by Rachel Caine
"I don't know," I said. "I've never made them."
"It's easy. I'll show you."
"You already ate pancakes," I reminded her. "I don't think you should eat more. Do you?"
Her shoulders fell into dejected curves. "You're no fun."
As a former Djinn, I felt a bit of satisfaction at that, but it faded quickly. The child was in pain, though she was trying to hide it from me.
"I'm sorry we were gone," I told her. She didn't raise her head. "I know you missed your uncle."
"You, too."
"I know."
"Grandma Sylvia doesn't like you," Ibby said. "She doesn't like you because you're a gringa and she thinks you're going to steal me away."
"Steal you? Why would I steal you?"
"Because I'm not safe with Tio Luis. She says he's why it happened." It being the tragedy that had shattered her life.
The girl's logic was unassailable. "So she thinks I would try to take you away. Why?"
Ibby shrugged. "You're white. The police will like you better. So they'll give me to you. That's what Grandma Sylvia says. She says I'd be better off here, with her."
I had no idea what that had to do with the issue, but I considered carefully before I said, "I wouldn't steal you away, Isabel. You do know that, don't you? I know you love your uncle and your grandmother. I wouldn't take you away."
"Promise?" Ibby looked up, and there were tears shimmering in her eyes.
"I promise."
"Cross your heart."
I looked involuntarily at the crucifix hung on the wall near the door. Cross your heart seemed a violent thing to do.
"No, silly, like this." Isabel slid out of her chair, clattered around the table, and guided my hand to touch four compass points around where my mortal heart beat. "There. Now you promised."
She climbed up in my lap, and I stroked her hair slowly as she relaxed against me. She was almost asleep when she said, "Cassie?" It was a slow, dreamy whisper, and I touched my finger to her lips. "I'm scared sometimes."
"So am I. Sometimes," I whispered, very softly. "I won't let anything harm you."
"Cross your heart?"
I did.
When Luis and Sylvia returned, Luis clearly was running short on patience, and Sylvia's expression was as hard as flint. A smile would have struck sparks on her.
"Luis agrees that we'll get my sister Veronica to come and sit with Isabel tonight," Sylvia announced. "You'll want to see Manny and Angela."
She was instructing me, it seemed. I gave her a long, level Djinn stare, and she paled a bit.
"Thank you for your consideration," I said. Isabel had fallen asleep in my arms, a limp, hot weight, and I adjusted her position so that her head rested against my neck. "I will put her to bed."
"I'll come with you," Luis immediately volunteered. Sylvia's lips pursed, but she said nothing as she cleared the syrup-smeared plate, fork, and empty glass from the table.
Isabel didn't wake as I put her down on her child-sized bed--I wondered if it had once been Angela's, as the furnishings seemed faded and used--and Luis showed me how to tuck her in. He kissed the child's forehead gently, and I followed suit. Her skin was as soft as silk under my lips, and I felt a wave of emotion that surprised me.
Tenderness.
"Sylvia doesn't like me because I am a gringa," I said to Luis as I straightened, "and because she's afraid I will take Isabel from you."
He seemed surprised by this. I didn't tell him Isabel had been the insightful one and not me. "Yeah, well, with my record the court might not be so thrilled, and it's not like the Wardens are around right now to be character witnesses. Sylvia's saying she wants to be her legal guardian, but that means Ibby has to live here, not come with me when I go off to a new assignment."
"Sylvia wishes to keep her." Luis, I recalled, had been afraid of that. It seemed he was right.
"Not going to happen." Luis brushed the girl's hair back from her face, and I saw the shadow of his brother in him, gentle and devoted. "Sylvia's okay, but she doesn't love the kid like I do. Ibby needs love."
"And Sylvia can't protect her," I said. "You can."
He straightened, looking at me directly, and I looked back. For a moment, neither of us moved or spoke, and then Luis pointed vaguely down the hall. "I should get ready. For the viewing. Listen, if you don't want to go--"
"I'll go," I said. "But we should find someone to watch over Isabel, at least from a distance. Are there any Wardens at all available?"
