Chill Factor

"Bite me. I'm not playing twenty questions; my head hurts." I was being bitchy. I couldn't help it. "You can't keep me prisoner here. I insist that you-"

His hand came down over my lips, stilling them. I continued to make cranky muffled noises for a few more syllables, then fell silent.

"You got no rights here, and you don't insist. You want to play rough, we'll play."

Qui

"Think a lot of yourself, don'tcha?" His smile was gallows-dark. "I don't. Somebody does."

"Who? Lazlo? Ashworth?" I made rude noises. "They already got their pound of electrocuted flesh out of me. Why can't I hit the road?"

"To do what? Get tossed out a window by that kid and his pet Dji

"Yeah. Great plan. Chock-full of foresight. Loved the whole bashing-my-brains-out part."

"I think there was something a little personal in the cane thing."

I couldn't exactly deny that one. Before I could find a suitably snarky reply, there was a knock at the door. Qui

"How's the head?" he asked. I shot him a filthy look. "Look on the bright side, sweetheart, you looked terrific. If you're going to go down in flames, you might as well do it in style. Great dress. You buy that here?"

I wanted to throw something at him, but the only thing available was a pretty new shoe, and I didn't have the heart. I settled for a superior hmph and settled down on the pillows again, a forearm over my eyes.

"Want an aspirin?"

"No."

"Good for you, tough guy. Now, you want to tell me what all that display downstairs was about?"

I massaged the bridge of my nose, where the headache seemed to be hiding. "I wanted to get to Kevin. To warn him."

"About…?"

"You're going to kill him."

"Well, yeah." He sounded surprised. "Obviously."

"You don't have to do that. And there's a girl with him. She's got nothing to do with this."

"Siobhan?" Qui

"You know her?"

"Busted her a few times." He shrugged. "She's a tough girl, and no civilian. She gets caught in the middle, I'm not wasting any tears."

He finally found what he was looking for in the bag and brought it out. A long black case about the length of his arm. He set it on the bed, flipped it open, and started assembling pieces.

He meant the line-of-fire thing literally.

He was putting together a rifle, a fine shiny one with a red-tinted scope. I stared at him in silence for a few seconds before I realized what he was showing me.

"You're going to shoot him," I said, and sat up. I didn't let the rodeo-bucking world stop me. When things got uncertain, I wrapped a hand in the collar of Qui

"You say that like it's easy." Qui

I had to admit, he was right. It was a solution. So long as you didn't have any qualms about putting a high-velocity round through a kid's brain, it was the perfect answer. "You can't do this, Qui

"He's a killer," Qui

"Yeah? Does the AARP executive committee downstairs know what you're about to do?"

Qui

"They know you're a cold-blooded killer."

"Sticks, stones. You know why you've got a headache? You think too much." Qui

"Nobody I want to meet, I'll bet."

He ignored me. He picked up the telephone and dialed four numbers. "Yeah," he said. "She's awake. Better get over here. She's kind of feisty."

I subsided, waiting. Realized that I was still wearing the ьber-expensive raw silk dress. Unfortunately, Qui

Maybe David was even deeper undercover than I was.

Knock on the door. Qui

Oddly, I wasn't surprised to see that it was Lewis. Well, I was surprised, but seeing him again seemed inevitable, really. I'd been expecting the other Lewis-shoe to drop, and now, looking at him, it did. He'd made it to Vegas-actually, for him it had probably been easy; the wards would have passed him right through without any Warden powers, and besides, I'd been waiting for him to make an appearance. He'd arranged for me to get abducted. He'd stood by and allowed me to be killed. He had a plan, and it just had to be a jim-dandy one, so long as you weren't on the receiving end of it.

He looked terrible. Grayer in his flesh, and his eyes were bloodshot. Hands trembling as they gripped his cane-unlike Ashworth, his wasn't for flash; it was for support. He moved like an old man. Qui

I would not feel sorry for him. No way. I refused.

"You okay?" he asked me. His voice sounded exactly the same, a warm tenor, slightly rough, like velvet stroked against the grain.

"Oh, hell, yeah. Never better," I said, and tried to look as if I were leaning against the headboard for effect rather than support. "I should've known. This had your smell all over it. I was such an idiot, you know; here I thought all these years you'd spent avoiding the Wardens you'd been out doing good, spreading rainbows and happy horseshit. You were working for the opposition."

"No," Lewis said wearily. "I started the opposition. Not that it was totally my idea; there were a lot of us who saw what was happening with the Wardens. I was just the force that pulled it together. The Ma'at started operation about seven years ago, officially. Since then, we've been doing our best to mitigate the worst of the Wardens' excesses."

"Yeah, you're the hero here. Modest as usual," I snapped back. "So what's your excuse? The Wardens wouldn't let you be king of the world, so you found a bunch of stodgy old farts who would?"

Qui

"No." Lewis continued meeting my eyes solidly. "Jo, after I ran from the Wardens, I spent a lot of time trying to find out just why they were so afraid of me. I found out a lot more than I bargained for. I know you want to believe the Wardens are good… I did, too. We trusted them with everything we are- we let them mold us and train us and shape us. But they shaped us wrong. And what they've done to the Dji