She had a long rattle, and it began to set up a relentless buzzing, like a thousand hives of agitated bees.
Isabel, wide-eyed, had said nothing at all. Finally, she looked up at me and said, “What happened to her?”
Snake Girl laughed. It was a harsh, unpleasant sound like knives stabbing a chalkboard. “Mira, it talks. What you think happened to me, little bitch? I got cursed by an evil witch. What else? Only I was the evil witch.” She stopped laughing and moved with frightening speed to the glass, her top half swaying above the massive, muscular snake’s body as she stared down at us, but especially at Isabel. She finally looked directly at me. “You. You look Djinn.”
I shrugged. “I was.”
“Explains how you knew I was here,” she said. “I don’t take out ads in the Yellow Pages. Didn’t think the Djinn paid that much attention to the Wardens’ failures.”
I didn’t blink as I watched her; there was something very predatory and primally frightening about her. “The Djinn never forget a failure like you,” I said.
That seemed to please her, in some bizarre, obscure way. She focused again on Ibby. “And you. You’re just like I was when I was your age. Maybe a little skinnier. But I was shorter.”
Ibby took a big step back, but I wouldn’t let her run away. Not yet. She tried to pull free, but I exerted a little Earth power to freeze her feet where they stood. Snake Girl pressed both her very human hands to the glass, then squashed her face against it, too, turning the beautiful features into something alien and monstrous. Then she pulled back and laughed, clearly delighted by the discomfort she was causing.
Ibby was shaking with it.
“I was so smart,” Snake Girl said. “I knew better than anybody. See, I was good, and I learned really fast. Eight years old and I was setting bones and curing diseases. Ten, and I was making crops grow out of dead ground. I was a fucking miracle, that’s what I was. They all said so, all the curanderas.” She smiled, but it was deeply unpleasant, and her body twisted sinuously to one side, then the other. It was mesmerizing and terrifying, and I could feel Isabel trembling. “I could do anything. To anybody. For anybody. You understand how that feels?”
Isabel didn’t nod, but I did. I understood all too well how that felt.
“Well, I thought I could do anything, anyway,” Snake Girl said. “But how do you know if you don’t try? So I wanted to see if I could.” She hesitated, studying me, then Isabel. “You sure you want me to go into it?”
“Yes,” I said. Isabel said nothing.
“Your nickel,” Snake Girl said with a shrug. “I started small, with animals, making them into other things. Some died. Some went all crazy. But I kept going, because why not, okay? I turned dogs and cats into bears and lions, only it didn’t go so well most of the time. Big messes to clean up and hide. I figured I’d messed around with animals long enough, so I finally changed a couple of kids, made them grow six feet tall in a day.” Her fierce, malicious smile faded. “They said they wanted to grow up. Well, I made them grown-up. Only they didn’t do any better in the end than the dogs and cats, and there was an even bigger mess to clean up. And I got caught.”
I knew the next part of the story, the part that involved the Djinn—it was something all Djinn knew—but Snake Girl seemed reluctant to continue, or else she enjoyed dragging out the suspense. The silence stretched until I said, “And then?”
“And then the curanderas got a Djinn to come and stop me. I almost won, you know. I turned myself into a giant rattlesnake and I bit him, but not before he turned it all against me. I killed him. I killed a Djinn. Can you believe that?” She laughed, and this time the huge white fangs in her mouth came down with terrifying ease, glinting and wet with venom. “But he got his revenge. He trapped me like this. Not human enough to live, not snake enough to die. A freak show. And while I’m a freak show, I’m damned sure going to make money from it!”
There was silence after she’d finished, except for the dry rustle of her coils.
And then, unexpectedly, Ibby spoke. “Aren’t you sorry?” she asked. “For what you did?”
“Sorry?” Snake Girl tossed her hair back over her shoulders and gave the other girl a look of smoldering arrogance. “Why should I be sorry? I didn’t ask for all this power in the first place. What, did you? You get yours at the Internet store, idiota?”
