Heat Stroke

I wanted to grin and say, “Done!” and rush out there and put the big Dji

“Dead,” he said. “Kill her dead. Slowly. Make her suffer.”

He was getting into it now. Which was not my intention. “Okay, let’s just—calm down.” Because the compulsion was getting stronger, the power flow cresting like the tide. “I will. I swear. But let’s talk about it first.” Because, luckily, he hadn’t specified now, the way he had when he’d sent me to Seacasket to commit arson and homicide. “Why?”

He gave me a dark look. “What do you care?”

I didn’t, really. I was too busy thinking about Yvette putting her hands all over the bottle that held David trapped, seducing Lewis so that i

Long silence. He flopped back down on the bed, sounding depressed. “She’s a bitch.”

“You’re going to run into them. Get used to it. In fact, pretty much all of us can be bitchy from time to time. Goes with the double-X chromosomes.” Just like Kevin was never going to win any Y-chromosome personality contests, either. “You can’t go around having me snuff out every life that a

“Why not?”

Ah, great, a sociopath in training. Again, not the conversational path I was eager to follow. “What’s she done to you, other than be a bitchy stepmom?”

He stared up at the pouting centerfold over his bed, put his hands under his head, and said, “She makes me do things.”

I had a bad feeling. “Like?” I was really, really hoping he’d say clean up the room, take out the trash…but one look around convinced me that couldn’t be true.

He sat up, grabbed the first thing that came to hand—a CD player—and threw it across the room hard enough to smash it to bits against the far wall. “What the fuck do you think I mean, say my prayers? Brush my teeth?” His flare of rage was sudden, violent, and totally untelegraphed. I had no reason to be afraid, but if I’d still been human I’d have felt utterly exposed. “She makes me do things, you stupid bimbo! Bad things!” He was blazing in Oversight, white-hot, as if some door had opened into hell. “I want it to stop!”

Oh, God. Not what I’d expected, not at all. Nor what I was even vaguely equipped to handle. I pitched my voice low. “Kevin, you can make that stop without killing her.”

“You don’t know shit about it.” Tears quivered in his eyes, jeweled his long, lush eyelashes. “God, you don’t understand… I can’t even tell you…”

“I know this. You have the power to make her stop, Kevin.” I edged over slowly, walking around the piles of wrinkled filthy clothes and discarded trash, to perch on the edge of the bed next to him. “You’re going to be a Warden. You have the power to control things around you. I don’t know if it’s weather, or fire, or earth—”

“Fire,” he said, and shut his eyes. “It’s fire.” Which explained the fury of the power that poured into me from him—it had the quality of fire to it. Out of nowhere, I remembered Rahel once telling me, Fire burns the hand it serves. Kevin was unstable, volatile, and he had way too much power at his disposal. I couldn’t believe the Wardens hadn’t already spotted him and started the process to neutralize or control him. If ever there was a reason for neutering someone, taking away their power… “I burned the house down. That’s how my dad died.”

I didn’t want to believe it, but I could sense the truth of it in him. God, such a burden for a sixteen-year-old boy. His father’s death, the crushing load of a developing talent of this magnitude, and if he was telling me the truth, some kind of sexual abuse… no wonder he was screwed up.

I wasn’t qualified for this. I wasn’t sure anybody was.

Kevin kept talking over my silence. “Bad Bob told me they’d come for me, take me away, but he said he’d protect me.” Yet another public service from Bad Bob Biringanine. Probably as a favor to Yvette, which meant he was banging Mrs. Prentiss before the late Mr. Prentiss had gone to smoke inhalation heaven. “Guess he won’t protect me now.”

Since I killed him. Right. I studied the frilly lace on my tiny, entirely useless apron. Prodded it with a fingernail, which was painted in hooker red. “So now you have me to protect you. Is that the general theory?”

“Sure. Nobody’s going to come after me if I have a kick-ass Dji

“And I think you should think about that a while.”

He rolled up on one elbow to stare at me. “Oh, I have. I’ve thought about it for years. I lay awake at night thinking about it. So you just go—”

“I should find out what she’s doing,” I blurted out. “You want me to kill her— What makes you think that she’s not ordering her new Dji

He was listening. Not talking, but I could feel him hanging on every word.

“Wouldn’t you like to know what she’s doing? I could find out. It wouldn’t be that hard. She’d never even know I was looking.”

No teenager could resist an opening like that. And a kid who’d been deprived of control his whole life… I was faintly ashamed of myself for feeding his paranoia, but not enough to stop myself.

Kevin wavered, frowned, and said, “You can do that?”

“If you order me to. I can be invisible. I can go anywhere for you.” And do anything, but it was best not to bring that up. I looked at him from under my eyelashes, pitched my voice low, and said, “It would be easier if I didn’t look quite so—unique. May I change my clothes?”

He sighed and flopped back in a boneless heap of surrender. “Whatever.”

I put the peachskin suit back on again, covered my eyes with sunglasses, and stood up. “So I can go?” I asked.

“Whatever.” He sounded hurt, and stubbornly put-upon. “Just come back. Tell me what she’s doing.” He snorted. “Like I don’t already know. She’s playing with her new toy.”

I paused, stricken, with one hand on the doorknob. I couldn’t get the images out of my head. Kevin threw an arm over his eyes. “I’m go

I escaped out into the hall, found my way back to the living room. Yvette was nowhere in sight. Neither was the blue bottle. Playing with her new toy… God, no. I had no idea what he meant, but it definitely didn’t sound good.

When I moved, I saw a definite fairy-dust afterglow. The coldlight infestation was growing in the real world, just like the aetheric. Of course, so far it didn’t seem to be doing anything inimical to me— just decorative. David didn’t seem to be suffering ill effects, either.

But then there was the storm, out in the Atlantic, powering up like some unstoppable juggernaut. It was still there, still growing, and it had to be the coldlight at the heart of it, didn’t it? Nothing else made sense.

One problem at a time. This second’s had to be Yvette, and getting David out of her well-manicured clutches.

First I had to make sure I couldn’t be noticed. I remembered the buzzing sensation that Rahel had used to conceal me at the Empire State Building… a certain frequency, a kind of invisible hum…