by Rachel Caine
I opened the throttle as I left the city limits, and the motorcycle leaped eagerly into action with a deep-throated roar. The vibration rang through me, clear and clean, and there seemed to be nothing ahead of me but empty, open road. The wind pushed at me like a solid wall, seeking entrance to my clothes, my hair, fanning across my neck in a cooling jet.
In time, my human concerns returned, whispering in the silence. Manny and Angela are dead. You can't simply run. You owe a debt.
It was a debt that Luis Rocha did not want me to pay. I could leave, and he would be happy with that outcome.
I decided, with deep regret, that I would not be. I needed answers. I needed to be sure that the child Manny and Angela had left behind knew the truth about her parents--their dedication, their bravery, their kindness to me.
She would need to know the truth about their deaths, as well. I had part of the answer, but not all. Scott Sands had been no normal Warden, and there had been a reason he had gone after Manny.
I could not believe that it would simply end.
The Ranch.
I would need to find what it meant, or it was likely that Luis and Isabel would never really be safe.
The trip from Albuquerque to Sedona, Arizona, took only about five hours--a remarkably short time, given the pleasurable experience of riding the motorcycle. It felt like effortless gliding, a reminder of all that I had once been. Despite the helmet, I felt less closed-in than I had in either airplanes or cars, and the sense of the wind passing over me, the sun beating hot on my back, gave me a kind of peace I hadn't realized I had missed.
As a Djinn, I had been connected to the Mother through Conduits--for most of my memory that Conduit had been a Djinn named Jonathan, a mortal who had died well before recorded human history had begun. Many thousands of years later--and only a year ago, if so much--Jonathan had chosen to die so that his friend David could live on, and that had splintered the Djinn. It had ultimately divided us, made Ashan the connection for the Old Ones, like me, and David the Conduit for New Djinn.
But there were other ways to reach the Mother than the Conduits, and the place I was going was one. I had chosen the location that was not only closest, but most likely to welcome me; the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona was holy to Djinn as well as humans, and served two purposes. The human worship was unimportant to me, but in that chapel resided an avatar of the Earth herself--an Oracle.
It was possible this Oracle would speak to me, even trapped in a lowly human body.
She had, after all, been similarly trapped once.
I had never visited the chapel in human form; this spot had existed on the aetheric, as well, since time began, and I had never been forced to interact with an Oracle with the burden of skin and bone. As I glided the motorcycle at a low purr into the parking area, the sun was flaring its last on the red sandstone rocks, and it was as beautiful a thing as I'd seen since opening human eyes.
And I was afraid that she would not receive me.
I took the long flights of stairs at a run, hoping that the activity would chase away the cold fear; all it accomplished was to bring an ache to my muscles, and sweat to trickle beneath my leather jacket. A Djinn died here. I had felt that powerful event even so far away, on the highest levels of the aetheric. Ashan had killed her. He had not reckoned with the consequences of that action, or how very angry Mother Earth had been with him for his crime.
Ashan, too, had almost lost his life. I did not think it had taught him any genuine lessons.
The doors at the top of the landing stood closed and locked. It was after the times posted for visitors, but that was meant for humans, not for me.
Surely, not for me.
I reached out to touch the warm metal of the handle, and I felt an answering stir behind the door, something vast and powerful and intensely old.
The door clicked open without any action from me.
Within, sunset spilled through the huge glass windows, tinting the simple, small church in vivid oranges and dusky reds.
A woman sat on a wooden pew near the back. As I walked toward her, I slowed; I hadn't expected her to be so clearly recognizable. And so much a mirror of her mother.
"Imara," I said. "I am--"
"Cassiel," she said. Her dark hair rippled in a breeze I couldn't feel, as did her brick red dress around her knees and feet. Her face seemed human, but her eyes were immortal, and more than mere Djinn.
I sank down to one knee and bent my head.
