by Rachel Caine
I wasn’t sure that I could protect it alone.
As I raced along the highway on my newly inherited Harley, I used a steady trickle of power to veil me from prying eyes. It wouldn’t be enough to stop a Djinn, but it would keep me hidden from any merely human agents Pearl chose to employ. I wasn’t certain about her Warden child acolytes, however. Their powers didn’t seem to be limited in the way I would have expected. It was entirely possible that they would be able to see and detect me, whatever measures I took to stop them.
It was also possible that the measures I would have to take against them would be . . . extreme. Not a prospect I faced with any sort of pleasure.
I took a less direct route away from Sedona than I had getting to it, traveling back roads and deserted, lonely stretches with only lizards and coyotes as rapidly passing company. I had no desire to run afoul of the law, even accidentally; last night’s events had taught me the value of anonymity, at least. The morning grew bright, edging toward noon, with the fierce amber bead of the sun the only flaw in a featureless sky. I breathed in the smell of the arid, perfect land, feeling freedom here in the emptiness.
And then my cell phone rang, vibrating against my skin. I had tucked it in the bodice of my vest, to ensure that I could detect it over the roar of the engine; even so, I only noticed because it was such a localized buzz, as opposed to the shaking my entire body received from the bike.
I pulled over to the side of the road, coasting to a gravel-crunching stop, and shut off the engine. In its absence, the day was heavy with heat, filled with birds calling and insects droning. I could almost hear the land baking beneath the sun.
I flipped open the phone and held it to my ear. “Yes,” I said.
“Try hello,” Luis said. “Would it kill you?”
“It might,” I replied. “I am trying to minimize risk.”
He sighed. “Did you get it?”
“Yes,” I said. “The girl?”
“I’m going to need you with me. It doesn’t look good.” He paused for a few seconds, then said, with a cautious note in his voice, “Everything okay? You have any trouble?”
With a pang, I thought of the death and destruction I’d left in my wake. Of the ruined Victory, too, although I felt that perhaps I shouldn’t rate a machine so highly as the lives that had been lost.
Then again, it had been a very nice motorcycle.
“A little,” I said.
“How little?”
“I have a Harley now.”
Luis knew me well enough, it seemed. “Holy crap,” he said. “What blew up?”
“Many things,” I said. “But I am alive.”
“I have got to stop letting you off on your own.”
His protectiveness made me smile, if a little bitterly. “If you hadn’t, you might be dead now.”
“Chica, you assume a whole lot of helplessness on my part. Check your program. I’m not the damsel in distress.”
I considered that. “Next time,” I said, “I will let you fight the battles.” Then, with a sudden shock, I remembered Isabel’s chubby, pretty face, and the unnatural focus in her eyes. “Luis.”
“Yeah, still me,” he said. “What?”
I didn’t want to tell him, but somehow I found the words. “I saw Isabel,” I said. “She was here. She was with one of Pearl’s agents who attacked me.”
For a freezing-cold second, Luis didn’t say anything at all. When he did, it was very soft. Deadly in its intensity. “Tell me you didn’t hit back at her.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t hurt her. But—”
“Ah, God, what? What?”
It was my turn to pause, to search for words. “Pearl is using her,” I said finally. “She’s too young. It will harm her, whatever I do. I don’t wish this, Luis. Please believe me. I want to spare her all pain, but I’m not certain I can. Or that anyone can.”
“Fuck,” Luis spat, and then launched into a fluid course of Spanish curses, liquid fire in words. “You saw her. And you let her go? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I did not have a choice,” I said. “I’m sorry.” It was hard to not feel defensive. It was also very difficult not to feel guilty. “I did not hurt her.”
He was silent for so long I wondered if he had simply put down the phone and walked away. Then he said, flatly, “Did you get what you went for or not?”
“Yes.”
“Then get your ass here fast, you hear me? Fast.”
