by Rachel Caine
His moment’s fascination with the map faded, and he walked away, clearly thinking.
“What?” I asked him. I couldn’t follow what logical—or illogical—leaps he was making, but I could sense the changes in his mood quickly enough, and it had darkened considerably.
“Area 51’s a hell of a secure spot,” he said. “But I really can’t see the government letting the Wardens set up shop in there. If they’re letting us in at all, they’ve got some kind of ulterior motive about it.”
“Like what?” I asked. He turned and looked at me for a long second, then shook his head.
“Could be Ibby,” he said. “Could be they want all these kids for themselves. Could be they want you, Cass.”
“Me,” I repeated, surprised. “Why?”
“Because the feds have never had an actual Djinn, they never could even come close to grabbing one. You, you’re vulnerable, and you’re the next best thing—you can spill all the weaknesses, and give them an idea of Djinn strength, too. I don’t like it, and no way am I going to risk Ibby, either.”
I had never thought of myself as vulnerable, and the idea surprised me far more than I’d expected. “I could fight them,” I said.
“Yeah, sure you could. But this is something you don’t understand about humanity, querida—you can kill one, or five, or ten, but they keep on coming. I guarantee you, in Area 51, if they want you, they’ve got you.”
Unsettling. “Then what do you want to do?” I asked.
He locked the door behind Cardenas. “I want to find out what the hell Marion thinks she’s doing, because I’m not taking Ibby—or you—blindly out into the field of fire. Not ever again.”
It took two hours to get a return call from Marion Bearheart. When it finally came, Ibby was eating cereal in the kitchen with us, and Luis gestured for me to finish pouring her orange juice and follow him into the other room. Ibby watched us go, too much awareness and calculation in her face, and I wondered just how much we could really keep from her. I leaned over to stroke her silky hair back from her face. “Just a moment,” I promised her. “You’ll drink your juice?”
That got a well-remembered, brilliant smile from her. “I know, juice is good for me,” Ibby said, which wasn’t the same thing.
“Promise me.”
“I promise,” she sighed, and reached for the glass to down a mighty mouthful, to prove her point. I kissed her forehead and followed Luis.
He was pacing, with the cordless phone held to his ear. I knew that particular style of restlessness in him; it meant he was deeply worried, and very angry on some level he was determined not to convey. His knuckles, however, were pale where he gripped the receiver. “Yeah,” he was saying. “Yeah, I know the kid needs help, Marion; that’s not what I—” He paused, clearly interrupted, and his dark eyes met mine briefly before the pacing carried him onward. “Ibby lost her mother and father; that’s enough trauma for any kid her age. Then those nutcases triggered her powers too early. They filled her head full of lies about the Wardens; they told her I was dead—showed her I was dead. They showed her how Cassiel killed me. And now you want to put her in some kind of camp—No, shut up and let me finish. I don’t care if you call it a ranch or a camp or a hospital or a school; it’s nothing but more of the same. She’s had enough terror and brainwashing for a lifetime, Marion. She needs a home, and I’m not sending her anywhere like that!”
Marion was patient—and kind—enough to allow him to finish his rant without interruption. Then she responded, something quiet and brief, and Luis hung up the phone. He stood there, head down, shoulder-length hair—now more than a bit ragged, from the fire we’d faced—hiding his expression, and then turned and walked away from me without saying a word.
I followed him into the kitchen. He poured coffee and sipped it, watching Isabel eat her cereal with narrowed eyes. She glanced up at him with a smile, and he smiled back. It looked almost natural.
“Ibby,” he said, “how would you feel about going away to school?”
She didn’t answer immediately. She looked up at him, no particular expression on her sweet-featured face—perfectly composed. There was an unsettling amount of calculation in the level stare she gave him, and then Ibby said, “I don’t like schools anymore.”
“I know, mija, but this is a good school, one that will help you.” He sank down at the table next to her and took her small hand in his large one. “You don’t say it, but you’re scared, aren’t you? And hurting. You still miss your mami and papi—I know you do.”
