by Rachel Caine
“And the contents are . . . ?” David asked, in that cool, controlled voice so at odds with the look in his eyes.
“Antimatter,” Heather said. “Antimatter colliding with any kind of matter will produce a violently energetic reaction. The by-products are—”
“There was a trigger?” I asked. “What kind of trigger?”
Her gaze slid away from mine, toward Lewis, and then back, as if she’d been seeking approval. “It looked as if it was adapted from a more traditional bomb-making approach. Timer and a small charge designed to crack the shell holding in the antimatter, spilling it out into the world.”
“Not a skill you pick up at your local community college,” Paul grunted.
“Unfortunately, it’s not exactly rare, either. And with the Internet so helpfully offering tutorials for this kind of thing, it will be hard to track.”
“The paper?” Lewis got us back on track. “The wrapping, the card?”
Heather brightened immediately. “That’s a possibility, ” she said. “If the Djinn can help us, we may be able to trace the card’s history back and find out who came in contact with it.”
But that experiment failed. I could have told them it would. When they brought in the card—in a heavily shielded container, since it was saturated with radiation—and presented it to Rahel, she just shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “I see nothing at all.”
It was the same with David, and I could see his frustration and growing alarm. He’d dismissed all this at first, but there were too many of us now, and we were too credible. The Djinn had to believe us—but believing us meant accepting half a dozen impossible things. Heather, disheartened, reclaimed the thing and began to have it carted back to the lab for more tests.
I stopped her. “Can I see it?” I asked. She looked surprised. “Well, it was addressed to me. It stands to reason that I might see something others don’t.”
I doubted she bought that theory, but I really did want to see it. It had been meant for me. So had the bomb—for me and David. I supposed the first explosion would have killed me, and the antimatter would have done the job for David. . . .
Heather handed me a pair of protective gloves, draped a heavy shielding vest around my chest, and put a protective hood on me before she allowed me to reach into the container and pull out the card. It was, as Lewis had told me, a greeting card—a fairly nice one, actually, with a graphic of a wedding cake, a bride, a groom. Inside, cursive preprinted script read, Congratulations to the happy couple!
But when I saw what was underneath, I felt cold, clammy, and sick. It said, in plain block letters pressed deep into the paper, Sleep with the enemy, pay the price.
Beneath it was sketched a symbol, kind of a torch. The kind that peasants carry to attack the monster-dwelling castle.
I cleared my throat and turned the card over. “Was there anything else?” My voice was muffled by the helmet, but clear enough. I distinctly saw Heather shoot another of those looks toward Lewis. “Well?”
“Give it to her,” Lewis said. He sounded grim and calm. “No point in hiding anything.”
Heather brought out another container. This one had several sheets of paper that had been folded in half—probably to fit inside the card or its envelope.
Plain white paper, no watermarking. Cheap quality. On it was printed in very small type a—I hesitated to call it a letter, because there was no hint of communication to it. A manifesto, maybe.
The Sentinels were declaring war on the Wardens, and they’d felt compelled to give us all their reasons. It was quite a list, starting with a detailed analysis of why the Wardens could no longer be trusted to put the interests of the human race first. Seems we’d been corrupted not by our own greed or weakness, but by contact with the Djinn.
Most of the manifesto was about the Djinn, and the crazy paranoia gave me the creeps. Sure, the Djinn could be capricious, even cruel; they certainly didn’t forgive those who trespassed against them, and turning the other cheek had never been a high priority for them. Added to that, they had millennia of pent-up anger against the Wardens.
But even so, the Sentinels’ position wasn’t that Djinn ought to be treated with care and caution—it was that none of them deserved to live. That every single Djinn in existence had to be hunted down and destroyed for the human race to survive.
That they had to be punished for their crimes before they were allowed to die.
I felt sick, and I’d barely skimmed the thing. David hadn’t been able to, saturated as it was with antimatter radiation that rendered it effectively invisible to him, but he could read my expression and mood like flashing neon. He stood up and said, “Enough. Jo, enough.”
