I found myself winding my fingers in his hair, deepening the kiss. The strands felt like warm silk against my skin, and I had a flash of sense-memory that told me how good it would feel brushing against my skin ... elsewhere.
Luis pulled free with an appreciative gasp. "Later," he promised, and put his finger across my damp lips. "Wish I didn't have to say that."
"I wish you didn't, either," I said. If I'd still had my powers as a Djinn, I would have stopped time, created space, made a secret hideaway for the two of us. There we could have done as we both wished, for as long as we wished.
Djinn were indulgent, easily seduced creatures. I missed being a Djinn.
A racket of noise from down the hall made us step apart even farther, and Luis shook his head. "A gang of bikers on meth on a Saturday night couldn't make as much noise as she does just putting on a pair of pants," he said. He raised his voice. "Isabel, you'd better not be doing what I think you're doing!"
I looked at him, mystified. "What do you think she's doing?"
"No idea," he said. "Doesn't matter. That's something her mother taught me--kids always assume you know what they're doing, even if you don't."
The mysteries of humankind.
Isabel appeared a few moments later, neatly dressed in a pair of small blue jeans and a pink knit top. Her cheeks matched the color of her shirt, and I wondered exactly what it was she had been doing that she felt the need to blush. "Something broke," she said. "But it wasn't my fault."
Luis went off to see what it was, and I got down my leather jacket and Isabel's small, cheerfully stained cloth one, embroidered with smiley-face flowers. Ibby treasured that jacket, and I knew it would be a sad day when she outgrew it; her mother had sewed the flowers with delicate, loving precision, and as long as Ibby wore it, she would feel a connection to Angela.
I had, not long ago, bought a child's helmet. I had never felt so glad to have made that impulsive purchase. I was prepared to risk my own skull readily enough, but not Ibby's.
We waved to Luis from the driveway, and I boosted Ibby up on the seat behind me as I straddled the motorcycle and ignited the engine, which caught with a growl and a throb of power. Ibby wrapped her arms around me and squealed in delight. Her helmet, decorated with glittering Disney characters, glowed a shocking shade of hot pink in the sunlight.
Luis was holding two halves of a broken vase, which he juggled in order to wave back. He almost bobbled half of it when I reached out with our shared Earth power and tapped his eardrum, formed vibrations of sound. Stay here, I told him. I have to convince her to do this of her own accord. Pack her things, and ours. Be ready.
He nodded, face shutting down to blankness. That didn't stop me from feeling his uneasiness, and alarm. Cass--what the hell are you doing?
Trust me, I said in reply, and got a stiff, grudging nod. I had earned that trust, I knew, but this was Isabel, and Luis would not forgive me if I did something that caused her to be hurt.
Then again, I would never forgive myself, either.
I eased the bike out onto the street, and gradually picked up speed, still keeping it well under the posted limits. Isabel wiggled with excitement behind me. "Are you holding on?" I asked her.
"Yes!" she shouted back, and tightened her grip on me to prove it.
"Are you sure you're holding on?"
"Yes!"
"All right, then."
We had come to an intersection, and I stopped for the light to change. When it went to green, I pushed the throttle hard over, and the Victory roared out a challenge and shot into the open road. Isabel couldn't fall off, because I had taken the precaution of using a fair amount of Earth powers to bind her hands tight together around me. Even should we crash--an extremely unlikely event--she would be thrown clear with me, and I would protect her from any injury.
I was taking her somewhere. This was not a joyride, although I could tell that for Isabel it certainly was, as she squealed in delight and turned her face into the wind. For me, it was cold-blooded manipulation. I thought again about the Djinn categories of how we saw others--friends, allies, adversaries, and enemies. I moved from friend to ally with Isabel, and I had been all the way to enemy. At the moment, I fell squarely between ally and adversary, I thought.
I wondered how she would feel about it afterward.
The road was indeed lovely, cool winter desert un-spooling on both sides of us once we reached the freeway, a gleaming black line cutting through the ochre wilderness. Overhead, the sky was cloudless and merciless, the way it often seemed in this part of the world. Vultures spun lazy circles in the distance, and I felt the slow pulse of this world around me--animals foraging, hunting, sleeping, mating; plants living their obscure and hidden lives of sun and shade, pollen and seeds. It was a world in which all things consumed, and were in turn consumed.
