Unknown

Chapter 4

I KNEW LITTLE about Rashid. My kind looked on our younger, upstart cousins with little respect, and we’d rarely taken the time to know or acknowledge them individually.

Except, of course, for Jonathan.

Even now, thinking of him, I felt a knot in my chest. Jonathan had come on us like a black storm of power, unlooked-for. He had lived as a mortal man, and he had been the first of all those we now called Wardens; his bond to the Earth was something even those of us who remembered formless voids could not explain, or imagine. His death had woken her to fury and grief, and she had preserved Jonathan’s soul by creating a new form around him. A new kind of life.

She had made him a Djinn, by gathering in the dying life force of thousands near him. Not only him—another had been created that day. Jonathan’s friend David, who had died with him. The first of many, after them.

But it was Jonathan who had been given the heart of the Mother, and it was Jonathan who, regardless of his human origins, had wielded more power over the Djinn—all the Djinn, old and new—than any other, before or since.

We had never accepted him, but all of us, however unwillingly, had obeyed him. For thousands of years, the True Djinn had bent our necks to one we should have, by rights, despised; and some had, though quietly. But there was also respect in even the most militant of us. And yes, love. Jonathan had shone with a kind of purity that I could never understand, nor hope to imitate.

I had even grieved for him when he was lost to us. But there will not be another Jonathan, another New Djinn who can charm and bully us into becoming one people. The True Djinn will always stand apart. We are too arrogant to do anything else.

And that was the gulf that lay between me and Rashid, and always would.

We walked out of Ashworth’s office into the chiming dimness of the casino, none of us speaking. Rashid was on one side of me, Luis on the other. People avoided our path, though whether consciously or unconsciously, I don’t know. I caught sight of us striding together on a security monitor; Luis looked utterly focused, tall, and dangerous; Rashid had moderated the alien nature of his coloring just enough to keep himself from drawing stares, although in this strange place that probably wasn’t necessary.

My pale, severe face, white hair, and pale leathers seemed to glow like a ghost between the two of them.

We looked . . . like nothing any sane human would want to challenge. Heads turned to follow us as we moved through the crowds, and I felt eyes assessing me, measuring, coveting.

It was oddly interesting.

Outside, the hot wind dried a faint trace of sweat from my face, and Rashid’s skin darkened, just a touch, to better absorb the sun’s harsh rays. Luis slipped on a pair of sunglasses. We stood in the shadow of the false pyramid, not far from the false Sphinx, and faced each other without speaking.

Then Rashid said, “Take me to where you left the boy.”

Luis nodded and led the way to where we had parked the van. He slid open the back and gestured for Rashid to get in, but the Djinn simply stood there, frowning, head cocked.

“You came in this?”

“Yeah, obviously, not up to your standards, I get that. Just get in.” Rashid curled his lip and stepped into the van, dropping into the seat with obvious distaste. Luis looked at me and rolled his eyes. “I thought you were bad. I see it runs in the Djinn family.”

I said—and Rashid said, from within the van—“We are not family!”

Luis burst out with a short bark of laughter. “Sounds to me like you are.” Before sliding the door shut, though, he fixed Rashid with a long look, and leaned in to say,

“You touch Cassiel again, you hurt her again, and you and me, we’re going to have a disagreement, Rashid. It’ll end in a world of hurt. You understand?”

Rashid turned his eyes straight forward, not even so much as acknowledging the threat. Luis slammed the door, sighed, and said, “Try to get along, okay? This is tough enough without bar brawls with our supposed allies.”

Like Rashid, I didn’t bother to acknowledge his words, although they were undeniably wise.

I heard Luis say, grumpily, as he rounded the front to climb into the driver’s side, “Freaking Djinn.”

I smiled. Just a little.

Luis drove us to the approximate location where we’d stopped, and I led the two of them through the sand and scrub out into the wilderness. Luis kept up a steady whisper of curses under his breath as he trudged. He hated the desert, I believe. Certainly he was not in favor of its heat, although Rashid and I both gloried in it; Djinn were creatures of fire, and even as muted and diminished as I was, I could still feel the tingle of ecstasy along my nerves.