I kicked the Harley to growling, rumbling life. “I am coming,” I said, hung up, and shoved the phone back in the bodice of my vest. This time, when I opened the throttle, I backed it with bursts of power, pushing the machine to its limits.
By the time I reached Albuquerque, both I and the motorcycle were exhausted. I slowed, because even with the clouding veil I maintained, the simple mechanics of navigating through traffic required me to be more cautious, even though I had ceased to fear attracting the attention of the police.
I pulled out the phone and dialed one-handed to shout, “I’m here. Where are you?”
“Christ, what are you riding, a tank? Just come to the house.”
The house was far from safe, but he knew that. Maybe he was actively hoping for another attack. Spoiling for it. As angry as I sensed he was, that was not beyond the realm of possibility.
“On my way,” I said, and hung up. It was a relatively simple matter to guide the big bike through the night traffic, under the glare of sodium- yellow and tungsten-white streetlights, to the quiet street that held Manny and Angela’s—now Luis’s—home. I cut the engine and coasted to a stop at the curb, dismounted, and was halfway up the walk with the scroll before the kickstand actually hit the concrete.
Luis had already opened the door. He looked me swiftly up and down, and I was warmed by the flash of concern in his eyes, however brief. Then he nodded and stepped aside to let me in, locking the door behind me.
On the worn, comfortable couch sat Agent Ben Turner, looking very tired. He was holding a mug that steamed with what must have been coffee, from the smell of it spicing the air. Luis likewise had a mug sitting on the coffee table, and a third had been poured already for me. I took it and sat on the opposite end of the couch, and gratefully drank. The caffeine would help mask my physical needs, if not those of the languishing Djinn within.
“You said you saw Ibby,” Luis said, and his dark eyes were fixed and intent on my face. “What happened? Tell me everything.”
I glanced at Agent Turner. “Everything?”
Turner sighed. “Don’t hold back on my account. I’m in the shit now, sure as death and taxes.”
“You can refuse to pay taxes,” I said. “Death rarely asks.”
Luis made an impatient sound, and I raised a hand to slow him down. “I know,” I said. “I will tell you.” It wasn’t comforting to either of us, but I told the story, and he heard it. Turner choked on his coffee when he heard of the carnage among the bikers, but said nothing.
Luis pushed the issue. “You got a problem?” he asked.
“You mean, do I have to do anything about it? No,” Turner said. “It’s local business, not federal. Until it becomes federal, I’m just . . . an interested bystander.”
“Even if it’s criminal behavior?”
“Criminal like what? Like getting out alive, after being jumped by a gang and threatened with a gun?” He shook his head. “Not my business. I’m fine with it.”
I hadn’t been particularly worried, either way, but Luis clearly had been, and now he sat back in the threadbare armchair and relaxed, sipping coffee. “But she seemed okay,” he said to me. “Ibby. Physically?” He was searching for any hope to cling to, and I gave it freely.
“She looked healthy,” I said. “She wasn’t injured.”
I couldn’t tell him, I realized, about Isabel’s words about her mother. That would hurt him far more than necessary; there was nothing he could do, at this moment, to relieve Ibby of that burden. Or himself.
So I would carry it for him, a little longer.
“You said you’ve got this thing you went out there for,” Turner said, and sat his coffee cup down on the table to lean forward, elbows on the wrinkled knees of his suit pants. “The list?”
“I do.” I didn’t move to produce it, however. Before I did that, I anchored myself quickly to Luis’s warm, steady presence, and rose into the aetheric, focusing on Turner.
It was not that I had a reason to distrust him. Quite the contrary. But something the Oracle had said stuck with me—that no trust could be absolute.
Overlying the vague outlines of his physical form lay his aetheric one, driven by subconscious desires and needs in his mind and soul. Some humans had radically different aetheric forms. Some were monstrous and twisted, the way some of the bikers had been who’d perished on the road.
Agent Turner’s spiritual self was merely . . . routine. He seemed much the same, though possibly taller and broader, more powerful in his spirit than in his body. Like most Wardens, he radiated waves of energy, though his were weak in comparison to the rich, lustrous radiance of Luis’s form.
