Unknown

Chapter 2

HOME FOR LUIS was his brother’s home, which he had decided to keep after Manny and Angela’s death. Partly this had been to allow little Isabel some continuity and familiarity in her life, although expecting her to return was less logic than sheer, bloody-minded determination. Partly it was convenience. Luis had moved from Florida, and had not yet rented an apartment before the murders.

I had an apartment, but it was not a home—merely a way station where I kept my few belongings, slept, and cleaned my body.

The Rocha home was . . . more.

“I should take you back to your place,” Luis said as he unlocked the front door of the small, neat house; that took a while, because he had installed new locks and an alarm system. His words lacked conviction, and I ignored them, moving through the opened doorway into the familiar living room. It was comfortably furnished, with things that did not quite match—the sign of people who had bought their possessions over time, and because of love, not fashion. Unlike his brother and sister- in-law, Luis kept it very neat, but there was a sense of peace in it. Order. Love. Some sadness.

It eased some anxious, tired knot in my soul.

I locked the door behind me and sat down on the couch. Luis glanced at me without speaking and went into the kitchen. He came out again with two glasses—both decorated with colorful cartoon characters—and a bottle of amber liquid, which he set on the coffee table before sinking down next to me with a sigh that spoke of utter weariness. “Drink?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do I?”

He poured me a thin line of liquor and handed it to me. “Try.”

I sipped carefully and made a startled, strangled sound as the fiery, smoky flavor coated my tongue and throat. Luis leaned forward and tipped a much more generous portion into his own glass, lifted it vaguely in my direction, and said, “Salud,” before downing the liquid in two heavy gulps. I took a larger sip. It didn’t burn as much the second time, and had more flavor.

Luis refilled his glass. I drained mine in three more slow sips, feeling an odd calm begin to work through me. Distilled chemical sedation. I began to understand why people sometimes pursued this course of action.

Luis put his glass down empty, refilled mine, and poured himself a third helping. “Last call,” he said, and capped the bottle. “How is it?”

“Interesting,” I said. I wasn’t quite sure I approved of the changes in my metabolism, but somehow that disapproval remained theoretical, and far away from the warmth that coursed through my body. I felt looser now, less on guard.

Less constrained. It sparked dangerous memories of being free, powerful, utterly different than what I was now.

Luis watched me over the rim of his glass as he drank—this time, much slower, almost matching my careful sips. “You were good today,” he said. “We were good today.”

It wasn’t often the case. Luis and I didn’t know each other as well as Manny and I had; I had been comfortable with Manny, and I had understood the dynamics of our relationship, which were almost all professional in nature.

Luis was . . . complicated. I responded to him more strongly, both in terms of the power passed between us, and in purely physical ways. Since becoming human, my flesh had surprised me more than once, and continued to act in mysterious ways that seemed divorced from the cold logic of my thoughts. I was not sure how humans combined these things. Or Djinn, for that matter; I had never been one of those who enjoyed assuming human form and playing at being mortal. Some, like David, almost were human. Others, like Ashan, wore flesh as a skin-deep suit, nothing more.

I wasn’t sure which more accurately described me; it seemed to be a shifting question.

I sighed and leaned my head back against the couch cushions. “Do you think she will recover?” I asked, cradling the glass between my long white fingers. Luis finished his last sip of whiskey.

“It’s not a matter of recovery,” he said. “She’ll learn to live with it, or she’ll become more and more unpredictable and unstable. If that happens, the Wardens will have to remove her powers. God help whoever gets that job. It’s risky enough with an adult.”

There was a small, elite force of Wardens devoted to tracking down those who were, or became, dangerous and bringing them back for that process, which was a kind of psychic surgery performed only by the most expert Earth Wardens. There was every chance of leaving someone scarred, psychically crippled, insane, or dead.

Yet some Wardens actually chose to take the risk, rather than continue as they were.

And some had to be treated by force.

“I hope that will not be necessary,” I said. I put the glass on the coffee table and felt my whole body relax as I curled in on the couch, knees up, body turned toward him. My head rested against the cushions.

“Yeah,” Luis agreed. He hesitated, then leaned over and put his own glass down. “You want another shot?”

I glanced at the bottle. “No,” I said. “Do you?”

“Can’t,” he said. “I set my limits, and I stick to them.”

