Unknown

Chapter 6

IMARA HADN’T STRESSED IT, but I clearly understood now that the scroll I carried was not merely the best intelligence we could hope for, but also the most dangerous. She had entrusted something to me that was far more precious than even the most valuable human treasure.

I wasn’t sure that I could protect it alone.

As I raced along the highway on my newly inherited Harley, I used a steady trickle of power to veil me from prying eyes. It wouldn’t be enough to stop a Djinn, but it would keep me hidden from any merely human agents Pearl chose to employ. I wasn’t certain about her Warden child acolytes, however. Their powers didn’t seem to be limited in the way I would have expected. It was entirely possible that they would be able to see and detect me, whatever measures I took to stop them.

It was also possible that the measures I would have to take against them would be . . . extreme. Not a prospect I faced with any sort of pleasure.

I took a less direct route away from Sedona than I had getting to it, traveling back roads and deserted, lonely stretches with only lizards and coyotes as rapidly passing company. I had no desire to run afoul of the law, even accidentally; last night’s events had taught me the value of anonymity, at least. The morning grew bright, edging toward noon, with the fierce amber bead of the sun the only flaw in a featureless sky. I breathed in the smell of the arid, perfect land, feeling freedom here in the emptiness.

And then my cell phone rang, vibrating against my skin. I had tucked it in the bodice of my vest, to ensure that I could detect it over the roar of the engine; even so, I only noticed because it was such a localized buzz, as opposed to the shaking my entire body received from the bike.

I pulled over to the side of the road, coasting to a gravel-crunching stop, and shut off the engine. In its absence, the day was heavy with heat, filled with birds calling and insects droning. I could almost hear the land baking beneath the sun.

I flipped open the phone and held it to my ear. “Yes,” I said.

“Try hello,” Luis said. “Would it kill you?”

“It might,” I replied. “I am trying to minimize risk.”

He sighed. “Did you get it?”

“Yes,” I said. “The girl?”

“I’m going to need you with me. It doesn’t look good.” He paused for a few seconds, then said, with a cautious note in his voice, “Everything okay? You have any trouble?”

With a pang, I thought of the death and destruction I’d left in my wake. Of the ruined Victory, too, although I felt that perhaps I shouldn’t rate a machine so highly as the lives that had been lost.

Then again, it had been a very nice motorcycle.

“A little,” I said.

“How little?”

“I have a Harley now.”

Luis knew me well enough, it seemed. “Holy crap,” he said. “What blew up?”

“Many things,” I said. “But I am alive.”

“I have got to stop letting you off on your own.”

His protectiveness made me smile, if a little bitterly. “If you hadn’t, you might be dead now.”

“Chica, you assume a whole lot of helplessness on my part. Check your program. I’m not the damsel in distress.”

I considered that. “Next time,” I said, “I will let you fight the battles.” Then, with a sudden shock, I remembered Isabel’s chubby, pretty face, and the unnatural focus in her eyes. “Luis.”

“Yeah, still me,” he said. “What?”

I didn’t want to tell him, but somehow I found the words. “I saw Isabel,” I said. “She was here. She was with one of Pearl’s agents who attacked me.”

For a freezing-cold second, Luis didn’t say anything at all. When he did, it was very soft. Deadly in its intensity. “Tell me you didn’t hit back at her.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t hurt her. But—”

“Ah, God, what? What?”

It was my turn to pause, to search for words. “Pearl is using her,” I said finally. “She’s too young. It will harm her, whatever I do. I don’t wish this, Luis. Please believe me. I want to spare her all pain, but I’m not certain I can. Or that anyone can.”

“Fuck,” Luis spat, and then launched into a fluid course of Spanish curses, liquid fire in words. “You saw her. And you let her go? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I did not have a choice,” I said. “I’m sorry.” It was hard to not feel defensive. It was also very difficult not to feel guilty. “I did not hurt her.”

He was silent for so long I wondered if he had simply put down the phone and walked away. Then he said, flatly, “Did you get what you went for or not?”

“Yes.”

“Then get your ass here fast, you hear me? Fast.”

I kicked the Harley to growling, rumbling life. “I am coming,” I said, hung up, and shoved the phone back in the bodice of my vest. This time, when I opened the throttle, I backed it with bursts of power, pushing the machine to its limits.

By the time I reached Albuquerque, both I and the motorcycle were exhausted. I slowed, because even with the clouding veil I maintained, the simple mechanics of navigating through traffic required me to be more cautious, even though I had ceased to fear attracting the attention of the police.

I pulled out the phone and dialed one-handed to shout, “I’m here. Where are you?”

“Christ, what are you riding, a tank? Just come to the house.”

The house was far from safe, but he knew that. Maybe he was actively hoping for another attack. Spoiling for it. As angry as I sensed he was, that was not beyond the realm of possibility.

“On my way,” I said, and hung up. It was a relatively simple matter to guide the big bike through the night traffic, under the glare of sodium- yellow and tungsten-white streetlights, to the quiet street that held Manny and Angela’s—now Luis’s—home. I cut the engine and coasted to a stop at the curb, dismounted, and was halfway up the walk with the scroll before the kickstand actually hit the concrete.

Luis had already opened the door. He looked me swiftly up and down, and I was warmed by the flash of concern in his eyes, however brief. Then he nodded and stepped aside to let me in, locking the door behind me.

On the worn, comfortable couch sat Agent Ben Turner, looking very tired. He was holding a mug that steamed with what must have been coffee, from the smell of it spicing the air. Luis likewise had a mug sitting on the coffee table, and a third had been poured already for me. I took it and sat on the opposite end of the couch, and gratefully drank. The caffeine would help mask my physical needs, if not those of the languishing Djinn within.

“You said you saw Ibby,” Luis said, and his dark eyes were fixed and intent on my face. “What happened? Tell me everything.”

I glanced at Agent Turner. “Everything?”

Turner sighed. “Don’t hold back on my account. I’m in the shit now, sure as death and taxes.”

“You can refuse to pay taxes,” I said. “Death rarely asks.”

Luis made an impatient sound, and I raised a hand to slow him down. “I know,” I said. “I will tell you.” It wasn’t comforting to either of us, but I told the story, and he heard it. Turner choked on his coffee when he heard of the carnage among the bikers, but said nothing.

Luis pushed the issue. “You got a problem?” he asked.

“You mean, do I have to do anything about it? No,” Turner said. “It’s local business, not federal. Until it becomes federal, I’m just . . . an interested bystander.”

“Even if it’s criminal behavior?”

“Criminal like what? Like getting out alive, after being jumped by a gang and threatened with a gun?” He shook his head. “Not my business. I’m fine with it.”

I hadn’t been particularly worried, either way, but Luis clearly had been, and now he sat back in the threadbare armchair and relaxed, sipping coffee. “But she seemed okay,” he said to me. “Ibby. Physically?” He was searching for any hope to cling to, and I gave it freely.

“She looked healthy,” I said. “She wasn’t injured.”

I couldn’t tell him, I realized, about Isabel’s words about her mother. That would hurt him far more than necessary; there was nothing he could do, at this moment, to relieve Ibby of that burden. Or himself.

So I would carry it for him, a little longer.

“You said you’ve got this thing you went out there for,” Turner said, and sat his coffee cup down on the table to lean forward, elbows on the wrinkled knees of his suit pants. “The list?”

“I do.” I didn’t move to produce it, however. Before I did that, I anchored myself quickly to Luis’s warm, steady presence, and rose into the aetheric, focusing on Turner.

It was not that I had a reason to distrust him. Quite the contrary. But something the Oracle had said stuck with me—that no trust could be absolute.

Overlying the vague outlines of his physical form lay his aetheric one, driven by subconscious desires and needs in his mind and soul. Some humans had radically different aetheric forms. Some were monstrous and twisted, the way some of the bikers had been who’d perished on the road.

Agent Turner’s spiritual self was merely . . . routine. He seemed much the same, though possibly taller and broader, more powerful in his spirit than in his body. Like most Wardens, he radiated waves of energy, though his were weak in comparison to the rich, lustrous radiance of Luis’s form.

I watched carefully. Sometimes, in the aetheric, one could detect lies, and deception, and fears. But I saw nothing.