"No need for that," Imara said. Her voice seemed to come from a long distance, echoing oddly in the stone walls of the chamber. "Sit. You've come a long way." I didn't know whether she meant now, on the motorcycle, or in a larger sense. . . . From Djinn to what I was now was surely a very long fall.
It didn't seem right to make myself comfortable in her presence, but I eased myself onto the pew at the end, as far from her as I could manage. I could feel the slow, strong pulse of Earth power from her, like the heartbeat of the Mother, and it frightened me. I longed for it, and I was afraid. . . . . . . Afraid I no longer deserved to feel it. I craved it, though. My hands trembled with the force of it.
Imara said, "It's hard to talk to you in this form. I don't have much time."
I avoided her gaze. "I need--" I couldn't finish the thought. She knew, in any case.
"I can't help you. Ashan is your Conduit. If he chooses to cut you off, there is nothing any Oracle can do."
"I--I know. I don't ask that." I waited until she slowly nodded.
"Your Warden, then," she said. "You want to know why events took the course they did. Why he is dead."
"I know why he's dead." My voice sounded rough and odd to my ears. "Enemies fired guns at him. Bullets ripped his flesh. And I chose revenge over duty."
"Sometimes revenge and duty are the same," Imara said. Her voice was getting even fainter, and the wind tossing her hair stronger. "I'm not connected anymore to the human world, except through my mother, but I can tell you one thing: You couldn't have saved him. I can see all the possible roads, and they all end in the same place for Manny Rocha and his wife."
I expected to feel relief, knowing that it wasn't my fault, but all I could feel, here in this quiet place, was a vast sense of emptiness. "I liked him," I said. It sounded very strange. "I liked Manny. I liked Angela. And they're gone."
Imara studied me, and there was something frightening about being looked on by such a power. There was compassion in it, but at such a vast distance that its warmth couldn't reach me. "I know," she said. "But it's how they live. It has its own power, that frailty."
The injustice of that threatened to overthrow my self-control. "I want justice. I want their killers to pay."
"Those who killed them already paid."
"Not enough."
She didn't answer. She only studied me for so long that it felt like a geologic age was passing.
"You left the child," she finally said.
"I had to. The police--"
"The child misses you. She grieves, and she needs you."
Suddenly, with a strength that shocked me, I remembered the feeling of Isabel's arms around my neck, of her warm body in my arms. Oh. It hurt so much that I wrapped my own arms over my stomach and rocked slowly back and forth, trying to drive away the pain.
It only sank deeper, and carried with it a terrible sadness.
I felt tears form hot in my eyes and trickle down my face. My head felt hot and tight, and I gasped for breath.
Imara's hand touched my shoulder. It should have made me hurt less, but instead the grief tightened in on itself in a choking spiral, and I began to sob, as helpless as any human.
"You're learning," she said. "That's good. You can't be a Djinn now, Cassiel. You have to be something else. It hurts, but it's a true thing, what you are. You're bound to the world now."
I had always thought the Djinn more connected to one another--bound by the cords of power. But now I was seeing that humans were bound to one another, as wel
l, in strange and difficult knots.
It should have felt like a trap. I would have thought it so once.
"You have to go back to them," she told me. "I know it's dangerous, and I know it won't be easy, but your future doesn't lie here with me, or with any Djinn. It's with them. If you want to find the truth about what happened to your friends, you must go back."
"Back," I repeated. "Back to what?"
"To Isabel. To Luis." The color of her eyes shifted between embers, flames, the pure gold at the heart of the sun, black, gray. "I know it's difficult to believe, but a power has put you here for a reason, Cassiel."
I sucked in an unsteady breath and wiped tears from my face. "I'm here because of Ashan."
She smiled, very slightly, and raised an eyebrow in an expression so like her mother I almost smiled in return. "Is he not a power?"
Her voice was as faint as a whisper now, and the invisible wind blowing across her had whipped into gale force. Her hand slipped from mine and fell back into her lap.
"Wait," I said. "Please. Tell me about the Ranch. They would have killed to protect it. It must be important."
