Windfall Read Online Free PDF

on the cool metal bench, rested my elbows on the table, and watched the morning arrive.
    Another lovely sunrise. Wispy clouds out to sea that glowed orange and gold; the ocean glittered dark blue, flecked with white foam. The sky shaded from turquoise in the east to indigo in the west, and a few brave stars were still glimmering through the dawn. A warm ocean breeze that slid over my exposed skin like silk.
    It was a lovely way to pass a few minutes. I didn’t do this nearly enough, just sitting, waiting, listening to the whispers of the world.
    As I drifted up there I began to feel something inside me start to resonate. Liquid light. A cell-deep hum. A deeply intimate feeling of coming home.
    I had company again. The good kind, this time.
    Down in the real world, warm fingers stroked my hair, and up on the aetheric I saw a white, sparkling flare of power, like a ghost.
    The tense curls of my hair relaxed, and David’s fingers dragged slowly through it, straightening it into a glossy black sheet of silk that fell heavily around my shoulders.
    I turned. David was worth the resulting skipped heartbeat and raised pulse level on a visual level alone—smooth golden skin, dark auburn hair that glittered with red highlights in the sun, lickable lips, and eyes of an impossible bronze color behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He was back in his usual uniform: blue jeans, a comfortably faded cotton shirt, an antique ankle-length olive coat.
    David didn’t look like a Djinn, most of the time. At least, not most people’s idea of one, since that included pantaloons, loopy earrings, and bare, rippling chests. Not that his chest, when bare, didn’t ripple satisfactorily. Far from it . . .
    â€œI thought you were resting,” I said, to get my mind off of the image of him, shirtless. I tried to make it sound stern, but he made it difficult when he leaned into my space. He slipped his fingers through my magically straightened hair, tilted my head back, and came very close to kissing me.
    And, teasingly, didn’t. Warm, soft lips just barely brushing mine.
    â€œIt’s been too long,” he said. “I want to stay with you for a while.”
    My pulse jumped into high gear. I knew he could hear it. Feel it through the brush of our mouths. I’d left him alone in the bottle for more than a month, hoping he’d be stronger for it, although I hadn’t capped the bottle and sealed him inside. I just . . . couldn’t bear to do that. It was too much like prison.
    â€œYou’re sure?” I asked. My voice didn’t sound too steady. It sounded breathless with excitement, actually.
    â€œJust say the word.”
    â€œWhich one?”
    â€œThe one you didn’t learn from your mother.” He made a low humming sound at the back of his throat, not quite a growl, not quite a laugh. I could almost forget how fragile he was at the moment. My body wanted to forget, but then, it had Attention Deficit Disorder, big-time.
    â€œAre you—” I hated to ask it—it was like asking someone with cancer how the treatments were going. “David, be straight with me. Really. Are you feeling better? Are you strong enough to—to do this?”
    Because David had, since I’d met him, been through even more than I had. He’d fought demons and split himself in two to give me life when I died, and he’d allowed an Ifrit—a kind of Djinn vampire—to drain him nearly dry. He wasn’t really healed from any of that.
    Worse, I wasn’t sure he could really heal. Jonathan, high muckety-muck of the Djinn world, hadn’t been all that clear.
    But today, he looked almost . . . normal. Maybe I’d been right. Maybe time healed all Djinn wounds.
    He smiled. At close range, that was a deadly weapon. “Don’t worry. I’m strong enough to spend a little time with you,” he said. His eyebrows—fabulously expressive, those