Undone

Chapter 9

I HAD TRACKED the attacker through the aetheric across New Mexico, into mountains to the north. I had lost the trail somewhere near the border, according to the map. I was considering this as we crossed the Albuquerque city limits, but there were no answers to be found on the flimsy paper, which flapped in the wind coming from the shattered passenger’s window, and I folded it carefully and put it away.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“First thing, I’m dropping the truck off at the body shop,” Luis said. “Then I’m crashing for about two hours.” He paused for a moment, and his voice changed timbre. “I have to go to the funeral home at ten.”

Funeral home. An odd combination of words. Homes were for the living, and for a moment I thought about the house—no longer a home—where Manny and Angela and Isabel had lived. Someone else would make it a home, in time, but for now it was a reminder, an empty shell filled with inert, abandoned things.

A place I had once felt happy.

“Should I go with you?” I asked. That earned me another glance, and a moment of silence. “If I shouldn’t—”

“It’s not that you shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s that we have to get you cleared by the Wardens and the cops before you start showing your hot pink head around town. Know what I mean?”

I did. “How do we do that?”

“I’m working on it. You’re going to have to sit down with a couple of representatives from the Wardens, eventually, but I heard yesterday that some odd things turned up at Scott’s apartment, and the Wardens are looking at that differently.”

“And Molly Magruder?”

Luis shrugged. “That one’s a little tougher. I don’t know yet, but they said they’ve got some other leads on that, too. Anyway. I should find you a hotel; you dig in and wait for a while.”

“I could disguise myself,” I said.

“Yeah, you’ve done a great job so far. Pink hair?”

“No one looks at my face.” I thought I’d done a good job. It stung me that he disagreed. “I don’t like to hide away.”

“Nobody likes it, but it’s the smart thing to do,” he said. He pulled the truck off the road into the parking lot of a small, cleanly kept motel coated in pink adobe. “I’ll get your bike out of the back, but promise me you won’t go anywhere.”

I looked at him, said nothing, and got out of the truck. Luis shook his head and went around to the bed of the truck to wrestle the Victory down the ramp, while I entered the motel office to use my credit card to buy a room. It was a new experience for me, but not unpleasant; the clerk was efficient and impersonal, and the process short. By the time I came out again, Luis had the motorcycle parked in an empty spot next to the truck, and I had a chance fess to survey the damage.

The Victory had come through remarkably un-scarred. The same couldn’t be said for Luis’s truck, which was pitted, dented, and scraped where the paint hadn’t chipped or at least been dulled by the abrasive scrub of sand. The passenger’s window was gone, only jagged fragments remaining. The front windshield was a web of cracks and pits.

Luis was staring at it with folded arms and a miserable expression.

“Man,” he said, “knowing you is expensive.”

I wanted to say something appropriate, something that would mean I valued his company. Something to recognize the moments in the truck when the two of us had been—different.

Luis continued to look at the truck, and for a moment I caught the sadness in him, the loss, and I knew he was thinking of his brother. The brother he would have to see again soon, in the funeral home.

The brother I had failed.

“I want to see Isabel,” I said. That made him turn toward me, frowning. “I understand it’s a risk. But you said she was asking for me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, she was. But I don’t want to put any more of my family in the firing line right now. Do you?”

I shook my head slowly, haunted again by the image of Isabel crouched against the fence as bullets passed overhead to strike her parents. No. I could not risk her. Luis was a target, but so was I, and I could not guarantee the child’s safety.

“May I call?” I asked.

Luis took out his cell phone, dialed a number, and turned away to speak in Spanish. After a moment he handed the phone to me.

“Cassie?” Isabel’s voice was bright and hopeful, and I felt warmth grow inside me in response.

“Cassiel,” I automatically corrected her, but my heart was not in it. “I’m here, Ibby.”

“Where are you?”

“Close,” I said. “I’m watching over you.” I had a sickening memory of saying the same thing to Angela. Empty promises.

“I thought you left us. I thought you went away.” Her brightness dissolved into tears. “Mama and Papa can’t come home anymore. Can you?”

“Yes,” I said softly. “Yes, I can. But, Ibby, you must be patient. I’ll see you soon, I promise.”

“Okay.” She was a brave child, and she mastered her tears into wet snuffles. “I love you, Cassie.”

Human words. Human emotion. It felt too large for my chest, this feeling, too heavy with meaning. “Be well,” I whispered. “I will watch over you, Isabel.” I meant it.