"Yeah, I can do that. Probably will have to be one of those other guys, the Ma'at. There are three or four of them still in town." He made an after you motion, and we closed Isabel's door behind us.
The Munoz Funeral Home was a long structure, with muted lights and deep carpets and quiet music. We were met at the door by an older man, balding, with small round spectacles perched on his nose. He wore a black suit, like the one Luis had on, and he seemed professionally sad. His doleful expression never changed as he shook Sylvia's hand, then Luis's, then mine.
I had, at Luis's prompting, changed my clothes from pale to dark--a pair of black slacks, a shimmering black shirt, and a fitted jacket. It seemed a fruitless use of power, but I was cautiously pleased with the results of my transformation. I still couldn't willingly alter the structure of my own form, but clothing seemed easier than it had been.
Perhaps--just perhaps--I was learning to use my powers more effectively. My appearance seemed to raise no alarms with the funeral director, at any rate, and I followed Sylvia and Luis down a long hallway, past open and closed doorways. The air smelled strongly of flowers and burning candles.
The funeral director opened a set of doors and preceded us into the room. It was smaller than I had expected, unpleasantly so, and I found myself slowing as I approached the threshold.
Six rows of plain black folding chairs, a cluster of padded armchairs near the back, a table, a book, a pen. Flowers.
The long, sleek forms of open coffins.
I stopped.
Luis and Sylvia kept walking, right to the front, and Luis stayed near Angela's mother as she sobbed, leaning over the casket in which I knew her daughter must lie.
I could not go forward. There is no need, the Djinn part of me said. Their essences are gone from the shells. This is human ritual. You have no part of it.
The human part of me didn't want to grieve again, and I knew that it would, once I took that last step.
I turned away, walking quickly. Other tragedies were unfolding here, families shattered, bonds broken, promises unkept. I am not human. I have no part of this. No part.
I was almost running when I reached the front door.
I stood in the stillness of the evening, watching the last rays of the sun fade behind mountains, and breathing in convulsive gasps.
"Hurts, doesn't it?" someone said from behind me. I turned. I'd heard--sensed--no approach, neither human nor Djinn, and for a moment I saw nothing except shadows.
Then he stepped forward into the fading light. I had not known him in human form, but I recognized the Djinn essence of him immediately. He was a brilliant flame on the aetheric, a burst that exploded out in all directions and immediately hushed itself into utter stillness.
His name was Jonathan, and he was dead.
I fell to my knees. I didn't mean to do so, but surprise and awe made it inevitable. I'm imagining this, I thought. Jonathan is dead and gone.
"Yeah, you keep on telling yourself that, Cassie. Can I call you Cassie? Ah, hell, I'm going to, so get used to it," he said. He looked very, very human at the moment--tall, lean, comfortable in the skin he wore. His hair glinted silver, and his eyes--his eyes were as dark as the hidden moon. "Guys like me don't exactly die. We sort of--get promoted."
Jonathan had held the reins to power for all the Djinn for thousands of years. I had not loved him, but I had respected him--if nothing else, because he had commanded respect from Ashan, and Ashan had never been stupid enough to directly challen
ge him. There was comfort in Jonathan, and there was also dangerous intensity, cleverly concealed by his all-too-human manner.
But he was dead. He had to be dead. We had all felt it. His passing had shattered the entire Djinn world into pieces.
"I don't--" My voice sounded very odd. "I don't understand. You can't be here--"
He flipped that away with a casual gesture. "Yeah, not staying, just passing through. Got things to do. So. How's the world? Never mind, I know the answer. Always teetering on the verge of disaster, right?" He studied me for a second, and extended his hand. "Get up, I don't like people on their knees."
When I accepted the touch of his hand, it felt real. Warm and human. I held it for a moment too long before I dropped it. "Everyone believes you dead."
"Good. Meant that, actually. It was time for me to move on, and there was no way to do it without giving up my spot in the great organizational tree of life. Like I said, I'm just passing through, so I've got no stake in things anymore. But I thought I'd drop in to say hello."
"Why?"
