by Rachel Caine
“Do you think Rahel is okay?” I shot back, and saw the flinch. “Sorry. I know you—care for her.” I wasn’t exactly sure what that entailed, between Lewis and Rahel; I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d been casual lovers. Rahel wasn’t the type to fall in love, and Lewis . . . Lewis already had, with the wrong person.
“He hasn’t hurt her yet,” David said. He had his back to us, but he was listening. “They’re hiding their tracks, but the connection is still there. I can trace her as long as they hold her.”
Was that a good thing, or a bad thing? I thought about the trap Bad Bob had laid this time around. He’d known—because of Paul, oh God, Paul, you fool—that Kevin and Rahel had been planted to spy on him. Surely he was assuming that David could sense and track Rahel’s position, too.
Surely he would just lay another trap.
Depressing as that was, we’d won a kind of victory here. Yes, Ortega was dead, but so was Paul; not only that, but the Sentinels had been forced to regroup and retreat. The current count was twelve dead in total.
Problem was, all of them were Wardens. And it was impossible to tell which of them had been Sentinels, except for anecdotal information about which side they’d been fighting for. I was sure about Paul, Emily, and Janette. The rest . . .
Once again, we just didn’t know who our enemies really were.
Lewis stood up and walked to where David was standing, facing the window. Facing Ortega’s desiccated body. “We can’t follow them,” he said. “They’ve got weapons that can destroy the Djinn, and we don’t know what they’re planning. Let’s talk to Kevin. Maybe he’s got some information we don’t.”
That was coolly logical, something that neither David nor I seemed capable of being at the moment. David nodded, and the three of us left the treatment area.
Or tried, anyway. An FBI agent got in our way. She was a tall woman, curved but in that I-work-out kind of way. Feathered dark hair around a heart-shaped face. Cool, impartial green eyes.
“Sorry,” she said. “Nobody moves. We haven’t finished our interrogations yet.”
David was likely to just walk over her, in the mood he was in, and that would at the very least lead to a confrontation we didn’t need. I looked over at Lewis, who sighed and dug something out of the back pocket of his jeans. “Right,” he said. “All-access pass.”
He held it up. I couldn’t see what it said, but the woman’s eyes widened, and she took a step back. I got the impression she hadn’t done that in a while.
“Yes sir,” she said. “Sorry. And they are—”
“With me,” Lewis said. “Thanks for your vigilance, but it’s not necessary, Agent. We’re the good guys.”
She looked as if she sincerely doubted that, but she didn’t say anything, just moved out of the way with a be-my-guest motion. Then she went to tell her boss, a tall gray-haired man. Cover your ass. It was the absolute code of any governmental agency, no matter how well-intentioned.
“This,” Lewis said, “is a cluster fuck.” He was looking at the parking lot, which was littered with burned-out, crushed vehicles, downed trees, fragments of glass and metal. The hotel, which had luckily been scheduled for demolition anyway, was partially destroyed, whether by us or by the Sentinels it was impossible to say. At a certain point, it really didn’t much matter.
The news media was out in a huge, baying pack. I tried to count the number of satellite trucks, but my head hurt. I was sure that a fair number of those photo and video lenses were being pointed in our direction, though, and remembered the reporter from Fort Lauderdale. Man, wouldn’t she feel vindicated? She now officially had a scoop.
“How much did they get?” I asked.
“Oh, everything. Tornadoes forming out of nowhere. Cars bursting into flame and exploding. Trees getting thrown. Buildings disintegrating.” Lewis’s shoulders twitched, then straightened. “The FBI wants me to give a statement. Something along the lines of, we’re a secret government agency; we’d tell you but we’d have to kill you, blah blah. They’d like me to tie it to terrorists.”
I stared at him. “And what are you going to do?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know yet.”
“You really think this is a good time to lie?”
“Well, I don’t think it’s exactly a good time to tell the truth.” He glanced at David, whose eyes seemed to be fading back to a more normal color. “I’ll leave the Djinn out of it, if you’d like.”
