Undone

Chapter 12

I DIDN’T HAVE time to warn Luis, but from the strength with which he was holding on, he was in no danger of slipping from the bike.

I veered sharply, out of our small tunnel of clearer air, into the heart of the storm. I had no choice, and even so it almost made no difference, as I felt the sucking rush of the car’s passage, and felt a hiss along the side of my boot where it bumped a passing tire.

I couldn’t see it, because here in this lightless hell, there was nothing but screaming wind, burning sand, and false midnight. I had lost directions again, though there was still road beneath my wheels. I had to slow down, uncertain of where the road might end, and I coughed as sand began to filter in around my faceplate, coating my face in acrid dust. Choking me.

Luis was right. We would not survive this.

You’re afraid, the Djinn ghost of me whispered. Like a human.

And once, I might have found that ridiculous or a matter for contempt. Now I found it a matter of survival. Every nerve in my body screamed in anguish. I wanted to hide, to curl up in a protective ball and wait for this terrible thing to pass me by.

That’s your flesh thinking, the Djinn ghost of me said. That’s what they want you to do. And she was right about that. If this was a Warden-driven storm, it could hover in place, flaying the leather from my back, the skin from my body, like being caught in a sandblaster.

I picked a direction based purely on instinct, and hit the throttle full speed. If I ran off the road into the sand, we’d crash and die in the storm. I won’t, I told the screaming panic inside me. I am in control.

The tires chewed loose gravel in the dark. I took in a gasp, choked, coughed. My mouth was coated with dust.

The handlebars of the Victory danced with hot blue sparks.

I veered left again, off of the shoulder, found the edge by trial and error, and concentrated on short, shallow breaths as we sped into the boiling, punishing darkness.

Something hard and hot slammed into my thigh and dragged loose. Metal, I thought. Wire, most likely.

Faster.

The storm could not last forever. Not even the most powerful Warden, the greatest Djinn, could keep this focus for long. Weather was the most unstable of forces, spinning apart under its own weight.

Oversight showed me nothing, a chaos, an unending sea of flashes and smoke and fog.

And then, dimly, a light.

My scoured, abraded faceplate cracked with a sound like thunder, and the drift of dust behind it became a rushing torrent into my face. I squeezed my aching eyes shut. I was driving blind in any case.

There was no way to draw breath, so I held it, struggling against the impulse to cough.

Almost there. Almost . . .

We burst out of the back side of the sandstorm, into stillness and drifting, smokelike dust. Overhead, the sky was a dull orange, the sun a shriveled dot.

There was no road, only a flatter area of sand.

I skidded the motorcycle to a stop and clawed at my helmet. The buckles seemed frozen in place, but it finally popped free, and as I removed it, the faceplate fell off in two pieces. The plastic was as gray and foggy as the eyes of a corpse.

My helmet, on the front side, had been stripped of paint, reduced to dull gray. A fountain of dirt cascaded out as I dropped it to the road. More dust spilled as I bent my head. I coughed uncontrollably, spitting up dirty mouthfuls, and I finally felt Luis’s hands let go of me. I’d have bruises where he’d gripped, I thought, with every finger clearly imprinted.

Luis got off the motorcycle and staggered a few steps as he tried to wrestle off his own helmet. He’d been protected by my body, but even so, when he turned, his face was a muddy mask of sweat and dirt. He coughed and spat, bracing himself with both hands on his knees, and shook his head.

“Can’t believe we made it,” he croaked. I couldn’t speak at all, I discovered. My throat wouldn’t cooperate. “You okay?”

I gave him a thumbs-up gesture. Running through my abused body was a rush of warmth, of ecstatic satisfaction.

I had survived. I had forced myself through, and I had survived.

As a Djinn, I had never understood how it felt to win against such odds. It’s only adrenaline, that old part of me scoffed. Illusion and hormones.

Behind us, the sandstorm rolled on, howling, black as night. There was nothing we could do to stop its progress, nor was I inclined to try.

I set my face forward, toward Colorado, where Isabel’s track still led.

Neither of us could go on for long without some kind of relief. It appeared in the form of a dilapidated, barely operating roadside motel just shy of the state line. If it had a name, I didn’t see it, only the rusting, flapping sign that said MOTEL, and below that COLOR TV AND AIR-CONDITIONING.