“I’d be sorry about it,” Ibby said very softly. “If I did what you did. I’d feel sick. I’d hate myself.”
Snake Girl’s face distorted with something like fury, and her warning rattled sharply again through the speakers. The writhing coils of her body slammed against the glass with such force that a crack appeared in its surface. Just a small one, but it was significant.
I let Isabel go. She ran to the far corner of the room, still facing the Snake Girl, as if she couldn’t stand to turn her back to what she was seeing. I couldn’t, either, but I let none of that show on my face, and I did not retreat. I refused to retreat from the murderer of a Djinn.
“You can’t hurt anyone now,” I said, not so much for the Snake Girl’s benefit as for Isabel’s. “You’re frozen—no power to shift yourself to either side. And so you will live, and die, between things. Between worlds.” Just as I will, I thought, but at least my predicament was not so dramatic. “Didn’t the Wardens try to help you?”
Snake Girl laughed. “Oh, yes. They tranquilized me, and they had their best Earth Wardens try to fix me. I guess that Djinn was just a little too good. Too bad, really. If they’d restored me, I’d have destroyed all of them.”
“Why?” I asked only because I wondered if maybe, just maybe, this peculiar creature could give me a glimpse inside the mind of Pearl, my enemy. I didn’t particularly care about Snake Girl, just as she didn’t particularly care about the victims she had destroyed. It was a fitting, Djinn-style punishment, what had been done to her. Better she should suffer.
“Why not?” Snake Girl asked, and laughed again. She looked very pretty in that moment, and very insane. “Because they’d stop me from doing what I wanted, of course. They say I used too much power. I say I didn’t use nearly enough. But the truth is, they could have killed me and they didn’t. So I kind of owe them for that, I guess.”
She stopped talking and stayed there, swaying back and forth, then whipped around suddenly as a steel door opened in the back of the room, and a rabbit hopped through, hesitant and worried. It sat up to survey the situation, not quite sure what to make of Snake Girl.
She moved in a blur of scales and fangs, all prettiness vanished into a deadly fury, and I caught a glimpse of the nightmare of her face distended, jaw unhinged to take in her prey, just before the rabbit discovered its last, fatal mistake.
I turned my back on it and went to Isabel. I didn’t hold out my hand to her; I knew she wouldn’t take it. Her gaze was wide, and fixed past me to the glass, and what was happening behind it.
I crouched down to put myself even with her, and said, “Ibby. Look at me.”
She didn’t at first, but finally, with a great effort, she transferred her attention to me. I expected anger, but I didn’t see any. What I saw, very clearly, was fear.
“You wanted me to see,” she whispered. “You wanted me to see what happens if I do the wrong things. If I become like her.”
I nodded slowly. “One possibility of it,” I said. “People are not Djinn; Djinn are born to power, bred for it, shaped for it. People are ... fragile, even the best. And power is a heavy thing; it warps even the strongest. I know this is much for you to learn, but you have too much ability not to understand what you could risk.”
We both looked at Snake Girl, who was swallowing the kicking feet of the unfortunate rabbit. She smiled at us with bloodied teeth.
I expected Isabel to flee, but she didn’t. She walked around me, right up to the glass, and stared Snake Girl full in the face. Snake Girl, for her part, bent her body in a sinuous curve to put herself on a level with Ibby. “What?” she demanded. “You not ge
t your five bucks’ worth, bitch?”
Isabel gulped, but her voice was steady when she said, “I just wanted to know your name.”
For the first time, I saw Snake Girl surprised. In that moment, she didn’t look much older than Isabel. Then her face hardened, and she said, “Snake Girl. That’s who I am now.”
“Who were you then? Before?”
“Why you want to know?”
“I just do,” Ibby said. “Please.”
It might have been the first time Snake Girl had been asked for anything since sealing herself in this cage—or being sealed in, perhaps. She was silent a moment, except for the restless writhing of her coils and the dry scrape of scales, and then she said, “Esmeralda. My brother called me Es.”
