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felt ridiculously cheering. “He won’t listen.”
    I was tired from the effort of saying it, and closed my eyes, but the blackness within terrified me, and I opened them again. David was still frowning at me. He began to ask a question, then stopped himself, shook his head, and smoothed my hair again.
    â€œRest,” he said. “I’ll try to find a way to help.”
    I struggled with a pitiful feeling of gratitude, and the ghost of an old, imperious wave of contempt. Contempt for him, for caring for me at all. Contempt for my own appalling weakness.
    â€œRest,” David repeated, and despite everything, I found myself burrowing beneath the warm covers, into the smell of another human’s skin, and darkness slipped over my eyes. I didn’t want to let go. I fought.
    But it won.
    Â 
    I woke up to a woman’s voice, dry and lightly amused. “Okay, David, I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why there’s a naked girl in my bed. No, really, I’m sure. And you have about—oh—five seconds to come up with it.”
    I blinked, turned clumsily in my cocoon of sheets and blankets, and saw the woman standing over me, arms folded. She was tall, slender, with long dark hair and eyes like sapphires. Skin like fine porcelain, lightly dusted with gold.
    Even as unfamiliar as I was with the subtleties of human facial expressions, she didn’t look happy.
    I heard David stir on the other side of the room, where he’d taken a seat in a wing chair. He put aside a book he was holding and stood up to come to the woman and put his arms around her. “Her name is Cassiel. Djinn. She’s only here until I can help her get her strength back,” he said. “Something happened to her. I can’t tell what it was, but I’m trying to find out.”
    â€œOne of yours?”
    â€œActually, no. One of Ashan’s.”
    â€œAshan’s? Oh, that’s great. Perfect.” With a shock, I realized that the woman must be Joanne Baldwin. I knew who she was, of course. All of the Djinn knew of the Weather Warden, and her love affair with one of the two leaders of the Djinn world. She was both one of the more warily respected of the billions of humans crawling the face of the planet . . . and one of the most hated, in many quarters, including Ashan’s. “And why isn’t she in his bed, then, instead of mine?”
    â€œGood question,” David said. “I don’t know. She isn’t saying much. She can’t.”
    Joanne wasn’t angry, I realized, despite her words. She was looking at me with what I thought was vague kindness. “Cassiel,” she said. “David—you’re sure she’s really a Djinn? I mean—”
    That frightened me. How could she not be certain of that? Had I fallen so low that I could be mistaken for a human ?
    â€œOld Djinn,” I managed to say. “Ashan’s.”
    Her next question came right to me. “I’ve never met you before, have I?”
    â€œNo.” Because I had never worn flesh before. Never craved it.
    She nodded slowly, and a slight frown grooved itself between her eyebrows. “David says you’re hurt.” Her blue eyes unfocused, and her black pupils expanded. She was looking into the aetheric, I knew, and seeing my damaged soul. “My God. You really are hurt. Can you draw power at all?”
    I managed to shake my head in the negative. Joanne turned to David. “What the hell is that bastard doing, dumping her out here on us? Is he trying to kill her, or just interfere with what we’re doing? We need to get out there, dammit! We’re supposed to be bait for the Sentinels, not—General Hospital for Wayward Djinn.”
    They exchanged a look, a long one, that contained information I could not understand. David touched her gently, a stroke of fingers along the skin of her arm.
    â€œI don’t know what he