"It is," she said. "It will be, to you." Her voice faded to a thin ghost. "Go now. Isabel--"
She faded like a candle flame.
I sat for a moment, staring at the growing darkness beyond the windows, and then stood and began the long journey home.
Chapter 8
I WAS TWO miles outside of Sedona when I felt the earth grumble and mutter, and power stir around me.
So. They know where I am. It could have been the Wardens; it could have been the faceless enemy that Scott Sands had so feared. Whoever it might be, they were coming for me, and coming fast.
And I welcomed the opportunity for an open, vicious fight.
I opened the throttle on the Victory and bent low across the handlebars, and the road became a blur of black, yellow, and shifting shadows. No moon yet, and the last rays of sunset were fading into black. There were headlights on the road coming toward me, and they were bright enough to dazzle.
A car suddenly swerved across the line and skidded toward me. I swore under my breath. No time to stop, only a fraction of a second to decide. A Djinn could survive such a crash; I couldn't.
I shifted my weight and steered, heading for the oncoming car, trusting instincts I hadn't known I possessed.
The car brushed by me with inches to spare. The wind of its passage battered me, and I heard the thin, enclosed screams of those inside it. Not my enemies, only victims, trapped in a war they didn't comprehend.
I couldn't help them. If I stopped, I was dead. I had to hope that, having missed me, my enemies would release them to let them continue on their way.
Ahead, a large tractor-trailer shuddered, and the giant metal rack of cars it carried tipped and twisted as it jackknifed into my path. The entire rig crashed onto its side and skidded toward me, shooting dry sparks.
It blocked the whole road. No room to go around, and nothing but loose sand to the sides. If I went off the road, I'd crash, and if that didn't finish me, I'd be on foot and an easy target.
I reached down into the earth and yanked a section of the road upward. The asphalt rose in a ramp, and then I was hurtling forward, leaving the ground in a long, flat arc.
The back tire of the Victory barely cleared the still-skidding wreckage. I couldn't spare a breath for relief; I was coming down now, and I knew my driving skills were not equal to handling that challenge easily. My innate Djinn nature allowed me to learn quickly, but not completely.
I pulled at the road on the other side, giving myself a ramp to land on, and even so, the impact of the motorcycle's tires grabbing hold almost overturned me. I controlled the wobbling machine somehow and focused ahead. Nothing could come at me from behind, not now; my enemies themselves had seen to it.
No, the next attack would come from ahead, or . . .
I had almost no warning, only an indefinable sensation on my left side. Just enough time to realize that speed wouldn't save me this time.
I let go of the throttle and jammed on the brakes.
A massive off-road vehicle on tall tires, black as a beetle, roared out of the dark. It had no lights, but there was a glow inside it from the instrument panel, and it reflected off the panicked face of the driver. He was trying to steer, but the wheel was locked.
The giant beast was aimed directly at me.
I couldn't get out of the way. He was too close, coming too fast, and as his front tires bit the gravel at the edge of the road, the truck erupted out of the dust with a roar and accelerated even more.
I flung myself and the motorcycle down, to the right. My side hit the road with a stunning impact, and a broad knife of agony tore through my body as the Victory's weight slammed down on my right leg.
The truck's undercarriage passed over me, reeking with hot metal and oil--a second of black terror, and then gone, spinning out of control off on the other side of the road, flipping in dust-devil showers of pale sand.
I had to get up, but when I tried, agony lanced through my right leg--broken or sprained.
For a precious few seconds, the power arrayed against me had nothing to throw at me. No oncoming vehicles. The ones it had used already were smoking wrecks.
Get up.
The leg, I decided between sobbing gasps, was not broken, only badly bruised and sprained.
Get up!
I struggled out from under the Victory, rolled over, and forced myself to my feet. I had to put most of my weight on my left leg, dragging the near-useless right, and it was an act of torture to pull the motorcycle to its balance point again. What had seemed so effortless and light in motion was cruelly heavy in stillness.