Limits. That was a concept unfamiliar to most Djinn; we had few limits, and those few were imposed on us by the immutable laws of the universe. Still, I understood him; I had imposed rules on myself here, in this place, simply by agreeing to live as a human instead of perishing as an outcast Djinn.

Some of the limits were even my own choice.

I realized that I hadn’t spoken, and Luis had fallen silent, and we were still looking at each other. I had noticed that humans did not typically gaze steadily at each other, unless they were seeking confrontation; glances were more common, polite and fleeting.

This was different. Luis watched me as if he had forgotten how to blink. There were thoughts behind this, thoughts I could not understand easily, having little experience of the human condition.

I understood my reaction, however. Deep within my body, warmth was blooming, spreading, and my blood was moving faster through my body. My breathing had deepened. My pupils, I suspected, had widened.

Arousal—deep, violent, and primal.

And hotly enjoyable.

“I should get you home,” he said, finally. His voice sounded different—deeper, slightly rougher, as if he had to force the words out.

“You can’t drive,” I said, and looked at the bottle on the table. “Three drinks would be too many, correct?” Except that as an Earth Warden he could easily control that; he could dismiss the alcohol from his system with a simple pulse of power, or at least minimize its effects.

If he wished.

“That’s true,” he said, in a neutral voice. “I should probably wait a while.” He picked up the bottle and looked at it with dark, narrowed eyes, then slowly uncapped it and tipped another splash of amber into his glass, then my own. He didn’t speak. I didn’t either. We sipped the whiskey, intensely aware of each other’s presence, and when I had finished the glass I felt stickily warm, impulsive, aware of every nerve in my body.

I sat up abruptly and stripped off the pale leather jacket, dropping it onto a nearby chair with a heavy thump. Beneath it I wore a thin pale pink cotton top, sleeveless. I had not bothered with the inconvenience of a bra; my body was not built in such a way as to make it structurally necessary, although I sometimes wore one for comfort, or to satisfy societal expectations.

But not today.

As I sank down on the couch again, skin lightly flushed and damp, Luis looked sideways toward me. Not toward my face. Toward the thin cotton fabric, where my nipples were hardening in reaction to the cooler air, and responding to his rapt attention.

Still, I said nothing. Neither did he. He raised his eyebrows and took a last sip of his drink, then put the glass down.

“Cass,” he said then, very softly. “I’m not sure we ought to be doing this.”

“Why?” I asked. I angled my body sideways on the soft cushions, and met his eyes directly. “You want me to be human. Yet you resist when I try.”

Luis let out a shaky laugh. “Yeah, I’m resisting all over the place, here. Lady, if I was resisting, I would have stopped at half a glass of whiskey and booted you the hell out of my house.”

I frowned, trying to work it out through the warm hazy pleasure that was coursing through my body. “But you didn’t.”

“You noticed.”

“But you are not sure—”

“Indecision. It’s the human condition, Cass. Get used to it. Although they’re going to kick me the fuck out of the Guy Club if I go all virtuous right now, with a drunk hot woman trying to get in my pants.”

He said woman, not Djinn. That was somehow significant to me. Some barrier between us that I’d barely been aware of had fallen away, and I didn’t know why. It could have been the alcohol, of course, but I didn’t think so. It might have equally been the extreme focus of the two of us working to save the small child in the hospital . . . or, simply, that we had both been thinking of this moment for some time, and denying it was so.

I slid off of the couch again, shoved the coffee table back so violently that the open bottle of whiskey teetered in an unsteady dance on its surface, and I reached out to catch it and center it before it could tip. Then I lifted it to my lips and tilted it, my gaze still hard- locked with Luis’s. Silky, liquid heat poured into my mouth, and I held it for a moment in savor before swallowing.

Then I put the bottle down and knelt astride Luis on the couch. My weight came down on his tensed body, and I settled against him in intimate contact—closer than I had ever been to him, in fact.

He made a startled sound, low in his throat, and I felt his muscles go tight all over his body, as if he was fighting his own impulses at a well-nigh-cellular level.

“If you don’t find me attractive,” I said, “tell me to go.”

It was patently evident that he found me attractive. With my weight pressed hard against his hips, it was very difficult to argue the point.

He closed his eyes and pulled in a deep breath. I could feel his heart pounding. I could see the pulse throbbing in his temple. A drop of sweat slid down the gleaming flesh of his throat, and I watched its glide with single-minded intensity. I strongly considered licking it.

