Unknown

Chapter 3

“HOLD ON!” Luis shouted, and wrenched the wheel hard, trying to control our skid. The van jittered, wheels spinning, and finally straightened out. I blinked and grabbed the handle for security as gravity whipped us violently, and cast my senses out to see what had happened.

Ice. The road was covered with it, an impossibility in the current weather conditions. The air was warm, and there had been no freeze, no rain.

And yet the ice was at least an inch thick, slick as glass, and the van was not made for such conditions; its tires spun and slid, trying vainly for traction as our momentum sent us hurtling onward.

Likewise, the truck coming toward us was helpless, driven by its massive kinetic energy. The driver’s attempts to steer were creating torque, and the trailer connected to the truck was beginning to slide as well, out of line with the cab.

“Weather Warden,” I said. Luis nodded without taking his eyes off the oncoming truck. He looked tense, but unafraid. Timing his actions. With a deep breath, he held out one hand to me, and I took it, feeling the snap of energy between us—complex, deep, and growing intimate.

“Now,” he breathed, and sent power out in a tightly focused wave. It plowed through the metal of the tractor trailer, slicing it cleanly in two. The two halves spun away from each other, spiraling outward from the release of energy, and Luis arrowed the van directly into the gap.

As we passed the wounded truck, I glanced over and saw the mangled remains of some large household appliance, which had been sliced in two by Luis’s strike.

“Man, I am hell on insurance companies today,” he said, with a trembling manic edge to his voice that was not quite humor. “Hold on. Could get bumpy.”

The ice was already thinning, and a hundred feet on, it ended altogether. The tires bit into asphalt with an almost physical hiss, throwing us to the side.

Luis hit the gas and arrowed us onward. I looked back over my shoulder. The driver of the truck was out, duckwalking cautiously on the ice, shaking his head at the mess that had been made of his load. He probably did not understand in the least what had just happened, which was best for us all, I thought. We drove for a few tense moments.

Nothing else came at us.

“What do you think?” Luis asked. “You think she got ahead of us somehow? Set a trap? You sense anything else?”

“I didn’t sense that one,” I pointed out. “But somehow—I don’t think so. It must have come from . . .”

From the boy. I felt that conviction strike me hard, and quickly twisted over my shoulder.

The boy’s eyes were open, wide, and focused darkly on me.

I waited, but he didn’t blink. There was an emptiness in his gaze that chilled me.

“Pull over,” I said to Luis, as I unbuckled my seat belt. I climbed over the seats to land lightly next to the boy, who still lay bundled in his red-and-yellow blanket. He didn’t move, not even to shift his gaze to follow me.

There was a dry flatness to his eyes.

I pressed my fingertips to his neck, feeling for a pulse. Nothing. No spark of life responding to my touch at all.

The boy was empty.

Candelario was dead.

Luis bailed out of the driver’s side up front, slid the cargo door back and climbed inside the van. I sat back and watched as Luis performed the same search I had, but with more effort, more anxiety. He came to the same result, but he didn’t simply accept the fact; he pulled the boy down into the flat open space between the seats and began pressing rhythmically on the unresponsive chest, sharp downward pumps that mimicked the beating of a human heart.

He glared at me. “Breathe for him.”

I didn’t move. “It’s no use.”

“Fuck you, Cassiel, just do it!”

This time, I didn’t answer at all. His look should, by rights, have melted the life from me as well, but then he dismissed me and bent to breathe into the boy’s slack mouth himself.

It took a long few moments for him, Earth Warden though he was, to admit what had been obvious to me from the beginning: The boy’s life force was not struggling to remain, it was long departed. Destroyed. No matter what efforts were put in, he would not be miraculously waking.

Luis sat back against the metal wall of the van, breathing hard, eyes unfocused, and then pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He was trembling. I wanted to reach out to him, but I knew he wouldn’t welcome the touch, not at this moment; instead, I reached down and gently closed the boy’s open eyes, then lifted his heavy, limp body and put him back on the seat of the van.

When it finally came, Luis’s voice was rough and uneven. “What the hell, Cass. What the hell is happening?”

“He was expendable,” I said. “Pearl didn’t get ahead of us; she used him to attack us. When he became of no further use, she used him to power the ice on the roadway; she hoped that you would be unable to avoid a wreck, perhaps fatal. She ripped so much power from him that he couldn’t survive it. She killed him to try to get to us.”