I hung up the phone and handed it back to Luis, whose dark eyes were full of understanding. “She’ll break your heart,” he said. “I know.”

Our fingers brushed, and then I walked away to my small, silent room.

I slept very little, tormented by the memories of Manny and Angela lying dead, by the haunting sounds of Isabel’s tears, by the touch of Luis’s hands as he healed my injuries. These things were anchors, weighing me down. As a Djinn, I had been weightless, and without ties or cares, and that seemed far away now. Unreachable. All around me, the sounds of the human world roared on, and I found no peace within or without.

Morning found me awake and exhausted. In the light of the bathroom mirror, I was sallow, haggard, and the whites of my eyes were as pink as my hair. I shed my clothing slowly, dropping it piece by piece to the clean tile floor. As human bodies went, mine seemed overly tall, overly thin, barely softened by the rounded breasts and hips. My skin was of a fine, almost featureless texture, and it glowed pale under the harsh lights.

I am Djinn, I told my reflection. My reflection strongly disagreed.

The shower’s beating hot water restored me somewhat, and I wearily contemplated the problem of my dirty clothing. I would need to buy new garments eventually. These—even the leathers—had suffered during the night’s adventures. I had more, at the apartment the Wardens had provided. . . . But I knew, even without Luis loudly reminding me, that I should not return there. Home. It was not, though, and never would be. I had only one home, and it was far away, unreachable.

A careful pulse of power restored my clothes to a wearable state, removing grime, stains, smells, scrapes, and tears. I donned all the required pieces, including the leather, and used the motel’s drying device to return my hair to its usual flyaway puffball state.

And I waited, as Luis had instructed. The hours dragged by. I read the holy books provided in the drawers next to the bed, and was both pleased and annoyed—pleased that humans held their history in such high regard, and annoyed by translational inaccuracies.

Television proved to be something I was grateful I could turn off.

When the telephone rang, finally, I grabbed at it with eager relief. “Yes?”

There was a pause, a long one. “Cassiel?” Luis’s voice, and yet not his voice at all. I sat up slowly, hardly aware I had done so. There was something tired and awful in his voice. I looked at the clock beside the bed.

It was one in the afternoon. “Luis,” I said. “You have been to the funeral home.” That combination of words continued to strike me oddly.

“Yeah,” he said. His voice sounded slow and deep, as if every word seemed an effort. “About you. The Wardens have bigger problems than you right now, and the Djinn do, too. I’ve been trying to get anybody, up to Lewis, and it looks like we’re on our own.”

“I am no longer hunted?”

“Not by the Wardens. There are barely enough of us left in place to hold things together, much less go running around trying fight crime.”

“And the police?”

“I pulled a favor from the lead detective on the case—I knew him, from the old days. You’re off the hook. There’s no body, so they’re listing Sands as a missing person.” He paused. When his voice returned, it sounded very quiet and very vulnerable. “I picked out coffins. The funeral mass will be in a couple of days.”

“Funeral mass,” I repeated. “In the church?”

“Yes, in the church, where else would you have one?” he snapped, and I heard the harsh rattle of breath on the phone’s speaker. “Sorry. I’m just—me and Manny, we stuck together for a lot of years. Our mother died when we were kids, and Pop went a few years back. It’s just us, Angela’s family, and a bunch of cousins I barely know in Texas. I’m just feeling alone.”

“Can I leave the motel?” I asked. I was aware that I should say—something. But I had no notion of what comfort sounded like, among humans, and I did not think he would welcome it, not from me.

“What? Oh yeah. Yeah, sure. But watch your back.” I heard the scrape of metal—the brakes of a large vehicle, I thought—and Luis said, “I’ll be at Manny’s house. I have to go through things, start figuring out what to do for Ibby.”

“Is something wrong with Ibby?”

“It’s just that the court’s going to have to award guardianship to me for me to keep her. My lawyer says that’s just a formality if Angela’s parents don’t contest it.” He didn’t sound certain of that. “It’ll hurt her if this comes down to a fight.”

Once again, I had no wisdom to offer. Something within me was tired of all the drama, all the emotion, all the humanity of it. That part of me continued to whisper, ever louder, Walk away, Cassiel. You are eternal. They are ghosts in the wind.

Perhaps they were, but if I walked away, they would haunt me.

“I should go see Isabel,” I said. “I promised her.”

“Come over here first. I want to go with you.”

