Undone

Chapter 7

STRANGE, HOW ONE person’s tragedy so quickly becomes someone else’s job. The ambulance attendants first, though their efforts were small; they knew well that neither Angela nor Manny would ever rise again. They left the bodies there, in the front yard, for the police. As they walked away, they were talking about stopping for a meal.

As if life went on.

I wanted to destroy them, snuff them out like candles, but I knew that Manny and Angela would not want it so. I didn’t have the power to do it, either.

I stood, still and quiet, waiting. I won’t leave you, I told them. Not again.

The police arrived moments later—a marked cruiser, with flashing lights and sirens. One of the officers immediately made a straight line for me; the other began moving back crowds of neighbors and passersby who had gathered to gawk.

“Ma’am?”

I focused away from Manny’s bloody, empty face to the smooth expression of the policeman opposite me.

“What’s your name?”

“Cassiel,” I said. He wrote something down and waited, as if I should have more to say. Ah yes. Last names. Humans had last names, denoting family lineage. “Rose. Cassiel Rose.” So read the identification card in my pocket. When he asked, I produced it, and he wrote down more information before handing it back.

“Can you tell me what happened here?”

I did, as best I could. The black sedan approaching, the gunfire. Chasing the car. I stopped short of admitting that I’d caused the crash.

He let several beats of silence go by when I was finished. “You . . . chased them.”

“Yes.”

“You chased a car full of gang-bangers who’d just shot up a house.”

“Yes.” I didn’t know why he was asking. I didn’t think I had been unclear.

“You catch up with them?” he asked.

“The car crashed,” I said absently. “I called the ambulance.”

“Lady—” He shook his head. “What the hell were you thinking? They could have killed you, too.”

Certainly. I wondered why he thought I did not know that, but I remained silent.

“You know these two?”

“Yes,” I said softly. “Manny and Angela Rocha. They live here with their daughter, Isabel.”

“Isabel,” he repeated, scribbling in his notebook. “Where’s the daughter?”

“Inside with her uncle Luis. She’s five.”

He paused, glancing up at me, and made another note. “She was here when it happened?”

“Yes.”

“And the uncle?”

“Yes.”

“Either one of them injured?”

“No.”

“Did you see any of the people shooting?”

I shook my head. “I was on the other side of the street,” I said. “Getting out of the van.”

He tapped a pencil on his notebook. “How are you connected with all this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, lady. You don’t exactly fit in around here.”

I supposed that I didn’t. It wouldn’t have taken a great detective to determine such a thing. “I’m a colleague of Manny Rocha’s,” I said. “I work with him.”

That seemed acceptable. “Where?”

“Rocha Environmental Services.”

“And you do—what, exactly?”

I gave him a flat, emotionless stare. “Analysis.”

Whether he believed that or not, it didn’t seem he was inclined to press. He took down my telephone number and address, and went inside the house to speak with Luis.

Again, I was alone with the dead.

Death, for Djinn, is dissolution—being unmade. Undone, as I’d been undone by Ashan. But this . . . the flesh remained, a constant reminder of what was lost. Manny’s eyes were open, the pupils huge and dark, and I wanted awareness to return to his body. I wanted him to look at me once more. I wanted to tell him that I was sorry for my choices.

He is not lost, something told me. Nothing is lost.

But my connection to him was gone, and even if Manny’s soul had passed on, it had traveled to a place I could not reach and might never reach. There was a hole here, in this world, where he had been.

I was alone. Strange that it should hurt so much.

Next came a rumpled, tired-looking detective, who asked the same questions again. I gave the same answers. He also spoke with Luis, who remained in the house, and then a coroner’s van arrived.

I thought it odd that it took almost an hour before Manny and Angela were at last declared dead. I remembered older days, older ways—a priest might have tapped them on the forehead with a small hammer, to claim them for the gods then, but no one would have questioned that they were dead. But in these days, these times, pictures were taken to document their ends, and then they were lifted and sealed into black plastic sheaths.

Taken away.

I watched as their bodies were removed, and felt another pang of loss. Death happened in stages among humans, and with each step another tie severed. How many remained?