That broke through the crystal shell of her artificial calm, and she looked away and said, in a small voice, “All the time.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Luis said, and kissed the top of her head with such gentleness it made my heart ache. “I hate it that they’re gone and they can’t be here to tell you how brave you’ve been, and how strong you are. But being strong isn’t everything. It doesn’t make you happy, does it?”
He’d struck a nerve, one that I didn’t even understand. Why wouldn’t strength make one happy? Would weakness? No matter which direction I turned the question, it remained unanswerable for me. A quintessentially human thing, I supposed.
Ibby’s dark eyes had filled with tears. “No,” she said, in an even smaller, more fragile voice. “Being strong makes me sad, too. I don’t want to hurt people. Even the bad people. I just want people to leave me alone.”
That, too, I failed to grasp. Among Djinn, things were much more straightforward. One had allies, friends, adversaries, and enemies. Behavior of others dictated responses, measure for measure. I couldn’t imagine having an ethical stand that would somehow keep me from striking out at those who wanted to hurt me. There could be no justice unless someone was willing to wield the sword.
But I saw in Ibby something else ... something that I was almost certain was placed there by her mother, Angela. I did not doubt that Angela would defend her child to the death, but Angela was one who forgave others. She had tried to find the good in people even when it was vanishingly small, or absent altogether.
She had passed that noble desire on to her daughter, and now it was a slender, precious thread holding Isabel away from the pit into which our enemies had tried to plunge her. They’d sought to use her as a weapon, but Ibby wasn’t anyone’s tool.
I sank down into the chair across from Ibby and Luis, watching the two of them together. There was a sweetness to it that held a strength of its own.
I didn’t know why, but I reached out to Isabel as well, and took her left hand in both of mine.
“Your uncle and I will fight the bad people for you,” I said. “They’ll never hurt you again. I promise you that.”
Djinn didn’t promise lightly; we were bound by oaths, when we swore them in the old, formal ways. An oath sworn by a Djinn had once bound our entire race, and put us at the doubtful mercies of humanity. My promise was well meant, but it would require dangerous commitment to keep.
But I did not regret it, especially when I saw some of the deep fear in her start to lose its hold. She sniffled, and her eyes overflowed. I let go of her hand as Luis put his arms around her and gathered her up in his lap, rocking her as if she were a much younger child. “Hush, mija, nothing’s going to happen. See, Cass and I are on the case. The bad people, they’re gonna take one look at us and run.”
She pulled back to give him a frowning look. “Why?”
“Why what, little duck?” He caught her nose gently between thumb and forefinger, and made a quacking sound.
Ibby suddenly reverted to her age, and giggled and put her arms around his neck. “Why would they run away?”
“Because,” I said, “your uncle is very scary.”
Luis snorted and said, “Yeah, coming from the Auntie War Goddess, that’s funny. I’m just freaking terrifying.”
“You can be, when you wish,” I said. I was telling the literal truth. “I’d fear you, should we be on opposite sides.”
He started to laugh, but then
he got a curious look and said, “I think you actually mean that.”
“I do,” I said. “Were I your enemy, I might run away, too.”
He held out his hand, which was curled into a fist. I glanced at it, then bumped it lightly with my own.
“You’d scare the crap out of me, Cass,” he said. “If you ever went all avenging angel on me.”
“Then you and I must try not to land on opposite sides,” I said, straight-faced. Ibby giggled again, a sound like tiny silver bells that woke joy in my heart. “You know, I am younger than Isabel, in terms of my human life,” I said. “I think I might go to this school to learn how to better use my own powers. That is the point of the training, isn’t it?”
Luis seemed surprised, but he controlled it quickly and nodded. “Might be tough for you,” he said. “I mean, you like to be head of the class, Cassiel. I can think of a lot of kids who’d be much better at this than you, you know.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Such as?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He winked at Ibby. “Maybe this one, here.”
