Chill Factor Page 0,80

do. They survive. It's the one thing about them I admire."

"I want to stop hurting." I was cold, wet, exhausted, wrung out. My daughter-the daughter I couldn't have without losing someone else I loved-my daughter had looked superhuman. I wasn't. "I want to be out of this, Jonathan. Let's end this."

He nodded, not unkindly. "Then get out. Walk away."

Kevin stepped up again, chin jutting out. "Hey! I said I want her dead, okay? She's trying to screw us! Just do it right-"

Jonathan, in a lightning-fast move, reached out and thumped him on the forehead. Just once.

Bop.

Kevin's eyes rolled back in his head, and he dropped. Siobhan yelled and went down on her knees next to him, fingertips pressed to his neck, but she needn't have bothered; Jonathan couldn't kill his own master. No matter how much he wanted to.

Kevin was sleeping like a baby.

"We'll take that up later," Jonathan said, and fixed Siobhan with a warning look. "Don't say a word."

She swallowed a mouthful of curses and ducked away.

I should do something, I thought. But honestly, what did it all matter, anyway? The kid was going to either get me killed or kill me himself. If he formulated the order right, Jonathan wouldn't have any choice but to carry it out.

I didn't have to care about any of this. Jonathan had already told me I could walk away. The Ma'at weren't my buddies. The Wardens... well, the Wardens hadn't exactly stepped up to shouldering the burdens. They'd sold me down the river when I most needed their support. And maybe Quinn was right... maybe the Wardens were corrupt and venal. I'd certainly seen enough of that to make it credible. I'd never taken money to change the weather, but I knew it went on. Rain on some farmland here for an extra sweetener... starve some folks over there to get them to cough up. As chaotic in nature as it all was, who'd know?

"Chill Factor"

Worse... who'd care? Yvette Prentiss had violated every code the Wardens possessed. She'd ignored her duties, abused her stepson, used her Djinn for purposes even the Marquis de Sade might have found repulsive. Had anyone stopped her? No. Not until I made it impossible to ignore.

The Ma'at had some clear ethics-not to be confused with morals-but it was a chilly kind of arrogance, an icy view of the world. Human suffering didn't even factor into the equations. They concerned themselves with numbers, not faces. I could see why that appealed to Lewis; as caring and vulnerable as he was, numbers must have been an escape from the constant agony of feeling the weight of the world.

But I couldn't be that. I couldn't reduce people to numbers and trend lines. Ma'at's principles said that the forest had to burn, but I'd fight the fire every step, protect every tree, until the smoke choked me or I went up with the rest. That was my nature. You know what you look like in Oversight? Goddamn Saint Joan the martyr. You burn real bright, Joanne, but you're burning yourself right up. Chaz Ashworth had said that, before I'd started the fight that had killed him and left me in a cave, trapped and wishing I was dead.

You're burning yourself right up.

I didn't want to burn anymore. I was entitled to a little not-burning. Just for a while.

I clasped my hands over my stomach, over the tiny spark of potential life that was our child, and mourned something that wasn't even gone.

I felt a warm hand on my forehead. Not Jonathan's; his touch didn't comfort; it seared. This was something easier and gentler.

"She's burning up." For a second I thought it was Imara's voice, but then I cracked my tear-caked eyelids and saw it was red-haired Siobhan, perched next to me on the couch in her hussy jeans and cheap shirt and chipped nail polish. She had a fading bruise under one eye, concealed under makeup, and she smelled faintly like sex, as if it had soaked into her clothes. "She sick or something?"

"Or something," Jonathan said. He sounded remote. "Better get her a blanket."

Siobhan left, and a few seconds later I felt something heavy and soft settle over my sweating, aching skin. Her hand explored my forehead again. "She's been beat up pretty good," she said, with the authority of someone who knew the subject well. "Her eyes look funny."

"She has a concussion," Jonathan said. "She'll live."

"Yeah, well, you can't tell me you couldn't fix that shit." Siobhan sounded