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you can do is take that bottle and smash it, right now, before I get the opportunity to really hurt you. Because I will, Kevin. I'll hurt you so bad it'll make your mom at her worst look like Mary Poppins."

I had him. I so had him. It was all I could do not to gloat. He looked about to vomit with fright.

And then he calmed down, swallowed, and said, "I know what I want. It's what you want, too. I want you to kill my mother."

Not that I couldn't understand it, but I felt like it was one of those cartoon moments, the one where you have to smack the side of your head to make sure there's nothing stuck in your ear. I stood there in my ridiculously sexy French Maid outfit and said, "Excuse me?"

"Yvette," he clarified hastily. "My real mom's already dead. My dad, too. I guess what I mean is that I want you to kill my stepmom. Yvette Prentiss."

I wanted to grin and say, "Done!" and rush out there and put the big Djinn smackdown on her, but truth is I wasn't all that eager to be killing anybody. Not even a top-rated bitch like Yvette. I was all too aware of how much power there was, flowing from Kevin to me, and how awesomely easy it was to use it. The compulsion was clicking in, but not strongly; there were, I sensed, still gray areas to exploit. I went for them. "There are all kinds of meanings to kill, you know . . ."

"Dead," he said. "Kill her dead. Slowly. Make her suffer."

He was getting into it now. Which was not my intention. "Okay, let's just-calm down." Because the compulsion was getting stronger, the power flow cresting like the tide. "I will. I swear. But let's talk about it first." Because, luckily, he hadn't specified now, the way he had when he'd sent me to Seacasket to commit arson and homicide. "Why?"

He gave me a dark look. "What do you care?"

I didn't, really. I was too busy thinking about Yvette putting her hands all over the bottle that held David trapped, seducing Lewis so that innocent little Kevin could sneak up and hit him from behind. "Yeah, well, what do you care? I'm just curious."

Long silence. He flopped back down on the bed, sounding depressed. "She's a bitch."

"You're going to run into them. Get used to it. In fact, pretty much all of us can be bitchy from time to time. Goes with the double-X chromosomes." Just like Kevin was never going to win any Y-chromosome personality contests, either. "You can't go around having me snuff out every life that annoys you."

"Why not?"

Ah, great, a sociopath in training. Again, not the conversational path I was eager to follow. "What's she done to you, other than be a bitchy stepmom?"

He stared up at the pouting centerfold over his bed, put his hands under his head, and said, "She makes me do things."

I had a bad feeling. "Like?" I was really, really hoping he'd say clean up the room, take out the trash . . .but one look around convinced me that couldn't be true.

He sat up, grabbed the first thing that came to hand-a CD player-and threw it across the room hard enough to smash it to bits against the far wall. "What the fuck do you think I mean, say my prayers? Brush my teeth?" His flare of rage was sudden, violent, and totally untelegraphed. I had no reason to be afraid, but if I'd still been human I'd have felt utterly exposed. "She makes me do things, you stupid bimbo! Bad things!" He was blazing in Oversight, white-hot, as if some door had opened into hell. "I want it to stop!"

Oh, God. Not what I'd expected, not at all. Nor what I was even vaguely equipped to handle. I pitched my voice low. "Kevin, you can make that stop without killing her."

"You don't know shit about it." Tears quivered in his eyes, jeweled his long, lush eyelashes. "God, you don't understand ... I can't even tell you . . ."

"I know this. You have the power to make her stop, Kevin." I edged over slowly, walking around the piles of wrinkled filthy clothes and discarded trash, to perch on the edge of the bed next to him. "You're going to be a Warden.