The Victory was coughing as much as I was, and I hoped that it had not been badly damaged by the sandstorm. It had blasted edges, pitted and smoothed, but seemed to have come through relatively unscathed. The same could not be said for me.

I rented a room using gestures and the Warden credit card that bore the name of Leslie Raine. The attendant behind the ancient, cracked counter looked young and far too excited to see a customer. “Y’all were in that sandstorm?” he asked as he hand-cranked a machine to get an imprint of the card. I nodded. “Y’all are lucky to be alive,” he said. “Here ya go. Sign here.”

I signed where he told me, using the name on the card. The boy was fascinated with my pink hair—still visible, though coated with dirt. “Not from around here,” he decided. “Dallas? LA? Las Vegas?”

“Albuquerque,” Luis said, and coughed. “Water?”

“Machine out front,” the boy said. “Cost you a dollar and a quarter, though. Water fountain right there for free. Well water; no city water.” He said it proudly. I raised an eyebrow at Luis, who gave me a mud-caked thin smile in return. As Wardens, we both understood well that natural did not equal safe. I mutely handed Luis several dollars, and he left to patronize the less risky choice.

The boy looked disappointed in our lack of moral courage. “Okay, then,” he said, and handed me a grimy key on an even grimier orange plastic dangle, which was marked with the number 2. “Here you go. A/C’s working, clean sheets, adult channel no charge.”

I gave him a long stare for that last, and walked out into the brilliant sunlight. Luis was retrieving the last of four cold bottles of water from a sun-faded vending machine. I walked past him to the door that matched the key, opened it, and surveyed our temporary refuge. It wasn’t even as much as the motel in which I’d stayed in Albuquerque, but the desk clerk had not lied—there was a bed, neatly made, and once I’d switched the air conditioner on, the blasting breeze was cool. I dropped the key on a table and started shedding layers of clothing on my way to the bathroom, sending cascades of gritty sand down to the carpet. Beneath the layers my skin was filthy and abraded, in places down to the muscle.

I stood under the water for a long time, until what swirled down the drain was clear instead of sandy, and as soon as I stepped out Luis was moving past me, naked, heading in. We said nothing to each other. He averted his eyes from me, and after my first glance, I did him the same. I shook out my clothing and cleaned it with a small burst of power, then did the same for his as the shower continued to run in the bathroom. Fully dressed again, I drank two bottles of water and stared out the motel room’s window at the sandstorm, which was proceeding toward the horizon.

I heard the shower shut off, and in a few minutes the rustle of cloth behind me as Luis began to dress. We had said nothing, but there seemed to be communication between us nevertheless. I was acutely aware of him, every movement, and I wondered if he had the same sensation of me.

I handed him a bottle of water, which he thirstily guzzled, and then the second. It was only as he neared the end of that one that Luis said, “You still have the trace?”

I nodded and sipped.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Maybe this isn’t about us at all. Maybe it’s about Isabel.”

That surprised me, and I turned toward him. “How can it be? She’s a child.” My voice had returned, but it was thin and scratchy. I cleared my throat and drank more water.

“Yeah, I know, but hear me out. It seems like they’re not in the kidnap-for-ransom business—they haven’t called in any kind of demand, not even to get us to back off. They had to have been watching the house to find an opportunity to grab her. So what if all of this has been to grab Ibby, not to kill Manny or Angela or me or you? We’re just—”

“Obstacles,” I finished softly. “But what value can a five-year-old child hold? Is she even displaying any talents as a Warden?”

“Not yet. Most kids don’t until they hit puberty. But it does run in our family.” He shrugged. “I started using mine pretty early. Around nine, I think.”

I thought back and wondered. It seemed impossible that the attacks would have been designed solely to eliminate potential guardians for the child, but he was right: Taking Isabel seemed to be a primary goal, not a secondary one.

“Then they won’t let her go easily,” I said. “If they did all this to ensure they could get her.”

Luis was watching me, and his expression was tense and grave. “You think they’ll kill her?”

“I don’t know,” I said softly. “I don’t know what they want from her.”

