anxiety than wanting us to get back home quickly. "You know she did," he said. His face was smooth, expressionless, and he'd changed his glasses now, darkened them to hide his eyes. "In many different ways."
I couldn't ask. I knew I should; I knew he'd tell me and it would be a relief if he did, maybe for us both, but I just . . . couldn't. I closed my eyes, rested my head against the window, and tried not to imagine David as Yvette Prentiss's slave.
As her weapon.
"Sleep," he murmured, and whether it was his influence or my own weariness, the steady roar of the tires and throb of the engine lured me down into the dark.
When I woke up, David was carrying me in his arms. I hadn't been carried like that by him, except when I was in danger or injured, in a long time, and it felt . . . wonderful. Hard not to appreciate the strength and surety of his body against mine, and his smile was gentle and deadly at such close range. "Good nap?" He set me down, and my feet sank into sand. I hastily stripped off the Manolos. Sacrilege, to walk on the beach in those. Also, awkward. It was night, and the surf curled in from the horizon in sweetly regular silver lines. It broke into lace and foam on the beach, and we were close enough to the water to feel the breath of spray.
"Where are we?" It wasn't Fort Lauderdale. The beach was too quiet, too secluded. It felt as if it had never been touched by humanity.
"Nowhere," he said. "In a sense, anyway. It's a place I come sometimes to be alone, when I'm troubled."
He was telling me something. I looked around. No lights on the horizon, no roads, no airplanes buzzing overhead. Just the beach, the surf, the breeze, the moon bright as a star overhead.
"This isn't real," I said.
"It's as real as we want it to be. Like Jonathan's house, beyond the aetheric." David shrugged slightly. "One of the benefits of being the Conduit is you can create your own realities if you feel the need."
"And . . . you feel the need."
He took my hand, and we walked a bit in the moonlight. It felt as if we were the first people to walk here, and I supposed we were. I didn't ask. He didn't volunteer. After a while, we rounded an irregular curve and I saw a low-burning fire ahead, warm and inviting. I knew, without a word being said, that we were supposed to sit down, and I settled into the cool sand without complaining about the damage to my dress. Besides, my dress was still on my sleeping body, somewhere out there.
David took a seat beside me. The fire snapped and popped and flared like a real flame, and it warmed like one, too. I stretched out my hands toward it. As real as we want it to be, he'd said.
Like the two of us, together.
"The question you won't ask me is, did Yvette ever force me to abuse her stepson," David said. "The answer is no. Not in the way you're thinking."
I have to admit, a weight of dread rolled away, and I must have given an audible sigh of relief. But David wasn't finished.
"What she did force me to do was to bring him to her, and watch," he said. "Yvette always did like an audience. Kevin avoids me because I'm part of those memories. I'm bound up with all the sex and pain and horror of it. So yes, I was part of it, even though I never - I never hurt him. I wanted to destroy her for it. I wanted to rip her apart into so many pieces not even God could find a trace."
I heard the ring of hate in his voice, real as what I'd heard from Kevin. He meant it, and I ached for him, too. "But you didn't, because you couldn't. You were as powerless as Kevin to stop her."
He said nothing to that. The Djinn were not comfortable with the idea of powerlessness; in a sense, it was worse now than ever, because they had thousands of years of slavery to try to put into some kind of context. He hurt, and I couldn't help him. Not with that.
"I'm telling you this because Kevin doesn't trust me," he said. "And that's part of the reason I sent Rahel with him. He's