Agent Turner simply seemed . . . tired.

I dropped down into my flesh again, stretched a little, and then nodded to Luis. I reached inside my heavy leather jacket and took the warm weight of the scroll case from the interior pocket.

“That’s it?” Turner leaned forward even more, chest almost pressed to his knees, trying to peer at the list in my hands. “That’s a list of all the kids with Warden powers?”

“Yes,” I said. “Worldwide. Constantly updated.” He held out his hand for it. “No. No one touches it but me.”

He frowned, and I thought for a moment he’d order me to hand it over—which would have been ineffective, at best—then shrugged and settled back in his chair. “Look up the kid we’re looking for right now, the latest disappearance,” he said. “Gloria Jensen.”

I opened the scroll and rolled it until I reached the middle of the alphabetical list. There were two Gloria Jensens. “California?” I asked. Turner shook his head. “New Jersey?”

His face took on a pinched look. “That all you’ve got?”

“Yes,” I said, and allowed the roll to slide closed. “Two of that name, one in California, one in New Jersey.”

“This one was taken from her home right here. New Mexico.”

Luis said, “Wait. Does the list show where they’re from, or where they are?”

It was an excellent, startling question, the answer to which Imara had never made clear to me. “I don’t know.”

“Then what the hell good is it?” Turner snapped.

There was a way I could know for certain, but Imara had cautioned me—strongly—that it made me vulnerable. Still, I saw no real option, if this list was to be of any practical use to us at all. I took a deep breath, opened the list again, and brushed my fingertip over the name of the first Gloria Jensen.

She was in a school auditorium, wearing a cheerleading uniform, screaming as a basketball soared through the air toward a hoop; I saw it clearly, experienced an echo of her youthful excitement and joy. “It’s not this one,” I said. “Not New Jersey.”

I slid my finger down to the second name.

Darkness. Fear. Pain.

I gasped and wrenched my finger away, involuntarily raising it to my mouth as if I had burned it. My heart began to pound in startled reaction, and I felt a visceral impulse to throw down the scroll, to never feel that again.

“Cass?” Luis’s hands came down on my shoulders, strong and steadying. “You all right?”

I nodded, still breathing too fast, and unrolled the scroll again.

Darkness. Fear. Pain. Alone. The rumble of an engine, a constant bouncing vibration. The smells of rust and oil. “She’s in a car,” I said. “In the trunk. The car is in California. This is the one who was abducted.”

“Where?” Turner’s voice, sharp with urgency. “I need exact details, dammit!”

“I know,” I whispered, and mimed a pen, writing. Luis’s presence removed itself, returned a moment later. He pressed a pen into my right hand, while my left forefinger kept the connection to Gloria Jensen open. I scratched down the information that poured into my consciousness, without understanding where it was coming from, or how. The wildly out-of-control feeling of it made it seem as if I had grabbed hold of the tail of a tornado, something insanely beyond my power to control.

I wanted, desperately, to back away, but I forced myself to stay focused. Stay connected. The pen scratched, moving without my conscious direction, and then stopped. As the pen slipped from my fingers, my finger jerked away from the scroll. I couldn’t force myself to stay in contact with the child, not even for another moment.

“I can’t help her,” I heard myself say, numbly. “I can only feel. Only feel.” My fingers felt scorched, but it was only an impression, the only way my nerves could interpret the kind of psychic pain that I had inflicted upon myself. Something inside of me was wailing in terror, still. Was this what the Oracle felt? Imara had said she felt them all . . . all their joy, their pain, their fear. This, times a billion. Times six billion.

I could not even stand to feel such things from one. The prospect of the job of an Oracle made me aware, for the first time, of the awesome scope and responsibility of such a thing. The strength of character it required.

Luis slid the piece of paper out from beneath my trembling hand and read it. Turner rose and looked over his shoulder. “La Jolla,” Luis said. “These are a list of cross streets, it gives us a direction.”

“Can you give me a type of car?” Turner asked, already reaching for his cell phone. I shook my head. “But it has a trunk. How big?”

“Small,” I said. The child had been cramped, struggling for breath. Hot and sweating, terrified. Injured. “She has a broken arm.”

“Christ,” Luis said. “Get Rashid. Maybe he can—”

“Can what?” Rashid was, without any warning, sitting behind us, crouched against the wall, skin gone from smoke to indigo in the artificial light. He looked wrong and very, very beautiful. There was a silvery shimmer under the surface of his skin, a glow that seemed to echo moonlight. “Help you? I might. What are you offering?”

Turner flinched, but to his credit, he didn’t back down. “That all depends. What do you want?”

Rashid’s lips parted in a genial sort of smile. “For rescuing a Warden child from her tormentor? Or for bringing you the tormentor in one piece and alive?”

“Both,” Turner and Luis said, at once. I said nothing, watching Rashid with wary intensity. The two men exchanged a look, and Turner continued. “Not worth much unless you do it fast. I’m going to have cops all over it in ten minutes.”

“But it is ten minutes of pain and fear that you might spare her,” Rashid said, with a kind of horrible satisfaction. “And so much can happen in ten minutes, yes? I have crippled a human in less than a second. Imagine what he might be able to do, with such a rich span of possibilities available to him. Especially were he warned you were . . . coming.”

Time slowed to an icy crawl, and I felt every slow beat of my heart as my focus narrowed in on him. On this Djinn who dared to say such things.

So you would have, once, I heard a whisper say, deep in my mind. So you might have done, at any rate. Their pain, their weeping, their losses meant nothing to you, all these thousands of years. And now, you know how it feels.

Yes. But I had been created a Djinn, and I had never come from human stock. Rashid had. Rashid should have known better. I couldn’t let that pass.

“If you do that,” I whispered, “if you even consider it, I will tear you apart. I swear it.”

He flashed me a mocking smile, unimpressed. “What is the human phrase . . . ? You and . . . what army?” He quoted the phrase like a visitor unfamiliar not just to the language, but to the planet. Which I supposed he was, in all the ways that might have been relevant to this conversation.

“How about me,” Luis said flatly. “How about the Wardens. Every fucking Warden on Earth. You want to go to war with us, Rashid, we’ll go right the fuck now. You pull that shit right now, and David won’t protect you. No one will. It’ll be you, and us. How you like those odds?”

He didn’t. He also wasn’t so much afraid as cautious, I saw. He was not certain that David, in his capacity as Conduit for the New Djinn, wouldn’t turn on him for such a thing.

I was. I knew David well enough to know that Rashid’s attitude wouldn’t go unpunished.

Whatever Rashid assumed about the Djinn, he knew there was no doubt that the Wardens would come after him, for something like this. I could only imagine Lewis Orwell’s fury. Or Joanne’s.

The odds were not in Rashid’s favor.

Rashid, acknowledging this, shrugged. “Only a thought,” he said. “A mere hypothetical. If you want me to save the child and stop your villain, then I can do so. For a price. You are free to choose as you like.”

“Wait,” I said. “How do we know the girl’s abductor isn’t Pearl’s agent? If we act immediately, we could lose any chance of tracing him to his destination.”

Luis seemed stunned. “You’d let that kid be bait? Jesus, Cass. You’re as bad as he is.”

That stung. “No,” I said. “I simply raise the question.” Like Rashid, I thought but did not say. “It may be our only chance of finding Ibby and the other children quickly without waiting for another child to be abducted.”

“You sure you can’t find Ibby or the others through the list?” Luis asked. “Did you try?”

I glanced down at the scroll, and felt that visceral flutter again, that dread. Touching it had torn open something inside of me that I desperately wished to close, a feeling of vulnerability that was anathema to someone like me.

Luis must have seen my worry, or felt it through the connection he held with me. His expression softened, and he leaned closer to say, quietly, “Let me try.”

I shook my head. “No. No one else can touch it, especially a human. I’m not sure what the consequences would be. We can’t take the risk.”

“But we have to know. If we can find her this way, we should do it. Right now.” Luis sounded tentative, apologetic, but he was also very, very right. We had to know. If I had the ability to end this, I couldn’t flinch from it, no matter the pain.

I unrolled the scroll to find Isabel Rocha.