“That’s kind of you, but I think we’d better tell everything if we tell anything,” David said. “Let’s talk to Kevin. We don’t have a lot of time.”
Kevin was sitting with his least favorite people. Well, that probably wasn’t fair; he didn’t like anybody, so most people were his least favorite people, but he reserved a special kind of dislike for the Ma’at. I wasn’t really sure why, except that in general, the leadership of the Ma’at was pretty unlikable.
Two of them were flanking him: Charles Spenser Ashworth II and Myron Lazlo. Talk about the Old Boy Network . . . they weren’t just in it, they’d laid the original cable. Lazlo had dressed down for his public appearance; he normally liked subtle, tailored suits that reeked old money, but he’d deigned to wear what I supposed was his “field outfit”—khaki slacks, a cotton shirt open at the neck, and a sport coat that undoubtedly cost nearly as much as the sports car he’d probably arrived in.
Even so, Charles Ashworth’s outfit made Lazlo look cheap.
Both of them were older than the pharaohs, and twice as stern, both in looks and in attitude. Yeah, I liked them just as much as Kevin did.
I thought it was just about the first time I’d ever seen actual relief on the kid’s face as he spotted me.
“About time,” he said. “Who put me in fucking detention with the Mummy Twins?”
I had to admit, that made me smile. The Ma’at had taken a lot of their iconography for their organization from the Egyptians, and it was no accident they’d made their headquarters at the Luxor in Las Vegas. I suppose they could have made a case for Memphis as well, but where else do you get a real live pyramid for a clubhouse?
“I did,” Lewis said. “Thanks, gentlemen.”
The gentlemen in question glared and, in Lazlo’s case, gave him a well-I-never patrician huff. “We are not your staff,” Ashworth snapped. “Do you have any idea what kind of imbalance this little fracas has caused? Oh, of course you do. You’re supposed to be preventing this kind of thing, you know. Protecting people, not putting them in danger. Isn’t that the Warden credo?”
He said Warden as if it were an epithet, which it practically was, for the Ma’at. They looked on themselves as the accountants of the aetheric; they were concerned about balance, always balance. Important, yes, but even supernatural double-entry bookkeeping was still bookkeeping, and I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for their way of doing things.
“The credo of every one of us is to stop Bad Bob Biringanine from screwing things up any worse than he already has,” Lewis said. “I’ll expect your support.”
He sent them on their way with a jerk of his head. He was probably the only person in the world they’d have taken that kind of treatment from, another mystery of Lewis Levander Orwell. He had an impressive presence, but not that impressive—generally. And yet we all jumped when he snapped his fingers.
Kevin stayed where he was, slouched in the plastic chair, as the two older men vacated. I settled in on one side, Lewis on the other. David paced. It was what David did, at times like these. He looked preoccupied, and I knew that he was tracking Rahel, trying to find out everything about what the Sentinels were doing.
“You saw Paul, right?” Kevin asked. He kept his head down, and addressed the question toward the tops of his dirty Nikes. “Bastard sold us out.”
“I know,” I said. My whole heart hurt, and I hadn’t allowed myself to really feel it yet, the depth of Paul’s betrayal. Things he’d said came back to me—his refusal to disagree with the Sentinels, his reluctance abo
ut my relationship with David, and the wedding. For Paul, it had been a matter of us versus them. He had never really understood, deep down, that Djinn and the Wardens were the same. Different points on the same scale.
Sometimes I despaired for the human race.
“I think they bought the cover at first,” Kevin was saying. “They had us in a room for almost a day, talking to us. All about how the Djinn had always been dangerous, and we’d been stupid to ever open ourselves up to them.” His bitter eyes followed David. “Can’t say I ever really disagreed with that. Made a lot of sense to me.”
“That’s why you were perfect,” Lewis said. “How’d Rahel do?”
“Fine. If I hadn’t known she wasn’t human, I’d never have figured it out. She was—” Kevin’s throat worked nervously, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing. “She was really good at being Cherise.” And I couldn’t imagine Kevin had been able to really play along too well, but that might have been okay. After all, he was socially awkward at the best of times.