I turned in the key to the desk clerk ten minutes later, which led to his anxious worry that we had found something wrong with the accommodations, and Luis and I mounted the Victory and resumed the journey.

The trace, on the aetheric, was still there, and still definite. Isabel was ahead of us, but only by an hour. Whatever method of travel they were using to transport her, it was slower than our motorcycle, even double loaded. I opened the throttle, and we began to close the distance.

We rode for almost an hour, and my hunting instincts—inherited from the Djinn I had been as well as the flesh I wore—bayed for blood. We were maddeningly close, so close that a single fold of the horizon hid her from us.

Careful, the cautious part of me warned. They’ll fight to keep her.

“Colorado!” Luis shouted as we flashed past a large sign. I didn’t care about the boundaries. Isabel’s track was only a few miles ahead of us, and I intended to catch them. “Dammit! Cassiel, slow down—cops!”

I saw the cruiser as we flew past it, sitting nose out in a dirt road at the side of the highway. I glanced in my rearview mirror to see if he’d take up the pursuit.

He did.

“Pull over!” Luis was shouting to me now. “You can’t outrun them on a straight road; just pull over!”

I slowed. It was hard. My instincts howled to keep on chasing, and although I knew he was right, it seemed wrong to give up so easily.

The cruiser pulled up behind us, and two men got out. One approached us while the other hung back.

“Off the bike, please,” the policeman said. He was a large man, solid, with an expression that seemed blankly polite. His eyes were covered by dark sunglasses and shaded by a brimmed hat. My impression of him was one of starch and angles.

I swung my leg over the seat, as did Luis, and once we were off the motorcycle, the policeman drew his weapon and shoved it hard against my chest, right over my fragile human heart.

“Don’t move,” he said. Luis had frozen, not daring to protest, and that cost us, as well; the other policeman came around the car, grabbed Luis by the collar, and threw him facedown on the hot metal hood of the car.

He put the muzzle of his gun on the back of Luis’s neck.

“On the ground,” the man who had me said. “Face-down. Do it!”

The asphalt was hot and sticky, but I had little choice. I could resist, but I doubted I could save Luis as well as myself. Too many variables, and I didn’t understand this reaction. It seemed out of proportion for a speeding violation.

“Hands!” he demanded. I felt a hard knee in the center of my back, and moved my arms within his reach behind me. He snapped cold metal over my wrists and jerked me up to my knees with a hard pull on the restraints. Pain lanced up my strained shoulders, and I bit down on a wince. “All right, bitch, you’ve got about one minute to tell me what I want to know. Understand?” He jammed the gun hard at the back of my head. “Understand?”

“Yes,” I said. A Fire Warden might have been able to disable the guns. Perhaps it might be possible for an Earth Warden, as well, to warp the metal, but undoing the chemical reaction that fired the bullet was a skill that Luis did not have, and remained elusive to me.

I don’t know what question I expected the policeman to ask, but it surprised me when he said, with cold intensity, “Tell me what happened to my son.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and my gaze touched Luis’s, where he’d been thrown facedown against the car. His dark hair was damp and clinging to his face. He looked desperate and angry.

Dangerously so.

“What are you talking about?” Luis snapped. “Let her go, man!”

The policeman holding him down pushed harder. “Shut up.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so! Colorado State Police have cameras in the cars, right? Smile, you jackass, you’re busted for brutality!”

“Luis! Enough!” I said, and twisted enough that I could see the edge of the policeman’s face, the one holding the gun to my head. “I don’t know what you are talking about. Who is your son?”

It was a very dangerous question. I sensed the sick fury building in him, and he was mere seconds from pulling the trigger that would kill me.

“Who’s my son?” he repeated. He grabbed a fistful of my pink hair and yanked my head painfully back. “Who’s my son? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Randy,” the other cop said. “This guy’s got a point. We’re exposed out here. You want to get straight answers, we can’t do it right here on the side of the road, man.”

“Cameras can be smashed,” Randy said.

“Maybe so, but passing cars can’t.”

Randy hesitated, then grabbed the handcuffs and hauled me up to my feet. He shoved me in the direction of the police car as his partner opened the back door and put Luis inside. Luis didn’t fight, but as we approached the vehicle the stench of it rolled over me—hot metal, vomit, despair, sweat, blood, stale air, and the reek of plastic—and it was hard not to dig in my feet and resist.