There was no location next to her name. That in itself was odd; adding to the sense of wrongness was the fact that the text of her name pulsed, faded, pulsed, jittered—as if something was struggling to remove it, and failing. For now.

I touched her name with my fingertip, and the glow flared as before, but instead of that immediate knowledge I had felt before—even the knowledge of terror and pain—all I felt from touching Ibby’s name was a kind of voracious, hungry darkness. It howled through me like a storm.

Trap. And Imara had warned me. Touching it will make you vulnerable. She’d told me that Pearl had become something like a Conduit, like an Oracle, something with power to touch the flow of time and space and reality directly.

With the power to corrupt the flow.

I gasped aloud, and tried to pull my hand away from the scroll, but the darkness surged up through the contact, licking through nerves and veins and flesh. I saw the nail turn black, and then lines of indigo shot up my finger. Quick as a breath they spread into my left hand, a midnight tracery that brought with it an icy, fatal numbness.

Pearl’s madness, her power, her furious hunger for revenge, all distilled into a black poison that had been crafted solely for this purpose, for me. Imara had known this. She’d known the risk even as she allowed me to take it. She’d tried to warn me how dangerous it could be.

I gritted my teeth and focused, trying to halt the progress of Pearl’s invasion within my body. I could feel her black joy, her triumph. It was happening quickly, devastatingly quickly. I distantly heard Luis’s sharp intake of breath, and felt him moving toward me as he realized something was wrong. Too late, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing he could do.

Then my hand was knocked away from the scroll, and the paper fell to the floor and rolled away, snapping into that tight, protective casing that looked like polished bone. Featureless and faintly shimmering with power. Turner hesitated, then reached down toward it. “No!” I screamed. “Don’t touch it!”

He hesitated, then slowly backed away, leaving it where it had fallen.

I stared down at my limp left hand. It was blackened and numb where it lay in my lap.

Dead.

“Madre,” Luis whispered, and shoved me back to kneel in front of me, taking the damaged hand in both of his. I saw power flare from him, seeking entrance, and felt a tantalizing flicker of heat within the tissues.

Something fought back. I felt the snap of attack, from within my hand to strike at him, and Luis broke off, panting. He gave me a wild look of utter horror. “I can’t,” he blurted. “It’s not—I can’t stop it. I can’t even touch it. You have to do something. Fast, Cass.”

“I can’t.” My voice sounded level and calm, unnaturally so. “It’s inside me now. I can’t even keep it contained in my arm much longer. My power is yours; if yours can’t stop it, mine can’t either. The battle’s already lost.”

What I meant, what he must have understood, was that I was going to be destroyed. There was nothing to be done, nothing magical that either of us could do or try.

Turner watched, confused and shocked. No help from him. No help possible.

I looked at Rashid.

He smiled, and from his crouch in the corner, said, “For a price, my razor-edged angel. It will cost you.”

“What price?” I asked. My mouth was dry, my skin felt tight and clammy. I was afraid, but I also knew the dangers of showing my desperation.

“Do you really have time to bargain?” He cocked his head, just a little, and stared at me with inhuman, unfeeling eyes. “I think you don’t. I can stop it. Say yes.”

“To what?”

His grin turned feral. “To whatever I want, of course.” His tone dripped with all manner of salacious innuendo, but his eyes . . . his eyes flicked toward the scroll, where it sat radiating power. A direct connection to the Oracles. To the Earth herself, perhaps. Power beyond measure, especially in the hands of a Djinn.

I had promised Imara never to let it out of my hands.

I sucked in a deep, trembling breath. “No,” I said. I was not willing to take that particular risk. Not even at the cost of my life. Rashid was a wild, random creature. In his hands, this list could wreak incalculable damage as easily as overwhelming good.

I felt one of the barriers I had built to wall off my poisoned hand break, like a levy under a black tide. More darkness flooded into my hand, and began to spread.

“Yes,” Luis said. “Dammit, do it, Rashid. Do it! Save her!”

Rashid raised an eyebrow, and didn’t move his gaze away from mine. “She has to say it,” Rashid said. “No one else can answer for her. What say you, Cassiel? Deal?”

I licked my lips. I felt the darkness raging beneath my skin, bubbling like some viscous acid. It didn’t hurt, not yet, but that was only because it destroyed physical nerves as it went. It would no doubt be an agony beyond anything I had ever known, when it reached my centers of power. When it consumed and utterly destroyed my soul and unmade me from the world.

And deep within me, the other Cassiel stirred. The ice-cold core of me, the inhuman persona who had seen stars burn out, seen death in the billions, witnessed atrocity and miracles with the same utter lack of concern.

That Cassiel knew what to do, where the merely human one failed. I felt her chill in my heart, her clarity in my mind.

I had a choice. It wasn’t one my human self could make.

Only a Djinn could make it.

“No,” I said again, very precisely. “I do not accept your deal, Rashid. Not for that.”

I walked forward and took hold of a bronze sculpture on a side table, a metal representation of two clasped, weathered praying hands. Angela’s possession, one dear to her during her life. I felt the whisper of her devotion and passion soaked into the metal. Her history.

Help me be strong, the human side of me whispered. Help me do the right thing. Help me not be afraid.

The Djinn part of me had no fear at all, only frozen, emotionless purpose.

I raised power and re-formed the metal. It melted in my right hand into a shimmering pool, then lengthened. Hardened.

Formed itself into a sharp, long-bladed hatchet.

Before either Luis or Ben Turner could stop me, I put my hand and wrist flat on the wooden surface of the dining table, raised the hatchet, and put all my strength into the downward blow. I had to do it in one strike.

To my Djinn mind, it was all angles, force, calculation. An entirely academic exercise.

The human part of me had gone away. That was for the best.

I heard Luis screaming, but it was too late.

Now.

The blade slammed squarely into untainted flesh an inch above where the poison stopped, sliced through flesh, muscle, and through the tough bone. All the way through, burying its edge in the wood below.

Its work done, the Djinn in me faded back into watchful silence, satisfied with the precision and power of its work.

The human part of me woke to the horror. I screamed. The pain was tremendous, a hot red storm that threatened to drive me unconscious to the ground; it took all my focus and strength to hold on. Immediately after, shock set in fast, and the flood of bleeding slowed to a sudden, dizzying trickle from the stump. The severed hand took on a strange, disassociated look, as if it had never been a part of me, as if I had only dreamed of ever having such a thing attached to my body.

Rashid had idly noted how many terrible things could happen in a matter of mere seconds.

He was so correct.

“No!” Luis was shouting. He grabbed at me, struck the hatchet from my hands and sent it skittering across the floor, scattering blood drops. “Dios, no!” He hissed something else, something I couldn’t understand through the hazy fog that descended over my eyes, and took the stump of my arm in a firm grip. Maybe he meant to try to reattach the hand. Earth Wardens had been known to work such miracles, after all.

The hand had other ideas.

My severed hand spasmed, and then it began to move, like a separate and living creature. Tentatively at first—stiff little jabs of the blackened fingers—and then it dug its nails into the wood and curled, looking suddenly like nothing so much as a spider preparing to leap.

Rashid, who had not reacted even as I chopped my hand off, suddenly rose to his feet in a smooth, startled motion as my blackened hand began walking across the table toward me.

Rashid reached out, and a broad-bladed knife from the kitchen counter flew through the air to smack into his palm. He advanced with three fast steps, and with a blindingly quick motion, stabbed the knife into the back of my severed, crawling hand, pinning it to the table. It struggled for a few seconds, scrabbling with its black fingernails, and then went still.

Not limp.

Just . . . still. Waiting.

“Holy fucking God,” Turner whispered, and then shook himself. “We need to get a tourniquet on her. Fast.”

Luis tore his wide gaze from the hand on the table, and I saw him thrust all of it away with an almost physical effort of will. “I’ve got it,” he said. “Cass? You hear me?”

“I hear you,” I said distantly.

Luis’s face was set and hard, but his eyes were so worried. So vulnerable. “Not going to lie to you, this is going to hurt like hell, so I’m going to turn off your nerves for a second. Hang on, okay?”

I nodded placidly.

