Unseen

Chapter 1

FIRE IS A LIVING, malevolent thing. It eats, it breathes, it moves with fluid grace and eerie, destructive beauty.

I could still appreciate the astonishing power of it, even as my hair crisped at the ends and the heat seared across my fragile human skin. Flames poured like liquid down the walls of the office, rippling and twisting out onto the floor, devouring the furniture. Everything seemed trapped in its own frozen moment of destruction, as if the fire had become amber. I couldn’t focus my stinging eyes for more than a few seconds; everything seemed too bright, too hot, and in the next instant smoke billowed black and choking around me.

I fell to my knees and crawled, breathing oven-hot toxic fumes until my searching hand fell on something soft. Skin—a woman’s hand. It wasn’t moving. I grabbed hold and pulled her back toward me; her black suit had caught fire, and I batted the blaze out as coughing fits threatened to rip my lungs from my body.

The woman I had found was unconscious but still breathing shallowly. Smoke had made her face a grimy mask.

“Cass! Get your ass out now!” A raw, ragged shout pierced the roar of the fire, and I looked around to see a sheet of fire racing across the floor toward me. A sudden chemical blast of white foam snuffed it out. It was a temporary measure, but it gave me precious seconds to find the strength to move.

Luis Rocha, still holding the sputtering, empty extinguisher, stumbled into view out of the thick smoke. My Warden partner looked as if he’d been through a fierce battle—clothes torn and burned, skin singed. He’d lost part of his shoulder-length black hair to the flames. “Cass, come on—we’re losing it! Gotta go!”

I poured raw Earth power—thick, golden power that flowed like honey—over the woman I’d found, into her, and saw her breathing and heartbeat steady. I stood up and grabbed her around the waist. She was a small thing, and I was tall; even so, the weight of her draped over my shoulder caused me to stagger. The fire roared its defiance and ignited a chair only a few feet away; it burned fast, upholstery charring into black lace and revealing bones of springs and wood.

I stopped, momentarily overcome. Nothing looked good right now, and I couldn’t find the exit. You will die here, something told me. It sounded like the cold, dispassionate voice of Ashan, the leader of the Old Djinn—my brother, in a very real way; my king, in every way that mattered. Why do you do these things for them?

For humans, he meant. I was not born into flesh; being here in the mortal world was my choice, just as I’d chosen to run into this burning building alongside Luis.

I had my reasons for doing both of those foolish, potentially fatal things.

At least the part of me that was stubbornly Djinn, immortally powerful, saw it as foolishness. There were times—and this was one—when the human part was tempted to agree with it.

A blessedly cool draft of air fanned my face, and I gulped it in as I staggered blindly into an area of the building not yet fully involved. A glass door had shattered at the end of the hall, and the strong breeze flowing past me was drawn by the sucking pressure of the fire behind me. We had, at best, only moments before it would lash out with explosive force in a fireball, scorching everything it touched along the way.

Ahead of me Luis was shouting something as he headed for the doorway. I couldn’t answer. My lungs were choked with smoke and soot, and all I could do was cough, stagger, and brace myself against a black-smudged, too-warm wall. My eyes were watering and stinging, and I wanted to sit down against this wall, drowning in the cool, blowing air—but I knew that if I did, I’d be dead, and the woman I was trying to save along with me.

I felt a sudden wavering pause in the air flooding past me, and my skin prickled in instinctual alarm. It felt like the silence before a lightning strike, but I felt no weather-working in play. No, this was physics—physics of a different kind.

And then the fire exploded through the door behind me, crawling and leaping along the hallway’s ceiling and walls in thick, fiery tendrils. Hungry, and grabbing for its food.

“Cassiel!” Luis shouted, and plunged back toward me. Too late, of course; he couldn’t outrun that fire, any more than I could. I felt it with a kind of fatalistic calm: I was, indeed, going to die here, now, in this moment.

I was going to die a failure, trapped in human flesh, unable to prevent the disaster that was coming, or my own foolish end.

And it might have been so, except that a child walked calmly out of the hellish burning heart of that fire, through the doorway, and extended her hands toward me. She was a small, lovely girl with long, silky black hair and the caramel-colored skin of her uncle Luis. When I had first met Isabel, she’d been a laughing, happy child.

Now she was far too grown-up for her very young age—almost six. Her eyes had a depth and sadness that spoke of trauma, and as she extended her chubby little hands toward me she closed them into fists, and the fire that was racing toward me ... died.

It was as if there was some barrier over the doorway she had stepped through. The fire boiled and roared there, but couldn’t pass to reach the cooler air beyond. Even the breeze had ceased.

There was not a mark on Isabel. Not a singed hair, nor a single smudge of ash. Her pale blue T-shirt had a cheerful rainbow on it, vibrant as ever, and even her white sneakers were clean.

