Chill Factor Page 0,23

This really wasn't easy for him.

I looked at the rest of them. They avoided my gaze. "Gee, guys, none of you are coming with? That's too bad, 'cause you're just so darn much fun."

Paul put his hands over his face and leaned his elbows on the table. Behind him, the desert glittered in sunlight, fresh and dry and clean on the other side of plate glass. Inside, the bright yellow and retro-seventies rust decor looked desperate and grubby around the corners. The omelet I was eating needed salt. I added Tabasco sauce instead.

"We've got a lot to do," Paul said. I didn't stop dispensing Tabasco. "We're meeting a couple of guys; they'll see you all the way home."

"Fabulous." I capped the pepper sauce and began mushing up the omelet to my satisfaction. "I hope you have a plan B handy, because your plan A sucks, and it's going to fall apart faster than a Yugoslavian car. I don't care what Kevin says; he's playing you. He's not giving up his Djinn."

Paul didn't have the moral courage to meet my gaze. "We've got a plan B."

"And yet this stands as the best option?" Silence around the table. I tried a mouthful of coffee. It tasted like sludge. "Wow. We really are screwed."

"Jo, quit making this hard. I goddamn well just got over the shock of you not being dead. Can you quit mouthing off and let me be glad you're breathing for a while?"

"I'll quit being a bitch if you quit selling me and mine down the river." I didn't really want to keep on hurting him, but I couldn't stop. Facing things with fortitude wasn't really my strong suit. Since screaming and crying were out, insults were what I had left.

We tacitly agreed to a mutual cease-fire, to chew in peace.

I finished up and excused myself to the bathroom. Marion started to go with me. "Please," I said, and fixed her with a smile that didn't match what I was feeling. "You know I'm coming back. Where can I run? Jesus, let me pee one time in private. I give you my oath as a Warden that I'll come back." I held up my right hand, palm out, and the rune there glittered blue up on the aetheric. Truth, for anybody with the eyes to see it.

Marion nodded and sank back down in the leatherette chair. She folded her hands together and watched me gravely as I walked away, headed for the door marked with the skirt hieroglyphic. The plastic fake-wood finish had a tacky film on it, a consequence of being located too close to the fry baskets. I didn't actually have to pee, but I needed a minute alone. A minute to stare at myself in the harsh fluorescent light, at the curling, still-damp hair and pallid face, at the dark blue eyes that seemed too haunted to belong to me. When I'd been Djinn, they'd been silver, bright as dimes.

I looked tired. I tugged irritably at my hair, which was not supposed to curl like that, and seemed destined to be the bane of my existence for the rest of my... probably very short life.

"Snow White."

A cold, gravel-rough whisper. I froze and looked around. Saw nothing. Heard an almost silent laugh that sounded like sandpaper over stone.

I felt goose bumps breaking out all over my skin, and fought back a shiver. "Who's there?" I demanded. No feet under the two bathroom stalls. Nobody else in the room except my reflection.

You know. I didn't know if that voice was in my head, or put there from outside. Creepy, either way. I stared hard into the mirror, let myself float up into the aetheric, and finally spotted something that didn't quite belong. A flicker. Use your eyes. Except that my eyes were just plain human these days, not Djinn; I couldn't see in every spectrum, every level of the world. And what was talking to me didn't exist in this one.

Shall I lend you mine?

Something happened in my head, a sharp, tearing pain, and then I was seeing edges to things that weren't there, colors that had texture and depth and no name in the world I lived in.

In the corner, shadows flowed black into a shape that glittered like faceted coal. Spiderlike. Dangerous.

An Ifrit. A failed, twisted Djinn.

A vampire.

Sara? No, it couldn't be Sara; she'd died along with Patrick, both giving up their essences to create a human body to house me. It was someone else. Who...?

Who else