, fresh screams. I had another flashback to the black, slick taste of a demon squirming down my throat, burning itself into my flesh. Never again.

The Djinn whirled in the wind, picking up a lethal dose of rocks, sand, thorn-spiked branches, tin cans.

It was going to strip the skin right off of us.

I hit it with the strength of panic, compressing air molecules and freezing the rain, blowing it backward and into a shredding minitornado that trapped the Djinn inside.

Chapter Twenty

"Finish!" I screamed. I didn't know if Marion could even hear me; I couldn't see her, in the confused darkness with my hair whipping wildly over my eyes.

Whether she could hear me or not, I definitely heard her.

"Be thou bound to my service!"

It rang out, loud and clear, and there was a sudden sense of indrawn breath and a pressure drop so sharp it made my ears pop, and in a last, blue-white flash of lightning, I saw blackness streaming into the mouth of the bottle in Marion 's hand.

She slammed the cork down and collapsed to her knees, breathing in convulsive gasps. There was blood trickling from the corner of her mouth, and as she slipped the bottle into her coat pocket, she hugged her right arm close to her ribs.

The wind blew on for another few seconds, then faltered and began to calm down. Overhead, the bruise-colored clouds, stained by sodium and neon, began to shift and break against each other.

"You okay?" I asked her. My legs were shaking, and I realized how cold I was. My heart galloped on, ignoring the message my brain was sending about the danger being over. Hearts are funny that way. Prove it, it was saying.

"Yes," she said. She sounded faint and exhausted.

She had reason, I supposed-she hadn't been blown a couple of miles up and tossed straight down, but she definitely had carried her weight. Not to mention saved my ass from pancaking on the desert floor. "Broken rib, I think. It'll mend. The boy did this, you know. Broke the bottle, freed the Demon Marked Djinn. He has to be stopped."

I extended a hand. She needed a lot of help getting up. With her hair blown into a wild tangle, she looked much less like the intimidating Marion I knew and feared.

"How did you get here?" I asked. The faint smile she gave me had a tinge of pain to it.

"Never mind that now." She probed her side, and winced. "You need to get moving. They'll be looking for you, and I'd rather not take on anyone else just now, if you don't mind. If you're going to stay here, we could use your help. The boy needs to be neutralized. Soon."

She didn't look up to it; that was certain. I held her dark eyes for a few seconds.

"I'm going there now. Listen, if I leave you here, will you be okay?"

The smile etched deeper and spawned little lines of amusement at the corners of her eyes. "Joanne, I've survived far worse than you. And I'm not so old as all that."

To prove it, she pulled free of my grip and straightened up. It almost looked credible. Overhead, the clouds scudded fast, moving south, as the wind pushed and searched for its path.

"Chill Factor"

Moonlight wandered through a slit in the clouds, and bathed us in a circle of silver.

"Get moving. I'll see you later," Marion said, and turned and walked away into the desert.

I limped barefooted through sand, wincing at the rocks and stabbing thorns, and came up against an eight-foot razor-wire-topped cyclone fence.

"Great." I sighed.

I was really starting to miss being a Djinn.

There didn't seem to be any reason to go limping back to the Luxor, particularly since it was at least a half a mile hike farther than the Bellagio, and I'd just have to turn right around and go do the bidding of the Ma'at, not to mention the Wardens. Since no cabbie in his right mind would be stopping to pick up a shoeless, windblown, ragged waif in the predawn darkness, I hit the sidewalk. It was marginally easier than scaling the fence had been, which had involved layers