Heat Stroke Page 0,81

through her fingers. Petting him, the way she'd pet a particularly glorious and dangerous animal. "Make it last."

He reached for my throat.

I felt another will impose itself over mine.

Right on cue, I vanished.

I collapsed in a heap, blind with shock and pain, and knew I was somewhere else. Where?

Ground-in, Day-Glo orange spots in the rug just inches from my face, and a few more feet away, a grease-stained pizza box with its top partly open. A fat brown-shelled roach was scuttling along the top of it. It stopped to waggle its antennae inquiringly, then decided I was no threat to its conquest.

I couldn't breathe. My lungs had been ruptured. My body-human, not human, whatever it was-was shutting down. That wouldn't kill me, I sensed, but it would trap me inside of a dead shell. Not the way I wanted to escape, especially since it meant I wouldn't be going anywhere.

"Yo!" Kevin's pimply, pallid face appeared in my field of vision, pointed at a weird horizontal angle. He was bending over, staring at me. He waved a hand in front of my eyes, snapped his black-fingernailed, blunt-cut fingers. "You okay?"

I couldn't answer. I slowly blinked my eyes, which was about all that my body was capable of doing for me at the moment.

"Oh," he said, and straightened up. He prodded me with the toe of a particularly crappy-looking sneaker. This close, the smell of his feet was rancid, like mold-ridden buttermilk. "She got to you, huh? Yeah. Thought so. So, can you fix yourself?"

I blinked again. If ever I needed the kid to catch a clue . . .

"You can't, can you? You need me for that." He crouched down, staring down at me. "You need me. How about that? Not so high and mighty now, are we?" A thick finger prodded at my flaccid arm, and broken bones grated together. "What if I just leave you here, huh? What's your game plan then, bitch? Lay there and bleed on me? Some fucking guardian you are."

He sounded surly, but there was a tremor deep down. He was scared, all right. Not of me. He knew what she was capable of, and he wanted a friend. Protection. Something.

I tried to move my lips, but it was useless. I couldn't even blink anymore. My eyes were fixed and staring. I heard my heart murmur one last, regretful beat, and then the blood in my veins slowed and stopped.

Death was anticlimactic, as a Djinn. I kept waiting for something, anything. I still had senses-I could hear the rustle of Kevin's baggy jeans as he paced back and forth, could smell the unwashed aroma that eddied off of him through the room. Under the bed, the cockroach emerged from the pizza box with a couple of its friends, paused, and tried to figure me out. I must not have looked tasty. They went the other way.

Kevin's bedroom door suddenly blew open. Locks tore off of the frame and hit the far wall with enough force to put holes in the Sheetrock. I didn't have a good view, but I heard Kevin's pacing stop and stagger backward. He stumbled right into me, lost his balance, and fell. I felt him roll across me, hot and sweaty and tense with panic.

The swirl of power that went through the room was unmistakable.

David was here.

Kevin grabbed my limp, broken hand and yelled, "Fix yourself, dammit! Stop him! Don't let him hurt me!"

Game on.

I felt my body instantly begin to heal, drinking in power from him to rebuild itself, and before I was anywhere near better I rolled away from him, away from his grip, and came fluidly to my feet to stand between him and David. Blue sparkles flashed all over me with false Vegas cheer.

Yvette was with him, of course. Still smiling.

"You left." She pouted. "It was just getting interesting. We're going to have lots of fun, sweetie, aren't we?" The butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth tone turned cold and cutting as she focused past me, on her stepson. "Tell her to submit."

"Yeah?" His voice wavered, but didn't break. "Maybe I won't."

Why the hell had she ever taken a chance and given him a Djinn? No, I knew why . . . because she thought he was completely under her control, and she knew that having two Djinn under her direct control could be dangerous. Well, arrogance was