You don’t have to feel it at all, something in me said. You could leave. Go back to the Wardens and tell them you want a new posting. You need never see Luis Rocha or Isabel again.

It was so tempting to walk away, to leave this behind in the human world where it belonged. To start over. I could choose to walk away. It would be easy.

It would be a Djinn thing to do.

Instead, I sat down on the front porch step and waited.

In time, the police cars left, the onlookers dispersed. The phone inside began to ring, and I heard the muted sound of Luis’s voice, explaining to callers what had happened. Friends, family, perhaps the Wardens had called, as well.

Isabel cried. She wailed. It was the sound of a child realizing that her world had broken around her. I was not human. I could not give her false promises, and the thought still lingered in me, I could leave. Just walk away from all this pain, this senseless, stupid waste.

As night began to fall, the front screen door slammed, and with a creak of wood, Luis settled down next to me on the steps. He smelled of soap and shampoo, freshly laundered clothing. No trace of Manny’s death still remained on him.

He did not speak for a while. We watched the sun go down in a bright blaze of colors.

“Isabel wants to see you,” he said. “You coming in?”

I turned and looked at him. He did not meet my gaze.

“For the kid,” Luis said. “Not for me. I don’t care what the hell you do.”

I stood up and walked into the house. It smelled like—home. The still-lingering aroma of Angela’s last meal on the air. Clean, warm, welcoming. In the kitchen, plates and glasses still remained in the sink, waiting to be washed; I drew hot water and added soap, and scrubbed them sparkling before I went to the child’s bedroom.

Luis had tucked her securely in her bed, but she was not asleep. Her thumb was still in her mouth, and her eyes were dark and very wide.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and very carefully stroked her silken dark hair. “Ibby,” I said. “I am here.”

She didn’t speak, but she curled against me. Tears leaked silently from her eyes. I picked her up in my arms, heavy and warm and human, and rocked her until she began to cry in earnest. Chubby arms around my neck, holding tight.

I buried my face in the clean cotton of her night-gown. It was for her comfort, not my own. Djinn did not grieve. Djinn walked away.

It took hours, but she fell asleep still in my arms. I tucked her back in her bed and went out into the living room, where Luis sat in the dark.

I crouched down next to his chair, putting our eyes at a level, though he did not look at me.

“I would not ask,” I said, “except that Manny is gone. I need—” My tongue didn’t want to finish the request. Luis’s dark eyes shifted, and the look sent shivers through me.

“You need power,” he said. “Yeah?”

I nodded. I held out my thin white hand, and his own large, strong one closed over it in a crushing grip.

“Fine,” he said. “Here. Take it.”

Power rushed across the link, burning and angry, and I gulped down all I could before finally yanking my hand free of his. He continued to glare at me, and the stolen fire inside me gave me an insight I didn’t want.

“You blame me,” I said.

“Of course I blame you.”

“Yet the men in the car were shooting at you, not at me.” I said it calmly, without accusation, but Luis flinched as though struck. “Isn’t that true?”

He didn’t answer. He looked through me, to some event in his past that I couldn’t read. As a Djinn, I could have known; as a human, I would not have even seen the shape of it. This frustrating middle ground made my head ache with possibilities.

“Maybe,” he said at last. “The police say it was a car full of Norteños, so maybe they were aiming for me. Why? Does that make you feel better about leaving Manny and Angela alone to die while you played the big, bad Djinn hero?”

It was my turn to flinch, inwardly at least. “Even had I been there, even had I used every ounce of power inside me and destroyed myself in the process, I could not have saved Angela. She was dead the moment the bullet entered her brain. It’s not likely I could have repaired the damage to Manny’s heart, either.”

He knew that. He was an Earth Warden; his analysis would have shown him the same thing, but he could not, would not, accept it.

The night stretched on in silence, and finally Luis said, “Get out. I don’t want you in their house.”

I rose to my feet, but didn’t move to the door. “Isabel—”

“She’s my niece. I’ll take care of her.” His bloodshot eyes fixed on mine. “Go away. Get your free lunch somewhere else. You don’t belong here.”

