It meant that we would have a difficult time getting out once they'd been alerted to our presence.
But I already knew that.
The road wound down a steep hill, twisting like a snake through treacherous switchbacks. Rashid flew down it at an insane speed, teeth bared, eyes flaring bright with pure, risk-taking joy.
He lost his smile for a bare instant, and said, "Hold." It was all he had time to say before I saw the ground ahead of us crumble and disappear into a sudden, dramatic sinkhole less than five feet from the hood of the ambulance. The hole was at least twenty feet across, and there was no chance of stopping. Still less chance of a clumsy, non-aerodynamic vehicle like an ambulance somehow jumping the chasm.
But Rashid did both. He stopped the van so abruptly that the momentum pitched the back of the vehicle up in an arc, straight up, flipping the ambulance in a sickening full, whipping revolution twice. I clung to the dashboard and the handle above the door, struggling not to lose my grip as gravity's pull tugged one way, then another . . . and then I saw the road coming up at us from below on the last revolution.
We were somehow right side up. The front tires hit first, and Rashid pressed the gas.
The back wheels slipped into the chasm, but the momentum and the front wheels' grip dragged them up with a bump, and then we were flying again, moving so fast that the world passed in a twisting blur.
"Five seconds," he told me. "Be ready." Rashid sounded utterly focused and calm.
I was still openmouthed and amazed that we had survived that impossible maneuver.
You made a good bargain, some part of myself said. It was probably right. My mission would have ended there in that sinkhole if I hadn't swallowed my pride to accept Rashid's help.
I had no idea what we would be coming into in the promised seconds, but the seconds counted down to zero.
Rashid hit the brakes with a violence that threw me forward, then back, and before I could open my passenger door he was out and pulling it open to drag me out. As he did, the ambulance disappeared. No, it was still there, but he had successfully hidden it, shifted it between times and realities. It was a rare Djinn skill, one I had never mastered; I hadn't known Rashid was capable of such things.
It was good that he was. In another second, as he pulled me at a run away from the spot where the ambulance had been, a white-hot comet of fire hurtled out of the darkness, growing in size as it went, and detonated on the empty grass where the ambulance had been. It would have been utterly wrecked, and us with it. As it was, I felt the pressure wave and heat on my back, and smelled a faint scorch as the ends of my hair blackened. I stumbled against Rashid, who held me upright and pulled me onward, in a crashing run through underbrush, whipped by branches and slashed by thorns, pursued by something that I sensed coursing darkly through the trees like a bounding black pack of dogs. Our pursuers were silent. I tried to turn to face them, but Rashid wouldn't allow it. Wouldn't let me so much as slow to look.
"Let go!" I hissed at him. He sent me a burning look out of lambent eyes and ignored me. When I stumbled and almost fell, my feet twisted in tangled roots, he hissed, grabbed me, and threw me over one shoulder with his hand gripping the backs of my thighs. It was a ridiculous, helpless posture, but I dared not struggle. He was moving too fast, and with too much purpose. I tried lifting my head to see what was behind us, but between the veil of my blowing hair and the darkness, I could make out nothing.
And then, quite suddenly, Rashid's body tensed, exactly as a human's would have for a great effort, and I felt a tremendous force flow from him to hammer against the ground as he leapt. We rose into the air in a parabolic arc, and below . . . below . . .
Below was a chasm, a deep one, full of sharp rocks and killing drops. Too wide for a human to attempt to jump, no matter how foolhardy. Had I been running on my own, I would have stopped.
Looking down, I saw our pursuers burst out of the scrub into the small clearance between the brush and the cliff. Black as the shadows, vaguely dog-shaped, but with the physiques of bears and the speed of panthers. Nothing natural. Chimeras, forced together by the twisted but powerful skills of an Earth Warden of exceptional talent and madness. Two of them, moving faster than the others, toppled over the edge of the cliff and fell in a shower of stones and dirt to the rocks below--a drama that I watched as the arc of our jump began to decline again, and the far side rushed up at us with frightening speed.
Rashid landed, legs tensed, and barely paused before breaking into a run, again.