“I get that,” he said raggedly. “But why kill him? Why now?”

I shrugged. “She doesn’t have the respect for young life that you do,” I said. “You are all insects to her, regardless of your circumstances. It means nothing to her to kill. Sometimes, she does it for her own amusement.” Or she did, once, in my distant memories.

I had, in thousands of years past, watched Pearl stand at the leading edge of a storm of destruction, tall and wild, only vaguely holding to a shifting human shape that glittered and flowed on the wind. Before her a wide, pleasant valley stretched out, covered in thick yellow flowers. There was a settlement there of creatures who were not humans, as we would later recognize them, but shared most of the same ancestry.

Pearl rode the wave of destruction down the hill, sweeping everything before her in a storm of ashes and death. She was terrible and beautiful, and insane.

It was the last settlement of its kind, and Pearl destroyed every last life in it, erasing the existence of that race of prehumans, erasing any trace that they had ever been. She unmade them, leaving behind the clean, green meadow, the nodding flowers, and an Earth that remained, for a time, the sole province and plaything of the Djinn. Before the rise of humans.

I had watched. Watched, and done nothing. Only later had I acted, when we all realized just what Pearl had become. When her selfish desires no longer ran in concert with our own.

And I had made the fatal mistake of defeating her, but not fully destroying her.

“She isn’t at her full strength,” I said, almost to myself. The Pearl of that ancient memory was a primal force, a goddess, something that woke shivers in me even now. “If she were, she’d destroy us without a thought. Us, the entire city, the nation. She doesn’t understand restraint, and the losses mean nothing.”

“Great,” Luis said. “And this bitch has Isabel.”

“She wants Ibby alive. Ibby could not be in a safer place for now.” Far safer than she would be with us, at least until we worked out what it was Pearl was doing. “We should perhaps worry about ourselves.”

“Trust me, I’m worried.” Luis turned his gaze back, unwillingly, to the boy. “Why didn’t she just kill us the way she did him?”

“I don’t think she can,” I replied. “Yet. The boy must have trained at the Ranch, where she kept the children. It’s likely that she has access to those who’ve surrendered their will to her in ways that she doesn’t to others, like us, who resist. But she’s powerful, and growing more powerful with every passing day. The more who surrender their wills to her . . .” I shook my head. There was no point in taking it further; he understood my concerns fully.

“If she’s killed her only connection to us, maybe we can make it to Las Vegas before she gets another one in position to take us on.”

“Maybe,” I said slowly. Something did not seem right about that, however, and it dawned on me precisely what it would be. “Luis. We have to leave him.”

Silence in the van, deep and weighty. The wind outside rattled sand against the windows, and the metal frame rocked slightly from the pressure. Luis’s face was blank, his dark eyes hot.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Why?”

“Because if I seriously thought you would dump this poor kid like trash at the side of the road—”

“Luis,” I interrupted him. “Think. She did not have to kill him. Why would she? He was perfectly placed to destroy us, if we gave him time to recharge, and he is young enough that we would have hesitated to fight him with full strength. It would be a significant advantage. She sacrificed a pawn who was in position to destroy us. Why?”

He didn’t answer this time. I don’t think he understood my point, so I made it clear.

“When we tracked Isabel toward the Ranch where Pearl was keeping her, what did Pearl do?”

He opened his mouth, then shut it, thinking. Then squeezed his eyes shut as if he had a terrible headache.

“She whistled up the cops and accused us of kidnapping,” he said. “Nothing the cops will respond to faster than an endangered, abducted child.”

“And when they arrive,” I said softly, “they find a boy dead in the back of our van.”

He understood, then, and leaned forward to press both hands to his face. He had a record with the police, the kind of thing that predisposed them to suspicion. His own niece had disappeared.

This would not go well for him.

I continued, only because I felt I had to drive the point home. “She intended this to slow us down, confuse us, delay us. Separate us. As you pointed out before, the police can be defeated, but they are many, and we can’t fight them on fair terms. We must run. And we must leave the boy behind.”

“Wouldn’t do any good. Forensics and shit, don’t you watch any of those cop shows on television? They’ll link the kid to me sooner or later. Hell, the blanket around him is Isabel’s. And my DNA’s in the system.”

