Unseen os-3

by Rachel Caine

  I doubted they would ever find the bodies of those who’d “fled.” Rashid had not been in a very good mood, and after posing as the “fast-thinking citizen,” he would want his pound of flesh.

  The children were safe. That made me feel a distant, cold satisfaction, if not happiness; but even the satisfaction was wiped out by the next story, which involved the grisly discovery of a shooting victim in the woods, two men dead of apparent natural causes and one who’d been torn apart by wild animals.

  Luis had gotten what he’d wanted from me. Full value.

  They hadn’t found the one who’d been sealed alive inside the tree, but he was as dead as the others, no question about it.

  “Gruesome stuff,” said Turner as he slid into the booth across from me, a porcelain cup of coffee already in his hand. He was a thin, bland sort of man, and as usual he was dressed in what I considered the FBI uniform—a dark suit, a plain tie, a white shirt. Turner was, however, also a Warden—not very powerful but well trained, at least. I doubted his FBI bosses had knowledge of that particular aspect of his life. “What kind of pie was that?”

  “Good,” I said. He sighed, motioned to a waitress, and pointed at my pie.

  “Another one of those, unless it’s cherry. I don’t like cherry.”

  “Coconut,” the woman said. “That okay?”

  “Brilliant.” He sipped coffee and returned his attention to me. He’d showered recently; the ends of his hair were still dark and damp against his neck, and his face seemed freshly shaved. By contrast, his shirt seemed wrinkled and stale, and his suit hadn’t seen recent cleaning, either. “Nice trip?” He glanced over his shoulder at the TV. “You pass that place along the way, the one with the dead guys?”

  “I think I would remember something like that.”

  Turner had enough experience with me to recognize a non-answer when he heard one, and for a moment I thought he might continue to pursue it, but he decided not to, as his slice of pie was deposited in front of him. “I’m sure they needed killing,” he said. “That would be the usual excuse, even if you’re not from Texas.”

  “I thought you investigated things like that.”

  “Murder isn’t a federal crime,” he said, “luckily for you. Abductions are, which is why I was tracking this Denver thing until miraculously everything just went wrong for the kidnappers. Kids got out of it fine, which was another miracle considering the bullets that started flying around. Incidentally, although this isn’t going out to the media, all of the adults in the plot were either recent converts to the Church of the New World or hired guns paid as muscle. And the kids were all Warden kids. You got any insights?”

  “None that would be useful to you,” I said. “But you didn’t call me because of those kidnappings.”

  “Not originally,” he agreed, and considered his next words over a bite of pie. “You said the FBI wanted you to come in for a case. Truth is, there is no case. They want you to consult on some hypothetical scenarios.”

  “Consult,” I repeated, frowning. “I don’t think I understand your meaning.”

  “I did some digging around to get this, so please, tip generously. I mean that some eggheads up in Quantico have developed a what-if idea about what could happen if our relationship with the Wardens goes sour, and they’d like you to render an expert opinion about how likely the FBI and other governmental agencies are to be able to contain the situation.”

  It was frankly laughable to think that, should humans somehow go to war with Wardens—much less with Djinn—there would be any scenario at all under which they would live, much less win, but I gazed back at him with what I hoped was a politely interested expression. “I should be glad to render my opinion,” I said. “But I don’t have time for such things at present.”

  “I’m afraid their response to that is that you’re going to make the time,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to meet you out here instead of at my offices. They’re going to, ah, require your immediate assistance. You understand what I’m saying?”

  I thought so, and ate the last bites of pie instead of offering an immediate reply. “You think they will take me into custody and force me to do it.”

