"He's . . . not what I would have expected." The Djinn had always had a touch of the eldritch about them, but Ortega seemed . . . normal. His eccentricities were more like what you'd expect from a dot-com genius who'd cashed out of the Internet game early and sailed away on his golden parachute.
The door to the guesthouse swung silently open for us as we walked up the steps. Night-blooming flowers poured perfume out into the air, and I stopped to drink it all in. The cool ocean breeze. The clear night air. Rolling surf.
David, gilded silver by the moonlight.
"What are you thinking?" he asked me, and stepped close. Our hands entwined, and I crossed the small, aching distance between us. Our bodies fit together, curves and planes. He let out a slow breath and closed his eyes. "Oh. That's what you're thinking."
I put my arms around his neck. "I'd be crazy if I wasn't," I said. "Look, it's been driven home to me today that we're living in a bubble. If it's not the damn reporters sneaking hidden-camera footage, it's the Sentinels trying to wipe us out. If we have even a second of safety and solitude, I don't think we should waste it."
"I've been wanting to get you out of that dress all day." His voice dropped low and quiet, barely a murmur in my ear. I felt my pulse jump and my skin heat in response. "Jo, I don't want to go on like this. I can't stand knowing that at any moment they could come for you again. If I lose you - " His hands moved through my hair, urgent and possessive. "If I lose you - " He couldn't finish the sentence.
We both knew that he was going to lose me, in the end. But it was the fullness of time, the richness of time, from now until then that would make that pain of parting something worth bearing.
"I love you," I said, and his mouth found mine. He tasted of tears, but I saw no trace of them in his eyes or on his face. "No more mourning. I'm here. While I'm here, we're together."
"Yes." Another soul-deep kiss that left my knees weak and every nerve tingling. "We'd better go inside. Security cameras. Wouldn't want to shock the guards."
"Mmmmmm." He'd destroyed my ability to form words that didn't include adjectives, such as faster and more.
David picked me up and carried me across the threshold . . . and stopped. He had no choice. The entire room was filled with cartons, floor to ceiling, rows and rows and rows of them.
And each one was neatly labeled MISC.
"Ortega!" he bellowed, and let me down. "Dammit - "
The other Djinn popped in with an audible displacement of air, standing outside the door. He looked past us, at the makeshift warehouse, and seemed a little embarrassed. Just a little. "Well," he said, "I did warn you that I needed to clean up."
That wasn't messy; it was obsessive-compulsive. I'd met a Djinn with a behavioral disorder. Now that was new.
Ortega did something I couldn't quite follow, and two columns of boxes disappeared - probably moved into the mansion, I guessed. He gave David a questioning look, then sighed and repeated the maneuver with all the boxes in view.
"Any other rooms?" he asked.
"Bedroom," David and I said together. Ortega's eyebrows rose. "Please," I added. "Umm - bathroom. And kitchen."
"Done."
And it was. The areas I could see, at least; I had no doubt that if I opened up a closet (or for that matter, a drawer) I'd see more of Ortega's collecting fetish, but right now, the only things that mattered to me were open space and privacy.
Ortega was waiting for something, watching David, and once again I caught a hint of something otherworldly in him, something not quite in sync with the harmless human exterior he projected. "I have what you asked me to find," he said. "When you're ready to see it."
David had been looking at me, but now his gaze cut sharply toward the other Djinn. "You have it? Here?"
"In the main house. It's warded. I can't open it myself."
"What is it?" I asked. If I'd only left it alone, we might have been able to ignore the tempting, dangling bait and go on to a fevered night of fulfilling every delicious, decadent fantasy, but noooooo. I just had to ask.
Ortega's face brightened. "The Ancestor Scriptures. "
David went very still. I sensed whatever chance we had to forget all this and hit the sheets vanishing like mist in sunlight. "You persuaded the Air Oracle to give it up?"