All things except the Djinn.
It was the best day I had ever spent with Isabel, a delirious whirl of riding the roads, eating at roadside diners, shopping at odd little dusty stores. We were both filthy from the road's dirt by the time we got to where I had planned to take her all along--Mabel's Exotic Pets, a nearly deserted place in a very empty area outside of Albuquerque, where the mountains were only a smudge on the horizon. It was a single building coated with thick, faded white stucco, with small barred windows and a creaking sign that rattled in the wind. COME SEE THE REPTILE GIRL! the sign blared in red, dripping letters.
I released the binding on Isabel and let her climb down; she looked very small and uncertain as she stood there in her handmade jacket and Disney Princess helmet. Even her sneakers sparkled with glitter. "Why are we going here?" she asked. "It looks scary."
"It is, a little," I said, and held out my hand. "There's someone I want you to meet." When she hesitated, I said, "And they have ice cream inside."
She brightened immediately and took my hand. In that moment, I felt a surge of something dark and sticky boiling up from my stomach--guilt, and the sick certainty that I was doing the right thing, no matter how unpleasant it would be for either of us.
Luis would be furious when he found out.
There were only a few other vehicles in the parking lot. One was a rusted van with a giant, crude painting of a woman with a cobra's head, and red letters that screamed SEE THE SNAKE WOMAN! ONLY AT MABEL'S EXOTIC PETS!
Ibby was looking more and more apprehensive. I'd left my helmet with the bike, but she had chosen to keep hers on, and her hand was clammy and sweaty as it gripped mine tightly.
I pushed open the door to the shop. It gave out a rusty sound not unlike a shriek, and Ibby flinched and pulled back. I looked down at her, and she looked up at me, and then she finally nodded and gave me a trembling smile.
That smile almost broke my resolve, but I looked away and walked inside Mabel's Exotic Pets, bringing the girl in with me.
Inside, the place was no chamber of horrors--it was surprisingly clean and cool, with dim lighting that somehow managed to seem soothing instead of sinister. Ringing the four walls were rows of tanks, lit with bluertinted fluorescent bulbs and the reddish glow of heat lamps. Within each tank was a tiny ecosystem, painstakingly preserved ... a desert for the bearded dragons of Australia, who sat happily in their sand under the heat, watching us pass with curiously cocked heads. In the next tank a Chinese water dragon luxuriated in a jungle of leaves and raindrops, and Ibby stopped to examine the lizard's bright jewel-green color. At another tank she shrieked in horrified delight as a large blue gecko licked its own eye; it didn't seem in the least impressed with her, choosing to chase after a cricket in its tank.
I heard a dry rustle of beads, and a warm woman's voice said, "Can I help you folks?"
Ibby, engrossed in the discovery of a truly huge iguana stretched out, uncaged, across a branch at the back of the shop, didn't even register the question. The sign next to the iguana read, YES, YOU CAN PET ME AS LONG AS YOU'RE NICE. She tentatively reached out and ran her fingers over the iguana's giant, jowl-heavy head,
and it lazily opened a golden eye and then closed it again. She patted it, and the iguana held up its head for more. I heard the silvery glitter of Ibby's laughter, and it hurt me--it felt in that moment as if I was on the verge of destroying all the innocence left in her.
I looked at the women who'd spoken to us. She had come out of the back of the shop--middle-aged, dried out by age and the sun, with gray streaks through her shoulder-length dark hair. There was a bearded dragon riding on her shoulder, looking at me with perky interest.
I held out my hand, and the dragon leapt without hesitation from her to me, where it sat in my palm and stared up at me. It was lighter than I had expected, and very warm. Its skin was soft and dry, and it cocked its head quizzically, as if asking a question I could not hear.
"Hello, little brother," I told him, and touched my finger lightly to his head. He settled down comfortably in my palm, and I handed him back to Mabel. She took him back with raised eyebrows.
