I left the bike and walked on, dodging trees, maneuvering through thick brush that choked the areas between. Leaf litter coated the ground where the snow had melted, thick and spongy and filling the air with a thick, piney scent of decomposition. I sensed a snake making its sluggish, cool way through the leaves toward the sun, and changed course to avoid it.
Then, quite suddenly, I was in a clearing that was bathed in golden morning sunlight, and there was a dark green canvas tent angling among the surrounding trees. The grass in the clearing was artificially thick and green, and the man had scraped a round bare circle for a fire pit and lined it with stones. There was nothing in the pit now but ash and embers, burned down overnight.
The tent flap was unzipped and open, and a man sat cross-legged on a striped blanket in front, in the sun. He was dressed in a thick flannel shirt of red and blue checks, a sleeveless down vest, and a pair of much-worn and seldom-washed blue jeans, with battered hiking boots. His salt-and-pepper hair had scarce acquaintance with a barber, and he wore a three-day growth of beard, some of which glinted silver in the sun.
He was drinking a cup of something that steamed hot wisps into the cool air, and as I emerged from the trees he stopped in mid-gulp, staring at me.
He was, for a human, reasonably attractive, though worn by time—lines around his eyes, and at the corners of his mouth. He spent much time in the open, I thought, because his skin was leathery and well tanned. I could smell him from where I stood, a rich mixture of sweat, leather, and unwashed clothing.
He put down the coffee—I could smell it, too, now—and said, “Hello, there. You lost?” He turned down the machine next to him, which had finished playing the Beach Boys and moved on to another musical group I couldn’t identify. He couldn’t have missed my exotic look—the pale, pink-tinted ragged hair, the white cast of my skin, the vivid, not-quite-human green of my eyes. His face went hard and a little pale, and he put his hands down on his knees, affecting an unconcerned sort of body language. “So to what do I owe a visit from the Djinn?”
I didn’t have to speak with him; my commission from Rashid didn’t require me to know him at all, this man who’d committed such crimes against my brothers and sisters. But I inclined my head and said, “My name is Cassiel.”
“Nice to meet you,” he said, which was a patent lie. “Rick Harley. Weather. If you’re looking for a Djinn, I’m not working with any right at the moment.”
“I’m not looking for Djinn. I’m looking for you,” I said, without any particular emphasis or menace. His eyes were blue, faded a bit from their sapphire sparkle of youth. He drank too much alcohol, and it showed in the tremor of his hands and the state of his body. “Did you participate in any gambling involving the Djinn?”
He looked ghostly now, and grim. There were pale patches around his mouth and eyes, and a muscle jumped unsteadily in his jaw as he said, “Don’t know what you’re talking about. If that’s all—”
“I am speaking about the death of a Djinn,” I said. “And you know what I’m talking about, very well. It disturbs your sleep. It makes you drink too much, and cut yourself off from your family and friends to hide out here in the wilderness. You are guilty, and it eats at you.”
He said nothing to that. He stared at me as if I were the angel of death, come on this fine, sunny morning to reap his soul ... as I was. He seemed unusually composed, and resigned.
“Rick,” I said, “I’ve been sent to kill you. This isn’t my choice, although it’s justice; your death serves a greater purpose, and will save innocent lives. Your death is the price I have to pay to ensure the safety of those innocents.”
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked, and there was a grim, wry twist to his mouth at the end. “Do you think it makes me feel any fucking better? You think I’ll be happy to put my neck on the chopping block because all of a sudden I’m dying for a good cause?”
“You might be,” I said. “Your death isn’t in vain. Your death is honorable, the way a Warden’s should be. Your death redeems your life, and the mistakes you’ve made.”
“Fuck you,” he said, and stood up in an unsteady scramble. He was already drunk, I realized, even so early in the morning. His ears were flushed bright red, but his eyes were steady and focused, and frightened. “I knew one of you would come for me. I knew it would happen someday. Well, fuck you. I know I can’t win, but I’m not giving up. Maybe you can kill me, maybe you can’t, but I’m damn sure going to give you one hell of a ...”
