Unknown

Chapter 7

GLORIA JENSEN HAD LITTLE TO TELL US, after all. She was drowsy from painkillers, neatly bandaged, with her broken arm set in a plastic brace. Her parents, unaware of the incident down in the parking lot, had already made their ecstatic welcomes, and they sat on either side of her bed, touching her as if they couldn’t bear to let her go even for a moment.

Gloria’s eyes widened when she saw me. I had come alone; Turner and Luis had stayed behind with our child attacker. Luis was maintaining the artificial sleep that kept the unconscious girl from further destruction, of herself if nothing else; Turner, I think, just wanted to stay out of my way. He was regarding me with more and more caution.

Gloria told me nothing of significance. She’d been taken from school. She’d tried to fight the man who was taking her. He’d broken her arm in the process of subduing her; he’d tied and gagged her, and put her in the trunk of his car.

“Then the other man came, after a really long time,” she said. “I don’t know how he got in there. He was just there. Then the trunk opened, just enough for me to get out, and he took me to a policeman before he left again. Then they brought me here.”

Rashid. The hushed tone of her voice confirmed that she’d sensed him as being somehow different.

“The first man,” I said. “Did you know him? Recognize him? Had you seen him before?”

Gloria nodded, small braids bobbing around her face. “He was at camp, the camp last summer,” she said. “His name was Mr. Holden. I didn’t like it there, so my dad brought me home. But Brianna stayed.”

“Brianna,” I said. “She’s your friend?”

“Yeah. Her parents travel a lot. She spends a lot of time with me. She liked it there.” Gloria made a sleepy face of distaste. “They seemed nice, but I could tell they weren’t. I told Dad I wanted to leave, and he got me. Bri-Bri wouldn’t go.”

I took a guess. “Brianna is about your age? With blond hair that she wears in braids on the sides of her head?”

Gloria could not have looked more impressed if I had suddenly waved a magic wand and produced an elephant from thin air. “Yes. That’s Bri! How did you know?”

“Magic,” I said, straight- faced, and she smiled in delight. “Gloria. I need you to understand something. You, and your parents as well. You are not safe. These people could come for you again. I think they will try. You must stay on your guard, all right? And—” Now, I looked at Gloria’s mother steadily. “And you must be trained, so you understand what is ahead of you.”

Gloria’s mother flinched, then nodded. She patted her daughter’s shoulder gently. “It’s because you’re special, sweetie,” she said. “Like me. Like I used to be. And you need to understand what that means.”

Gloria looked over at her and said, very calmly, “I know already, Mom. I saw the news and stuff. It’s magic, right? Like those people who can make rain.”

Gloria’s mother heaved a sigh. “Yes. Like that. And yes, your powers are probably going to be weather. Like mine were.” Another sharp look in my direction. “Will the Wardens protect her?”

“I doubt the Wardens can protect themselves just now,” I said. “Look out for your own. That is all I can say.”

I started to go, but the pleading look in Gloria Jensen’s eyes stopped me, and instead, I took her small hand and said, “You are a fighter, Gloria Jensen. And you won’t let this stop you. I know how afraid you were in the car; I could feel that. I know how much pain you were in. But you’re strong. I believe you will make a great Warden someday.”

“But not right now?”

“No,” I said. “Not right now. And you shouldn’t let anyone make you try.”

I squeezed her fingers and poured some of Luis’s healing force through her, which brightened her eyes and damped down some of her lingering pain and fear. Then I nodded to her parents, and took my leave.

Before I did, though, I thought of one more question to ask her father.

The answer, ultimately, did not surprise me.

Brianna was, according to the roll I carefully examined, a girl named Brianna Kirksey. Her location was shown as La Jolla, which was consistent with the hospital in which we stood. When Turner consulted the Warden HQ officials, he found that Brianna’s parents were not merely traveling . . . they were dead. Gone in a recent Warden skirmish with something in Florida, whether supernatural in nature or not was unclear. But undoubtedly, both were gone. Their bodies had only recently been recovered.

“Do you think they’re killing off the parents?” Luis asked tensely. “To keep the ones they want?” He was doubtless referring to the deaths of Manny and Angela, but I couldn’t see how Pearl could have been behind that attack. It had seemed genuinely driven by human motives, not supernatural ones.

“Maybe it’s just an accident,” Turner said. “Poor kid. She’s an orphan and doesn’t even know it yet. You think she’s been at the Ranch all this time?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “Schools would have reported her as missing, unless they had some kind of word that she’d moved. Perhaps someone covered that by telling authorities she was being—what is the term? Homeschooled.”

“If they did that, they could have had her the whole time.” Turner let out a wordless growl. “Jensen had the chance to take that kid home.”

“Not his fault.” When the two men looked at me, I shrugged. “She wanted to stay. Mr. Jensen had no legitimate reason not to allow it. It was supposed to be a camp, after all, and she had her parents’ permission at the time, I suppose.”

“How many?” Luis asked. “How many kids at this camp?”

That was the question I had asked Gloria’s father on my way out of her room. “Hundreds,” I said. “And the camp was here, in California. Not Colorado.” Colorado was where the Ranch had been located when first we’d discovered it, but it had vanished without a trace before the Wardens and the Ma’at could come to finish the job. Pearl had covered her tracks.

I was no longer convinced that there was only one location, either. Perhaps there were dozens, scattered throughout the world. Pearl wasn’t any longer a physical presence upon the Earth; she was like an Oracle. She could be anywhere. Everywhere. The spider at the center of a dark, delicate web of power.

