It might have been a plan. Pearl had sent him to get the list away from me. I’d stopped him. After seeing the lengths I’d been prepared to go to, he hadn’t dared make another move, not then.
Luis was still talking, but I was no longer listening. Whether this was real anger, or false, I couldn’t know, but I no longer felt that I had left him in safety.
I no longer knew where I could find safety at all.
I climbed from rock to rock, jumped and landed hard on the walkway on the other side of the protective barrier, and ran for the distant headlights moving along a nearby street.
I needed a ride, and I wasn’t going to be particular about how I obtained one.
Chapter 8
I CONSIDERED STEALING ANOTHER VEHICLE,
but they were all occupied by drivers; I was planning how to force one to stop so that I could remove the driver—without hurting him or her—when, to my surprise, a white sedan glided quietly to a stop at the curb next to me. The tinted window rolled down.
“Hey, is your name Cassiel?”
I looked in, frowning. The driver was no one I knew. “Get in,” the man said. The locks clicked open, and he leaned over the seat to shove the door open. “I said get in. Your friends sent me to pick you up.”
He was a younger man, probably near Luis’s age, although there was something in his eyes that seemed much older. Hard experience, perhaps. The car was clean, neat, and smelled of smoke and narcotics. The man nodded to me as I slipped into the passenger seat and buckled my safety belt, then slammed the door. The window rolled up, sealing me in with the narcotic- flavored smoke. He pulled out into traffic, heading vaguely north.
I watched his profile steadily. “Aren’t you going to ask me where I need to go?” I asked him.
“Nope,” he said. “Because you’re going where I tell you.” He pulled out a knife as long as his forearm from a sheath underneath the driver’s seat, and held it casually on his leg. “You just sit there and be quiet, all right? Don’t give me no trouble.”
“Who sent you?”
“You always ask this many questions when you see a knife? Shut the hell up and hand it over.”
“It,” I repeated.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
The stranger was asking me to hand over the scroll
.
For a heart-stopping second I remembered the ruined cell phone, dripping water, before Rashid had deigned to repair it. Was the scroll equally damaged? I ignored the man with the knife, although he said something else, probably a threat to emphasize why I had to obey him. I reached into my jacket and pulled out the hard cylinder of the scroll. It looked seamless. No water dripped from it. I traced a finger along the edge, and the casing split, retracted, and the paper beneath was crisp and dry. I let out a relieved, slow breath.
“I
said,
” the man driving said, “
hand it over.
I will cut you, bitch. Your choice.”
He was jumpy. Unpredictable. His knuckles were white around the knife.
I sealed the scroll, put it back in my jacket with a feeling of cold relief, and sat back against the drug-scented upholstery as he accelerated the car, no doubt to convince me I couldn’t safely dive from it.
He lifted the knife threateningly.
I grabbed his hand, twisted, and slammed the blade down into his own right leg.
“Who sent you?” I asked. “Who told you where to find me? Who told you my name? Who knows I have the scroll? Is it Ben Turner?”
He screamed, face going stark white, and hit the brakes with his left foot, sliding the car to a noisy, jittering stop in the middle of an intersection. Overhead, the swaying traffic signal clicked from green to yellow to red. He whimpered and let go of the knife, staring at it stupidly.
I reached over and pulled it out in one fast, efficient pull. Blood immediately flooded out to soak his jeans. It was deep, but he had missed the larger arteries. Not through any planning on my part.
“You bitch,” he said. “You
bitch,
you stabbed me!” “Technically, I did not. You stabbed yourself.” I stared at him without any feeling of empathy at all. Perhaps I was still more Djinn than Rashid thought. “Now, answer my questions. Who sent you?”
“Fuck you.”
Luis would have been appalled, but Luis wasn’t here. I responded to the man’s rudeness by putting a slender bronze fingertip on his wound, and pressing down into it. He whined in the back of his throat and struck out at me, but it was weak, and I easily fended him off as I pushed my finger deeper into the gash.
