“No, you don’t,” he said. “She became Djinn in a way nobody else we’ve seen has been able to accomplish. Whitney died alone. Not with others, not in some mass disaster or slaughter. She died alone, and she became a Djinn.”
That was not the way it worked for the New Djinn (or the Old Djinn, for that matter). Djinn could make the leap from human to superhuman only when there had been enough lives lost to trigger some kind of energy exchange … people dying alone, or even in small groups, wouldn’t do it. David had made me a Djinn once, but he’d cheated, using his own power to sustain me. That hadn’t gone over well, and it hadn’t been sustainable, for either of us.
“She didn’t have another Djinn helping her?”
“Nothing. She just … died, under traumatic circumstances, and then transformed. Jonathan was studying her to find out why, but she’s difficult to control, and I don’t think he got very far with it before—” He didn’t need to continue. We both knew that Jonathan had given his life so that David could live, after our disastrous attempt to keep me Djinn. “She’s extremely powerful. More than any other New Djinn, except me, and that’s only because I’m the Conduit.” David was the direct plug-in for the New Djinn to the powers of the Earth—the center of the spiral. Whatever his normal power level might be, he could draw on the strength of the Mother, and that trumped Whitney or any other New Djinn.
It didn’t look to me like Whitney was the type to accept that without pushing the issue, though.
“She’s—not like the other Djinn I’ve met.”
“More human? She is that. In human life, she was savagely ambitious, and she’s carried that over to life as a Djinn. Whitney’s never seen a challenge she didn’t want to take, or believed she couldn’t win.” He sounded as if he almost admired that—from a distance. “She was a thief and a con artist as a human. She’s carried that over as well. No matter how many times I tell her being Djinn isn’t a license to cause chaos…”
The primping apparently had concluded, and now the still photographer was having his day, having Whitney pout, pose, and lounge with the backdrop of the sports car. She was, I had to admit, good at it. I wished my best friend, Cherise, was at my side; surely she would have had some good, snarky asides to make me feel better.
Especially since Whitney kept glancing at David between shots, as if all her pouting, sexy posing was personal.
If it affected him, he wasn’t showing it. He watched her with a cool, intense stare, arms folded, clear warning in his body language.
The photos went on for a while, but they were finally done, and a round of applause sounded around the crew.
“Get her set for the video,” the director ordered, and ran over to check focus on his two high-definition rigs, much to the bored chagrin of the camera operators. “Come on, people, the light’s going to go soon!”
“Well, this is exciting,” I said. “And our champagne is getting warm in the car, you know.”
“I know,” David said. “But she’s not here for the chance to look pretty.”
“Then why is she here?”
“She’s a sociopath and a thief, and as far as I know it could be anything. The thing is, if I leave, there’s nothing to stop her.”
Whitney must have heard him, because she straightened from a casual lounging position against the shiny Bugatti, smiled with blinding intensity, and said, “Oh, honey, please. There’s nothing to stop me now !”
In between one breath and the next, she opened the Bugatti’s door, slipped inside, and fired up the engine, which caught with a full-throated, intimidating roar. The director jerked upright, staring, utterly astonished, and dug in his pockets. He came out with a set of keys—the car keys, presumably—and stared from that to Whitney, who was playfully gunning the engine. “How—”