by Rachel Caine
If every room was like the foyer . . .
“Sorry.” Ortega shrugged. “There’s never enough room. This way. Watch your step.”
There were boxes on the staircases, too, all labeled, unilluminatingly, MISC. I wondered if they were the ones he’d banished from the guesthouse, but I was more afraid they weren’t, actually. At the top of the stairs he took a right, edging around another bulwark of stacked cardboard, and led us into what should have been a spacious—no, gracious—room. It was a library, old style, with floor-to-high-ceiling shelves. An honest-to-God rotunda, and a sliding ladder on rails.
He kept books in the library, but it was about five times more books than could safely fit on the shelves. The stacks teetered and leaned everywhere, and of course there were the inevitable boxes. These were labeled, not very helpfully, BOOKS.
Ortega blazed a trail through the maze and brought us to what must have been one of the few open spaces in the entire house. There was a massive podium, all of carved black wood, decorated with leaves and vines, and on it lay a closed, massive book with an iron latch, secured with a simple iron peg. No title was on the worn, pale leather cover.
Ortega stood back and indicated it with one graceful wave. David stepped up to the podium, studying it, and reached out to touch the latch.
It knocked his hand back with a sharp, sizzling zap of power.
“I thought you said it was a copy,” David said, rubbing his fingers against his jeans.
“It is. An exact copy. And I believe I did say it was warded.” Arms folded, Ortega watched with half-closed eyes, looking like nothing so much as an eccentric Buddha.
David nodded, never taking his eyes off the book, and touched the spine. There was no zap this time, but as he moved his fingers toward the pages themselves, I felt the surge of energy building up. He quickly moved back to safer territory.
“Jo,” he said, “give me your hand.”
I did, and he guided it slowly over the leather toward the latch.
No response. I heard Ortega let out a low, quiet breath and say something in a language that might have been an antique form of Spanish, something last heard when the Aztecs were still running their own kingdom.
“I’m okay,” I said when David hesitated, and went the last bit of the way to lay my fingers on the metal.
No shock. The Oracle had protected the book against Djinn, but had never anticipated a human getting hold of it. It reminded me of something, this book. Something . . .
The memory snapped back into focus with an almost physical shock. I’d seen a book like this before, minus the latch, in a bookstore in Oklahoma.
It had possessed the power—or the knowledge, which was the same thing—to enslave Djinn.
I looked at David in alarm. “It’s like Star’s book,” I said. “Right?”
Star had been an old friend of mine, one who’d been badly damaged in the course of duty as a Fire Warden. I hadn’t known how badly damaged, for a long while. She’d had something like this in her possession.
David nodded, confirming my suspicions. There were cinders of gold and bronze in his eyes, sparking and flaring. His skin had gone a darker shade of warm metal at least two shades off from anything human.
“Open it,” he said.
“You’re sure?”
He was. I eased the iron peg out of the loop and folded back the black metal hinged piece, and then it was just a matter of opening the book itself. “What now?” I kept both hands on the book, as if it might try to get away. Ortega, I saw, had moved back, but not far; he had an expression on his face that was half dread, half fascination.
“Open it,” David said. “Turn pages until I tell you to stop, and whatever you do, don’t focus on anything. ”
Easier said than done. Like the book that my old friend Star had used—it seemed so long ago—this one seemed to want to be read. The symbols were incomprehensible, densely printed on the page; I was tempted to look at the thing on the aetheric, but I was also afraid. I had, in my hands, power that was off the scale as humans understood it. It was something that I was never meant to have in my possession; I felt that weight in every cell of my body. It made me wonder why it hadn’t been warded against humans, but then again, it had been the possession of an Oracle. . . . Humans didn’t even figure in their equations. They’d been concerned about the Djinn.
I turned pages, trying to keep my gaze unfocused as I did. The symbols kept attracting me, trying to come clear into focus. I ran lyrics to popular songs through my head, the more annoying the better. I knew—I remembered—that the last version of this thing I’d seen had possessed an eerie kind of pull, and this copy had that in full measure.