I nodded and put the manifesto back into the container. Heather sealed it and took back her protective equipment. “They intended that to be found,” I said. “So they really didn’t intend the bomb to go off, did they?”
Lewis and Heather once again exchanged that look.
I was starting to really hate that look. “These weren’t in the box with the antimatter,” Lewis said. “They were in your mailbox, where they’d be found later. But they’re still saturated with radiation, enough to sicken anybody who touched them.”
No question, this was serious. If they’d succeeded with the bomb in the package, I’d be dead or badly injured, and David . . . David would be, too. Putting tainted, taunting letters in my mailbox was worse yet. It reminded me of the cruelest of terrorists, who detonated one explosion and waited for rescue workers to arrive before detonating another. My friends would have been the ones to suffer.
I tried to lighten my own mood. “Special Delivery Guy delivers the mail, too,” I said. “Give him credit, at least he’s a full-service assassin. Maybe we can get him to throw in a pizza and hot wings next time.” All my attempt at humor did was give everybody the opportunity to stare at me with faintly worried looks, as if they were afraid that I was going to scream, faint, or grow a second head.
At length, Heather said, “We’re following up on anyone who goes into the hospitals for treatment of radiation sickness or burns, but I have the feeling that a well-trained Earth Warden could have handled these letters without lasting damage, if he was careful. Or she, of course. And we have to proceed on the idea that whatever the Sentinels are, they’re well organized and well protected.”
Lewis nodded, acknowledging the point. He wasn’t watching Heather, though; he was scanning the faces around the table. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but he stopped and focused on Kevin. “You’ve got something to say,” he told the kid. It wasn’t a question.
Kevin, who’d been staring at the table, looked up, and his face flushed red along the line of his jaw, bringing a few pimples into sharp relief. His eyes were almost hidden by the messy fall of his hair, but I had no problem reading his body language. Busted.
“Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “So, I got this message about a week ago.”
“About?” Lewis’s voice was calm and even, but I wasn’t fooled. Neither was Kevin, who looked down again at his clenched hands.
“About joining the Sentinels,” he said. “They told me they could use my talents.”
There was a long, ringing silence. I instinctively put out a hand to touch David’s, telling him without words to hold his temper.
“What did you say?”
Kevin cleared his throat. “I told them I’d think about it. I figured maybe keeping the bait out there would help.”
“Good thinking,” I said. “Thanks, Kev.”
He shot me a frown. “Didn’t do it for you.”
“I know. But as it seems that they’re after me, I still appreciate it. Did they say they’d be getting back to you? Give you any way to approach them?”
“Yeah. They gave me a phone number.”
Lewis let out a slow, quiet breath. “Let me have the number.”
“No.” “No.”
“What?”
“No. It’s my lead. I get to f
ollow it.”
“This isn’t a goddamn game!” I’d never seen Lewis lose his temper, but that was a sharp crack of anger in his shell of Zen. He stood up, leaning both fists on the table. “You can’t screw with these people, Kevin. And you’d better not screw with me, either. They want Jo and David dead, but I don’t think they really care how many people they have to take out along the way.”
It was a mistake, a big one, and I knew it the second Lewis raised his voice. Kevin had been raised by an abusive parent, and he didn’t react well to things that dredged up that bitter past.
He said, without looking up, “Fuck you, Lewis. I’m not your bitch. I don’t have to do what you say.”
Lewis started to reply, but I grabbed him by the shoulder and squeezed hard enough to get my point across. I used fingernails. He flinched and looked at me, and I saw the light dawn in his eyes and clear away the fog of anger. He took a deep breath and walked away from the table, heading for the far corner of the room where Rahel sat in silent witness. Kevin’s narrow gaze followed him, just aching for a confrontation.
I said, very softly, “Would you be willing to join the Sentinels? Go undercover?”
That brought Kevin’s attention back to me with a snap, and for a second he looked his age—far too young to be so angry and defensive. “What?” he asked. On the far side of the room, Lewis turned and made a move, but then he checked himself with a real physical effort.