No. I had to learn to deal with this strange problem of mine sometime, and now, with a gun aimed at my head, it seemed a good time to begin.

I told myself it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought, once I was inside the police car, but that was a fragile sort of lie that crumbled as soon as the door slammed shut beside me. The air was stifling, and it reeked. I coughed, barely controlling an urge to void my stomach, and tried not to struggle like an animal in a trap.

I am Djinn. This is nothing, nothing, nothing.

No. It was confinement. And confinement was something the Djinn hated.

Officer Randy and his partner got in the vehicle, which rocked to accommodate their weight, and we pulled out onto the road.

“You okay?” Luis asked me in a low voice. I nodded, throat working, unable to speak. I had never liked enclosed vehicles, but this one seemed ever more sinister and confining. “Don’t do anything crazy.”

“Yeah, listen to your friend,” Randy said. We had gone about five miles from where we’d left the Victory, and now he slowed the cruiser and made a right turn on to a barely visible dirt road. The car bounced and rocked along the trail, throwing up showers of dust and rocks.

When we could no longer see the road behind us, he brought the car to a stop and turned off the engine. The tick-tick-tick of cooling metal and the constant low chatter from the radio speakers were the only sounds.

“Out,” Randy said. His partner gave him a worried look, but complied. He and Randy opened our doors and removed us from the backseat, out into open air again. The hot air fanned the sweat that had trickled down my back, and I shivered.

Randy drew his gun again, staring at me with cool, dust brown eyes. He was a hard man, but I didn’t sense real cruelty in him. Desperation, perhaps.

“Now,” he said. “Let’s start the movie over. Where’s my son?”

Luis shook his head. “We don’t know what you’re talking about, Officer. We really don’t.”

He stuck the barrel of his gun under Luis’s chin, and Luis’s eyes squeezed shut to conceal what must have been either rage or fear. He didn’t move, but I saw muscles flexing in his tattooed arms.

I, too, was remembering his brother, dead of a bullet.

“I’m going to kill this guy,” Randy said, “and then you’ll remember what I’m talking about. How’s that?”

“If you do, you’re a fool,” I said, and got the full cold glare. He didn’t move the gun away from Luis. “Explain what’s happening. Maybe we can help you. We’re also looking for a child. A little girl, Isabel Rocha. She’s five years old. She’s been abducted from her bed.”

That surprised him enough to take his finger away from the trigger and lower the weapon to his side. “What?”

“She’s my niece,” Luis said raggedly. “My brother and sister died in a drive-by a couple of days ago. Ibby’s all I have left.” For just that moment, he couldn’t conceal the horror and despair of that, and I knew it rang true with the policeman, who took another sharp look at Luis, then at me. Frowning. “God-dammit, you have to believe us!”

It was convincing enough to cause uncertainty in our captor. And the frustration. “A kid,” he repeated. “What the hell is going on?”

“Who is your son?” I asked softly. Randy didn’t take his gaze from Luis.

“His name is C.T. Calvin Theodore Styles,” Randy said. “He’s five years old, and he was taken out of his bed three nights ago. Just—gone. No sign of an intruder, no clues.”

Randy’s partner, who seemed visibly relieved that violence wasn’t about to erupt, contributed the rest. “Randy got a call a couple of hours ago,” he said. “Came to his personal cell phone, said the one who’d abducted C.T. had left him somewhere to die, and was heading this way.”

Randy finally shifted his attention back to me. “The caller said I’d know her by the motorcycle and the pink hair.”

“That caller,” I replied, “is the one who has your son, and more than likely Isabel. I have nothing to do with it, but they are using you, and me, to slow down pursuit.”

Randy kept staring at me. “I get why he’s in this,” he said. “Family. Why are you?”

It seemed a fair question, and all I could do was shrug, as hard as that was to do with my hands manacled behind my back. “Family,” I said. “They’re all I have, as well.”

That, too, rang true to his lie-sensitive ears, and he exchanged a glance with his partner, who nodded. Without a word between them, they unlocked our handcuffs. Handcuffs, I realized, that either of us could have melted away at any moment . . . and had not. Luis had likely been biding his time, waiting for a strategic moment. I had been—what? Distracted? Djinn are not distracted.