After about twenty pages, the book began to whisper. Turn pages. Don’t listen, I told myself. David’s eyes were focused on the book, dark bronze with sparks and flares of gold. He looked completely alien in that moment, more severely lovely than anything in human form had any right to be.
I felt my mouth trying to speak, and I ground my teeth together to keep the words—if they were words—inside. I had no idea what was in this book, but I knew it was raw, undiluted power, and not meant for humans to channel. If the Oracles wouldn’t even let the Djinn have it, it must have been deadly dangerous.
This made me wonder with a prickly unease why the Air Oracle had let Ortega have it. Unless maybe the Air Oracle had an ulterior motive of his own.
“Stop,” David said, and I froze. The page slowly flattened, revealing dense lines of text, all carefully scribed in a language that bore no resemblance to anything I’d ever seen in human writing. “Ortega. Read.”
Ortega took a look, frowning, and his eyes widened. Unlike David’s, they stayed firmly in the range of human colors, and he quickly backed away. “What the hell is that?”
“I think that’s what the Sentinels have found,” David replied, never taking his eyes off the text, as if it were a poisonous serpent poised to strike. “I think it’s the source of their power, and how they plan to strike at us.”
Ortega looked pale now, and deeply troubled. “But—if that’s true, we have no defense.”
“Then we have to come up with one.” David took a thick felt bookmark from a drawer in the podium and slipped it in place between the pages, then nodded for me to close it, which I did, feeling a massive rush of relief. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could have resisted focusing on those words, and repeating the whispered sounds that echoed in my head.
“So, I guess you know that the Sentinels must have a copy,” I said, staring at the closed volume. I carefully flipped the latch back into place and slotted in the iron peg to secure it.
Clearly, it wasn’t what David and Ortega expected me to say, and from their expressions, it hadn’t occurred to them. “Impossible!” Ortega blurted. David didn’t try to deny it; he was already thinking along the same lines I had followed.
“Star had one.” I glanced at David for confirmation, and he gave an unwilling nod. “Do you know what happened to it when she died?”
“I thought it was destroyed,” David said. He looked very troubled. “If it wasn’t . . .”
Ortega was looking, if anything, even more horrified. My voice ran down as I noticed his distress, and I watched as he staggered to a dusty velvet wing chair and dropped into it, rocking back and forth, head in his hands.
David and I exchanged glances, and David went to the other Djinn and crouched down, laying a hand on the man’s knee. “Ortega,” he said, “what is it?”
“It’s my fault,” he said. His voice sounded weak and sick, and pressed thin under the weight of emotion. “I swear to you, I never meant—I thought—I was only curious, you see. You know how curious I am. It’s always been a curse—”
A curse, indeed. David froze for a moment, then bowed his head. His hair brushed forward, hiding his expression in shadow, and he said in an ominously soft voice, “You had it. The other book.”
Ortega nodded convulsively.
�
�Whom did you trade the book to?”
“A Warden,” Ortega said. His voice was muffled by the hands pressed to his eyes. “He never knew I was Djinn. I swear to you, I never meant—I lied, I didn’t get it from the Air Oracle. I created a copy of the original book—”
“I need this Warden’s name,” David said.
“I never meant for any harm to—”
“The name, Ortega.” I shivered at the tone in his voice; he didn’t often sound like that, but when he did, there was no possibility of argument. He was invoking his right as the Conduit, the Mother’s representative to the Djinn, and it rang in every syllable.
Ortega took in a deep breath, lowered his hands, and looked David in the eyes. “Robert Biringanine.”
“Bad Bob,” I said blankly. “But he’s dead!”
Ortega shook his head. “I saw him,” he said. “Two weeks ago. On the beach. And he’s been around for a while now.”
Chapter Eleven
To say that was a shock would be an understatement. A shock implied a jolt, like sticking your finger in a light socket; this was more like grabbing the third rail of the subway.