“I don’t have a brother,” Ibby said. “But my mami called me Ibby. Thank you, Es.”
“For what?”
Ibby shrugged. “Just thanks.” In an act of courage so vivid that I could not quite believe I was seeing it, Ibby put her small hand flat against the glass. “I hope you feel better someday, Es.”
Snake Girl—Esmeralda—stared at her with odd, troubled eyes for a long moment, then slowly reached out and put her hand against Ibby’s, with four inches of glass and steel wire between them.
“Adios, Ibby,” she said. “Don’t trust the Djinn. She’s a cold one, like me.”
“I don’t trust anybody,” Ibby said. “Not really.”
Esmeralda nodded, and Ibby did as well, and then she walked back to me. I rose to my full height, and Isabel held out her hand to me. I took it.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“To leave?”
“To go to the school.” She looked at me very seriously. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Chapter 4
DARWIN THE IGUANA was indeed waiting when we came out from the back of the room, which brightened Isabel’s darkened spirits a great deal. Mabel watched us with a frown. After consultation with Isabel, we decided that an iguana was too large, but that a bearded dragon was an acceptable substitute.
Ibby wasn’t interested in snakes as companions.
I called Luis, who answered on the first ring, sounding worried. “Could you bring the truck?” I asked. “We have things to carry.”
“Everybody all right?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “I bought Isabel a pet.”
There was an interestingly long silence, and finally he said, “Is it poisonous?”
“Not that I am aware of.”
“That’s ... surprising, somehow, from you. All right. You can explain it all to me later.”
I gave him the address, and Isabel and I spent the hour until he arrived quite happily encountering wildlife, in the gentle glow of Mabel’s benign residual Earth powers. Esmeralda was, I thought, in the best possible place; Mabel was protective of all her charges, including a girl who might be tempted all too easily to dangerous aggression. If Mabel was uncomfortable with the exhibition aspect of Esmeralda’s situation, it was clear that Es reveled in it; she enjoyed seeing the discomfort and horror on people’s faces.
Although I believed that perhaps Esmeralda had gotten a bit more for her five-dollar charge than she’d bargained for, with Isabel.
Mabel gave us all of the care instructions and a supply of food for the bearded dragon, whose name Isabel immediately decided was Spike. Spike was tame enough to ride home sitting on Isabel’s lap in the sun, dozing happily with his head resting on her palm.
Luis, however, kept casting it, and me, nervous looks. “This wasn’t just a shopping trip,” he said. Ibby had also succumbed to the warmth of the sun, and was asleep with her head tipped against my arm. She showed no sign of hearing.
“I had to show her something,” I said. “I had to convince her. It seemed the only way.”
“Scared straight?”
I considered the phrase. “Perhaps,” I said. “And perhaps I just introduced her to a future ally, in which case we will have much more to think about later on. But for now I think Ibby will go to the school without a fight.”
“Good,” he said. “I just got another call from Bearheart, and she’s not kidding about the deadline. How you want to do this? I’m not too keen on putting her in an airplane, and Marion says it’s too late to meet at the rendezvous at Area 51.”
“Driving is better,” I agreed. “Besides, I doubt they would allow Spike on the plane.”
The school that Warden Bearheart had established was in Normandie, Wyoming. That was as close to effectively the middle of nowhere as it seemed possible to be in modern-day terms. The drive was long and tiring, not the least because I could not possibly take my attention off the world around us for long; our enemies were still shadows in the night, but they stalked us, and there would be only split seconds between life and death for all of us if our vigilance failed.
Despite all that, I found that there was little I loved more than being on the Victory, with the road disappearing beneath the wheels. Wind battered me, sun broiled me, we were visited by torrential rains that drove us to shelter for almost a full day, and yet something inside of me found this vagabond life fiercely beautiful. The snow came next, falling in steady white curtains and veiling everything in thick drifts.
I suspect Luis and Isabel, in the truck, found the long trip merely very tiring.