I shrugged. “Those things, I can fix. We leave him, and I remove all traces and links to us, both physical and aetheric. But we must do it now, quickly. She won’t be waiting to put her plans in motion. All my skill won’t help if the police search the van and find him here. I can’t credibly hide him from their sight. It’s too small an area.”

Luis waited a torturously long second, then wiped a palm over his hand and nodded. He looked ill. I didn’t hesitate; I picked up the boy, slid open the door of the van, and jumped down the embankment of the road in a shower of pale dirt, sliding out of sight of the road.

“Wait,” Luis said. He’d lunged to the opening in the van, and his knuckles were white where he gripped the door frame. “Don’t just—don’t just dump him. He meant something to somebody. Like Ibby means something to us. Please. I’m asking you. Treat him—treat him like you care.”

That said a great deal about what Luis presumed he knew about me.

I stared at him for a few seconds, saying nothing, and then walked away.

Desert stretched out on all sides, hot and sterile, dotted with the alien shapes of the only plants that could fight the harsh conditions. But the desert was far from empty; no, it throbbed with life, from the busy burrowing insects to the running rabbits to the cunning, coiled snakes.

It was a hard place to leave a child.

I let the sense of bruised hurt fade, and focused on my task. I balanced my burden—suddenly much heavier than its mere physical weight—and set off at a steady run, heading far from the road.

I didn’t look back, but I heard Luis say, very quietly, “I’m sorry.” I didn’t know if he meant it for the boy, or for me.

I made the boy a grave on a hillside, near an overhanging fragrant bush that offered a little shade. It overlooked a valley lush with the rainbow of the desert—russets, ochers, and tans, dotted with vivid greens and the occasional struggling flower. It had a kind of empty, wild beauty. It was all I could offer as apology, as acknowledgment of what Luis had said—that somewhere in the world, someone was missing this boy.

I stripped away the blanket and carefully, using bursts of Luis’s power, removed any traces that might link the boy back to us before wrapping it tightly around him again, in an obscure wish to give comfort. Conscious of the press of time, I knew I couldn’t hesitate, yet something made me do just that.

I looked down on the boy’s silent, empty face before covering it, and said, “Be at peace, child. I will stop those who hurt you.”

Then I leaped out of the grave and triggered a heavy landslide of dirt to cover him. The earth flowed and shifted, thumping heavily down, and I felt myself flinch from the sound. Not a Djinn reaction, a human one, a primal recognition of what it meant to be beneath the ground. To be gone from the world.

I sent out a thought that might have, in a human, been a prayer, as the earth settled in place above him.

I felt the Mother stir slowly and quietly beneath my feet, a sense gifted to me through my connection to Luis—although even Luis rarely felt Her presence so clearly. A tendril only, a whisper, questioning, like a murmur in sleep. This borrowed touch, fleeting and faint, made me drop to my knees and press my hands flat into the sand. I gasped in ragged breaths, begging with all my soul for the blessing of her awareness, of her embrace.

I had forgotten how alone I was, until for a single, shining instant, I was found.

Then sense faded, and I was alone, lost, and afraid once more.

Human, again.

I rose, still breathing hard, and wiped the tears from my dusty face before heading back to the van.

“Here they come,” Luis said, less than half an hour later, glancing in the rearview mirror. “You know the drill, Cass. Stay cool.”

I nodded. The van was completely empty of any trace of the boy. No doubt there would have been witnesses that saw the boy back near the Rocha house, but one thing I had quickly learned about Luis’s neighbors: They were not eager to help the police.

It was highly doubtful any of them would talk.

I looked in the mirror on the passenger side and saw the lurid red and blue lights, and heard the rising wail of a siren. Luis immediately slowed the van, pulling off to the gravel shoulder of the road.

The police car pulled in behind.

It went as Luis had no doubt assumed it would; we were ordered to get out of the van and lean against the hot metal of the vehicle. The policemen—two large men who kept their ready hands near the butts of their guns—searched the van, then each of us. Luis stayed bland and calm. If I fumed at the casual way that they dared to touch me, I kept the reactions carefully hidden. That was one thing that Detective Halley had done for me; he had taught me to handle these official invasions with some semblance of control.

