Chill Factor Page 0,1

in the seat and tilted his head up at the blank car roof. "Yes, so you've said."

"Well, it does."

"You didn't mind being human before."

"Hadn't seen how the other half lives, before."

He smiled at the roof. Which was a shame, because the roof couldn't appreciate it the way I do. "Want me to conjure you up a bathroom?"

Bastard. "Bite me."

He gave me that raised-eyebrows expression again, over mockingly innocent eyes. "Why? Would it help?"

He was taunting me with the whole bathroom thing. Oh, he could conjure one up, that wasn't the problem; hell, he could probably conjure up one with Italian marble tile and hot and cold running Perrier. But I couldn't let him, because we had to keep a low profile for as long as we could, magic-wise. David was doing all he could to keep us unnoticed, but any big, flashy conjurations would certainly light up the aetheric like a supernova.

And that would be bad. To put it mildly.

I pulled the car over to the side of the road; Mona protested, powered down to a throaty growl, and shivered to silence when I turned the key. In seconds, heat pushed through the windshield like a bully. Had to be in the nineties already, even though it was barely mid-April. I felt sticky, unwashed, cramped, and frazzled. Nothing like a little two-thousand mile trip and spending three weeks in a holding pattern-driving nearly the whole time-to make you get that less-than-fresh feeling.

"Are you okay?" David asked me.

"Fine, already!" I snapped back. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Oh, I don't know. Let's see... in the past two weeks, you've been infected by a demon, chased across the country, killed, become a Djinn, been reborn..."

"Got shot," I put in helpfully.

"Got shot," he agreed. "Also a point. So there's plenty of reason for you not to be okay, isn't there?"

Yeah. I was a few clouds short of a brainstorm, as we like to say in the Wardens. I'd thought I was dealing well with all of the craziness that had become my life, but being out here, alone, with all of this desert and huge empty sky...

... I was beginning to realize I hadn't dealt with it at all. So, of course, I insisted...

"I'm fine." What else could I say, realistically? I suck, this is awful, I'm a complete failure as a human being and a Warden, we'll never pull this off? Hell, David already knew that. It was a waste of breath.

David gave me a look that said he plainly thought I was full of crap, but he wasn't going to argue. He pulled a book out of his coat pocket. This one was a dog-eared paperback copy of Lonesome Dove, which somehow seemed appropriate to the current circumstances. One benefit of being a Djinn... David had a virtually limitless library of reading material available to him. I wondered how he was on DVDs.

"I'm waiting here," he said, opening the book. "Yell if a rattlesnake bites you."

He settled comfortably in the seat, looking every inch the normal guy, and refused to respond to my various irritated noises. I opened the door of the Viper and stepped out onto the shiny black asphalt of the shoulder.

And yelped, as my sexy-but-sensible heels promptly sank into the hot surface. God, it was hot! Forget about frying an egg on the sidewalk; this kind of heat would fry an egg inside the chicken. Waves of it shimmered up from the ground, beating down from the hot-brass sky. I tiptoed over to the safety of gravel, skidded down the embankment, and tromped off into the dunes.

Open-toed shoes and desert: not a good combination. I cursed and shuffled my way through burning sand until I found a likely looking Joshua tree that had just enough foliage to function as a privacy screen to the highway. It smelled astringent and sharp, like the thorns that spiked it. There was nothing gentle about this place. Everything was heat and angles and the hot stare of a clear, unwilling sky.

No way around it. I sighed and skinned down my panties and did the awkward human stuff, worrying all the time about rattlesnakes and scorpions and black widow spiders. And sunburn in places that didn't normally get full western exposure.

Surprisingly, nothing attacked. I hurried back to the car, jumped in, started Mona up. David kept reading. I pulled the car back out into nonexistent traffic, shifting gears smoothly until I was cruising at a comfortable clip. Mona liked speed. I liked giving it to