“Not especially,” he said with a frown.
“Don’t demur. It’s unattractive.” Grey drummed his fingers against his thigh. “Even before all of this,” he encompassed the room and themselves in a broad hand gesture, “you knew you were something outside of the average human being. You are stronger than most. Faster than many. Sharper and wiser and, by far, more deadly. If this does not make you special, then what would? I’ll answer that,” he said quickly. “A human who can navigate the world of the Nightwalkers and not only live to tell the tale, but be crucial in the shape and form of that tale.”
Leo had to give in a bit when he realized that everything Grey was saying was very much the truth.
“Tell me one more thing…”
“Young man, if you want to know anything else, you’ll have to wish for it. And since you only get one wish per Djynn, I would use your wish very wisely. Especially when wishing from the most powerful Djynn in the Americas. I’ll know when you are ready, so you better get to it, Faith.” With that, and in a shower of golden dust, the Djynn disappeared.
Leo turned to look at Faith. She was looking at him, her hands clasped tightly. He moved closer to her and reached to cover her hands with one of his. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” he asked. Somewhere inside of himself he realized he knew she always laced her fingers tightly together like that whenever she was nervous. It was almost like cheating, knowing these intimate details without having learned them the right way. I wish I could have discovered this in my own time, he thought.
Leo shook the thought off. It didn’t matter. Not any of it. He shouldn’t even be interested in knowing anything about her. And he didn’t trust Grey as far as he could throw him so the odds of them becoming lovers…
He looked into her eyes, the bright lemon color of them so breathtaking in their own way. When first he’d seen her, describing her eyes as beautiful would never have occurred to him. Alien. Strange. Deadly. Yes, all of those…but not beautiful.
But they were. They were crisp and bright and expressive and the more he thought about it, the more he had to agree with himself.
“I don’t trust this guy,” he said, moving closer to her. “And I can tell you don’t either.”
“Djynn are notoriously not trustworthy,” she agreed. “But there are exceptions to every rule.” She cocked her head to the side. “I am wondering why he’s so sure you’ll make a wish.”
“I could give an ant’s fart what he thinks I want to wish for,” he said sharply, even though he’d just been asking himself the same question. “What I’m worried about is…”
You, he thought. I’m worried about you.
She smiled at him, a soft, warming expression. A knowing one. “Well,” Faith said, “it’s nice to know you don’t think me entirely contemptible.”
Damn. He’d forgotten she could read that scroll thing. He wondered what word had been scrawled across it. He wondered if she knew things about him that he didn’t. Maybe she knew something and just didn’t feel inclined to share.
Jesus, Alvarez, you’re starting to sound paranoid!
“When it comes to wishing,” she said instructively, as if he might need the information in the future, “simplicity is to be avoided. The more specific you are the less likely the Djynn is able to find a loophole.”
“Loophole? You mean like…‘I wish I lived in a palace’ so he gives you a room at the Palace Roach Motel?”
She grinned. “Exactly like that.”
“Great. Or like ‘I wish I was surrounded by some hot bitches’ and he makes you a dog walker of female dogs in heat.”
She laughed, a short little snort of amusement. “That’s a good one. Or ‘I wish men would fall at my feet’ and then every time you touch a man he’ll pass out cold. It’s called the Midas effect. Midas wished everything he touched would turn to gold. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink…and eventually he touched his beloved daughter and turned her into a gold statue. That isn’t just a fable. There really was a man named Midas. But over the years it changed into a cautionary tale rather than a true historical accounting.” She smiled softly. “Did you know that a Djynn started the Revolutionary War? Well,” she nodded her head in allowance, “maybe not started…but all that tea getting dumped in the water had more mischief behind it than it did protestation.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“You know I’m not prone to lying,” she laughed.
“Except when you’re trying to make me own up to my feelings.”
“That’s not lying! It’s merely encouraging you to see the error of your ways by any means necessary.”
“You mean lying.” He snickered. “Justifiable fibbing.”
“I like to call it creative solutioning.”
“Is that even a word?”
“You’d be surprised what makes a word. Especially when it comes to you. Just because it isn’t in the English or Spanish dictionary doesn’t mean it’s not—”
She broke off, her eyes widening suddenly. And then Leo realized, just as she had, what they’d been doing. They had fallen into an easy familiarity, like longtime lovers might do, teasing each other, goading each other…
“I’m sorry,” Faith said quickly in a soft voice. “I didn’t mean to…” She trailed off, unable to put too much effort into her regret. Truth be told, she liked laughing with him. He had a nice laugh and his eyes smiled alongside that charismatic curve to one side of his mouth. He seemed somehow more handsome to her when he was enjoying his own indolent charm, when he flirted with her as if there were nothing different about them at all.
But the truth of the matter was that they were different. Worlds apart, nearly literally. And that flirtation was as knee-jerk to him as brushing his teeth in the morning might be. There was no real intent behind it.
And though it shouldn’t, it hurt her. It hurt her to know he didn’t feel anything for her. Nothing positive in any event. To him she was the “them” to his “us.”
But for a moment there they had felt like an “us.” That feeling, she knew, was Grey’s fault. Whether what he had shown them was the truth or a lie, it had felt real…still felt real. No amount of telling herself otherwise seemed to be working.
