Didn’t we?

  Luis was readying a counterattack, but I hesitated. Something . . . something was not right.

  “Wait!” I snapped, as Luis began to strip the rocks and sand from the rushing wind. The theory was good; the wind itself would do damage, but not as much as the hurtling debris. But there was a sense to this that wasn’t right.

  “What?” Luis threw me a wild look. Another gust slammed into the truck, this one head-on, and the impact was vicious. Cracks formed in the windshield. “Wait for what? They’ll pound us into scrap!”

  I didn’t bother to reply. I was busy. Instead of sending power out, I gathered it in, close around us, an armored shield within the cab of the truck. Let the metal and glass take the damage for now; I was waiting.

  It was a brilliantly focused attack, so tightly wrapped that it punched through my shields like a laser through butter. Aimed not at me, but at Luis.

  I lunged forward as he gasped and collapsed forward against the steering wheel. His chest was heaving, his face going dirty-pale.

  I had a flash of the singing snap of Manny’s bright presence leaving the world, leaving me, and of the exploded meat of his chest. That had been a bullet.

  This was pure power, a fist around Luis’s struggling, pounding heart. Squeezing.

  They were trying to crush the life out of him, and I would fail again, lose again.

  No. I would not.

  I batted away the attack with brute force, giving Luis a few precious seconds of recovery time, before it came back, fast as a striking snake. It was almost invisible on the aetheric, a shifting mass of color that blended into the general storm of chaos. Difficult to anticipate.

  Difficult to stop.

  I couldn’t allow them to get a hold on him. Seconds counted in this, and the damage could be mortal, beyond my ability to repair—I didn’t know enough about the human body, didn’t have the fine surgical instincts of an Earth Warden. My healing of the boy had been lucky, and I’d had no risks; this time, failure would be utter destruction.

  I threw myself into the aetheric and put myself in the way of the attack. Better me. He can heal me after.

  That seemed logical enough, until the attack actually struck me full force.

  In the mortal world, I gasped and folded, hands pressed to my chest. The pain was extreme, the panic even worse. Trying to form an effective shield under the assault was near useless; my instincts, my human instincts for breath and survival, overrode my logic, made me struggle madly like an animal in a trap.

  I felt Luis’s hands on me, holding me. “Cassiel!”

  I would not fail. I could not allow it. Weakness was a human trait; I was Djinn. . . .

  I screamed, and the world shattered into knives of agony. Death. This is death.

  Shadows on the aetheric, and a blazing white outline of a human form in front of me, dazzling my eyes.

  Luis. He’d had a chance to prepare himself, while I’d taken the brunt of the attack, and this time, he not only gave me relief from the pain; he struck back, hammering away the assault. He’d done something to shield himself; his heart glowed a brilliant red on the aetheric, and as I watched, the tint spread through his ghostly form, tracing organs, veins, arteries. It tinted his aura into spectrums that reminded me of the hot surface of the sun.

  He was beautiful. And as I collapsed, shaking and defeated, he stood against them.

  Human, and beautiful.

  The attack ended not with an explosion, but with a whimper, fading away into mutters and fitful gusts, rattles of pebbles on scarred metal, a final angry spurt of dust.

  Silence.

  Luis was whispering under his breath, a long monologue in Spanish that I thought was a string of prayers and curses, followed by more prayers. He was shaking, and somehow I was pressed against him, his arms enfolding me.

  Breathe. My lungs ached with the effort, but I forced them to work. Bright sparks of pain leapt through my body, the afterimages of what our attackers had done to us, and I knew I was trembling as much as Luis.

  “Hey.” His voice was low and rough. “You still with me?”

  I nodded, unable to speak. My body was sticky with sweat, my hands cold as if they’d been plunged into wet snow. When I swallowed, I tasted bitter salt and blood. I waited for him to release me, but Luis didn’t seem inclined to let go. There was something comforting about the warmth of his chest against me, the strength of his arms holding me.