Then I was sitting on the floor. I don’t know how; it seemed like life had jumped its tracks for a moment, as if a few vital seconds of my life had been erased, crudely and utterly destroyed.

Whatever trauma I had felt, those seconds were gone, utterly vanished. Sometimes the human brain protects itself, creates a fail-safe circuit. That was what Luis had done—triggered that final protection, a kind of static during which the brain resets itself.

I had no memory, because no memory of those moments existed for me. Nor ever would.

There was a towel tied tightly around the end of my arm, which ended abruptly in an empty space. I raised it and stared at it, wondering where my hand had gone. I could still feel it, still feel the phantom muscles flexing. What happened . . . ? I knew, but I didn’t know. Not really.

My head felt light and vague. I pulled in deep, trembling breaths and felt an arm bracing me across my shoulders. “Easy,” Luis said. His voice was wrong, shaking and too high. “Breathe. Come on, breathe.”

I was breathing, I thought, with a hot flash of annoyance. Even Rashid was watching me with a frown of concentration. Turner and Luis seemed shocked and horrified.

Ah, yes, of course. I had chopped off my hand.

Their reactions made perfect sense, then.

“I’m all right,” I said. Indeed, I was. My pain had receded, and the light- headed feeling was going away. The absence of the invading darkness left me feeling unreasonably strong. “Were you able to stop the bleeding?” As if I was inquiring politely about the health of a distant relative, or the weather. Something that had no bearing on my own ability to survive the night.

Luis swallowed. His skin looked cream- pale beneath its burnish of bronze. “It’s stopped,” he said. “I deadened the nerves and sealed the blood vessels. But it’s not good, Cass. Christ, why?”

“Pearl,” I said. “If I hadn’t acted, she’d have destroyed me. It had to be done.”

“I could have stopped it,” Rashid said. I gave him a long look. “Perhaps.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” I said. “You wanted the list. I can’t give it to you. I couldn’t depend on your goodwill, Rashid. Or would you say that you would have acted to save me, regardless?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. I’d felt it from him, felt that avarice and pure, selfish desire. I knew him.

I had once been Rashid, or very like him.

“It was the only way,” I said, and for some reason it came out almost kind. I deliberately hardened my tone. “If you want to make amends, Rashid, you may. The girl, Gloria. Go and get her. There will be no bargain. You will do it because I tell you to do it.”

Rashid’s eyes widened. He looked at the table, where my blackened, severed hand still lay pinned by the knife. Not dead. Quiescent.

“If I save her now,” he said, “you will lose your way to the one you seek. I can follow instead, and retrieve the girl before more harm is done.”

“She’s alone,” I said. “She’s in pain. She’s a child.

More harm is done every second. Do this, Rashid. You owe this to me.”

He thought about that, and unwillingly inclined his head.

Then he vanished.

In the silent aftermath of his departure, Ben Turner said, “You cut your hand off. Jesus Christ, you cut. Your hand. Off.”

“It wasn’t my hand,” I said. “Not anymore. And it couldn’t be saved.”

Turner looked a little queasy, and stared hard at the unmoving black thing that sat crouched and nailed to the tabletop. It still didn’t look dead. It looked like it was simply waiting for an opening, for a careless moment. I was not entirely certain the knife could hold it, if it truly exerted itself, although Rashid had certainly buried the metal deeply into the wood.

“Yeah,” Turner said softly. “I see your point. So . . . what the hell do we do with that now?”

“You are a Fire Warden, aren’t you?” I asked. “Burn it. Please.”

He sent me a narrow, disbelieving look, then silently asked Luis if he agreed. Luis did, with a bare, silent nod. Turner took in a deep breath, focused his energy, and the wood on the table, for a respectable distance around the severed hand, burst completely into flame.

The hand began to struggle against the knife, jerking, slicing itself blindly as it tried to escape. Luis and I opened the floodgates of power to pour it into the wood the hand was touching. What wasn’t yet burning warped, folding over the fingers, trapping it. Fire, metal, earth—it was bound by all the powers, save air, which in this case fed the fire. The hand flopped wildly, trying to pull itself free, and finally, with a crackle of baking bones and sizzling flesh, went completely, utterly limp.

Dead.

A black, viscous liquid flowed from the severed stump of the wrist, turning wood to powdery, rotted ash where it touched, and smothering the flames. But it didn’t live long beyond its flesh host, and vanished into black, greasy smoke that faded into nothing on the air.

Turner kept the fire burning hot until my hand was a lacework of bones, bright white and crumbling, and then he let the flames die.

He promptly stumbled to the bathroom and slammed the door. I watched him go without comment. Luis, moving like a man who’d taken a gut wound, let go of me and walked to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out a beer. He popped the cap from it, still staring into a distance full of horror, then upended the bottle and drank until all that was left was foam. Then he leaned forward and rested the cold empty glass against his forehead.

I stood up, swaying a little from the loss of blood and lingering shock, and retrieved the bronze hatchet from where it lay in a pool of crimson on the floor. I cleaned it carefully against the towel wrapped around my left wrist, then sat down on the sofa and worked the tight knots of cotton twine that bound the towel in place.

“What the hell are you doing?” Luis asked wearily, and tried to stop me. I shoved him away with my good hand and held him there, pulling at the frayed cord with my teeth until it loosened enough for me to slip the towel away.

I had enough control of my body to keep the blood vessels clamped, and the nerves deadened. I wrapped the twine tight again, then contemplated the bronze weapon in my right hand.

“Cass.” His voice broke a little. “Cass, what the hell are you doing?” He was afraid, I realized, that I had gone entirely mad. That I was about to start mutilating myself again, to no real purpose.

“Shhhhh,” I said, and reached out with power. The metal of the weapon softened, melted, formed itself into a complex and delicate structure. I built it with a Djinn’s instinctive understanding of the world, of my own lovely, finely engineered body, the interconnectedness of all things. I think in a way Luis was right—I was quietly, oddly mad. It had seemed completely rational to me to do these things, from the moment I had recognized that I had a choice none of the others—not even Pearl—had foreseen. Sever my hand. Burn the remains.

Now the same ruthless, cold Djinn instinct was telling me to make myself a new hand, out of the weapon that had been my salvation.

I began by building hard metal bones, then overlaying them with fine, strong cables in patterns that mirrored the muscles and tendons of my right hand. Then, over all of that, a light, flexible bronze skin. Fingers. Even delicately etched fingernails, each slightly and sharply pointed, like finely manicured claws.

Then I slipped the complex mechanism over the open stump of my arm and joined up the parts, with little regard to what was metal and what was flesh. It fused together with a hiss and a smell of burning flesh, and I began to move my fingers slowly, one after another, before Luis’s wide, disbelieving eyes.

Then I made a fist, with my new bronze hand, and uncurled it to lay it flat in my lap. It was an exact mirror of my right hand, perfect in every visible detail. Even the shine of the metal mimicked living flesh. It was as if I’d dipped my living hand into metal.

I heard the water running in the bathroom, and then the door opened and Turner came out, wiping his mouth with a towel. “We need to get you an ambulance and—what the hell is that?” He sounded like a man who’d gone beyond surprise, into weary resignation.

I held up my metal hand and said, “No ambulance. No hospital.” I wiggled the fingers to show him that it worked, then lowered it and closed my eyes. “I will sleep now.”

I don’t know, but I imagined that Turner and Luis exchanged long looks. I simply drifted off into a half-drugged distance of shock, artificial calm, and true, genuine exhaustion.

It felt like I slept only a few minutes before coming awake again, shaking. The calm and shock had left me, the cold Djinn certainty had left me, and there was only the knowledge of what I had done to my fragile human flesh.

Luis was sitting beside me on the couch. I looked mutely at him, my eyes blurring with cold, lost tears, and he put his arm around me, pressed his lips to my temple, and whispered, “Thank God. Thank God you’re back.”

I was. The person who had been inhabiting my body, from the moment I had realized what my only choice had been, was gone. That Cassiel had once again been banished to the hidden recesses where she lurked.

“That was her, wasn’t it?” he asked. “The Cassiel you used to be. The Djinn. The badass you keep telling me about.” The one who would make the choice to destroy humanity, if it was necessary.