“When did Paul show up?” I asked.
“About an hour ago,” Kevin said. “That was when they cut us off. Tried to make it seem like they were just testing us, but Rahel knew Paul was in the building, she told me. She knew he’d sell us out.”
“Didn’t she try to get the two of you out?”
“Yeah.” Kevin’s voice faltered. “I made her stop.”
Silence. I looked at Kevin’s hands. They were tightly bound up together, trembling.
“Why?” Lewis asked the question I wanted to, in a voice far more gentle than I could have. “What happened?”
“There was this girl. I didn’t know—she might have been one of them, I don’t know. But they said—they said they were going to kill her if we tried to leave. I had to—” Kevin squeezed his eyes shut. “Christ. I should have just let Rahel get out of here.”
“Trust me, if Rahel hadn’t thought it was important to stay, you’d have been yanked out whether you wanted it or not.” Lewis glanced at David, who was still pacing, but listening to every word. “Then what happened?”
“They had this stuff. Black stuff. I guess it was like—like the stuff you found.” Antimatter. I nodded. “They tied Rahel up with it, and she couldn’t move. I know she tried to get away, but she couldn’t; she was able to make enough noise that I could run. I was looking for a way out when you showed up.” He nodded at me. “I should have—”
Kevin stopped. I knew that feeling, all too well. I wanted to help him, but I knew it was something that he had to deal with himself. No platitude was going to help, no matter how sincere.
“Kevin.” I took one of his hands and drew it out of its tight ball; it stayed tense in mine, trembling, ready to yank away at a second’s notice. “Before Paul showed up, they may have told you some things. Something that could help us.”
He was already shaking his head. “I’d have said if they spilled their guts, okay? But they didn’t. They just talked about what a bitch you were, and how you were willing to fuck over the Wardens for your boyfriend. . . .”
“Finally, someone you could agree with,” I said. He shot me a covert look, almost hidden by his dangling, shaggy hair.
“No,” he said, “I don’t. Not after I saw what they wanted to do.”
I felt a shiver crawl hand-over-hand up the bones of my spine. “What did you see?”
“They were going to torture him,” Kevin said, glancing up at David, then away. “Make him tell everything about the Djinn. About the Oracles. About how to destroy them.”
“They really are crazy,” Lewis said grimly. “Destroying the Djinn and the Oracles would destroy us. There’s no way humanity, or anything else alive on this planet, would survive a catastrophe like that.”
We thought of it at the same time, our gazes locking over the top of Kevin’s bowed head. David must have as well, because he spun toward us.
“He knows that,” I said. “Bad Bob knows that. He’s not stupid enough to assume anything else. So why would he want to destroy the human race?”
“You know,” David said.
“It’s not Bad Bob,” I said. “Is it?”
“No,” Lewis agreed. “I think it’s a Demon wearing his skin.”
Unfortunately, I had way too much personal experience with Demons. Most recently, I’d seen the damage they could do once they took on a human form. I thought the Wardens had been pretty successful about purging anyone from their ranks who carried a Demon Mark—a larval form of a Demon that granted the carrier more-than-normal strength and energy, almost like having a secret Djinn under your control. But you could carry a Demon Mark only so long before it began to corrupt you from within, and if you wanted to survive, you had to get rid of it by passing it to someone else.
Someone else more powerful, because the Demon Mark was only attracted to power. It traded up.
I’d been the unfortunate recipient of such a thing, at Bad Bob’s hands. I hadn’t understood, at the time, that he’d been paying me a kind of backhanded compliment. . . . I hadn’t known, then, how really strong I was.
He had. He’d chosen me for just that reason.
It had killed him in leaving his body—he’d waited too long, hung on to his power until it was nested deep inside. I thought about his cold body lying in a grave somewhere, and wondered if his flesh was still there, peaceful and empty. Maybe what was walking around right now was Bad Bob reanimated; maybe it was just a semblance, like the one Rahel had worn to play Cherise. Either way, it wasn’t Bad Bob on the inside. Couldn’t be. But if it was a full-grown, fully formed Demon, it had powers I couldn’t begin to understand.