Luis sweated.

We arrived at the hillside where I’d buried the boy, with its view of ocher and red gullies and a burning blue sky, and Rashid crouched down, drew thin, clever fingers through the dirt, and looked up at me in surprise. There was something that shone in his eyes, momentarily, like respect. Then it was gone.

“How?” he asked. Luis looked at me, frowning.

“How what?”

“She knows.”

I did. he was asking about how I had touched the spirit of the Earth here, in this place.

I shrugged. “She came,” I said. “You can’t summon her. You know that.”

Rashid did, in fact, know. He watched me for another moment, then nodded and raked fingers through the dirt again. “You didn’t kill the boy,” he said. “I stand corrected.”

“I told you we didn’t,” Luis snapped. “Can you hurry up and track where he came from? Some of us need shade around here.”

For answer, Rashid plunged his hand down into the dirt, all the way to his elbow, and then drew it back out with a sharp twist. He shook the dust from it and nodded, eyes gone bright, but somehow distant. “The trail is clear,” he said. “But fading. I will leave you and follow it. It will be faster.”

“Rashid,” I said. “Don’t go too close.”

He made an impatient gesture. “I’m not afraid of your phantom enemy.”

“Neither was Gallan,” I interrupted. “Who is gone. Rashid. I don’t like you. But neither do I wish to see you destroyed. I am warning you: Don’t go too close.”

He heard the urgency of what I said, and finally, unwillingly, nodded. Still, I didn’t feel he had truly understood. I stepped forward, touched his hand, and said, while looking directly into his glowing eyes, “She was once one of us. A Djinn. She will kill you if she can.”

He shook his head, rejecting the idea—mostly, of course, because it came from me. I controlled a flash of anger and continued. “I would ask another task of you.”

That made his eyes widen. He cocked his head, a trace of a frown between his brows. “What?”

“Find the boy’s people,” I said. “His family. Those who lost him. I would wish—I would wish to return him, if we can.”

He stared at me, no expression on his face for a long moment, and then gave a sharp, dry nod.

And then simply . . . faded. Gone. I saw a shimmer on the aetheric as he sped away.

Luis sighed. “So, I’m taking bets. Did we just do something really smart, or really, dramatically stupid?”

“I see nothing to say it can’t be both,” I said. “There is, after all, an endless supply of stupidity.”

We silently gave our respects to the dead child whom we were, once again, abandoning, and returned to the van for the long drive back to Albuquerque.

Before we got there, we ran into a roadblock of flashing lights.

Standing in front of the angled police cars was FBI agent Ben Turner, part-time Fire Warden, looking very grim indeed, and very much as if he had not slept since we’d last seen him. When Luis slowed to a halt and rolled down his window, Turner leaned in, took a quick, comprehensive look around the van, and said, “You both need to come with me. Right now.”

Luis and I exchanged a look which clearly said, This is not good news. “Why?” Luis asked.

“Not here. Just get out and come with me. Do it now.”

Around us, police were quietly drawing their weapons, although thus far, no one was pointing them in our direction. Luis noted it with lightning-fast shifts of his eyes, then focused back on Turner.

“Please,” Turner said. His face was a blank mask, but there was tension around his eyes and mouth, and weariness in the slump of his shoulders. “I need your help.”

As if that was a magic incantation, Luis nodded to me, and we both left the van to stand on the roadway, facing Turner. Dusk was falling, and so was the temperature, but the asphalt had trapped a great deal of heat during the day. It radiated up through my feet and legs uncomfortably.

Turner motioned to the police, who holstered their guns and got into their cruisers, although they didn’t leave their positions.

“I’ve got an abducted kid,” he said. “It fits the pattern you described. Little girl, age eight, got snatched from school. I checked. Her mother washed out of the Warden program.”