I nodded, burying my face against his shirt. I couldn’t stop shaking. Couldn’t stem the tears. His hand stroked my hair over and over, an animal comfort and connection, and I wanted . . . oblivion. Just for a while.

“You were right,” he told me. “She’s terrifying.”

To me, as well.

The next few minutes were long ones, silent ones, filled with the sound of Turner drinking down a glass of water, refilling it, then emptying it again, as if he hoped to wash himself clean from the inside out. I wondered if I should ask for something, but I didn’t need to do so; Luis, unasked, brought me a glass and very gently encouraged me to drink.

I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was until the water touched my lips, and then I sucked it down gulp after greedy gulp, barely pausing for air until the tumbler was dry. He refilled it, then sat beside me as I drank at a slower pace, stroking my hair with restless fingers.

“It’s the power,” he said. “It takes a lot out of you, physically. And you—” He glanced down at the metal hand, lying still in my lap. “Yeah. I’m not even sure how you did what you did.”

“Which part?” I asked.

“Hell, any of it. I’ve never seen anything like that before, outside of some big-budget sci-fi movie.” He kept watching the hand with guarded fascination. “Are you sure that’s not some evil hand or something?”

“Evil?” I raised it in surprise, flexing the metal fingers. “Why would this be evil?”

“You’re kidding. I mean, it’s a metal hand.”

“My flesh hand was much worse, I think.” I touched my fingers together. The control was very good, but there was an odd clink as the metal connected.

Luis continued to stare. “Can you feel anything with that?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

I raised my eyebrows involuntarily, because it was a question that hadn’t rightly occurred to me. I ran the metal fingertips over texture—the sofa, the smooth leather of my jacket, then lightly over Luis’s skin.

All different sensations. All exactly as experience had taught me they should feel.

“The metal,” I said, surprised. “It’s a part of the living Earth. Your powers control metal, so I can interpret the sensations.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” I said, and put my metal palm against his warm cheek. “Does it feel odd?”

He seemed startled, raising his hand to lay it over my bronze one. Before he could answer me, my cell phone began to ring, buzzing against my skin like a trapped insect. I slid it free, flipped it open, and held it to my ear. The screen displayed nothing at all except a random pattern of light.

I put it to my ear.

“Human technology.” It was Rashid. He sounded disgusted, and a little smug. “So wasteful, yet so interesting.”

“We can’t all be you,” I said. “Did you get the child?”

“Of course. And before you ask, the man driving the car doesn’t yet know that she’s gone. I retrieved her when he stopped for a traffic signal.”

“Did he see you?”

“Of course not. To all appearances she is still locked in his trunk.” Rashid’s voice took on a slight edge. “Before you ask, yes, I am following him.”

“What about the girl? You’re sure she’s all right?”

“Did I not say—”

“Yes.” I closed my eyes and tried to focus. At Luis’s urgent gesture, I put the phone on speaker so the others could hear. “What did you do with her?”

“I am not insensitive; I didn’t just abandon her at the side of the road. I found a policeman. I handed her over safely enough.”

That eased a weight within me that was staggering once lifted. “Where are you now?”

“In the trunk of his car,” Rashid said. “I thought it would be impolite to take one thing from him and leave nothing in return.”

“No,” Turner snapped. “You need to get out of there. Just get out. If you got the girl, the job’s over. Leave it.”

“Don’t,” I said, overriding him. “Stay with him, Rashid. But understand, if he is heading toward Pearl, you must know when to let go. You can’t allow yourself to get too close. You saw what she can do.” He’d knifed the blackened evidence of it on the kitchen table.

“I saw,” he agreed. “I will be in contact.”

He broke the connection without any sort of goodbye, which was not unexpected. Turner was already dialing his own phone, and turning away to hold a fast, urgent conversation. He was back in just under five minutes, looking immensely relieved beneath his pallor and exhaustion.

“They’ve got the girl all right,” he said. “She’s in custody, heading for the hospital with an armed escort. I got a Warden to meet them at the hospital. She’ll be watched.”

“And her parents?”

“I’m heading over there now,” he said. “This kind of good news, I’d rather deliver in person.” He picked up his suit jacket, which was as rumpled as his pants and shirt, and shrugged it on, avoiding our eyes. Then he said, “You two want to come along?”

“I’m not sure. She still doesn’t look too good,” Luis said doubtfully, but I was already moving to stand up. He braced me with one hand under my left elbow, but

I felt only a touch of disorientation. The shock was, indeed, passing.

The physical pieces of it, at any rate. I couldn’t yet tell what I felt emotionally, or would feel tomorrow. It was entirely new territory for me, to have been so deeply hurt. Especially by my own choice, and my own action.

“I want to go with you,” I said. “If you’ll allow it.”

We all glanced at the burned spot on the table, the soot-blackened knife, and the white exposed bones that were all that was left of my hand. Turner shuddered.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess you’ve got the right to do whatever you want to right now. Fine.”

Luis didn’t approve, but he only shook his head and touched my shoulder to turn me toward him. “Hey,” he said. “You need more?” More power, he meant. I hadn’t dared to check, but now I realized that I was as empty of energy within as I had been parched and thirsty.

I nodded. He sighed and took my right hand in his, facing me. “Ready?” he asked.

I held his gaze and nodded.

His energy flowed into me, a trickle that built to a steady pulse within my veins. It left my skin burning hot, and I felt the interface of metal with my arm grow colder by contrast, like a phantom limb of ice. The power coursed through me, repairing damages, and then pooled deep within. I pulled away then, sending a wordless pulse of gratitude between us, and in an unguarded moment saw the drawn look on his face, and the fierce pain in his eyes.

I was hurting him. He was weary and anguished; he had seen me do a terrible thing, and had been helpless to stop it, or to save me from the consequences. On top of that, he’d already been through a great deal. Now, I was taking from his precious reserves of strength.

But he didn’t hold back. Not at all.

I kissed him. I don’t know why; it was wrong, it was the wrong moment, the wrong place. Everything about it was irrational and terribly mistaken, except for the rush of feeling that rose inside me at the soft, and surprised, touch of his lips. At the way his body tensed and leaned toward mine. At the way his hands slipped up my arms and caressed my body.

Luis broke the kiss with a gasp and stepped away, cheeks flaming dark red. His eyes cut toward Turner, who had paused, staring, in the act of turning the knob on the front door.

“What are you looking at?” he demanded. Turner shook his head. “Then get the hell out, man, you never saw people kissing before? Go.”

Turner shut his mouth with a snap and left the house. Luis reached down to take my right hand in his left. His forehead leaned to press against mine.

“Hey,” he said. “Later, okay? We need to talk about this.”

“Yes,” I said. “Later.”

If there was a later.

I reached for the scroll, sealed in its protective coating of enamel that felt as warm as bone, and slipped it back within my jacket as we left.

The FBI sedan was no more pleasant this time than it had been before, but it was mercifully brief, and I was too tired, too distant to take any notice of, or make any objection to, the various stenches and discomforts. My muscles had begun to ache and throb, complaining of the long day and constant fear. I needed rest, I realized. Sleep. Food. The basics to continue human life.

But first, I needed to see this through. That wasn’t logical, but it was necessary.

“Why did she come after you?” Luis asked. “She’s doing it more and more, all these little attacks. It’s like she’s trying to kill you, but not trying too hard.”

It was an excellent question. I kept my eyes closed, adjusted my position in the seat to ease an ache in my back, and said, “Have you ever seen a bullfight, Luis?”

“A—hey, man, just because I’m Hispanic doesn’t mean—”

“I’m talking about the picadors,” I said. “The bull must be angered before the fight. So the picadors torment the beast, stabbing it, arousing its fury until it is willing to charge. It makes a better show.”

He was silent for a moment, and I felt his gaze on me. I didn’t look.

“I’m the bull,” I said. “The sacrifice. She just wants a better fight.”

“What about the rest of us? The Wardens?”

I shrugged. “She’ll kill anyone who gets in her way,” I said. “But her fight isn’t really with you. It’s with me. With the Djinn.”

“I thought you were the bullfighter, chica.”

I smiled slowly. “Sometimes you’re the bullfighter,” I said. “And sometimes, you’re the bull.”