No one—human or Djinn—had ever spoken to me so, in such words, in such tones. It should have been a death sentence for him, with as much power as tingled in my veins.

Instead, I walked away. I left the house, closing the door quietly behind me, and as I stood out in the dark, I realized that I had no car and no way to get to my home.

I pointed myself in the right direction, and began to walk.

I did not go home. I walked to the building, but there was nothing inside it to draw me. Instead, I walked all night, thinking. The world passed in a blur of lights, noise, distant laughter. None of it mattered. I couldn’t leave the prison of my own body, and inside that cage I waited, trapped, for something.

In the morning, my cell phone began to ring. Messages from the Wardens organization. Manny had likely been right; they were assuming that I’d had a hand in the death of the Warden in El Paso.

It occurred to me that I did have something I could do. Something to channel this dark need inside of me.

Something to lash out at this world that had hurt me.

Manny’s superior officer in the Wardens, Scott Sands, lived in an expensive high-rise building in downtown Albuquerque, one that commanded a view of the pine-covered mountains. Once again, I walked; the feeling of movement was important to me, and I was in no great hurry. Not now.

The apartment building had electronic security, which was a simple thing to confound. I took the steps at a run. When there were no more steps, I opened the door to the top level—a quiet, carpeted hall with solid, expensive doors.

I could have knocked, perhaps.

Instead, I blew open the door to 1514, and then I shattered the plate glass windows that composed the entire back wall of the apartment. Cold mountain wind shrieked in, sending Scott Sands lurching to his feet in surprise. He was still in his bathrobe and slippers. I was happy to see that he lived alone—I would not have hesitated had he put his family in the line of fire, but neither would I have relished it.

But alone—ah, that was a different thing, and I could take my time about it.

He cowered before me, and then, of course, he remembered he was a Warden, and he counterattacked.

Electricity arced from every power outlet in the apartment, formed a pink-tinged bolt in the palm of his hand, and arrowed toward me.

I dodged it easily. It struck the walls of his apartment and splashed in a burning spray across his carpet, crisping it into stinking slag.

“Is that your best effort?” I asked, and began walking toward him. “I was expecting more from a hardened killer, Scott. Perhaps you should try again.”

He scrambled away from me, pale legs flashing beneath his fluffy black bathrobe. The wind pushed at him, sending papers flying in a white storm around us.

He used the wind, whipping the papers into a cutting vortex between us. I had no command of the wind, but because the power I’d taken was Earth power, I had command of the paper, and I sent it hurtling inward to cover him in a choking, smothering cloud. It rammed against his mouth, nose, and eyes, triggering panic.

He lost control of the vortex.

I had my hand around his throat before he could claw the clinging sheets from his eyes, and the Earth power coursing through my veins made me far stronger than a human of my size. It would have been easy to crush him.

I held him still instead, staring into his wide, frightened eyes. Thinking of Manny’s open eyes, the last time I had seen them. Open and so empty.

“You hired the Fire Warden to burn Manny Rocha’s office,” I said. “And to kill Manny and Luis, if possible. Yes?”

He clawed at my hand, but he would have had more luck opening a vise with feathers. “Yes,” he choked out. “Yes!”

“Were you responsible for the shooting?” He didn’t answer. His pupils were huge, his face growing purple. It occurred to me that he might need breath to speak, and I loosened my grip enough to let a trickle of air into his lungs. “I’m not in a good mood, Warden Sands. Please answer swiftly.”

“No,” he gasped. “No!”

“Why did you destroy Manny’s office, then?”

“I—can’t breathe—”

“That is the point of choking you,” I pointed out. “Haste, please, if you want to live.”

Scott’s face was distended, his eyes bulging, and there was true panic in him now. He’d kill me if he could, but I had the upper hand, and it was crushing his throat.

“Orders,” he managed to scrape out. “From the Ranch.”

“The Ranch,” I repeated. It meant nothing to me. “Whose ranch? Where?”

