“Never mind.” He obviously hadn’t read Dr. Seuss as a child. Then again, neither had I. “Get going before I decide to wish myself off the island.”
I was smiling, but Cale’s frown only deepened. “Do me a favor and don’t mention the W-word again, even in jest. Don’t give him any excuse to grant you something and call his work done.”
Paranoid, much?But I nodded as images of singed cities and scorched corpses flashed behind my eyelids. Xaphan couldnotgo free. Not even by accident.
“I’ll be right back.” Cale leaned forward and kissed me. Then, before I’d recovered from that not-unpleasant surprise, he took off across the beach and dove into the water, as if we were in Maui in July, rather than Maine in October. And I hadn’t noticed a single chill bump on his skin. Not that I was exactly looking…
“Is that what you wish for?” Xaphan asked from directly behind me.
I nearly jumped out of my skin, my left hand going automatically for my gun. I hadn’t heard him approach. Nor had I heard him breathing. Did djinnis even breathe?
“Iswhatwhat I wi—” I barely caught my slip up in time for a rephrase. “What are you talking about?”
The djinni stepped forward, stopping by my right arm, in which I held Cale’s clothing, because I wasn’t willing to tie up my gun hand. “The water sprite,” he said. “Is he what you wish for? I can give him to you, if you only say the word.”
I could get Cale on my own, if I wanted him. Hell, I’d alreadyhadhim, once.
My ponytail slapped my cheeks as I shook my head. “No. Absolutely not.” I turned, intending to chew the djinni out face-to-face and set the record straight. “I don’t want anything from y—”
I choked on my own words. Or maybe on surprise.
The knee breeches were gone, as was the slitted silk doublet. And the high, cuffed boots. Xaphan now wore a dark pair of Levis and a gray cable-knit sweater peeking through an unzipped gray-on-black snow jacket.
“What the hell happened to your clothes?” I demanded, stepping back to see him better in the moonlight.
“You seem to like these better.” The djinni indicated his new ensemble with an all-inclusive, sweeping hand gesture.
My eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why do you say that?”
“You clutch at those as if they have great value to you.”
“What?” I glanced down at the bundle of clothes Cale had given me to hold, and that’s when I realized that Xaphan had somehow produced for himself exact replicas of everything Cale had been wearing. At least that I could see. And I wasnotgoing to check his underwear for consistency.
“I’m notclutchingthem,” I insisted, though the djinni looked less than convinced. “I’m holding them so they won’t get wet while he goes for the boat.”
“Of course.” His condescending smile said he didn’t believe me. “Is this more appropriate for the current year?”
I nodded, impressed yet unnerved by the ability to pull new clothes from thin air.Could he do the same thing with weapons? Did djinn evenneedweapons?
“You long for something very badly. I can feel it in your very presence. What is it you want, if not the sprite?”
It’s not that Idon’twant the sprite…
“Nothing. I have everything I could possibly want already.”
Xaphan shook his head slowly. “Another lie. Your request sits on the very tip of your tongue, yet you won’t speak it. Why?”
“Because it doesn’t matter.” I sighed, staring at Cale, who was climbing onto the ski boat at that very moment, to avoid looking into the djinni’s eerie black eyes. “I didn’t free you to earn a wish. I smashed your box to keep the imps from doing it. And very soon, we’re going to stuff you into a new box, then let the nymphs tow you out to deep sea, where no one will ever have to worry about you again.”
Xaphan laughed, a deep, ringing sound that rolled across my skin the way Orthus’s growl reverberated in my skull. Irritated, I turned on him. “What’s so damn funny?”
“You speak with absolute confidence, as so few humans do. You are arrogant and sure—amazingly so for a woman. And you have dark urges.Manydark urges. They swirl around you in a cloud of anger. So much rage in one so small…” He paused, and I could swear I saw his irises swell, taking over space from the whites of his eyes. “We could have fun together, little Lex. Such fun, if you would but say the word.”
At the moment, the only word on my mind was a profanity, and my darkest urge was to stuff a certain djinni into the nearest empty whiskey bottle and throw him into the deep end of the ocean. “I don’t need anything from you. Not a thing. What I want, I take for myself.”
“Yet there is something you hunger for. Something you cannot claim on your own. Power, maybe? Do you crave the authority a woman cannot wield alone?”
This timeIlaughed, a short, harsh barking sound. “These days, thereisno authority a woman cannot wield. Humans are more complicated than you remember; they want more than shelter and security. They heat food with the press of a button and kill with one squeeze of the trigger. They fly through the air in big metal tubes, crossing the planet in a matter of hours. Women have power, ambition, and seats of authority that wereearned, not granted. And firefighters…” My lips curved into a tight smile as I told him the best part. “They drench flames with huge quantities of water and chemicals shot from high-pressure nozzles or dropped from ships in the sky. Times have changed, Xaphan.Peoplehave changed. You can either roll with those changes or be rolled overbythem. Trust me.”