“You’d be credible,” I continued. “You’re strong, you’ve never really liked the Wardens, and you’re on record as being one of my biggest nonsupporters. They’re recruiting you already. Why not join up? You could be our inside man.”
David touched the back of my hand, just a light stroke of fingers, and I heard him whisper, so softly it could have been my imagination, “Are you sure about this?” I wasn’t, but it was the best chance we were probably going to have to send someone inside the Sentinels quickly.
Kevin abruptly sank back in his chair in a trademark teenage slump, round-shouldered and boneless. His eyes drifted half closed. “Yeah,” he said. “Why not? They’ll probably be better company than the old farts around here. The Sentinels may be assholes, but at least they have some backbone.”
A few eyebrows went up around the table, but nobody said anything. They were leaving it up to me, and I knew—knew—that I was about to make a decision that could cost a young man his life.
I said, “Do it. And Kevin?” He cocked his head to one side. “If they ask you to kill me, demand at least five million. That’s the current market price. Wouldn’t want you getting shorted on the deal.”
He smiled, and I have to admit, it wasn’t a comforting smile at all. “Maybe I’ll do it at a discount,” he said, “because we’re such good friends.”
And then he flipped me off.
That ended the first official war meeting of the Wardens.
“I’m putting a stop to it,” Lewis said an hour later. He’d been pacing for at least forty-five minutes, with occasional stops at the window to twitch back the blinds and stare out at the city street. He looked off balance, and it was odd seeing him so out of control. Lewis had always, by definition, been the guy who held it together in a crisis. “He’s a kid, Jo. You can’t send him in there by himself!”
“I wasn’t planning to,” I said. “Cherise is going with him.”
He spun and looked at me as if I’d lost what was left of my mind. I didn’t blame him; if I’d meant exactly what I said, he’d have every right to order me a padded jacket in designer fall colors.
I raised my voice. “Cherise?” And sure enough, my cute blond friend poked her head around the edge of Lewis’s office door and gave me a tentative wave. “Come in. Explain it to Lewis.”
She eased inside, gave Lewis a charming dimpled smile that didn’t seem to make him feel any less unhappyabout my idea, and shut the office door behind her. That didn’t leave much room. Typical Lewis: Give him a job as the head of the entire Wardens organization around the world, and he’ll do something goofy like take the smallest office available, even if he has to kick a junior analyst out to do it. There was a battered desk that still bore scars from the Great Djinn Rampage that Ashan had led through this place, and a couple of slightly-less-than-new chairs, and paperwork. And a sleek new computer that I doubted he turned on much.
With the four of us, it was crowded. I say four, even though David was, to all intents and purposes, a shadow; he hadn’t said a word, and he’d taken up a post leaning in the corner, arms folded, watching us with an expression I could only think of as bemused.
Cherise spread her arms and dimpled even more. “You rang?” she asked.
“You have any objection to going with Kevin when he joins the Sentinels? It could be dangerous, you know.”
“Ooooh, I live for danger! But do you think they’ll believe I won’t run back to squeal to you about what’s going on?”
“I think just the opposite,” I said. “I think they’ll keep you as a hostage for Kevin’s good behavior, and that also ensures you don’t rat them out to me. It puts you squarely in the hot seat. It also makes you the one person they won’t be thinking of as a threat. What do you think?”
Her blue eyes widened; she seemed lost in thought for a second, then nodded. “Could work,” she said. “Could definitely work.”
Lewis lost his cool. “What the hell are you talking about, could work? Look, Jo, I’m iffy about sending a kid in, and I’m damn sure not allowing her to go. She’s not even a Warden—”
“Exactly,” I said. “She’s not even a Warden. If they’re going to underestimate anyone, they’ll underestimate Cherise. Not that she really is Cherise.”
I gave Cherise the nod, and her form shifted, growing taller, darker, the sweetly rounded figure of the beach bunny taking on sharper edges and angles.