He sounded so quiet, so unhappy, that I felt it necessary to agree. When the call ended, I slid the room key into an interior pocket of my jacket, locked the door, and left without a backward glance. My motorcycle—still gleaming and largely unmarked—glittered in the sunlight a few spaces down. Keys . . . I searched my jacket pocket, found nothing. They were not in the ignition slot.

They’d fallen out at some point. I smiled slightly, touched my fingertip to the ignition, and willed the machine to life. The engine growled, settled to a low, contented purr, and I realized another thing that I had somehow lost during the evening’s festivities: my helmet.

The constant wind tugging at my hair was a new sensation, and I liked it. I liked the blast on my face, the sensation of flying without walls. I attracted stares, of course—why wouldn’t I?—but that was no longer an issue. My nerves prickled as I passed a police car, but they gave me only a flat, assessing glance and did not pursue.

I pulled to a stop in front of Manny’s house and silenced the engine. The street, as always, seemed quiet. There was rarely anyone to be seen in yards or on the sidewalks, even children. The windows, I realized, were all barred. Doors were blocked by wrought-iron gates.

It was a neighborhood of fortresses and fear.

I knocked on the door, and Luis opened it. He took a single second to look at me, and then nodded and turned away, walking into the living room. I closed the door behind me and followed.

In the bright light slanting in the windows, Luis looked infinitely tired. Older than he had only yesterday. He sat down at the table with a pile of papers and idly shuffled through them.

“I’m looking for their life insurance,” he said. “I need to file that for Ibby. Manny told me he had some kind of retirement thing, too. And their bank accounts, I need to freeze those. People sometimes read obits and try to con the banks, steal from the dead.” He shook his head. “People.” The contempt in his voice was almost worthy of a Djinn.

I reached out to the pile of papers, touched edges, and withdrew three sheets. “Insurance,” I said, and laid it in front of him. “Retirement plan. Bank accounts.”

Luis stared at me with dark, empty eyes, then nodded. “Thanks.”

I sat back, hands in my lap. He fiddled with the papers for a few more minutes, then stood up and walked around the room. It was full of things—things, I realized, that would need to have a future, whether that was with Isabel, with Luis, consigned to destruction, given to others. . . . It was a problem I had never considered. Human lives were lost, but the wreckage they left behind had to be managed. Deconstructed.

Another step deeper into the never-ending grief.

“I’m going to keep their papers, their pictures, that kind of stuff,” Luis said. “Anything I think Ibby might want of theirs.”

Would that include the small ceramic angels on the shelf above the television, the ones that Angela told me she had collected over the years? Or Manny’s books? Or the warm woven throw that trailed fringed edges over the arm of the couch, the one knitted by Angela’s mother?

So much. I realized then that Luis had stopped moving, and was staring down at a collection of objects on the battered coffee table in front of the couch.

A book, turned facedown—something Manny had been reading.

A glass with a dried residue in the bottom.

An open bag of animal cookies.

Remote controls scattered haphazardly across an uneven landscape of magazines and newspapers.

Luis collapsed on the couch and put his head in his hands, and his shoulders heaved silently. I felt the storm of emotion from him, dark and heavy.

Walk away, Cassiel. You are not mortal.

I sat down beside him and placed my hand on his back. He didn't speak, and neither did I; the silence stretched for a long time. When he finally raised his head, he took in a deep breath and sat back against the couch cushions. I took my hand away and folded it with its mate in my lap.

“They’re gone,” he said. “I guess it took me a while to really get it, but they’re gone. They’re not coming back.”

I gathered up the cookies and the glass and took them into the kitchen. The cookies went in the trash, and I filled the glass with hot water. A flash of memory overtook me: Angela, standing here at this sink, washing up dishes from the first evening I’d been welcomed here, to this house.

They’re not coming back.

No, they weren’t, and the ache of that was like a constant gray storm inside me. A human might have succumbed to tears.

Walk away.

I yanked open the refrigerator door and began to empty the contents into trash bags. The physical sensations helped fuel a growing tide of what I realized was anger. Anger? Yes, I was angry at them for abandoning me. For leaving behind Luis and their child.

Angry at my own weakness.

“What are you doing?” Luis asked from the doorway.

“Cleaning,” I said flatly, and tossed half-empty bottles of sauces into the bin. The milk was already turning rancid in its carton. “We’re here to clean, yes?”

“Not now. Leave it,” he said. “I need to think about what I’m going to keep.”

“You won’t keep any of this,” I said, and kept pulling things from the shelves. Leftovers, wrapped in plastic, marked in Angela’s clear hand with the dates.

