I looked into his face now and saw only a cold, calculating predator.
"No," I said. "I don't consent. But you will help us, anyway, Gallan."
He laughed. "Why would I do that?"
"Because you can. Because it's right. Because it's necessary."
"I'm not a human," he reminded me almost gently. "Arguments of right and wrong won't sway me."
"They should. We--the True Djinn--have lost that." I remembered what the New Djinn Quintus had said to me. "Long ago, in the beginning, we cared, didn't we? We wished to help. To protect. Now only the New Djinn feel this, and we feel nothing. Nothing, Gallan. We amuse ourselves in cruelty and meaningless games. We were better off slaves to the Wardens. At least then we had a purpose."
Gallan--who had been a slave once, where I had not--snarled at me with startling fury. His teeth turned sharp as daggers, and the bones beneath his face shifted to sharper angles. "You were cast out, Cassiel. Don't make it worse."
Luis pulled the jeep off to the side of the road, killed the engine, and turned in his seat to look at Gallan. If he was afraid--and he had to be; no human could look on the face of an angry Djinn and not feel some kind of fear--he hid it well. "Look, either help or don't help. It's your choice. But don't threaten my friend, and don't act like the Djinn hold the keys to the universe. You need us. You need humans; you always have."
"No. We allow humans to exist. We don't need them." Gallan's eyes turned a muddy shade of red. "But you do need us. Choose, Cassiel. Do you agree to submit yourself to me or not? Because that's my price. You know I can't change it."
I shook my head. "No, Gallan. I can't."
The angry glow faded from him, and he became almost human now. Almost, but never. "No?"
"You didn't think I'd turn you down?"
"You can't. You need me."
"Not as much as you believe. Good-bye, my friend. We won't meet again."
I turned face forward. My last glimpse of his face showed him startled, round-eyed, and lost.
"The lady said no," Luis said. "Thanks, anyway. Now, if you don't mind, we've got work to do."
Gallan misted away without another word.
For a moment, neither of us spoke, and then Luis said, in carefully neutral tones, "That was awkward."
"That was exceedingly dangerous," I said. "And unproductive." My heart was racing, and I struggled to calm it. My palms felt damp. "He could have killed us."
"He didn't."
"I thought Gallan was the best of the True Djinn. The kindest."
Luis started the truck. "If he's the kindest, I'd hate to see the meanest."
I gave him a look. "You already have."
"Oh," he said, puzzled, and then his frown cleared. "Oh. You're talking about you."
"Once," I said, and looked away. "And perhaps still."
We drove past the hidden entrance to The Ranch and on to Lake City, which, though small, was still the largest community in the area. Luis left me to fill the jeep with gas as he went inside to buy food at the small store. When he came back, he pointed down the street, toward a building lit with pink and green neon. "There's a motel," he said. "We could both use a bath and some rest, and I need to use the phone."
"The phone?"
"You called for help," he said. "It's time for me to do the same."
The motel was old, but surprisingly well maintained. The clerk sold us two rooms with an adjoining door, which Luis requested instead of only one; I thought that odd, since we had few secrets now. He handed me my key as we walked outside. "Get cleaned up and eat something." He had gotten a bag of food at the gas station--two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, some potato chips, some sodas in cans. "I'll leave the door open to my room. Twenty minutes."
I nodded.
Twenty minutes seemed a short time. I washed away grime, dried blood, sand, a thousand tiny irritants in the shower, and used the thin motel shampoo on my hair. I had no clean clothing--again--but I wrapped a blanket around me and opened the door to Luis's room through the connecting passage.
He was on the phone. Like me, he had showered, and his hair was flat against his head, dripping at the ends with beads of water. He had wadded up the neon yellow paper jumpsuit they had given him at The Ranch, and like me, had wrapped himself in a blanket for clothing.
He held the receiver in the crook of his shoulder as he wrote furiously on a piece of cheap paper with a pen provided by the motel. "Yeah? You're sure that's the number? Gracias, man. I owe you big time. Adios."