"You're different," she said. "Djinn, right? I used to have a Djinn, back in the day. He was a big fella, scary as hell. Used to really have to watch my step around him. Part of why I got out of the business when I did."
"The business" being, of course, the Warden business. Mabel was a former Warden--Earth, of course--who had elected to have her powers blunted and leave the service. I had no doubt she still retained a strong influence over the living creatures in her shop; they were uniformly healthy and happy, from the snakes to the lizards to the arthropods like tarantulas and scorpions, who were surprisingly complacent.
"My name is Cassiel," I said. "I came to introduce young Isabel there to your friend."
Mabel's face, which had been open and friendly, shut down completely. I felt the entire mood of the shop shift, and the iguana moved on his perch under Isabel's hand, lifting himself up on strong, muscular legs. His large, mottled dewlap came down from concealment, making him look even larger, and he bobbed his head up and down in rapid, aggressive movements. Ibby took a step back in surprise, but the iguana was looking at me, not her.
"Costs five dollars each to see the Snake Girl," Mabel said. Her words were monotone, stripped of any kind of emotion. She held out her hand. I opened my wallet and placed a ten in her palm, and she met my eyes. Hers were black, bitter, and hard. "She ain't my friend," Mabel said. "And I only do this because she wants me to. If it was my choice--"
But it wasn't, clearly, because she shook her head and stalked over to the swaying beaded curtain in the doorway. She held it open, face averted.
"Ibby," I said, and held out my hand. "We have someone to meet."
"Can't I stay here?" she asked. Her voice sounded faint. "I like the iguana. He's nice."
"His name's Darwin," Mabel said. "He's very nice. Maybe the kid ought to stay here."
"She needs to see," I said.
Mabel looked up, startled, and I could see the calculations moving through her mind until she finally nodded. "All right," she said. "All right, then. Come on, little one, your friend's already paid for you. Darwin will wait for you, I promise."
Isabel frowned, looked back at the iguana with real misgivings, but he laid his head back down on the branch with every indication that he was agreeing with Mabel's statement.
I took Ibby's hand, and together we went to meet the Snake Girl.
The first indication of something unusual was that there were bars at the end of the hallway--a gate, one with a lock. Mabel walked ahead of us, keys jingling in her hand. She unlocked the gate and slid it aside with a scrape of metal. The air was warm, and smelled feral.
"Right," she said. "Rules. Snake Girl is on the other side of the glass. Don't touch the glass. Don't get her upset; it takes days to calm her down. Don't try to talk to her, either. You only look and you go. Okay?"
"Okay," I said. I didn't intend to follow any of those rules, but Mabel didn't need to be advised of that fact.
"Straight down on the left," Mabel said. She slid the gate in place behind us and locked it. "I'll wait here until you're done."
Despite the warm, musk-scented air, I felt a chill move through my body. I felt it in Isabel, too.
Was I doing the right thing?
It was too late to change my mind. It's for the best, I told myself.
And I hoped that I was right.
Isabel and I walked down the narrow brick hallway, which ended in an arched doorway that opened into a larger room. Half of the room was closed off by a giant glass barrier--heavy glass, at least four inches thick, with steel reinforcing wire inside. At the back of the room was another door, one with no handle on the inside. There was a slot at the bottom wide enough to admit trays for food.
Inside the room, sitting on a battered sofa that had once been antique gold in color, was a young woman of about twenty. She was stunningly beautiful--an exotic Aztec cast to her perfectly proportioned face, and skin like rich, glowing copper. Her eyes were black, and so was her hair, flowing in ebony waves down her back.
She looked annoyed. She was lying slumped on the sofa, clicking a remote control at a big flat-screen television across the room. She finally gave it up and tossed the remote to a nearby coffee table, which held stacks of well-thumbed magazines and soft drink cans. She seemed partial to Dr Pepper.
"What?" she snapped at us, finally giving us her attention. Her voice came through clearly, but off to the side from a speaker installed in the wall. "You never seen a Snake Girl before? Vamanos, losers. You've got your five bucks' worth."
