by Rachel Caine
I said—and Rashid said, from within the van—“We are not family!”
Luis burst out with a short bark of laughter. “Sounds to me like you are.” Before sliding the door shut, though, he fixed Rashid with a long look, and leaned in to say,
“You touch Cassiel again, you hurt her again, and you and me, we’re going to have a disagreement, Rashid. It’ll end in a world of hurt. You understand?”
Rashid turned his eyes straight forward, not even so much as acknowledging the threat. Luis slammed the door, sighed, and said, “Try to get along, okay? This is tough enough without bar brawls with our supposed allies.”
Like Rashid, I didn’t bother to acknowledge his words, although they were undeniably wise.
I heard Luis say, grumpily, as he rounded the front to climb into the driver’s side, “Freaking Djinn.”
I smiled. Just a little.
Luis drove us to the approximate location where we’d stopped, and I led the two of them through the sand and scrub out into the wilderness. Luis kept up a steady whisper of curses under his breath as he trudged. He hated the desert, I believe. Certainly he was not in favor of its heat, although Rashid and I both gloried in it; Djinn were creatures of fire, and even as muted and diminished as I was, I could still feel the tingle of ecstasy along my nerves.
Luis sweated.
We arrived at the hillside where I’d buried the boy, with its view of ocher and red gullies and a burning blue sky, and Rashid crouched down, drew thin, clever fingers through the dirt, and looked up at me in surprise. There was something that shone in his eyes, momentarily, like respect. Then it was gone.
“How?” he asked. Luis looked at me, frowning.
“How what?”
“She knows.”
I did. he was asking about how I had touched the spirit of the Earth here, in this place.
I shrugged. “She came,” I said. “You can’t summon her. You know that.”
Rashid did, in fact, know. He watched me for another moment, then nodded and raked fingers through the dirt again. “You didn’t kill the boy,” he said. “I stand corrected.”
“I told you we didn’t,” Luis snapped. “Can you hurry up and track where he came from? Some of us need shade around here.”
For answer, Rashid plunged his hand down into the dirt, all the way to his elbow, and then drew it back out with a sharp twist. He shook the dust from it and nodded, eyes gone bright, but somehow distant. “The trail is clear,” he said. “But fading. I will leave you and follow it. It will be faster.”
“Rashid,” I said. “Don’t go too close.”
He made an impatient gesture. “I’m not afraid of your phantom enemy.”
“Neither was Gallan,” I interrupted. “Who is gone. Rashid. I don’t like you. But neither do I wish to see you destroyed. I am warning you: Don’t go too close.”
He heard the urgency of what I said, and finally, unwillingly, nodded. Still, I didn’t feel he had truly understood. I stepped forward, touched his hand, and said, while looking directly into his glowing eyes, “She was once one of us. A Djinn. She will kill you if she can.”
He shook his head, rejecting the idea—mostly, of course, because it came from me. I controlled a flash of anger and continued. “I would ask another task of you.”
That made his eyes widen. He cocked his head, a trace of a frown between his brows. “What?”
“Find the boy’s people,” I said. “His family. Those who lost him. I would wish—I would wish to return him, if we can.”
He stared at me, no expression on his face for a long moment, and then gave a sharp, dry nod.
And then simply . . . faded. Gone. I saw a shimmer on the aetheric as he sped away.
Luis sighed. “So, I’m taking bets. Did we just do something really smart, or really, dramatically stupid?”
“I see nothing to say it can’t be both,” I said. “There is, after all, an endless supply of stupidity.”
We silently gave our respects to the dead child whom we were, once again, abandoning, and returned to the van for the long drive back to Albuquerque.
Before we got there, we ran into a roadblock of flashing lights.
Standing in front of the angled police cars was FBI agent Ben Turner, part-time Fire Warden, looking very grim indeed, and very much as if he had not slept since we’d last seen him. When Luis slowed to a halt and rolled down his window, Turner leaned in, took a quick, comprehensive look around the van, and said, “You both need to come with me. Right now.”