The Victory glittered in a sudden flash of headlights. Another oncoming vehicle. I gritted my teeth and calmed myself as I straddled the motorcycle.
It wouldn't start.
"Please," I whispered, and tried again. And again. On the third try, the engine coughed, caught, and roared.
I put it in gear and released the throttle. The bike leapt forward, back tire squealing and fishtailing, and the vibration felt like hot hammers pounding up and down my right leg. The lights smeared greasily in my vision, and for a black second I thought that my flesh would fail me.
I blinked, and the world steadied again.
The oncoming vehicle was large and dark, but I couldn't see its details or edges. If it was another tractor-trailer jackknifing across my path, I might not be able to avoid crashing this time.
The oncoming vehicle's lights grew larger, brighter, blazed like insane white suns. . . . . . . And flashed by me. No attack.
I gasped in a shuddering breath and jammed on the brakes again, bringing the Victory to an unwilling, skidding halt, because in the fraction of a second it had taken for the truck to pass me, I had recognized it. Black and chrome, with red and yellow flames.
Looking back, I saw brake lights blaze red, and heard the juddering shriek as Luis Rocha's truck came to a halt crosswise in the road.
I stripped off the confining helmet, and the cold desert wind chilled my sweating face and fluffed my hair. It was a risk; it was Luis's truck, but that did not mean it was Luis in the driver's seat--and even if it was, the force that had attacked me had used innocents. It could just as easily use him, if it caught him unawares.
For a long second the truck idled, and then Luis Rocha opened the door and stepped down to the road. He didn't seem surprised to see me. Or especially happy. I shut off the Victory's engine, dismounted, and began to roll the motorcycle to the side of the road, limping badly with every step.
Luis, without a single word, came to my side and took hold of the machine. When it was safely out of the way, he turned to me. In the backwash of the truck's headlights he was all shadows and angles, and the flame tattoos along his arms seemed to writhe.
"Leg?" he asked. I nodded. He crouched down and ran a practiced hand from my hip down to my ankle, and I bit my lip to ke
ep from crying out as pressure found pain. "I can't take care of this here. We have to go. Get in the truck."
"My motorcycle--" I couldn't leave it. I needn't have worried; Luis rolled it to the truck, unlatched the back gate, and slid down a built-in ramp. He laid the Victory down in the bed, jumped down, and secured the back again.
"Like I said. Get in the truck."
"There are people hurt--" I could feel their agony and fear battering at me, the way the boy's pain had caught me that day in my apartment. I could feel them crying out for help.
"I know." The resigned look in his eyes, caught in the headlights' glow, was an awful thing. "Help's coming."
He was right. I could hear the rising howl of sirens, and red-and-blue flashes were visible just coming over a distant hill.
One of the wrecks--the tractor-trailer, I thought--shattered in an explosion and blew fire to the sky. I flinched, off-balance, and Luis's hand closed around my scraped, aching right arm.
"Cassiel," he said, "get in the truck. I'm not telling you again."
"You don't need to," I said wearily. "I'm a Djinn. The third time's the charm."
We didn't speak at first. I hated the closed-in metal of the truck cab, but that was less important at the moment than the enormity of the attack that had come against me. I'd seen Djinn wield that kind of force, but this--this hadn't felt like a Djinn. While I didn't doubt there were a few Wardens capable of such things, in terms of pure strength, I didn't think they'd be so . . . obvious.
Then again, Scott Sands had not been a subtle man--but his power was Weather, not Earth.
The first thing that Luis said, after several miles passed beneath the wheels of the truck, was, "Ibby cried all day. I couldn't get her to stop."
She had lost her parents. It hardly seemed odd for a young child to be distressed.
Luis's glance cut to me, hard and dark as an obsidian knife. "She cried because you left."
I shifted so that I was no longer receiving the full glare. "You wanted me to go."
"Yeah. I did. And today I get word that you blew my boss out of a window. What the hell was that? Your idea of subtlety?"