"Why?" he echoed, and his eyebrows quirked up. "Yeah, I see your point; we weren't exactly close. I was the boss, and I was too human for your taste. We call that irony, by the way, down here in the dirt." He let that sink in for a moment, then smiled. "You realized what you've been given yet?"
"Given," I repeated, and I heard flat anger in my voice. "What have I been given?" Everything I had once possessed had been ripped away from me. I'd been given nothing.
From his thin-edged smile, he knew what I was thinking. "You've been given a chance."
"Chance. What chance? I have been cast out, crippled, forced into human skin. I'm hunted and despised. What chance is this?"
"Something most Djinn never get," said Jonathan, who had been born in mortal flesh only a few thousand years ago, and yet seemed far older than I. "A chance to learn something completely new. A chance to shed your old life and form yourself in a different body, a different shape, a different direction. You're a blank slate, Cassiel, that's your chance." He didn't blink, and I saw the flicker of stars in his eyes, endless galaxies of them, an eternity of possibilities. "Or just a chance to screw it all up, all over again. Anyway. You're here for a reason."
"I'm here because Ashan cast me out."
He shook his head. "Something bigger than Ashan is in play, Peaches. You'll figure it out. You always did have logic on your side, even if you were as cold as space. You have a battle ahead of you. Just thought I'd shake your hand while I could, and tell you good luck."
Something rippled in the sky above us, like heat above a road, and Jonathan looked up sharply. His human body flared into light, pure white light, and I sensed the flash of steel-sharp wings as I covered my eyes.
I could see him even through closed lids and concealing fingers--a man-shaped bonfire, coursing with energies I couldn't touch, couldn't even identify.
Jonathan had gone far beyond the Djinn, into something that was legend even to us.
"Got battles of my own to fight," his voice said, in a whisper that came shockingly close to my ear. "Think about what I said, Cassiel. Think about your chance. Remember how it feels to feel. It's important."
The light intensified into a burning pressure on my skin, and I turned my back, crying out, as those mighty wings carried the being who had once been the greatest of the Djinn up, out, away.
"Cassiel?"
Luis's voice. I whirled, shaking, and saw him standing in the doorway, watching me with unmistakable concern. There were marks of tears on his face, but he seemed . . . peaceful.
"Something wrong?" he asked. He hadn't seen.
Jonathan wasn't visible, not to him.
I couldn't begin to explain. I shook my head and wrapped my arms around myself, trying to control the chill I felt. I had been in the presence of something so great that I'd felt so small beside it, and it made me wonder--it forced the question of what else the Djinn didn't know, couldn't imagine.
Of what I had once been, and might still become. A chance, he'd said. But a chance to be what? Do what?
"It's okay," Luis said, and put his hand on my shoulder. "It's good that you cared about them."
Manny. Angela. He thought my tears were for them--and, in a way, they were, for all the chances wasted, for all that was unknown.
I took in a deep breath and nodded. "I did," I said, and heard the surprise in my voice. "I did care."
Luis put his arm around my shoulders and steered me back into the funeral home, and with his hand in mine, I went to look for the last time on the first two human friends I had known.
I went to say good-bye.
I was surprised by how many people came to the viewing. Greta, the Fire Warden with the scarred face, came to pay her respects and talk quietly with Luis for a moment. She glanced toward where I sat at the back of the room, and for an instant I thought she would speak to me, but she changed course and shook hands instead with Sylvia, who sat remote and quiet near her daughter's coffin.
Some came with flowers. Some cried. All felt uncomfortable here, in the presence of such massive change.
No one spoke to me.
At eight o'clock, the funeral director with the sad face came to me to whisper that it was time to close the viewing.
Luis was shaking hands with the last few visitors when the doors at the back opened again, and five young men walked in--Hispanic, dressed in casual, sloppy clothing. Glaring colors, baggy blue jeans topped by oversized sports team jackets, all for either UNLV or the San Francisco 49ers.
Four of them were nothing: followers. Killers, most assuredly, with jet-black eyes and no hint of conscience behind them.
But it was the one in front I watched.