  I did not struggle free.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “I couldn’t—”

  He laughed softly, and his breath brushed my ear. It woke new shivers, pleasurable ones. “You got in the way and gave me time to get it together. You saved my damn life, chica. What are you sorry for?”

  Not doing it well enough, I supposed. There seemed no logic to that, but there it was, immutable and inexplicable. “I’m sorry about your truck,” I said instead.

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “Damn. Me too. So—did we learn anything from that?”

  “They’re strong.”

  “We knew that already.”

  “They’re vicious.”

  “Knew that too.”

  I looked up into his face. “They’re in Colorado.”

  “Oh.” His arms tightened around me, and his dark c, ant> eyes widened. So did his smile. “Didn’t know that.”

  Chapter 9

  I HAD TRACKED the attacker through the aetheric across New Mexico, into mountains to the north. I had lost the trail somewhere near the border, according to the map. I was considering this as we crossed the Albuquerque city limits, but there were no answers to be found on the flimsy paper, which flapped in the wind coming from the shattered passenger’s window, and I folded it carefully and put it away.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “First thing, I’m dropping the truck off at the body shop,” Luis said. “Then I’m crashing for about two hours.” He paused for a moment, and his voice changed timbre. “I have to go to the funeral home at ten.”

  Funeral home. An odd combination of words. Homes were for the living, and for a moment I thought about the house—no longer a home—where Manny and Angela and Isabel had lived. Someone else would make it a home, in time, but for now it was a reminder, an empty shell filled with inert, abandoned things.

  A place I had once felt happy.

  “Should I go with you?” I asked. That earned me another glance, and a moment of silence. “If I shouldn’t—”

  “It’s not that you shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s that we have to get you cleared by the Wardens and the cops before you start showing your hot pink head around town. Know what I mean?”

  I did. “How do we do that?”

  “I’m working on it. You’re going to have to sit down with a couple of representatives from the Wardens, eventually, but I heard yesterday that some odd things turned up at Scott’s apartment, and the Wardens are looking at that differently.”

  “And Molly Magruder?”

  Luis shrugged. “That one’s a little tougher. I don’t know yet, but they said they’ve got some other leads on that, too. Anyway. I should find you a hotel; you dig in and wait for a while.”

  “I could disguise myself,” I said.

  “Yeah, you’ve done a great job so far. Pink hair?”

  “No one looks at my face.” I thought I’d done a good job. It stung me that he disagreed. “I don’t like to hide away.”

  “Nobody likes it, but it’s the smart thing to do,” he said. He pulled the truck off the road into the parking lot of a small, cleanly kept motel coated in pink adobe. “I’ll get your bike out of the back, but promise me you won’t go anywhere.”

  I looked at him, said nothing, and got out of the truck. Luis shook his head and went around to the bed of the truck to wrestle the Victory down the ramp, while I entered the motel office to use my credit card to buy a room. It was a new experience for me, but not unpleasant; the clerk was efficient and impersonal, and the process short. By the time I came out again, Luis had the motorcycle parked in an empty spot next to the truck, and I had a chance fess to survey the damage.

  The Victory had come through remarkably un-scarred. The same couldn’t be said for Luis’s truck, which was pitted, dented, and scraped where the paint hadn’t chipped or at least been dulled by the abrasive scrub of sand. The passenger’s window was gone, only jagged fragments remaining. The front windshield was a web of cracks and pits.

  Luis was staring at it with folded arms and a miserable expression.

  “Man,” he said, “knowing you is expensive.”

  I wanted to say something appropriate, something that would mean I valued his company. Something to recognize the moments in the truck when the two of us had been—different.

  Luis continued to look at the truck, and for a moment I caught the sadness in him, the loss, and I knew he was thinking of his brother. The brother he would have to see again soon, in the funeral home.

  The brother I had failed.

  “I want to see Isabel,” I said. That made him turn toward me, frowning. “I understand it’s a risk. But you said she was asking for me.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, she was. But I don’t want to put any more of my family in the firing line right now. Do you?”