“I am formidable,” I said. “Do you think you can learn more quickly than I can, Isabel?”
Ibby turned her head to look at me. “If I wanted,” she said. “I’m a fast learner, faster than anybody. The Lady said so ...”
Her face shut down, and I knew I’d made a mistake leading her down a memory path that would inevitably bring up images of Pearl, and her time shut up at the Ranch.
Time, events, that she still hadn’t fully revealed to either of us.
She turned her head and buried her face in the soft material of Luis’s shirt, like a younger, shyer child. “I don’t want to go to any school,” she said. It was almost a wail. “Tío, don’t make me go!”
He kissed her hair again and hugged her tight. “No, sweetie, I won’t,” he said. He sounded miserable, and whether Ibby knew it or not, I could sense that he was lying. “I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.”
My body felt a sudden bite of chill, even though I rarely felt shifts in temperature unless they were extreme and sudden. I cocked my head and studied him. He mouthed, Not now, very clearly, and I inclined my head just a fraction.
For Ibby’s sake, I would let his lie go unchallenged.
For now.
The day passed without much incident—or at least, much beyond the normal chaos of having a restless child-Warden roaming a household. Luis and I were required to be on call for the Wardens at all times, but remarkably, this was a day without an emergency, other than a few small aetheric maintenance requests to relieve seismic pressure in one area and build it in another to maintain the balance.
It seemed almost artificially calm, and it worried me.
Luis didn’t discuss the order from Marion Bearheart until Ibby went to take a bath that evening—a thing that I supervised, albeit from the hallway, as Isabel’s body image was starting to form and she was going through a period of shyness. As she splashed in the tub and soaped her hair, I looked down the hall toward the kitchen, where Luis retrieved a bottle of beer, opened it, and then turned to face me. I glanced at the bathroom. Ibby was singing something in Spanish, and making fanciful shapes in her shampoo-inflated hair.
“You lied to her,” I said quietly, still watching her. She wasn’t paying us any attention. “What did Marion tell you on the phone?”
Luis took a deep drink of beer before he said, “Marion said I could bring her, or they’d come and get her, but either way, it was going down. I was tempted to tell her to bring it, but I was afraid she’d take it literally. Marion’s kind of like that. She’s not giving us any choice.”
“And will you fight them when they come for her?” I asked. “Because you know Ibby will resist. She’s too afraid to surrender again.”
“I know she will. And the truth is, I haven’t decided yet.” He sounded very troubled, and very serious. “I can’t let her get dragged off again, not on my watch. Not gonna happen. But if Ibby and I put up a fight, people will die on their side, and maybe on ours. And innocent people for miles around, probably.”
“Not only that,” I said, equally softly. “If Ibby fights with lethal force, it only proves their point that she can’t be left on her own among other children. It will destroy any chance she has for a free future. And she will kill, if she thinks you are in mortal danger. She saw you die before, even if it was a false vision. She won’t allow it to happen again without acting.”
He closed his eyes and pressed the cold bottle to his forehead. “Jesus, what a mess. I should have asked—what are you gonna do?”
“Like you, I have not decided,” I said. “But I don’t care for the idea that anyone should try to take her by force, even if they believe it’s in her best interests. I don’t like that all.”
“Well, we’ve got that in common.”
“Neither do I want to see her, or you, die,” I continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Or myself. I find I rather value myself.”
He laughed. “No kidding.”
“I am an important asset to the Wardens,” I said, possibly too earnestly and too literally. “Should I not admit I am valuable? Is that wrong?”
“No, it’s not wrong, Cass,” he said, and put the beer down. He walked to me and put his hands on my upper arms. His right was cold, his left warm, but the temperature quickly equalized; I forgot the sensation as I looked into his eyes and saw the regard and strength there. “You maybe stretch the reasonable limits of self-confidence sometimes, but it’s not wrong. You are valuable.” His hands glided up my arms, and his voice softened and deepened. “God knows, I can’t put a price on what I feel for you. You know that, right? You feel that?”