He charged forward, knocking a bottle of Tabasco sauce from my hand, which bounced from the counter onto the hard floor. As it hit, it shattered in a hot red spray. Vinegar stung sharply at my nose and eyes. “Stop!” he yelled. “Just stop, dammit! Stop touching things!”

I shoved him backward, and he rushed toward me again. He drove me back against the counter with bruising force, and his hands grabbed my shoulders. I took hold of his shirt, my fingers wrapping into a convulsive fist, and felt a wild, black desire to hurt him, hurt. . . .

“Stop,” he said, and there was so much despair in the single word that my anger shattered. My fist relaxed, and my hand rested flat against his chest. “Stop, Cassiel. Please stop.”

His whole body was pressed against mine, and the wildness in me mutated, twisted, became something else.

I wanted . . .

. . . I didn’t know what it was I wanted from him. The conflict in his own expression told me he felt the same, torn in so many directions his self-control was tattering like a flag in a hurricane.

His hands slid from my shoulders up my neck, to cup my face. I could feel every rapid pulse beat in his veins, every ridge and whorl of the lines in his fingertips.

Luis’s eyes were huge and very dark, like midnight lakes where the unwary drowned alone.

I knew, in that frozen instant, that the next thing we did would chart the course of our futures, together and apart. This is the moment of choice.

“Stop,” I said, and a warning flare, not quite a shock, passed from my splayed fingers into his chest.

He did, but he didn’t retreat, not for a long few heartbeats. When he did, it was fast and decisive, leaving me there without a word as he stalked to the kitchen door. His boots crunched shards of glass and left pale red Tabasco-colored prints in their wake.

I heard him go into another room. Doors opened and closed, wood banged. I followed his wet footprints and found him emptying out drawers from a dresser, tossing the contents onto the neatly made bed. He barely paused when I appeared behind him. “I’m going to need some bags in here,” he said. “Most of this has to go in the trash or to some charity.”

His voice was his own again—calm, controlled, with a dark undercurrent of anger traveling beneath the surface.

I silently fetched him bags, and helped him fill one bag with underthings and clothing too worn to donate, one with donations, one with items he thought Isabel would treasure. That one was the smallest. When he came across a sealed white garment bag in the corner of the closet, he took it down and laid it gently on the bed, unzipping it enough that I could see lace and white satin.

“Angela’s wedding dress,” he said. “For Ibby.”

I met his gaze. It went on a long time. “Which one of us do you really think they’re trying to kill?” I asked him. “You or me?” It had assuredly not been only Manny or Angela, or our enemies would have stopped trying.

The question didn’t confuse him. It had been on his own mind, from the lack of surprise in his expression. “I think the more important question is how long is it going to take them to get their power back together to try again.” Some of the grief receded in him, which was what I’d intended. “They aimed for you, alone, twice. You do realize that, don’t you?”

I nodded. “That might have only been because I am a danger linked with either you or your brother. One or both of you could have been the main target.”

“But why? What’s so special about me or about Manny? He’s a—” Luis took a deep, startled breath. “He was a good man. He was good at his job, but you know—you know he wasn’t a superstar or anything. He was just a guy.”

“And you?”

Luis looked away. “I’m not that much, either. I know where I stand. Look, if I’d been any kind of a real threat, they’d have given me a Djinn before the revolt, and I’d be dead now, right?”

“Joanne Baldwin didn’t have a Djinn,” I said. “At least, not one assigned her by the Wardens. So I don’t believe you can make such a claim. Perhaps you don’t really know yourself at all.”

That got me a very slight smile, an echo of the old Luis. “Who does?”

Indeed.

I cannot speak for Luis, but I stayed alert at all times, ready for any sort of attack, whether magical or physical. I learned that alertness carries a price. By the time we were finished packing the items in the bedroom and marking them, it was late—dark outside.

“You throw out everything in the fridge?” Luis asked at last, sinking wearily down on the stripped mattress. I shrugged. “Guess it’s pizza, then.”

He called a number taped to the refrigerator’s door. He must have realized it was useless to ask me what I preferred in the area of pizza, because he ordered something called a combination, and pulled a couple of beers out of the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, toward the back, that I had left, in case he wanted them. He tossed one to me, and I caught it.

We twisted off the caps and drank in silence. I wondered if he was also waiting for the attack, and feeling the slight, indefinable strain of it.

The pizza came, borne in a sagging cardboard box by an unenthusiastic messenger. Luis paid for it, locked the door, and we sat down together on the couch to eat.

