Chill Factor

Then she pulled up a chair next to me and said, "Nice to know you made it."

"Yeah, likewise." I shot a look at Kevin and Siobhan. "I guess you know Kevin."

She nodded politely to him, as if she weren't pla

Marion dismissed him, and focused her dark eyes on me. "You have it?"

I opened my fist to show her Jonathan's bottle. "I'd like to trade for something more valuable than your word. Not that I don't trust you, but… well, I don't trust you."

She removed a hand from her coat pocket and mutely displayed the blue glass bottle that Yvette Prentiss had used, not so very long ago, to trap a man willing to give up his life for me.

I reached out, slowly, and took the glass. No stopper in the bottle. It felt warm. "David," I whispered, and closed my eyes for a second in relief as the co

"Right here." I heard a chair scrape, and saw that he'd joined us at the table.

He looked utterly unchanged-auburn-flecked hair worn a little untidily, brown eyes flashing behind round gold-rimmed spectacles. An old-fashioned olive-drab coat over a faded blue plaid shirt. Blue jeans.

I sucked in a startled breath and felt my eyes sting with tears; the vision of him turned into a colorful blur. A blur that reached across empty space and cupped my cheek in its hand, and yes, that was his touch, warm and sweet and gentle. I leaned against it, breathing in the smell of old wool and ci

He was leaning close; I could feel the aura of him against me, the barely-there touch of his lips against my ear as he whispered, "I've been watching you." The shimmer of heat that ran through me turned me into honey and butter, made me think thoughts that I shouldn't be having in public, much less in front of people who might want to kill me.

"Could've helped me out a little," I said.

"You did fine." He kissed me, and all the thoughts were refined into sheer, unadulterated longing. I wanted him to keep kissing me, forever if that was possible. I couldn't imagine it ending, but of course it did, a slow withdrawal of those soft, delicious lips from mine.

I opened my eyes and looked straight into his, and saw them burning copper and gold, molten with love and longing and power.

This was what I'd been fighting for. What I'd fight for with every breath, every remaining day of my life.

"Anything I can do for you, master?" he whispered to me. "Or to you, anyway?"

I sucked in a superheated breath, trembling, and managed to be practical. "A purse to put this bottle in would be great, actually."

He reached under the table and pulled out a black leather bag, nothing designer-my bad for not specifying properly, really-and he'd thoughtfully included padding material. I slid the bottle inside and zipped it shut, then looped it bandolier-fashion over my head. I was not losing him. Not again. I'd break his bottle when we were out of this mess; I didn't like keeping him prisoner, but right now having David's power amplifying mine might keep us alive.

"Joa

Oh. Right.

Jonathan had given up on slot machines and had wandered back. He was standing behind my chair, and without turning around I knew that he was watching David. I could feel the crackle of power in the air. They weren't speaking, but there was conversation going on. Levels of power, emotion, give and take.

"Glad to get rid of it," I said sincerely, and held it out for Marion to accept.

Kevin had been waiting, and he took advantage of the chance. He slapped my hand, and the bottle went spi

"Jump ball," Jonathan murmured, and then turned serious again. "Crap."

I felt the surge at almost exactly the same time, and so did David, who threw himself over me. Something was coming. Something big. I could see it blowing up in the aetheric, big as a dragon and twice as fiery-no idea what it was, but it was huge and very, very scary.

"Get down!" Jonathan's voice roared through the casino, supernaturally loud, like an enraged drill instructor on the world's largest loudspeaker, and it wasn't surprising that every single person in sight who wasn't Jonathan dropped to the carpet like they'd been chopped off at the knees. There was some muffled screaming, but surprisingly little. I started worming my way across the floor toward where Jonathan's bottle had fallen, but David was in the way, and Kevin was elbow-walking that way, too. I lunged across David at the faint sparkle of glass in shadow, but I was too late; a hand was there before me.

Siobhan. She grabbed it and stuffed the bottle into the pocket of her jeans.

Jonathan had turned, watching her with narrow, dark eyes, like a predator about to eat something. I grabbed the girl's wrist. "Siobhan. He'll kill you. Give it to me!"

She went very pale. She hesitated, then pulled it out of her pocket and handed it over just as Kevin got into position to try to snatch it away. We had an undignified little wrestling match, which consisted of me yanking my hands away from his and him trying to pry my fingers open, muttering things about my mother that weren't very complimentary. Siobhan crab-walked backward, away from the fray.

"Quiet!" Jonathan snapped at us. We all froze. Then there was a surprisingly weighty, profound silence. And then there was the faintest tinkle of glasses on tables, going on for a few delicate seconds.

And then an earthquake hit like a bomb.

Maybe people screamed, I don't know; the first tremor rippled through the floor like a wave through a stormy ocean, and I was tossed sideways, rolled, fetched up against a railing that I grabbed onto for dear life as the building continued to pitch and roll. It was too loud to hear screaming over the jangling of alarms and bells and dying slot machines and breaking glass and shattering steel.

I had a lot of power. It was all useless. Weather was an ephemeral power; this was something deep, strong, relentless. I caught a flash of someone moving faster, coat flying, and saw David leaping over the rolling, rippling floor to land hard beside me. He threw himself on top of me, smothering my scream-I had been screaming, I realized from the raw ache in my throat-and I felt impacts against his body. Things hitting him. Things that would have crushed me.

Even a minor earthquake has a deeply unsettling effect, but a major one, like this, robs you of the ability to do anything but hang on and pray. I prayed, my hand locked a vise around the wrought-iron railing, and I heard David whispering in that liquid language of the Dji

And then I realized that I had the power to stop it. My left hand, the one not holding on in a death grip, was clutching Jonathan's bottle-which was, thankfully, still intact.

"Get off!" I yelled in David's ear. "Off!"

He rolled away into a fluid, inhuman crouch-the first time I'd really seen him betray his Dji