  “I think they’d try. Look, I don’t agree with eighty percent of what the Wardens are up to these days, but I could say the same about the FBI, and that’s why I think I’m getting less than half the story at any one time. Wardens don’t trust me; my colleagues at the day job trust me even less. Officially what they’re telling me is that you’re under no obligation to help them, but I’m placing my bets that if you say no, you get strongly reminded that you’re now a citizen of the United States of America, and there’ll be some statute they invoke to make damn sure you don’t go anywhere until they’re ready to let you off the hook.” He paused, licking coconut cream from his fork. “I know you well enough to know that detaining you when you want to be somewhere else is a really awful idea. So in the interests of you not melting down a wing of a government building and putting yourself on the Most Wanted list, along with every Warden who ever met you, let’s get you heading somewhere else. Fast.”

  It explained much, including why the government had initially wanted Luis to bring Ibby, and me, to an area they controlled ... Area 51. They wanted me, and they weren’t inclined to change their minds.

  I signaled the waitress for another cup of coffee and, after due consideration, for another piece of pie. Watching him eat was making my taste buds crave another. “And you? They’ll know you spoke to me.”

  “Yeah, they’ll know,” he said. “Fact is, though, they don’t know what we talked about, and technically I don’t know enough to have warned you off anyway. My story is that I tried to persuade you to come in, but you didn’t want anything to do with it. You told me you were heading for Mexico.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “And where am I going?”

  “Anywhere but Mexico. Look, I don’t care. I don’t want to know.” Turner was concentrating very carefully on his pie, and no longer meeting my eyes at all. “I’ve seen the stakes. You need to get where you’re going and put an end to this. I don’t care if you do it by our rules or not. I’ve seen what Pearl has done to these kids. So have you.” He suddenly looked around, frowning. “Where’s your shadow?”

  “Who?”

  “You know who I mean. Big, tall guy, badass tattoos ...?”

  “Luis has other commitments,” I said coolly. “He’s not involved at present.”

  “Huh.” Turner chewed his pie thoughtfully. “I’d have placed a bet that I’d never seen the two of you apart.”

  “You’d lose,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t be the only one.”

  My pie and extra cup of coffee were delivered, and I slid the waitress a larger bill than necessary to pay for us both. “Margaret,” I said. She looked up, startled, and I focused on her tired, faded green eyes. “Margaret, we were never here. You don’t remember serving us at all.” The money was for my FBI friend’s benefit. The pulse of power—illegal to use in this way, for a Warden—was the real weapon I was wielding. In her mind, our faces blurred and became indistinct. “Keep the change.”

  She smiled vaguely and wandered on. I ate my pie quickly, savoring every bite, and drained the coffee in one long gulp. “The sun’s up,” I said. “You should go before you’re late to work.”

  He looked at his watch. “I’ve still got plenty of—”

  “Ben.” Now I had his eyes, too. “No, you don’t. You need to go, now. I’m sure you have paperwork to com plete. Just forget you saw me today.”

  I had him now, too, caught in the hold of my gaze, and my borrowed powers. The pupils of his eyes widened, and I sensed that he was thinking now about getting to work, and wondering vaguely why he’d come all the way out here to eat pie, of all things, for breakfast.

  Before he could focus again, I slipped out of the booth and walked quickly away, out into the hot spill of the morning sun. In ten seconds, I was on the bike and riding away.
>
  I’d lost another ally. More critically, perhaps, I had gained an adversary of definite ability ... the entire system of human law enforcement, which could be easily brought to bear upon me because of its vast size and scope. I was no Djinn, to slip quietly away. I was flesh and blood—powerful, but fragile. I could be hurt, imprisoned, or killed.

  So be it. I would risk all that, and more, in order to ensure that Pearl was stopped from hurting another child as she’d hurt Isabel.

  That was my only mission now.

  * * *

  My first stop was at an Albuquerque map store that sold detailed laminated illustrations of every area of the United States. I bought sets detailing roads, another with painstaking topographical detail, and colored markers. Then I stored it all in a plastic tube that I slung across my back, and rode my motorcycle to the interstate. It didn’t much matter which direction I chose, so long as it was out of Albuquerque and heading toward a major city, so I picked the widest, straightest roads possible, and opened up the throttle. The buffeting of the wind numbed my skin and froze my hair into unruly spikes, and hours passed before I spotted a quiet, out-of-the-way motel that seemed clean. It had only two other vehicles in the parking lot—one, a battered pickup, almost certainly belonged to a staff member. The other was a dusty dark red sedan with out-of-state license tags and children’s toys in the back window.