She said, very soberly, “We should go now, Cassie.” Isabel was the only person in the world I permitted to call me that. It was a reminder of happier days, and a happier Ibby. I continued to cough as she walked past me toward her uncle Luis. He shook his head and met my eyes briefly, and I read in his gaze how disturbed and worried he was by seeing her this way. There was nothing to be said, though. He took Ibby in his arms and carried her toward the broken glass door.

I followed, with my own unconscious burden.

Outside, the scene was a confusion of flashing lights, the harsh glow and roar of the fire, the squawk of radios and shouts of men. Fire trucks unrolled great white snakes of hoses, and men and women in heavy protective gear rushed toward the building. One took the woman from my shoulder and hurried her toward a waiting ambulance and team of paramedics.

I sank down to the grass, still coughing, and spat out black, vile-tasting mucus. I don’t know how much time passed—a minute, maybe two—before a paramedic knelt next to me and held up an oxygen mask. I sucked gratefully on the cool, sweet breath of life, feeling my head clear and my lungs ease. He handed me a packet of premoistened towelettes and gave me a thumbs-up motion, with eyebrows raised. I nodded. He moved on.

I scrubbed the damp fabric over my grimy face, and realized that my hands were trembling. I could have used Earth power, drawn from Luis, to clean myself off and start to heal the damage done to my lungs, but I chose not to do so; Luis, at the moment, needed his strength, and I was not seriously injured. My vanity could be satisfied with mere human cleaning methods for now.

A well-dressed man with a badge hung on a cord around his neck took a knee beside me. He wasn’t looking at me so much as at the burning building, and his expression was remote and focused. His credentials said his name was Guilder, and he was wearing a crisp black suit, white shirt, and businesslike blue tie.

“You’re Cassiel,” he said. “The Djinn.” He didn’t say it the way a Warden who’d grown up with the idea of supernatural genies locked in bottles would have; he pronounced the word carefully, awkwardly, like an entry in a foreign dictionary. “I’m Guilder. FBI.”

I nodded. I had expected the agents to descend on us quickly; I was simply surprised that he wasn’t one of many. I removed the mask (a little regretfully) and said, “You want to know how it happened.” My voice hardly sounded like my own; my vocal cords were strained, and had the husky growl of a longtime smoker. “We warned you.”

“I’ve been briefed already about your warnings,” he said, still watching the blaze as the firefighters began to train their hoses on it. “You really think a child caused all this?”

“Not just any child,” I said. “A child who can control fire and bend it to his will. We warned you not to keep any of them here. You’re not equipped to handle them.”

The children had been rescued—or abducted, depending on which side you might be on—from camps across the United States run by the Church of the New World, a fringe organization that had recently twisted itself in dangerous new directions: either one that abducted children with blossoming Warden powers over Earth, Fire, and Weather, or subverted the parents to believe that the Church was the only possible way to protect their young ones. Part of the Church’s teaching was that the Warden organization, the official gathering of those gifted with these powers, intended harm to the children. I was the first to admit that the Wardens were not perfect, but I knew they meant the best, especially for the talented innocent.

The Church, on the other hand, taught that the Wardens were ruthless, cruel mutilators who would rip the talent away from the children, leaving them psychic cripples at best, or dead at worst. That could happen, of course, if a child manifested a talent that was dangerous to everyone else, and had to be stopped. It was rare, but possible. The Wardens didn’t always err on the side of mercy.

The Church preached it as an everyday occurrence, as a plan. And many people had believed, and given the Church children to train—or the Church had, in some cases, abducted those it thought were the most valuable, the most vital, to its cause.

Such as Isabel.

Those children—the few we had managed to free from the Church compounds across the country—were dangerously gifted, trained too early, burdened with power that they were not equipped, either emotionally or physically, to handle.

I had warned the FBI not to keep the children here, in their offices. At the minimum, Wardens should have been kept on duty to ensure that the children didn’t panic and use their abilities irresponsibly.

As one of them clearly had.

Guilder didn’t argue the point. “We thought we knew the risks,” he said. “We underestimated the situation.”

In earlier months I would no doubt have informed him just how badly they’d miscalculated, but I had learned, at great cost, when to let a subject go, for politeness’ sake. Tact was not something for which I had a natural gift. “How many casualties have you sustained?” I asked.

“Zero, since you got Agent Littleton out.” There was a slight warming in his tone, and he glanced at me, finally. “Thanks for that.”

I nodded and coughed a little more, but the pressure in my lungs had eased. I was beginning to feel a monumental wave of exhaustion building, and knew I’d have to rest soon, but in the meantime there was a pleasant feeling of warmth and relaxation. Even my burns stung only lightly.