He only got a few steps before he stopped and bent to lower me back to the ground. I backed a step away from him, caught between a furious snarl and gratitude, and realized why he'd put me down.
"Well?" He cocked an eyebrow at me. "I'm yours to command, mortal. Temporarily."
From all around us came the metallic clinks of weapons being made ready.
Chapter 9
LIGHTS BLAZED ON, brilliant as morning, illuminating us from two sides, and I saw human shapes stepping out of the trees--dressed in dark trousers, with bulky black vests and dark blue all-weather jackets. Most were armed with assault rifles. Those who weren't were armed with handguns.
All weapons were pointed at the two of us. This didn't pose much of a challenge for Rashid, but for me . . .
Agent Ben Turner stepped out of the shadows. His gun was in his holster. He looked exhausted, hollow-eyed, and angry. "You," he said. "Down on the ground, hands behind your heads. Both of you. Do it now!" He speared Rashid with a glare. "I know you probably aren't worried about us, but if you don't comply, she gets shot. Understand?"
Rashid nodded, and without a flicker of his oddly amused smile, lowered himself with Djinn grace to his knees and laced his fingers behind his head.
Then he looked up at me, eyebrows raised.
"Unless you'd prefer to try martyrdom," he said. "Entirely your choice, of course."
I dropped to my knees, turning my glare instead to Agent Turner.
Who had tried to kill me.
I slowly laced my fingers together behind my head--one set flesh, one set metal--and watched as he nodded to his FBI team of agents, who swarmed forward to shove both Rashid and me forward and snap cold steel around our wrists before hauling us both to our feet again.
There was something odd about the handcuffs, and I tested them with a frown.
As I reached for power, a sharp, painful shock went out from the cuffs. "New thing," Agent Turner told me, reading the surprise in my face with eerie accuracy. "We've been developing a few tricks the last few years. Some of us weren't convinced the Wardens were a great thing for this country, what with all the egos and the corruption and unpredictability. We developed some countermeasures. That's one. You try to use your powers, and you get shocked. The bigger the draw, the bigger the shock in reaction. So don't try it. Trust me."
"We," I repeated. "So your loyalty is not with the Wardens."
He shrugged. "Double agent," he said. "I'm spying on the FBI for the Wardens. On the Wardens for the FBI. But only one of those is for real, and that's the FBI side. As far as I'm concerned, if every Warden on Earth disappeared tomorrow, we'd be a hell of a lot better off. Speaking of that--" He reached out, flipped back the leather of my jacket, and found the scroll.
No!
I tried to fight him, but bound as I was, there was nothing I could do. I subsided, panting, as he pulled the case from my pocket. He smiled, and searched for the catch to open it.
There wasn't one. It had sealed itself into a perfect hard shell, like hardened ivory. After a moment of fruitless poking at the thing, Turner put it in an inside pocket of his own jacket. "Something for the techs," he said. "They'll figure out how to crack into it. Once we have the list, we can start to manage this effectively."
"To stop the abductions?"
"For a start," he said. "More than that, we can start managing the Wardens, instead of letting them have an unlimited supply of governmental support and cash."
His probl
ems with the Wardens were, frankly, not my concern. Let Lewis Orwell and Joanne Baldwin deal with the political aspects of their organization; my concerns were much more basic. More personal. "You sent the man after me."
"Him? Oh, Glenn, the guy with the car? Yeah. He was only supposed to tail you, and grab the scroll if he could. I assume, since you still have it, that it didn't work out. Did you kill him?"
"Would you care if I had?"
Turner smiled thinly. "Oddly enough? Yes. I'd like to keep the funeral costs down on this operation if I can. And he was acting on my orders. That means I'm ethically responsible for him."
I shrugged, which wasn't particularly easy with my hands bound so closely behind me. "He shouldn't have tried to threaten me with a knife. Or underestimated me. And your ethics are hardly what I would consider to be spotless." I hardened my gaze and focused in on his face. "Where is Luis?"
"Not here," Turner said. "So don't go nuclear on me. It wasn't my idea to take him anyway." I didn't blink. "He's safe."
"No," I said. "He's not." I had not heard from him since Rashid and I had been taken prisoner, and although the connection remained, like a hiss of static between us, I thought Luis was unconscious. "He was being hurt."