  I paid for a room. It was all I wanted—simple, well maintained, without any of the luxuries so many travelers seemed to expect. I bought a bottle of water from a machine, sat down at the old, narrow table with my maps, and put down everything I knew.

  Then I rose up into the aetheric and zeroed in on the closest of Pearl’s compounds. That one, the Colorado facility, was long gone, dead and closed down, with nothing left to even mark it in the physical world. It wasn’t so easy to erase the stains in the aetheric, though. A darkness still hovered there, and I directed my insubstantial body to step inside that quivering cloud.

  It felt like heat, and rot, and hate, and even the ghost of it made me feel drained and exhausted—but I had what I needed, as quick as the encounter had been. I had the taste of Pearl’s madness.

  Now all I had to do was verify the information Rashid had given me ... information that could be a lie, a trap, a useless waste of time, or—and this I believed—a golden opportunity to finish Pearl once and for all.

  Tracking on the aetheric is simple for Djinn since it’s their primary home, the environment in which they feel most alive, most comfortable. For humans, it is a closed door. For Wardens, there is access, but it is limited, and even the most gifted find it extraordinarily difficult to read the subtleties of that world; human senses, enhanced though they might be, are not meant to take in what is natural for Djinn.

  But I had an advantage—I was a blind woman remembering sight. I could interpret what I could see in ways that most of the Wardens never could.

  Distance was no barrier on the aetheric; my self-projection could travel easily enough without regard to the laws that governed the natural world. My next stop was California, where Pearl had established her second known camp. Like Colorado, this place had been closed and abandoned, but the traces were stronger. I didn’t dare venture too close. The shimmering blackness above it warned me that it would burn. I recalled the fate of my friend Gallan all too well—he’d been the first Djinn to come in too close to Pearl’s orbit, and he’d been destroyed. Utterly destroyed—unwound from the world, erased from existence. There were ways to kill Djinn, but in my opinion that was the worst.

  The California facility still had a faint black shadow stretching out into the aetheric, fading to a thread-thin line. I followed it, careful to stay out of accidental touching range. Around me, lights flared and rolled in confusing shapes, coming and going in a brilliant neon flood. I was in an area rich with human history, from the ancient tribes who had first inhabited it to the flood of immigrants searching for land and gold to the modern-day prospectors panning for fame and fortune in an inhospitable land. Djinn were more difficult to spot than Wardens—Wardens flared with brilliant sparks, but Djinn were subtler, more inclined to fade into their natural environment.

  I avoided them all as I raced after the fading trail of Pearl’s influence on the world. Where are you, sister?

  The thread ended, fraying into gray smoke.

  Gone.

  I cast about, feeling more tired than I should. There was no sign of Pearl, nor of any other Warden or Djinn. I was standing in an utterly featureless area, one that held the soothing, nacreous colors of a shell.

  Ah. I was over the ocean. The huge amount of the Earth’s surface covered by water had its own aetheric energy, but few features; humans traversed it, but made little lasting impact. Had I been Djinn, I could have seen the magnificent depth and variety of the life around me, but Wardens were not so perceptive.

  I had lost Pearl at sea.

  I marked the spot and opened my eyes into the mortal world while holding the aetheric steady as well, overlaying the two, and found the spot on the map where Pearl’s trace had disappeared. I colored it with a thick black dot, then drew a line from the rancid California compound to where she’d last left a mark.

  Off the coast of Florida.

  Journeying on the aetheric was tiring, and I was quickly burning through the power that I’d received before leaving the school. I should have taken power from Turner, my FBI friend and enemy, but delay might have cost me more than I would have gained. He wasn’t especially powerful, on his own.

