Thin Air Page 0,110

I still can."

"How can you possibly sleep while..."

He switched himself off, pretty much just like that. I stayed put through the teeth-rattling jounces, and tried to pretend that I didn't hate flying at a cellular level. Lewis really was asleep. I hated him.

Now that we were safely in the air-if that was the right term-we were free to take our lives in our hands and move about the cabin. I unbuckled and made my way through the small, cramped area toward the back. Kevin and Cherise were sitting together, heads close, whispering; they looked up at me, and Cherise winked and offered a thumbs-up. I weakly returned it, crushing the back of Paul's seat in a death grip as the plane dipped and dropped unexpectedly, and he broke off his conversation with Marion to ask me if I was all right. I decided it was better not to lie, so I just smiled palely and kept going.

David was sitting alone at the back of the plane. He hadn't bothered with anything so superfluous as a seat belt, of course. He, like Lewis, seemed perfectly calm, and he was reading a paperback novel, one that looked vaguely familiar to me. Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry.

I dropped into the seat beside him and whimpered under my breath as our fragile flying machine sledded from one punishing draft to another. He closed his book and took my hand.

"Have we done this before?" I asked.

"Flown in a plane together? No. Mostly we drive."

"Mostly I understand why." I gulped and tried to relax. "So, you want to tell me about Seacasket?"

"Is that why you came back here?" He was staring at the cover of his book. He was wearing round little spectacles, and they softened the lines of his face and made him seem gentle and bookish. And hot, though the hot part was pretty much a given. "Information?"

"Thought it would be important."

"Information won't take up much time. It's a long flight."

Not a pleasant thought at all. It was already too long, as far as I was concerned. I wanted my feet on the ground-or at least, my butt in the driver's seat of a car. Now that was transportation.

"I need to keep my mind off of this," I said, and gestured a little wildly at the clanking, shuddering aircraft we were trapped in for the next eternity.

"Be careful," David murmured. His voice had drifted lower in tone as well as volume, and his eyes were half-closed, still focused on the book cover. "There are all kinds of ways to take your mind off of it."

Even in the midst of ongoing panic, that sounded...interesting. More than a little. "Mmmmm?" That was noncommittal, yet expressed...

David put the book aside, flipped up the armrest that separated us, and shifted to face me. "I want to try to give you some of my memories."

Whoa, that was not where I'd thought we were going. I'd been in a warm, happy place for a second, and now I was falling right back into Anxiety Alley. "Um...Venna said it wasn't possible for a Djinn to-"

"You might have noticed that we all have...specialties," he said. "Venna's the only Djinn I've ever met who can-sometimes-transport humans through the aetheric without damaging them, and she's got other skills that the rest of us have to only a lesser degree. Doesn't make her more powerful, necessarily, because she's deficient in other areas. Like controlling what you'd term Earth powers."

"Which you're stronger in."

He nodded slowly. Light flickered across the surface of his glasses. I wondered why the hell he was wearing them; was there such a thing as a physically imperfect Djinn? Was it just a comfort thing, like a favorite shirt or pair of shoes for a human being? Like his coat..."What's the deal with the coat?" I asked. I knew it was a non sequitur, but it gave me a chance to consider what he was saying, and how scary it could be to let David in my head. Or me in his, as might be the case.

He blinked. "My coat?" He wasn't wearing it at the moment, but it was draped over the back of his seat. Olive-drab, vaguely military from an era about a hundred years ago.

"Yeah. You don't even need a coat, right? You don't get cold. And it's very...specific."

His eyes widened this time. "Let me understand. We're on our way to stop a Demon wearing your skin from ripping a hole through this world to hers, possibly allowing other Demons to