All licenses and registrations were current, and, as I had expected, the police had nothing but an anonymous report on which to question us. Without some physical evidence, they were forced to let us go.

I didn’t imagine for a moment that they were happy about it.

Luis let out a slow breath as the police car, its lights still flashing, disappeared behind us. He kept the van to a careful speed, mindful of all road laws, and at the next turning pulled off in the parking lot of a diner that advertised HOME COOKING. It smelled like grease, even from where I sat a hundred feet away.

“Are we turning around?” I asked. I sincerely hoped we weren’t stopping for food. Not here.

“I was thinking about it,” Luis admitted, then shook his head. “No, it’s no good. We need information, and we’re not going to get it sitting around waiting for Pearl to send another kid after us. The Ma’at know things we don’t. Let’s see what we can get out of them.”

Activity. I felt a slow smile spread across my face, warm and genuine. “Sounds like fun.”

“Your definition of fun sometimes worries me.” Dark eyes examined me for a moment. “You want something to eat?”

I shuddered. “Not here.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes.”

“Not even pie?”

I did love pie. I turned my gaze to the diner, and said, “Not here.”

“You’re too picky.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “Perhaps I have a better-developed sense of self-preservation than you do.”

He frowned. “You just got no appreciation for the little things.”

I continued to smile as the hot breeze blew in through the open window, washing away the stench of burning food. “Then how is it that I like pie?” I asked him. “Or that I like you?”

“Hey, I’m not a little thing. Don’t you go spreading that rumor.”

“Everything is small,” I said, and my smile faded.

“Everything. Even me.” The memory of that brush of the Mother’s touch ached inside me, woke needs that had slept since I’d been cast down into human flesh. I wanted, needed . . .

Luis took my hand in his, a human touch that was irrationally comforting. “Stay with me, Cass. We’re going to find a way out of this.”

I knew the way out. I kept my gaze trained on the desert as it swept by outside my passenger window, and I tried not to think about how much destruction lay along that path to victory.

I would lose him.

I would lose them all in winning, and it would be such a fierce, cold victory. A world empty, new, swept clean of the complications of humanity. The way Pearl had swept the world clean, once. For the good of the Djinn, or so we had pretended.

It had not been worth it then. I was far from sure that it would be worth it now.

Las Vegas was a dizzying wonderland of lights that reminded me of nothing so much as the aetheric. It was filled with spinning, brilliant colors that seemed to blend one into another, too many for the eye to take in. It seemed to burst out of the ground in fantastic shapes, more a defiance of nature than its product. Where Albuquerque often seemed shaped by its environment, Las Vegas seemed to deliberately ignore the land upon which it sat.

There was a certain magnificent idiocy in that, a denial of all the reality so evident around us. Humans. I would never truly understand them, even if I survived in this body a hundred years. That made me wonder . . . would I grow old? Develop infirmities and diseases? Could I actually create life, the way humans did, to live on after my time on the Earth?

The thought made me involuntarily look at Luis, who was navigating the van through traffic with the ease of someone who was a frequent visitor to this town. He glanced back. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I don’t think you would want to know,” I said, very truthfully. I couldn’t imagine Luis would find it comforting to consider the prospect of a child, much less being the father of my child.

Although, if the earlier events had been at all indicative of his feelings, and not simply raw physical needs let loose by the whiskey, then . . . perhaps. But it seemed not to be the time to pursue the thought.

“Okay,” he said. “So we’re going to meet with the head guy for the Ma’at. You’re going to mind your manners, right?”

“Of course.”

From the rude noise he made, Luis evidently did not believe me. That was, perhaps, appropriate. “Just try not to destroy anything. Or make enemies out of the only real allies I’ve been able to scrounge up. It’s not like we’re neck deep in people willing to help us, you know.”

The Ma’at, from all I knew of them, were not the strongest allies that might be had in any case, and I was far from certain they were really interested in helping us. They were people who, though having some tendency toward wielding the same powers as the Wardens, had been disqualified for admission into their ranks—usually because their powers were not deemed significant enough to matter. In some cases, though, they were powerful indeed, and had somehow managed to slip through the complex net that identified potential Wardens as young adults, which meant they lived a furtive double life, and were jealous of their secrets.