He hung up, ripped off the sheet of paper, and pressed the posts of the phone to end the call. The phone was very old, with a rotary dial, and he fumbled with the unfamiliar operation as he entered a string of numbers.
I sat on the bed and ate my sandwich. It was surprisingly good.
When Luis finished his call--which was conducted largely in Spanish--he hung up and dried his hair with the thin cotton towel slung across the back of the chair. "We've got a couple of hours," he said. "I called in some support."
"Who?"
"Trust me, you don't need to know. But they're sneaky little bastards. And they know how to run an infiltration operation better than just about anybody. They've done it a hundred times, taking down things the Wardens never even noticed. Never had to notice, because these guys took care of it before it became a problem."
"The Ma'at," I said. "Yes?"
He seemed surprised I knew. "Yes. Officially, I'm not supposed to know them."
"You called one to watch Isabel."
"Yeah, but he was a friend first, a Ma'at second. These guys aren't any kind of friend, not to me."
I chewed a bite of sandwich. "You admire them."
"Hell, yeah, I admire them. For one thing, they actually learned to work together--Djinn and human--when the Wardens were still stuck on that whole master/slave thing. And what they do isn't brute force, it's subtle." Luis flashed me a smile. "And okay, I dated a girl once who was Ma'at."
I felt a strange surge of antipathy. "Were you speaking to her just now?"
"Mirabel? No. She's off in China, last I heard. I haven't talked to her in years." He studied me through half-closed eyes. "Why?"
I didn't wish to explain, so I didn't, methodically finishing the sandwich and drinking the soda. Luis shrugged and fiddled with the few items on the small desk.
I felt the vibrating disturbance of air a second or two before Luis, and came to my feet, holding the blanket in place, as a shadow thickened and took on form and edges in the corner of the room.
When he stepped from the shadows, Gallan was a changed Djinn. Changed in attire, yes--from brilliant white to neutral gray--but also in other ways.
Most notably, in the way he looked at me.
I held out a warning hand to freeze Luis in place as he gathered his breath for a challenge. Gallan's dark eyes had locked on mine.
"I'm a fool," he said. "Forgive me."
I had never heard Gallan apologize to anyone, not in all the slow turnings of the world. I blinked.
"I saw it," he said. "I went to look at this place you spoke of, this Ranch. And I saw it."
"Saw what?" I could hardly hear my own voice over the thundering of my heart, because there was fear in Gallan's eyes, and I had never seen that, either.
"I saw the end of the Djinn." His gaze on mine bored like a diamond-edged drill. "I saw the end of us, Cassiel. I saw."
He swayed. I moved forward as Gallan--a True Djinn, stronger than any human--crumpled slowly to his knees and bent his head.
"We brought this on ourselves," he said. "You were right. You were right. I beg your forgiveness."
Luis muttered something under his breath, and said, "Don't trust him."
I didn't. I knew Gallan, and this was not the Djinn I knew. Not any Djinn I knew.
"I will help," he said. "I must help you."
I felt a cold hand grip my spine and shake it. "What did you see?"
He shook his head, a violent spasm as if he tried to throw the i
mage of it away and could not. "I can show you," he said, and extended his hand.
I looked at Luis Rocha, who shrugged. "It's your call. I don't trust the guy, but that's probably just me."
I transformed the material of the blanket wrapped around me into cloth--enough to make trousers and a shirt--and took Gallan's hand.
We rose into the aetheric.
Gallan, on this plane, was a shadow, quick and quiet, and I felt heavy and obvious in my human aura. He pulled me with him, heading through a maze of living trees and rocks that gave way to darkness and whispers.
There was no darkness on the aetheric, but it was here, bitter and void of any hint of energy.
We were above the compound called The Ranch.
There were no signs of people, no sources of even electrical power. It was as if every ounce of life had been drained, not just inside the compound, but out. The devastation went on in all directions, stretching almost a mile--death incarnate.
Only the pearl-and-bone yin and the parklike yang remained, glowing in the darkness in white and green.
Pulsing.
Alive.
Hungry.