“You got a picture of the girl?” the policeman was asking.

“Yeah,” Luis said. He dug in his back pocket and flipped photos, stopping on one that showed Manny, Angela, and Isabel in some sort of holiday setting. They were frozen in that moment, happy and glowing. Alive.

It hurt me to look at it. This is how things are for them. Time is a long road, with tragedy around every turn. They can’t go back; they can only bring the past forward with them in fragments and photographs and memories.

No, not them. I was human now, to all intents and purposes. Like them, I was traveling that road now, and time was an enemy: a thief, stealing moments and memories and lives.

Randy—Officer Styles—flipped to Luis’s identification card, then examined his other photographs before handing it all back. He was cautious, which reflected well on him. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “They look like nice people.”

“They were,” Luis said. I could tell it was still hard for him to use the past tense of the verb. He put his wallet back in his pocket and sent me a glance. “So where are we? We good now?”

“Yeah,” the policeman nodded. “We’re good, until I find out you’re shining me on, and then both of you are food for crows if I find out you had anything, anything to do with my son’s abduction. Clear?”

Luis nodded. “Clear.”

Officer Styles’s attention turned to me. “Pink, what’s your name?”

I almost answered Cassiel, but stopped myself. He had been thorough in checking Luis’s identity. He’d hardly take my word for it. In answer, I took my own wallet from my jacket pocket and handed it over. He flipped it open to the driver’s license. “Leslie Raine,” he said, and glanced up at me. “Picture doesn’t look much like you.”

“Do they ever?” Luis muttered. It was good he answered for me, because I felt stung. I had used a minor amount of power to adjust the photograph to resemble me. Was he implying that I was not skillful at such forgery?

“Huh,” Randy said. He studied the photo closely, then me, then the card again.

“I’m albino.” Several people had referred to me so; I thought it only fair to adopt the idea. “Perhaps we don’t photograph well.”

“Don’t albinos have pink eyes?”

“Not all of them,” I said.

He flipped through the rest of the wallet. Apart from the credit cards that Lewis had provided, there was nothing else. No mementos. No photographs of any kind, saving up memories for empty days.

I wished I had taken some now, not so much to placate the policeman, but to keep Manny’s smile vivid in my mind.

He handed everything back. “Kind of a light wallet.”

“I’m neat.”

“That’s not neat, that’s OCD,” he said. “Okay, I’ll buy you guys might be legitimate; we already looked you up on the computer in the car. Manny and Angela Rocha, shot dead in their front yard, just like you said. Isabel Rocha, abducted. Got a nice mug shot of you, sir, from bad old days.”

Luis shrugged. “Reformed,” he said.

“Used to be in the Norteños, right? I didn’t know that was an option, getting reformed.”

“I got a good job.”

“Yeah? Doing what?”

“How is this helping to find your son?” I cut in. “Or Isabel?”

Officer Styles took in a breath, held it, and let it out. “It isn’t, I guess,” he said. “You tell me what you know about this.”

It was my turn to exchange a look with my partner. Luis, correctly guessing that I did not have enough experience in half-truths to be credible, took the lead. “We got a lead,” he said. “Isabel was spotted along this road, heading from New Mexico into Colorado. We were getting close when you stopped us. Look, if you want to come with us . . .”

“Who gave you the lead?”

Luis shook his head. “I can’t tell you that. But I promise you, if you let us follow it, we’ll do everything we can to get your son back while we look for Ibby.”

He meant it, and I knew that Officer Styles sensed it, too. He was on the verge of saying something when his phone rang. He checked the number on the display and said, “My wife.” Tension ran dark through his voice. He turned away to speak in low tones, and I did not try to hear what was said. The pain and fear coming from him was palpable, like a sickening fog.

Children, I thought. What can our enemies want with children?

So many terrible things.

Randy closed the phone and took a moment staring toward the horizon. When he came back to us, his manner and expression were composed, but that didn’t matter. He was far from calm. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Randy,” his partner said. “Everything okay with Leona?”

“She’s just anxious. I don’t want to tell her—” He shook his head. “I don’t want her to know this was a bad lead. She needs a little hope.”