The girl was perfectly human down to her waist, and wearing an old, faded T-shirt that featured the same cartoon character decorating Isabel's crash helmet. From the waist down, however, her body turned into the muscular coils of a serpent--massive, and patterned like a rattlesnake in tan, brown, and black. The scales glistened in the light, and as the coils began to move, undraping from the sofa, I saw the gleam of white bone at the end of her body.
She had a long rattle, and it began to set up a relentless buzzing, like a thousand hives of agitated bees.
Isabel, wide-eyed, had said nothing at all. Finally, she looked up at me and said, "What happened to her?"
Snake Girl laughed. It was a harsh, unpleasant sound like knives stabbing a chalkboard. "Mira, it talks. What you think happened to me, little bitch? I got cursed by an evil witch. What else? Only I was the evil witch." She stopped laughing and moved with frightening speed to the glass, her top half swaying above the massive, muscular snake's body as she stared down at us, but especially at Isabel. She finally looked directly at me. "You. You look Djinn."
I shrugged. "I was."
"Explains how you knew I was here," she said. "I don't take out ads in the Yellow Pages. Didn't think the Djinn paid that much attention to the Wardens' failures."
I didn't blink as I watched her; there was something very predatory and primally frightening about her. "The Djinn never forget a failure like you," I said.
That seemed to please her, in some bizarre, obscure way. She focused again on Ibby. "And you. You're just like I was when I was your age. Maybe a little skinnier. But I was shorter."
Ibby took a big step back, but I wouldn't let her run away. Not yet. She tried to pull free, but I exerted a little Earth power to freeze her feet where they stood. Snake Girl pressed both her very human hands to the glass, then squashed her face against it, too, turning the beautiful features into something alien and monstrous. Then she pulled back and laughed, clearly delighted by the discomfort she was causing.
Ibby was shaking with it.
"I was so smart," Snake Girl said. "I knew better than anybody. See, I was good, and I learned really fast. Eight years old and I was setting bones and curing diseases. Ten, and I was making crops grow out of dead ground. I was a fucking miracle, that's what I was. They all said so, all the curanderas." She smiled, but it was deeply unpleasant, and her body twisted sinuously to one side, then the other. It was mesmerizing and terrifying, and I could feel Isabel trembling. "I could do anything. To anybody. For anybody.
You understand how that feels?"
Isabel didn't nod, but I did. I understood all too well how that felt.
"Well, I thought I could do anything, anyway," Snake Girl said. "But how do you know if you don't try? So I wanted to see if I could." She hesitated, studying me, then Isabel. "You sure you want me to go into it?"
"Yes," I said. Isabel said nothing.
"Your nickel," Snake Girl said with a shrug. "I started small, with animals, making them into other things. Some died. Some went all crazy. But I kept going, because why not, okay? I turned dogs and cats into bears and lions, only it didn't go so well most of the time. Big messes to clean up and hide. I figured I'd messed around with animals long enough, so I finally changed a couple of kids, made them grow six feet tall in a day." Her fierce, malicious smile faded. "They said they wanted to grow up. Well, I made them grown-up. Only they didn't do any better in the end than the dogs and cats, and there was an even bigger mess to clean up. And I got caught."
I knew the next part of the story, the part that involved the Djinn--it was something all Djinn knew--but Snake Girl seemed reluctant to continue, or else she enjoyed dragging out the suspense. The silence stretched until I said, "And then?"
"And then the curanderas got a Djinn to come and stop me. I almost won, you know. I turned myself into a giant rattlesnake and I bit him, but not before he turned it all against me. I killed him. I killed a Djinn. Can you believe that?" She laughed, and this time the huge white fangs in her mouth came down with terrifying ease, glinting and wet with venom. "But he got his revenge. He trapped me like this. Not human enough to live, not snake enough to die. A freak show. And while I'm a freak show, I'm damned sure going to make money from it!"
There was silence after she'd finished, except for the dry rustle of her coils.
And then, unexpectedly, Ibby spoke. "Aren't you sorry?" she asked. "For what you did?"
"Sorry?" Snake Girl tossed her hair back over her shoulders and gave the other girl a look of smoldering arrogance. "Why should I be sorry? I didn't ask for all this power in the first place. What, did you? You get yours at the Internet store, idiota?"