"What did you expect me to do, Luis? Wait at home for your call?"
"Wasn't expecting murder."
"It wasn't murder," I said absently. "He didn't die."
"What?"
"He didn't die. I don't know what happened to him. He jumped, but he never hit the street. It's as if--a Djinn helped him."
"Don't change the subject. You went there to kill him, right?"
"I went to find out what he could tell me. As you would have, if you hadn't needed to care for your niece," I said.
"And what did he say?"
"Not much. Have you ever heard of something called The Ranch?"
"The Ranch," he echoed. "Chicken ranch, dude ranch, ranch dip? What the hell are you talking about?"
"I don't know," I said. "He seemed to think his superiors at The Ranch had ordered him to destroy the office. That is all he told me."
"You suck at interrogation. That doesn't surprise me, by the way."
"I didn't harm him." I thought about it in detail. "Much. Given the circumstances, how would you have handled him to get more answers?"
"What is this, a classroom? Interrogation 101?" But Luis didn't seem to have the same fury inside that he'd carried yesterday. Sharp edges, yes, and a simmering core of resentment, but he did not hate me.
Quite.
"Yes," I said. "That's exactly what it is. I'd like to understand how you would have done it."
"I--Okay, I probably would have gone over there, kicked the crap out of him, and forced him to tell me what was going on." I simply looked at him, and finally he said, "So probably not all that different, I guess."
"No." I felt tired, and my entire right side ached fiercely. "Perhaps you would have done it better."
"Yeah, I kind of doubt I'd have been better at the ass-kicking." Luis's look at me this time was guarded. "You crashed the bike?"
"Not exactly. I had to lay down the motorcycle so a truck would drive over me."
He barked out a laugh, then realized I was serious. "No way. You did?"
"It seemed the easiest way out at the time." I shifted and winced. "I might have been wrong."
Luis kept watching me, flicking his gaze back and forth between me and the dark, largely empty road. We had a five-hour drive back to Albuquerque, barring any surprises. I felt very tired.
"There's a motel up ahead," he said. "Ibby's safe--she's with Angela's mom and her family--so I'm not due back until tomorrow. I need to take a look at your leg."
"It's fine."
"I'm an Earth Warden. I know it's broken."
"It is?" I looked down at it, bewildered. I would have thought my body would have been clearer about such an injury.
"Cracked femur, and the more time you spend hobbling around on it, the more damage done. Pretty sure you ripped up some muscles, too." He sounded carefully remote about it, and I felt the warm brush of power, like the faintest touch of sunshine. "All right, if you don't want to stop, let me pull over and take care of it, at least."
I didn't object. The continuing waves of pain were distracting, and they made me feel weak and angry with the weakness. How did humans survive a lifetime of these scars and agonies? It seemed impossible. Did they ever really stop hurting?
We drove on in silence for another mile or two, and then Luis exited into a well-lit but empty rest stop area, though I could not see what was so restful about it; it would be difficult to sleep in the glaring lights, and there were no bathrooms, only a number of battered-looking metal and wood tables and benches. Luis put the truck in park and left the engine running as he unbuckled his seat belt.
"Lean against your door," he told me, "and put your legs up here, on my lap."
With the ache in my right, that was a difficult process, but once it was done there was a simple comfort in having his hands lightly resting on my leather-clad shins. That comfort turned darker and deeper as his fingers lightly brushed up to my knee, then moved up my thigh.
He paused just over the place where the ache was the worst, about midway up the bone. His hand settled there in a pool of heat, and Luis looked up at me. In the dim light of the dashboard, the expression in his eyes was unreadable.
"Hold on to something," he said. "Your hip's actually dislocated. This won't be pleasant, but I have to slip it back into the socket."
I gripped the plastic handle overhead and nodded. Luis took hold of my leg, one hand beneath my thigh, the other gripping below my knee, and without a pause, pushed and twisted. In the middle of the flare of white-hot agony that arced through me, I felt and heard the snap of bone resettling in place.
