my heart, I felt the drag as she towed me with her.
"No!" That was Lewis, yelling. "No, not yet, not yet-"
I felt Lel reaching out, but it was too late; we were already moving, already in that not there space between worlds.
My last thought was, Oh shit, my heart isn't beating...
Chapter Eight
And then I hit something, hard, and that all stopped mattering.
FOUR
Chill Factor
I was lying on a tiled floor. It was hard, warm, and damp. The air smelled hot and moist, earthy, heady with the perfumes of a hundred flowers. I saw blackness and star fields streaming away from me, and people were running toward me.
Being dead was oddly painless. Oh, wait, I wasn't dead yet, was I? Just dying. Takes minutes for the brain to shut down, and meanwhile, I had a fixed-stare view of thick-leafed succulents rustling overhead, of a tracery of milky glass and black iron beyond that. Faces kept appearing and disappearing. They all looked alarmed.
One of them leaned over me and did something that made my ribs creak. As he leaned over, I thought, I did not give you permission to French me, and then I realized what was happening.
I was being revived. Chest compressions. Mouth-to-mouth.
I choked, and felt something flutter in my chest under the painful stiff-armed pumping someone was giving me. The first hint of a heartbeat.
"She's coming back!" My rescuer had turned away, yelling; he was young, African-American, wearing what looked like an official-type security blazer with a logo on it. Nice cologne. When he turned back, I offered him a loopy smile. "Hey, just stay still, okay? We've got an ambulance coming."
"I'm fine," I said, and tried to get up. He was as strong as he looked, and I felt a good deal weaker than I should have. "What happened?"
"You collapsed, ma'am. Look, don't move. Everything's-"
Definitely not okay, I saw as I pushed myself up on my elbows. Prada was down flat on the tile a few feet away, and a black, sharp-edged shadow was crouched on top of her like some hideous gargoyle.
"Hey! Stop it!" I tried to sit up. I'd been locked in a struggle with an Ifrit when I'd been a Djinn myself; I knew how terrible it felt to have the life torn out of you... "Rahel, stop!"
The Djinn was eerily silent, but the Ifrit was making noises-eager, whimpering noises, like a starvation victim at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Prada's face was turned away from me, so I couldn't see the agony in her expression, but I could see her whole body trembling. Shaking apart. Misting at the edges, sublimating into the aetheric.
The Ifrit began to change. Take on shape and form and texture.
Take on color.
Lel must have finally mastered her confusion and ordered the Djinn back in the bottle, because suddenly there was a sensation of vacuum, and she was gone. The Ifrit, deprived of her feast, fell to humanlike hands and knees on tile, still making those raw, wretched noises. Her form wavered, solidified, became... Rahel.
"She's not making any sense," my savior in the security blazer said to an army of paramedics, who arrived wielding tackle boxes and professionally bored expressions. One had a gurney. Not that a bed didn't look good, but I really didn't have time for this.
I swatted aside his hand. "Am too." And then it came to me, why he thought I was crazy. I was watching Rahel, and Rahel didn't exist for them. They couldn't see her. I blinked and fell back flat, being obliging for all the nice medical folks who took BP and pulse and talked about various things that I didn't understand but which sounded very official. The world slowly came into focus around me, now that the crisis was passing. We were in a huge greenhouse, a Victorian monstrosity that stretched up at least two or three stories in graceful arches of wrought iron and frosted glass. The place was delirious with flowers and lousy with plants, but every single one was perfectly groomed. Not a speck of dirt out of place. I couldn't tell if the birdsong and insect hum were real or prerecorded; this was so perfect it was more like a simulation of nature than nature itself. We were in the center of the garden, near the picturesque, dignified gazebo where tourists by the millions had no doubt taken blurry photos to commemorate losing their shirts. I smelled food, and spotted a restaurant about twenty feet away. At the far end of the