Chill Factor Page 0,86

across the carpet toward me; the discarded liquor decanter, heading for the floor.

Everything... just... stopped.

I sucked in a deep breath and held it, felt my muscles and tendons and blood and bone and tissue as if they were all new, brand-new, made in this second. Then the world formed around me. Air, in its complex and beautiful lattice of molecules, moving in waves and eddies, a life-form of its own. The stunning crystal perfection of the bottle in my hand. The world, God, the world, so huge, so astonishing, so wondrous in its clockwork precision.

The enormous, dreaming strength of the world living in every pulse beat, every breath.

And there was Jonathan, standing before me. Not in his normal human form, with its easy-to-underestimate casual grace; no, this was something else, something bright and unknowable and wild in its magic.

The seduction of it...

The next breath, Jonathan was back in human disguise, staring at Siobhan and Kevin, who were still frozen in time. Light gleamed in his brown-and-silver hair, and the darkness of his eyes was the darkness of the end of things.

"I don't like you," he said, without even glancing my way. "You know that."

"I know." My mouth felt strange, my voice even stranger. "Sorry."

He shrugged. "Well, that's the way the world crumbles. Sometimes you get surprised."

And he turned and pulled me close to him. His touch was fire-not the soothing heat of David's skin, but the scalding burn of an open flame. I tried to pull away, but that wasn't possible here, now. He put one hand at the small of my back and moved the other to splay an open palm across my stomach.

Too close. Too intimate. Very personal.

Stars in those eyes, like an endless sky. Unknown and unknowable, to anything human. And there was passion in there, too, the passion of gods that insects would never know or understand.

"This saves you," he whispered, and put his lips very gently against mine. A closed-mouth kiss, but it set my blood on fire, made my knees weak and rubbery. "She saves you. Count your blessings, Jo. This could have had a different ending."

"Chill Factor"

... and time snapped back together. Jonathan stepped back, smiling.

And Kevin's fist hit my chin, snapped my head back, and instead of visions of mountains and gods I saw stars, but I hung on grimly to what was in my hand, even as his fingers scrabbled at it to take it away.

I slid sideways to the carpet, worked my jaw experimentally, and said, "Jonathan, restrain them, please."

When I opened my eyes and blinked away the blurring, he was holding Kevin by the scruff of the neck and Siobhan by the arm. They were both struggling-

Kevin was screaming curses, mostly directed at me- but they weren't going anywhere.

Jonathan raised his eyebrows in my direction. "Nice bruise you're going to have."

I glared. "Let's get this over with," I said. "Take the powers Kevin stole from Lewis, and put them back where they belong." He just stared at me. We did several long seconds' worth of that. "I said, take the powers Kevin stole from Lewis, and-"

"Heard you," Jonathan interrupted me. "You don't want me to do that right now."

"You want to play Rule of Three with me?"

"Trust me, you really don't want me to do what you just said."

"I-" I shut up and looked at him, deeply, and changed my mind. "Okay, I'll play. Why not?"

He gave me a Djinn smile, all slyness and misinformation. "I thought you wanted to save the world."

Chapter Twenty-three

"Meaning what?"

He shrugged. Siobhan was trying to bite his hand. He gave her one sidelong look, and she went limp and fell to the carpet.

"Hey!" I protested, and scrambled over next to her. She was still breathing. In fact, she had a sweet little smile, when she lost the 'tude. She was a natural redhead, with the soft pink skin to match, and the light was kinder to her than the world. "Watch it, buster. I'm the one with the-"

"You got nothing," Jonathan said. "We both know you can't make me do a damn thing I don't want to do. Yeah?"

"Yeah," I agreed glumly. "So why don't you want to return Lewis's powers? What's the point in that? He'll die!"

The smile continued on Jonathan's sharp, handsome face, but there wasn't any amusement in his eyes.

"Trust me," he replied. "It's better this way. Just for a while."

We could have played the game for hours, I knew that; I had Jonathan's bottle, but I didn't have Jonathan