No. I had to learn to deal with this strange problem of mine sometime, and now, with a gun aimed at my head, it seemed a good time to begin.
I told myself it wasn't as bad as I'd thought, once I was inside the police car, but that was a fragile sort of lie that crumbled as soon as the door slammed shut beside me. The air was stifling, and it reeked. I coughed, barely controlling an urge to void my stomach, and tried not to struggle like an animal in a trap.
I am Djinn. This is nothing, nothing, nothing.
No. It was confinement. And confinement was something the Djinn hated.
Officer Randy and his partner got in the vehicle, which rocked to accommodate their weight, and we pulled out onto the road.
"You okay?" Luis asked me in a low voice. I nodded, throat working, unable to speak. I had never liked enclosed vehicles, but this one seemed ever more sinister and confining. "Don't do anything crazy."
"Yeah, listen to your friend," Randy said. We had gone about five miles from where we'd left the Victory, and now he slowed the cruiser and made a right turn on to a barely visible dirt road. The car bounced and rocked along the trail, throwing up showers of dust and rocks.
When we could no longer see the road behind us, he brought the car to a stop and turned off the engine. The tick-tick-tick of cooling metal and the constant low chatter from the radio speakers were the only sounds.
"Out," Randy said. His partner gave him a worried look, but complied. He and Randy opened our doors and removed us from the backseat, out into open air again. The hot air fanned the sweat that had trickled down my back, and I shivered.
Randy drew his gun again, staring at me with cool, dust brown eyes. He was a hard man, but I didn't sense real cruelty in him. Desperation, perhaps.
"Now," he said. "Let's start the movie over. Where's my son?"
Luis shook his head. "We don't know what you're talking about, Officer. We really don't."
He stuck the barrel of his gun under Luis's chin, and Luis's eyes squeezed shut to conceal what must have been either rage or fear. He didn't move, but I saw muscles flexing in his tattooed arms.
I, too, was remembering his brother, dead of a bullet.
"I'm going to kill this guy," Randy said, "and then you'll remember what I'm talking about. How's that?"
"If you do, you're a fool," I said, and got the full cold glare. He didn't move the gun away from Luis. "Explain what's happening. Maybe we can help you. We're also looking for a child. A little girl, Isabel Rocha. She's five years old. She's been abducted from her bed."
That surprised him enough to take his finger away from the trigger and lower the weapon to his side. "What?"
"She's my niece," Luis said raggedly. "My brother and sister died in a drive-by a couple of days ago. Ibby's all I have left." For just that moment, he couldn't conceal the horror and despair of that, and I knew it rang true with the policeman, who took another sharp look at Luis, then at me. Frowning. "God-dammit, you have to believe us!"
It was convincing enough to cause uncertainty in our captor. And the frustration. "A kid," he repeated. "What the hell is going on?"
"Who is your son?" I asked softly. Randy didn't take his gaze from Luis.
"His name is C.T. Calvin Theodore Styles," Randy said. "He's five years old, and he was taken out of his bed three nights ago. Just--gone. No sign of an intruder, no clues."
Randy's partner, who seemed visibly relieved that violence wasn't about to erupt, contributed the rest. "Randy got a call a couple of hours ago," he said. "Came to his personal cell phone, said the one who'd abducted C.T. had left him somewhere to die, and was heading this way."
Randy finally shifted his attention back to me. "The caller said I'd know her by the motorcycle and the pink hair."
"That caller," I replied, "is the one who has your son, and more than likely Isabel. I have nothing to do with it, but they are using you, and me, to slow down pursuit."
Randy kept staring at me. "I get why he's in this," he said. "Family. Why are you?"
It seemed a fair question, and all I could do was shrug, as hard as that was to do with my hands manacled behind my back. "Family," I said. "They're all I have, as well."
That, too, rang true to his lie-sensitive ears, and he exchanged a glance with his partner, who nodded. Without a word between them, they unlocked our handcuffs. Handcuffs, I realized, that either of us could have melted away at any moment . . . and had not. Luis had likely been biding his time, waiting for a strategic moment. I had been--what? Distracted? Djinn are not distracted.