Luis and I exchanged a look which clearly said, This is not good news. “Why?” Luis asked.
“Not here. Just get out and come with me. Do it now.”
Around us, police were quietly drawing their weapons, although thus far, no one was pointing them in our direction. Luis noted it with lightning-fast shifts of his eyes, then focused back on Turner.
“Please,” Turner said. His face was a blank mask, but there was tension around his eyes and mouth, and weariness in the slump of his shoulders. “I need your help.”
As if that was a magic incantation, Luis nodded to me, and we both left the van to stand on the roadway, facing Turner. Dusk was falling, and so was the temperature, but the asphalt had trapped a great deal of heat during the day. It radiated up through my feet and legs uncomfortably.
Turner motioned to the police, who holstered their guns and got into their cruisers, although they didn’t leave their positions.
“I’ve got an abducted kid,” he said. “It fits the pattern you described. Little girl, age eight, got snatched from school. I checked. Her mother washed out of the Warden program.”
Luis traded a glance with me. We both remembered the boy we had rescued from captivity at the Ranch: C. T. Styles. His mother had left the Wardens as well. She had held a grudge. “You cleared the mom?” Luis asked.
“She’s got nothing to do with it. That lady’s practically in ruins. God only knows how she’s going to handle it if this turns out badly.” Which, from the tense, hard set of his expression, he clearly recognized was a risk. Even a probability.
“What about the father?” I asked.
“He seems okay, too. No connection back to the Wardens, and I’m not turning up anything questionable on him. I think they’re both okay.”
“Perhaps it isn’t related,” I said.
“Maybe it’s not. But it’s still a little girl, missing. I figured you’d want to step in.” Turner squared his shoulders and looked first at Luis, then at me. “I could really use your help. If this is connected, it’s our freshest lead. It’s the best possible place to start.”
“We’re already—”
“Let me rephrase,” Turner said, and this time I saw the flare of banked anger in his eyes. “You’re going to help me with this or I’m going to find all kinds of reasons to make you wish you had, starting with dressing funny and ending with suspicion of terrorism, which means you’ll end up so deep in a hole you’ll never see the sun again. So give the keys to your van to one of the officers; they’ll drive it back to your house for you. You’re coming with me.”
I thought uncomfortably of Rashid, certain to reappear at any time. Luis, I was sure, was thinking the same. He would find us regardless of where we might be, but Rashid had not struck me as someone willing to keep a low profile. He might, in fact, find it amusing to advertise his nature in public. If the police began shooting, we could be injured.
Rashid would probably find that very funny.
“Let me make it real easy for you,” Turner said. “You have two choices. One, get in my car and drive back to Albuquerque and help me find this girl. Or two, turn around for the cuffs, because I will charge you with something.”
“With what?”
“You’re kidding, right?” he asked. “There are all kinds of ways I can make your life hell, Mr. Rocha. You really don’t want to test me. I can be very creative.”
I was fairly sure he was serious.
Luis shrugged an
d tossed the van’s keys to a nearby patrolman in a starched khaki uniform, who plucked the jingling metal out of the air. “Insurance and registration is in the glove compartment,” he said. “In case you get stopped by even more cops. Oh, and I’ll expect it filled up. Washing it wouldn’t be out of the question, either.”
The officer did not seem amused.
Turner held open the sedan’s back door, and Luis and I slid inside. In less than a minute, we were speeding away toward Albuquerque.
It was home, and yet I had the conviction that we were also headed toward a lethal combination of grief and trouble.
Although it seemed trouble was a constant companion, these days.
Ben Turner was a very fast driver, disobeying the posted speed limits with the abandon of a law enforcement man on a mission.
I sat in the back, struggling to control the nausea that roiled within me. Turner’s car was not the most pleasant experience—either sensory or psychic—that I had ever encountered. He’d had blood spilled on the seats. Bodily fluids of all sorts. And death. The car reeked of death—perhaps not in a physical sense, but the impression of a bad and lingering agony was embedded into every part of the vehicle. Something terrible had happened here, before. Something that would never completely go away.