"No." The Djinn's smile widened, inviting us to join him, but David didn't, and I had no idea what we were smiling about. "I persuaded the Air Oracle to let me make a copy. You have no idea what I had to give up for that."
I'd met the Air Oracle once; it wasn't one of my most treasured memories. I'd had lots of scary encounters, but the Air Oracle had been one of the strangest, most remote, most malevolent creatures I'd ever met.
The fact that Ortega had charmed something out of him/her was fairly damn impressive.
David glanced at me, and I saw the frustrated apology in his expression before he said, "I have to take a look. This could be important."
My hormones were not understanding, but my brain tried to be. "I know. Mind if I look, too?"
"I want you with me," David said, and he meant it on a whole lot of levels. I smiled, and he turned his attention back to Ortega, who was waiting with a polite, attentive smile. "Main house, you said?"
Ortega nodded and blipped out, then almost immediately blipped back, looking chagrined. "You can't travel so quickly, can you?" he said to me. "I do apologize. We'll walk."
The stroll back to the main house was just as lovely as the first time, only with less anticipation of fun to come. Still, the destination was certainly interesting; when Ortega led us through the front door, I was struck once again by the incredible scale of the place. The massive chandelier overhead, loaded down with an entire year's production of Swarovski crystals, glittered like a captured galaxy. The ceiling was as tall as any respectable opera house lobby, and the foyer was just about big enough to stage a road-show production of Aida, complete with elephants. There was a sweeping grand staircase, of course, with all the usual marble and mahogany features.
What didn't quite fit in this oh-so-upscale setting was the clutter. Boxes piled randomly against walls, paintings (nice ones, at that, to my relatively untutored eye) leaning against the boxes, knickknacks, and gadgets strewn over every flat surface. It was like walking into one of those clutter stores, crammed with bargains and cool finds, if only you can contain your sense of claustrophobia long enough to find them. My eyes couldn't focus for long on any one thing.
If every room was like the foyer . . .
"Sorry." Ortega shrugged. "There's never enough room. This way. Watch your step."
There were boxes on the staircases, too, all labeled, unilluminatingly, MISC. I wondered if they were the ones he'd banished from the guesthouse, but I was more afraid they weren't, actually. At the top of the stairs he took a right, edging around another bulwark of stacked cardboard, and led us into what should have been a spacious - no, gracious - room. It was a library, old style, with floor-to-high-ceiling shelves. An honest-to-God rotunda, and a sliding ladder on rails.
He kept books in the library, but it was about five times more books than could safely fit on the shelves. The stacks teetered and leaned everywhere, and of course there were the inevitable boxes. These were labeled, not very helpfully, BOOKS.
Ortega blazed a trail through the maze and brought us to what must have been one of the few open spaces in the entire house. There was a massive podium, all of carved black wood, decorated with leaves and vines, and on it lay a closed, massive book with an iron latch, secured with a simple iron peg. No title was on the worn, pale leather cover.
Ortega stood back and indicated it with one graceful wave. David stepped up to the podium, studying it, and reached out to touch the latch.
It knocked his hand back with a sharp, sizzling zap of power.
"I thought you said it was a copy," David said, rubbing his fingers against his jeans.
"It is. An exact copy. And I believe I did say it was warded." Arms folded, Ortega watched with half-closed eyes, looking like nothing so much as an eccentric Buddha.
David nodded, never taking his eyes off the book, and touched the spine. There was no zap this time, but as he moved his fingers toward the pages themselves, I felt the surge of energy building up. He quickly moved back to safer territory.
"Jo," he said, "give me your hand."
I did, and he guided it slowly over the leather toward the latch.
No response. I heard Ortega let out a low, quiet breath and say something in a language that might have been an antique form of Spanish, something last heard when the Aztecs were still running their own kingdom.
"I'm okay," I said when David hesitated, and went the last bit of the way to lay my fingers on the metal.
No shock. The Oracle had protected the book against Djinn, but had never anticipated a human getting hold of it. It reminded me of something, this book. Something . . .