I let my breath out slowly, and realized that I'd ripped the plastic handle completely out of the roof. I quickly pushed it back in place and secured it with a fast, guilty burst of power. The ache was different now, much more bearable. . . .
And then Luis moved up both hands to encircle my upper thigh, and light moved in a merciless, cruelly beautiful dance through my bones and muscles. It burned. It scorched. My whole body shook in response, and I heard myself give voice to a moan--barely a whisper, but I couldn't stop it.
Luis's hand pressed down, cascading life energy into me, and I felt myself rise to meet it, a wave upon the shore, and the moan purred in the back of my throat, sinful and delicious.
I opened my eyes and saw Luis watching me. His dark eyes were still unreadable, but there was a vulnerability to him now. He saw me--not as his brother's human-formed Djinn, not as a burden, but as something else entirely. His hand moved slowly up the sensitive interior of my leg, and even through the layers of denim and leather, I felt it in every nerve.
And then he sat back and left me cold and alone, spiraling down into the breathless dark.
"Better?" His voice was low in his throat, almost harsh. "Sorry. Sometimes that happens; it's because the nerves--well, whatever. I didn't mean to--anyway. Sorry."
I wasn't sorry at all, but his retreat confused me. I concentrated on slowing my racing pulse. My human body had responded in ways that brought back vivid flashes of sense memory. . . . The dream, the one I thought I'd suppressed. The heat he'd poured into me for the healing should have cooled, but instead I felt it growing and concentrating inside me into a golden liquid glow.
I wanted more. More of his touch.
Luis was no longer looking at me. He faced the floodlit night outside of the front windshield, and his face was tense. Unreadable, yet again. "We should go," he said. "Miles to go, and I don't know about you, but I haven't been to sleep in days." He started the car. "You good to go?"
He was right, of course, but I felt there was something false in it. He'd put up barriers again, strong ones. "Yes," I said, and moved my legs off of his lap. There was still a little pain, but it was nothing like it had been. The warmth persisted. "I'm good to go."
Luis put the truck in gear, and we accelerated out into the night.
Evidently, the fact that I had a driver's license did not convince Luis of my actual driving ability, at least not with his vehicle. He flatly refused to allow me to take the wheel, although he had already admitted his own weariness.
I missed being on my motorcycle. There had been something solitary and wild about it, something I couldn't get from a ride within a vehicle even with the window rolled down. I still felt caged. Trapped.
I still felt the imprint of Luis's hand on my thigh, and now it angered me that I was so weak. It's only flesh, I told myself.
But flesh had its own power.
"How did you find me?" I asked Luis at last, when the silence got too thick. The road was long, dark, and almost empty, and I sensed that he was growing very tired. The question snapped him back to alertness. I saw his knuckles whiten as he gripped the steering wheel harder.
"I had an idea where you'd go," he said. "You can't run to the Wardens right now; the Djinn wouldn't have you. So the local Oracle was a safe bet."
I hadn't realized my logic would have been so transparent. "So naturally, you came running to my rescue," I sai
d. My tone was dry and sarcastic, and earned me another glare. Ah, we were back on more familiar footing now.
"No," he said. "I came to get you and take you back to answer questions. I'm a Warden, Cassiel. My brother might have bent the rules for you, but I won't. And I won't have you going on your own Djinn crusade for vengeance, either."
I had not expected that, and perhaps I should have; Luis owed me little, and he had his own life and career to think of. And Isabel. "Did you sense anything about the one who attacked me on the road?"
"Other than Earth powers? Nope. So, there have been three separate attacks--fire, at Manny's office; weather, on the plane; and now earth, on the road. What does that tell you?" Luis didn't wait for my answer. "I'll tell you what it tells me: We've either got an undiscovered triple-threat Warden who can control all the elements, or there's something else going on here. Something bigger than anybody suspects."
"It's more than that," I said. "Manny and I were attacked before that, at a farm." And that power I hadn't been able to identify; it had elements of both weather and earth. Curious.