I’d killed Bad Bob Biringanine—well, at least, seen him die. I’d always staked a lot of certainties on that fact; I’d been told his body was found, and nobody ever seemed to have any doubt that Bad Bob was pushing up daisies. They’d certainly gone after me with enough vengeance to sell the concept of murder.
As his last act prior to dying had been to infect me with a Demon Mark, ensuring my enslavement and eventual death, I didn’t feel too good about his miraculous reappearance. Of all the people I would pick to claw their way out of a grave, he’d be the dead last— pun intended—I ever wanted to see.
Partly it was because he’d so successfully hidden his capacity for cruelty and corruption from me—from most Wardens—for so long. Partly it was that I still had nightmares about that horrible day, about the helpless fury I’d felt and the slick, gagging feel of the Demon sliding down my throat.
It couldn’t have pleasant associations for David, either. He’d been the Djinn who’d held me down. Rape, he’d called it later, and he’d been right, in an aetheric kind of way if not a physical one. But it had been a rape of both of us—he hadn’t wanted to do it any more than I had.
I’d taken three steps back from Ortega, an involuntary retreat that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the monster that had just leaped out of the closet to roar in my face. David must have sensed my reaction, but he stayed fixed on Ortega.
“When?” he asked. “When did you give him the book?”
“A few months ago.” Ortega struggled not so much to remember—Djinn didn’t forget—but to order his mind so things were clear. “The day of mourning. He came—he had something I was looking for. He said he’d trade. He wanted the book.”
By the day of mourning, Ortega meant the day Ashan had killed our daughter, Imara, or at least destroyed her physical body. Imara had become the Earth Oracle, but on that very black day, we thought we’d lost her forever.
Oh, and I’d died, too. Kind of. I’d ended up split, amnesiac, and wandering naked in the forest. Yeah, good times.
That day had seen the expending of a lot of power. A lot. Some of it was from the Wardens, some a product of the Djinn, some from the Earth herself. And there’d been a Demon in the mix, fouling the well of power. . . . Anything could have happened, out of that bloody mess.
Apparently, anything had happened. Somehow, Bad Bob had managed to come back.
If he’d ever really been gone at all.
Suddenly, the appearance and rise of the Sentinels was beginning to make sick, deadly sense. Bad Bob was a player; he wanted power, and he’d do anything to anyone to get it. I’d cheated him the first time.
He’d make damn sure that David and I weren’t in any position to do it again.
By separating the Wardens from the Djinn, then destroying the Djinn, he could ensure that no one had the resources and strength to fight him when he made his final move. Divide and conquer. A timeless classic.
“He’s in Florida,” I said. I was sure of it, as sure as I’d ever been of anything in my life. “The bastard’s not even hiding, really. This is his old stomping ground. He’s got networks of friends and supporters; he feels safe here. That’s why we traced the signature to the Keys, and Kissimmee—”
“The beach house.” David snapped to his feet.
“What?”
“The beach house. I sensed him. I thought it was just a memory, but—” A pulse of light went through his eyes, turning them pure white. “The signature of the power fits his.”
“He’s been at the goddamn beach house?” I’d gone inside. I’d searched the house looking for the focus of the wards. Bad Bob must have been out picking up his latest issue of Megalomaniacs Weekly, which was damn lucky for me, because if he’d been there, I’d have been trapped inside the house, with David outside, and Bob could have done anything to me, anything at all. . . .
I couldn’t think about that. Not without shaking. I’d been through a lot of trauma in my life, but there was something so slick and calculated about Bad Bob’s use of me. . . . It was worse than betrayal. He’d cultivated and trained me specifically to transfer the Demon Mark to me, a cold long-term plan that I’d spoiled by not being quite as weak as he’d anticipated.
You’re stronger now, I told myself. But I also remembered the moment in my apartment when Bob had focused all the power of the Sentinels on me, and I’d realized that I wasn’t going to be strong enough, in the end.