Turner frowned and said, "No, that's impossible. I know--" He stopped himself, but it was too late; he'd already admitted to me that he knew far too much. I felt a primal growl building in the back of my throat, and I knew that my eyes were growing brighter, creating their own light stronger even than the brilliant halogen spotlights being directed on me. "He's safe. That's all you need to know. The Wardens aren't in charge of this anymore. This is a government matter, and we're taking control."
I barked out a laugh of pure disbelief. "Really."
A hand fell on Turner's shoulder, and another man stepped up, eclipsing him immediately. Not for size; Turner was broader, taller, more physically imposing. This man, however--he was unquestionably in charge. He was small in stature, expensively dressed under his government-issue bulletproof vest and Windbreaker. It was hard to tell his age; anywhere between thirty and fifty, I guessed, but there was no trace of gray in the dark, neatly trimmed hair. Expressive dark eyes that somehow conveyed his regret and command without a word being said. He wore a wedding ring, a pale gold band on his left hand, and a silver ring with a red stone on his right. Like all the agents, he had a communications device curling around his ear.
Unlike most, he had no gun in evidence.
"Ms. Raine," he said. "Or should I call you Cassiel?"
I stared at him without blinking, and didn't answer.
"My name is Adrian Sanders. I'm the special agent in charge of this operation, in cooperation with Home-land Security, the ATF, and several other government agencies. So I've got a lot on my plate right now, not the least of which is that I have to worry about magic instead of just good old-fashioned people wanting to blow things up." He sounded faintly disgusted with the idea. "Luis Rocha is in custody at an undisclosed location. He tried to interfere when we took some people in for questioning."
"Children," I said. "You took children in for questioning."
Agent Sanders cocked an eyebrow. "Ms. Raine, the way I understand it, our whole problem here is children. So absolutely, I need to question anyone who can help us get to the bottom of things. Including people below voting age."
He seemed so reasonable, but there had been nothing at all reasonable about the pain Luis had been feeling. "I will see Luis Rocha," I said. "Now."
"No," Sanders said in reply, flatly. "You won't. Now sit your ass down on the ground, legs crossed, and don't get up until we tell you. I've got bigger problems than you."
I really doubted that.
Sanders turned away, pulling Turner with him; the two men conferred, backs to me, and Turner set off at a run through the trees with an escort of three others.
"Are you still standing up?" Sanders asked, without looking over his shoulder at me. "Because one way or another, you're going to be on the ground in about ten seconds."
Impossible to manage all the impulses to violence that erupted inside me; he was angering both my human and my Djinn instincts, to deadly effect. I wanted nothing so much as to rip my hands free of these confining restraints and pour power through the man until he was a smoking hole in the ground. The rage was, in fact, frightening in its intensity, all the more so because it was entirely impotent at the moment.
"I'd do as he says," Rashid murmured, and when I looked over, the Djinn was seated calmly on the ground, legs crossed, looking as if he'd chosen the posture for meditation instead of by intimidation. "They'll kill you. They have orders to shoot until you're no longer moving."
The agents around me were aiming their guns, and Rashid was correct; none of them looked in the least like they would hesitate to fire if they felt it necessary.
I sat down next to Rashid, concentrating on regulating my breathing and the impulse to try to use my powers. The handcuffs were delivering stronger and stronger jolts, sensing the energy rising inside me, and my hands and forearms felt burned and tender from the repeated stabs of pain. I stayed perfectly still, eyes closed. Beside me Rashid was as immobile as the mountains.
Waiting.
Luis.
Nothing came back to me, save that wordless static. He was still alive, but incapable of conscious thought. Drugs, most likely. Or they'd hurt him so badly that his body had, in self-defense, taken away his awareness of the damage. Either way, it was not good news.
Turner had betrayed us, and now there were much greater concerns. Not just Pearl; the government. I had no doubts that Agent Sanders thought he was in control of the situation, and the day; he had no idea just how out of his depth he--and all his merely human colleagues--really were.