“Mistake,” he wheezed. “Papers. Had to kill them, in case they knew.”

He wouldn’t speak another word, not even when I squeezed tighter. At last, I dropped him semiconscious to the floor and crouched down next to him, staring into his eyes. The terror in him was close to madness.

“You fear your masters more than you fear me,” I said. I didn’t need his acknowledgment; it was clear enough. “Do you really think that’s wise, Warden Sands? I think you understand how little I care about your pathetic life just now.”

He blinked at me and said, “You don’t know. You don’t understand.”

“Clearly, I don’t care.”

He laughed. Laughed. It was a raw, broken sound, and then he rolled over to his hands and knees, the robe loose and dragging as he crawled.

He reached the windowsill and glanced back at me, and I saw the light of madness in his eyes.

“You can’t fight her,” he said. “I’d like to see you try, bitch.”

And then he pitched forward, out into empty space.

I moved to the window and slapped aside the blowing, lashing curtains. Beyond, the fragile blue of the New Mexico sky burned over the mountains, and the sun shone brightly.

There was no sign of Warden Scott Sands on the pavement below. It was as if he had . . . flown away.

Wardens had unique powers, it was true, but even had he been capable of such a feat, he would have still been visible against the clear morning sky.

He was simply . . . gone. As if—and this struck me deep, and badly—as if he had walked away, into the aetheric. Wardens could not. Djinn could . . . but Sands was no Djinn. And there were only a few of my kind capable of carrying humans unharmed through the aetheric. Fewer still who would be at the beck and call of humans.

I stayed where I was for a long moment, staring out at the impossible, and then I walked slowly across the broken glass to the shattered door. I heard the sirens below on the street, likely responding to my explosive entry into this apartment.

Once again, I felt the net drawing tight around me, and I didn’t know how to stop it. This was human business, Warden business, and a Djinn had no place in it.

My phone rang. This time, as I took the stairs down to street level, I answered it.

“Hey,” a male voice said. “It’s Lewis Orwell. And you’re in one hell of a lot of trouble.”

“I know,” I said.

“You kill anybody, Cassiel?”

“No.” Not technically. “Possibly the four in the car who shot Manny. Do they count?”

He sighed. “That’s a question we don’t have time to get into. You kill any Wardens?”

“No.”

“Because I’ve been told you did.” He paused [d.”

“No,” I said. “I was there. I saw it.”

Someone was coming up the stairs. I froze on the landing where I was, pressed my shoulders to the concrete, and willed myself invisible. This was an Earth Warden trick, using only a fraction of my power, and it worked beautifully; the police officers jogged past me, heading up. I waited until they had turned two flights before continuing on my way.

“I need your help,” I said.

“Can’t. We’ve got big-time problems of our own right now. All the Wardens I can grab are coming with me, out of the country. Most of the Djinn are coming, too. The best I can do for you is to tell you where to find some resources.”

“Resources?”

“Money. Identification.” I heard the sound of the ocean, strong and rhythmic, through the speaker of the phone. “I need to go. You won’t be able to reach me again until I get back, so be careful. Are you ready for the information?”

“Yes,” I said. “Ready.”

Unexpectedly, what he gave me was not addresses, but coordinates—numbers. I memorized them and repeated them back, and then, just as quickly, Lewis was gone, the phone call ended.

When I tried to call back, the number didn’t respond.

The Wardens were facing dangers that had nothing to do with me. Even the Djinn were involved. I had the strong feeling that my survival now rested solely with me, and if I wished to find any kind of justice for Manny Rocha, any kind of justice for his wife and his daughter, then I would need to save myself first.

Alone.

I descended the remaining flights of stairs and slipped out a service entrance. My appearance was no longer simply exotic, but dangerously obvious. I would need things.

Luckily, the human world was full of them.

I dyed my hair in the restroom of a gas station. The harsh chemical smell clung to me even after I had wiped away the excess and dried my hair as best I could using the bathroom’s blower mechanism. It no longer looked like a white puffball, at least. Instead, it looked like a pink puffball, lighter at the ends. I resembled, I realized, one of the unhealthy-looking pink snacking cakes in the convenience store’s shop.