The memory snapped back into focus with an almost physical shock. I'd seen a book like this before, minus the latch, in a bookstore in Oklahoma.
It had possessed the power - or the knowledge, which was the same thing - to enslave Djinn.
I looked at David in alarm. "It's like Star's book," I said. "Right?"
Star had been an old friend of mine, one who'd been badly damaged in the course of duty as a Fire Warden. I hadn't known how badly damaged, for a long while. She'd had something like this in her possession.
David nodded, confirming my suspicions. There were cinders of gold and bronze in his eyes, sparking and flaring. His skin had gone a darker shade of warm metal at least two shades off from anything human.
"Open it," he said.
"You're sure?"
He was. I eased the iron peg out of the loop and folded back the black metal hinged piece, and then it was just a matter of opening the book itself. "What now?" I kept both hands on the book, as if it might try to get away. Ortega, I saw, had moved back, but not far; he had an expression on his face that was half dread, half fascination.
"Open it," David said. "Turn pages until I tell you to stop, and whatever you do, don't focus on anything. "
Easier said than done. Like the book that my old friend Star had used - it seemed so long ago - this one seemed to want to be read. The symbols were incomprehensible, densely printed on the page; I was tempted to look at the thing on the aetheric, but I was also afraid. I had, in my hands, power that was off the scale as humans understood it. It was something that I was never meant to have in my possession; I felt that weight in every cell of my body. It made me wonder why it hadn't been warded against humans, but then again, it had been the possession of an Oracle. . . . Humans didn't even figure in their equations. They'd been concerned about the Djinn.
I turned pages, trying to keep my gaze unfocused as I did. The symbols kept attracting me, trying to come clear into focus. I ran lyrics to popular songs through my head, the more annoying the better. I knew - I remembered - that the last version of this thing I'd seen had possessed an eerie kind of pull, and this copy had that in full measure.
After about twenty pages, the book began to whisper. Turn pages. Don't listen, I told myself. David's eyes were focused on the book, dark bronze with sparks and flares of gold. He looked completely alien in that moment, more severely lovely than anything in human form had any right to be.
I felt my mouth trying to speak, and I ground my teeth together to keep the words - if they were words - inside. I had no idea what was in this book, but I knew it was raw, undiluted power, and not meant for humans to channel. If the Oracles wouldn't even let the Djinn have it, it must have been deadly dangerous.
This made me wonder with a prickly unease why the Air Oracle had let Ortega have it. Unless maybe the Air Oracle had an ulterior motive of his own.
"Stop," David said, and I froze. The page slowly flattened, revealing dense lines of text, all carefully scribed in a language that bore no resemblance to anything I'd ever seen in human writing. "Ortega. Read."
Ortega took a look, frowning, and his eyes widened. Unlike David's, they stayed firmly in the range of human colors, and he quickly backed away. "What the hell is that?"
"I think that's what the Sentinels have found," David replied, never taking his eyes off the text, as if it were a poisonous serpent poised to strike. "I think it's the source of their power, and how they plan to strike at us."
Ortega looked pale now, and deeply troubled. "But - if that's true, we have no defense."
"Then we have to come up with one." David took a thick felt bookmark from a drawer in the podium and slipped it in place between the pages, then nodded for me to close it, which I did, feeling a massive rush of relief. I wasn't sure how much longer I could have resisted focusing on those words, and repeating the whispered sounds that echoed in my head.
"So, I guess you know that the Sentinels must have a copy," I said, staring at the closed volume. I carefully flipped the latch back into place and slotted in the iron peg to secure it.
Clearly, it wasn't what David and Ortega expected me to say, and from their expressions, it hadn't occurred to them. "Impossible!" Ortega blurted. David didn't try to deny it; he was already thinking along the same lines I had followed.
"Star had one." I glanced at David for confirmation, and he gave an unwilling nod. "Do you know what happened to it when she died?"
"I thought it was destroyed," David said. He looked very troubled. "If it wasn't . . ."