Firestorm Page 0,94

me? A weak little creature like you?" I shook my head. His eyes glowed brighter, and the smile grew sharper at the edges. "Perhaps you have finally lost your mind."

"That's probably it." I forked up the last delicious bite of my pie, savoring every bit, and washed it down with a prodigious gulp of milk. Now that was a snack. "I've gone insane. But at least it came with dessert."

He steepled his fingers into long, strong columns of flesh and bone. It reminded me of Eamon, fingertips touching his lips, watching me in the motel room. I felt a bolt of sheer terror flash through me, and it made me flinch; that was bad. Numbness was good. Numbness was my only real defense right now.

I compensated the only way I knew how: with sarcasm. "What are you going to do, Ashan? Glare me to death?"

I'd goaded him a little too far. He reached across the table, knocking my plate off in a wobbling arc to the floor, and grabbed my wrist. He pinned it to the table with crushing force. Probably wasn't even an effort for him to break my bones, shatter the table beneath, bring down the entire restaurant, for that matter. But I just sat still, watching him. Unresisting.

And he didn't exert any more force than he had to, to hold me still.

Like Eamon.

"What do you want?" I asked him breathlessly.

"You keep coming after me. What do I have that you want?"

There was a flash of loathing in his eyes so extreme that I swallowed. "You are of no interest to me at all. You are less than what crawls in the dirt."

I realized something terribly important. Ashan didn't want to be here. He really didn't, and it wasn't about me. He was just dicking around with me out of some obscure desire to play with his food, like a giant tomcat.

"Let go," I said. He did. I boggled, but covered it quickly. No sense in letting him know that I was lost, too. "What do you want to know, Ashan?"

"What did the Oracle say to you?"

"Nothing."

"You lie." His hands were flat on the table again, and if anything his eyes were even brighter, incandescently bright in the darkened corner. "What did the creature say to you?"

"Look," I said quietly. "I don't know what you want, but I can only tell you what I know. Which is nothing. The Oracle screamed, and--" I realized what he was getting at. The Oracle hadn't told me, but Ashan had told me himself, with all his paranoia.

He'd had something to do with the Demon Mark breaking through the defenses to get to the Oracle. Maybe he'd even done it himself.

He must have seen that I'd figured it out, because he backhanded me.

I saw it coming, and I was able to turn my face with the smack, but even so, it knocked me into the wall. My head impacted wood with a crack, and I felt a hot wave of sickness crawl over me. It didn't hurt immediately, but I had an instant conviction that it was going to hurt later. For now, there was just a high-pitched ringing in my head, and a fire-hot throb on my right temple.

Ashan was standing up. I was about to be ripped to pieces, I could feel it in the raw fury boiling off him. He reached out...

And David caught his hand.

They didn't speak. David just stared at him, face set. He looked hard--as hard as the Djinn facing him. Fire and ashes, neither one of them human.

Ashan smiled. "Took you long enough," he said. "I thought I might have to make her scream more to get your attention."

"You're a fool," David said. "And you're the second fool who's tried this in less than a day. You have no idea--"

He stopped talking, and slowly turned his head off to the side, staring into shadows.

"Fool, you were saying?" Ashan asked. He was still smiling. I liked that smile even less the longer it stayed. "I'm not so much of one. Though clearly you are, since you continue to come running at her beck and call, even without the bottle forcing you to her will."

"What have you done?" David let go of Ashan's wrist. "Ashan--"

"What was necessary," he said. "We were gods once. We were worshipped. And we will be again."

"Yessssss," whispered a new voice. If it could be called a voice. It was more like flesh being dragged over sandpaper. "Godsssssssssss."

And an adult Demon stepped out