When we finally arrived in Wyoming, I thought it a beautiful place, stark and lovely as only the most deadly things can be. Thick with snow, it seemed especially ancient, and implied that humanity was a recent, not very welcome visitor. I liked its character. It suited me well.
Outside of Cheyenne, Luis received a phone call; I saw him drop back and flash his lights, which was the signal to pull over to the side of the road. That wasn’t difficult, despite the banked snow; we saw very little in the way of traffic on this road. I braced the motorcycle on its kickstand and walked back toward Luis’s truck, watching the shadows around us for any hint of hostile action. Nothing more menacing than a rabbit was nearby—not that I would underestimate the rabbit.
Luis rolled down the truck’s window as I approached; he covered the speaker of the phone and said, “FBI.” I nodded, because that spoke volumes in the three simple letters. The FBI had been working with the Wardens to try to take down several of Pearl’s compounds across the country, but we’d heard little in the past few days about any success—or failure. Luis mostly listened, but from time to time he would look to me, or Ibby (who was again sleeping, with Spike’s plastic case on her lap to get full benefit of the heater), and I was not feeling overly confident based on what I saw in his eyes. He finally said, “Yeah, sorry about that, but we’re traveling. Nowhere near Albuquerque right now. Won’t be back for at least a few more days.” He paused to listen, and smiled grimly. “Well, you can try to trace us if you want, but you’re tracking Earth Wardens. Whatever that GPS chip shows you, we ain’t there, man. And I’m not telling you where we’re going. I’ll call you when we’re headed back. Best I can do. Okay. I’ll hit you back.”
He shut down the call and tossed the phone on the dashboard of the truck.
“Let me guess,” I said. “The FBI agents would like us to inform them of our every movement.”
“Preferably they’d like us to not move at all. But, yeah, failing that, they want us on a leash. Very sad for them. Maybe we should send them a gift basket.” He drummed his fingernails on the steering wheel, looking out at the road ahead. “Thing is, they wanted us back bad for something in particular.”
“What?”
“Don’t know, and I don’t like it. They’re pretty damn cagey about details on the phone. They want a face-to-face briefing—now, they say, but since that ain’t gonna happen, as soon as we get back.”
What he didn’t say was this was bound to not be a good thing; the FBI turned to us only when problems became far too bad for their agents to handle alone. It meant the situation was already messy, and would probably only get worse the longer we delayed.
/> “We could split up,” I said. “I could go to the FBI. You could go on to the school.”
He shook his head even before I’d finished. “Not a chance. We stay together.”
I smiled a little, and held my hair back from my face as the icy wind thrashed it around in a pink-tinted storm. “Jealous?” I asked.
“As hell. You bet. I’m not letting any filthy feds get their hands all over your ... assets.” He grinned outright. “And we don’t break up the team. Clara?”
“Clara,” I said. “We go on, then.”
“All night if we have to, but according to the GPS, we don’t have more than a couple more hours to go,” Luis said. “You good for that?”
“Always.” I turned to walk back to the motorcycle. Luis leaned out the window and gave me a sharp whistle. I looked over my shoulder.
“We should have dinner later,” he called. “Something hot. And in my room, while she’s asleep.”
“Maybe,” I said, although that wasn’t what I felt rushing through my body at that moment. No, that was definitely a yes.
I put my helmet back on and kicked the engine to life and got us back on the road.
Warden Bearheart’s patrols picked us up almost a hundred miles outside of the location of the school; I first became aware of them as a disturbance in the aetheric, and when I checked I saw a vivid glow on that plane of existence that could only be a first-class Warden at the height of his powers. Male, most certainly, and by the signature of those powers, he was gifted with Weather. There were two others with him, in the traditional Warden triad of Earth and Fire, though neither could match him for strength.
They challenged us outright, on the road, by slamming a wall of air and snow into our faces and forcing us to slow down, then stop. Luis could drive through the gale-force winds, but not easily; on a motorcycle, I was much more vulnerable. If I’d sensed it as a threat, I would have fought, and fought hard, but we had both expected the Wardens to have perimeter security.
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