“It’s the whiskey talking,” he said. “You’re going to hate us both tomorrow.”

I laughed softly. “I don’t need whiskey to make me hate anyone,” I said. “It is my natural state. As you very well know.”

Luis pounded his head backwards against the soft cushions of the couch, twice, then opened his eyes to look at me. The distance between us seemed to contract, even though neither of us moved.

“I wanted to hate you right back,” he said. “I tried. When Manny died—”

He’d been right to loathe me. I had seen Manny and Angela fall, fatally wounded, and instead of leaping to save their lives as Luis had done, I ran after those who had harmed my friends. I had selected vengeance over mercy. That was Djinn instinct, and it was still a raw wound inside of me.

But complicating that pain was the knowledge that even had I done as Luis had, even had I applied all my skill and power to my two fallen friends, they would almost certainly still have died. And Luis knew that as well.

“I wanted to hate you,” he continued softly, “but I couldn’t. You’re just . . . baffling.”

“Baffling,” I repeated. I rather enjoyed that description. “How so? I try to speak my mind.”

“No shit.” He pulled in a breath as I circled my hips on his. “Holy crap, don’t do that.”

“Is it because I wish to touch you? To remove your clothes and touch you everywhere, to know you completely?” I was not certain of human protocols in these matters, but Luis didn’t seem offended. I leaned closer, slowly, and settled my arms around his neck. His skin felt hot and firm. “Because I wish to feel your body on mine? Your needs pounding through your veins?”

“Cass,” he said faintly, and then took a deep breath and said, in an entirely different tone, “Oh, what the hell, anyway.”

And he kissed me.

I didn’t know what I’d expected from this meeting of skins, but my body clearly did. In an instant, my mind blazed white, and I thought of nothing, nothing but the warm, damp glide of his lips, his hands gripping my waist and pulling me hard against him. It was challenge. It was surrender. It was an intoxicating brew of instinct and need and emotion, and I shuddered and opened my lips to the stroke of his tongue. One of his hands stroked slowly up the bumps of my spine, brushed the tender skin at the base of my neck, and cradled the back of my head in primal warmth.

I had been holding myself suspended, just a little, above his body, but now my knees seemed to spread of their own accord, lowering me the last half inch. He groaned breathlessly into my mouth, and I moved my hips back and forth against his. Pure, wild instinct, springing from the body I wore, from a hundred thousand years of human coupling hardwired into my DNA.

It took my breath away, as well.

The kiss deepened, and time stretched, measured in racing heartbeats. He was flesh and bone and muscle, all of it suddenly, insanely new to me. My hands stroked over him, sensing where he was hotter, colder, softer, firmer. I explored the long sweep of his arms, feeling the knotted cords of muscles moving beneath.

I felt an alien heat moving through me now, something coming not from my own waking human desires, but from his, bleeding over through the link that sustained my life and power. Coursing through the white-hot network of nerves, pooling and triggering pleasures that made me moan into his mouth, lost and only half-aware. The bliss was extreme, and dangerous—not because Luis’s Earth-based powers were in any sense overwhelming me, but because I felt his own precise control eroding.

“Is it always like this?” I asked him, between gasps. It took him a long time to form words for an answer.

“Sometimes,” he managed to reply. “Between—really strong Wardens—but different.”

That was nondescriptive, but interesting to me. I traced a fingertip over the strong muscles of his shoulders, and I actually saw power moving between us, strong enough to manifest in a golden afterimage where I touched.

I laughed, took hold of his shirt collar, and pulled the knitted fabric over his head to bare his chest to me. The color of his skin was like the darkest honey, the muscles strong and tensed beneath. He had more tattoos than those on his arms, I discovered, though the tribal symbols meant little to me except in sharp indigo contrast to the rest of him.

I felt his hands on me now, restlessly moving, finally coming to rest around my waist on either side.

Moving up and in, to cover my small breasts in warmth through the thin material of the shirt.

Without breaking his intense, dark gaze, I pulled the shirt from my body and dropped it on the floor to mix with his. The difference in our skin tones was startling, and beautiful to me . . . my milk to his honey, and mine was beginning to pulse with opalescent colors that I was not sure really existed in the human realm. He looked down to the place where his hands now cupped my breasts. His thumbs stroked over the hardened tips, bringing a shudder through me that started from somewhere deeper than I could explain.

Bodies. Instincts. It was all frighteningly uncontrollable.