"You got a picture of the girl?" the policeman was asking.
"Yeah," Luis said. He dug in his back pocket and flipped photos, stopping on one that showed Manny, Angela, and Isabel in some sort of holiday setting. They were frozen in that moment, happy and glowing. Alive.
It hurt me to look at it. This is how things are for them. Time is a long road, with tragedy around every turn. They can't go back; they can only bring the past forward with them in fragments and photographs and memories.
No, not them. I was human now, to all intents and purposes. Like them, I was traveling that road now, and time was an enemy: a thief, stealing moments and memories and lives.
Randy--Officer Styles--flipped to Luis's identification card, then examined his other photographs before handing it all back. He was cautious, which reflected well on him. "I'm sorry for your loss," he said. "They look like nice people."
"They were," Luis said. I could tell it was still hard for him to use the past tense of the verb. He put his wallet back in his pocket and sent me a glance. "So where are we? We good now?"
"Yeah," the policeman nodded. "We're good, until I find out you're shining me on, and then both of you are food for crows if I find out you had anything, anything to do with my son's abduction. Clear?"
Luis nodded. "Clear."
Officer Styles's attention turned to me. "Pink, what's your name?"
I almost answered Cassiel, but stopped myself. He had been thorough in checking Luis's identity. He'd hardly take my word for it. In answer, I took my own wallet from my jacket pocket and handed it over. He flipped it open to the driver's license. "Leslie Raine," he said, and glanced up at me. "Picture doesn't look much like you."
"Do they ever?" Luis muttered. It was good he answered for me, because I felt stung. I had used a minor amount of power to adjust the photograph to resemble me. Was he implying that I was not skillful at such forgery?
"Huh," Randy said. He studied the photo closely, then me, then the card again.
"I'm albino." Several people had referred to me so; I thought it only fair to adopt the idea. "Perhaps we don't photograph well."
"Don't albinos have pink eyes?"
"Not all of them," I said.
He flipped through the rest of the wallet. Apart from the credit cards that Lewis had provided, there was nothing else. No mementos. No photographs of any kind, saving up memories for empty days.
I wished I had taken some now, not so much to placate the policeman, but to keep Manny's smile vivid in my mind.
He handed everything back. "Kind of a light wallet."
"I'm neat."
"That's not neat, that's OCD," he said. "Okay, I'll buy you guys might be legitimate; we already looked you up on the computer in the car. Manny and Angela Rocha, shot dead in their front yard, just like you said. Isabel Rocha, abducted. Got a nice mug shot of you, sir, from bad old days."
Luis shrugged. "Reformed," he said.
"Used to be in the Nortenos, right? I didn't know that was an option, getting reformed."
"I got a good job."
"Yeah? Doing what?"
"How is this helping to find your son?" I cut in. "Or Isabel?"
Officer Styles took in a breath, held it, and let it out. "It isn't, I guess," he said. "You tell me what you know about this."
It was my turn to exchange a look with my partner. Luis, correctly guessing that I did not have enough experience in half-truths to be credible, too
k the lead. "We got a lead," he said. "Isabel was spotted along this road, heading from New Mexico into Colorado. We were getting close when you stopped us. Look, if you want to come with us . . ."
"Who gave you the lead?"
Luis shook his head. "I can't tell you that. But I promise you, if you let us follow it, we'll do everything we can to get your son back while we look for Ibby."
He meant it, and I knew that Officer Styles sensed it, too. He was on the verge of saying something when his phone rang. He checked the number on the display and said, "My wife." Tension ran dark through his voice. He turned away to speak in low tones, and I did not try to hear what was said. The pain and fear coming from him was palpable, like a sickening fog.
Children, I thought. What can our enemies want with children?
So many terrible things.
Randy closed the phone and took a moment staring toward the horizon. When he came back to us, his manner and expression were composed, but that didn't matter. He was far from calm. "Let's go," he said.
"Randy," his partner said. "Everything okay with Leona?"