He didn’t have a chance to finish. His head exploded in a cloud of red mist, and it took me a shocked second to realize that someone had shot him, from a distance. Someone had put a high-caliber bullet through his head, blowing it apart like a ripe melon. Warm spray spattered my face and dotted my white leathers, and a second later I heard the rolling crack of the rifle shot.
I didn’t think, only reacted, throwing myself down and to the side, rolling even as Rick Harley’s body toppled dead to the ground. Another shot snapped into the dirt where I had been, and a third followed but missed by inches. I made it to the cover of the tent’s bulk and paused, breathing hard as the facts began to hurtle through my brain at light speed.
One, I had been sent here by Rashid to kill a man.
Two, I wasn’t the only one.
Three, and most important, I had never been expected to carry through on my task.
This was a trap, set not for Harley but for me.
Rashid was no longer my ally. He was my adversary, and he’d sold me out to my enemies.
That was confirmed as a very human voice called from the trees, near where the rifle shot had originated, “Come out, Cassiel. We’ll let you live if you surrender peacefully.”
Chapter 7
THERE WAS, in fact, no possibility of surrendering, because I knew that these had to be Pearl’s human acolytes—and they were under orders to kill me if at all possible. Otherwise, they’d not have fired the shots they already had—or, in the next breath, fired through the tent, opening bright spots of sunlight that blazed into the shadows beside me. The last of these missed my head by no more than an inch.
I closed my eyes, blocking it all out, and went on the aetheric to assess the situation. There were four of them—one, probably the shooter, holding his position in the trees beyond the tent. A second was creeping slowly through the foliage around to my left, and a third was climbing a tree to try to get an angle down on me from above.
The fourth, and most worrisome, had abandoned stealth and was running fast, heading for my exposed right. Once I was flanked, I was dead—that much was clear. They were certainly all armed. I could control guns, but there were many moving factors in this that didn’t play to my strengths.
I considered my options, which weren’t plentiful, and then did the only thing I could.
I softened the ground beneath my boots into loose, frictionless fine sand, and sank quickly to my knees, then to my hips. I held my breath as the sand advanced to my breasts, and closed my eyes and held my nose as my body plunged completely into the earth.
I was no Weather Warden, to create breathable oxygen, but the earth and things within it responded to me; I kept my vision in Oversight, assessing the positions of my enemies, and swam silently through the ground and loose rocks, cutting through like a shark beneath the waves. I sensed the two others getting quickly into position, and felt the waves of alarm and confusion when I wasn’t where they expected me to be. They would waste time assuming I’d somehow managed to make it to the trees.
The one who’d gone up into the tree had made a deadly mistake. I poured power through the tough, springy bark, waking thirst and hunger, and the branches began to twist, seeking sun. If he felt it, he must have attributed it to nothing more than the wind, until he paused and a tiny tendril of a new branch whipped around his ankle. Then another. Then another, pinning his knees. By the time he realized he was being restrained it was already too late, and bark was growing up and over his body with relentles
s speed.
It closed over his face and cut off his screams of alarm, and in another moment his final thrashings were over.
I achieved the safe shadows beneath his tree and emerged from the earth just enough to allow myself to take a quick breath. The air tasted sweet, and I had to fight the urge to gulp it in uncontrollable spasms that might be heard. I stayed very still. My enemies were down to three, but each of them had a good vantage point, and would be hard to take down if I came out of cover.
But there was no real need, I realized, as I assessed their aetheric signatures more closely. There were no Wardens among them; these were merely human hunters—which would have been enough, if I hadn’t been warned and taken immediate action.
But once I was able to ready myself, they had no real chance at all. I proceeded to kill two of them, simply by reaching out and stilling their hearts. They had no concept of how to fight such an attack, and dropped without a sound. In a way, it was a pity, because I do enjoy a fair fight. But I love winning much, much more.