I took the first bite, and it was lucky that I did. My senses were sharper than a human’s, mostly because they had received relatively little use, and I tasted the poison immediately. I spat out the bite.

“Don’t like the mushrooms?” Luis asked, and was on the verge of putting his own slice into his mouth when I knocked it out of his hand. “Whoa! Okay, you really don’t like mushrooms.”

“Amanita virosa,” I said, pointing at the innocent-seeming chunks of mushroom. “Deadly within a day.” I moved to point at finely diced white cubes scattered among the chunks of sausage and wheels of pepperoni. “Aconite. Wolfsbane. Very fast acting, difficult to treat. There’s more.”

Luis had a stunned look on his face as he sank back on the couch, staring at the food. “Somebody poisoned the pizza?”

“The pizza was made correctly,” I said. “Amanita virosa is genetically very similar to Agaricus bisporus, the table mushroom. And I expect that the aconite was converted from garlic. It would be easier to do it from horseradish, of course, but someone spent time changing the toppings with great care.”

It took him a moment, but Luis followed my logic. “An Earth Warden did this. Poisoned it by genetically twisting certain ingredients.”

“Also by accelerating the decay rate in the meat.”

He visibly shuddered. “How the hell does somebody think of that?”

“They knew we’d be looking for a direct attack. This was more subtle.” It would have worked, too, if I hadn’t been possessed of more acute senses than normal. The inside of my mouth tingled, but I knew I hadn’t absorbed more than a light dose. “Would you have known?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Probably not right away.” Luis looked very shaken. “What about the beer?”

“We’d have felt any attempt to change it while we were here, and I don’t taste anything wrong with it.” I smiled slightly. “No more than there usually is, with beer.”

He responded by picking up his bottle and glugging down several swallows, still staring at the pizza box. “Do you know who it was?” he asked me.

I contemplated the pizza box, touched the damp cardboard, even trailed my fingers over the offending poisonous mushrooms. “No,” I finally said. My senses were blunted and imprecise, frustrating. I should have known, should have been able to tell who had done this thing, but trapped as I was, heavy in flesh, the trail went cold.

“All right, that’s it,” he said. “If I can’t trust the food I put in my mouth, avoiding a fight ain’t going to work.”

I raised my eyebrows. “So?”

“So. We’re taking the fight to them.”

It wasn’t so simple as that. Without knowing who and where, we were moving blind—and with our usual sources of information, through the Wardens, cut off from us, we had little in the way of resources.

While Luis slept, wrapped in an old quilt on the couch, I sat on the floor with a small lit candle and silently called the name of a Djinn, in repetitions of three.

It took me well into the night, and more than one candle, but I finally had a response. The flame flickered, flared, and guttered out in a hiss of molten wax, and darkness fell around me like a heavy cloak.

I didn’t move.

When the candle sputtered back to life, a Djinn had appeared across from me.

“Quintus,” I said. “Thank you.”

He nodded slightly. His eyes glowed with banked fire, and I knew that inviting him here was a dangerous game. He had shown me no special enmity, and had, in fact, saved my life, but that didn’t mean he would do it again. Or that he wouldn’t have changed sides.

“I’m sorry about Molly,” I said. “I didn’t kill her.”

He didn’t blink, and his expression stayed remote and calm. “No,” he said. “I know that you didn’t. If you had, I’d have ripped you apart and fed you to pigs within the hour.”

The venom in him was chilling. So was the fact that he didn’t bother to manifest himself completely; his eyes were on a level with mine, but he dissolved into dark gray rolling mist below his waist.

“What do you want, Cassiel? I’m tired of your chanting.” Quintus smiled, but it wasn’t at all friendly. “Most human calls can’t reach us. Yours seems to be especially annoying.”

I was glad to know it. It might one day mean my death, if I annoyed them too badly. “Do you know what happened to Molly?”

His eyes narrowed, and it seemed to me that his face sharpened its lines, took on more definition along with more anger. “She was murdered. It was quick and vicious, and I was elsewhere. What more do you want?”

“I want to know how far you traced the killer.” I had absolutely no doubts that he’d done so. I’d raced after the car full of gunmen who’d shot down Manny, and if Quintus truly cared for the woman, he’d have done the same.

Seconds passed, thick and ominous. “It’s not that simple,” he finally said. “Even the Djinn can’t fight shadows.”

“How far did you trace the attack, Quintus?”

He looked past me, at Luis, who was snoring lightly on the couch. “I traced it to the end.”