"She's just anxious. I don't want to tell her--" He shook his head. "I don't want her to know this was a bad lead. She needs a little hope."
It was astonishing, how little it took to change him from a man I needed to battle to a man I wanted to help. Djinn rarely changed their minds, but then, they had scopes of knowledge that humans did not. Human perception, I realized now, was like a prism, reflecting first one facet of a new thing and then another.
It made the matter of trusting someone even more risky. I wondered how they had ever learned to do it at all.
"Can you take us back to the motorcycle?" I asked.
"Why?"
"Because I like my motorcycle."
That seemed to amuse him, but he nodded. "Sure. Why not?"
Back on the Victory, we raced down the road with the patrol car drafting behind us. Luis's hand clasped the bare skin around my middle, sealing the connection between us and allowing me to concentrate on piloting the bike in Oversight as well as reality.
The red, faint trail of Isabel's passage on this land was fading but still present. We were on the track, and we were very, very close. Over the next fold of the road rose the growing shadows of mountains. Desert was rapidly giving way to different landscapes and plants, although the toughest, thorniest bushes continued to make their presence felt.
The air changed gradually, too. We were traveling into different climate bands.
As the sharp mountains began to cut the sky in hard, black edges, the trace came blindingly clear, in a flare of hot red.
Luis saw it, too. His hand tightened on my waist. I increased speed, flying toward the site. If they intended to fight us, I was ready. Eager for it.
You will not take this from me. Not this.
Over the next ridge, the road fell into a gentle downward slope. There were no roads leading into the underbrush, no obvious settlements or buildings. No sign at all of human civilization here, except for this road built in a clean, straight line through nature.
I slowed, anxiety building inside me. I had expected to see something--a car, perhaps, or a building.
There was nothing.
And yet the trail ended here.
I slowed the motorcycle again, this time to a coast, with the engine humming and the tires hissing along the gravel at the side of the road.
I stopped.
"Oh, God," Luis said, and every sound seemed to hang sharp on the clear air. "Where is she?" He sounded as confused and afraid as I felt, and he let go of me and swung his leg over the bike to stride away. He paced like an angry lion, hair blown in a black flag by the whipping winds. Grass bent and whispered its secrets. This flat, open area concealed nothing, but a child might be small enough to be hidden in the grass--
--if the child could not move.
I slowly dismounted the bike and approached Luis, who was stalking the edge of the road, frantically sending out waves of power like radar signals, hoping to get a response.
He did. I heard the sharp intake of his breath, and then he plunged forward, off the road and into the knee-high pale stalks of grass. Insects rose up in confused clouds, disturbed by his passage. I followed him. Behind me, the police car's doors opened and closed, and I knew the men would be right on my heels.
Luis and I leapfrogged each other, racing through the grasses, both heading for the same point of pulsing red on the aetheric.
When we reached it, there was no sign of a child. No body. No presence at all.
Luis sank down on his haunches near a bare spot in the grasses and held out his hand, palm down, over it. I put my hand on his shoulder, and it popped up in Oversight in hot red.
The soil was darker here.
"What?" Officer Styles barked, as he and his partner stumbled to a halt next to us, looking at--apparently--nothing.
Luis touched his fingers to the soil, and raised them into the light.
Blood, smeared red on his skin.
He rubbed it slowly between his fingers, expression distant and closed even to me.
"It's hers," he said softly. "It's Isabel's."
I knew, with a sinking sensation, that he wasn't wrong.
Something failed inside of him, something that had been tenaciously holding together. His hope was dying here, the precious light of it guttering out like a candle starved of oxygen.
I was on the verge of feeling the same when I became aware of a strange flutter at the edges of my awareness, a kind of red echo.
I let go of Luis's shoulder and stepped away into the grass, hunting for the source of the dissonance.
I found it. It was a plastic bag, the kind used to store blood for reuse in hospitals. It still contained a red film within it. I crouched next to it, studying it carefully.
Isabel's blood was inside of it.
"Over here," I said. Officer Styles was the first to my side.