He was the shortest of the five, slight of build, with a smooth, empty face and the coldest eyes I had seen in a human. Like the others, he had tattoos covering his neck and arms. He was ten years younger than Luis, perhaps more, but there was something unmistakably dangerous about him.
Luis had frozen into stillness at the first sight of the intruders, and now he moved only to keep facing them as they strolled past Sylvia, the funeral director, and the two or three remaining mourners. Luis flicked his gaze quickly to me, and in that look I read a very definite command. I rose from my seat and glided to the others in the room, and gently but without hesitation hurried them toward the doors. Sylvia frowned thunderously at me, but she also understood that something was very wrong.
I closed the doors and locked them from the inside, turned, and crossed my arms over my chest. Three of the newcomers were watching me, assessing what risk I posed; two of them immediately dismissed me. The last of them--smarter than the rest, I thought--continued to keep part of his attention on me.
"Hola," the young leader said to Luis, and bent over Manny's casket to stare. "Holy shit, this your brother? Doesn't look much like you. Then again, the makeup probably don't help. Makes him look like a puto. A dead one. Pinche cabron."
Luis didn't move, didn't betray even by a flicker the anger I knew he felt. I could feel it coming off him like heat from a furnace.
"Show some respect," he said. "Leave."
"Respect?" The boy turned slowly in Luis's direction, and his thin smile grew even tighter. "You want to talk to me about respect, Ene? You screwed my brother. You ratted him out. You got nothing to say about respect."
"Whatever I did to your brother, you killed mine," Luis said. "It's enough. Get out and let us bury them in peace."
The boy sprawled himself over two chairs, completely at ease, and put his feet up on the coffin. "Fuck you and your brother," he said. "We were aiming for you."
Two of the men slipped guns free of their waistbands and held them at their sides. Luis locked eyes with me, and I pushed away from the door.
"My friend asked you to leave," I said. "Please comply."
"Please what? Who is this pasty-faced gringa bitch?" The boy didn't wait to hear Luis's response. "Never mind. Just kill her."
/> The men were turning toward me when I weakened the metal chairs the boy-leader was sitting on. He toppled to the carpet, cursing, and Luis moved forward, grabbed another chair, and hit the first man to point the gun toward me in the back of the head, with stunning force.
I took a running leap and slammed my body into the midsection of the next man, ripped the gun from his hand, and threw it toward Luis. It didn't require much power to disrupt the electrical impulses within the brain of the third man, an interruption just long enough to make him stagger and fall. Luis jumped him and recovered that gun, as well, while I moved to take down the last.
In seconds, it was done. Most of the men were on the floor, their guns in Luis's hands or pockets, and the boy was just struggling up to his knees to find one of the guns aimed directly at him, along with Luis's deadly stare.
He froze.
Luis thumbed back the hammer on the revolver he held. "You need to get your ass out of here before I forget my manners," he said. "Your brother got what he deserved. Mine didn't. You want to keep on going to war, I'll bring it, and you'll be the first one down. Good thing you're already in a funeral home. Saves time."
"Shoot me," the boy growled. "You better shoot me, 'cause if you don't, you got no idea what we're going to do to you. No place you can go, no place you can hide. You or your piece of shit family. Next time we get the kid, too."
Heat flared inside me, sticky and tornado strong, and it was all I could do not to take hold of the boy and take him apart, one bloody scream at a time.
Luis sent me a warning look, one full of unmistakable command to stay still. "Watch them," he ordered, and jerked his chin toward the other men. He tossed me one of the guns. I plucked it from the air and aimed it at the group of angry, hurting men in front of us. The urge to pull the trigger was very, very strong, and they must have sensed their death in the air, because none of them moved.
Luis put the gun he held away in the waistband of his pants. "You got them, Cassiel?"
"Yes," I said softly. "What are you doing?"
"Breaking the law."
I felt the storm of power, even though I was on the edges of it; the gravitational pull of it focused on the boy. Luis seemed to hover, almost floating in the strong currents of it, and then he lunged.
He put his hands on the boy's slicked-back hair and his thumbs on the high forehead. The boy opened his mouth, but no scream emerged.