Luis traded a glance with me. We both remembered the boy we had rescued from captivity at the Ranch: C. T. Styles. His mother had left the Wardens as well. She had held a grudge. “You cleared the mom?” Luis asked.

“She’s got nothing to do with it. That lady’s practically in ruins. God only knows how she’s going to handle it if this turns out badly.” Which, from the tense, hard set of his expression, he clearly recognized was a risk. Even a probability.

“What about the father?” I asked.

“He seems okay, too. No connection back to the Wardens, and I’m not turning up anything questionable on him. I think they’re both okay.”

“Perhaps it isn’t related,” I said.

“Maybe it’s not. But it’s still a little girl, missing. I figured you’d want to step in.” Turner squared his shoulders and looked first at Luis, then at me. “I could really use your help. If this is connected, it’s our freshest lead. It’s the best possible place to start.”

“We’re already—”

“Let me rephrase,” Turner said, and this time I saw the flare of banked anger in his eyes. “You’re going to help me with this or I’m going to find all kinds of reasons to make you wish you had, starting with dressing funny and ending with suspicion of terrorism, which means you’ll end up so deep in a hole you’ll never see the sun again. So give the keys to your van to one of the officers; they’ll drive it back to your house for you. You’re coming with me.”

I thought uncomfortably of Rashid, certain to reappear at any time. Luis, I was sure, was thinking the same. He would find us regardless of where we might be, but Rashid had not struck me as someone willing to keep a low profile. He might, in fact, find it amusing to advertise his nature in public. If the police began shooting, we could be injured.

Rashid would probably find that very funny.

“Let me make it real easy for you,” Turner said. “You have two choices. One, get in my car and drive back to Albuquerque and help me find this girl. Or two, turn around for the cuffs, because I will charge you with something.”

“With what?”

“You’re kidding, right?” he asked. “There are all kinds of ways I can make your life hell, Mr. Rocha. You really don’t want to test me. I can be very creative.”

I was fairly sure he was serious.

Luis shrugged and tossed the van’s keys to a nearby patrolman in a starched khaki uniform, who plucked the jingling metal out of the air. “Insurance and registration is in the glove compartment,” he said. “In case you get stopped by even more cops. Oh, and I’ll expect it filled up. Washing it wouldn’t be out of the question, either.”

The officer did not seem amused.

Turner held open the sedan’s back door, and Luis and I slid inside. In less than a minute, we were speeding away toward Albuquerque.

It was home, and yet I had the conviction that we were also headed toward a lethal combination of grief and trouble.

Although it seemed trouble was a constant companion, these days.

Ben Turner was a very fast driver, disobeying the posted speed limits with the abandon of a law enforcement man on a mission.

I sat in the back, struggling to control the nausea that roiled within me. Turner’s car was not the most pleasant experience—either sensory or psychic—that I had ever encountered. He’d had blood spilled on the seats. Bodily fluids of all sorts. And death. The car reeked of death—perhaps not in a physical sense, but the impression of a bad and lingering agony was embedded into every part of the vehicle. Something terrible had happened here, before. Something that would never completely go away.

I was struggling with the urge to blow the door off its hinges and leap from the car. The only thing that stopped me was the absolute certainty that Luis would suffer for it if I did so.

And then I was distracted.

“Shit!” Turner yelped, and in the same instant hit the brakes. Tires screeched, and Luis and I both reflexively threw out our hands to brace ourselves as the sedan’s nose tipped down, fighting its own momentum.

Rashid had appeared in the middle of the road, perhaps five hundred yards away. Arms folded, a shark’s smile on his face, watching the car hurtle toward him at killing speed.

Turner, face gone white, fought desperately with the vehicle.

“Just hit him,” I said, through gritted teeth. “It serves him right.”

Turner paid no attention to my excellent advice. He managed to bring the car to a smoking, sliding halt no more than a foot from Rashid’s immobile body.

For a moment, no one moved. White, stinking smoke from the scorched tires blew into my window, and I coughed and choked. The cloud of smoke moved toward Rashid, but he simply waved it away, still smiling.

