"He said - David, he said that his mother used Djinn against him." I couldn't even really bring myself to articulate the implications. "Did she?"

He was silent for a moment, apparently focused on steering around the traffic and increasing speed as the road opened up in front of us. The steel structure of the bridge flashed past in a blur, and I wondered if the speed wasn't more about David channeling anxiety than wanting us to get back home quickly. "You know she did," he said. His face was smooth, expressionless, and he'd changed his glasses now, darkened them to hide his eyes. "In many different ways."

I couldn't ask. I knew I should; I knew he'd tell me and it would be a relief if he did, maybe for us both, but I just . . . couldn't. I closed my eyes, rested my head against the window, and tried not to imagine David as Yvette Prentiss's slave.

As her weapon.

"Sleep," he murmured, and whether it was his influence or my own weariness, the steady roar of the tires and throb of the engine lured me down into the dark.

When I woke up, David was carrying me in his arms. I hadn't been carried like that by him, except when I was in danger or injured, in a long time, and it felt . . . wonderful. Hard not to appreciate the strength and surety of his body against mine, and his smile was gentle and deadly at such close range. "Good nap?" He set me down, and my feet sank into sand. I hastily stripped off the Manolos. Sacrilege, to walk on the beach in those. Also, awkward. It was night, and the surf curled in from the horizon in sweetly regular silver lines. It broke into lace and foam on the beach, and we were close enough to the water to feel the breath of spray.

"Where are we?" It wasn't Fort Lauderdale. The beach was too quiet, too secluded. It felt as if it had never been touched by humanity.

"Nowhere," he said. "In a sense, anyway. It's a place I come sometimes to be alone, when I'm troubled."

He was telling me something. I looked around. No lights on the horizon, no roads, no airplanes buzzing overhead. Just the beach, the surf, the breeze, the moon bright as a star overhead.

"This isn't real," I said.

"It's as real as we want it to be. Like Jonathan's house, beyond the aetheric." David shrugged slightly. "One of the benefits of being the Conduit is you can create your own realities if you feel the need."

"And . . . you feel the need."

He took my hand, and we walked a bit in the moonlight. It felt as if we were the first people to walk here, and I supposed we were. I didn't ask. He didn't volunteer. After a while, we rounded an irregular curve and I saw a low-burning fire ahead, warm and inviting. I knew, without a word being said, that we were supposed to sit down, and I settled into the cool sand without complaining about the damage to my dress. Besides, my dress was still on my sleeping body, somewhere out there.

David took a seat beside me. The fire snapped and popped and flared like a real flame, and it warmed like one, too. I stretched out my hands toward it. As real as we want it to be, he'd said.

Like the two of us, together.

"The question you won't ask me is, did Yvette ever force me to abuse her stepson," David said. "The answer is no. Not in the way you're thinking."

I have to admit, a weight of dread rolled away, and I must have given an audible sigh of relief. But David wasn't finished.

"What she did force me to do was to bring him to her, and watch," he said. "Yvette always did like an audience. Kevin avoids me because I'm part of those memories. I'm bound up with all the sex and pain and horror of it. So yes, I was part of it, even though I never - I never hurt him. I wanted to destroy her for it. I wanted to rip her apart into so many pieces not even God could find a trace."

I heard the ring of hate in his voice, real as what I'd heard from Kevin. He meant it, and I ached for him, too. "But you didn't, because you couldn't. You were as powerless as Kevin to stop her."

He said nothing to that. The Djinn were not comfortable with the idea of powerlessness; in a sense, it was worse now than ever, because they had thousands of years of slavery to try to put into some kind of context. He hurt, and I couldn't help him. Not with that.

"I'm telling you this because Kevin doesn't trust me," he said. "And that's part of the reason I sent Rahel with him. He's a bit fascinated with her, like most humans seem to be, and she's got no history for him to fix on. If he can trust any Djinn, he'll trust her. But he'll never truly trust me."