Impossible, in my state, to miss the surge of feeling that had come from the FBI agent—a complicated mix of gratitude, worry, and ... love. Not for me, of course, and it was rare that I could feel emotions from anyone save Luis, but it appeared that Agent Guilder had at least a latent Earth-based ability, something too mild to be called a true power.

The love was not for me. It was for the agent I had saved. Agent Littleton.

I met his gaze and said, “Is there not a regulation against agents becoming ... close?” So many euphemisms, in human speech. But the imprecision helped, I’d found; I didn’t know his relationship with the other agent, but I sensed its depth. And secrecy.

He hadn’t expected that question at all, and I caught the surprise and discomfort in his expression, despite the reserve that he had surely learned as a law enforcement professional. He just as quickly smoothed it away. “No code against being happy a coworker survived,” he said. “I’m pretty sure there isn’t. I read the rule books.”

That made me smile, as he no doubt intended. “I’m sure you’re correct,” I said. “The children are not harmed?”

He shook his head. “The rest of the kids are all okay. The only one unaccounted for is the boy who kicked off the fire, and he took off once he got the whole thing revved up to Mach Three; this was basically a big, fiery distraction to cover his escape. Your niece and another boy protected the other kids and as many of the agents as they could.”

“She’s not my niece,” I said. It was an automatic response, but I almost immediately regretted saying it. I cleared my throat and tried again. “She is the niece of my partner, Luis Rocha. Her name is Isabel.”

“Hmm. She calls you Aunt Cassie.”

“I know.” I looked away from him toward the fire. “She was recently orphaned. It’s been—difficult for her.”

“From what I’ve heard, it’s been difficult for all of these kids,” Guilder said, and finally rose to a standing position, still looking down at me. “We’re going to need a statement about what happened inside. Not tonight, though. Tomorrow. We’ll call you and Mr. Rocha in for that.”

“You’ll have offices again so soon?” I asked. He smiled. It was a deep, charming sort of smile, a professional weapon he wielded with surgical accuracy.

“That’s why God made laptops,” he said. “And cell phones. Not to mention credit cards.”

He nodded and walked away toward the ambulance, where he bent over the agent I’d pulled from the fire. She looked very small on the gurney, and he was quite tall, bending over her. I was certain he did not intend to reveal what his body language so clearly communicated.

It was probably a good thing for him that Agent Littleton was unconscious. If she returned his affection, it would be awkward for them both; if not, it would be heartbreaking.

My attention drifted from Agent Guilder to Luis Rocha, who was sitting on the curb beside Isabel, with his arm around the child. He looked tired and smoke-stained and singed around the edges, but the smile on his face was genuine and very lovely. The smile was for Ibby, but as he looked at me, the smile ... stayed. If anything, it grew warmer.

I looked away, suddenly unsure what an appropriate social response might be. The feelings that ripped through me were too jagged and confusing to sort out now, and the exhaustion wave was cresting inside me, drowning me in a need to lay my head down and rest. He felt that, of course; it was almost impossible for me to hide that sort of exhaustion from Luis, as closely as we were connected. He hugged Ibby and stood up, with her hand in his. The light from the fire caught and flickered on his skin, especially his bared arms, where flame tattoos twisted in skillfully inked patterns.

I watched the tattoos flex and move as he walked closer. It was easier than looking into his face.

“You’re tired,” he said, and it wasn’t a question. “I’m taking you home, Cass.”

I nodded, because it sounded like a very acceptable idea. Isabel and I were almost on eye level, since I was sitting down, and when I glanced at her I saw she was watching me with wide, luminous eyes. I couldn’t read a thing from her expression, and her emotions were closely concealed within as well.

Until she threw her arms around my neck and hugged me.

I embraced her in return and put her on my lap. “Hush,” I whispered, even though she was making no sound at all. “Everyone’s all right. Even us.”

“I’m sorry,” Ibby said. “I tried—He was so mad, Cassie. I couldn’t make him stop. He thinks you want to hurt us. Hurt him. I just couldn’t make him understand.”

“Nor should you have to,” I said. “It was brave of you to try, little one. And to get the others to safety.”

She shrugged that off. “It’s only fire,” she said. “That’s easy.”

“For you. Not so for others.” I nodded toward the firefighters and their hoses. “They risk their lives against fire daily, without a scrap of power to protect them. Don’t underestimate how dangerous your element can be, Ibby. Even to you, if you lose control.”

She nodded, but not in a way that meant she really understood. I wondered when she’d learned to be so diplomatic; it wasn’t a child’s usual response. I supposed that part of the training—no, the abuse—she’d undergone had taught her how to avoid conflict. It was sad, because Ibby had been such a forthright girl when I’d first met her.

I sighed. “Yes, I believe it’s time to go home.” I kissed Ibby’s clean, sweet-smelling hair, all too aware that I reeked of smoke, singed cloth, and very human sweat.