I watched carefully. Sometimes, in the aetheric, one could detect lies, and deception, and fears. But I saw nothing.
Agent Turner simply seemed . . . tired.
I dropped down into my flesh again, stretched a little, and then nodded to Luis. I reached inside my heavy leather jacket and took the warm weight of the scroll case from the interior pocket.
“That’s it?” Turner leaned forward even more, chest almost pressed to his knees, trying to peer at the list in my hands. “That’s a list of all the kids with Warden powers?”
“Yes,” I said. “Worldwide. Constantly updated.” He held out his hand for it. “No. No one touches it but me.”
He frowned, and I thought for a moment he’d order me to hand it over—which would have been ineffective, at best—then shrugged and settled back in his chair. “Look up the kid we’re looking for right now, the latest disappearance,” he said. “Gloria Jensen.”
I opened the scroll and rolled it until I reached the middle of the alphabetical list. There were two Gloria Jensens. “California?” I asked. Turner shook his head. “New Jersey?”
His face took on a pinched look. “That all you’ve got?”
“Yes,” I said, and allowed the roll to slide closed. “Two of that name, one in California, one in New Jersey.”
“This one was taken from her home right here. New Mexico.”
Luis said, “Wait. Does the list show where they’re from, or where they are?”
It was an excellent, startling question, the answer to which Imara had never made clear to me. “I don’t know.”
“Then what the hell good is it?” Turner snapped.
There was a way I could know for certain, but Imara had cautioned me—strongly—that it made me vulnerable. Still, I saw no real option, if this list was to be of any practical use to us at all. I took a deep breath, opened the list again, and brushed my fingertip over the name of the first Gloria Jensen.
She was in a school auditorium, wearing a cheerleading uniform, screaming as a basketball soared through the air toward a hoop; I saw it clearly, experienced an echo of her youthful excitement and joy. “It’s not this one,” I said. “Not New Jersey.”
I slid my finger down to the second name.
Darkness. Fear. Pain.
I gasped and wrenched my finger away, involuntarily raising it to my mouth as if I had burned it. My heart began to pound in startled reaction, and I felt a visceral impulse to throw down the scroll, to never feel that again.
“Cass?” Luis’s hands came down on my shoulders, strong and steadying. “You all right?”
I nodded, still breathing too fast, and unrolled the scroll again.
Darkness. Fear. Pain. Alone. The rumble of an engine, a constant bouncing vibration. The smells of rust and oil. “She’s in a car,” I said. “In the trunk. The car is in California. This is the one who was abducted.”
“Where?” Turner’s voice, sharp with urgency. “I need exact details, dammit!”
“I know,” I whispered, and mimed a pen, writing. Luis’s presence removed itself, returned a moment later. He pressed a pen into my right hand, while my left forefinger kept the connection to Gloria Jensen open. I scratched down the information that poured into my consciousness, without understanding where it was coming from, or how. The wildly out-of-control feeling of it made it seem as if I had grabbed hold of the tail of a tornado, something insanely beyond my power to control.
I wanted, desperately, to back away, but I forced myself to stay focused. Stay connected. The pen scratched, moving without my conscious direction, and then stopped. As the pen slipped from my fingers, my finger jerked away from the scroll. I couldn’t force myself to stay in contact with the child, not even for another moment.
“I can’t help her,” I heard myself say, numbly. “I can only feel. Only feel.” My fingers felt scorched, but it was only an impression, the only way my nerves could interpret the kind of psychic pain that I had inflicted upon myself. Something inside of me was wailing in terror, still. Was this what the Oracle felt? Imara had said she felt them all . . . all their joy, their pain, their fear. This, times a billion. Times six billion.
I could not even stand to feel such things from one. The prospect of the job of an Oracle made me aware, for the first time, of the awesome scope and responsibility of such a thing. The strength of character it required.