“Don’t apologize,” she heard him say quietly. Surprised, she looked up at him. “We’ve been manipulated. I recognize that. It wasn’t your fault.”
Now that really did surprise her. Freeing her from blame was as good as picking her for his team. Until that moment he had made it very clear he wanted nothing to do with anyone that fell under the category “Nightwalker.”
“I can’t help what I am,” she heard herself saying to him. “And I don’t want to.”
“No, I don’t suppose you would. No more than I would. I carved my identity a long time ago, learned to take responsibility for who I was. It wasn’t always that easy, being a young Hispanic man running around the barrio trying to look like a badass. It was hard not to get caught up with all the gangbangers hustling the neighborhood, always trying to claim it like a fiefdom. But I loved my mother and I’d never do anything to lose her faith in me. And then along came Jackson and Docia. I could have really gone the wrong way at any point in my life I guess is what I’m saying, but I didn’t. I’m all right with who I am, too.”
“How did you meet Jackson?” she asked him curiously.
“Well, one day I was hanging out with some of the neighborhood boys trying to be a badass like them, coming really damn close to shaming my mother with my behavior…until this white kid, young and strong, walked by and became a target for the older boys. They blocked his path, got in his face, puffed themselves up like peacocks.
“That was the day, the moment, I decided not to be what they were. Not to be the same old story, or the stereotype. When the first punch flew, I leapt into the fray like a wild thing, putting my back against Jackson’s. In that moment I had changed the encounter from one against four to two against three. Jackson dropped one of the three with a s
ingle punch. Not bad for a kid as young as he had been. I found out later on that Jackson’s father was a highly trained martial artist and had demanded the same from his son. Of course, Jackson was nowhere near comparable to his dad at that age, but he had it far and above over the lazy shit-talking bullies who had confronted him.
“I didn’t realize until later that I had been very lucky in picking the right side. I blame it on my mother, blamed it on hearing her voice in my ear, feeling her hand against the back of my head, teaching me to respect her above the easy choice, respecting her above the lemmings I lived around. That day was the closest I came to becoming a gangbanging jackass like all the rest of the boys from my neighborhood.”
“And Docia?” she asked gently, amazed that he was offering all of this information up to her. Grey may have put them through hell with those visions, but it might just be worth it if it meant it let Leo lower his guard a little. Let her in a little.
“My mother had died. There was nothing tying me down. My brothers were fucking useless pieces of shit who did nothing but give my mother grief every day of their lives. I had always envied Jackson’s world, the love of his father, the steadiness and the balance Jackson had been raised with. I was genuinely shocked when Jackson’s father took me in like a second son. By the time Docia had been born I’d been slated for the Rangers and Jackson was already dreaming of being a cop. It was all he had ever wanted…and he’d almost lost it all the day his parents were killed just a few short years later. With a baby sister to raise, Jackson was watching his dreams wash away as he was forced to make ends meet rather than take his turn at the academy. He was struggling to keep a roof over their heads. He barely graduated high school.
“That was when I told him we were going to do this right. We were going to raise his kid sister, give him his career and give me mine as well. I worried about the bills and Jackson went to school. We sort of split the duties when it came to raising Docia. We each had our strengths and weaknesses. But I think we did a pretty good job overall.”
Leo sighed and looked away from her. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this. It doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.”
“Yes, it does,” she said heatedly. “It matters a great deal! Now I understand why you are sticking your neck out for your friend, and why you are so afraid of him being somehow less than the friend you knew. I mean, my god, he’s your best friend and she’s as good as your flesh and blood daughter…”
She trailed off and their eyes met, both of them remembering another daughter…one that hadn’t been real…
Leo resisted the urge to get his temper up all over again. He was tired of feeling so much hatred. It had never been who he was, no matter how jaded he had become and how far off the path he had strayed since his mother had left him. He’d never doubted his moral compass. Even though he had chosen to cross the line in order to see justice done, he had never lost focus on the right and the wrong of things.
Until now. Now he was blaming her for things she hadn’t done, condemning her based on her race alone. It made him laugh with the irony of it. How many times had he hit a wall based on nothing but his race?
“What’s done is done,” he said quietly. “We can’t change what we know and we can’t help what we’ve been manipulated into feeling. I recognize that you are a victim here as much as I am. And that’s all the more reason why I get a sick feeling in my gut when I think of you trusting this guy, this Djynn, after the tricks he’s pulled on us.”
“I didn’t say I trusted him. I just…I don’t see how we have any choice in the matter so we have to just proceed at smartly as we possibly can.”
“For whatever that’s worth.” Leo sat down across from her with a sigh. “I’m navigating in a world I don’t understand, playing by other people’s rules.” The look he shot her was a mixture of irritation and anxiety. “I don’t like it.”
“I don’t blame you,” she said. “I only ask that you realize I’m doing the exact same thing. What I know of the Djynn begins and ends with warnings never to make a wish. I was always told that there’s no such thing as a smart wish because they are always smarter. But I have heard that there are a lot of Djynn, mainly Afreet and Marid like this one, who are not interested in the trickery the less powerful Djynn seem to take delight in. I can only assume that he wouldn’t have reached this position of power and import if he’d wasted his time and magic on unimportant things.