  I shook my head slowly, haunted again by the image of Isabel crouched against the fence as bullets passed overhead to strike her parents. No. I could not risk her. Luis was a target, but so was I, and I could not guarantee the child’s safety.

  “May I call?” I asked.

  Luis took out his cell phone, dialed a number, and turned away to speak in Spanish. After a moment he handed the phone to me.

  “Cassie?” Isabel’s voice was bright and hopeful, and I felt warmth grow inside me in response.

  “Cassiel,” I automatically corrected her, but my heart was not in it. “I’m here, Ibby.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Close,” I said. “I’m watching over you.” I had a sickening memory of saying the same thing to Angela. Empty promises.

  “I thought you left us. I thought you went away.” Her brightness dissolved into tears. “Mama and Papa can’t come home anymore. Can you?”

  “Yes,” I said softly. “Yes, I can. But, Ibby, you must be patient. I’ll see you soon, I promise.”

  “Okay.” She was a brave child, and she mastered her tears into wet snuffles. “I love you, Cassie.”

  Human words. Human emotion. It felt too large for my chest, this feeling, too heavy with meaning. “Be well,” I whispered. “I will watch over you, Isabel.” I meant it.

  I hung up the phone and handed it back to Luis, whose dark eyes were full of understanding. “She’ll break your heart,” he said. “I know.”

  Our fingers brushed, and then I walked away to my small, silent room.

  I slept very little, tormented by the memories of Manny and Angela lying dead, by the haunting sounds of Isabel’s tears, by the touch of Luis’s hands as he healed my injuries. These things were anchors, weighing me down. As a Djinn, I had been weightless, and without ties or cares, and that seemed far away now. Unreachable. All around me, the sounds of the human world roared on, and I found no peace within or without.

  Morning found me awake and exhausted. In the light of the bathroom mirror, I was sallow, haggard, and the whites of my eyes were as pink as my hair. I shed my clothing slowly, dropping it piece by piece to the clean tile floor. As human bodies went, mine seemed overly tall, overly thin, barely softened by the rounded breasts and hips. My skin was of a fine, almost featureless texture, and it glowed pale under the harsh lights.

  I am Djinn, I told my reflection. My reflection strongly disagreed.

  The shower’s beating hot water restored me somewhat, and I wearily contemplated the problem of my dirty clothing. I would need to buy new garments eventually. These—even the leathers—had suffered during the night’s adventures. I had more, at the apartment the Wardens had provided. . . . But I knew, even without Luis loudly reminding me, that I should not return there. Home. It was not, though, and never would be. I had only one home, and it was far away, unreachable.

  A careful pulse of power restored my clothes to a wearable state, removing grime, stains, smells, scrapes, and tears. I donned all the required pieces, including the leather, and used the motel’s drying device to return my hair to its usual flyaway puffball state.

  And I waited, as Luis had instructed. The hours dragged by. I read the holy books provided in the drawers next to the bed, and was both pleased and annoyed—pleased that humans held their history in such high regard, and annoyed by translational inaccuracies.

  Television proved to be something I was grateful I could turn off.

  When the telephone rang, finally, I grabbed at it with eager relief. “Yes?”

  There was a pause, a long one. “Cassiel?” Luis’s voice, and yet not his voice at all. I sat up slowly, hardly aware I had done so. There was something tired and awful in his voice. I looked at the clock beside the bed.

  It was one in the afternoon. “Luis,” I said. “You have been to the funeral home.” That combination of words continued to strike me oddly.

  “Yeah,” he said. His voice sounded slow and deep, as if every word seemed an effort. “About you. The Wardens have bigger problems than you right now, and the Djinn do, too. I’ve been trying to get anybody, up to Lewis, and it looks like we’re on our own.”

  “I am no longer hunted?”

  “Not by the Wardens. There are barely enough of us left in place to hold things together, much less go running around trying fight crime.”

  “And the police?”