Brianna had likely been a sort of private joke between us. Look, I can take a child from your own hometown, corrupt her, send her after you anywhere I wish. Pearl could have used a resource local to California, after all. She’d made a special point of bringing Brianna here and using her, knowing we would find out who she was.

I had the scroll. I had the means to track the children, but she had set traps for me, too. Each name I touched in hopes of tracing them was a potential opening through which she could attack. Not all, certainly; I thought she could only attack through the connection to the children she controlled. But I had no way of knowing which doors were safe to open, until I had already opened them and been bitten by what lay on the other side. A nice dilemma, one that must have appealed to her sense of irony. I’d outmaneuvered her in gaining the list. She had outmaneuvered me in poisoning its usefulness.

“Hundreds of kids,” Turner echoed, appalled. “All Warden kids, you think?”

“Maybe not. It seems likely she would attract other children, for protective coloring. Possibly to use as distractions for us. Even the children gifted with powers won’t be of equal strengths. She’ll only keep the ones she thinks are most valuable. The others—the others are expendable.” I looked at Brianna, and thought of Ibby, in her miniature uniform with the poisonous darkness in her eyes. Ibby was expendable?

No.

“What are you thinking?” Luis asked me. He was touching Brianna’s forehead lightly, monitoring her sleep, but he was also reading my expression.

“I am thinking about history,” I said. “Your history, not mine. Child soldiers have been used in many eras. They’re still being used today, in some parts of your world. They’re easily trained, easily replaced. There is little doubt that Pearl would see their value in fighting against humans, but the Djinn . . . the Djinn do not, in general, share the same scruples. Some do, of course, particularly among the New Djinn. But others see all humans, of whatever age, as expendable. A child is no different than an adult, in terms of threat. You see?”

“No,” he said.

“The children are weapons against the Wardens,” I said. “Not the Djinn. But her fight is with the Djinn.”

Luis let out a slow breath. “You mean that she’s got something else. Something worse.”

“I think,” I said, my eyes fixed on Brianna’s sleeping, innocent face, “that we must stop this before she can finish with the Wardens and launch her true war, or my choices will become more and more limited.”

“To what Ashan wanted you to do in the first place.”

“Yes,” I said softly. “I feel like an animal in a trap, Luis. How many parts of myself will I have to cut away to survive?”

His gaze moved involuntarily to my hand, then wrenched away. I closed the metal fingers, and my phantom sensation told me that the metal was cold to the touch. I lifted the fist and opened it. Engraved in delicate etching on the bronze were the lines and whorls of my fingerprints, and the patterns in my palms—ghosts of what had been in flesh. I rubbed the fingertips together, and felt a phantom friction.

“Have the doctors checked her?” I asked. Luis nodded. “Then we need to wake her. Carefully. Can you block her access to power?”

“Maybe,” he said. “It depends. I can try.”

It was risky, having a Fire Warden in a hospital, with so many delicate and fragile lives that could be put at risk. I knew how he felt. We could counter her, but not completely. Not easily. There were protocols to block and even remove powers, but they were difficult and time-consuming, and extremely delicate. Even with the best of care, a percentage of those so treated were left crippled, mad, or dead.

Doing it to a child was beyond insane. I knew Luis would use the least amount of interference necessary to render her quiet, but it was a risk.

Not as much of a risk as letting her strike at will.

I nodded, and Luis removed the blocks that kept Brianna in her artificial sleep. She surfaced quickly, driven by more than a natural desire to wake, and when her eyes flew open they were hard, focused, and not at all confused.

Luis pressed his fingers to her temples on either side and went very still, head down. Concentrating. Brianna’s pupils expanded, and she panted for breath in angry frustration. Her hands convulsively opened and closed, making fists, but she didn’t otherwise move.

Couldn’t, I sensed.

“Brianna,” I said, and sat down on the edge of her small, high bed to look deeply into her eyes. In them, I saw echoes of . . . something else. “Brianna Kirksey. My name is Cassiel. Do you know who I am?”

Without question, she knew me. The hatred in her was astonishing. It twisted her face, arched her body, almost launched her from the bed at me.

“I hate you!” Her scream came shockingly loud, echoing from the stark walls and tile as if a dozen of her were shouting the words. “I hate you!”

The bedclothes began to smoke, and Agent Turner stepped up to quell the fire. He likely wasn’t anywhere near as strong as young Brianna had been artificially forced to be, but he was capable of counteracting the side effects of her rage. For now.

“I know you hate me,” I said. “You hate me because you were told of the terrible things I’ve done.”

“You killed them!” she screamed, and writhed under Luis’s calming influence, thrashing almost uncontrollably. “You killed my parents! I saw you do it!”

Ah. This was how Pearl ensured the loyalty of her soldiers, at least the ones aimed at me; she showed them horror, and cast me as the leering villain. In reality, Pearl—or, more likely, one of her trusted subordinates—had killed Brianna’s parents, and disguised the killer as me. It was also possible that Brianna had been shown photographs, or video, doctored to place the blame on me. Children believed things in a very literal manner. She’d have no reason to think anyone would lie.

There was absolutely no point in convincing the child—or attempting to convince her—that I had not done these things. I abandoned the conversation, looked at Luis and Turner, and said, “I will go.” They nodded. Turner looked relieved; Luis looked determined, but then, he was focusing almost all his powers inward, on the girl.