I slept a little during the drive, waking as Turner slowed the car and braked it in front of a house on a suburban street—a house like many others. Like Lu-is’s own, in fact, if a little older. There were many cars parked around it—police vehicles and big, industrial vans bristling with ungainly antennae. There were also those on foot—simple gawkers, drawn by the mystery of what was happening, so long as it wasn’t happening to them, of course. Turner’s car was waved beyond the barricades, into a clear space in the driveway.

“Back door,” he said. “Follow me. And don’t look over at the crowd. Cameras are filming everything, you’d be breaking news.”

I kept my back to the crowd as strobes flashed, camera lights woke to a bright glare, and questions began to be shouted in our wake. We walked quickly and quietly around the corner of the house, leaving the reporters and onlookers behind, and followed a small brick path through a neat, small yard to a screen door as the sudden burst of noisy interest faded out in disappointment.

Beyond it, all of the lights were on behind the house, no doubt to discourage the curious or determined. There was a girl’s bicycle lying on its side on the porch, and a pair of roller skates, elbow and knee pads, a pink helmet.

A baseball mitt and bat. A soccer ball. Gloria was an active child. Turner didn’t so much as glance at them, but I supposed he’d seen it before. Been here before.

Inside, the police paused as Turner came in, turning expectantly toward him. There were three present, two of them in plain suits, one in uniform. I didn’t recognize any of them, but they evidently recognized me, and Luis, with closed expressions and guarded nods.

The two people sitting on the couch, apart but somehow unmistakably together, looked . . . empty. Haunted and hollowed out by fear and stress. The woman had a glimmer of power around her, only a ghost on the aetheric; she had once tried to be a Warden, I remembered Turner had said. She’d lost whatever power she’d once had, or at least lost the will to use it. She was a thin, middle-aged woman of African descent, with delicate, high cheekbones and skin the color of dark roasted coffee. Beautiful, but drawn and made frail by fear.

The man was taller, a bit lighter in coloring, and his eyes were a striking pale green. He looked at us mutely. Miserably. With, still, a gleam of hope in his expression.

There was an array of photographs on the coffee table in front of them, removed from frames that had been carelessly stacked beneath on the carpet. In each was the image of their child, Gloria—laughing, fearless, strong. A life, laid out in a neatly spaced row.

I remembered the terror and pain in the girl I’d touched, locked in that trunk, and felt another lingering stab of outrage and anger. This was Gloria—the confidence, the strength, the possibility. That other should never have been visited on her, not at this age. Not at any age.

A flare of sudden awareness illuminated the woman’s dimmed eyes—she’d read something in Turner’s body language, or his expression. She came to her feet, suddenly tense, and her husband rose with her more slowly, more carefully, as if he might break if he moved too fast.

“She’s alive,” Mrs. Jensen said. It wasn’t a guess. I watched life spill into her, like water pouring from a broken dam, and she no longer looked frail. No longer tired. I could now see where Gloria inherited her strength and vivacity. “She’s alive!”

She clapped her hands and threw herself into her husband’s arms. He continued to stare over her head at Agent Turner, eyes still full of hope and fear, until Turner smiled and said, “She’s okay, we’ve got her. She’s on her way to the emergency room in La Jolla. We can have you on a plane in half an hour. You’ll see her very soon, I promise you.”

The man shuddered and shut his eyes, burying his face in his wife’s hair, and the two of them clung together and cried, sinking back down to the couch, weeping in utter relief. There was a feeling in the room as the tension shattered—it reminded me of the clean, crisp air after a storm’s passage. A moment of peace.

All things changed, but the moments were what mattered. I had never understood that as a Djinn, where such things were eternal, but now I strove to recognize these moments, cling to them, live in them as fully as I could.

I was happy for these strangers. Just . . . happy.

“I want to introduce you to someone,” Turner continued. “This is Luis Rocha, he’s a—civilian consultant working with us. And his partner—” He hesitated.

“Leslie,” I supplied. “Leslie Raine.”

“Yes, of course.” He looked briefly embarrassed by the lapse, though he shouldn’t have been; I was impressed that he had not automatically called me Cassiel.

“They were—instrumental in getting Gloria away safely from the man who took her.”

Instrumental. What an odd thing to be, an instrument. But then, I supposed that he was right in labeling me so. I had been used . . . by Ashan, by the Wardens, by Turner himself. In this case, though, perhaps it had been a higher purpose at work.

Still. I did not like being used, not even by God.

Luis glanced down at my left hand, burnished and gleaming; I slid it into the pocket of my jacket before the Jensens could notice and comment on its oddity. Mrs. Jensen sniffled, wiped at her eyes, and forced a smile on her lips as she extended her hand toward me. I shook it gravely, then her husband’s. Luis did as well. There was something so vulnerable in their gratitude, so overwhelming, that it was difficult for me to meet their tear-brimmed eyes. I didn’t feel worthy of their respect, suddenly. I remembered suggesting that we use their child as bait, and felt suddenly filthy with the memory.

“Did you get him?” Mr. Jensen asked. “The man who took my little girl?”

The police were prepared for the question, I realized; I had not been, and I looked at Luis, who looked in turn at Turner. Turner’s expression didn’t change. “We’re running him down,” he said. “He’s not going anywhere. We’ll have him in custody before your plane touches down in Cali.”

“You let me have him,” Mr. Jensen said. “You let me have him and you won’t have to worry about any of that bullshit. There won’t be enough of that bastard to bury, I promise you that.”

I knew how he felt. I felt the same, and I wondered, in a strangely disconnected way, if Rashid had also been moved to hatred by holding that little girl in his arms as she wept in pain. If so, Mr. Jensen wouldn’t have anything left to punish.

I rather hoped that was the case. It would amuse Rashid, and save Mr. Jensen from any . . . regrets.

“Let’s focus on Gloria right now,” Turner said, which seemed to distract the parents from their vengeance, at least for now. “Get some things together, and get some of Gloria’s as well. That will help her feel more at home in the hospital—clothes, toys, that kind of thing. They’re probably going to want to keep her overnight for observation.”

They both nodded, eager to have something, anything to do. I felt almost regretful as I said, “Before you go, I need to ask you a question.”

The Jensens stopped, still holding on to each other, and both of their gazes fixed on me.

“Have either of you ever been to a place called the Ranch?”

I wasn’t so much expecting a straightforward answer to the question as hoping to see, in the aetheric, an indication of surprise. And I got it, from the husband. A faint, but unmistakable, ripple of surprise.

“What kind of ranch?” Mrs. Jensen asked, frowning. “I’ve got some cousins who own a farm in Indiana—”

I oriented on Mr. Jensen, with his pale green eyes which widened as I captured his gaze. “I think you know what I mean, sir.”

He didn’t answer. I saw flares of panic in his aetheric presence, bright hot stars exploding and crackling in his aura. It was weirdly beautiful. I felt Luis watching the man, too. And Turner. All of us, using Oversight to lay the aetheric template over the real world and see the changes.

“Mr. Jensen,” Turner said. “I need a few words with you, please. In private. Mrs. Jensen, maybe you can get those things together for me? We need to hurry. I don’t want to keep you from your daughter.”

Mrs. Jensen clearly knew something was wrong, but she seized the only thing she could from the confusion—the certainty she would see her daughter. Her husband watched her go, looking lost and more than a little afraid.

Turner pointed the way to a small laundry area off to the side of the living room. It was a close fit for the four of us, and it smelled of cleaning products and soothing fragrances. A strange place to accuse someone of collaborating in his daughter’s kidnapping.

“The Ranch,” Turner said, as soon as he’d closed the door to prying ears. “You recognized the name.”

“Maybe I was thinking of something else,” Jensen said. I took my left hand out of my pocket and let it hang at my side, bronze and gleaming, clearly alien. His eyes were drawn to it, puzzled, and he cocked his head while he focused on it. “I was wrong. I don’t know what you were talking about.”

“Don’t you?” I asked, and slowly flexed my metal fingers. There was a phantom sense of muscles moving; that was very odd. “You have been there, Mr. Jensen. You took Gloria there, did you not? For evaluation?”