This felt so intimate that it frightened me. He came here to face his fears, face his history, and there was a lot of that to get through - more than I'd ever be able to understand. He could read my life at a glance, if he chose, and that more than anything else made me feel disadvantaged.

David put his arm around me, and I leaned against him. We both stared at the fire for a long time before he said, "My birth mother was like you. Strong, like you. Beautiful. Willful, which gave my father plenty of heartaches; it was a time when women were more constrained by society, or at least had fewer choices in how to misbehave. She taught me many things, but one of the things she gave me was a love of learning, and that was rare then. Not even the sons of kings were learned; it wasn't considered manly."

I closed my eyes and breathed in the night, the peace. Maybe this wasn't real, but it had a kind of solemnity to it that we couldn't get out there, in the daily whirl of life.

"Tell me about her," I said, and snuggled closer to his warmth. "Tell me everything."

And he did.

Chapter Eight

When I actually did wake up, we were still driving, and I wasn't sure that I hadn't dreamed the whole thing until David looked over at me. He had an expression, open and vulnerable, unlike any he'd ever really shown me before. I'd never even realized how armored he was before, until the armor was removed.

"I wanted to tell you all that," he said. "I'm sorry I didn't before, but there never seemed to be time. Always something happening with you. And it usually involves explosions."

"That's an exaggeration," I replied with great dignity. "Things hardly ever explode. They burn, they shake, and occasionally they break, but explosions aren't my thing."

"Point taken." He gave me an assessing look, and took the next exit. "You need a break."

"Buster, you need to learn how to take them, too. If you intend - "

"To live like a human, yes, I know. I'll start tomorrow. First thing. For tonight, I just want to get you safely home."

Home. I imagined the soft bed, imagined waking up with him, and imagined that it would be like that every day for the rest of my life.

It seemed too precious to be true.

The truck stop where we pulled off the freeway was one of those open-all-night places that specialized in everything, from deli sandwiches to wind chimes. After investigating the facilities, which were scrupulously clean, I browsed the snack aisles and stocked up on road food, looked over the DVDs, rummaged through the books, thought about purchasing those wind chimes, and finally ended up with nothing but a bag of chips and a cold soft drink at the register. No sign of David. I wondered where he'd gone off to; maybe he was still in the car.

I collected my purchases and went outside. No, the Mustang was empty. I went back inside, strolled the aisles, saw nobody I recognized. Somewhere inside, a slight tightening started in the vicinity of my stomach. I walked faster, looked harder.

Nothing.

"Excuse me," I said to the guy behind the counter. "I came in with a guy, a little taller than you, brownish hair, kind of long - "

"He left," the guy said. "Said he'd be right back. I figured he'd just gone out to the car or something. He's not out there?"

I checked again. No sign of David anywhere. I waited out in the darkness, indecisive, and paced. Manolo Blahniks weren't meant to be paced in, but I wasn't taking off my shoes on the stained concrete of Moe's All-Niter, either.

I finally stopped and said, "David?" Just in case he was there and watching, though why he'd do that I couldn't imagine.

Someone answered me, but it wasn't David. "He's gone," said a little girl, standing in the shadows at the edge of the building. She didn't move, but she emerged from the darkness, as though the lights had brightened around her, and I saw that it was Venna. Venna was one of the most puzzling Djinn I'd ever met, and that was saying a lot; she was the only one I'd ever seen who preferred the form of a child, and she usually liked to dress in Alice in Wonderland-style blue, with a white pinafore. Long blond hair, held back by a simple band, and big china blue eyes.

There was absolutely nothing human about her right now. The clothes - the body - were a disguise.

I took a long step toward her. "What the hell did you do to him?" I blurted. "Where is he?" Showing aggression probably wasn't the smartest thing to do in this situation; Venna could be deadly, although she'd also been my friend more often than not, and saved my life a few times. Putting her on my bad side wasn't a good career move.

But I couldn't stop myself.

