Firestorm by Rachel Caine Page A

a compromising position for the delight of the tabloid media, and be on my merry way.” He listened to my furious silence. I could feel a grin coming off the phone, like radiant heat. “I was thinking something from the oeuvre of the Hillside Strangler. Nothing like the classics.”
    â€œYou fucking son of a—”
    â€œ I want a Djinn. I don’t care about your technical issues. You’re thoroughly resourceful when you need to be—I’ve seen that firsthand. No, your lovely sister stays with me until you come through for me. In the meantime, she suffers whatever I see fit to make her suffer, which I promise you will get progressively worse the longer you take to satisfy me. And if I feel you haven’t done your level best to get me what I want, well…you’ll follow the breathless coverage about her bad, sad end on the news.”
    My free hand was in a fist, clenched tight. I didn’t remember doing it, and deliberately relaxed until the white knuckles loosened up. “You won’t get anything by threatening her. There are other things happening, in case you’re not aware. Bad things. I can’t just—”
    â€œYeah,” he interrupted. “Dead Wardens littering the landscape, very sad, I’m devastated, et cetera. But in short, bugger your problems, darling, because my problems are the priority. I’ll give you exactly two days to settle your little difficulties and make arrangements to get me what I want, and no tricks, or I swear to you, your sister will not leave a pretty corpse, are we understood?”
    â€œYes,” I said. “Yes, we’re understood.”
    â€œThen it’s been a slice, love, and you watch yourself. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to you before I get what I want. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I hear the water shutting off in the bath. I have to go do your sister.”
    He hung up before I could fire off anything I’d regret later. The number was blocked, of course. I sank down on the bed again, exhausted and aching and angry as hell, with nowhere to put all that nervous dread. Not like my sister’s life could count for any more than the hundreds of thousands of people who were in danger, or the millions—billions—in the balance if we didn’t figure out how to make things right again.
    Bones and dust, corpses turning to petroleum. Sunflowers nodding placidly over a graveyard. Had I just been dreaming? Or was Jonathan—the spirit of Jonathan, anyway—trying to tell me something important?
    Two days. Not enough time. Not enough time for anything.
    I felt tears coming, and choked them back furiously. I was not going to let that bastard make me cry, and I was not going to think about him standing in that steam-fogged bathroom, wiping beads of water from my sister’s naked back while she smiled innocently at him in the mirror.
    No, I wasn’t going to think about that at all.
    Okay, maybe I was.
    I curled up on the bed, hurled the alarm clock across the room in a satisfying crunch of plastic, and put my pillow over my head to sob out my fury and pain. That was supposed to be cathartic, but mostly it seemed to result in aching muscles, sinuses packed with fluid, and raw, abused eyeballs.
    I needed to blow my nose. When I reached for a tissue from the bedside box, my fumbling fingers met warm flesh, helpfully handing one over.
    I lifted my head slowly from the smothering embrace of the pillow, and gasped.
    â€œAren’t you going to take that?” David asked. I looked down. My fingers were clenched on the tissue in his hand, but I hadn’t made any move to claim it. I slowly pulled it toward me.
    David was sitting in a chair a couple of feet away, watching me with his head tilted a little to one side. His eyes were more brown than bronze, just now, lazy behind the concealing round glasses. Relaxed. He was wearing a familiar outfit of a blue checked shirt and faded