I put my hands flat on his chest, but not to push him away; I savored the feeling of his lungs moving, his heart pumping. Life, in all its odd, complex glory.
Luis, too, was irreplaceable. As was Isabel. As had been Manny and Angela.
And in that moment, I knew the decision had already been made for me—that I couldn’t possibly allow Luis and Isabel to fight without me, whether the cause was good or bad. And yet I knew that fighting might bring terrible consequences.
There might come a time when we would all have to surrender.
Luis might have known it, too, but he wisely didn’t pursue the subject. He kissed me instead, a sweet, warm lingering of lips and tongues, and I felt tension gathering inside, golden-hot, when I heard Isabel say, “Tía Cassie?”
Unthinkable as it might have been, I’d forgotten her completely. I broke free of Luis’s embrace and turned, to find that she’d emptied the bathwater, wrapped herself in a towel, and was standing there on the tile floor, dripping. Her eyes were huge, and full of curiosity.
“Are you in love with my uncle Luis?” she asked.
I looked at Luis, who stared back, on the verge of laughing. He spread his hands helplessly. “Hey, she didn’t ask me,” he said. “Good luck.”
In this, at least, I was determined to be truthful. I sank down to one knee in front of Isabel, which put us almost on eye level, and said, “Yes. I love your uncle very much. Is that all right?”
She cocked her head a little to one side, thinking; clearly, she hadn’t expected such a direct response. From the choked sound Luis was making, neither had he. “I suppose,” she said, a little severely. “But don’t make him sad. I won’t like it if you make him sad.”
She continued to watch me with a serious expression, until I nodded with equal gravity. What Luis might not have picked up from her words was the underlying threat. She still doubted me, at some very deep level; my once-Djinn-sister Pearl had gone to great lengths to try to create me as the villain in Ibby’s life, to paint me as a monster and a cruel murderer, to twist the child in the direction that Pearl wished her to go, for whatever obscure and dangerous reason. It would take time for Ibby to get over that completely, even if on a rational level she was trying to believe in me again.
I didn’t yet know what Pearl
was trying to achieve by abducting and altering these children, but I knew one thing: They were powerful, and dangerous when angered.
The subtext of what Ibby had said was quite clear: If you hurt him, I’ll hurt you back. And she meant every unsaid word of it. She might not want to hurt bad people, but she would, for Luis, make a definite exception to her rule ... even if the bad person was me.
I nodded, holding her gaze. There was no doubt between us what she meant, or what I had agreed. Ibby, satisfied, grabbed her pale pink nightgown, the one with bright cartoon characters woven in the fabric, and shut the door to change.
Luis had watched the entire exchange, and now, as I glanced toward him, I saw that he hadn’t missed any of the subtexts, either. “Dios,” he breathed. “She really would take you on if she had to, wouldn’t she?”
I nodded. “For you, she’d take on anyone. You’re all she has, Luis.”
“No,” he said. “She has you, too. Even if she doesn’t really know that yet.”
I wanted to believe that, but I had choices to make—small ones now, and larger ones looming like storms in the distance. The wrong decision at any time would have catastrophic consequences, not just for me but for everyone I had come to love in the human world. I had, in a very real sense, been sent here by the Djinn to halt a disastrous, still-unknowable chain of events that Pearl had put in motion, by breaking a weak link in the chain itself.
The link of human life, from which Pearl was drawing her power.
Perhaps even the right decision this time would still mean that I would become the villain Ibby so feared, destroy my fragile relationship with her uncle, and set me adrift and alone.
Choices.
I hated them.
I felt a burst of power from the bathroom, and reacted without thinking to what could have been an attack upon Isabel; I banged the door open and charged in, and caused Ibby to yelp and back up fast against the wall. She was wearing the nightgown, and her hair was dry and crackling with energy. Too much energy. There wasn’t a trace of water drops in the tub or on the floor, but there was a faint smell of singed fabric in the air.