Chill Factor Page 0,25

one, but I wasn't going to be concerned about their comfort. "Sure." And the minute I could ditch my escort, I'd be heading back to pick up the pieces of this disaster. Because it was going to be a disaster. No doubt about it.

Carl finished the toast, swilled down half a cup of coffee with a noisy slurp, and stood. Lel followed suit more slowly.

"Jo." Paul reached out and took my hand, just for a second. "I'm sorry."

"Oh, you're not nearly sorry yet," I said. "Get back to me later, though."

It was the hardest thing I'd ever done, to walk away and leave David behind.

I'll find you. I promised it to him with a grim, burning fury. I will. No matter what.

My Viper started up with a roar.

Lel had called shotgun, leaving a disgrunted Carl in the cramped backseat. She seemed completely uninterested about why they were babysitting me on a drive back to Florida; in fact, she slipped on headphones and flipped a switch on an iPod, and ignored me completely. Which was fine with me. I backed my midnight-blue Mona out of her parking space and eased her into gear. The freeway beckoned ahead.

"So that was your Djinn, right?" Carl asked, just as we hit merging speed. Nobody on the road in either direction. I opened Mona up to eighty and kept an eye on the horizon for cops or storms. "Your Djinn they're trading over to the kid? Must suck, right?"

"Chill Factor"

"Sucks," I agreed tightly. "We're not going to chat, right?"

"Long damn trip if we don't."

"Longer if we do."

He sighed and settled back. Lel bobbed her head in time with a beat I couldn't hear, and I watched the miles start to spin away.

There was a huge, gaping empty space inside me. I couldn't feel David anymore, and that was the worst part. Not knowing where he was, what they were doing with him. How could they believe Kevin? Were they really that stupid, or just that desperate? Kevin wasn't exactly a brilliant strategist, but he had a certain criminal cunning... and you could count on the fact that if he had the chance to double cross you, he would. He was greedy, he was selfish, and he'd never been treated fairly in his life. He'd believe you were going to screw him anyway, so why wait?

As a survival strategy, not half-bad. As a way to live, it was a tragedy.

I kept half my attention up on the aetheric as I drove, looking for trouble and hoping for a sign. There was a huge roiling disturbance centered behind me, in the direction of Las Vegas, but it was like an impenetrable wall of confusion.

David had told me that this had to happen. I didn't understand why, but all I could do was trust him, trust Lewis, trust in the goodwill of the universe.

Not really in my nature.

We'd gone about fifteen miles out into the big nowhere when Lel took the headphones off, looked over the backseat at Carl, and said, "This about right?"

"Yeah," he said. "Looks right."

"For what?" I asked, and that was when Carl took a gun out from under his tan windbreaker and pointed it to my head.

"Pull over," he said.

I felt a cold-hot bolt of shock. "You're kidding."

I heard a metallic snap, cold and harsh, right next to my ear. "The next sound you hear kills you. Pull the car over."

Lel was watching me with a little half smile, satisfied as a cat in a cream factory.

I drifted the car to a stop at the side of the road and stood on the brakes unnecessarily hard. My legs were shaking. I've been on the wrong end of a lot of situations, but the wrong end of a gun was a different story. God, I hadn't seen this coming...

"Out," Carl said, and handed the gun to Lel. "Cover her."

The woman was good at it; I never felt there was a split second to take advantage of, and besides, there were two Wardens on me, and it wasn't like I could overpower them, not without David. Not without a huge, costly fight. The memory of being shot in the back overwhelmed me. I'd survived it, but not without cost, and not without pain; I didn't have any wish to try a rematch of me versus Smith amp; Wesson. I opened the car door and stepped out, keeping my hands up and in a helpless position.

"You understand that if I feel so much as a light breeze,