Gale Force Page 0,53

still taken aback by the venom in his voice. Kevin had a huge backlog of hate stored up, and some of it was meant for me; it was an officially approved opportunity for him to vent some of it, and I was going to have to be the one to control my reactions. He's a kid, I reminded myself. He's a kid who's been wounded, over and over. Cut him some slack.

My slack-cutting hand was getting tired.

"Shut up? In your dreams, bitch." He stepped up again, this time addressing the entire hall. "Look, you can see where this is going, right? You think the Djinn are just going to forgive and forget all the time we spent sticking them in little bottles, making them do our shit work? You think they don't hate us for that? Don't kid yourselves. She thinks this is some kind of peace process. It's not. It's obscene. Believe me, I know all about obscene. Especially when it comes to people using the Djinn for sex."

"That's enough," I said, and moved to the edge of the stage. "Enough, Kevin."

"Don't think so. Bad enough the two of you popped out some kind of mutant kid - "

I saw red, and fury burned up from around the base of my spine and jolted into my head like a physical shock. Son of a bitch. He'd never said he was going to drag Imara into this, and while I was prepared to overlook personal insults to myself, my kid wasn't part of the deal. Some of the audience agreed with me; they were shouting him down. But a significant portion was either silent or nodding in agreement, shooting me frowns and dark looks.

"We need to move away from the Djinn, not get all cozy all over again," Kevin continued. "She just wants everything to go back to normal. What the hell was so great about that, anyway? What about the rest of you? You think we should just rip up the blood-stained carpet, remodel, and get over it? Or should we figure out what the Wardens are supposed to be? Not depending on Djinn, not letting them into our heads or our homes or our beds - "

"What's the matter, Kevin?" I asked. "Some hot Djinn chick turn you down?"

We'd scripted this part. I hadn't wanted to do it - had argued against it, in fact - but now I took just a tiny bit of satisfaction in seeing him visibly flinch. The pallor that set into his face, followed by a vivid flush, wasn't acting. I was bringing up old demons, opening old wounds.

"No," he said. "I turned them down. But it didn't matter. They had their orders, and the Djinn always follow their orders, don't they? My mother made sure of that."

Rumors had floated around over the past year about Kevin, about his stepmother, Yvette, who was truly one of the most morally grotesque people I'd ever met. About her illicit use of Djinn for personal gratification, and for other, even less savory, purposes.

Kevin had suffered at her hands. I didn't know whether or not she'd turned her Djinn on him in a sexual sense, but I didn't doubt it. It would have been a tragedy for the Djinn as well as Kevin, but Kevin wouldn't necessarily feel that.

The worst part of it was that for at least some period of time, Yvette had owned David. I'd never asked him what his history was with Kevin, and neither he nor Kevin had ever really come clean about it.

I hoped I wasn't hearing the truth of it, right now, but the pain and rage in Kevin couldn't possibly be mistaken for anything else but honesty.

"I hope you get what's coming to you. Both of you," he spat, and turned to leave.

"Wait a minute," I said. "You think you just get to make a dramatic exit?" I sent a gust of wind past him and blew the doors shut with a heavy thud. "Sit your ass down, Kevin."

"Bite me." He whirled back toward me, and there were tears glittering in his eyes, real and agonizing, and I almost stopped it there, almost went to him and put my arms around him and told him he didn't have to do this.

Lewis got in my way. "Sit," he said flatly. "I'm not telling you again, Kevin. If you can't control yourself, I'll do it for you."

In answer, Kevin formed a fireball in both hands, glared at both of us through the