The Ma’at were unique in that they had set out from the beginning to work with the Djinn—not to hold them as slaves, as the Wardens did, but to seek out those who were free and might be interested in an alliance. There were few of these, and almost all were New Djinn, not the elders like me. In fact, I knew of only one of the True Djinn who had taken such a direct interest in humanity: Venna, who often presented herself as a child when in human form. Venna was ancient and extraordinarily powerful. I suspected the child-form to be a complex sort of joke I did not fully understand.

Las Vegas burned in alien colors as we entered the main part of the city—brilliant greens, acid yellows, burning reds and pinks. The patterns and hues rippled and changed in brilliant, mesmerizing patterns, and I stared at them without blinking, fascinated by this manifestation in the physical world of what I so loved about the realms available to the Djinn. Crude it might be, but the fact that humans found this mesmerizing as well showed a connection between humanity and the Djinn that I’d never really considered.

I hardly noticed the crush of strangers passing on the streets, or the river of wheeled metal rushing around us; I hardly even noticed the stench of exhaust and rubber that never seemed far absent from these clusterings of humanity. That was a measure of how delighted I was by the triumphant blaze of light around us.

And then, quite suddenly, we were facing something that I recognized with an almost physical shock—a shock that quickly faded, because the familiarity was only a surface impression. This was not the magnificent carved Sphinx, nor the towering majesty of a pyramid; these were modern reproductions, lacking in the sophistication of those long-dead artisans, or the sanctity with which those works of religious fervor had been imbued.

These were cheap copies, packaged and sold as mere entertainment, and just for a moment the glitter of the place fell away, and I grew angry. Angry that humans valued their history so little. Angry that even their greatest achievements could be made so commonplace.

I wondered what would happen if I melted the false Sphinx into a messy heap of painted slag, and then remembered—regretfully—that I had promised Luis not to destroy anything.

Still. There was provocation. I could claim self-defense, in a way.

“Right,” he said, parking the van in one empty space in a vast field of concrete covered with neatly ordered glittering vehicles. “Please do me a favor. Keep quiet and follow my lead. And don’t start anything.”

I glared at the Sphinx. In my opinion, something had already been started.

It stared serenely past me, toward the distant horizon. That, at least, it had in common with its ancient cousin.

The lobby of the hotel was cavernous, dark, and—like the exterior—a cheap exhibition that had little to do with the history it claimed to honor. A constant chatter of chimes, coins, and voices set my nerves trembling with the need to make them all fall silent and leave me in peace, but I gritted my teeth and held on to the promise I had made to Luis. They will help, I told myself a little desperately. They will help us find Isabel.

The carpeting was thick and plush underfoot, and it had soaked up a million spilled drinks. The entire room reeked of desperation, old liquor, and cleaning fluids, although most humans wouldn’t have noticed anything at all. I tried to breathe shallowly, and balled my hands into fists. I must have seemed angry, because I noticed uniformed security men and women turning to watch our progress through the room. One lifted a small device to his lips and spoke.

Luis went to a simple phone set into an alcove; the label above it said PRIVATE USE ONLY. There were no buttons, only the handset and cradle. He picked it up, put it to his ear, and said, “Luis Rocha and Cassiel to see Charles Ashworth. We’re expected.”

Before he’d replaced the handset, one of the security men was behind us, hemming us into the alcove. Not aggressively, which was all that saved him, but certainly with unmistakable purpose.

“Please wait,” he said, and set his feet in such a way that I could tell he would not be moving without orders. Or, of course, without the application of appropriate force. But a glance at Luis told me that this was still not the time, nor the place, for that kind of action.

Someone not far away screamed—not in fear or pain, but in some kind of joy. I heard a sustained clatter of coins, and a flashing yellow light began to pulse about fifty yards distant, among the ranks of quietly chiming machines.

“Man,” Luis sighed. “Wish I had that kind of luck.”

“You’re an Earth Warden,” I reminded him. “You could bring gold from the ground if you wished it.”

“Yeah, I know. But I don’t. Because that would be wrong, and besides, it’d attract too much attention from the other Wardens. So no.”

“You could simply force the machines to deliver winnings.”

He eyed me as if he’d never seen me before. “You want me to cheat in a casino run by the Ma’at? You really think that’s any kind of a good idea?”