Luis lifted Ibby off my lap and offered me his hand. I took it, and felt an immediate surge of fresh energy cascade into my body. “Stop,” I said. “You need—”

“Don’t tell me what I need, chica,” Luis said. “I know, believe me, and it involves a beer, a shower, and a bed, in that order. But anyway, this will keep us both going a while longer.”

Luis’s truck was parked a few blocks down—a big, black, shiny thing, with painted-on flames down the sides. Still flawless, even after all the damage the two of us had heaped on it—or else it was a new replacement. I wasn’t sure. Likely the latter, I decided, since the interior smelled and felt fresh. He hadn’t told me, and I hadn’t bothered to ask.

My motorcycle, a new Victory Vision in smoky silver, was parked just a little distance away. Luis, without a word to me, slid a ramp down from the tailgate of the truck and walked the bike up into the bed, carefully laying it down on a padded blanket. When he got into the cab with Ibby and me, he caught my stare and shrugged. “What?” he asked. “You’d just get up in the middle of the night and come back for it anyway. Better do it now so you don’t wander around scaring people at four in the morning.”

He was right about that. I loved my motorcycle with a devotion I reserved for only a few things, and I knew I wouldn’t rest easy unless I’d made sure it was taken safely with me. Having successfully second-guessed me, Luis was almost grinning. I schooled my face to its customary mask of indifference, and wiped my hands again with a moist cloth from the package sitting on the dashboard. My pale skin still looked ashen with grime. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get clean.

Luis started the truck, and the engine caught with a deep rumble. Air-conditioning blasted out of the vents and bathed me in a soothing chill, and I sighed in pleasure. Instead of putting the truck into gear, Luis reached for the cloth in my hand. “You missed a spot,” he said, and gently wiped my face with the moist fabric. It felt ... unexpectedly intimate. I blinked, and found myself smiling, just the smallest amount. He stared at me for a few long seconds, then handed the cloth back. “That’s better.”

“Yes,” I said. “Better.”

I was acutely aware of him—his warmth, his strength, his power—all the way home.

I lived in an apartment—a spare, empty place with only a few sticks of furniture and the occasional mistaken gifts people had given me to try to “warm it up.” I didn’t understand the need to stamp a personality on a set of rooms that was, essentially, temporary. It was shelter, and a place to rest. A storage unit with a bed and some hanging space for clothing.

For instance: I had no idea why I would need a ceramic statue of an angel (a gift from a well-meaning neighbor who’d been moving away), but Luis had said it was polite to accept. It was, in fact, the only thing I possessed that was of no practical use, which made it seem awkward and singularly strange. I thought often of throwing it away, but the more I stared at the thing’s serene porcelain face, the more irritated I became with it. Becoming human, I’d discovered, seemed to come with a thousand invisible strings tugging at you, and each and every one of them conferred an obligation, and unexpected benefits.

Luis didn’t take me back to my apartment after all, so I didn’t have to gaze at the blank-eyed angel and wonder how long the grace period would be before I could safely dispose of it.

Instead, Luis took me home—to his home. This home had once belonged to his brother Manny Rocha, my first Warden partner, and in contrast to the awkward sterility of my apartment, it felt ... warm. Permanent, and saturated with the loving life of those who’d inhabited it. Manny’s and Angela’s deaths had stained it, but Luis was slowly repairing that psychic damage, and the house now felt ... welcoming. Even to me, even with the guilt that always struck me when faced with the reality of Manny’s and Angela’s absence from the world.

“Yo, Ib,” Luis said as we entered the front door. “You want some dinner?”

“No, thank you,” she said, primly polite. “I’m tired. I just want to sleep.”

“Right there with you, kiddo.” He kissed the top of her head. “You need me to tuck you in?”

“I don’t need tucking in, Tío,” she said. “I’m almost grown-up.” His smile faded, and I saw the concern in his eyes as she walked away.

It wasn’t, I understood now, the correct developmental behavior for a child of Isabel’s age. And yet it didn’t seem there was any way to undo what had been done to her, body and soul, during that time after she’d been taken from us. We still didn’t know all that had happened; Ibby was reluctant to talk about it, and Luis wanted to respect her wishes.

But it worried us both, deeply, that she seemed to have aged so quickly.

She was almost to her bedroom door when she spun around and ran back to Luis, threw herself into his arms, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Good night, Tío,” she said, and then wiggled free to run to me and receive a hug, though I could tell that she did it more from duty than enthusiasm. “Good night, Cassie.”

“Sweet dreams,” I said, which was something I had heard Ibby’s mother, Angela, say to her once. I missed Angela. She would have known what to say, what to do ... but it appeared I had not done so badly, because Ibby smiled and kissed me on the cheek, too.