He was sweating now, fine beads of moisture that glimmered on his forehead in the light of the overhead fixture. The air felt close and heavy around us. “It was a camp,” he said. “A camp for the gifted and talented. But Gloria didn’t like it, so we came back home. That’s all there was to it.”

“Not all,” I corrected. “You saw things, didn’t you? Things you couldn’t understand or explain.”

Mr. Jensen flinched and looked away, and I understood, finally. “She never told him,” I said to Turner and to the silently observing Luis, leaning against the built-in sink with his arms folded. “His wife never told him she could have been a Warden. Or that their daughter might inherit those talents. He didn’t know what he was seeing. What was happening at the Ranch.”

Jensen’s eyes blurred with tears. “Is that who took her? Those people? But that was last year, it was—it was just a camp, for God’s sake, it was one of those kid things. It wasn’t—Why? Why would they do that?”

Luis and Turner looked at me. All I could find to say was, simply, “Because your daughter has the potential for power. And they want it. You’ll have to be on your guard, from now on. Talk with your wife. Tell her you know your daughter has Warden gifts. She has things to tell you in turn.”

I was bound to harm these people, by saying these things; they had existed in a false world, but a happy one, and now I was poisoning it. With truth, yes, but nevertheless, there would be no stopping the changes.

Life is change, I thought but did not say, and slowly curled the cold metal fingers of my left hand. The hand I had lost not for their child, but for Ibby. For the child I . . . loved.

Life is change.

“We’re going to need you to sit with us,” Turner told Mr. Jensen. “Tell us everything, every detail, about how you received the invitation to take your daughter to this camp, where it was located, who you met, what you did. Everything. You understand?”

He nodded, tears streaming down his face now. “I did this,” he said. “I put her in danger. I put my little girl in danger from these freaks. Oh my God.”

“No,” Luis said, speaking up for the first time. “If you didn’t take her to them, they would’ve come into your house and gotten her anyway. It’s what they do.” A spasm of rage passed through him, registering in harder lines in his face and in red waves on the aetheric. “That’s what they did to my niece. Ibby. And they’ve still got her.”

Mr. Jensen wiped at his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Is she okay?”

Luis and I stared at each other for a moment, and he answered, very quietly, “I’m going to do anything I have to do to make sure she gets that way.”

Turner let Mr. Jensen rejoin his wife then, leaving the three of us standing in silence in the warm, scented confines of the laundry room. There was a basket of neatly folded clothes sitting on top of the dryer. A young girl’s clothes, bright colors, lovingly maintained.

“So,” Turner said. “You guys got some place you need to be?”

“Yes,” I said. “I believe we will go with you to California.”

Turner smiled thinly, unsurprised. “Grab your gear and meet me at the airport.”

I was surprised to find that Turner had requisitioned a Warden plane, unmarked save in the aetheric, where Wardens would be able to identify the hidden stylized sun symbol on the tail section. It was a small private plane, sleek and gleaming, holding only a dozen or so people in moderately comfortable surroundings. Turner saw the Jensens settled, their bags stored, before seeing to me and Luis. Not that we needed assistance; we had a small bag each, easily tucked away, and although I was hungry, I didn’t feel it was time to eat. Luis asked for a beer. When I raised my eyebrows, he shrugged. “Look, I’m an Earth Warden. I’m not getting drunk. Can’t happen unless I let it.” He sounded a little defensive. I nodded, closed my eyes, and let my head fall comfortably against the leather pillow behind it. The flight was short and uneventful, for a change—smooth air, no turbulence, no attackers emerging to duel us out from the sky.

Refreshingly different.

I slipped into dreams, of blood and wriggling dark things that scuttled through shadows and clutched at my throat. When I woke I realized that my metallic left hand had clenched tight as a cinched knot. I felt nothing from the metal, only from that phantom, nonexistent hand that still eerily insisted it could feel pain. When I relaxed the metal hand, the pain eased. Phantom or not, it felt . . . real. Pain was, after all, in the mind; if my mind still received messages from nerves no longer there, it didn’t matter how the messages arrived. Pain was pain.

Luis was just finishing his beer. He watched me flexing my hand and said, “You still feel it? Your hand?”

His guess was accurate, and startling. I nodded.

“Not all that uncommon,” he said. “People who lose limbs in some kind of traumatic accident often talk about still feeling them. Sometimes for years after. Has something to do with the body’s perception of itself on the aetheric, I think.”

I couldn’t see my own body in the aetheric, not in any kind of detail. “How do I look?” I asked him. “In Oversight?” It was a bit of an impolite question, among Wardens; it simply wasn’t done to ask directly. But I needed to understand.

His eyes unfocused a bit, and he tapped the bottle against his lips a few times before upending it to capture the last few drops and setting it aside. “You mean your hand? It’s still there. Your aetheric self still has it.”

“What form do I take?”

Luis smiled, very slightly. “A beautiful one. You glow like a nuclear reactor. The Djinn don’t show up that well, you know. You do.”

“Because I’m anchored in flesh,” I said. “Because I’m not a Djinn any longer.”

He tilted his head forward, acknowledging the point. “Not technically, no. But you’re more than just a Warden. Or a human. Don’t kid yourself, Cass.”

“Cassiel.”

“Cass.”

“Stop.”

“Make me.” His voice had gone lower, more intimate. I found myself captured by the shape of his lips on the words he spoke, not the words themselves, and shook myself from a wave of feelings that were difficult to avoid.

“Wrong place, wrong time,” I reminded him. “I doubt Turner would appreciate such a display here, under these circumstances.”

That sobered him immediately. “Or the Jensens,” he agreed, and put the bottle aside to rest his elbows on his knees, leaning toward me. “Cass, for serious now. Is Ibby all right? I need to know. I need you to tell me exactly what happened out there.”

He did, and I hated to tell him, but I sensed the ache in him. He already hurt, infected by his fear and imagination.

“She looked fine,” I told him then, looking down at my hands, one bronze, one flesh. The fingers twined together almost naturally. “I saw no signs of mistreatment or hunger.”

“But.”

I pulled in a deep breath. “But she sounded—not herself. She spoke of her mother, but as if Angela was alive. As if she is doing what she is doing to protect her.” A darker thought occurred to me. “Or . . . as if she believes Pearl is her mother.” That was chillingly likely.

Luis made a sound deep in his throat, and I saw his head tip forward, hiding his face. He said nothing audible.

“I think—” I hesitated, then plunged ahead. “I do think Pearl is using Angela’s image. To make Ibby believe that her mother wishes her to train, to hunt, to kill. To make her do it despite the child’s natural gentleness.”

Luis raised his face then, and his expression was blank, except for the darkness in his eyes. “That bitch is using a dead woman?” His voice was not his own; it was a low growl, angrier than I’d ever heard it. “Using Angie to get at her own kid?”

“I think so,” I said. “I think Isabel wants to please her mother, and she wants her mother back, badly. Pearl would have used that against her. It would have been . . . very easy for her.”

Luis snarled, and his hands clenched into bone- hard fists. Had I been facing him as an enemy, I would have found an immediate and pressing reason to surrender.

I put my right hand on his clenched fist, making the touch as gentle as I could. “No,” I said. “Listen to me. If you fight her directly, Ibby will fight for her. She’ll have to, to defend her mother. Do you understand? We must go at this another way. A better way.”

He shook his head blindly, dark hair whipping, and then buried his face in his hands for a moment. When he finally sat up again and took a deep breath, he had his anger controlled. It was a banked, smoldering fire, but it was under a tight leash. “All right,” he said. “You tell me, how the hell do I let that go on? How do I not knock that bitch’s head off and take Ibby back? Because I’m not really clear on the concept right now.”

“Neither am I,” I confessed. “But if we face her directly, Ibby will suffer, and we won’t accomplish our goal. So please, don’t let Pearl use the child to goad you into fighting the battle on her own terms.”

He stared at me for a second, then said, “You’re talking about tactics now?”

“I’m talking about choices.”

“Like the choice you made to chop your own hand off?” He sounded angry, but it wasn’t really directed at me. He was simply . . . angry. And unable to point it at the person responsible.

“Exactly like that,” I said. “Pearl thought she had given me an either/or choice. Die from the poison coming through the link, or accept Rashid’s offer. I chose instead to change the game.”