I shrugged. “I am simply pointing out that you make your own luck. Whether you use it or not is your choice.”

“Yeah, well, stop putting bad thoughts in my head already.”

“Was I?”

Our eyes locked, and I felt his attention like the heat of a distant fire. “Pretty much all the time.”

That made me want to smile, but somehow, I resisted the urge. I was making a habit of resisting urges. I wondered if that made me virtuous, or merely stupid.

After another few moments, the security man received a message through a tiny speaker tucked inside his ear, and stepped aside. “This way,” he said. Polite, but firm. He led us through the rows and rows of casino machines, then off behind a busy, glowing bar with a phalanx of bartenders pouring dozens of drinks. There was a plain, dark wooden door set into the wall, almost invisible in the shadows. A plain gold plate was engraved with the words PRIVATE SALON.

The guard swung the door open and stepped aside to allow us to enter. Beyond, it was just as dimly lit, but much smaller. Dark paneling, discreet inset paintings that I instantly felt were true classics. A heavy desk at the far end of the room, with two substantial armchairs placed at precise angles in front of it. An empty poker table, covered in green felt, sat in the corner, surrounded by comfortable chairs.

Behind the desk at the far end sat a small, neat man. Older, with white hair and a lined, sharp face. His hands were folded together on the empty, clean wooden surface, and he watched us without much of an expression—neither welcoming, nor suspicious.

He didn’t rise to greet us. “Rocha,” he said, and nodded. “Sorry to hear about your brother and sister- in-law. My condolences.”

“Thank you,” Luis said, and took one of the chairs angled to face the desk. I wondered for a moment if I should take the other, then decided to stay standing, arms folded, behind Luis’s chair. He had told me to follow his lead, but I was not entirely comfortable here, in this place. There was something powerful, and it was also something that I did not quite understand.

“You’re Cassiel.” That pulled my attention back fully onto the old man. “I’m Charles Spencer Ashworth. For now, I’m the head of the Ma’at.”

“For now?” Luis asked.

“Let’s just say there was some management reorganization. Internal politics, nothing you need to worry about. Coffee?” He didn’t wait for a reply, simply pressed a button inset in the top of the desk. “You’ve got some explaining to do, I think.”

He assumed a very clear posture that said he was awaiting our report. Luis took a moment before saying,

“I’m not sure I should do my explaining to you. With respect, sir.”

Ashworth’s thin lips stretched, but I didn’t think it could be properly named a smile. “With respect,” he said, “I think that if you’re standing in my hotel, surrounded by my people, and there’s a Djinn standing in the corner ready to enforce my wishes, I really think you should reconsider.”

I whirled.

In the darkest corner of the room stood a Djinn—not one of those I felt the most fellowship with, but a New Djinn, one who had been born from human origins. An artificial creation, I had always thought. A pretender.

This one was tall, slender, and the bluish color of smoke even in human flesh. He bowed his head slightly as I met his gaze. His eyes were a bright, liquid violet, and his hair was dusty gold. Beautiful, in a shocking way, although not in a way I had ever seen before.

He was—for a New Djinn—powerful.

“Cassiel,” he said, and his voice was magic distilled—soft, warm, deep, comforting. “I’ve long wanted to meet you—though, I admit, I never wished to face you on the battlefield. You may take that as a sign of respect.”

He was gracious in pretending that I was still something a Djinn could truly fear. I nodded unwillingly in return. “Your name?” I could have read it from the air around him, once. Not now.

“Rashid,” he said.

I turned back to Ashworth and said, “He belongs to you?” It was a deliberate provocation, and I heard a soft laugh from Rashid—amused, almost mocking, but far from offended. Ashworth smiled again, this time more genuinely.

“No one belongs to anyone,” he said. “Tenet of our society. Anyone who joins the Ma’at joins as a volunteer, and they can leave when and if they desire.”

“How democratic,” I said. I didn’t put any special weight on the words, which made them, by default, a touch sarcastic. “I had heard you made use of Djinn when necessary. I see it’s true.”

“We make use of anyone willing to work. Including you, should the spirit move you, of course.”

I shook my head slightly and focused back on Luis. My conversation had given him time to decide what to do, and I could see by the set of his back and shoulders that he was bracing himself for some kind of impact.