I saved the last one, who had no idea he’d gone from a position of strength to even odds in less than a minute. I sank back into the ground and swam again, avoiding the area where Rick’s blood was seeping into the soil. I came up where one of the other hunters had fallen, with his rifle still clutched unfired in his hand.
I rose out of the earth and grabbed the rifle in the same motion, sank to one knee, and sighted.
Rick’s killer saw the movement and started to turn, but I was quick, and although I wasn’t an expert with a rifle, I didn’t really need to be; his chest was a large enough target, and I hit him high on the right side, between heart and shoulder. Probably through a lung, possibly near or through a major artery. The rifle rocked in my hands, driving back against my shoulder, and I rode with it and kept it at ready position as my opponent staggered and tried again to raise his own weapon. He failed, and it slipped out to fall to the grass.
Another second, and his knees went out from under him to dump him to a kneeling position. He fumbled for the rifle, but even if he’d been able to grab it, he couldn’t have fired it with the wound I’d put in his chest. I stood and walked over, weapon still held in a position from which it would be easy to fire. I stood over him.
Like Rick Harley, he was of middle age, but that was where the resemblance ended. He was a smooth-skinned man, with skin that spoke of clean, indoor living, a fattening diet, and the gentle ministrations of facial cleansers and massage therapists. He looked well-off, in other words. His rifle was clean and expensive; his clothing was designer-made, and the boots he wore seemed almost new. He radiated a kind of bland superiority that made me want to put another bullet into him, in a more painful spot.
“Name,” I said, and put the barrel of the rifle against his throat. “Please.”
He swallowed, and I felt the vibration through the metal and wood. “Errol Williams,” he said. “You’re one of them. The demons.”
“You could say that,” I said, and smiled over the warm barrel of the weapon’s long, blued steel. “You could say I’m worse. Why are you here?”
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” he said. “You can’t touch my soul.”
“No? Are you very sure of that?” I cocked my head quizzically. Errol proved to be sensible. He stopped talking. “You were sent by the Church,” I said. “The Church of the New World. Who told you where we’d be?”
He said a name that meant nothing to me, but I hadn’t expected to have an easy solution. Ultimately, however the information had gotten to him, it was Rashid who had performed the simple, vital task of putting me in the same valley with them, at the right time.
And they’d known that I was leaving the school. Somehow, impossibly, they’d known.
That meant they also knew about the school, and Luis, and Ibby.
It meant they had someone inside, or on perimeter guard. Certainly, it had to be someone who was known to the Wardens, and trusted by them.
I didn’t kill my would-be assassin. I left him there, naked and alone, without weapons or any protection from the elements. I left him tied by his wrists to a tree, with a rope I’d found in his backpack. He’d had a neatly packed restraint-and-murder kit in it—coiled rope, wide tape, plastic strips of handcuffs, knives, and guns. Meant for me, I assumed.
Foolish.
I hefted the pack on my shoulder, considering him—naked, he had lost any sense of menace or competence he’d had clothed—and said, “You understand that I could have killed you, as I did your friends?”
He nodded, watching me very closely. He couldn’t speak. I’d used some of the tape across his mouth. He would work it loose, but for the present, I would not have to listen to his lies and protestations.
“Soon,” I said, “you may well wish that I had.”
I slung the rifle across my body and walked away, passing the clearing with Harley’s bullet-ripped tent, past his gradually cooling corpse, and stopped to completely douse the embers of his fire before moving on.
I paused at the edge of the clearing to put out a call to the area’s predatory wildlife. Most of them were smaller things—foxes, a few lynxes—but deep in the trees lived some bears, and a pack of wolves.
They might come to investigate an easy meal. They might not. It was still a better chance than he’d given Harley. Or me.
I reached my motorcycle and considered the rifle. It was a fine weapon, but I suspected that traveling with it slung across my body wouldn’t win me any thanks from the highway patrols. With a certain regret, I stripped it of bullets and tossed it into the underbrush. A quick burst of power encouraged the bushes to grow up and around it. It wouldn’t be found for some time, if ever.
