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actual work process; everything was expensive, but nothing was very good. The filing cabinet was some exotic handcrafted wood, but the drawers stuck. Inside, there was a chaos of unmarked folders, piles ofhaphazard papers, crap mixed in with vital documents. I’d heard he hadn’t filed quarterly reports in a year; they were probably here, stuffed in with downloaded porn photos. The records I found…well, threadbare would have been a generous description.
    After two hours I was ready to scream and blow the whole place away with a tornado. Instead – reminding myself that I was a professional, dammit – I grabbed and boxed up everything that looked remotely interesting, while Chaz’s smile got thinner and thinner, and wrote him out a receipt for what I’d taken.
    The Jag’s trunk was roomy. I got six boxes in there, added the remaining four to the back seat, and headed back to the hotel.
    Time to settle in with room service tuna salad and pay-per-view movies while I struggled through the paperwork.
    It was going to be a long, long audit.
       
    I drifted back to the present, and realised that instead of lulling myself to sleep I was lying in the dark, staring up at the ceiling and watching rain patterns ripple across the spackle. The light out in the parking lot was a bright blue-white, like sustained lightning.
    I considered doing something about the rain, but so long as it didn’t develop into somethingdevastating, I decided to let it ride. There were Weather Wardens aplenty roaming around the country; the Wardens Association was on the verge of chaos, what with the senior leadership being dead and all hell breaking loose out here in the desert. I was here with a specific job, and I ought to concentrate on it.
    Like last time. And look how that had turned out.
    I closed my eyes on a vision of blood and tried, uselessly, to sleep.
       
    I woke up, not remembering drifting off, to find myself on my right side, staring into David’s face. He was watching me. I yawned, stretched, and inventoried the need for a good toothbrushing, not to mention mouthwashing – more things I hadn’t needed to deal with when Djinn. Those halcyon days were making resuming normal life one giant pain in the ass.
    ‘Sleep well?’ David asked.
    I hadn’t, and he knew it. ‘Where’d you go?… No, I take it back, I don’t really want to know. Why did you go?’
    ‘We were going to fight.’ He lifted a hand and traced a fingertip up the outside of my arm to my shoulder. ‘I didn’t see any reason it had to happen. You were just tired and discouraged.’
    ‘Fighting can lead to other things.’ It had before.Our first real lovemaking had happened as the result of a fight in a hotel. I saw the memory move in him, too.
    ‘No need to fight to have that.’ His voice had dropped an octave, gone even quieter, but there was a tension behind it that made him seem even more alive, even more intense. The light glide of his touch on me took a left turn, followed the line of my collarbone.
    ‘Close the curtains,’ I whispered. Behind him, the curtains snapped shut, all on their own, blocking out the frowning clouds and the steady, mournful pulse of rain. It occurred to me, late and with an electric jolt to the spine, that David was under the covers with me, and he’d already done away with the bother of clothes. His glasses lay carefully folded on the nightstand, next to the fragile blue glitter of his bottle.
    Nothing between us but skin, mine real – whatever that meant – and his manifested by will and magic. And all the more real for that, because he’d chosen this. Chosen me .
    I felt cold. As if he knew it, he put his arms around me and pulled me close to his heat. His lips pressed a burning kiss on my forehead, a benediction I didn’t deserve, and slowly travelled down to my mouth. Sweet, slow, leisurely kisses, gentle as the rain outside. Healing the chill inside me, filling the empty places.
    He murmured something into my