"This isn't useful," Rashid observed, after at least fifteen minutes of total silence. I pulled myself back from the contemplation of my own, maddening lack of control. "I agreed to help you fight, not help you surrender."
I bit back my first response, which came with another jolt of pain from the controlling handcuffs. "Can you leave?"
"If I wish." He let a beat go by. "It wouldn't negate our agreement. We made a bargain. The fact that it didn't turn out well for you--"
"Is beside the point, I know. I wasn't born human." I tried to moderate the snarl in my voice. "Could you take me with you?"
"Of course," Rashid said placidly. "The question would be whether or not you'd survive. The odds are not good on that point. I'm not one of those Djinn who can safely convey humans through the aetheric and bring them out alive, and no matter how fast I am, they do have countermeasures."
"Such as?"
"Ma'at," he said. "One or two, not powerful enough to be Wardens, but powerful enough to interfere with you, slow you down. That would be enough to allow bullets to reach you. I believe if I try to take you with me, you'll be dead."
I considered that. My shoulders ached from the restraints, and I was thirsty. Exhausted. I needed sleep. But more than anything else, I needed to know that Luis was all right.
"I know we can't alter the agreement," I said, very carefully. "So I am not attempting to do so. I only say that should you wish to leave this place, no one will be able to stop you. And should you take the scroll from our friend Mr. Turner, I don't suppose anyone can stop you from doing that, either."
"Or destroying him like a small bug," Rashid noted.
"Or that, of course."
He didn't move. I had supposed that a mere mention of the fact that he might lay his hands on the scroll would cause him to flicker out of existence and into Mr. Turner's very nightmares, but instead Rashid sat, patient and silent.
I asked, "Are you waiting for something?"
"No," he said. "But there's no great hurry. I can take the scroll from him anytime I please. He is not the rightful owner. Therefore, it's fair game to take it, so long as I return it to you."
Was it? I didn't know that; I supposed it made sense, by Djinn logic. I was s
pecifically given the list--officially granted it by an Oracle. That meant it was my possession, exclusively, until such time as I voluntarily gave it up. Humans didn't have those types of rules of ownership, which reflected the transfer of power on the aetheric; hence, Turner hadn't thought twice about taking it from me.
But, I realized, the scroll itself wasn't just some mere piece of paper locked in a case. It was living.
It was capable of reacting, as it had when it sealed its case shut.
I smiled slowly. "And if you take it into your hands without me granting it to you, it won't open for you, will it?" I asked him. "That's why you wanted to bargain for it, not simply take it from me. I have to give it."
Rashid didn't bother to deny it. "So in liberating it from your friend Mr. Turner, I am only its temporary custodian. Not a thief."
"Not a thief at all," I agreed. "Well then." I felt my smile fading. "While you have it, you'll be a target. Whatever you do, you must not let it be taken by Pearl or those she commands."
"And now you're putting conditions on me," Rashid said, and shook his head. "Cassiel. I'll do as I please, when I please, and you will have to trust that these things will also please you." He looked up at me, and his eyes were bright and direct, entirely inhuman. "Time to go."
He'd sensed something, but I didn't know what. I nodded. That was all the goodbye we said, or needed; Rashid simply melted away, a whisper on the wind, and his empty handcuffs thumped to the ground where he'd been.
That got a reaction from the agents watching us--quick steps in to tighten the cordon, and one small red-haired woman with a pretty, no-nonsense face snapped, "Where is he?"
For all that they'd been briefed on the nature of the Wardens, the nature of the Djinn, the primal terror of a human confronted with the unknown was still there, showing in the tense lines of her body and the flash of disbelief in her blue eyes. She repeated her question, more loudly, pointing her weapon straight at me in unmistakable threat.
I ignored her as I tried to locate what had triggered Rashid's sudden decision to depart. Nothing obvious; the government agents had control of this side of the chasm, separated from Pearl's area by a harsh divide that would be difficult to cross without attracting notice. Likewise, Pearl could send her child-soldiers here, but even Pearl had her limits. I didn't imagine she would stage an all-out assault against an armed camp of the FBI. Her followers weren't Djinn; they couldn't travel the aetheric at will. So their approaches would be human in nature--extra-human, possibly, but not Djinn.