None of us was going to be strong enough, not alone.
“If he’s still at the beach house,” David was saying, as if he couldn’t see I was melting down, “he won’t be there for long. We need to get word to Lewis.”
I shook my near-panic off with what I hoped wasn’t a visible effort, and focused on the problem at hand. “Contact Rahel. Tell her to get Kevin out of there. I don’t want him caught in the middle if we spring a trap. We’re screwed if Bad Bob has the contacts in the Wardens that I think he does. He was too well liked, even after the facts started coming out. Too many good people still like him. They wouldn’t even think of it as betraying us to do a little under-the-table heads-up to him.”
David nodded. “Ortega. I need for you to go to Rahel and give her the message. Tell her to extract Kevin. I don’t care what she has to do. I don’t care how noisy it is. Just tell the two of them to get out.”
“Me?” Ortega looked completely thrown. “But I—”
“It’s an emergency,” David said, and again, I felt that pulse of command and control. “I’m sorry, I know you don’t like to leave this place, but it has to be done.”
Ortega looked utterly miserable now. “Can’t you go? She won’t listen to me. She doesn’t even like me—”
“No,” David said. “I can’t.” He didn’t explain. Ortega heaved a great sigh, nodded, and blipped away.
David didn’t relax. He looked grim and angry, and avoided my eyes.
“Why didn’t you go?” I asked. “I mean, I’m grateful. I’m just surprised.”
“Because if you’re right, and if they have what I think they have, they will be setting a trap,” he said. “A trap designed specifically for me. They want to lure me in. I hope that they haven’t managed to get everything together yet to spring it. That’s why I’m sending Ortega.”
“Because they’d be planning to get you.”
“The Conduit,” he said. “If they can destroy me, they can destroy the structure and power of the Djinn. You were right, Jo. I didn’t believe it, but you were right. They’ve found our one true weakness, and I don’t know how we’re going to defend against them. Maybe Ashan was right. Maybe the only way to win is to withdraw.”
“And leave us to fight alone.”
He turned toward me, and I saw the fury and frustration in his eyes. “Yes.” His hands clenched and unclenched. “The book. We need to get it to his v
ault. I don’t want it out where anyone can stumble across it.” He forced some of his anger back with a visible effort; it wasn’t directed at me, but at the world. At Bad Bob. “I’m sorry, Jo. I can’t touch it. Can you carry it?”
I picked up the weight reluctantly, afraid that even latched it might still have the power to seduce me, but it was quiet. Just leather, paper, ink, and iron.
Just a book that held the secrets to destroying an entire race.
No wonder it felt heavy.
The vault—of course a mansion like this would have one, along with a genuine, honest-to-God panic room—was crammed with stuff. Valuable stuff, to be sure. I was no expert, but I knew that early comics were worth money, and he had shelves full of them, each carefully bagged and labeled. Coin collections. Stamp collections. Toys. Rugs. Artifacts. I edged into the big steel-cased room and waited while David reorganizedthe collections enough for me to put the book down in an open space on a table. “Does he ever sell any of this stuff?” I asked.
“No,” he said, moving a collection of what looked like vintage one-sheet posters. “But he buys a lot on eBay. Put it down here.”
I did, gratefully, and stepped back from it. So did David, letting out a slow breath.
“Ortega,” I said. “Is he going to be okay?”
David didn’t answer. I understood a lot in that moment—his frustration, his anger. There was a good deal of self-loathing in there. David was not Jonathan, who’d held the position of Djinn Conduit before him; he wasn’t naturally the kind of man who could make ruthless, cold decisions and sacrifice his friends and family when necessary. Lewis was like that. David was more like me—more willing to throw himself in front of the bus than push someone else, even if it was the tactically right thing to do.
“He’ll be okay,” I said, and took his hand. “It’s a simple enough job, and they won’t be looking for Ortega. Hell, I’d never have had a clue he was a Djinn if I’d met him in any other context.”