“Now,” I said, in exactly the same tone. “There’s another inch before I hit bone. Tell me who sent you.”
“Turner!” he screamed. His face had gone the color of spoiled milk. “Ben Turner, okay? I owed him!”
I sat back, wiped the blood from my metal hand onto the upholstery of his car, and considered what he had just said. “He sent you to follow me.”
“Yeah.” His breath was coming short now. “I was supposed to jack you and get the scroll. Wasn’t supposed to be any big deal.”
“And how is it now?” Facetious question. I waved it aside. “And how do you know Agent Turner?”
“He busted up a meth lab couple of months ago around here. Told me I’d have to do him a favor to stay out of prison.” The man gave a dry, wicked chuckle. “Some favor.”
“He didn’t warn you about me?”
The man shrugged, both hands now clamped protectively over his bleeding leg. He avoided looking directly at me.
“Ah,” I said, light dawning. “You didn’t listen. He did warn you, but you thought you could handle me in your own way.” I smiled slowly. “How has that worked out for you?”
He was beyond mouthing insults now. I considered leaving him by the side of the road, then reached across him, opened his door, unbuckled his seat belt, and said, “Come around the car to the passenger side.”
He stared at me, blue eyes wide and oddly childlike under the baffled rage. “Why?”
“Because I’m going to the hospital to have a talk with Special Agent Turner,” I said. “And I might as well take you with me. It seems the least I can do.”
I was holding the knife. It seemed that put me in charge. He stared at me for a second, then said, “Don’t take my car. I need my car. I got a job and a family and shit.”
“Then I feel sorry for your employer and your relatives. Come around before you bleed so much you soak the seat.” Because, of course, it would be unpleasant for me—not because I was worried about the man’s health. As the thug got out and limped his way around the back of the car, I slid smoothly over into the driver’s seat.
I considered driving away. I did. But I waited for him to step-drag his way around the trunk, fumble open the passenger door, and drop inside, sobbing for breath. He’d left a wide, shimmering trail of crimson on the pavement in a semicircle around the car.
“Buckle up,” I said, and followed my own advice. He sent me a sweaty, disbelieving look. “It’s the law.”
He couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry; I could see both in the trembling set of his mouth, the shine of his eyes.
I put the knife flat on my thigh, just as he’d done. My eyes brightened just a little with Djinn fire. I know that, because I saw the reflection in his widening eyes. “Buckle. Up,” I said, very precisely.
He jammed the seat belt home with trembling fingers.
I nodded in satisfaction, put the car in gear, and drove, breaking speed limits and ignoring all safety precautions. I sped through red lights, drove down one-way streets, and arrived back at the hospital’s emergency entrance in record time, pulling to a halt barely seven minutes after entering the vehicle.
I got out, dumped the bloody knife into the nearest trash can, and walked away into the hospital. I left the driver’s-side door open. “Hey!” the man inside the car yelled. “Crazy bitch! You can’t just leave like this!”
A nurse on duty at the desk looked up, frowning. I gestured back toward the entrance. “There’s a man in the car,” I said. “He’s bleeding. I think he’s been stabbed. Also, I believe he is on drugs. He’s not making any sense.”
She didn’t seem at all surprised. She merely nodded, gestured to a couple of other medical professionals sitting at a table in another room, and the three of them headed out to tend to my new acquaintance.
I didn’t even know his name.
That did not really distress me.
I took the stairs up to the room where I’d left Brianna with Luis and Turner.
It was empty.
I broke into a flat run, flying past startled interns and doctors, nurses and technicians, and found my way to the room where we’d left Gloria Jensen and her family as well.
Not there.
All of them—the Jensens, Brianna, Luis, Turner—were gone as if they’d never existed at all.
I grabbed a nurse walking by Gloria’s room. “The Jensen girl,” I said. “Where was she taken?”
“She was released,” the nurse said, frowning, and shook free of my grip. “She’s fine.”