I heard her screaming all the way down the hall, and then I heard her stop. I leaned against the wall, eyes shut, listening to her voice, her tears, her anguish. I am not your enemy, I thought to her, although she neither would know nor care. She had been bitterly hurt, if not physically, then emotionally. Her pain was the price of Pearl’s determination to remove me from the equation.

I bared my teeth in a silent, fierce grin. We’ll see, sister, I thought. We’ll see who is left standing in the end. I took the scroll from my jacket and held it in my right hand. There was a catch on the hard protective cover, which was surprisingly difficult to work with my prosthetic left fingers; I fumbled it open, took hold of the scroll, and began to scan the list of names. So many names. So many children, and all of them hopelessly at risk.

There must be something I could do.

I traced the first name with my metallic fingertip, and felt a distant echo. Not the same intense contact that I had before; this was more of a whisper, something just at the edge of awareness.

The metal was creating a mostly-inert barrier between me and the power of the list. I felt a surge of interest, almost of hope, and controlled it with an effort. Not proven, I thought. Not until Pearl attacks, and fails to reach me.

I sat down on a nearby bench and tried again, touching first one name, then another. I got a confusing, indistinct jumble of impressions. Normal life, I thought. Nothing I could understand easily. I glided my finger down the list, until I felt something not normal.

Intense, fierce emotion. It overwhelmed me for a moment, and then it clarified. Rage. Fear. Terror.

I looked down at the name beneath my finger.

Alex Carter. La Jolla, California.

It was happening here. Right here.

I took a breath and placed my real-flesh right index finger on Alex’s name, and shuddered as the emotion rolled through me, flaying my nerves raw. With the fear and pain came knowledge, sure and instinctive.

I knew where he was. And he was not at all far.

I let the scroll snap shut, closed the case, and put it back in my jacket pocket. I could still hear Brianna’s sleepy, still-angry voice, punctuated by Luis’s, or Turner’s.

No, I thought. This is mine to do. Mine.

As if on cue, as I headed for the exit, my cell phone rang. I flipped it open without looking at the display and said, “Rashid.” No answer. “Rashid, where are you? Are you still following the man who abducted Gloria?”

A burst of static greeted me, and then the Djinn’s voice said, “—help—” He was no longer proud. No longer confident. He was afraid. Or at least, he sounded that way.

“Tell me where.”

He didn’t, not in words. Instead, a burst of data came across the screen, resolving into a map, with a glowing, pulsing dot.

“I’m coming,” I said, and ran out into the darkness. There were a few motorcycles parked in a special area in front of the hospital, locked in place. I snapped one of the chains with a simple jerk of my fingers that ripped the link in half. Then I took the link in my hand, melted it into flowing liquid, and poured it into the ignition, where it hardened into a perfect key.

It was a Harley. That was, apparently, a very popular brand. It was even larger than the last one I’d ridden, all chrome and heavy black leather saddlebags. There was aggression in the lines of it. Anger.

I liked it immediately. It suited my mood.

I opened the throttles and sent the bike roaring from the parking lot in front of Scripps Memorial Hospital, out onto Genesee, heading for Rashid’s location as it was marked on the tiny map. Rose Canyon, which was—by no coincidence, I was sure—the same location I had sensed for the Warden child in distress, Alex Carter. I pushed the motorcycle faster, faster still, until the lights around me were a blur, until I was dangerously fast even for Djinn reflexes—which I no longer possessed in full measure. But the fact remained: Rashid was trapped, and the child, Alex Carter, was in pain. In danger. And I might be in time, if I hurried.

I never made it.

I turned down a side street, focused intently on the map, on finding a less obvious way to the goal. Darkened buildings flashed by me in a smear; streetlights blurred together.

And then something hit me from behind, like a massive punch from a giant’s fist, throwing me and the motorcycle forward into an uncontrolled slide, and then I felt myself airborne, felt the world spinning sickly around me, and heard the crunch of metal and glass, and saw my own face reflected starkly in a mirror. No, not a mirror, a plate-glass window in a dark building, which I slammed into at almost a hundred miles an hour, fragmenting glass with such force it turned almost to powder where my body impacted it. At the edges, though, it turned lethally sharp, and I felt it rip at me like a shark, only for a single hot instant, and then I was hitting a wall, and falling back, seeing the splash of blood where I had impacted . . . ... and then I was down, lying still, staring up at swaying lights.

I heard the crunch of bootheels on glass.

A Djinn looked down at me. Rashid. Handsome and exotic and remotely dispassionate. “You’re badly wounded,” he said. “What will you cut off this time to save yourself, Cassiel? Your head? That would be entertaining.”

I rolled slowly to my hands and knees.

Rashid’s boot thudded heavily into my back, driving me facedown into the broken glass. I might have cried out. The sight of my blood, again, was disconnecting me from the immediacy of my injury; I felt serene, on some level, and alert.

But I couldn’t get up. “Rashid,” I said, and turned my face to the side, looking up at him through bloodied pale hair. “You don’t seem as if you need help after all.” There was something eerie in my voice, as well. Light, unconcerned, almost indifferent. The Djinn in me, rising like a monster from the dark. Rashid gazed down at me, and his eyebrows slowly rose, widening his eyes.

“From you?” he asked, and yawned, showing needle-sharp teeth. “Why ever would I? No. Never.”

“Someone called me,” I said. “Someone pretending to be you. I was provided with a map. I came to save you.”