Then she ran down the hall, suddenly acting her age, and shut her bedroom door with a slam. Luis winced and shook his head. “Kids,” he said. “They don’t know how to shut a door without breaking the hinges, but I guess I shouldn’t complain; at least she’s not breaking my heart so much as she was. So. Food?”

“No.”

“Ah. Beer, then?”

“Yes.”

He disappeared into the kitchen and came back with two frosted bottles, tops already removed. He handed me one and clinked the glass. “Cheers,” he said, and took a deep, thirsty gulp. His eyes closed in almost indecent pleasure. “Ah, damn, that’s good. I’ve been thinking about that all night.”

It was good, chasing away the ashy taste from my mouth and burning bright and cold down to my stomach. I sighed and sat down on the couch, only belatedly thinking of the state of my clothing and its effect on his furniture. But Luis motioned me to stay seated, and sank into place next to me. “I’ll flip you for the shower,” he said. I had a mental image of him tossing me head over heels, and couldn’t imagine why that would be any kind of decision-making choice. He must have seen my confusion, because he laughed and clarified. “A coin. Two sides, heads and tails. Understand?”

“Yes,” I said. I took another long, considering drink of my beer. “But there are two baths in this house.”

“Yeah, there are,” he said. “It was kind of a figure of speech, but anyway, the hot water heater’s crap. One shower at a time or we both shower cold.”

“Oh.” I considered that. I had experienced cold indoor showers before; it was surprisingly less pleasant than being caught in the rain. Perhaps it was the fact that one deliberately chose it. “Then I will let you go first.”

“Oh?” He was draining his bottle quickly, and cut a sideways glance toward me. “Thanks.” He didn’t sound especially grateful. I wondered what subtext I had missed in the conversation. Again. It was especially frustrating when I was tired and felt so grubby. I would have been glad to go first, and the fact that I had offered so selflessly seemed, to me, to be worth some gratitude on his part.

And yet, when his gaze lingered on me, I felt all that melt away. Luis and I had been ... close ... for some time, but never close, in the euphemistic way humans sometimes used the word. When he gave me that kind of considering look, it felt unexpectedly intimate, as if a door had opened between us. I wasn’t under any illusions that it was a change in our relationship; one of us always slammed the door shut at some point. My background didn’t lend itself toward absolute trust and honesty, and his—well, I suspected his didn’t, either.

And still he watched me. I stared back, my eyebrows slowly climbing, and finally said, “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” he said, and tilted his bottle up for the last of the beer.

“Really.” I sipped mine. I was less than half finished, but the beer combined with the exhaustion from the effort made me feel light-headed, in a pleasantly drifting sort of way. “That’s odd. It looked as if you had something on your mind.”

“Don’t you think I know when I’m thinking of something?”

“I would assume you would.”

“And you think I would tell you all about it.”

Ah. There was the interesting point. “Why wouldn’t you?” I asked. “Unless you think I am thinking something entirely different.”

“Cass ...” He sighed. “Damn, girl, I never know which way to jump with you. When it’s all action and danger, we’re synced like a sound track; when it’s just you and me, I never know what you’re thinking, or what you’re feeling, if you’re feeling anything. I look at you and you just ...”

“Just what?”

He shrugged, frowning. “You just reflect,” he said. “Like steel.”

That surprised me, and it hurt a little. “I am not steel,” I said. “I am human. Blood and bone and muscle, heart and feeling and vulnerability. Don’t I show that?”

“Not even a little. Not here.” He sounded almost apologetic about it. “Probably not your fault, you know. You’ve adapted so well to everything else, it’s not surprising you can’t shed that last little bit of Djinn.”

I drank a quick, cold mouthful. “I was a Djinn for aeons. I’ve been a human for months. Maybe you’re judging me a little harshly, Luis.”

“Oh, yeah, I know. I see your point. It just doesn’t make it any easier to get a vibe off of you, that’s all.”

“What vibe are you trying to feel?”

That made him look away at the empty beer bottle in his hands, which he turned slowly, finding something intensely interesting in the label. “Just want to make sure you’re okay, that’s all. And you get all closed up.”

He was lying. I was expert enough in human feelings to feel that, at least. And suddenly I understood what it was he was seeking—what it was that I’d been holding back, hiding behind my Djinn mask. I had not lied. I was human, and vulnerable, but my instincts were never to disclose that soft, unprotected side to anyone. Not even to Luis, who most needed to see it.

And the thought of letting down that wall, of exposing my true feelings to him ... that was terrifying, in the same way that it would be to stand on the fragile edge of a cliff with a killing drop below. If what the humans said was correct, I would float, not fall. But all my instincts went against it.