"Don't touch it," he warned. I nodded. I had no need of touching it, in any case. The presence of the bag itself told me all I needed to know.
They had laid a false trail for us to follow. This was Isabel's blood, taken from her small body, probably while she was unconscious. The bag had held less than a pint. They had sprinkled it along the road, and left a clear trail here, to the spot where they had dumped the rest to draw us in.
I came quickly back to my feet. "Luis," I said sharply. "Be ready. They would have done this for a reason."
He looked up at me with dulled eyes, still rubbing his fingers together. Isabel's blood. He believed she was dead. I showed him the bag, but he seemed not to comprehend.
"They're coming for us," I said. "And she's still--"
I was going to say alive, but I didn't have the chance.
There was a low growl from the grass; something leapt at Luis's unprotected back in a dun-colored blur. I heard a chilling roar, one that woke primitive instincts inherited from millions of years of cowering in caves, waiting for predators to attack.
Human instincts, not Djinn.
The beast attacking Luis was a mountain lion, a large one, but I didn't have time to come to his aid. There were other animals closing in, moving with unnatural stealth and focus. Two more mountain lions. Loping in from the north and the south were two large black bears.
"Down!" I screamed at Officer Styles, as a mountain lion prepared to leap at his back. He didn't obey me. Instead, he spun around, gun drawn, and fired. He missed. The mountain lion crashed into him with a vicious snarl and slammed him down on the grass. His partner aimed for the animal's skull.
I knocked his gun aside at the last moment. The report of the shot startled the big cat, and it lifted its head to focus its attention toward the two of us. Huge gray-green eyes fixed on us with terrifying intensity, and it gathered itself for a leap.
"Behind me!" I shouted, and shoved the man into position. "Don't fire!"
The mountain lion launched itself into the air, scimitar-sharp c
laws extended to disembowel me.
"Get out of the way!" I heard the man behind me yell, but my attention was fully on the animal. Someone was pushing it, controlling it, overriding its self-preservation instincts. These creatures weren't the enemy; they were weapons, confused and terrified beneath the surface fury.
I couldn't condone their deaths, rare as such predators were on the earth since the proliferation of humans. Luis and I could handle them.
It was a risk--a large one--but I slapped my hands down on the creature's skull as it barreled into me, bearing me to the ground with a heavy thump. Soft fur, hard bone, powerful flexing muscles. I saw the flash of teeth. Its claws ripped at the leather covering my chest, and I felt the sting of cuts.
My leather had slowed it, but I had seconds, at best. I poured my power into the creature, not to dominate, but to free its mind from the cage of power that had trapped it. It seemed easier in theory, because the faceless enemy had all the strength of a top-class Earth Warden and all the ruthlessness of a Demon. I slashed at the bonds holding the cat, and it sprang away from me, snarling in terror and confusion.
It leapt past the trembling policeman behind me and vanished into the grass.
Luis's mountain lion lay unconscious on its side, breathing in slow, steady rhythm.
I dragged Officer Styles up to his feet. The four of us formed a square, shoulders touching, as the bears loped closer.
"Next time, put it under," Luis told me. "They'll just grab the animals again once you let go."
He was right. The mountain lion I'd freed from control was veering, turning back toward us at a gliding run. It slowed to a cautious, slow stalk, luminous eyes fixed on me. Its huge paws made almost no sound at all on the grass, but I could hear the low sound of its growl on the cooling air.
They would know my power now. They'd tasted it. I wouldn't be able to be so merciful again without cost. They would kill me if they could. Me, Luis, the two policemen.
All for what? For Isabel? Why?
"Cassiel," Luis said, and held out his hand. I hadn't realized that my reserves were sinking, but he was right. I needed power. The golden flow poured into me, waking shivers, and I cut it off as quickly as possible to keep my attention focused outward. "Put them out. Down, if you have to."
I nodded. The policemen had their guns drawn, but unless they were very fine shots I doubted they could bring down any of these animals before being gutted. The bears were charging, one on Luis's side, one on Officer Styles's.