“The boy we were trying to save is dead,” Luis said. “We did our best, but whoever sent him drained him in the last attack. We couldn’t help him.”

Ashworth’s thick brows slowly climbed, though his face remained set and still. “Really. I’d heard you were a skilled Earth Warden.”

“I am.” He glanced at me. “So is she.”

“Then I think you’d best explain to me why a child attacked you in the first place, and why you couldn’t simply stop him without death entering into it.”

Luis did his best, but Ashworth gave no indication, throughout the explanation, as to whether or not he believed a word of it. When Luis came to the point where we’d left the boy’s body behind, I heard a soft hiss from Rashid, behind me. I resisted the urge to turn.

“It was not my first choice,” I said. “But it was necessary. She intended for us to be caught with the body. She hoped we wouldn’t notice his passing until it was too late.”

“She,” Rashid repeated. “Name this enemy.” I didn’t. He gave another soft sound of disgust. “There is no great villain in this, Ashworth. Only the twisted desperation of one who was once a queen among our kind. Don’t believe her. The humiliation of being cast down into skin has turned her.”

“I’ll believe what I like, Rashid. Thank you for your input.” I’d never heard a human rebuke a Djinn in quite that way, firm and authoritative—not a human who didn’t arrogantly assume that owning a Djinn protected them from retribution. The aggression raised fierce, cold instincts in me, even though it was not directed toward me. I wondered what it did to Rashid. “I was at the Ranch,” Ashworth continued. “I understand what you two think you saw.”

“We don’t think,” Luis said. “We know. She exists. We may not be able to find her yet, but we will. And we’re going to get my niece back, safe and sound.”

Ashworth didn’t comment on that. He said, instead, “Not many Wardens left these days. Some are off chasing ghosts, some lying low, the rest just trying to hold things together. A good portion of them died fighting the Djinn in the rebellion. Some say there’s still a war going on, one of attrition. Fewer Wardens, stretched thinner. Enemies picking them off, one by one.”

“Some say it could benefit the Ma’at,” Luis pointed out.

Ashworth’s face twisted in a tired grimace. “People talk nonsense most of the time. I have no interest in making the Ma’at any kind of replacement for the Wardens. You should know that, better than most. The world needs Wardens; if she didn’t, they wouldn’t be here. They’re part of the natural order, same as the Djinn. Same as regular human beings, animals, plants, insects, protozoa. Ma’at, boy. Everything in balance. Now. Why are you here? You could’ve turned around and gone straight back home, nothing to stop you.”

“Guess just wanting to visit Vegas isn’t a good excuse.”

Luis’s attempt at humor—never more than half-hearted—fell into a cold silence. Ashworth didn’t reply. He shifted his gaze to me. “You really do think this creature’s real.”

“Yes,” I said. “She’s real. She’s a threat to the Djinn. A genuine threat. And until we can locate her again, we are fighting shadows. She can target us. We can’t target her in turn.”

Rashid made that sound again. I turned to face him, and he folded his arms across his chest. “Yes?” he asked.

“You have something to tell me?”

“Not really,” I said. “I presume when you’re screaming your last, the way Gallan screamed, you will take my words more seriously.”

I left that deliberately ambiguous. He would know of my friend Gallan’s death—the death of a Djinn never went unremarked, and Gallan had been no minor power. What Rashid did not know, from the sudden burst of brightness in his eyes, was whether or not I had been the cause of it.

I knew well enough what he suspected.

“I take you seriously now,” Rashid said. “Believe it.”

“Enough,” Ashworth snapped. “The both of you. You’ll not be settling any grudges in my office; I just redecorated. Luis, what the hell do you want from me? I can’t offer you any real help. And I don’t have any real information.”

“Then there’s one other thing you can do. You can lend me a Djinn,” Luis said.

There was a sudden, startling quiet among the four of us; Ashworth’s gaze leapt to Rashid, and mine moved to focus on Luis as I struggled to process what he had just said.

He had a Djinn. He had me. I felt a sudden, baffling surge of rage and confusion, and I wondered if it was . . . jealousy? Surely not. Surely I had not sunk so low.

Rashid’s voice came from behind me. Very close behind, so close that I felt the whisper of air on the back of my neck. “You must not be performing to his expectations,” he said. “How very sad for you.”