“Amusing,” he said. “But not really important. I’m not so sensitive as all that, to take offense to something not even done to me.”

“You should,” I said. “If you’re not Pearl’s creature. She’s using you to lure me. Doesn’t that offend you?”

The weight of his boot lifted from my back, and Rashid sank into a smooth, almost feline crouch, staring at me with inhuman intensity. “I am no one’s creature.”

“So I believed,” I said. “Yet you just attacked me.” And I was hurt, although not devastatingly so. I just didn’t allow him to see it. “If you aren’t hers, why?”

Rashid shrugged. “I didn’t attack you, I just saw your crash. Why would I strike out at you? What does it get me?”

I rolled over on my side in a crunch of broken glass, staring up at him. He cocked an eyebrow.

“Then who was it?”

“You have a truly impressive number of enemies,” he said. “I, however, am not necessarily one of them. I came to see if you were dead, that’s all. I was curious.”

Curious. Of course. I felt a cold, sick wave of anger, and pushed it down; anger wouldn’t help me in dealing with Rashid, or any Djinn, unless I was truly in a position to fight. “I thank you for checking,” I said, and couldn’t keep the sarcasm from the words. “If not you—?”

“Some human.” He said it as if they were all interchangeable. From his perspective, most likely they were.

“Help me stand,” I said.

“It will hurt.”

“I’m well aware of that, thank you.”

He leaned down, hooked a hand under my arm, and hauled me up to a standing position. I braced myself against the wall. Blood sheeted down my sides and pattered on the floor. I concentrated hard on slowing the flow from the wounds—hundreds of them, small and deadly slices that would drain me dry—while at the same time trying to clear my head.

“You’re standing,” Rashid said. He sounded surprised. I opened my eyes to look at him. “Well, for the moment, perhaps.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “This war isn’t against the humans, do you understand? It’s against the Djinn. It’s against you. Fight now or fight later, when she’s much stronger. Your choice.”

“You’re giving me a choice to fight at your side? Considering how well you’re doing so far? I’m flattered.” His attention strayed away from me, out to the dark, as if he was listening to something far away. “Something’s coming for you. You should leave.”

“Rashid,” I snarled, “fight with me, or get the hell out of my way. The New Djinn must be ashamed to have you among them, running coward that you are.”

He froze, face going immobile, eyes blazing, and then I felt a growl echo in the air around me, starting from low in his throat but building in the very bricks and concrete around us. What glass hadn’t already shattered did so, with a sharp, concussive pop.

Then he turned and put his back to the wall beside me. “If you die,” he said, “I will not be overly sorry. But I won’t let you survive to tell your lies of my cowardice.”

“You may assume that I won’t be sorry if you fall as well,” I said, and coughed. Blood sprayed the air in a fine mist, but I felt better, after. “Who is it coming for us?”

“Not who,” he said. “What.”

With a scream of fracturing rock, the street outside erupted, pulping metal and stone in a geyser of smoke and dust, and something . . . stood up from the wreckage.

No. Built itself from the wreckage. Piece by piece, stone by stone. A vaguely headlike piece of boulder. Twisted metal for arms, ending in sharp prongs that sparked with random electrical current from the underground power lines. A body amassed of hot asphalt studded with trash, metal, and a single screaming face embedded in the torso, an unfortunate pedestrian caught up in the insanity, frozen in his moment of death.

Another soul on my conscience.

The thing turned its head toward us. As it lumbered for the building, it struck the twisted wreck of the Harley I had been riding, and the frame and tires re-formed and warped, then were sucked into the creature, reinforcing its armored coating.

A golem, straight out of the ancient days. It was held together by a simple, massively effective self-propelling, self-powering seed that had, in its heart, a single purpose. It would rebuild itself, over and over, so long as that core of purpose existed.

Destroy the seed, destroy the golem.

But finding the seed would be like finding a needle in a hurricane of knives.

“That’s not good,” Rashid said. “You understand how to stop it?”

“In theory.”

“Theory is all you have,” he said. “It will come for one of us and ignore the other; whichever of us it is focused on, the other must take action. And no more talk of cowardice, O disgraced one, or I will slice off your other hand and feed it to you.”

It seemed to me he was quite serious on that point. “If I fall—” I said.

“Then you’re dead,” he said. “And I am free to leave without incurring any further insults on my courage. So I think it would be advisable for you not to die, if you wish to keep me fighting your enemies for you.”

I bared bloody teeth at him.

Rashid, for no reason that I could understand, laughed, and then plunged away from me, meeting the oncoming monster head-on. With each step, he gained in size, expanding himself without any regard to human rules of conduct.

By the time he reached the golem, he was almost its equal.

He ducked a sweep of the creature’s wicked, jagged talons, put his shoulder against its chest, and shoved, driving it backward with a deafening screech of metal on stone. The golem was still forming itself, still learning its strength and balance, which were shifting as it sucked up new wreckage, new mass from the destroyed street. As it bumped against the slender metal stalk of a streetlight, the light flared, flickered, and the entire structure folded and twisted, wrapping around the golem like a vine. For a second I believed that it was trapped, that Rashid had leashed the thing, but then the golem simply absorbed the metal, ripping the post free of its concrete bolts.

It feinted for Rashid with a deafening crash, like a building coming down, and when he retreated, it turned and came toward me at a ground-shaking run.

I was its true target, after all.

And a golem couldn’t be killed.