“Cass,” he whispered. I sensed the fight in his voice, the struggle to contain the same instincts that haunted me. “Cassiel—”

I kissed him, and we melted together, one constant ecstasy of light and sound, power and bodies, and yet

I knew there was more to this; my body craved it, demanded it, screamed for it.

Luis twisted and took me down to the couch in one swift, almost violent movement. My hands struggled to reach the fastenings of my pants, because I knew only one thing now, and that was how much I wanted to feel his skin everywhere, hot and damp against mine.

The air around us suddenly chilled, and I felt a crackle of energy that pierced even the fog of desire around us as heat was forcibly ripped from the air and coalesced together. I felt it before Luis, and I was able to shove him bodily out of the way of the strike, rolling him up and over the top of the couch.

He yelled in surprise. Before his body hit the floor on the other side, I was rolling the other direction, off the couch and to the floor, shoving the coffee table as I did. The bottle of whiskey tipped and spilled.

Lightning tore through the room, exploding from every electrical socket, stabbing toward a central point—the couch. It was a one-shot attack; the forces channeled through the lines overloaded the fuses almost instantly, but the convergence of the four-direction attack left deep, smoldering burns the length of the sofa.

Before the blue-white afterimages faded, I rolled to my feet, glanced at the burning couch, and reached down for my shirt. I pulled it on, then yanked on the leather jacket as Luis scrambled up on the other side, breathing hard, eyes wide with surprise.

“Someone just tried to kill us,” I said.

“No shit. Really?” He came around the couch, took up his own shirt, and tugged it over his head. “Weather Warden, right?”

“Most likely.”

“That won’t be their only shot.” He looked at the couch, charred and smoking, and then at the blackened outlets on the walls. The power was out in the house, of course. “Fuck, there goes my insurance premiums. You got any direction on this asshole?”

We had effortlessly shifted from intimacy to professional alertness, and I felt Luis burning the intoxication out of his blood, then out of mine, ensuring we were both perfectly prepared for battle. I crossed to the window, but I saw nothing amiss on the street outside; Luis launched his awareness out of his body and into the next plane of reality, which both the Wardens and the Djinn call the aetheric. Because I was linked to him, I was able to follow, and I did, rising up into a realm of existence that was less rooted in physical reality, and more in the reality of power. All things in the human world are invested, to some extent, with power; whether it is a faint spark or a flood depends strongly on its history and heritage. Humans tend to manifest strongly in the aetheric; after all, they come from long, long lines of ancestors, many wielding extraordinary energies, whether they know it or not. They also manifest themselves unconsciously, so what is seen on the aetheric tends to be more revealing than their physical forms.

Luis showed himself not too differently from his usual physical body, but the flame tattoos on his arms glowed red, and moved like real fires. It struck me that on the aetheric, he looked very much like a Djinn; there was a sense of power and purpose about him that was startling. He had gained in strength recently, though whether that was because of his association with me or his personal tragedies, I could not say.

As a Djinn, I had a less obvious presence on the aetheric, but anchored as I was now in human flesh, I had a form of some kind. I couldn’t see it for myself, and there were no mirrors in this plane, but I assumed it was fairly close to the shape I had donned in the human world. After all, this form had been—on some level—my own choice.

Luis and I hovered close together, and his wraith form took the hand of mine. I felt the indefinable click of power cementing into place, and then we rose together—up, far up, to dizzying heights. Beneath us, Albuquerque spread out into a map, but it glowed not with physical lights, but aetheric energy. History pooled and glowed in the older buildings, violet and green. Old battles and crimes stained the map in angry reds. But what we were looking for was easy to spot, even among the confusion . . . a spark of power like no other color showing. A Warden, moving among the streets. I saw the white flare of our own two presences as well. The attacking Warden was close, but not close enough to be within our physical line of sight. Weather Wardens did not need to be.

As we watched, the Warden reached out for power, gathered it in like a black vortex from the world around him, and flung it out in a focused, cohesive blow. It was not aimed for the house in which our physical forms stood.

It was aimed up, at the warm, stable weather systems covering the city. There was little for the Warden to work with, but all clouds contain stored energy, and there were enough to make a difference.

The Warden slammed together a storm, working in a crude, brute-force way that spoke of little training. This was odd, because in general the Weather Wardens were among the most precise; they had to be when working with such massive and volatile forces, which could so quickly spin out of even a gifted user’s control.