I kept the bullets, which might come in handy. I sealed them in an inner pocket of the backpack, which I settled comfortably on my shoulders before I reached into my leather jacket and took out my cell phone.
Luis was on speed dial. I called, but it rang five times and then his recorded voice—still warm and friendly in this virtual contact, at least—invited me to leave a message. “Watch your back,” I said. “Someone either inside or close to the school has a Djinn, and may be working for Pearl. I was trapped coming out.” I considered reassuring him that I was all right, but that seemed obvious, considering that I was summing up events for him. “Find the traitor. It’s the only way to protect the children. Look for someone with a bottle—” My phone exploded in a scream of static as the electronics inside it fried.
“That won’t do you any good,” said a voice from behind me. I dropped the useless corpse of the phone and rolled off the bike, then up to my feet facing the Djinn. Rashid was still as I’d last seen him—elegant and exotic, clothed in opaque, shifting shadows. But he no longer smiled. “Your warnings will do no good.”
“You lied,” I said. “On the Mother, you lied.”
“No, I didn’t. Every word I said to you was true. The Warden was guilty. And I wanted him dead.”
“But you sent me into a trap. You knew Pearl’s men would be there.”
“That was the plan, to draw them out,” he said. “And I trusted that you would escape without assistance.”
“Trusted?”
“Hoped perhaps is a better word. Yes, I hoped you would escape. As you have.” He studied me for a few silent seconds. “You’ve killed those who came against you. Without much regret.”
“I never feel much regret,” I said. “That’s the legacy of being a Djinn. I wouldn’t feel much regret in destroying you, either, under these circumstances.”
“I’m not your enemy. I was put in a position that made it impossible for me to refuse to send you to that place, or to help you once you were there. You understand?”
I did. Djinn were, after their own fashion, consistent and predictable; under a strict obligation, we would do exactly what we’d been told to do. He would have helped me if he’d been able to find a way to do so.
“I didn’t fulfill my part of the bargai
n,” I said. “I didn’t kill Harley.”
“He’s still dead.” Rashid shrugged. “I consider that you achieved the objective as it was worded. And I’m prepared to fulfill my obligation to you. You still want the children saved, I assume.”
“I do,” I said. “But I’ll want something more, to right the balance between us.” He bowed a little in silent agreement. “I want the name of the person within the school compound who passed word of when I would be leaving. This couldn’t have been done without advance warning. Your part, certainly; you can go anywhere you wish. But Pearl’s men had to be put in my path, and that takes timing.”
“Clever Cassiel,” Rashid said, and sighed. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Can’t,” I repeated. “Not won’t?”
He didn’t affirm or deny, simply looked at me with those fiercely glowing eyes, as expressionless as an owl. A bad feeling grew within me.
“Does this person,” I said, “possess a bottle within which you’re bound?”
No response, which was in itself a response. Someone in the Warden compound had a bottle, and had found a way to bind a True Djinn into it. I hadn’t thought that was possible anymore, not since the death of Jonathan and the breaking of the vows that had made us vulnerable in the dim mists of time, but it seemed things had changed, again. The Djinn were vulnerable—which, curiously, might serve us in the struggle against Pearl. It might be harder to destroy Djinn who had masters to protect them; a Djinn inside a bottle was almost indestructible, unless his master ordered him to extreme measures. As compensation for slavery, it was weak tea, but I couldn’t deny that it had saved Djinn lives from time to time.
“Were you bound by your own consent?” I asked. It was an important question; some Djinn allowed themselves to be so bound, for their own reasons. I could not understand it, but I did respect the legality of it.
Rashid bared his teeth. “No,” he said. “Not by my own consent.” Tricked, then. Ambushed and overcome. There was a fire in the violet eyes now, eerie and full of impotent anger. “I can’t help you, Cassiel.”
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