Luis blinked. “You think Rashid is in on it with her.”

“I think Rashid is a wild Djinn, not a tamed one. I think if he believes that he can gain an advantage, he will have few human scruples about taking the action. He wanted the list. He’ll continue to try to find a way to take it, because it represents great power, and the Djinn can never resist that.” I felt my lips stretch, unordered, into a smile. “As to cutting off my hand—if I had seen a fourth option, I would have taken it. Believe me.”

“So we can’t trust Rashid?”

I remembered what the Oracle had said to me. “There is no such thing as unlimited trust,” I said. “We can trust him until we can’t. Like anyone else.”

Luis jerked his chin toward Turner, sitting with the Jensens. “Like him?”

“Anyone,” I said. “Even you. Even me. Because if this goes to the endgame, Luis, you won’t be able to trust me, either. Or I, you.”

He shook his head, as if he couldn’t accept that, but I knew he could. He was a pragmatic man, deep down. He knew human nature.

The rest of the trip was spent in pensive silence.

We landed in California in the early- morning hush, although it seemed the human race never stilled itself for long. Lights glimmered; cars moved along roads. Businesses still served, here and there. We grabbed our bags and followed Agent Turner off the airplane, along with the Jensens, to find two black FBI sedans waiting for us. One of the black-suited drivers checked our credentials and loaded the Jensens into the first car, and Agent Turner and the two of us into the second. The FBI car smelled—surprisingly—new, with little olfactory contamination like most other vehicles I’d been inside. I felt less claustrophobic than I usually did. I almost enjoyed the ride.

Almost.

The FBI caravan wound through the sleeping city, and

I caught glimpses of the vast, dark ocean, ceaselessly renewing itself with wave upon wave of change. The drive ended at a large, well-lit building, comfortably aged, and Turner said, “Scripps Memorial. Come on, they’ve got Gloria in a room.”

We exited the car and walked toward the hospital entrance; I heard the wail of a siren approaching—an ambulance, carrying a life in crisis to the emergency services at the rear of the building. It was a source of some amazement to me that humans, for all their capacity for—talent for—wreaking violence, would also build something so thoughtful as a system to care for their ill and injured, and devote such time and energy to it.

I heard tires suddenly squeal as the ambulance changed direction, and looked around to see the massive metal vehicle plunging over the curb, bouncing wildly, aimed now straight for me, Luis, and Turner as we crossed the parking lot.

I shoved Luis and Turner one direction, hard, and didn’t have time to watch where they landed as the ambulance swerved and focused on me. Behind the glass, I saw the driver frantically trying to stop the truck or turn the wheel, but I could tell that it was beyond his control. Like the passenger in the back, and the other paramedic, he was utterly at the mercy of whatever force now had control of his ambulance.

I turned and ran, sprinting across the dark asphalt. Luckily there were no cars in the way, this late at night, and my body was capable—when forced—of speeds that even I found surprising. The ambulance fell behind, but then I heard the engine roar as it picked up speed, eating up ground between us. I heard the dim thunder of the ocean, and the more immediate thudding of my heart, and as I ran I reached back with power and blew out all four rubber-and-metal tires in a tremendous bang. The ambulance immediately thumped hard onto bare metal rims as broken rubber flailed in all directions, spun off by the momentum. It lost speed, but I could sense that the one forcing it on wouldn’t give up so easily.

Neither would I.

I gained the end of the parking lot. There was a chain-link fence there, at the top of a steep slope covered by ice plants; I charged the ten feet up the hill, leaped onto the fence, and climbed toward the top.

I reached the top just as the ambulance jumped that curb, and its momentum carried it up the slope toward me. But without tires, the metal rims chewed ground, finding no purchase, and it never reached the fence before it began to slide backwards, engine screaming in frustration.

I leaped from the fence to the top of the ambulance. I landed with a hollow, booming thump, crouched, and looked from that vantage point out into the night. You’re close, I whispered. I know you are. By making a target of myself, I was hoping to spot the attack before it arrived.

After a split second, I felt power begin to stream through the aetheric, a red-black pulse heading in my direction, and struggled to identify the type of attack. Not Earth powers, this time.

Fire.

It came as a hot streak of light as large as a man’s head, glowing white hot and trailing flames and smoke. I put my right hand down on the ambulance’s metal roof and pulled up, willing the metal to flow with me, then jumped down to ground level by the rear doors. As I jumped, the roof ripped free, front to back, peeling like a giant tin of sardines, and hit the ground with a thick, heavy boom—arched, still connected to the ambulance at the very top, but extended out like a waterfall of cold steel.

I ducked behind and hardened it just in time for the attacking fireball to strike it squarely in the middle. Ten inches from my face, the metal began to glow a dull, muddy red, and I felt the waves of heat boring through. But I hadn’t intended the metal alone to stop it; I heaved up the ground from the other side of the ambulance in a fountain of damp earth and cascaded it overhead, to thump down on the fireball, burying it beneath an organic weight that would not catch fire easily, if at all.

I heard the hiss as the fire began to fail, and the metal in front of me ceased to glow.

I stepped out of the barricade and stared out in the direction from which the attack had come.

There was a shrill, short cry, and then nothing for a long moment before Luis called, “Cass! Got her!”

Her. My heart stuttered in its rhythm, and I spurred my body back into a run, shattering even the speed at which I’d fled before. Ibby?

Luis emerged from the darkness into the glow of a streetlight. There was a child in his arms.

It was not Isabel. It was another girl, dressed in the same dull paramilitary uniform, long golden braids spilling down over Luis’s arm and swinging like ropes. I felt my stomach clench, and I slowed to a walk.

I saw the same weary pain in his face. “Had to knock her out,” he said. “Same as the other kids. Somebody amped up her powers, big-time. It’s burning her out. Goddammit, we have to stop this. How many of these kids does she have?”

“Enough to throw them away on the mere chance of killing us,” I said. “You noticed the change?”

He frowned down at the sleeping face of the girl in his arms. “Cleaner,” he said. “Healthier. Not dressed in rags and castoffs like the ones in Colorado.”

“Uniformed,” I said. “And trained. Pearl’s army is becoming a reality. I doubt we are the only ones being targeted, if that’s the case.”

Agent Turner, out of breath, arrived at that moment and heard the last part of my statement. He immediately pulled out his phone and dialed a number, turning away to talk, then back as he finished.

“You’re right,” he said, folding the phone. “Warden HQ has reports of isolated attacks all over. Kids attacking adult Wardens. The Wardens are off balance, they’re not sure what’s going on.”

“Tell them,” I said. “Tell them we have a significant problem, and they should be ready.”

“To fight kids?”

“To protect themselves,” I said. “These children won’t hesitate to kill. They’ve been trained not to flinch. If the Wardens do, they’re dead.” More of Pearl’s games. Sometimes you’re the bull. She’d use her Warden children as picadors, pricking us, bleeding us, driving us into a fury that she could manipulate.

But perhaps Pearl’s control wasn’t as perfect as she imagined. Isabel hadn’t struck at me with lethal force. She’d knocked me out and retreated instead.

Incomplete training? Or free will?

I could count on neither being true for long.

The next time I faced Ibby . . . I might have to destroy her.

Her, the other children . . . the Wardens . . . the human race.

Destruction radiating out the way the poison from the list had taken my hand.

But if I took that step, that last step, it would not be Pearl making that choice. It would be me, and me alone.

I stared at the blond- haired girl in Luis’s arms. She seemed so innocent. So small. Eight or nine years old, no more than that; the age of Gloria Jensen, whom we were here to see. I wondered who had lost this child, and when. And if they even knew of it yet.

Luis said, “I can keep her out. Let’s get her in the hospital and make sure she’s okay otherwise.”

I followed him and Agent Turner to the door as security and medical personnel spilled out, pelting toward the ambulance at the far end of the parking lot. It hadn’t crashed, although it had certainly been a rougher ride than necessary; there was that mercy. I hoped that not too much damage had been done to the occupants, but I’d done all I could to safeguard them.

I left it to the more creative among them to explain the missing roof, the metal barricade, and the piled wall of wet earth around the scorches and burns.

I had better things to do.