  No, all in all, I really had very little choice. I was cut off from the powerful Warden friends I might normally call upon—Lewis Orwell and Joanne Baldwin, so nearly equal in power and influence, had taken the majority of significant Wardens with them out to sea, seeking to stop a rogue Warden—or, possibly, something worse—from ripping a hole between universes and allowing destruction to pour forth. They’d been gone some time now, and the news had been ominously silent. We would know if they failed, of course. Success might well be heralded by a bland wave of sameness—and only the Wardens themselves could rejoice at that.

  But whether success or failure awaited them, one thing was certain: My most powerful allies couldn’t help me now. My options were small, and dwindling all the time.

  I could still draw power from Luis without speaking to him; it would be a simple matter, since the connection between us still existed. My entire being resisted that necessity, but I am nothing if not practical.

  I knew he wouldn’t stop me, but I was reluctant to act like a parasite, preying on him for nothing more than existence. Even given what he’d done to breach the trust between us. I tentatively tugged on the connection between us, and got no response. I tugged harder, trying to open the flow of the low-level trickle that always existed between us, but he had blocked me.

  I had no choice but to pick up the phone and call him. It was a difficult thing, to press the keys and initiate the contact. ... I didn’t want to talk with him, truly I didn’t, and yet some part of me yearned to hear his voice. I wondered if he felt the same anger, anguish, need, and desire, all rolled into a dangerously spiked ball. I couldn’t tell, truly. He was guarded now, more guarded than ever before.

  Luis answered on the third ring, but said nothing. For a moment, it was a war of silence and static, and then I said, “I am close to finding a way to Pearl, but I’m running out of power. Will you help me?”

  He was quiet for a long few seconds, and then he said, “Sure.”

  “Why didn’t you simply let me draw what I needed?”

  The pause this time was longer, and his voice was weary as he said, “Maybe I just wanted to hear your voice. Make sure you were okay.”

  That hit me hard, and I took the phone away from my ear for a few seconds, struggling to sort out my own torrent of feelings. I finally took a deep breath and said, “I am fine.”

  “Fine. Really.”

  “Yes.” I wasn’t, not now, not listening to his breathing, h
is voice, knowing how far separated we were by both distance and emotion. “Luis—”

  “Yeah?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to forgive him, or even to acknowledge that I understood the decisions he’d made. I admired his ruthless dedication, but the scars were still too bloody. “How is Isabel?”

  “Better,” he said. He sounded relieved that it was a less controversial topic. “She’s settling in, and the seizures are coming under control; Marion thinks we’re making good progress. She helps out with Elijah; he likes her better than any of the others.”

  “But she’s suffered more seizures.”

  “Yeah, one more,” he said. “Not as bad as the first one.”

  “Have you given any thought to what I said? About the possibility of someone acting against you inside the school?” I hadn’t discussed it with him, but that mudslide had not been any sort of natural occurrence, not at that time of year. It had been brought down on me by a Weather Warden, one subtle enough to do it without tipping his hand early.

  “I’ve looked around, but there’s nobody I can put my finger on. Maybe it was just random, Cassiel.”

  His use of my full name felt like a barb, even though his voice remained calm and neutral. I had grown used to his nickname for me, Cass. I hated it on anyone else’s lips, but from him it seemed ... honorable. And warm.

  “I don’t think it was,” I said. “So please, watch yourself. And protect Isabel.”

  “I’d be able to do that better if you’d stayed.”

  “I couldn’t. You know that.”

  His voice was sharp enough to draw blood. “You made your choice, Cass. We’ll both get by without you. Sorry, but that’s how it is. That’s how you wanted it.” He was silent for a moment, in which I fought the impulse to protest that I hadn’t chosen this, not this, not this separation and anger and loss. I’d chosen him, and Ibby, to love, and that had been an enormous risk for me; it was duty that pulled me in a different direction, and I responded to it only because of my burning desire to keep them safe. He was the one who’d made the irrevocable decision to betray my trust, and I was certain that part of that was spite.