Rashid had said it: As the target of the golem, my only job was to stay alive. It was Rashid’s task to use the single-minded focus of the golem to destroy it. In theory, it should have been a comfort that, even as I ran and fought for my life, there was someone working to ensure my survival.

In practice, that someone was Rashid, and I had no real guarantees that he would go at his task wholeheartedly. It did not encourage me to linger.

The typical Earth-based defenses I might have put up to repel an attack would be useless against a golem; whatever I threw at it would simply be absorbed, used to power it even more. So I ran, blowing a hole in the wall at the rear of the wrecked store—a clothing store, I realized belatedly, with the ghostly still shapes of mannequins frozen awkwardly around the edges. I had done considerable damage already, but it was nothing to what the golem was about to do, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it even if I’d wished to do so.

I was dangerously weak now, and I needed healing. The energy I pulled from Luis in a trickle was enough to sustain me under normal circumstances, but these were far from normal. I needed more.

It was going to hurt him, but I had to have it. It was now a matter of survival.

I paused, leaned against a wall, and opened the connection between us, forcing it wider. Power flowed into me, pooling golden in my veins, washing out pain and weariness. Cuts healed, though only enough to stop the blood loss. Scars would have to be dealt with later. I’d escaped any broken bones, but there were some internal injuries. I did what I could, and hoarded the last precious store of energy.

I could feel Luis’s pain from what I’d done. I’m sorry, I whispered through the link. I’d left him vulnerable, almost damaged.

He had no more to give.

I used another burst of power to blow concrete blocks and debris outward in a hole approximately the size of my body, knocking a door in the back wall, and I plunged through the cloud of choking dust, stumbled on the tumbling bricks, and came out on the other side, in a narrow back alley. The back of the building was featureless, with a scraped and dirty sign naming the business just to the left of a massive, battered metal trash container. I raced down the alley, moving as fast as I could, dodged down another side street into almost total darkness, and continued to run.

Behind me, I heard the grinding crunch of the golem chewing and absorbing its way through everything in its path. The giant metal trash container gave an almost organic shriek as it was ripped and torn, malformed and put to use to build the golem’s own body. With every single moment, it was becoming bigger, stronger, heavier, and deadlier—to me, and anything that stood in its way.

There were cars passing on the street ahead, and I ran for the motion and lights, threw myself off of the curb and in front of an oncoming vehicle, a van. It shrieked and shuddered to a halt in a thin veil of white, acrid smoke from its scorched tires, and through the windshield I saw the shocked face of a well-groomed man and a much younger girl who was almost certainly not his wife.

I yanked open the driver’s-side door. “Out,” I told the man. He gaped at me, started to sputter, and I snapped the seat belt holding him in the car, grabbed him by the collar, and hauled him out to a sitting position on the road. He scrambled up and out of the way, running; the girl in the passenger seat stared after him, then at me, black-rimmed eyes wide.

“You owe me fifty bucks, bitch,” she said. “He didn’t pay me yet.”

“I give you your life,” I said. “Consider that a tip you don’t deserve.”

She bailed out as I slammed the driver’s-side door, and before she was a step away I hit the gas, sending the van into a burst of acceleration. I rolled the windows down and watched the rearview mirror. I saw sparks as power lines fell, blue-white flares as transformers exploded behind me.

The golem was a black, lurching shadow against the stars, the more terrifying because it was so featureless.

I wheeled the van into a turn and accelerated again, heading north. Rashid clearly had not been successful yet at his assignment—finding and destroying the seed that powered the golem—so I needed to have some kind of alternate plan. Quickly.

A fresh breeze brought the scent of the ocean with it, and the sound of waves hitting the coast.

Water. Of course.

I wrenched the wheel again, taking the first possible turn west, toward the shoreline. I was close, which was fortunate; glances in the rearview mirror showed me that although the area behind me was hidden in darkness, inky and deep, there was movement there. Glints of metal. And a constant, grinding roar, as if a powerful engine behind me was systematically ripping apart the world.

Rashid suddenly appeared in the passenger seat of the van. I knew he wasn’t bound to a physical body, but Djinn sometimes sustained hurts too deep to heal on the aetheric, and those were reflected in any physical form they took.

Rashid looked . . . beaten. There was a long slash across his bare, indigo chest, and blood splashed over his face, hands, arms . . . none of it the golem’s. The golem wouldn’t bleed.

He sat, limp and gasping for breath, and then leaned his sweat- matted head back against the seat and said, “I can’t get to it. It’s too strong.”

“You’re giving up,” I said. “You. Rashid the mighty. Rashid the arrogant.”

“Save your contempt,” he said, and swiped irritably at the blood on his face, then made a disgusted expression and wiped the spilled crimson on the seat of the van. “You have mighty enemies, for one who’s already fallen far. Why do they need to kill you so badly?”

“My charm.”

“Ah, that would explain it.” Rashid shuddered a little, and I saw the cut across his chest draw together into an ugly scar. He was healing, but not nearly as quickly as a Djinn should. The damage he’d sustained must have been massive, on the aetheric plane. “You must leave this place. The golem will have a limited range. If you leave—”

“It will just follow, grow larger, and destroy anything it comes against,” I said. “I’m not a Djinn. I can’t jump from one spot to another to break the trail. It will find me, sooner or later, and the longer it takes to catch up, the larger and stronger it will be.”

Rashid closed his eyes for a moment. “Then you can’t win.”

“I’m not giving up.”