With the last of my cash, I bought changes of clothes and makeup. I deliberately chose unusual styles, in garishly colored layers, and made up my face in dramatic neon strokes. I looked young and outrageous, and I noticed that following this transformation most humans avoided eye contact with me.

I was no longer immediately recognizable as the pale albino woman in white who had been spotted at the scene of so many deaths, and that was all I wanted.

Lewis’s coordinates led me to the heart of Albuquerque, in OldTown, to a shaded spot next to the blocky tan-and [blot s-brown structure of the NationalAtomicMuseum. It was just a bare patch of earth, and a large flat rock. Humans had scrawled obscure messages on its surface, but time was bleaching them into history, and I wondered for a moment how he expected me to find anything in so empty a place.

One of the obscure messages caught my eye, because it was the glyph of the Wardens—an odd place for it to be lurking, most surely. I traced it with a fingertip, and then lifted the rock.

Beneath it was damp earth, but it formed a slight hollow—as if something had been buried beneath. I dug with my fingers and brushed cool metal—a cylinder, a type of container with a screw-on lid. It was welded shut, in a way that any competent Earth Warden would have been able to unseal but that would resist simple human tampering; I burned my fingertips opening it, but the reward was a folded piece of note-paper and three plastic bags.

The note, although unsigned, was clearly from Lewis Orwell, and it said,

If you’re holding this, you’re an Earth Warden in trouble, and I decided you were worth helping. The bags contain cash, two new credit cards with high limits, and a set of clean ID documents for you to alter. One thing: If you use any of this without my authorization, I’ll kill you. Call first. You know the number.

I presumed that since Lewis had sent me here, there was little need for another phone call. I opened each bag in turn. Cash—several thousand dollars in old bills. Two credit cards, as he’d promised, in the neutral-gender name of Leslie Raine. The identification—a Texas driver’s license, birth certificate, and passport—were in the same name. The photograph was of an extremely generic human, androgynous. I concentrated on each of them in turn, adjusting the pigments within the photographs until the image more closely resembled me, including my newly pink hair.

I wrote my name and the date on the back of the note and put it back in the cylinder, sealed it, and buried it beneath the rock again.

Leslie Raine.

It seemed as much my name as any other.

I left Albuquerque on a newly purchased motorcycle. The motor vehicle permit that had come with my new identity, I was told, would not allow me to operate the machine legally until I took the tests necessary, but despite my new disguise I didn’t feel comfortable placing myself on police property to achieve that goal. I simply asked to see an example of a motorcycle license, which would allow me to make the necessary alterations to the license I had.

I solemnly lied to the vendor that I would go straight to the appropriate authority to obtain the proper documents. He was less inclined to question me once the credit card purchase went through, and I added a black helmet, white leather jacket, gloves, and chaps. I donned those in the changing room, picked up the helmet, mounted the motorcycle, and taught myself the mechanics of it in a few moments.

“You sure you can handle that?” the salesman asked me as I went over the controls. “That’s a lot of motorcycle, lady.”

Indeed, it was. The motorcycle was a sleekly designed Victory Vision in gray and steel, and it had cost the Wardens quite a bit of money. Still, I felt it was better than buying a car; I was doubtful that I’d want to be trapped in a steel box for hours on end, but this seemed freeing. Powerful.

I started the engine and savored the shivering purr of power. I pressed the throttle and listened to the finely tuned roar, and for the first time in my human life, it felt entirely natural to smile.

“It’s perfect,” I said. I put on the helmet, raised the kickstand, and put the machine into gear.

The salesman waved good-bye to me in my rearview mirror. I concentrated on operating the motorcycle. It was a complex dance of balance, intuition, and control, and I felt a rush of excitement I had not felt since falling into flesh. This—this was freedom. I was alone, I had escaped my enemies, and for the moment, at least, I could simply exist.

