Heat Stroke

He did, and he didn’t like it. David frowned. “Jonathan, a week’s not long enough—”

“It’s what she’s got,” he interrupted. “Be grateful. I don’t even have to do that much.” He turned to me, and I found myself standing straighter. “You. You understand what I just said?”

“I have a week to figure this out or I die. Got it.”

“No, you don’t,” Jonathan corrected. Those dark, cold eyes weighed me and found me wanting, again. “David’s just said that he won’t let go. If I cut the cord and he doesn’t release the hold, you both bleed to death up there on the aetheric, and nobody can help you. Not me, not anybody. Get it?”

I swallowed hard. “Yeah.”

“This is on you now. You fix this, or you might take him with you.”

David, dying for me because I dropped the ball? No way in hell. “I will,” I said. “I promise.”

“Good. Glad we’re in agreement.”

I wasn’t prepared for it, so when hands closed around me from behind and yanked me into an iron-hard embrace, I squeaked like a field mouse instead of fighting back. The hands that held me were feminine, perfectly groomed, with fingernails glossed in bright neon yellow.

“Don’t fight me,” Rahel’s voice whispered in my ear. “Neither one of us has a choice in this.”

David whirled to face us, but Jonathan held out a hand and instantly David was frozen, unable to move. His face was chalky and strained, his eyes molten, but he was helpless.

“Here’s the deal,” Jonathan continued. “I need David with me right now, Dji

I didn’t, but I discovered that I couldn’t say a word, anyway. I threw a desperate look at David, and found him just as horrified, if not more. I could practically feel the no! vibrating the air between us.

“Master,” Rahel said. “Where do I take her?”

Jonathan’s narrow dark eyes swept over me one last time. Judging me like a drill sergeant assessing a particularly scrawny new recruit.

“Patrick,” he said. “Take her to Patrick.”

David let out a strangled cry of protest, but it was too late. The world—Jonathan, David, the cabin— disappeared around me as Rahel took me out of the world.

And then, with no sense of transition at all, we were standing in an alley in Manhattan. Well, Rahel was standing in an alley in Manhattan; I was drifting around like Pigpen’s dirt cloud trying to figure out how to put my skin on again. Crap. I’d never get the lime green Manolos right.

Rahel crossed her arms and stared at the not-space where I was. Amused. She inspected her flawless fingernails and evidently decided that neon yellow was no longer the color of the day; her pantsuit morphed to a hot tangerine, and her nails took on a rich sunset blend of orange, gold, and blue. Even the beads in her hair changed to amber and carnelian.

“Still waiting,” she said, and wiggled her fingers to inspect the effect. Evidently it wasn’t impressive enough; she added some rings, nothing too flashy, then turned her attention back to me. “Come on, Snow White, we don’t have all week.”

Keep your pants on, I thought at her. She must have heard it, because she raised one eyebrow in a very Spock-like gesture of amusement.

“The issue, I think, is your pants, not mine.”

I slowly formed myself, inside out. Faster than before. By the time the skin came on, I was already moving on to the clothing, adding it rapidly from the templates I’d created earlier. Zip, zoom. Maybe five seconds. Not so bad.

The shoes looked good. I leaned over and admired them, decided I really needed toenail polish, and went for matching lime green.

When I looked back up, Rahel was smiling. The friendly expression disappeared as soon as I noticed it. “What?” I asked.

She shook her head, beads tinkling in her braids. “Nothing. It’s just that your personal style might even be more untraditional than mine. Quite a feat, little one.”

“We going to stand in a stinky alley all day talking fashion?”

“Not that we couldn’t, but perhaps it isn’t the best plan.” She started walking toward the mouth of the long brick tu

I clumped along after her—if one could be said to clump in shoes this fabulous. I picked my footing carefully, avoiding the puddles of God-knew-what and the shapeless heaps of God-didn’t-even-want-to-know-what. Rahel reached the end of the alley, took a sharp right and fell into the traffic flow. I hurried to keep up with her long-legged strides. It really was a beautiful day; the sun caressed my skin, covered me in a sweet warm blanket of energy that I sucked in greedily. Around us, a constant symphony of honking cars, sirens, loud voices—energy to spare. You gotta love New York City. Kick the crap out of it, and it just rolls over and comes back for more. Me and the Big Apple had that in common. That and a certain brash, trashy style.

“So who’s Patrick?” I asked, eventually. “Friend of yours?”

Rahel’s snort was rich with disgust. “No. We don’t travel in the same circles.”

Wow, even in the world of the Dji

“Nothing. We’re only very different.”

“Yeah? How? He into the business casual look?”

I earned a narrow, amused look from beast gold eyes. “He thinks the best way to learn to be a Dji

I missed a step. Rahel kept on walking, but slowed enough to let me catch up. “And this is the guy you’re taking me to?”

“Neither of us has a choice,” she pointed out. “I am bound to obey Jonathan’s orders. So are you.”

“Yeah, speaking of that, why?”

She shot me a wide-eyed look, and her hot amber eyes were nearly human in their surprise. “Why what?”

“Why do you obey him?”

She shook her head gently. “I do not have the time or energy to teach you all of Dji

Maybe for her, but I wasn’t used to taking orders without the chance to argue about it first. Still, no point in arguing with Rahel. I knew from experience that she could crush me like an ant. “So where is this guy?”

She pointed. I blinked.

“You’re kidding,” I said. Straight ahead, at the end of her pointing finger like she’d conjured it up out of the ground, stood the huge stone and steel tower of the Empire State Building. Well, the blurry outlines of it. We were a long walk away. “Do these look in any way like L.L. Bean hiking boots to you?”

Rahel flashed me a blinding, sharp-toothed smile. “Then put on comfortable shoes.”

I sighed and fell into step with her. Some days, it just doesn’t pay to have fashion sense.

New York is interesting on every level, but especially on the aetheric. In the physical world it’s layered like a wedding cake, history on history; dig far enough down in those sandhog ru

It was brighter today than it had been the last time I’d seen it, a kind of fierce pride spiking from every structure, even the tenements tainted by anger and despair.

The Twin Towers still existed, on the aetheric plane. When we came into a space where the buildings would have once been visible, I stood and gaped, feeling cold prickles all over my not-quite-human skin. The ghosts of the two buildings rose like glittering ice into the gray sky.