I felt it pull at us. Gallan backed away, drawing me with him, and rose far up into the aetheric sky until the pulsing, living entity was far below us.
I still felt the drag. So did Gallan. I realized that I was feeling it through him--this thing called to Djinn, lured them.
It ate them.
Gallan was weakening. I took the lead to pull him onward, back toward my mortal body; this time, at least, the anchor of flesh seemed to be an advantage. A salvation.
I crashed back into flesh and opened my eyes to see Gallan still kneeling where he had been, swaying.
He was unraveling.
"I got too close," he said. "Help me, Cassiel."
"Luis!" I grabbed Gallan's arm, but it felt more like mist than flesh, and my fingers sank sickeningly into moistness.
Luis tried, but when he reached out, his hands passed entirely through the Djinn, leaving trails of smoke behind. Gallan's eyes were desperate, his mouth open, but he made no sound now.
He was trapped on the aetheric, and this manifestation was failing.
Fading into smoke.
Gone.
I grabbed Luis's hand and launched us both into the aetheric, trying to follow Gallan's essence, but the darkness disoriented me, whispered to me, taunted and pushed in strange currents.
I heard screams, and the screams of the Djinn are not meant for human ears. I fell back into flesh, and so did Luis.
He was holding me in his arms. I was trembling.
"It eats Djinn," I said numbly. "It ate Gallan. It destroyed Gallan."
It was the Voice, the pearl-and-bone yin, the parklike yang. It was the children within it, being used to fuel and enhance a creature that had limitless hunger, an appetite for power and destruction that knew no boundaries.
She, my Djinn side whispered. Not it. She. You know who she is.
She had been familiar to me because once, a very long time ago, I had been asked to kill her.
I'd thought I had.
"Pearl," I whispered. "It's Pearl."
I collapsed in Luis's arms as the darkness closed in.
When I woke, I was in a bed, sheets and blankets over me. Despite the warm coverings, I felt cold and empty. The room seemed very silent, though I heard voices coming muffled through the wall. The other room, I thought. Luis had put me in my own bed, and he was talking to others next door.
I got up, dressed in my stained leathers, and walked in without knocking. My appearance interrupted Luis as he talked with three others, two men and a woman. The woman, I was surprised to see, was Greta, the Fire Warden from Albuquerque. The others I didn't know, but from their weak auras, they were Ma'at, not Warden.
"Cassiel." Luis's eyes were warm but wary. "How are you?"
I sat down on the bed without an answer. I didn't know how I was. I wasn't sure I would ever know. After an awkward silence, Greta said, "We conducted several flyovers of the compound. The thing is, there's no installation. Nothing like what you described, anyway."
She had printed photographs, which she spread out on the table. They showed the weathered wreckage of an old farmstead, no modern buildings, no fences, no walls, no houses.
There was no pearl-and-bone building, no living embodiment of yin-yang.
No sign of the compound at all.
"We're still working to get a team in there to do a ground reconnaissance. Luis--is it possible that somehow you were, I don't know, delusional? That the two of you--"
"No," I said. "It is not possible."
Luis wasn't so sure, and he seemed shaken by the suggestion. "Cassiel, they altered my blood chemistry. They could have altered yours, too. Maybe what we saw--"
"What we saw," I said, "was real. The compound was real. The bullets were real. We saved a real child, Luis. That was not illusion."
"Then where is it?" one of the Ma'at asked, and tapped the photos. "Where did it all go?"
I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Luis. I need to talk to you. Only you, alone."
Greta and the Ma'at exchanged looks, then shrugged. Luis moved them to the open door, into my room, and shut it behind them before he turned to look directly at me.
I took a moment before I spoke, because I knew that once I began, he would never look at me so kindly again.
"I need to explain how I came here," I said. "I need to explain why Ashan cast me out. You won't like it."
Luis nodded and settled himself in a chair.
"A long time ago, I became the first Djinn to do murder," I said. The words felt numbing on my lips, like ice. "Another Djinn. Her name was Pearl. You think us cold, I know, but we are the guardians of the Mother, and we have limits. Pearl . . . had none."