Ben Turner looked stunned, but in the next flash of a second, his face turned beet red and screwed up in righteously justifiable anger. He opened his car door and got out, yelling, “You idiot! You could have gotten us all killed—”

Rashid simply looked at him. To his credit, it didn’t take Turner long to realize his mistake, to take in the slightly-off color of the Djinn’s skin, the shine of his eyes. He turned to look through the windshield at Luis, then at me. Then back at Rashid. His lips compressed into a thin, angry line.

“Djinn. So I guess he’s with you two,” Turner said.

Rashid made a rude sound. “Not in any sense, I assure you.” On that, we were in complete agreement. He stalked around to the passenger door of the front seat, opened it, and got in. Leaving Turner standing outside, staring in at us.

We all stared back at him.

“Seriously,” Turner said. “He’s a Djinn.”

Rashid reached out and touched a finger to the ignition of the car. It fired to life without benefit of the key, dangling from Turner’s shaking fingers. “Yes,” he said. “Seriously.”

Turner blinked, as if the world had gone out of focus, and shook his head. He slipped back into the driver’s seat, looked at the key in his hand, then dropped it into the drink holder next to him. He put the car in drive and accelerated away, fast. I looked behind us and saw the heavy black streaks of skid marks disappearing behind us.

“Didn’t really think you’d show up again,” Luis said to Rashid.

I turned my head back. “I did.”

Rashid was watching me with a predator’s hot intensity. Waiting for weakness. Well, I had that in abundance, but I was not willing to demonstrate it on his command. “You found something,” I said. “Correct?”

“No, I came back because I find your company so inspirational. Of course I found something.” His mouth stretched and settled into something that was almost a smile. “I found the boy’s bloodline. His sires are gone from the world.”

“Siblings?”

“No. Distant branches. Nothing close.”

I shook my head and translated that for Luis. “His parents are dead. No brothers, sisters, or cousins.”

“Yes,” Rashid confirmed. “His father was a Warden, killed in Ashan’s uprising. His mother was mere human, dead of disease.”

“Orphan,” Luis said. “An orphan with latent Warden powers.”

Rashid said, “He was listed so on the rolls.”

Both Turner and Luis sent him identical looks. “Rolls?” Turner was just a beat faster at the question than my Warden partner. “You mean there’s a list?”

Rashid lifted an eyebrow slowly. “You mean you don’t keep your own lists? How careless of you. How do you ensure your progeny are trained properly if you don’t have a record of their potential?”

Luis’s mouth opened, then shut, and he looked at me instead. “Let me get this straight, okay, just so there’s no confusion: The Djinn have a record of kids born with Warden powers?”

He was asking me. It was embarrassing, but I had to admit the truth. “I don’t know,” I said. “If it’s done, I had nothing to do with it. I had no interest in Wardens, much less regular humans.”

Luis stared for a beat, then went back to Rashid. “Can you get us that list?”

“Why?”

“Because the kids on that list are all at risk. It’s our best way to get ahead of this bitch and stop her from taking more kids. If we can lock down all these potential victims . . .”

“You forget,” I said. “Some of their parents are willing participants. And we don’t have enough Wardens to do this.”

“We’ve got enough FBI. And enough cops,” Luis shot back. “To hell with the Wardens, they’re not doing squat for us anyway. We work with law enforcement, we got plenty of firepower. And I don’t think she’ll have planned to fight her way through that. She’s looking for a magical resistance, not a physical one.”

Luis, I had to admit, had a point. But when I glanced at Rashid, I saw that his face was closed and hard. He said nothing.

Luis sighed. “Come on, man. I get it, you’re a bastard. You don’t care. Fine, whatever. I’ll give you all the respect you want, just give me the goddamn list.”

“I can’t,” Rashid said. “Whether I wished to or not, this list isn’t mine to give.”

“Yeah? Then who the hell do we have to talk to?”