I opened the throttle as I left the city limits, and the motorcycle leaped eagerly into action with a deep-throated roar. The vibration rang through me, clear and clean, and there seemed to be nothing ahead of me but empty, open road. The wind pushed at me like a solid wall, seeking entrance to my clothes, my hair, fanning across my neck in a cooling jet.

In time, my human concerns returned, whispering in the silence. Manny and Angela are dead. You can’t simply run. You owe a debt.

It was a debt that Luis Rocha did not want me to pay. I could leave, and he would be happy with that outcome.

I decided, with deep regret, that I would not be. I needed answers. I needed to be sure that the child Manny and Angela had left behind knew the truth about her parents—their dedication, their bravery, their kindness to me.

She would need to know the truth about their deaths, as well. I had part of the answer, but not all. Scott Sands had been no normal Warden, and there had been a reason he had gone after Manny.

I could not believe that it would simply end.

The Ranch.

I would need to find what it meant, or it was likely that Luis and Isabel would never really be safe.

The trip from Albuquerque to Sedona, Arizona, took only about five hours—a remarkably short time, given the pleasurable experience of riding the motorcycle. It felt like effortless gliding, a reminder of all that I had once been. Despite the helmet, I felt less closed-in than I had in either airplanes or cars, and the sense of the wind passing over me, the sun beating hot on my back, gave me a kind of peace I hadn’t realized I had missed.

As a Djinn, I had been connected to the Mother through Conduits—for most of my memory that Conduit had been a Djinn named Jonathan, a mortal who had died well before recorded human history had begun. Many thousands of years later—and only a year ago, if so much—Jonathan had chosen to die so that his friend David could live on, and that had splintered the Djinn. It had ultimately divided us, made Ashan the connection for the Old Ones, like me, and David the Conduit for New Djinn.

But there were other ways to reach the Mother than the Conduits, and the place I was going was one. I had chosen the location that was not only closest, but most likely to welcome me; the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona was holy to Djinn as well as humans, and served two purposes. The human worship was unimportant to me, but in that chapel resided an avatar of the Earth herself—an Oracle.

It was possible this Oracle would speak to me, even trapped in a lowly human body.

She had, after all, been similarly trapped once.

I had never visited the chapel in human form; this spot had existed on the aetheric, as well, since time began, and I had never been forced to interact with an Oracle with the burden of skin and bone. As I glided the motorcycle at a low purr into the parking area, the sun was flaring its last on the red sandstone rocks, and it was as beautiful a thing as I’d seen since opening human eyes.

And I was afraid that she would not receive me.

I took the long flights of stairs at a run, hoping that the activity would chase away the cold fear; all it accomplished was to bring an ache to my muscles, and sweat to trickle beneath my leather jacket. A Djinn died here. I had felt that powerful event even so far away, on the highest levels of the aetheric. Ashan had killed her. He had not reckoned with the consequences of that action, or how very angry Mother Earth had been with him for his crime.

Ashan, too, had almost lost his life. I did not think it had taught him any genuine lessons.

The doors at the top of the landing stood closed and locked. It was after the times posted for visitors, but that was meant for humans, not for me.

Surely, not for me.

I reached out to touch the warm metal of the handle, and I felt an answering stir behind the door, something vast and powerful and intensely old.

The door clicked open without any action from me.

Within, sunset spilled through the huge glass windows, tinting the simple, small church in vivid oranges and dusky reds.

A woman sat on a wooden pew near the back. As I walked toward her, I slowed; I hadn’t expected her to be so clearly recognizable. And so much a mirror of her mother.

“Imara,” I said. “I am—”

“Cassiel,” she said. Her dark hair rippled in a breeze I couldn’t feel, as did her brick red dress around her knees and feet. Her face seemed human, but her eyes were immortal, and more than mere Djinn.

I sank down to one knee and bent my head.

“No need for that,” Imara said. Her voice seemed to come from a long distance, echoing oddly in the stone walls of the chamber. “Sit. You’ve come a long way.” I didn’t know whether she meant now, on the motorcycle, or in a larger sense. . . . From Djinn to what I was now was surely a very long fall.