It was astonishing, how little it took to change him from a man I needed to battle to a man I wanted to help. Djinn rarely changed their minds, but then, they had scopes of knowledge that humans did not. Human perception, I realized now, was like a prism, reflecting first one facet of a new thing and then another.

It made the matter of trusting someone even more risky. I wondered how they had ever learned to do it at all.

“Can you take us back to the motorcycle?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Because I like my motorcycle.”

That seemed to amuse him, but he nodded. “Sure. Why not?”

Back on the Victory, we raced down the road with the patrol car drafting behind us. Luis’s hand clasped the bare skin around my middle, sealing the connection between us and allowing me to concentrate on piloting the bike in Oversight as well as reality.

The red, faint trail of Isabel’s passage on this land was fading but still present. We were on the track, and we were very, very close. Over the next fold of the road rose the growing shadows of mountains. Desert was rapidly giving way to different landscapes and plants, although the toughest, thorniest bushes continued to make their presence felt.

The air changed gradually, too. We were traveling into different climate bands.

As the sharp mountains began to cut the sky in hard, black edges, the trace came blindingly clear, in a flare of hot red.

Luis saw it, too. His hand tightened on my waist. I increased speed, flying toward the site. If they intended to fight us, I was ready. Eager for it.

You will not take this from me. Not this.

Over the next ridge, the road fell into a gentle downward slope. There were no roads leading into the underbrush, no obvious settlements or buildings. No sign at all of human civilization here, except for this road built in a clean, straight line through nature.

I slowed, anxiety building inside me. I had expected to see something—a car, perhaps, or a building.

There was nothing.

And yet the trail ended here.

I slowed the motorcycle again, this time to a coast, with the engine humming and the tires hissing along the gravel at the side of the road.

I stopped.

“Oh, God,” Luis said, and every sound seemed to hang sharp on the clear air. “Where is she?” He sounded as confused and afraid as I felt, and he let go of me and swung his leg over the bike to stride away. He paced like an angry lion, hair blown in a black flag by the whipping winds. Grass bent and whispered its secrets. This flat, open area concealed nothing, but a child might be small enough to be hidden in the grass—

—if the child could not move.

I slowly dismounted the bike and approached Luis, who was stalking the edge of the road, frantically sending out waves of power like radar signals, hoping to get a response.

He did. I heard the sharp intake of his breath, and then he plunged forward, off the road and into the knee-high pale stalks of grass. Insects rose up in confused clouds, disturbed by his passage. I followed him. Behind me, the police car’s doors opened and closed, and I knew the men would be right on my heels.

Luis and I leapfrogged each other, racing through the grasses, both heading for the same point of pulsing red on the aetheric.

When we reached it, there was no sign of a child. No body. No presence at all.

Luis sank down on his haunches near a bare spot in the grasses and held out his hand, palm down, over it. I put my hand on his shoulder, and it popped up in Oversight in hot red.

The soil was darker here.

“What?” Officer Styles barked, as he and his partner stumbled to a halt next to us, looking at—apparently—nothing.

Luis touched his fingers to the soil, and raised them into the light.

Blood, smeared red on his skin.

He rubbed it slowly between his fingers, expression distant and closed even to me.

“It’s hers,” he said softly. “It’s Isabel’s.”

I knew, with a sinking sensation, that he wasn’t wrong.

Something failed inside of him, something that had been tenaciously holding together. His hope was dying here, the precious light of it guttering out like a candle starved of oxygen.

I was on the verge of feeling the same when I became aware of a strange flutter at the edges of my awareness, a kind of red echo.

I let go of Luis’s shoulder and stepped away into the grass, hunting for the source of the dissonance.

I found it. It was a plastic bag, the kind used to store blood for reuse in hospitals. It still contained a red film within it. I crouched next to it, studying it carefully.

Isabel’s blood was inside of it.

“Over here,” I said. Officer Styles was the first to my side.

“Don’t touch it,” he warned. I nodded. I had no need of touching it, in any case. The presence of the bag itself told me all I needed to know.

They had laid a false trail for us to follow. This was Isabel’s blood, taken from her small body, probably while she was unconscious. The bag had held less than a pint. They had sprinkled it along the road, and left a clear trail here, to the spot where they had dumped the rest to draw us in.