I knew, with an ill feeling, before Rashid said anything. “The Earth Oracle.”

Rashid nodded once, sharply. Of course. My last encounter with the Earth Oracle—archangel to the Djinn’s angels—had been uncomfortable, and nearly shattering in its intensity. Not by her doing; the Oracle simply was. There was no being reachable by the Djinn who was as deeply rooted in the mind and soul of the Mother, not even the Fire Oracle, or the one with dominion over water and air. Each had separate, distinct powers and attitudes, and of all of them, the Earth Oracle was perhaps the most approachable—the most willing to understand and assist us with this matter.

It did not change the fact that she had once been halfling-born—the daughter of the Djinn David and his Warden love, Joanne. Imara, she had been called. And Imara had been a special sort of creation, one with no real place in the natural world until Ashan himself had violated the laws of the Djinn and murdered her within the sacred precincts of the Earth Oracle’s temple.

Imara not only had survived, but had become . . . more. Other. She wasn’t a half- powered Djinn anymore. She had gone vastly beyond all of that. Yet, some of her human heritage still lingered, and I retained enough of my Djinn snobbery to remain just a touch uncomfortable with that fact.

I wasn’t sure Imara had any great and lasting fondness for me, either. The last thing I wanted was another, perhaps less cordial, encounter.

“Get it for us,” I told Rashid. He shook his head. “You must be a special pet of hers, if you know of this list at all.”

“I know of it because David told me of it, not because I can lay my hands on it.”

David. I fumed quietly. He led half the Djinn—the less consequential half, by my reckoning—but he was nothing I wanted to cross. I had no connection to him, not as Rashid did; I would have to rely upon his pure goodwill. He had, however, been kind to me before—had, in fact, helped save my life, when Ashan cast me out. So it was possible. “Then I will ask David for it.”

“You could. He might even be inclined to grant it to you, knowing David; he’s so accommodating.” Rashid made a face that implied he did not altogether approve of this trait. “Unfortunately, he cannot be located.”

That stopped me, Luis, and even Turner cold for a long, icy second. “You . . . can’t find him.”

Inconceivable. David was the Conduit of the New Djinn. He was the core and source of their power on Earth and in the aetheric. How could they not find him? It was akin to mislaying a part of your own body.

“He’s hidden from us,” Rashid clarified. “He told us, before he left, that he would be cut off from us.”

“Then there must be some replacement. Someone keeping open the Conduit for you.”

Rashid inclined his head, but didn’t answer.

“Rashid,” I said. “My patience is not just thin, it is starving, and moments from death. Just tell me.”

Djinn do love their games, but Rashid seemed to understand that I was no longer playing. He turned to face forward, staring out at the road as the car hurtled along its smooth, straight surface, landscape whipping by in a blur of ocher, brown, and green.

“He would have preferred to give the responsibility to Rahel,” Rashid said. “But Rahel likewise cannot be reached. He’s walled both her and himself off from us, to protect us. There are risks.”

I growled softly, and the sound rumbled through the metal of the car. “You’re telling me who he did not choose. I only need to understand who he did choose.”

“Only to explain,” Rashid said. “Because we all acknowledge that Rahel would have been, in fact, the logical choice. Instead, we are saddled with . . . Whitney.”

I was not at all certain I’d heard correctly. “Whitney. Who is Whitney?”

“Our newest Djinn,” he said. “And you will be very, very unimpressed. I confess that I am completely baffled by his logic. Perhaps the woman he’s consorting with has finally driven him insane.” Rashid sounded not just bored, but actively angry. Jealous, I assumed, not very charitably. Rashid did seem to me the type to think he was the natural heir apparent of all the powers in the universe.

Of course, from what I had seen of him so far, he might have been correct to do so.

“I will need to see Whitney, then,” I said.

“That might be a problem, since David ordered her not to leave Jonathan’s house.” Rashid cast a scornful glance over me. “I doubt you can go to her. Not in that form.”