Rahel sighed, stretched, and looked down at her clothes as they shifted to her traditional neon-yellow pantsuit. She flicked an imaginary mite of dust from the cloth, and cocked a sassy eyebrow at Lewis.
He closed his mouth with a snap, then opened it again to say, “I didn’t know you could do that.”
Rahel smiled. “I’m sure, my love, there are many things I can do that you haven’t even begun to imagine. ” She winked, to top it off.
“Are you sure you’re strong enough?” Lewis asked. He was trying very hard to ignore the somewhat intimidating charm she was sending his way.
“Strong enough to impersonate a human?” Rahel flicked her taloned, glossy fingers impatiently. “Please. You insult me if you think otherwise. You are nothing like difficult to imitate.”
I thought Lewis found that as profoundly disturbing as I had. I’d known the Djinn could do it, of course; David had pulled it off with me when we’d met, and there was no doubt that he could, when he chose, take on other forms. But he’d told me that Rahel was the master of that sort of disguise, able to perfectly match whatever template she was given—something I hadn’t known any more than Lewis had, evidently. I wondered whose form she’d taken on before, and for what purposes.
“You’re sure you know what to do?” Lewis asked.
“I will watch out for the boy, and gather information for you. I will deliver it to David as often as I dare to, without exposing the boy to danger. Is that not what you want from me?” Rahel recited it like a laundry list, inspecting her nails for flaws. “Don’t worry, Lewis. It will hardly be the first time we have hidden among you, discovering your secrets.”
Well, if that didn’t make us all paranoid . . . Lewis didn’t look happy, but he’d lost some of the stiff, angry body language. “You’re sure you can do this,” he said. “I’m putting Kevin’s life in your hands, Rahel. And in some ways, I’m putting you in more danger than him—these guys don’t like Djinn. In fact, it’s safe to say they’d just as soon destroy you as look at you. And I’m really not so sure they can’t, if they try.”
She let a slow, contemplative smile slip across her lips, and eve
n I shivered. “How would they then be any different from most of my so-called friends and allies?” she asked softly. Her eyes had taken on an unnatural gold glow, and there was no mistaking her for anything but what she was: Djinn, through and through. “We have survived the Wardens. We will survive the Sentinels. You may count on it.”
There was no arguing with the Djinn once they got that look, and Lewis knew it. He put up his hands in surrender, came around the desk, and stood just a couple of feet away from her. They were almost of a height; he had an inch on her, maybe. “Take care,” Lewis said, and leaned in to kiss her lightly on the lips. “Come back safely.”
I felt my eyebrows pull up, but I wasn’t really surprised, not deep down. Lewis had a lot of secrets, but he’d always been intrigued by Rahel, and she was drawn to his power, if nothing else. Maybe it wasn’t the world’s great love affair; maybe it was just casual, but it eased some anxious part of me to see that Lewis wasn’t still pining after me.
Okay, it vexed that part of me, too, but that’s a personal problem.
Rahel effortlessly folded her shape back into Cherise’s cute, compact little body, tossed her blond hair with a flair so familiar it would have fooled even me, and winked at him. We all stared after her as she left, Cherise’s trademark little gray alien tattoo waving at the small of her back.
I didn’t even notice what she was wearing as Cherise; that was how much she’d thrown me off stride, and after all, I’d known who she really was.
Lewis turned his attention to David, still standing silently in the corner. David cleared his throat and pushed his shoulders away from the wall. “She’ll be all right,” he said. “No, she’s not full strength, but that could play well, considering what she’s doing. There’s no danger. Rahel can always leave if things get too hard.”
He sounded too casual about it. I felt an uneasy lurch; there it was, again, that strange blind spot, as if the Djinn just couldn’t see the threat when it was right in front of them. What was it about these Sentinels? How could they have that kind of power—or were they just taking advantage of a weakness I’d never really seen before? I’d always thought the Djinn were invulnerable, except when they took on each other, or a Demon.