I turned, slammed the palm of my hand into the flat of his chest. It should have sent him flying across the room, splintered paneling, crumbled concrete in his wake.

Instead, Rashid simply stood there, smiling at me with a terrible bright light in his violet eyes. Then he took hold of my wrist, and snapped my arm.

I cried out as the bones broke, twisted, and ripped into muscle. Pain tore through me in a livid white wave, loosening my knees, and darkness flickered over my eyes.

“Rashid!” Ashworth shouted, and surged to his feet behind the desk. Luis, however, was faster. His armchair tipped over, and before it hit the carpet with a dull thud he was next to me. He pointed a finger at Rashid, and for a second I saw—or thought I saw—black flames lick up and down his arms. I blinked. It was an effect of the pain, surely.

“You,” Luis said. “Let go of her. Now.”

Rashid did, still smiling, and stepped back. Luis took my arm in both his hands, and his touch was extraordinarily gentle and warm. I felt the warmth cascade into me, power twining in intimate circles around the damage. I swayed closer to him as my strength left me, and he caught me with one arm around my body, holding the injury clear as the healing continued.

“Point made,” Rashid said, sounding bored and waspish. “She’s no better than a human, is she? Hardly of much use at all. You do need a Djinn. But why, I wonder?”

“I need one who thinks he’s invulnerable,” Luis said through gritted teeth. “You’ll do fine.”

Rashid frowned, and a little of his overwhelming arrogance flickered away. Not enough to matter, however. I found some strength left after all, and pushed away from Luis to stand on my own. My arm felt fragile and barely knitted together, and I knew I shouldn’t test it, though the healing was vastly accelerated. Rage had subsided to a low, hot burn deep within me, but I was less pleased with what had replaced it: fear. Was this how humans lived, so afraid of pain, so aware of their fragile and temporary bodies?

I didn’t like it. Not at all. “What are you doing?” I asked. Luis sent me a dark, urgent look that almost demanded my silence. He went back to a silent war of stares with Rashid, who, finally, crossed his arms across his chest, lowered his chin, and gave a wolfish smile. “You think you can challenge me with threats of danger? Little man, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, sure, you’re a big man, breaking the arms of women without giving them chances to fight back,” Luis said. “Big talker. I get that. But what I’m asking is for something that’s going to take some balls and some brains. Maybe you should go get somebody, you know, better. I’ll wait, man.”

Rashid’s eyes grew molten, and I thought for a dull, terrible second that he would simply burn Luis down to the ground for that. He was fully capable.

Instead, Ashworth snapped, “Enough, you two. We don’t have time or luxury for this. Rocha, tell me what you want, and don’t be coy about it. Now.”

It must have taken a sincere and awesome act of will to turn his back on Rashid, but somehow Luis managed it. For security, I kept an eye on the Djinn. I didn’t for even an instant trust him. He was a jackal, sniffing for opportunity, and I had a sudden and sickening experience—for perhaps the first time in my long existence—of being the wounded prey.

“I need a Djinn who can verify where this boy came from,” Luis said.

“The dead boy?”

“Yes. Time’s critical. Traces fade. I need somebody who’s not full of bullshit and bluster.” That, of course, was specifically thrown at Rashid, and I watched the Djinn consider, again, whether or not to kill us. If he decided to act, there would be little Ashworth could do to stop him, and while Luis and I would put up a fight, it was a foregone conclusion how it would end.

Wasn’t it?

I don’t know what expression must have crossed Ashworth’s face, as he assessed all these things, plus of course the potentially lethal damage a fight could do inside his dark-paneled sanctum. Finally, he said, with absolutely no emphasis, “I think we could work something out. However, it would have to be done as a strictly voluntary effort on the part of the Djinn. That’s our code.”

“Of course,” Luis said, and hesitated before continuing. “Thing is, from everything we know about this situation, tracing this dead boy back to the ones behind him could be dangerous. Even for a Djinn. I wouldn’t want anybody to misunderstand the risks involved.”

Rashid was still giving us that unsettling predator’s smile. Now he said, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Ashworth sighed.

“Then I pronounce you all friends and allies. Mazel tov,” he said, in a tone that was weary with disgust. “Now all of you, get the hell out of my office, out of the hotel, and go kill each other someplace where I don’t have to worry about cleaning it up.”