It didn’t seem right to make myself comfortable in her presence, but I eased myself onto the pew at the end, as far from her as I could manage. I could feel the slow, strong pulse of Earth power from her, like the heartbeat of the Mother, and it frightened me. I longed for it, and I was afraid. . . . . . . Afraid I no longer deserved to feel it. I craved it, though. My hands trembled with the force of it.

Imara said, “It’s hard to talk to you in this form. I don’t have much time.”

I avoided her gaze. “I need—” I couldn’t finish the thought. She knew, in any case.

“I can’t help you. Ashan is your Conduit. If he chooses to cut you off, there is nothing any Oracle can do.”

“I—I know. I don’t ask that.” I waited until she slowly nodded.

“Your Warden, then,” she said. “You want to know why events took the course they did. Why he is dead.”

“I know why he’s dead.” My voice sounded rough and odd to my ears. “Enemies fired guns at him. Bullets ripped his flesh. And I chose revenge over duty.”

“Sometimes revenge and duty are the same,” Imara said. Her voice was getting even fainter, and the wind tossing her hair stronger. “I’m not connected anymore to the human world, except through my mother, but I can tell you one thing: You couldn’t have saved him. I can see all the possible roads, and they all end in the same place for Manny Rocha and his wife.”

I expected to feel relief, knowing that it wasn’t my fault, but all I could feel, here in this quiet place, was a vast sense of emptiness. “I liked him,” I said. It sounded very strange. “I liked Manny. I liked Angela. And they’re gone.”

Imara studied me, and there was something frightening about being looked on by such a power. There was compassion in it, but at such a vast distance that its warmth couldn’t reach me. “I know,” she said. “But it’s how they live. It has its own power, that frailty.”

The injustice of that threatened to overthrow my self-control. “I want justice. I want their killers to pay.”

“Those who killed them already paid.”

“Not enough.”

She didn’t answer. She only studied me for so long that it felt like a geologic age was passing.

“You left the child,” she finally said.

“I had to. The police—”

“The child misses you. She grieves, and she needs you.”

Suddenly, with a strength that shocked me, I remembered the feeling of Isabel’s arms around my neck, of her warm body in my arms. Oh. It hurt so much that I wrapped my own arms over my stomach and rocked slowly back and forth, trying to drive away the pain.

It only sank deeper, and carried with it a terrible sadness.

I felt tears form hot in my eyes and trickle down my face. My head felt hot and tight, and I gasped for breath.

Imara’s hand touched my shoulder. It should have made me hurt less, but instead the grief tightened in on itself in a choking spiral, and I began to sob, as helpless as any human.

“You’re learning,” she said. “That’s good. You can’t be a Djinn now, Cassiel. You have to be something else. It hurts, but it’s a true thing, what you are. You’re bound to the world now.”

I had always thought the Djinn more connected to one another—bound by the cords of power. But now I was seeing that humans were bound to one another, as well, in strange and difficult knots.

It should have felt like a trap. I would have thought it so once.

“You have to go back to them,” she told me. “I know it’s dangerous, and I know it won’t be easy, but your future doesn’t lie here with me, or with any Djinn. It’s with them. If you want to find the truth about what happened to your friends, you must go back.”

“Back,” I repeated. “Back to what?”

“To Isabel. To Luis.” The color of her eyes shifted between embers, flames, the pure gold at the heart of the sun, black, gray. “I know it’s difficult to believe, but a power has put you here for a reason, Cassiel.”

I sucked in an unsteady breath and wiped tears from my face. “I’m here because of Ashan.”

She smiled, very slightly, and raised an eyebrow in an expression so like her mother I almost smiled in return. “Is he not a power?”

Her voice was as faint as a whisper now, and the invisible wind blowing across her had whipped into gale force. Her hand slipped from mine and fell back into her lap.

“Wait,” I said. “Please. Tell me about the Ranch. They would have killed to protect it. It must be important.”

“It is,” she said. “It will be, to you.” Her voice faded to a thin ghost. “Go now. Isabel—”

She faded like a candle flame.

I sat for a moment, staring at the growing darkness beyond the windows, and then stood and began the long journey home.