Luis silently noted the Warden’s location, and the two of us plummeted down through the shimmering layers of force and color, back in a dizzying fall to our bodies. I felt a second’s disorientation, and then grounded myself in my flesh and whirled to run with Luis to the back door of the small house. He hit it first, slamming it open and leaving it to swing on its hinges, and jumped down the three shallow concrete steps that led down to the packed earth and sparse grass of the backyard. The back fence was sagging chain link, and beyond it we saw a figure in a black coat, running.

Overhead, clouds swirled, gray and troubled. Lightning flashed within them, still randomly aggressive but building up to a level that could become dangerous. I noted the risk, but we had little choice; a Weather Warden could rip the house down around us with surgical precision, and there would be very little we could do to stop it. Luis’s powers were primarily those of stability, of life, of healing; there would be little overlap to cancel the more ephemeral, destructive powers of air and water.

There was a gate in the back, locked with a padlock. Luis reached out and snapped it off with barely an effort, turning the metal brittle and fragile with a pulse of power, and then we were out into the alley. It was piled with trash—boxes, cans, and plastic bags awaiting pickup by the city. The stench was horrifying, and after the first choking gasp I vowed to stop breathing until I was out of this miasma. A useless vow, of course, but it made me feel better.

Luis was a powerful runner, and he quickly pulled ahead of me as he dodged the trash and occasional stinking puddle in the alleyway. I gritted my teeth and forced my body to greater effort; my long legs ate up the distance between us, and I drew level with him just as we reached the end of the alleyway. My held breath exploded out, and I gasped in sweet, untainted air as we both scanned the street for the Warden we’d been pursuing.

He was standing about a block away, stock-still, staring upward. As I touched Luis’s arm to alert him, the Warden reached up a commanding hand to the heavens, and lightning leapt from the low, gray clouds in a furious pink-tinted rush, grounded in the Warden’s left palm, and exited from his right . . . straight at us.

“Down!” Luis shouted, and we both dove for the pavement as the energy sizzled toward us. One point was in our favor: The Warden seemed to have little fine control, though an overabundance of power. He was not able to redirect the strike toward us when we fell. Instead, it hit and charred a metal storage shed behind us, melting a wide, smoking hole in the side.

Luis slammed his open palm down on the sidewalk next to his head, eyes focused on the Warden, and a line of force ripped through the ground, rising and falling like an ocean swell, cracking pavement and shoving aside everything in its path. It hit the pavement on which the Warden stood, tossing him off his feet and rolling him onto the thin grass of someone’s yard. The grass was little to work with—thin, brittle, ill-watered—but I poured energy into it, forcing it to grow in long, rubbery runners that wound around the Warden’s thrashing legs. It wouldn’t hold him, but it would slow him down.

Luis softened the ground into mire, sinking the Warden’s legs but leaving his upper body supported to prevent smothering. In seconds, the Warden was mired as his feet and lower legs sank into the soft mud, and were trapped as it hardened.

Luis offered his hand to help me to my feet, and we walked across the street to where the Weather Warden lay panting and helpless, locked into the earth.

He could not have been more than twelve years old.

Luis and I exchanged looks; I do not know what mine said, but his was appalled. Just a boy, it said.

A boy who’d tried twice to kill us. I was less appalled, and more interested in why.

I sank down to a crouch beside the boy, and examined him more closely. He was typical for the age, I supposed: a defiant glare, a childish, undefined face. Black eyes, black hair, coloring much like Luis’s. “Your name,” I said. “Give it.”

He responded in Spanish. It was easy enough to guess the content of it, especially when accompanied by an aggressive hand gesture. I felt him gathering power again from the clouds overhead.

I reached out, thumped a forefinger against his forehead, and disrupted his concentration. The power fell into chaos, and the child blinked at me, startled.

“Name,” I said again.

“Candelario,” he said. “Puta.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Candelario,” I repeated. “I assume that other was not your last name.”

Luis said, from behind me, “Not unless his name translates to whore.”

I thumped the child-Warden’s head again. “Stop. I can kill you if I wish, you know that?”

His concentration faded, and I felt him let the powers he’d been gathering up fade along with it. “So?” he challenged me. “You kill me, it don’t matter. You’re messing with her.”

I knew exactly who he meant. Pearl. My sister Djinn, once. My enemy. My conquest, or so I’d thought.