He was right. Humans—and undeniably, I was trapped in human form, unable to shift from it without massive expenditure of power, more than I could safely draw from Luis or any other mortal—could not perform the trick of sifting through the planes of existence, like dialing the tumblers of a lock, to reach the nonspace that held the Djinn stronghold . . . a shifting place, out of phase with the rest of the realities. Once inside, Djinn were insulated from most, if not all, dangers outside; it would take the death of the universe itself to destroy Jonathan’s house.

And it would destroy a mere mortal to attempt the access. I knew of only one who’d accomplished it—Joanne Baldwin, David’s sometimes human, always presumptuous lover. But she’d been a Djinn at the time, so that hardly counted.

I held Rashid’s gaze without blinking. “If I can’t go to her,” I said, “then you must. I need the list. Tell her.”

“No,” he said. “Ask her yourself. If you can.” He bared his teeth. “Or ask the Oracle. She can give you access. Of course, the Oracle’s not as tolerant as she once was. She’s become . . . more powerful. Less accessible.”

That didn’t bode well for my chances, but my chances of getting to this Whitney were even smaller, considering her location and my human-form disability.

I looked at Luis and said, “I will go to Sedona to see the Oracle.”

“Wrong,” Agent Turner snapped. “You’re going nowhere except where I take you. I told you, I need your help!”

“You need help,” Luis agreed. “Tell you what, I’ll go with you. Let her do this. She gets her hands on that list of potential targets and we can start preventing this crap before we’re chasing after missing kids in trouble, maybe suffering or dying. Yeah?”

Turner didn’t like it, I could see that from the stony look on his face. Still, he knew that Luis was right; if there was a way to prevent more missing children, more dead children, he would have to risk it.

“Fine,” he said. “So how does this work? You just blip out, or . . . ?”

“Like this?” Rashid gave him a vicious smile and disappeared so suddenly that Turner involuntarily veered the car to the right, staring. Air made a small thunderclap of sound rushing in to fill the space he had occupied.

Turner looked at me in the rearview mirror.

“No,” I said wearily, and settled back in the seat to close my eyes. “Not like that. Not anymore.”

More was the pity.

In Albuquerque, Agent Turner let me off at my apartment, where I had left my motorcycle parked beneath a shaded awning. He was impatient to be gone, but Luis got out with me, walked me around a corner of the building, and turned to me. It was a cool evening, clear and dry, with the smell of sage and pine flavoring the air. The barely seen smudges of the mountain peaks rose up to the north, lifting part of the city out of its bowl. Overhead, stars sparkled cold in a vast, otherwise empty sky.

Beautiful and only lightly tamed, this place—like the man facing me, hair stirring just a bit in the breeze. Artificial lights glinted on his skin, shadows darkened his eyes, and he said, “You be careful. Remember what happened last time.”

Last time, Pearl had sent her forces after me on the way back from Sedona. She’d broken my leg. She’d almost killed me—and would have succeeded, if Luis hadn’t come to my rescue. As I thought about it, my still-healing arm twinged. The bones were fixed together, bonded and straight, but nerves were still repairing themselves.

I nodded without speaking. I was no longer sure how to speak to him; something had changed between us, something fundamental had shifted beneath our feet. I wasn’t sure if I had forced that change, or he had, or if it would have happened no matter what we did.

All I knew was that it felt . . . different. And it hurt to leave him.

Luis lifted his hand and touched the side of my face. The skin of his palm felt warm against my skin, and I closed my eyes in an involuntary spasm of delight. I sensed the power coursing in his veins, natural as the blood that ran with it.

“Take what you need,” he said. “I’m not sending you out there unprepared and underpowered.”

He didn’t know what he was asking. Not really. I pulled in a quick breath and opened my eyes again, meeting his.

“I could hurt you, doing this too quickly,” I said. “I don’t wish to do that.”