I came quickly back to my feet. “Luis,” I said sharply. “Be ready. They would have done this for a reason.”

He looked up at me with dulled eyes, still rubbing his fingers together. Isabel’s blood. He believed she was dead. I showed him the bag, but he seemed not to comprehend.

“They’re coming for us,” I said. “And she’s still—”

I was going to say alive, but I didn’t have the chance.

There was a low growl from the grass; something leapt at Luis’s unprotected back in a dun-colored blur. I heard a chilling roar, one that woke primitive instincts inherited from millions of years of cowering in caves, waiting for predators to attack.

Human instincts, not Djinn.

The beast attacking Luis was a mountain lion, a large one, but I didn’t have time to come to his aid. There were other animals closing in, moving with unnatural stealth and focus. Two more mountain lions. Loping in from the north and the south were two large black bears.

“Down!” I screamed at Officer Styles, as a mountain lion prepared to leap at his back. He didn’t obey me. Instead, he spun around, gun drawn, and fired. He missed. The mountain lion crashed into him with a vicious snarl and slammed him down on the grass. His partner aimed for the animal’s skull.

I knocked his gun aside at the last moment. The report of the shot startled the big cat, and it lifted its head to focus its attention toward the two of us. Huge gray-green eyes fixed on us with terrifying intensity, and it gathered itself for a leap.

“Behind me!” I shouted, and shoved the man into position. “Don’t fire!”

The mountain lion launched itself into the air, scimitar-sharp claws extended to disembowel me.

“Get out of the way!” I heard the man behind me yell, but my attention was fully on the animal. Someone was pushing it, controlling it, overriding its self-preservation instincts. These creatures weren’t the enemy; they were weapons, confused and terrified beneath the surface fury.

I couldn’t condone their deaths, rare as such predators were on the earth since the proliferation of humans. Luis and I could handle them.

It was a risk—a large one—but I slapped my hands down on the creature’s skull as it barreled into me, bearing me to the ground with a heavy thump. Soft fur, hard bone, powerful flexing muscles. I saw the flash of teeth. Its claws ripped at the leather covering my chest, and I felt the sting of cuts.

My leather had slowed it, but I had seconds, at best. I poured my power into the creature, not to dominate, but to free its mind from the cage of power that had trapped it. It seemed easier in theory, because the faceless enemy had all the strength of a top-class Earth Warden and all the ruthlessness of a Demon. I slashed at the bonds holding the cat, and it sprang away from me, snarling in terror and confusion.

It leapt past the trembling policeman behind me and vanished into the grass.

Luis’s mountain lion lay unconscious on its side, breathing in slow, steady rhythm.

I dragged Officer Styles up to his feet. The four of us formed a square, shoulders touching, as the bears loped closer.

“Next time, put it under,” Luis told me. “They’ll just grab the animals again once you let go.”

He was right. The mountain lion I’d freed from control was veering, turning back toward us at a gliding run. It slowed to a cautious, slow stalk, luminous eyes fixed on me. Its huge paws made almost no sound at all on the grass, but I could hear the low sound of its growl on the cooling air.

They would know my power now. They’d tasted it. I wouldn’t be able to be so merciful again without cost. They would kill me if they could. Me, Luis, the two policemen.

All for what? For Isabel? Why?

“Cassiel,” Luis said, and held out his hand. I hadn’t realized that my reserves were sinking, but he was right. I needed power. The golden flow poured into me, waking shivers, and I cut it off as quickly as possible to keep my attention focused outward. “Put them out. Down, if you have to.”

I nodded. The policemen had their guns drawn, but unless they were very fine shots I doubted they could bring down any of these animals before being gutted. The bears were charging, one on Luis’s side, one on Officer Styles’s.

“Go!” Luis shouted, and let go of me. I spun away from him, facing the nearest threat. It was another mountain lion, already in the air. Her muzzle was drawn back, exposing her fearsome sharp teeth, and the roar was meant to freeze me in place.

Instead, I waited until the last instant, stepped aside, and straddled the lion’s back to slap my hands on its skull from behind as it landed. She roared again and twisted, but I found the blood vessels I needed, and squeezed.