“Then how do you plan to—” Rashid fell silent as I wrenched the wheel, tires screaming, and almost crashed the vehicle into the side of a building as I sped down another side road. It was the last of the industrial district. Beyond it was a long stretch of straight asphalt running parallel to the sea. Beyond that there were parking lots, metal barriers, and the rocky coast with the heaving dark ocean beyond, glinting with moonlight. “You’re not serious.”

“Hold on,” I told Rashid, and jumped the curb with a hard bang and scraping metal to get into one of the deserted parking areas. There was a sturdy metal barrier between the parking and the walkways, where in sunny weather humans would promenade, enjoying the beautiful views.

I pushed the van’s accelerator flat to the floor, picking up speed as the engine roared. The van hit, bounced up, and its mass and momentum overcame the metal barrier at the end and threw it down. Tires grabbed and propelled us forward, over the mangled steel; I felt one of them shred and blow, but the others held firm.

Behind us, the golem lurched out of the night, huge and inconceivably only a step behind us. It was as tall as a downtown building now, a teetering mass of ripped road surface studded with absorbed wreckage, cars, and unlucky humans who’d wandered in its way. A nightmare, reaching out for the van and slamming down an appendage that was only vaguely hand-shaped.

Metal spikes the size of girders slammed into the roof of the van and drove all the way through, biting into the ground and rock beneath. The van came to a sudden, lurching stop, engine screaming, tires burning, and I realized that it was over.

We weren’t going to make it.

“Out!” I screamed at Rashid, and bailed from the door next to me. I didn’t wait to see if he’d obeyed; I knew I didn’t have time. The golem was a heartbeat away from achieving its goal, and it wouldn’t give up. Not now.

A fist made of metal and stone slammed down on the van, drove it all the way to the pavement, and destroyed any sign that it was ever a vehicle at all.

I was five feet from the rocky edge of the cliff. Waves pounded on stone below.

I ran.

The golem crouched, an ever-shifting mass of destruction, and absorbed the wreckage of the van. I didn’t see Rashid as the metal, plastic and glass shattered and deformed, as the golem devoured it, but I knew I had no time to gawk. He’d live, or not. I couldn’t help him in any way.

I dug deeply for every ounce of strength inside, and sprinted hard for the edge of the cliff. As my feet touched the last of the rock, I let my power explode out, driving me up in a graceful arc toward the moon, a shallow trajectory that rose, hung for a second, and then rapidly slipped down into a dive.

I broke the surface with my outstretched hands, and arrowed deep into the water. The shock of the cold was enough to drive all thoughts from my head for a few seconds, as momentum carried me deeper and pressure built around me. It was so dark beneath the waves that I felt lost, suspended in icy night, and my body began to cry out almost immediately in protest. Too much cold, too much pressure, no air. I was no Weather Warden; this was not my environment, not even a little. There was a vast feeling of wrongness to it, of the very primal powers interacting to my detriment.

And then there was a tremendous wave of force that blew through the heavy liquid around me, sending me tumbling, and above I saw a silvery ripple as the surface boiled into a thrash of bubbles.

Something vast and dark began to descend. Curiously, it brought light with it—the headlights of cars, still powered from their batteries, trapped within its vast, sticky body.

Golems are fearfully strong things, and virtually impossible to defeat, but they have a critical weakness.

They really can’t swim.

The golem’s limbs flailed the water in useless sweeps. The vast quantity of metal and stone that created and sustained it, that made it so invincible, was nothing but an anchor in the water, and I floated, watching as it fell past me and was pulled down, down, into the depths below me. The car headlights continued to glow, lighting up its struggles as it fell.

I collected myself and began to push for the surface. The icy water was sapping my strength, and lack of oxygen would begin to confuse me soon, and force me to breathe even though there was nothing safe to draw in. The golem was inconvenienced, possibly fatally; if it couldn’t get out of the water before the seed at its core was corrupted by the salt water, it would dissolve into a formless mass of junk scattered across the ocean floor for future archaeologists to puzzle over.

But we were close to the shore, and the golem might be able to make its way back up, following the ocean floor and climbing the rocks, before the corrosive action of the salt water reached its heart.

A white comet of force streaked through the water, blowing me aside again in an uncoordinated tangle of limbs, and I watched it descend in lazy spirals into the dark, heading for the faint glow of the golem’s illumination. I had no idea what it was. I no longer even cared.

My lungs began aching and spasming, hungering for air. I couldn’t linger, even if I wished to try. I kicked for the surface, driving hard into the black, but without the turbulence that had briefly turned the upper layers of the water silvery with trapped air, I could see little to guide me. At last I spotted the faint moonlight drifting through the waves, and arrowed for the surface with the last energy of desperation.

I thought I had surfaced, and opened my mouth.

The gasp I took in was equal parts air and water, and I sputtered, choked, coughed, and tried again, knowing that if I failed again, I wouldn’t have the strength to stay conscious.

And that would mean death.

Warm, sweet air flooded into my lungs. I floated on the surface, coughing and breathing in uneven gasps. Around me, the water heaved, dark and cold, and there was no sign of the golem. It was gone, as if it had never existed at all. Not even the bubbles remained.

And then, from deep below me, I saw a bright white light that flared out like an explosion—but there was no force to it, only light that lingered, expanded, and faded down to a single hot pinpoint.

It coalesced to a single, bright dot.

A cometary flare, racing upward toward me.