I reached over and touched my fingertips to his cheek. It felt rough against my skin, stubbled with a day’s growth of beard, and the sensation roused all kinds of odd feelings inside me—instinctive feelings, nothing summoned by my conscious mind. Curiously powerful rushes of chemicals in my bloodstream that overrode, for the moment, all that caution and hesitation.

He looked over at me, startled. The contrast of my pale fingers resting against his dark bronze skin made my heart run faster. I held his gaze this time, and the wall I’d put up weakened, melted, and was gone. “Now can you see?” I asked him very quietly. “There’s much between us, good and bad, but can you see past all that, to what I feel?”

He put the bottle down. I mirrored him, without stopping the slow caress of my fingers across his cheek, down the warm, damp column of his neck, the harsh rasp on his chin, the startlingly soft skin of his lips. They parted under my fingers, cool from the beer. “Hey, Cass?” he asked, and his voice had taken on shadows, weight, deeper registers. “Are you sure you know what the hell you’re doing?”

“No,” I said, with complete honesty. “I trust you to tell me when I do it wrong.”

“Jesus,” he whispered, with an odd expression of utter concentration. “Seriously. You know what you’re not exactly talking about, here? Because I’m not sure you do.”

I stared straight into his rich brown eyes and said, “I want to make love with you. Is that not what you want, as well?”

“Oh,” he said, after a second’s stunned silence. “I guess you do know what you weren’t talking about. Sorry. Just didn’t want to get that wrong, and madre, Cass, I still don’t know if you—”

I stood, turned, and straddled his lap as he sat on the couch, kneeling on the cushions to either side. At that distance, there was no possibility of barriers or mistakes for either of us. And I kissed him.

There was something so astonishingly sweet to the taste of him, sweet and spicy together, heady and overwhelming and powerful in ways that I could only dimly grasp. Kissing him seemed to temporarily still a howling hunger inside me, but it only moved to a different place to set up new, strange aches. While our lips were sliding together, damp and striving, I couldn’t feel the pressure of the world around us, the weight of all that responsibility and fate and desperation.

All I felt was light, and silence, and a trembling, silvery sliver of breathless anticipation.

I pulled back just far enough to breathe into his open mouth, “Is that clear enough?”

“Claro,” he whispered back. He put a finger to my lips and said, “We can’t do this here, querida. Ibby. Come with me.”

I nodded, and followed him to the bathroom—not the one in the hall, which was close to Ibby’s room, but the one in the master bedroom. He closed the door after me and turned the lock, as I stripped away my white leather jacket. It would need repairs later, a simple enough matter when I had energy to spare, but for now it simply looked grubby and battered. I began to unbutton the soft pink shirt beneath, but Luis reached out and stilled my fingers. “No,” he said. “Wait. I know you already made it pretty clear, but—I just want to put it out there. You sure you want to do this? All the way?”

“I already said that I did.”

“Cass—” He shook his head. “Okay. Then slow the hell down, will you? It ain’t a race to the finish line.”

He took his time at it, slowly slipping each button through its anchoring hole, and tracing warm fingers down over the revealed pale flesh. Three buttons down he uncovered the pale pink of the satin bra I wore, and I felt his heartbeat move just a bit faster. Mine was well ahead of his, heating my flesh to warm ivory, pounding in my temples and veins, pooling heat like sunlight into the lower part of my body. Preparing me, I realized.

He slipped the blouse from my shoulders, and I shivered, though the air in the bedroom was warm enough. The shivers intensified as he trailed his fingertips over my bare skin. He bent very close and put his lips to my ear. “Turn around,” he murmured. I did, not moving any farther away from his body than the movement required. He unhooked the clasp of my bra and slipped the silky straps down my arms. The fragile thing fell to the floor, next to my shirt. Then he reached around my waist and unsnapped the leather pants, then unzipped them and slid them slowly down my bare legs. I found myself leaning back against him, mesmerized by the simple, catastrophic explosions of feeling in my body as he slipped his hand inside the thin underwear ...

I gasped and bit my lip as an entirely new sensation fired through me, and found myself pressing against his fingers. A sound escaped me, completely beyond my control. I had no idea what was guiding me, but it must have been something coded deep into the human form. I’d always thought that Djinn who grew fond of wearing skin were somehow flawed, but now—now I understood. There were delights in a Djinn’s natural form, of course, but nothing quite so ... intense.

“Easy, girl. We’ve got a long way to go,” Luis said, still in that low murmur that somehow only intensified the pleasure I was taking from his touch. “Let’s get these off of you first.”

He pulled his hand away, which made me almost cry out in protest, and slipped the underwear down my legs. I realized that I was naked, but I didn’t feel exposed or vulnerable. Quite the opposite. I felt ... powerful. Clothed in trust.