“Think of the amount of magic it must have taken for him to take us on that journey just now,” Faith said, leaning toward him with energy. “I can promise you that it was a lot. Djynn don’t just throw their magic away for no reason. If he showed us a possible future it was very probably for the reasons he stated…though I’m sure he’d had other ulterior motives as well. Odds are he doesn’t have an altruistic bone in his body, that’s true, but I have to hope that he doesn’t want to screw with us. Maybe he’s trying to curry favor like he says. Djynn like it when others owe them favors. Especially people as important as…as Jackson is.”
Leo had been divining things about people for too long not to notice that hesitation. His attention perked up and he narrowed his eyes at her, trying to access whatever he could from those pseudo memories they had shared. If he knew about her anxiety tells, maybe there were other things he’d learned from those vignettes that he could use to his advantage.
He realized then that she knew a great deal more about him than he did about her. His only sense of it was that she had somehow turned her back on her heritage, her people, in order to be with him. She had known that he’d had little tolerance when it came to Nightwalkers, so she had tried her best not to remind him of their differences…in spite of the fact that it stared him in the face every time he looked at her, every time he’d touched her black skin.
But you’ve never really touched her, a voice inside his head whispered to him fiercely. Never really made love to her. And he couldn’t escape the thought that that was a damn shame. He didn’t want to think it, didn’t want to give birth to even an instant of curiosity over it, but he couldn’t help himself.
Leo shook himself from the inside out. Focus, he told himself. Stay on point.
“Who are you?” he asked, watching her face very closely as he did so. “How is it that you ended up at the right place at the worst time and were able to do what you did to help Jackson…and me?”
She hesitated, taking just a moment too long to look up at him. But when she did he could tell she wasn’t going to lie to him. He could tell because he knew her. Thanks to that Djynn, he knew her.
“I’m a Night Angel,” she said simply. “Djynns need to grant wishes, and we need…we need to help others. I don’t know a better way of explaining it. It revitalizes us, the knowledge that we’ve done something to help someone. Ferrying a soul into a cusp is not totally selfless. We reap a great deal of pleasure from it. It satisfies us. I suppose all of that is where the ideas about angels come from, although they’re a teensy bit off on the coloring.” She held up her fingers with a pinch of air between them.
“That didn’t even come close to answering my question,” he said, pinning her down with a hard stare. “Who are you?”
“A messenger,” she said quietly. “Just like any other society we have a hierarchy. We have hierophants, messengers, and saints…and none of those things are what you might think they are. They’re not what humans think they are. Our hierophants are our oracles. A hierophant very close to me saw what was going to transpire on the lawns of that house in New Mexico and I, being a messenger, was sent to try and prevent it, or at the very least control the damage afterward. Some think it’s not our place…but others feel that we are bound by what we see and what we can do, that we have a moral duty to try and make things right.”
“A messenger. What you did…it packed quite a punch.”
She nodded. “Messengers are sent for a reason. We’re the strongest of our breed. We have the power to do certain thin
gs that not everyone has. I was chosen, and rightly so, because the hierophant knew my specific abilities would come into import in the situation. And he was right.”
“And what is your ability? What is it that I saw you do?”
“I am a reflector, you could say. I have no real ability, per se, except that I can reflect back to others whatever power it is they choose to use against me. So long as I am aware it’s being used against me, that is,” she said with a grim expression. “I wasn’t aware of what the Djynn was doing to me. I can be just as easily deceived as the next person. But I should have known better. I should have been on guard against…” She trailed off and he nodded.
“You couldn’t, could you? You had no way of knowing he could do that, so you couldn’t reflect it back against him.”
“I know now. He won’t be able to do it again. Not without my consent, in any event.”
“This makes you very powerful, doesn’t it? It makes you just as powerful as anything you come up against.”
“Yes…and no. There is a downside to what I can do. I can reflect things back, but it doesn’t stand to reason that I will have any control over the power that I’m wielding. I got lucky against Apep. I took him by surprise. I won’t have the luxury of that advantage again. He will see me for the threat I actually am next time we meet, and believe me when I tell you he won’t be very happy with me.”
Leo did believe her. He had a feeling that they had barely scratched the surface of what Apep could do. And when it finally came down to brass tacks, no matter how she tried to underplay it, she was going to be a crucial and dangerous weapon they could use against Apep.
“I feel like you still haven’t answered my question,” he said. “You’ve told me what you are and what you can do, you’ve told me your mission in this world…or your mission as you see it, but there’s something you’re avoiding telling me, and that’s who you are. It’s an important detail, or you wouldn’t go to so much effort to hide it.”
“I’m not hiding—”
“Don’t lie to me,” he said sharply. “I’ll give Grey that much. He made it so I can tell if you’re lying to me. I know your tells, Faith. I know you can’t look me in the eye when you’re being deceptive. I know you run the pads of your thumbs over your nails when you’re anxious. Please I have a hard enough time trusting as it is and I’m making an effort here. Please don’t lie to me.”
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