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looked past me, toward her, then quickly away. "She was a friend of Bad Bob's."

David's former sick, demented master. Okay, I could believe that, and it didn't raise her in my estimation. "How good a friend? The come-on-over-and-watch-a-movie kind of friend, or the come-on-over-and-sweat-up-the-sheets kind?"

David avoided my eyes. "Let's just say they had appetites in common."

"Let's say a little more than that."

"Why?"

"Because it's creeping me out that she's in mourning and I've never met her."

He focused back on her with that scary intensity. "Oh, she's not in mourning." Which I could believe, seeing her flirt and tease at the other end of the room. She was currently sucking sauce off of a shrimp, to the delight of the middle-aged guy hovering near her like a bee on a flower. "She's hunting. Bad Bob paid her bills. She's looking for a new source of income."

"David." I drew his eyes back to me. "What's with the two of you?"

"There are things I don't want to remember about my time with him. She's one."

That sounded dry and uninformative, but he was shaking. Shaking. "David?"

He reached for me and captured my face between his hands, leaned his forehead against mine. Lips close enough to taste. "You're an innocent," he said. "I want you to stay that way. Don't let her near you, and whatever you do, don't let her know you're Djinn. There are things-I can't tell you. And I hope you'll never know."

Across the room, Yvette Prentiss laughed. She had a sweet little-girl laugh that no doubt charmed the pants off of rich old guys arrogant enough to believe she loved them for their personalities. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought there was a deep, midnight black thread of darkness in it.

I felt the laugh rip into David like a claw, and did the only thing I could.

I said, "Let's blow this place and go home."

Two days passed. Nice days. There's nothing bad about lazing around a fancy hotel room with the sexiest guy in the world and unlimited pay-per-view movies.

Not that it was all fun and games. I was learning things, like the physics of being a Djinn. They were entirely different than the physics I'd learned as a human being, and believe me, I'd been a specialist. Handling the weather with any degree of skill requires an absolute knowledge of little rules like conservation of energy, and it was full of detail work. I can't even count how many times disarming hurricane-force winds boiled down to something as simple as turning down the subatomic thermostat, changing the world one whirling atom at a time.

But operating as a Djinn was the difference between a two-dimensional game of tic-tac-toe, and a three-dimensional Rubik's Cube of consequences. There were still scales, and they still had to balance- if I wanted to control the weather, I could still reach up into the aetheric and create a little warm air cushion moving counter to the cold-air mass streaming in from the sea, and voila, rain. In human terms, that would have cost me personal energy.

As a Djinn, I had to balance the physical world, the aetheric, and about ten other planes of existence to create that rain, all without pulling anything out of my own essence. Because, as a Djinn, I didn't have any essence, really. I drew power from the earth, the sun, the life around me. It was surprisingly difficult to do.

And, I discovered, I was pulling power from David. Lots of it. A big silvery conduit of it, flowing from him into me up on the aetheric plane, like a sleek, barely visible umbilical cord.

"It's nothing," he said, when I brought it up. "Training wheels. Once you start feeding yourself from other sources, it'll stop."

It was a lot of power. I wondered how hard he was having to work to keep himself strong. The image of a transfusion kept occurring to me-blood flowing out faster than the body could replenish it. Juice and cookies probably wouldn't be enough, not when he kept bleeding like that.

All this learning was tiring. And Djinn, I found, really did need sleep-not as much of it as humans, or in the same physical ways, but the pull still existed, and on the seventh evening I fell asleep in David's arms to the comforting flicker of Jay Leno telling political jokes. It was the first time