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neon blue beads, which clicked like dry bones when she tilted her head.

Rahel had always known how to accessorize.

Djinn, I was coming to understand, had a flare for the dramatic, so popping in unannounced wasn't necessarily threatening. Rahel had done this to me before, in the days when I still had a pulse and a human lifespan. The first time I'd met her, she'd blipped into existence in the passenger seat of my car, which had been doing seventy at the time. I'd barely kept it on the road.

She'd enjoyed the joke then, and she was clearly enjoying it now. She crossed her arms, leaned back against the elevator wall, and took in the reaction with a smile.

Unlike me, David didn't seem surprised at her sudden appearance. He slowly turned to face her, and his expression was a closed book. "Rahel."

"David."

"Not that I'm not happy to see you, but . . ."

"Business," she said crisply.

"Yours or mine?"

Chapter Six

"Both. Neither." Not really an answer. "You know whose business it is. Don't you?"

No answer from David. Rahel hadn't paid the slightest attention to me, but now her vivid gold-shimmering eyes wandered my direction and narrowed with something that might have been amusement, or annoyance, or disgust. "Snow White," she said. "Love the perm."

Defending my hairstyle was the least of my worries. "Rahel, what the hell is going on?" Because there was no question that trouble was brewing. No coincidence that Lewis was trying to get me, and then Rahel popped in with urgent business. I could feel the gravity, and we were right in its center.

She didn't answer, not directly. She turned her attention back to David and shrugged. "Tell her."

David shoved his hands in his coat pockets and leaned against the wall, considering her. "Oh, I don't think so. If Jonathan wants to see me, let him come find me. I don't come running to him like a kid to the principal's office."

"Do you imagine I'm giving you a choice?" she asked, silky as the finish on a knife. The tension already swirling in the air between them turned thick and ugly. "This is a bad place for you to fight me, David. And a very bad time, don't you agree? He wants to see you. It's not an invitation you refuse, you know that."

The elevator dinged to a stop on the third floor. Doors rumbled open. Outside, a middle-aged couple waited with impatient 'tudes. Anybody with a grain of sense would have known not to get in that elevator, given the body language of the three of us already inside, but these two were clearly self-absorbed to the point of impairment. The woman-fat, fifties, fabulously well kept-was complaining about the quality of the preserves on the breakfast tray as she petted a white rat of a dog. She crowded in. Hubby rumbled across the threshold after her.

"Excuse me," the matron said to me, clearly expecting me to move back and give her royal personage more breathing room. She raked me with a comprehensive fashion-police inspection from head to toe, then Rahel. "Are you guests here?" With the strong implication that we were working the hotel by the hour. Rahel shot me a glance out of eyes that had moderated themselves to merely amber. Still striking, but in a human fashion-model kind of way. She showed perfect teeth when the woman glared at her, but it wasn't a smile.

"No, ma'am," Rahel said equably. "Hotel security. May I see your room keys?"

The matron huffed and fluffed like a winter sparrow. Hubby dug a key card from his pocket. Rahel took it in inch-and-a-half-blue-taloned hands, studied it intently, and handed it back. "Very good. Have a nice day." For some reason, I had the strong impression that key card wouldn't be working the next time they tried it.

Another musical ding, and the elevator doors parted like the Red Sea. The couple stalked haughtily out into the arched marble foyer. I started to get out, too, but the doors snapped shut in front of me-fast and hard, like the serrated jaws of an animal trap.

David's eyes flared back to copper. Rahel's flashed back to bitter, glowing yellow. There was so much power crackling in the air it stung my skin.

"Okay, can't we just talk this over?" I asked, and then the elevator dropped. I mean, dropped. Fell straight down. I yelped and