She didn't react. Her hands stayed folded, but her eyes flashed a more intense blue, just for a second, and I found myself unable to advance. My heart raced, and I shuddered in every muscle, trying to fight, but it was useless. She had me shut down.

"Ready to listen now?" she asked mildly. "I'm sorry, but you're angry. I'm just trying to be sure you don't hurt yourself."

I hadn't known Venna was capable of doing this. I hadn't known any Djinn could do this, not so easily. Not against someone of my strength level.

As if she were reading my mind, too, she smiled. "Don't be scared," she said. "It's only because you have so much power, so many ways to get inside you. If you were any other Warden, I couldn't do it at all."

"Except for Lewis," I managed to say, and her smile took on dimples.

"I'd never do this to Lewis. Lewis would never make me."

As always, there was this subtle tone in her voice when she mentioned his name - all the Djinn had it, a kind of puzzlement, or awe. I'd gotten to my current status as a triple-threat Warden, controlling weather, fire, and earth, through a series of circumstances -  died, reborn as a Djinn, then reconstituted as a human, then granted Earth powers by my half-Djinn daughter turned Earth Oracle.

Lewis had just been born that way. One in a thousand years, I'd been told, and nobody since the original - Jonathan, later leader of the Djinn - had displayed so much raw power from the outset.

If I were Lewis, that comparison alone would make me very, very nervous about my future.

Venna studied me for a moment, then nodded. I felt the force gripping my muscles let go. I lurched forward, then got control and glared at her. It had all the impact of an ant glaring at a galaxy a few billion miles away.

"David has been summoned," she said. "He'll return to you as soon as he can."

"Summoned? Who summoned him?"

That earned me a pitying look. "Who can?"

Oh. Mother Earth. I couldn't fight that, and neither could he, whatever his original intentions. "Why would she do that?"

"Her reasons are her own. Perhaps she wants to keep him away from you for a while."

"Why?"

Venna shrugged. "Some say you're corrupting him."

"You're sure Ashan doesn't have some ulterior motive here?" Because for better or worse, Venna had gone with Ashan when the Djinn had split between Old and New; I didn't think she belonged there, because she seemed genuinely curious about humanity, if not exactly caring. "What's going on?"

Venna shrugged. Not her business to wonder such things. "I was just dispatched to reassure you."

"You're doing a great job so far."

She cocked her head, her gaze growing sharper. "Is it true? That David intends to pretend to be human for the rest of your life?"

I cleared my throat. "We're getting married, if that's what you mean."

It obviously was. Her cute little-girl face scrunched into a frown. "Why?"

"If you have to ask, there's no way I can explain it."

"Are your sexual encounters not currently satisfying? "

"Venna! I know you're not a child, but really, that's just creepy. And personal."

She looked surprised, then thoughtful. "So many rules," she sighed. "All right. I accept that I will not understand your reasons. But do you understand the risks? There are many of your people who won't approve. Many who don't like the Djinn at all, and want us to leave you alone."

"Can't imagine why," I said dryly. "You're all just so darned nice."

There was that smile again, mischievous and dimpled. I thought she must have copied it from a young Shirley Temple, but for all I knew, it could have been a young Cleopatra. She didn't take the bait.

"How long is he going to be gone?" I asked. She shrugged. "Well, should I wait?" Another tiny shrug, as if it didn't even matter enough to her to waste the energy on a gesture of indifference. "Let me say it another way: Can I go?"

Venna rolled her eyes, a shockingly human gesture for her. "Please," she said. "Go. I do have better things to do."

And she misted away, just like that. I was on my own.

I felt alone, driving away from the truck stop; I'd entered it feeling peaceful and excited and happy, and now I was back to living on the edge. All because Mommy Earth had yanked David's leash. That could happen any time, and I'd forgotten about it, or wanted to. The car felt empty without him, and I felt exposed. So much for my 24/7 protection, I thought, but then I felt guilty. Was that why I wanted him? To make myself feel safe? Boo. Boo on me.