She went limp. Still breathing, but down. I kept her at that level as I jumped across her body to veer in front of Officer Styles, who had his gun trained on the charging black bear.

This animal was not as large as some, but large enough—at least half a man’s weight, all muscle and fury. Black bears were, for the most part, good-tempered, but this one had been driven almost to the edge of madness. He was in terrible pain, and he would savage anything that came within reach of his claws and teeth.

I repeated the trick of knocking out the animal, but this time it was more difficult. I had to concentrate on the mountain lion, as well, and the bear was strong and very, very angry. When it finally collapsed into a messy tangle of broken grass, it was breathing heavily and making a noise that sounded terribly like a moan of fear.

I looked around. Luis had brought down the last mountain lion, and the other bear—cannier than the others—was pacing angrily in jerky paths, charging Luis, then backing away. Never quite committing. That one, I thought, was not fully under our enemy’s control.

All in all, we had managed to come out of this well, without unnecessary death.

I should not have been so sure of that.

My first hint of more trouble was from the other policeman—CAVANAUGH, his name tag read—who put a hand on my shoulder and pointed off toward the east. A black smudge of smoke was rising about a hundred feet away. As we watched, it spread into a line, and as the dry grass caught like tinder, flames blazed six feet into the air.

The wind was toward us.

Within seconds, the smoke had reached us, thick and choking. The fire would not be far behind, and grass fires could race faster than a running man. I couldn’t leave the animals helpless to burn alive, but if I freed them from control, they would turn on us.

“Run,” I snarled to Styles and Cavanaugh. “Get to the car!”

They did not argue. They pelted through the smoke, into the grass, heading in the right direction. I hoped there would be nothing there to meet them, but I had other problems.

Luis coughed wetly as he stumbled to my side. “Gotta go!” he shouted. I nodded.

“Go first!”

He clearly didn’t wish to, but he loped into a run and was immediately lost in the thickening smoke. I was coughing now myself, and my nose and eyes were dripping fluids. The air was filthy and thick.

I released the animals all at once, with a snap of power, and three mountain lions and one bear rolled up to their paws.

All oriented on me.

All forced to ignore their natural instincts, which would have taken them from the fire into safety.

They moved to circle me.

I waited until one darted toward me, then dodged and jumped the circle, and ran. Not toward the road—I could not be sure that the others had made it to safety yet, and I didn’t want to draw an attack to them.

I ran to the north, toward the trees. I fed my muscles on pure golden Earth Warden energy, putting on a burst of speed that kept the mountain lions bounding a few feet behind me. The smoke was blinding, and I felt a blast of heat loom at me from the right, hot enough to sear. I smelled my hair burning, an acrid and stomach-turning stench, and veered to the left as flames flickered and took hold in front of me.

It was no use. The field was fully in flame now, driving me toward the road in a broad, shrinking arc.

Out of desperation, I softened the ground beneath my feet and dropped into a sinkhole of powder-soft sand, plunging grave deep into the earth. I hardened the top as quickly as possible, and felt the thunder as the animals charged on, chasing shadows.

The pressure of the sand and earth around me was intense—cool, insistent, constant. I struggled not to fight it, concentrating instead on holding my breath and staying calm, calm, calm. Seconds ticked by, slow as torture. I counted every pulse beat.

When I could no longer resist the need to struggle for breath, I reversed the process, hardening the sand beneath my feet in stages, and rose from the ground like a dusty, pink-haired Aphrodite. . . .

. . . Into a blackened, stubbled, smoking emptiness like the shores of hell. The fire had passed over me and was sweeping toward the road, leaving smolders and sparks behind, and little else.

There was no sign of the mountain lions or the bears. They had lost me, and continued to race on to the safety of the trees, or veered toward the road.

I felt exhausted, bruised, and smoke soaked as I limped toward the line of flames and black billows. Before I reached it, the last of the grass was consumed to twisted ash, the wind carried sparks across the road, and the field on the other side of the pavement began to burn.

As smoke cleared, blown by the constant wind, I saw that the patrol car was intact, though smoke stained, and so was the Victory. The car doors opened.

Both policemen were safe.

There was no sign of Luis.