I began swimming hard, all too aware that it was hopeless even as I began the effort; the water would have grounded out my Earth abilities, even if I had still possessed the energy to ready a defense. My speed was merely that of a tired, abused human; I had no chance against anything that might be turned against me, particularly by a Weather Warden, with dominion over the water itself.

The water turned a brilliant aqua blue around me, then a fierce white, as the speeding form came closer. It broke the surface ten feet from me, and the light flared, then faded to a dull glow, then darkness.

Rashid lay floating on the surface of the water, eyes full of moonlight. His skin looked pallid beneath its indigo luster, and there were slashes and cuts on his body that had not healed.

I swam to him, feeling the water and the cold dragging at me like hands. My legs felt rubbery and strength-less, and I was losing all feeling in my arms and hands, which struck the water clumsily, like paddles.

“The creature’s dead,” Rashid said, and opened his left hand. In it was a glowing metal ball. It had burned his palm in a red circle. “The seed. Must be crushed. Can’t be done by a Djinn.”

I took it from him, and he gasped in a rushing breath that told me more than his expression what kind of pain holding on to that seed had caused him. His wounds began to slowly knit themselves closed.

The seed felt warm in my hand, and I felt it vibrating, building up its power again. It would only be vulnerable for a precious short time.

I closed my fist around it, and squeezed.

It shattered like glass, spreading something warm and slick, like oil, over my palm. When I opened my fingers again, there was only a faint shimmer of liquid, and a single scrap of oil-soaked paper with a few faint markings.

I took hold of it with two fingers and dipped it into the water. It dissolved almost instantly into foam.

Gone.

I didn’t see the destruction of the golem, but that had likely been less than dramatic; the coherence of the thing would have simply . . . stopped, scattering component pieces as gravity willed. It was possible that the central core of the thing remained, stuck and inert, with all the doomed, illuminated vehicles and dead humans trapped inside it. I shuddered a little, thinking of what it meant to have that for a grave, and dipped my whole hand in the water, scrubbing at the oily remains. My teeth were chattering.

“One thing I will say for you,” Rashid said, distantly. “You are not the most boring human I’ve ever met.”

“I’m not human.”

“You grow closer to it every moment,” he said, and with a sigh, righted himself in the water. Water cascaded from his skin and hair in silvery threads, emphasizing the flawless shape of his chest, the lines of muscles beneath. For someone so decidedly not human, he aped the form very well. “You won’t survive long in this water. You’re cold.”

He was stating the blindingly obvious. I began to swim, heading for the rocky coastline where lights glowed. I was still clumsy, still aching, but I was utterly determined not to allow Rashid the satisfaction of saving me.

After a beat, Rashid followed me, matching me stroke for stroke. The effort warmed my body, cleared my mind, and by the time I crawled up on the stones, battered by waves, I felt I might survive. That conviction quickly faded, though, as my wet clothing clung tightly, leeching the warmth from my skin, and I realized that I had no vehicle. No way to continue to Rose Canyon, where the map had shown me Alex—where I might, might find the other children, including Ibby. Where I might prevent more attacks, more deaths. More suffering.

If only I were not so desperately tired.

Rashid climbed up onto the rocks, sinuous as a panther, and looked down at me. So very Djinn. So very beautiful, perfect, arrogant. So curious, in the cock of his head as he watched me.

Then he crouched down and put a hand on my shoulder.

Warmth sheeted over me in a flood, sinking into every tissue, coursing through my nerves and bloodstream. Waking a sleepy satiation in me, and an almost overwhelming sense of exhaustion. I wanted, badly, to lay my head down on the cold rocks and sleep.

I fought it, somehow; simply Djinn stubbornness, my last inheritance from an endless lifetime of never surrendering to weakness. I pulled away from Rashid and stumbled to my feet. My clothes were dry, thanks to his efforts.

I realized, with an appalling sense of horror, that I was going to have to genuinely thank him. For saving me. That was very nearly worse than losing to the golem.

Rashid smiled, and whether he meant to or not, he robbed me of the necessity by saying, “The next time you call me a coward, I’ll rip your spine out and beat you with it. Just so we are clear on the matter.”

I glowered at him. “Go away.”

“And you don’t need my help.”

“No.”

“Liar.” His eyes were luminous and gleeful. “Where’s your human pet? The Warden?”

“Where he’s needed. Why do you care?”

“I deeply do not. I was merely curious. You seem . . . attached to him.” The distaste in his voice made me bristle, again. “It seemed strange to see you here, alone.”

“I am not attached,” I snapped. “I am . . .” I smiled, sharp edged. “Merely curious.”

That wiped the smugness from his face, and Rashid stepped away from me. His expression smoothed out into a blank mask, but his eyes continued to burn. “I have not seen a golem walk the Earth in a few thousand years,” he said. “Interesting that your enemies have such . . . long memories, don’t you think?”

Memories, and powers, I thought, but didn’t say. Creation of a golem was nothing that a mere child could come up with, certainly not alone; the Warden children sent against me so far had been powerful, but it was unfocused brute force, not precision. Not the kind of delicate and focused control necessary to create something like a golem. That was a manifestation of Earth powers, but so very specific, so very exacting in its nature that few had ever been able to learn the trick of it. A mere handful of humans, throughout history.

And all of those, so far as I knew, were long dead and gone. There was no one alive today, not even Lewis Orwell, who had the ability to do this sort of thing unaided.