I turned to face Luis, breathing hard, and found that he was still dressed. I helped him pull his charred, ragged shirt over his head, and before it hit the carpet I had my hands on him. I’d seen him without his shirt before, but that had been like looking through an obscuring filter. Now, in this moment, I saw how beautiful he really was. The light and shadow of his muscles as they tensed and relaxed; the smooth, velvety skin, the deeper brown of his tightened nipples. The dark hair that drew a line straight down beneath his waistband, and tickled my fingers as I unfastened the riveted button. It yielded with a soft snap, and I unzipped his pants and hesitated, not sure what he wanted of me. Luis gave me no signals. He watched me with intense, opaque brown eyes. I could feel the emotions roiling inside of him, and when I looked at him in Oversight, overlaying the aetheric world native to the Djinn with that of the human reality, I saw him glowing in incandescent, intense colors—colors of passion, of need, of life itself. Breathtaking, and overwhelming.

I looked into his eyes as I carefully slid his pants down his legs and left him in his underwear—tight, defining a growing tribute to our attraction. Then I took a deep breath and pulled those down as well.

Then, with nothing between us, and before I could allow any sensible objections to overcome me, I stepped forward, pressed my body against his, and kissed him.

Power flowed out in a torrent from him at that first touch of our lips, thick as melted amber, drenched with the essence of all living things, the slow pulse beat of Mother Earth herself. I felt my skin scrubbed clean, and my hair blew back in an invisible wind. I felt ... reborn. New. Perfect.

His lips warmed to fever heat against mine, damp and urgent and sweet to taste, and I shuddered against him as his hands traveled down my spine to the small of my back, then caressed the swell of my hips. His lips parted, and I felt the soft stroke of his tongue against mine. My blood felt on fire now, and my heart pounded hard. I didn’t know how much of what I felt came from his use of Earth power, and I didn’t care. It was intense and beautiful and utterly involving.

I couldn’t believe I had avoided it for so long, being daily in his company. I’d yearned for it, and yet I hadn’t even known why.

An odd sensation—the areas of the flame tattoos on his arms felt different. The flame tattoos seemed warmer, as if the dark borders banked in actual fire instead of only ink.

Luis broke off the kiss and buried his face in the hollow of my neck, breathing hard. His breath pistoned hot against my skin and fluttered my pale hair. “Slow down,” he finally said. “You’re going to get me off too soon. Relax. I told you, it’s not a race.”

“Then what is it?” I asked. “Because my body seems to want to rush to the finish.”

He laughed. “Stop feeding back my energy and I’ll show you. Shower first, though.”

“We’re clean.” Thanks to that initial burst of power from him, which had scrubbed our skin and hair and left us deliciously fresh.

“That’s not why we take the shower,” he said. “You trust me?”

“Yes.” I always had, at a very deep level. This was not different ... and yet, it was. This was a physical kind of trust that I found hard to imagine outside of this moment, and yet here and now it seemed perfectly inevitable, and perfectly right. “Of course I do.”

He slipped his hand down to grip mine. “Then come on. Get wet with me, girl.”

Somehow, that phrase had connotations I had never really considered ... ones shadowy and exciting, a sudden burst of spice on the tongue. It made my breath quicken, and my pulse beat faster.

I allowed Luis to pull me along to the bathroom. That door, too, he shut behind us, and locked with a quick snap of his wrist. He sensed me watching him, and raised his brows. “Only so Ibby—look, I don’t want you to think I’m trying to push you into anything. Is that what you think? Because you can stop this anytime you want.”

I smiled. “Do you believe you could force me to do this if I didn’t want it?”

“Ah, good point. You’d hurt me so bad.”

“At the very least,” I said, and put my pale hands on his darker shoulders. “And I hope I am not driving you to do anything beyond what you wish.”

He laughed. “Chica, you don’t know guys very well.” He took a second to sweep his gaze down my body, and then let out a slow breath. “Their loss, too. You are so beautiful.” He moved his focus back to my focus. “You don’t believe that, though, do you?”

I didn’t, in truth; to me human beauty was a very different thing—a thing of weakness, of vanity, of misdirected goals. I was strong, tall, perfectly serviceable in form, but I had never felt any need to be beautiful.

Now, suddenly, I did. For him, I did.

“I believe you believe it,” I said in a very low voice, and kissed him again. This time, I kept myself from reaching out to the core of his power, and this was merely flesh, warming and responding, perfect and natural. He backed me against the wall, and I gasped at the cold lick of tile on my skin, but the mild sting was quickly forgotten in the blur of the moment. Luis broke away to lean into the shower and turn on the controls, and as the water began to spray he pulled out towels from a cabinet and put them at the ready. In a moment steam was billowing inside the shower’s glass cubicle, and I saw moisture beading on my skin.

