television. I locked eyes with the black void where I thought her face should be, and began sending Kevin's power into her. Force-feeding. By the time I'd stripped off my pants I'd already formed the lacy undergarments for the Frederick's outfit, so there was no actual nudity involved, but Kevin was looking just as stunned as if I'd done a Full Monty for him. Good. Stunned would keep him out of my way.
I templated on the French Maid outfit and walked forward, to where the Ifrit had gained dark, smooth substance. Can you hear me? I asked her. Somewhere under the shadows, I thought I saw a flash of purple eyes.
I hear. It was barely a whisper, but it was there. And it sounded like the Sara of my dreams.
Can you take me where I'm supposed to go?
Jonathan. Such a wealth of sadness in that single word. Yes. Can.
What about Patrick?
She seemed to flinch. Gone. Seeking.
I sucked in a deep breath that creaked the corset and strained the engineering of its lacings. Take me to Jonathan.
Barrier. The sparklies? No, that wasn't meant to be a barrier. It was far too porous. Hard to pass.
We had to. I held up a finger to put her on hold as Kevin walked up behind me.
He put his arms around me and pulled me close, and I nearly gagged when I realized how turned on he was. God, how had I gotten myself into this . . .
"I want you to-" Tactical error. I hadn't finished dressing yet, which meant I still had access to his power. He couldn't give me simultaneous commands.
"Sleep," I said, spun around in his arms and used some of the power that was still flowing through me to turn back on him. "Dream about me."
For a second I thought it wasn't going to work, but then his eyes rolled back in his head, his mouth fell open, and he dropped like a bag of bricks to the carpet. The bottle stayed in his hand, clenched tight. Dammit. If it had rolled free . . .
I tried working on his fingers, but I couldn't get them to relax. Probably some Djinn rule against it anyway. Couldn't break them, since he'd ordered me not to hurt him. Couldn't kill him-okay, not that I would have, but . . .
I dragged him feet first over to the leather couch, got him comfortably situated, and tried not to listen to the moaning. Oh, yeah, he was dreaming about me. I hoped I'd remembered to Scotchgard the couch.
"Do it," I said to Sara.
The Ifrit leaped on me, dug talons deep into my chest, and started to feed. After the first few seconds of agony . . .
. . . we were falling through the aetheric. Fast. Balled up together, inseparable, feeding on one another like an ouroboros. Falling like a meteor through the aetheric, up through higher levels, the weirdest sensation of gliding in a direction that wasn't up or down or sideways, here or there. I remembered the weirdness of the journey to Jonathan's house, even in the relatively familiar analog of the elevator. The Ifrit wasn't even trying to cloak this in familiar terms.
The aetheric was a minefield of disasters in progress. To the east, the furious storm was consuming power at a frightening rate; it was a towering whirlwind of coldlight and pure energy, and the few Wardens still fighting it were flickering, weak, and near to breaking. I didn't sense any other Djinn. The fires in Yellowstone lit up the plane like a supernova-consuming everything in all the realms of our reality, nearly obscured by a shell of the swirling blue sparks. No Wardens at all near that, now. And no Djinn.
We hurtled toward the center of the inferno. I tried to scream, but the Ifrit was drawing everything out of me, every ounce of power and will, and I was deadweight by the time we hit the fires. The pain was so intense I thought that it was over, I was gone, but then there was a sense of pushing through something viscous and thick, of being squeezed, and then a sudden unexpected release.
We tumbled down, fast, still locked together. She was still feeding off of me.
We slammed down onto something hard and unyielding, and I realized I'd been made flesh again, sans tacky French Maid getup;