Pearl, insane and predatory, who had wiped an entire race of protohumans from the face of the planet once, in her jealousy and madness. She should by all rights have been destroyed, long gone from this Earth; I had seen to that. But instead she lived on, drawing strength and power in steady, parasitic increments from these hijacked Wardens.

These children.

Candelario was like Pammy—a victim, although it was likely he didn’t know this, and would never accept it. He almost certainly believed that he was chosen, special, a trusted soldier in a war against evil. Pearl had convinced many. It was a signal weakness of the human condition, to be so easily swayed by those who wished them ill. To be rotted from within by their own belief in their virtue.

“Where is she?” I asked the boy. He spat at me. “She is using you. She is not your protector.”

“You don’t know anything!” he shot back. “Let me go or she’ll kill you all!”

“I doubt that,” I said. “Or she’d already have done so.”

Something shifted inside the boy—a change so basic that it seemed that the bones inside of him moved along with it. His face seemed to grow sharper, more adult. More like . . . someone else.

“Do you?” An entirely different voice than the boy’s, although using his vocal cords. “Really, do you doubt it, my sister? I thought you knew me better.”

Pearl. Pearl was speaking through this boy. I caught my breath. I felt Luis’s warm hand grip my shoulder, and I put a palm down flat on the warm ground, taking in power and feeding it through the cycle between us. Preparing for the strike, if it would come.

The boy’s eyes were still black, but now it wasn’t adolescent anger in them, it was something worse. Focused malice. Real evil.

“You send out your troops ill-prepared,” I told her. “His attack was crude, you know.”

“I’m not interested in subtlety,” Pearl said. “You should know that about me, Cassiel.”

Oh, I did. All too well. “Then why not come to me directly? I’m your enemy. Not this one.”

“You’re wrong,” she said, and there was such deep, ancient anger in it that even I shuddered. “I have nothing but enemies. Doubt me not, sister mine. I will destroy this world and everything living on it. You’re a fool if you believe otherwise.”

With that, she was gone. Just . . . gone, leaving no clues, no comfort. She did not explain herself. She never had, and never would; I would have to guess at the dark motives behind her plans. But it would have to do with hatred and jealousy, just as it had before.

We had all felt it, when she had struck in those long-ago mists of time. Almost a million thinking beings killed in an instant, a mass murder on the scale of a god, a million souls screaming in pain and confusion. It had destroyed Pearl’s mind, or what remained of it; in response, she had begun to rip at the universe around us, damaging things that should never have suffered injury. Things that lacked the capacity to heal.

I had destroyed Pearl, or I thought I had. I was the original murderer, among the Djinn. The first of us to kill one of our own.

Ironic, that some seed of her had survived, had somehow cast down roots among the new species that filled the emptiness she’d left on the planet with her crimes. Humanity was where Pearl hid. Humanity was where her power lay.

And so Ashan, the leader of the True Djinn, had ordered me to repeat not my crime, but Pearl’s. By ending humanity, I would also, once and for all, end Pearl. So he believed, and it was likely true.

If I acted, I would become a monster. If I failed to act, Pearl would use the power she sucked from these humans to destroy my people.

Choices.

Candelario resurfaced, still glaring. I could see that he had no idea of what he had said—or what she said, using him as her remote tool. She hid within him, within all of them, like a virus.

This was, I realized, not a serious attack at all. Candelario was a crude instrument, powerful and poorly trained. A failure, she would classify him. Expendable. She sent him to me expecting him to be destroyed.

I exchanged a look with Luis, and then cupped a hand behind the boy’s head. Bravado or not, he was sweating; I felt the clammy moisture against my fingers.

“Sleep,” I said, and took a small measure of Luis’s power to course through Candelario’s nerves. The boy went limp, head gone heavy against my hand, and Luis softened the ground around his feet while I pulled him free. The grass was tenacious where it had twisted around his legs, but I finally convinced it to withdraw. I eased the boy to his back on the grass and looked up at Luis. “What now?”

He would be a bad enemy to leave at our backs; he might not be clever, but I sensed that he would be implacable. If he couldn’t hurt us, he could threaten those around us, innocents caught in the crossfire of powers that they couldn’t understand.

Luis was quiet for a moment; then he said, “I’ll call Marion.” Marion Bearheart, I understood this to mean; she was a powerful Warden in her own right, and she had been left here to oversee the skeleton crew of adepts remaining in the country while the majority of the Wardens were off chasing some other threat—what, I did not know and did not care. It was none of my concern.

