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her around and threw her in a violent, swinging arc that ended in a crushing impact with the ground thirty feet below, and with at least four rows of cars on her way into the parking lot. Rahel hit the ground, rolled, and came up fluidly to her hands and knees, looking for all the world like one of those clawed raptors from the dinosaur movies.

She vaulted up to the roof of the white van, where Detective Rodriguez might have noticed a slight weight displacement but wouldn't have seen a thing even if he'd looked out. She ran the length of it, then planted her feet and arced gracefully up into the air, heading straight for Ashan...

... who knocked her out of the air as easily as Babe Ruth swinging for the bleachers.

I could feel the disordered currents of energy in the air around me. The Djinn were causing instability, and dammit, there was nothing I could do about it.

Whatever damage had been done to my powers when I'd overextended and David had ... changed... wasn't fixing itself, and the energy Jonathan had thrust into me wasn't made for weather work.

Rahel flew bonelessly through the air, crashed to the pavement of the parking lot, and rolled about fifteen feet, arms and legs flopping.

And then she vanished into mist.

Poof.

Ashan turned his attention back to me.

I gulped and stood up, backing away. Not a lot of escape opportunities on the balcony.

"You know what I want," Ashan said, and held out his hand. His fingernails gleamed a kind of opal-silver in the twilight, and his eyes were as bright as moons. He might have been wearing a designer suit, but he was no kind of human. "Get the bottle."

"You can't even touch the bottle," I said. I meant it to come out cool and logical, but it sounded shaky. "Djinn can't-"

"Little girl, don't presume to tell me what Djinn can or can't do," he interrupted in a voice so low and cold that I felt ice form along my backbone. "I said get it."

"Or?"

"You don't want to test me." He took a measured step forward. I felt the ozone crackling in the air, felt the menace in the clouds overhead. Wispy things, but firming up as the disruptions in the aetheric mirrored themselves into the physical world... whipping, uncontrolled winds in the mesosphere; cold spots; a streak of heat from Ashan that cut through weather patterns like a spearhead.

I could feel the electricity in the air trying to find a way to ground itself.

He could fry me right here on the patio, and with my powers currently registering somewhere from zero to dead, I couldn't even defend myself. "David is fond of humans. I'm not. I don't care if I level this entire building to make my point."

"Djinn," I said, and forced a grin. "No sense of proportion."

I didn't see him move, but I felt the blow-hard enough to temporarily white out my nervous system and send me reeling to slam back against stucco and brick. I'd missed the plate-glass doors, at least. That was a relief. When sensation came flooding back, it brought with it a tide of stinging-hot ache along the side of my face. It had been an open-handed slap, but damn, he hadn't pulled it. I put my hand to my cheek and felt heat. My eyes were watering.

Ashan took another step forward. "I'm not interested in how clever you imagine yourself to be, and if you think your human body interests me, you're deluded," he said. "I only find it interesting in how many creative ways I might be able to take it apart. Now, go and get the bottle."

He couldn't touch the bottle. He couldn't take it away from me. Even Jonathan hadn't been able to do that. Was it a bluff? Or did he just want to know where it was?

I slipped open the sliding glass door and backed inside, then slammed it shut.

For all the good it would do, of course. Outside, Ashan stood silhouetted against the failing twilight, gray as a dead man, with those eyes swirling cold and silver.

"Hey," Sarah said. She was still deep in her culinary trance, doing something now involving bread and the oven. The kitchen smelled like rosemary and olive oil and roasting chicken. Heaven. I wished I could appreciate it; I was shaking, shaken, and