We stepped under the hot spray together, sealed so close together the water had a difficult time finding entrance between our bodies. The sensations overlapped, melted, blurred into a blood-warm, pulsing tide. I couldn’t distinguish between the heat of his hands, and the spray of the equally hot water. It was like being caressed everywhere, all at once, and as Luis’s fingers slipped again between my legs I put my arms around his neck for support.

What he was doing to me sparked miniature explosions inside of me, tremors that signaled something much, much greater on the approach. I found myself arching against his body, head back, lip caught between my teeth. That seemed to please him as much as it did me, a mysterious alchemy of feelings that I had never truly imagined was possible among humans. He didn’t speak. The water pounded down on us, hot as blood, and at last, at last, he lifted me by the waist, strong arms flexing and shedding water in bright silver streams, and braced my back against the warm, damp tile wall.

“Ready?” he asked me. I didn’t know what he was asking, but I nodded. I knew in principle, of course, but knowing and feeling were proving to be completely different things. “I’ll go slow.”

I had expected pleasure, not a searing, startling flash of razor-edged pain, and cried out more in panic than delight, putting my hands flat against his chest in protest. Luis froze, shocked, and held himself very still as I regulated my breathing again. In the next instant the pain wasn’t as great, but the surprise remained. I felt betrayed by my body, which had led me to suppose this would be nothing but sweet sensation.

Luis seemed just as astonished. After a few long seconds, he said, “Jesus, Cass, you didn’t tell me you were a virgin. I didn’t think ...” He pulled in a deep breath, and I saw he was angry at himself. “Stupid. Of course you’re a virgin. You came straight into human flesh—you haven’t been with anybody—”

He was right. I hadn’t been in this compromising, exceptionally intimate and vulnerable position with anyone else since my rebirth in human skin. I was, in many ways, more virginal than any human woman or girl, and yet I felt—not at all ignorant or unready.

Just betrayed by my own biology.

“It’s all right,” I said, and kept my voice low and steady, staring into Luis’s warm, cinnamon-colored eyes. “I’m all right.”

“No, I hurt you. I didn’t mean—”

I wrapped my legs around his waist and slowly, inexorably pulled him closer. Farther into my body, until we were completely joined. Then I fitted my hands around his face and smiled. “Since taking human form, I’ve had a great deal of pain,” I said. “That was a ... momentary discomfort. It’s done. Now help me forget it.”

He made a groaning sound low in his throat and dropped his head forward, into the warm space between my shoulder and neck. I felt his legs trembling, and then, by slow, gentle increments, he began to move.

“Tell me if I—” He was, even now, struggling to be gentle with me. With me, a being so old and powerful that even fellow Djinn had always treated me with caution. It made me laugh, and it made me warm with sweetness toward him. I solved his hesitancy by showing him my own urgent need, a furious bonfire of lust and heat, passion and delight.

No one had ever described what it felt like, to be consumed in that fire together, in an all-consuming, mind-destroying blur of hands and mouths, thrusts and silky caresses.

There were no words, and no real equivalent in the Djinn world. It was a humbling realization, one that made me understand, finally, why so many of my kind found solace in human form.

The world broke apart into sounds, and lights, and colors, frantic racing hearts and sweating skin, and then a slow, featherlight spiraling descent from an aetheric height I hadn’t known humans could scale. When Luis finally let me slip away, we stayed in the sheltering heat of the pounding water until it turned cool on our skin.

He shut it off, and we looked at each through the fog of steam still in the air.

Luis smiled. It was a beautiful, unguarded expression, and I saw in that moment that he truly had loved me for some time now—months, perhaps. I felt the same tide of emotion inside my own body, and felt a similar wild, uncontrolled smile bend my lips. I ached in odd places, felt strangely warm in others, and a lassitude had settled in that made me want to curl up on the damp tile floor and sleep. All that stopped me was the knowledge that there was a warm, waiting bed just a few steps away.

Luis dried us both with a burst of power, and I followed him to the wide, clean bed, draped in dark red silk, that was his place of rest. I’d never touched it before, but now I sank without hesitation onto the soft mattress, beneath the weight of the covers, and then burrowed through the cool sheets to meet him in the middle. We were both still warm, and a little damp, and our lips met in slow, dreamlike kisses as we twined together, again.

Luis eventually chuckled, a rumble deep in his chest, and I pulled back to regard him questioningly.

“I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he said. “You know?”

“I’m fairly certain our shoes—”

“No, I mean we get interrupted a lot by people trying to kill the hell out of us. Seems like every time we get anywhere near doing this, someone comes along and tries to ruin our good time.” He looked around. “Nothing yet. I think that might be a good sign.”

I kissed him again, savoring the sweet spice of his mouth. “Yes,” I agreed. “I think it’s a very good sign.”

Nothing disturbed us for hours, and hours, except when we fell asleep at last curled together in delicious, delirious exhaustion.