Marion Bearheart was also the head of a division of the Wardens which concerned itself with policing those with powers. They were police, judge, jury, and executioner when required.

We had little choice but to involve her. Only her resources could deal with this boy in anything other than a fatal manner.

Luis turned away to make the call on his cell phone, and I considered the boy on the ground. He looked thin, but not unhealthy. No scars or bruises that I could see. He had not been abused, or at least not in a way that left marks. Still, there clung to him an aura of desperation, of darkness, and I wondered if, on some level, his subconscious mind understood how little he meant to the one he followed so ardently.

I dug into his coat pockets, turning up the detritus of a young life—sticks of gum, a small cellular phone, a bus pass which showed he had arrived in town recently, coming to Albuquerque from Los Angeles, which I remembered was in the state of California. Many hours away. In another pocket I found a thin wallet, quite new, which contained only a library card for a place called San Diego, and some thin green sheets of money—not many. None of the other things that men like Luis normally carried in their wallets—no plastic cards, no slips of paper, no receipts for purchases. Only the cash, and the one simple card.

I held the card up to Luis as he finished up his phone call. He frowned as he read it. “San Diego?”

“What’s in San Diego?” I asked.

“Awesome shoreline, big naval base, great weather. Apart from that, I have no idea.” He handed it back. “Marion’s dispatching a team to take the kid into custody while they see what’s been done to him. Twelve is too young for anyone to be using the kind of power he did today. It could hurt him.”

Regardless of whether or not it hurt him, it would certainly, inevitably bring tragedy to those around him. Candelario was too powerful, and had none of the training and balance of an adult Warden. (Though I wondered, from time to time, how much difference that made with many of the Wardens, who had a tendency to act like spoiled children in their own right.)

“How long before they arrive?”

“You’re kidding, right? We’re short-staffed everywhere. She’s got to send a team out from Los Angeles. They’ll fly in, but it’ll still be tomorrow before they get here. We need to keep him on ice until then.”

I didn’t understand on ice until I framed it in the context of his words. Keep him controlled and unconscious, I interpreted. “Is that not kidnapping?”

“Sure,” Luis agreed. “If anybody is missing the kid. Which they might be, but we can’t give him back like this. He’s been brainwashed, like the rest of Pearl’s kids. Maybe Marion’s people can deprogram him and deactivate his powers until he’s old enough to grow into them.”

That was a positive interpretation. The other side—the likely side—was that the Wardens would be forced to remove Candelario’s powers completely, to ensure he didn’t harm himself or others.

But neither of us could afford to take a personal interest in the child’s rehabilitation. Isabel, I reminded myself. Isabel must be saved. Manny and Angela’s child, Luis’s niece. And something—though I hated to admit it—something to me as well. I dared not define it more than a simple admission that I had a connection to the child.

More than that implied threads which bound me into this half-life of human existence, and I was not yet ready to truly explore the depth of these connections.

None of which solved the problem of the boy lying at my feet. “What do we do with him?”

Luis shrugged. “Take him back to the house, I guess,” he said. “Can you shield us?” He meant, from prying eyes—a thing which, in fact, I had already done when I realized how this might look to the random humans in the area. It was not invisibility, but it was similar; they would see us, but their brains would attach no significance to it. No memories would capture us.

Luis, on my nod, picked up the limp body of the boy in his arms, and we walked calmly across the street, down the alley (where I, at least, held my breath), and into the backyard of Luis’s house. I refastened the lock on the gate, repairing the damage, and followed Luis inside.

He took the boy to Isabel’s room, still furnished with all her little treasures and brightly colored toys, and stretched him out on a bedspread covered with cartoon characters. In a curiously kind gesture, he removed the boy’s shoes and put them beside the bed, then touched his fingertips to the child’s forehead. I sensed the sleep I’d given grow deeper.

He wouldn’t wake for hours. “Unless you are planning to be here when he comes out of it, we should restrain him,” I said.

“Great. Kidnapping and restraining. I guess we have to tack assault on to that, since we knocked him down.”

“He was trying to kill us.” I glanced toward the living room. “Also, he burned your couch.”

“Well, that makes it all okay.” Luis sighed and sat down on a delicate white stool decorated with tiny pink flowers, which did not seem at all suitable. “Seriously, Cass, we’re in weird territory here. This kid could make a case that we abducted him, drugged him, tied him up. We could look at major prison time for this if we’re not careful.”