  “I pulled a favor from the lead detective on the case—I knew him, from the old days. You’re off the hook. There’s no body, so they’re listing Sands as a missing person.” He paused. When his voice returned, it sounded very quiet and very vulnerable. “I picked out coffins. The funeral mass will be in a couple of days.”

  “Funeral mass,” I repeated. “In the church?”

  “Yes, in the church, where else would you have one?” he snapped, and I heard the harsh rattle of breath on the phone’s speaker. “Sorry. I’m just—me and Manny, we stuck together for a lot of years. Our mother died when we were kids, and Pop went a few years back. It’s just us, Angela’s family, and a bunch of cousins I barely know in Texas. I’m just feeling alone.”

  “Can I leave the motel?” I asked. I was aware that I should say—something. But I had no notion of what comfort sounded like, among humans, and I did not think he would welcome it, not from me.

  “What? Oh yeah. Yeah, sure. But watch your back.” I heard the scrape of metal—the brakes of a large vehicle, I thought—and Luis said, “I’ll be at Manny’s house. I have to go through things, start figuring out what to do for Ibby.”

  “Is something wrong with Ibby?”

  “It’s just that the court’s going to have to award guardianship to me for me to keep her. My lawyer says that’s just a formality if Angela’s parents don’t contest it.” He didn’t sound certain of that. “It’ll hurt her if this comes down to a fight.”

  Once again, I had no wisdom to offer. Something within me was tired of all the drama, all the emotion, all the humanity of it. That part of me continued to whisper, ever louder, Walk away, Cassiel. You are eternal. They are ghosts in the wind.

  Perhaps they were, but if I walked away, they would haunt me.

  “I should go see Isabel,” I said. “I promised her.”

  “Come over here first. I want to go with you.”

  He sounded so quiet, so unhappy, that I felt it necessary to agree. When the call ended, I slid the room key into an interior pocket of my jacket, locked the door, and left without a backward glance. My motorcycle—still gleaming and largely unmarked—glittered in the sunlight a few spaces down. Keys . . . I searched my jacket pocket, found nothing. They were not in the ignition slot.

  They’d fallen out at some point. I smiled slightly, touched my fingertip to the ignition, and willed the machine to life. The engine growled, settled to a low, contented purr, and I realized another thing that I had somehow lost during the evening’s festivities: my helmet.

  The constant wind tugging at my hair was a new sensation, and I liked it. I liked the blast on my face, the sensation of flying without walls. I attracted stares, of course—why wouldn’t I?—but that was no longer an issue. My nerves prickled as I passed a police car, but they gave me only a flat, assessing glance and did not pursue.

  I pulled to a stop in front of Manny’s house and silenced the engine. The street, as always, seemed quiet. There was rarely anyone to be seen in yards or on the sidewalks, even children. The windows, I realized, were all barred. Doors were blocked by wrought-iron gates.

  It was a neighborhood of fortresses and fear.

  I knocked on the door, and Luis opened it. He took a single second to look at me, and then nodded and turned away, walking into the living room. I closed the door behind me and followed.

  In the bright light slanting in the windows, Luis looked infinitely tired. Older than he had only yesterday. He sat down at the table with a pile of papers and idly shuffled through them.

  “I’m looking for their life insurance,” he said. “I need to file that for Ibby. Manny told me he had some kind of retirement thing, too. And their bank accounts, I need to freeze those. People sometimes read obits and try to con the banks, steal from the dead.” He shook his head. “People.” The contempt in his voice was almost worthy of a Djinn.

  I reached out to the pile of papers, touched edges, and withdrew three sheets. “Insurance,” I said, and laid it in front of him. “Retirement plan. Bank accounts.”

  Luis stared at me with dark, empty eyes, then nodded. “Thanks.”

  I sat back, hands in my lap. He fiddled with the papers for a few more minutes, then stood up and walked around the room. It was full of things—things, I realized, that would need to have a future, whether that was with Isabel, with Luis, consigned to destruction, given to others. . . . It was a problem I had never considered. Human lives were lost, but the wreckage they left behind had to be managed. Deconstructed.