“What does that—”

“Don’t ask me, Cassiel. I can’t tell you.” Not, I realized, that he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. “There is a geas on me.”

A geas was a special kind of restraint, one that only a Conduit could apply—or an Oracle, I supposed. It was beyond the power of a normal Djinn, even the mightiest of us.

I had narrowed our pool of suspects considerably—and made it infinitely more dangerous. “We are going to Colorado,” I said. “We think the attacks are originating there.”

I was careful not to make it a question; a geas would force him to silence in response, or even to a lie. But a statement might pass.

It did. Quintus seemed to relax a fraction. “I hear it’s nice this time of year,” he said. “Cassiel, be careful. There are more things happening than you can see.”

I tried again. “We’re going to The Ranch.”

Quintus went silent, staring at me. I couldn’t sense anything from him, not even a flicker of struggle. The geas was a very strong one, and watchful.

He had, however, confirmed by his very silence what Warden Sands had said—our enemies were at The Ranch.

In Colorado.

Now we just had to find it. According to the maps I had studied, Colorado contained more than one hundred thousand square miles of land, and much of it was wilderness or ranches.

“Cassiel,” Quintus said. “I know you have to do this. If you don’t, you’ll be killed.” He was giving me information, as much as he could. Warning me. “They won’t stop coming for you.”

I looked toward Luis. “Not only me. And it may touch more than the two of us. It already has.” I returned my attention to Quintus quickly, warily, but he hadn’t moved. “Our enemies are near a river.”

Quintus nodded, but it was very slight. The glow in his eyes intensified, and I thought I saw a flicker go through him.

“Near the border,” I said. The flicker intensified. He didn’t nod this time. He couldn’t. I knew better than to try to push past that point; if it was a truly deep geas, he would attack to defend it.

I wouldn’t survive it.

“Don’t try to stop us,” I said. Quintus stirred, just a little.

“I’m not trying to stop you,” he said. “I’m trying to prepare you.”

“For what?”

Quintus’s presence was flickering like a dying flame. “For the war.”

“We’re running out of time,” I said. “Help us, Quintus. Try. Give me something!”

He did try. The flickering intensified, and the outlines of his form blurred and dissolved.

“To find the greatest, look for the least,” he blurted. He looked up sharply, toward the darkened ceiling, and screamed in rage and pain, a scream that dissolved into nothing. The candle flickered out again. I quickly relit it, but apart from a discolored burn on the carpet where Quintus had been floating, there was no trace that he’d ever existed.

He’d paid a price—that much was clear—even as little as he’d said. The war. But the war between Djinn and Wardens—that was over. Wasn’t it?

“It has to be,” I murmured.

But I was forced to admit that cut off as I was, orphaned from my own people, I could no longer be sure of anything.

To find the greatest, look for the least.

It was a clue, but I didn’t know what it meant. When I’d been a Djinn, I would have taken pleasure in such cryptic comments; I’d have relished the confusion it caused. But Quintus—Quintus had tried very hard to be very clear.

The geas had prevented it, and punished him.

Look for the least. The least what? The least . . .

The least population?

Colorado was a land of a few population centers, and much wilderness, but as I studied the maps and Manny’s computer, I thought I found the answer to the riddle.

HinsdaleCounty held only 790 people in more than 1,100 square miles, and had the fewest roads.

It was, I thought, not only a place to hide. . . . It was a fortress made for those who wanted to retreat from the world.

I blew out the candle and shook Luis awake. He flailed, trying to get loose from the cocoon he’d fashioned out of the quilt, all too aware that another attack could be coming at any second.

“I think I know where to go,” I told him. “Get ready. We have a long drive ahead.”

“Wait.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. He looked very tired. “Tell me first.”

He heard me out, in the predawn silence, in the house his brother had once built a life inside. When I was done, Luis said, “No.”

“No?” I was surprised, to say the least. I’d thought he understood the urgency.

“We can’t drive to Colorado and be back in time for the funeral,” he said. “And I’m not letting Ibby down this time. And I’m not leaving her unprotected while we go off chasing ghosts.”

I hadn’t thought about that. Now that I had, the weight of it sat like glass in my stomach.

“You’re going to have to keep us both safe,” Luis said, “until we get Ibby some alternate protection.”

I don’t know what the look on my face was like, but if it was anything like the frustration that raced through my body, it was no wonder he seemed wary. “Humans,” I snapped. I felt energy crackle within me, and for a moment, being balked, I felt truly Djinn once again.

But I knew he was right, as well.