“The antimatter,” I said. “The Demon produces it, secretes it, something like that. That’s why there’s no machinery, no plant they’ve had to set up. That’s why we couldn’t find any kind of permanent base for the Sentinels—they don’t need a plant, not even a hidden one. Because he just . . . makes it.” Like sweat, or blood, or other bodily fluids. It was the very essence of why the Demon didn’t belong here; it literally destroyed the world around it, just by being. The human shell kept it contained, like a space suit insulating an astronaut from the cold of space.
If it left that shell . . .
I remembered what Jerome Silverton had said about the black shard we’d found embedded in the dead Djinn. One kilogram of antimatter annihilating itself is supposed to produce about 180 petajoules of energy. The spear I’d seen Bad Bob use to kill Ortega had been at least five times the size of the shard we’d originally found. Catastrophic would be charitable.
The Demon was hunting us. Hunting Djinn, using the Djinn to power the growth of the antimatter weapon. Once it was strong enough, what would he do with it? Where would he—
“The Oracles,” I said. “What if he goes after the Oracles?”
David was already gone when I turned toward him; a blurred motion was all that was left. Imara. My daughter was in Sedona, locked for all time in one location. Unable to flee.
I sat with Lewis, holding Kevin’s shaking hand, and waiting for the end of the world.
The end of the world didn’t come before dinner, anyway.
As the hours went by, the FBI decided they’d have a better chance of containing the situation—ha!—if they ejected those of us not wearing three letters or badges on our outfits. That went for the Wardens, the Ma’at, and would have gone for the Djinn, had any been present. I’d stood witness to the FBI forensic team taking Ortega down from the wall, then interring him in a metal casket that was marked with all kinds of warning signs. Somehow, I felt someone should watch. He’d been a kind man, a peculiar sort of Djinn, and he hadn’t deserved this kind of ending.
Lewis, Kevin, and I were bundled into an FBI helicopter—not my favorite form of transportation— and flown to the Miami field office, where we were left in a severe-looking room for a few more hours.
Dinner was served, and apart from its being warm and edible, I don’t remember much about it. We barely talked. Ther
e didn’t seem to be all that much to say.
When David reappeared, he came with reinforcements—six Djinn. One of them was Venna, which made me smile in relief; one was the tough-looking specimen David had identified to me as Roy, when we’d seen him earlier—he’d been Rahel’s hypothetical backup. I wondered where he’d been when he was needed the most.
Zenaya was the third. I didn’t know the other three, but they all had the otherworldly grace and glitter that I associated with the most powerful of the Djinn, Old or New.
“The Oracles are protected,” David said. “Ashan’s taking care of it, and Wardens we trust have been assigned alongside them as backup.”
“He won’t like that,” I noted.
“He doesn’t have to like it. I’ve explained the necessity. ” There was a cold, angry shimmer in David’s eyes, and I wondered exactly how civil that discussion had been. “We intend to go and get Rahel.”
“You can’t,” I said. I was calm about it, and authoritative, but all too aware that David might not be in any mood to listen to reason. “She’s bait. You go charging in there, that’s exactly what they want— especially you, Conduit Boy.”
He didn’t answer me, but he didn’t argue, either. He was biding his time. I knew I couldn’t get him to just stand by and risk Rahel’s life, not under these circumstances. Time was running out. If I wanted to avoid watching David throw his life away, I needed a plan, and a damn good one.
And all of a sudden, looking at him, I had one. Granted, I was operating on little sleep, too much adrenaline, and next to coma-levels of caffeine imbalance,but it sounded good. I bit my lip, running it over in my head, and made a hold on gesture to David as I beckoned Lewis toward a convenient corner of the room.
“What is it?” he asked. He sounded just as stressed as I felt.
“I think I know what will bring them out in the open. We need to get the Sentinels to come after us again, not the other way around. If we allow them to choose the ground—”
“Yeah, I get it. The Djinn don’t even know how much of a disadvantage they have.” Lewis leaned closer. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? Your idea?”