"Add in the involvement of Magruder and Sands, and the fact that one's dead and the other one's missing--"
"It's more than just random violence," I finished. "And the shooting--"
"The shooting was my fault," Luis said. "I knew it was dangerous, coming back to town. The Nortenos aren't exactly known for their forgive-and-forget attitude." He swallowed hard and blinked rapidly, as if he was holding back a wave of sorrow. "What happened to Manny and Angela is my fault, and I'm going to make it right."
"I do not think it was your fault," I said. "It was mine, as well, if so. As you said, I should have stayed. I should have tried to save lives instead of take them." Manny's empty eyes still haunted me, even more than Angela's. Angela had never had a chance to live, but Manny--I had felt him go, when I was returning from the car crash. I'd felt him let go. "If I had tried--"
Luis shook his head slowly. "Too late for any of that," he said. "We made choices. Now we have to live with them. Sucks, but there it is." He took in a deep breath and let it out. "You know, Manny always was the serious one. The hard worker. I was always skipping school, hanging with criminals; he was the one who made our mama proud." Another shake of his head, as if he was trying to deny the truth of his own words. "Doesn't make sense. None of this makes any sense."
I did not tell him that life rarely did; he wouldn't appreciate hearing it, even if it was true. "How did you become a Warden?"
"Didn't it tell you in my file?" He knew I'd studied him. I didn't know if that should feel embarrassing or not. "Yeah, well, I got in trouble. Usual stuff--burglary at first. Thing was, I was breaking into places without the breaking part--I just unlocked doors and went inside. It's easy, you know. And I didn't know it was going to attract attention. I just figured, hey, cool, superpowers. Made me real popular with my homies, at least until the Wardens showed up at my bail hearing, posted for me, and carted me off to the inquisition. I was kind of surprised they didn't kick me right back. I wasn't exactly well behaved. But I guess they saw something I didn't. They put me through school, gave me a job. Two years later, they brought Manny in, too."
He was the younger brother, yet his powers had manifested earlier, and more vividly. I wondered how Manny had felt, trailing behind.
The way he said his brother's name woke a ghost of pain in my chest--there was a certain emptiness in it, and vulnerability. I found myself wanting to take his hand, not to draw power but to give comfort. That was how humans did such things--flesh to flesh.
I was reaching out to him when the next attack descended on us with shocking suddenness.
The lights of Albuquerque blacked out ahead, and I felt the sudden burn of power being released in the physical world. "Luis!" I snapped, and braced myself against the dashboard with one hand. It was good that I did; he slammed hard on the brakes, and I felt a heavy thud from behind as my motorcycle slammed into the cab of the truck. The tires screeched and jittered, but held against a skid.
"Shit," he breathed, and slammed the truck hard into reverse, gave it gas, and whipped it in a fast, reckless turn. "Can you do anything about that? Because I'm a little busy."
He offered me his right hand, steering with his left. I grabbed hold and rose into the aetheric for a look. Night fell away, and the world erupted in a chaos of color. Reds, maroons, oranges, hot flashes and sparks of yellow.
We were in trouble.
"It's coming in!" I shouted. "From the right!"
The passenger's side. I had just enough warning to duck, and the wind hit the truck with so much force that the entire heavy vehicle rocked up on the left two wheels, threatened to overturn, then settled down with a heavy, rattling thump.
A spray of stones, fired at hurricane speed, began pelting us, like bullets from a machine pistol. The window next to me cracked into icy shards, then blew in. I put up a shield as quickly as possible, but even so we were both bleeding and shaken from the attack, and that was only the opening salvo.
"Faster," I said. "It's circling, trying to cut us off."
"This is insane," he said, and somehow held the truck on the road as another gust lashed at us. "What the hell do they want?"
"One or both of us dead," I said. "Hold on. I'm going up."
I rose into the aetheric again, scanning the boiling mass of neon colors. There seemed to be no center to it, no weak point to target. We were the weak points. I sensed other things from it--a hunger, a blind and furious menace that gave me chills.
Someone hated us on a scale that seemed--even by human standards--insane. I had earned no such enmity during my brief stay in flesh; if Luis had, I could not imagine what he had done to trigger it. But we had to fight it, nevertheless.
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?"