Luis laughed, but it was soft and humorless. He shook his head. “You aren’t going to hurt me any worse than anybody else has,” he said. “I didn’t grow up soft, chica. I took bullets before, you know. Knives. Took a hell of a beating when I was jumped into the gang. So just do it already, we’re burning starlight.”

Drawing power was usually a slower process, and I had almost always been careful to draw at levels that didn’t risk his comfort, much less his life. But Turner was waiting, and the clock on a child’s life was ticking, and we had no time for the niceties even if the FBI agent was inclined to allow us our leisure.

I slowly put my hand over Luis’s where it rested on my cheek, feeling the pulse under my fingers race faster.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I will try not to hurt you.”

And then I let loose the hunger inside of me. It was not so much a matter of taking from him, as allowing the barriers to drop; the void in me, the cold, hungry vacuum where once the life force of a Djinn had been, sucked power from him in a ravenous stream. Too much, too much . . . it felt astonishingly good to me, like being bathed in light, but I also felt the sudden stabbing pain of overloaded nerves. My pain, but also his.

Luis trembled, but he didn’t try to pull himself away from me. His eyes continued to focus on mine, dark and drowning, and I forgot how to breathe as he poured life from his body to mine. There was an intimacy to it that went beyond mere bodies, went into realms of spirit, of pure and perfect life.

It was so hard to pull away.

I finally sucked in a shaking gasp and slammed shut the barriers between us again. I hadn’t felt so powerful, so alive in a very long time, and it was so very hard to give that up. Even so, this rich, intense intoxication was only a fraction of what I’d been as a Djinn. I could drain a dozen like Luis, a hundred, without coming near that lost perfection.

That was exactly what Ashan had meant to do to me, in throwing me into human flesh. He didn’t need to torment me. He knew that every time I came up against the natural barriers, I would torture myself, thoroughly, with my hunger and possibilities.

It troubled me less than he’d planned, however. I could be tempted, but I was also, by nature, a practical sort of predator; draining a hundred Wardens would kill them all in the process, and even then, I would never again be what I had once been. It was easy to forget when I was fighting for survival, subsisting on barely enough energy to live; it was worse still when I had a taste of the power.

Luis was shaking, but he kept his hand on my face until I tightened my pale, thin fingers around his and pulled them away. His pulse was thundering now, and his face had gone starkly pale under its copper. He was not precisely gasping, but his breathing was more ragged, and more rapid, than I would have liked. I reached out to lay my hand flat against his chest, feeling the too-quick laboring of his heart.

“I’m okay,” he said before I could speak. He smiled, but I saw the pain underneath it. “Is that better for you now?”

I nodded, unwilling or perhaps unable to speak. My eyes were glowing, I knew it; I’d rarely been able to afford that sort of display, but it was raw nature, and I had no doubt that I looked . . . different just now, as I struggled to manage the power he had given me in such an intensive burst. I could see the change in his expression. I just could not decide what precisely it was that had created such an indescribable tension in his face . . . fear? Or desire? Something of both, perhaps.

He surprised me by saying, in a low, rough voice, “If we didn’t have someplace to be right now, I would take you inside and get down to business.”

I blinked. “I don’t understand.”

He took in a deep breath, then let it out, and finally, I recognized the waves of emotion coming off of him, resonating within me. They were just . . . unexpected.

“No,” he said. “Don’t suppose you would. You watch your back, Cassiel. I mean that.”

Our hands were still linked, fingers wound together in pure, primal need.

“And you,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. “I will know if you need me.” Immediately, I realized that there were several likely interpretations of that, and immediately amended it to, “Need me to help.”

He laughed. It was still soft, but this time, it was lightened with considerable humor. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. I’ll keep you on the psychic speed dial. What is that, pound 666?”

He raised my hand as if it was the most natural motion in the world, and for an instant I felt the softness of his lips burning against my skin. Then he let go, took a step back, and turned to walk back to Turner’s idling sedan.

I pressed my back to the rough, warm wall and breathed, breathed, breathed.

Then I went inside, recovered my helmet, and got on my motorcycle for the trip to Sedona.