Luis leaned forward, intent on my words. "What happened?"
"We had been the first children of the Earth for so long, you know. So many countless, numberless millennia that you cannot even begin to imagine it. Life changed, evolved; we paid little attention to it. Species came and went--and then one arose. One that had awareness, and intelligence, and understood ." I held his gaze captured in mine. "Not mankind as you know it now. An earlier version, a more peaceful one."
Luis wet his lips. "What did you do?"
"I did nothing," I said. "Pearl found them offensive. She destroyed them. She erased them from the face of the Earth and ripped away everything they were. There are crimes among the Djinn, but that one had no name until that moment--not even as much because of the slaughter, but because of what happened to Pearl in response."
He waited while I gathered my thoughts.
"She . . . went mad," I said. "She tore holes in the fabric of the universe around us that should never be opened, and she could not close them again. She became--other. Alien to us. Ashan sent me to destroy her. It was the first time in our history that one Djinn killed another, you see." I looked away. "She did not defend herself, because she never expected me to strike against her. It had never happened."
Luis was frowning. "But I'm talking about now. Not then."
"It is the same," I said. "I destroyed her. I thought I removed her from the world, but there must have been something left. Some seed, some thought, some memory . . . and it grew in secret, in shadow, passed down within the new mankind that arose after her. Now it's here. Pearl is here. She's drawing her source power from humans, but her hunger for the Djinn is unlimited. She'll destroy them. Destroy us. What happened to Gallan will happen to all the Djinn, one at a time. They'll be drawn in and destroyed."
Luis swallowed. "Why did Ashan exile you, Cassiel?"
I held his gaze. This moment had been coming all along. I had dreaded it and feared it, and now it was here.
"Ashan must have known that Pearl was rising," I said. "He must have known that the only way to stop her was to remove her power." Luis's face was slowly bleaching white. "He ordered me to kill the human race,
but he didn't tell me why."
Ashan never explained. He'd never had to before. I hadn't guessed his thoughts, or my answer might have been different. I had thought it was Ashan's pride and his arrogance. His hatred for the Wardens.
I said, very softly, "He was right."
Luis shook his head. "No. We can fight this. We can find a way to fight this. We have to."
Tears burned in my eyes--tears of anguish and shame and fear. "Ashan cast me into human flesh so that I could understand the risk. So that I would agree to do what must be done. And now I do. Now I know."
Luis came off the chair at me so quickly I didn't think to react. He shoved me back against the wall, trapped me there with his hands chaining my wrists against the hard surface. "No," he said. He leaned his hot, sweating forehead against mine. "No, you can't believe this. We can beat this, we can. We have to find them. Save Ibby. Stop this from happening."
"How?"
"I don't know! We have to try!"
He was begging me not just with words, but with the contact of our bodies, with the unspoken primal warmth that connected us. The power that coursed from his body into mine.
"Please," he said. "Cassiel. There has to be another answer."
I wanted to believe that. "My people are going to die," I said. "You're asking me to stand by and let it happen."
"I'm asking you to find another way."
I broke the grip he had on my wrists with a sharp twist of my arms, but I didn't move away. "You can stop me," I said. "All you have to do is kill me."
That shocked him, drove him back a full step. "What?"
"I'm vulnerable to you. In human flesh, I'm vulnerable. Once I become Djinn again, once Ashan grants me power, you can't stop me. You know that." I wiped tears from my face. "If you want to stop me, kill me. If you don't--"
He lunged forward, hands gripping the sides of my head, but if he meant to hurt me, his touch turned gentle at the last instant. "We'll find a way," he said. "Cassie, we'll find a way."
But as long as I lived, I was a danger not just to him, not just to Isabel, but to every human breathing. I had never thought it would come to this.
I had never imagined Pearl would have survived to bring this darkness back.
"Yes," I said softly. "We'll find a way."
And if I had to do it, I would be Ashan's assassin one last time. He had known that. . . . But what was worse, what frightened me even as a Djinn, was that I knew Ashan better than to think I was his only plan.