“It’s Pearl,” I said. “She knows these things. Forgotten talents, forgotten uses, collected for tens of thousands of years. The Wardens of today use powers rooted in science, in their understanding of the world around them. The Wardens of yesterday had no science; their powers had sources in legend, folklore, religion. It is a different thing altogether.” The golem was a little of all three. There were others, too. Things that had not been seen on the Earth for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Giants and monsters. Things the Wardens would be ill-equipped to battle on their own, if Pearl brought them out as weapons. “She’s teaching them. These children. Guiding them.”

Rashid said nothing to that, but I could see he looked troubled. Like my Djinn friend and sometime lover Gallan, he would not believe me when I warned him of danger. He would have to see it, experience it for himself.

Like Gallan, that would be a fatal error. And I could not stop him from making it.

“You’ve done enough,” I told him, more softly, and stood up. “I will call—” My voice died as I pulled the cell phone from my pocket, flipped it open, and saw a dead screen. Water dripped from the casing in a steady stream.

I hate water.

Rashid sighed, reached over, and flicked the phone with a single finger. The flow of water stopped, the phone gave a smug musical chime, and the screen began to glow as it restarted itself.

“I will call Luis,” I said, as if I hadn’t paused at all, “and we will handle this among the Wardens. Go away, Rashid.”

“Say pretty please,” he purred. There was a maniacal gleam in his eyes, a Djinn emotion I recognized—remembered—all too well.

I simply glared back, unspeaking, until he shrugged, bared pointed teeth, and misted away, leaving me alone on the rocks.

“Hello?” Luis’s voice on the phone, small and distant. “Cass? Where the fuck are you?” He sounded anxious. Almost frightened.

“I’m all right,” I said, and pulled in a deep breath. The sound of his voice filled some small, dark space inside me that I hadn’t realized had gone empty. Need. That was a human thing, need. It seemed every moment I lived, I discovered more human feelings inside me.

Curious, how like Djinn feelings they were.

“That was really not my question,” Luis snapped. “Where?”

“At the shore,” I said. “I need you here.”

“And I need you here. Dios, woman, you don’t go racing off by yourself like that, not when we have kids here in trouble! What were you thinking?” I recognized the tension in his voice; it had a deadly significance to me, because it was the same tense, furious tone he had used after his brother and sister-in-law had been shot. After I had elected to chase the killers, instead of working to save their lives. “We are Wardens. We save lives first! Why is that so damn hard for you to understand?”

“It isn’t,” I protested. A curl of damp wind blew my hair away from my face, and I looked up at the moon and sighed. “My presence was not a help to you with Brianna. I thought I would do something useful. Such as find Isabel.”

He let out a scorching, fluid string of Spanish curses that was as evocative for its fury as its precision. I waited, holding the phone away from my ear, until I heard him pause. “Finished?” I asked him coldly. “Because I will not be talked to in this manner.”

“God, sometimes you’re exactly like my second-grade teacher!” He almost laughed, but there was no humor in it. “I hated that bitch.”

He sounded . . . different. I frowned. “Luis,” I said slowly. “You know not to talk to me this way.”

“Why do I care what you want? You’re a leech! You’re only hanging around me so you can suck on me anytime you need a fix. You don’t care that you just about knocked me down, pulling that much power out of me. You didn’t care about Manny and Angela, you don’t care about Ibby, about me—” He sounded . . . drunk. Verging on insane. He was raving, I understood that, but it still hurt. Badly. Was this what he thought of me, in the dark, secret recesses of his heart? That I was a mere parasite, pretending to be a part of his world?

It gave rise to a startling, cold question: Was I? I had deliberately held myself apart. Deliberately thought of myself as different, better, more.

Had that made me less, in the end?

I forced my brain—my very human brain, subject to all these treacherous tides of emotion and pain—to focus. Luis was not a cruel man. I had done nothing to anger him so much; yes, I’d left him, I’d done it without warning, but the reaction was all out of proportion.

I’d left him with Brianna. The little Warden girl, the one that Pearl had so thoroughly corrupted. Another eager little killer, twisted away from her true life and purpose.

Brianna. But Brianna was a Fire Warden, not an Earth Warden; she was capable of incinerating half the hospital, but what I heard in Luis’s voice was a very different kind of attack.

One that had insidiously gotten inside of him.

An Earth Warden had created the seed for the golem and called it into being. Set it on my trail.

I had an enemy who had not yet revealed himself. One who was close enough to touch—and twist—Luis. One subtle enough to do it without Luis even noticing.

Turner? But Turner was a Fire Warden. Only a Fire Warden? No, it couldn’t be Turner. I had looked at him on the aetheric. I had seen his true self. There had been no deception there. Only exhaustion.

Unless he was very good. Good enough to fool my admittedly human-limited senses on the aetheric.

With Pearl’s help . . .

He’d reached for the case of the list, when it had fallen to the floor. That might have just been reaction.

It might have been a plan. Pearl had sent him to get the list away from me. I’d stopped him. After seeing the lengths I’d been prepared to go to, he hadn’t dared make another move, not then.

Luis was still talking, but I was no longer listening. Whether this was real anger, or false, I couldn’t know, but I no longer felt that I had left him in safety.

I no longer knew where I could find safety at all.

I climbed from rock to rock, jumped and landed hard on the walkway on the other side of the protective barrier, and ran for the distant headlights moving along a nearby street.

I needed a ride, and I wasn’t going to be particular about how I obtained one.