I sensed something wrong with her. Deeply wrong. When I stared at her in Oversight, I saw damage in her aura, psychic wounds where someone had savagely and swiftly altered her memories. She’d be ill, later—physically first, then mentally, if she couldn’t adjust to the invasion.
I couldn’t help her. I didn’t have time. There was still a chance that I could sense Luis, if he was close, so I spun away from her and focused on my connection to him, my memories of him.
Nothing came to me that could be felt above the spiking sense of urgency I couldn’t seem to control.
I leaned against the wall, bowed my head, and tried to remember how it was that Luis, with all his Earth powers, had communicated to me silently. It was not what humans thought of as telepathy; it was an independent manipulation of the ear, re-creating sound patterns precisely, even down to intonation. Advanced work, but fairly common among Earth Wardens.
If Luis could do it . . . so could I. But I had no formal training, no idea how to direct the energy to the person I desired to speak with.
I could only try.
Luis.
Nothing. I concentrated on the aetheric essence of the man, on everything I knew and felt of him. On the connection still stretching between us—power and a growing, steel-core sense of need.
Luis.
Nothing. I felt a wave of frustration and helplessness sweeping over me, and focused even more, willing the world away.
Luis Rocha!
And from a great distance, I felt a whisper return.
Cass?
Relief, brief and sweet, before reality set in again. He sounded dazed, uncertain, and weak. Worse than I had ever heard him.
Cass, be careful, it’s not what you think—
Luis suddenly, invisibly screamed, and I felt the connection shredding apart—not an outside force detecting and destroying it, but his own pain destroying focus.
I opened my eyes, staring blindly at the wall, at the frightened face of the nurse a few feet away, who was gawking at me.
“I’m coming,” I told him aloud. “Hold on. Just hold on.”
And I ran.
I was spoiled for choices in the parking lot, but instead of a motorcycle I found an ambulance, parked and silent, at the back near a maintenance bay. The paper attached under the windshield noted that all repairs had been completed, but the vehicle wasn’t scheduled to be returned to duty until the next day.
I might need medical facilities. And armored transport for several people. The ambulance was a perfect choice, except for the inevitable stew of horror that awaited me on the sensory level. Although it was cleaned, bleached and sanitized, nothing could completely erase the odors—psychic, possibly—of blood, sweat, vomit, and death that lurked in the rear compartment of the vehicle.
Luis had held on to our connection, somehow, but it did not provide much of a sense of direction. He kept up a steady stream of whispers, some bursting wildly into static that told me he was struggling to keep his pain at bay. Twice the connection snapped altogether, leaving me silent and desperate, but he managed to reach out again.
I knew I was his lifeline.
I just didn’t know how I would be able to save him.
“I call on the Djinn to bargain,” I said. “I will bargain favors and obligations in return for assistance. I, Cassiel, swear this.”
It was a formal call for help, to the Djinn. I had never used it, never in my lifetime; it was an admission of weakness among the Djinn to be forced to bargain with another of equal or greater status, of being unable to charm or trick the service from another.
No one answered.
No one.
I had not expected Ashan to come calling; my Conduit had made himself very clear when he’d cast me out from his ranks that I could not approach him again, save at a crawl, and even then only once I’d fulfilled the mission he’d given me. The other True Djinn would not dare to cross him, except Venna, but Venna had problems of her own, from what I had been told.
But the New Djinn should have been interested enough to at least
ask.
I had screamed into the darkness, and gotten back nothing. Not even an echo.
And then I felt the weight in the van shift, and looked in the rearview mirror to see that one Djinn had, after all, answered my call.
“Interesting,” Rashid’s voice said from behind me. “I know that as a human you’re required to earn your bread, but surely this seems a strange time to learn a new trade as a physician?”
I looked into the rearview mirror to see that he was sitting on the clean, empty gurney in the back, idly fiddling with medical supplies. He looked better. Still indefinably . . . not quite himself. The battle with the golem had taken something out of him, and it would take time for him to recover. I couldn’t give him time.
“Why did
you
respond?” I asked him. “No one else did.”