I was struggling with the urge to blow the door off its hinges and leap from the car. The only thing that stopped me was the absolute certainty that Luis would suffer for it if I did so.
And then I was distracted.
“Shit!” Turner yelped, and in the same instant hit the brakes. Tires screeched, and Luis and I both reflexively threw out our hands to brace ourselves as the sedan’s nose tipped down, fighting its own momentum.
Rashid had appeared in the middle of the road, perhaps five hundred yards away. Arms folded, a shark’s smile on his face, watching the car hurtle toward him at killing speed.
Turner, face gone white, fought desperately with the vehicle.
“Just hit him,” I said, through gritted teeth. “It serves him right.”
Turner paid no attention to my excellent advice. He managed to bring the car to a smoking, sliding halt no more than a foot from Rashid’s immobile body.
For a moment, no one moved. White, stinking smoke from the scorched tires blew into my window, and I coughed and choked. The cloud of smoke moved toward Rashid, but he simply waved it away, still smiling.
Ben Turner looked stunned, but in the next flash of a second, his face turned beet red and screwed up in righteously justifiable anger. He opened his car door and got out, yelling, “You idiot! You could have gotten us all killed—”
Rashid simply looked at him. To his credit, it didn’t take Turner long to realize his mistake, to take in the slightly-off color of the Djinn’s skin, the shine of his eyes. He turned to look through the windshield at Luis, then at me. Then back at Rashid. His lips compressed into a thin, angry line.
“Djinn. So I guess he’s with you two,” Turner said.
Rashid made a rude sound. “Not in any sense, I assure you.” On that, we were in complete agreement. He stalked around to the passenger door of the front seat, opened it, and got in. Leaving Turner standing outside, staring in at us.
We all stared back at him.
“Seriously,” Turner said. “He’s a Djinn.”
Rashid reached out and touched a finger to the ignition of the car. It fired to life without benefit of the key, dangling from Turner’s shaking fingers. “Yes,” he said. “Seriously.”
Turner blinked, as if the world had gone out of focus, and shook his head. He slipped back into the driver’s seat, looked at the key in his hand, then dropped it into the drink holder next to him. He put the car in drive and accelerated away, fast. I looked behind us and saw the heavy black streaks of skid marks disappearing behind us.
“Didn’t really think you’d show up again,” Luis said to Rashid.
I turned my head back. “I did.”
Rashid was watching me with a predator’s hot intensity. Waiting for weakness. Well, I had that in abundance, but I was not willing to demonstrate it on his command. “You found something,” I said. “Correct?”
“No, I came back because I find your company so inspirational. Of course I found something.” His mouth stretched and settled into something that was almost a smile. “I found the boy’s bloodline. His sires are gone from the world.”
“Siblings?”
“No. Distant branches. Nothing close.”
I shook my head and translated that for Luis. “His parents are dead. No brothers, sisters, or cousins.”
“Yes,” Rashid confirmed. “His father was a Warden, killed in Ashan’s uprising. His mother was mere human, dead of disease.”
“Orphan,” Luis said. “An orphan with latent Warden powers.”
Rashid said, “He was listed so on the rolls.”
Both Turner and Luis sent him identical looks. “Rolls?” Turner was just a beat faster at the question than my Warden partner. “You mean there’s a list?”
Rashid lifted an eyebrow slowly. “You mean you don’t keep your own lists? How careless of you. How do you ensure your progeny are trained properly if you don’t have a record of their potential?”
Luis’s mouth opened, then shut, and he looked at me instead. “Let me get this straight, okay, just so there’s no confusion: The Djinn have a record of kids born with Warden powers?”
He was asking me. It was embarrassing, but I had to admit the truth. “I don’t know,” I said. “If it’s done, I had nothing to do with it. I had no interest in Wardens, much less regular humans.”
Luis stared for a beat, then went back to Rashid. “Can you get us that list?”