Luis slid the piece of paper out from beneath my trembling hand and read it. Turner rose and looked over his shoulder. “La Jolla,” Luis said. “These are a list of cross streets, it gives us a direction.”
“Can you give me a type of car?” Turner asked, already reaching for his cell phone. I shook my head. “But it has a trunk. How big?”
“Small,” I said. The child had been cramped, struggling for breath. Hot and sweating, terrified. Injured. “She has a broken arm.”
“Christ,” Luis said. “Get Rashid. Maybe he can—”
“Can what?” Rashid was, without any warning, sitting behind us, crouched against the wall, skin gone from smoke to indigo in the artificial light. He looked wrong and very, very beautiful. There was a silvery shimmer under the surface of his skin, a glow that seemed to echo moonlight. “Help you? I might. What are you offering?”
Turner flinched, but to his credit, he didn’t back down. “That all depends. What do you want?”
Rashid’s lips parted in a genial sort of smile. “For rescuing a Warden child from her tormentor? Or for bringing you the tormentor in one piece and alive?”
“Both,” Turner and Luis said, at once. I said nothing, watching Rashid with wary intensity. The two men exchanged a look, and Turner continued. “Not worth much unless you do it fast. I’m going to have cops all over it in ten minutes.”
“But it is ten minutes of pain and fear that you might spare her,” Rashid said, with a kind of horrible satisfaction. “And so much can happen in ten minutes, yes? I have crippled a human in less than a second. Imagine what he might be able to do, with such a rich span of possibilities available to him. Especially were he warned you were . . . coming.”
Time slowed to an icy crawl, and I felt every slow beat of my heart as my focus narrowed in on him. On this Djinn who dared to say such things.
So you would have, once, I heard a whisper say, deep in my mind. So you might have done, at any rate. Their pain, their weeping, their losses meant nothing to you, all these thousands of years. And now, you know how it feels.
Yes. But I had been created a Djinn, and I had never come from human stock. Rashid had. Rashid should have known better. I couldn’t let that pass.
“If you do that,” I whispered, “if you even consider it, I will tear you apart. I swear it.”
He flashed me a mocking smile, unimpressed. “What is the human phrase . . . ? You and . . . what army?” He quoted the phrase like a visitor unfamiliar not ju
st to the language, but to the planet. Which I supposed he was, in all the ways that might have been relevant to this conversation.
“How about me,” Luis said flatly. “How about the Wardens. Every fucking Warden on Earth. You want to go to war with us, Rashid, we’ll go right the fuck now. You pull that shit right now, and David won’t protect you. No one will. It’ll be you, and us. How you like those odds?”
He didn’t. He also wasn’t so much afraid as cautious, I saw. He was not certain that David, in his capacity as Conduit for the New Djinn, wouldn’t turn on him for such a thing.
I was. I knew David well enough to know that Rashid’s attitude wouldn’t go unpunished.
Whatever Rashid assumed about the Djinn, he knew there was no doubt that the Wardens would come after him, for something like this. I could only imagine Lewis Orwell’s fury. Or Joanne’s.
The odds were not in Rashid’s favor.
Rashid, acknowledging this, shrugged. “Only a thought,” he said. “A mere hypothetical. If you want me to save the child and stop your villain, then I can do so. For a price. You are free to choose as you like.”
“Wait,” I said. “How do we know the girl’s abductor isn’t Pearl’s agent? If we act immediately, we could lose any chance of tracing him to his destination.”
Luis seemed stunned. “You’d let that kid be bait? Jesus, Cass. You’re as bad as he is.”
That stung. “No,” I said. “I simply raise the question.” Like Rashid, I thought but did not say. “It may be our only chance of finding Ibby and the other children quickly without waiting for another child to be abducted.”
“You sure you can’t find Ibby or the others through the list?” Luis asked. “Did you try?”
I glanced down at the scroll, and felt that visceral flutter again, that dread. Touching it had torn open something inside of me that I desperately wished to close, a feeling of vulnerability that was anathema to someone like me.