“He attacked us.”

“And you seriously think anybody’s going to believe that? Anybody who wasn’t there, I mean?” He shook his head. “We need him out of here before he wakes up.”

“And how do we do that if the Wardens can’t send someone until tomorrow?”

“Meet them halfway,” he said. “We stick him in the backseat of a car, put a blanket over him, and drive. I’ve got a real bad feeling that if we don’t, we’re going to be sweating in a cell by nightfall.”

I didn’t really see the danger; with the power we had at our disposal, a jail could hardly hold us—at least, not a jail the way normal, nongifted humans constructed them. Holding any kind of Warden was extremely difficult, but Earth Wardens were by far the worst. Jails were made of metal, of stone, of wood—materials worked from the Earth and connected to her by chains of history.

If he was not unconscious, or drugged, Luis could make short work of most locks and stone walls. So could

I, through him.

“You’re not worried about escaping,” I realized. He grunted.

“Thing is, I’m not exactly tops on the Good Citizen list. They’re going to come for me guns blazing, and there are a lot more of them than there are of us.” Interesting that he was now automatically classifying the two of us as facing adversity together. “Trust me, it’s better if we don’t get into a fight. Not that we can’t win it, but we shouldn’t have to try. People will get hurt.”

It wasn’t the nature of the Djinn to be so prudent, but I saw his point, and I nodded. “What do you want me to do?”

“Manny’s van is in the garage,” Luis said. “Get it started, I’ll get the kid. If you could tint the windows a little darker . . .”

Child’s play. I went to the garage and did as he asked, and before long, Luis appeared in the door of the garage with the slight burden of the child in his arms. I opened the back sliding door, and we settled the boy across the bench seat in the back, sleeping quietly and wrapped in a colorful blanket from Isabel’s closet. He looked even younger now than before, and much more helpless. I saw Luis touch his fingers gently to the boy’s forehead, both in gentle affirmation and to ensure the deep sleep continued uninterrupted. I took the passenger seat up front, and Luis closed the back and entered the driver’s side.

“You ready?” he asked. I shrugged. “Yeah, me neither. Here, take my phone. You make arrangements with the Wardens. Shoot for someplace halfway.”

He backed the van out of the garage and into the street. The day remained quiet and sunny, few people around to see us leave. Manny and Angela’s home—Luis’s home, now—looked small and abandoned, and it was quickly left behind us as we made the twists and turns to lead us to the freeway.

The Wardens’ central hotline connected me directly to Marion Bearheart. I knew her by reputation, as I knew most of the prominent Wardens; she had been well thought of by many of the Djinn, although that had never extended to me. She knew of me—that was certain—because I sensed the guarded tension in her low voice.

“We need a meeting place,” I told her, without introduction; there was no need, as she would have been brought up to date by her staff or by Luis in any case. “Halfway between Albuquerque and your team’s starting point. We can’t wait here.”

“You’re sure? Crossing state lines with that boy is a federal offense.”

“I’m fairly certain that we’ve already crossed that line,” I told her, “and in any case, if we stay we’re likely to be betrayed before they can reach us. We need to move.”

She didn’t argue the point, which was a pleasant surprise. “I’ll send the team to Las Vegas,” she said. “It’ll be about a six-hour drive from where you are, and they can get a short-hop flight. Go to the casino with the pyramid, and ask for Charles Ashworth. I’ll alert him that you’re coming.”

“He is a Warden?”

“Wardens are thin on the ground right now. He’s Ma’at.”

“And we can trust him?”

“In this, I believe you can.” I approved that she limited her trust. Most humans didn’t, to their great tragedy. “Call me when you arrive, or if there’s any trouble. How powerful is this boy?”

“Very,” I said. “Far too powerful for someone his age. He lacks control and focus, but in power I would rank him highly.” I paused for a moment, then said, “I believe you will have to remove his powers.”

“That’s a last resort.”

“I believe it will be necessary,” I repeated, and shut off the phone. Luis cast me a doubtful look.

“Las Vegas,” I told him. “I shall sleep now.”

I drifted into darkness, only a little bothered by the noise of the road and the memory of Luis’s hands moving on my skin.

When I woke up, it was because the car was skidding violently sideways, heading for an oncoming truck.