“Why?”
“Because the kids on that list are all at risk. It’s our best way to get ahead of this bitch and stop her from taking more kids. If we can lock down all these potential victims . . .”
“You forget,” I said. “Some of their parents are willing participants. And we don’t have enough Wardens to do this.”
“We’ve got enough FBI. And enough cops,” Luis shot back. “To hell with the Wardens, they’re not doing squat for us anyway. We work with law enforcement, we got plenty of firepower. And I don’t think she’ll have planned to fight her way through that. She’s looking for a magical resistance, not a physical one.”
Luis, I had to admit, had a point. But when I glanced at Rashid, I saw that his face was closed and hard. He said nothing.
Luis sighed. “Come on, man. I get it, you’re a bastard. You don’t care. Fine, whatever. I’ll give you all the respect you want, just give me the goddamn list.”
“I can’t,” Rashid said. “Whether I wished to or not, this list isn’t mine to give.”
“Yeah? Then who the hell do we have to talk to?”
I knew, with an ill feeling, before Rashid said anything. “The Earth Oracle.”
Rashid nodded once, sharply. Of course. My last encounter with the Earth Oracle—archangel to the Djinn’s angels—had been uncomfortable, and nearly shattering in its intensity. Not by her doing; the Oracle simply was. There was no being reachable by the Djinn who was as deeply rooted in the mind and soul of the Mother, not even the Fire Oracle, or the one with dominion over water and air. Each had separate, distinct powers and attitudes, and of all of them, the Earth Oracle was perhaps the most approachable—the most willing to understand and assist us with this matter.
It did not change the fact that she had once been halfling-born—the daughter of the Djinn David and his Warden love, Joanne. Imara, she had been called. And Imara had been a special sort of creation, one with no real place in the natural world until Ashan himself had violated the laws of the Djinn and murdered her within the sacred precincts of the Earth Oracle’s temple.
Imara not only had survived, but had become . . . more. Other. She wasn’t a half- powered Djinn anymore. She had gone vastly beyond all of that. Yet, some of her human heritage still lingered, and I retained enough of my
Djinn snobbery to remain just a touch uncomfortable with that fact.
I wasn’t sure Imara had any great and lasting fondness for me, either. The last thing I wanted was another, perhaps less cordial, encounter.
“Get it for us,” I told Rashid. He shook his head. “You must be a special pet of hers, if you know of this list at all.”
“I know of it because David told me of it, not because I can lay my hands on it.”
David. I fumed quietly. He led half the Djinn—the less consequential half, by my reckoning—but he was nothing I wanted to cross. I had no connection to him, not as Rashid did; I would have to rely upon his pure goodwill. He had, however, been kind to me before—had, in fact, helped save my life, when Ashan cast me out. So it was possible. “Then I will ask David for it.”
“You could. He might even be inclined to grant it to you, knowing David; he’s so accommodating.” Rashid made a face that implied he did not altogether approve of this trait. “Unfortunately, he cannot be located.”
That stopped me, Luis, and even Turner cold for a long, icy second. “You . . . can’t find him.”
Inconceivable. David was the Conduit of the New Djinn. He was the core and source of their power on Earth and in the aetheric. How could they not find him? It was akin to mislaying a part of your own body.
“He’s hidden from us,” Rashid clarified. “He told us, before he left, that he would be cut off from us.”
“Then there must be some replacement. Someone keeping open the Conduit for you.”
Rashid inclined his head, but didn’t answer.
“Rashid,” I said. “My patience is not just thin, it is starving, and moments from death. Just tell me.”
Djinn do love their games, but Rashid seemed to understand that I was no longer playing. He turned to face forward, staring out at the road as the car hurtled along its smooth, straight surface, landscape whipping by in a blur of ocher, brown, and green.
“He would have preferred to give the responsibility to Rahel,” Rashid said. “But Rahel likewise cannot be reached. He’s walled both her and himself off from us, to protect us. There are risks.”