Текст книги "Cape Storm"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

Miss Clark was seated, like Mr. Cole, on the grand sofa, but she was wearing a pair of pencil-legged white pants, very ’s nautical, paired with a blue-and-white-striped knit shirt. Her eyes were the same blue as shallow Caribbean waters, and if her hair was dyed that lustrous shade of blond, I couldn’t tell. Even with the makeovers, she had seriously fierce DNA at work.

I felt as if I should genuflect before taking a seat in the side chair that she offered with a gracious nod. David remained standing, but he didn’t resort to the in timidation stance this time around. More of a tranquil stand-at-ease type of thing.

Clark’s trainer and maid busied themselves in another part of the room. I barely registered them as background noise, because La Clark simply drew every bit of attention to herself just by sitting there.

“Thank you for seeing us, Miss Clark,” I said. “My name is—”

“Joanne Baldwin, yes, I know,” she said. She had a contralto voice, and she used it the way a master musician uses a violin, conveying all shades of meaning in one brilliant stroke. “You represent these Wardens I’ve been hearing so much about. And your companion?”

“David Prince,” he said.

“You’re one of the . . . Djinn?” She tried the taste of the word, and I could tell she liked it. When he nodded, Clark’s eyes drifted half closed, and she sat back against the cushions, studying him. “Extraordinary. I thought there were no surprises left in the world, but here you are. Like something straight out of a fairy tale. The old kind, of course. The frightening ones.”

She offered us coffee, tea, drinks. Neither of us felt thirsty, but I accepted a delicate little teacup steaming with French Roast, just to make this more of a social call. Being able to say I had coffee with Cynthia Clarkdidn’t factor into that decision at all. Well, not much.

Clark blew on the surface of her own brew and studied us both with X-ray eyes that had reportedly once made Steve McQueen swoon. “How can I help you?” she asked.

“Just a few questions, and then, I promise, we’ll certainly be out of your way,” I said. “First, can you tell me why you didn’t leave the ship before departure, as you were asked to do?”

“Well, you’re direct,” she murmured. “How very refreshing. It’s all a bit embarrassing, I suppose, and it’s going to make me seem like a horrible tyrant. I was terribly tired, and I left strict instructions not to be disturbed for any reason prior to departure. I’m afraid my employees might have taken those instructions a bit too literally. When I finally rose for breakfast, I was informed of the evacuation order, but it was too late for us to make our arrangements and leave.”

There was something odd about Clark’s aura. It seemed very calm, swirling with neutral blues and soft golds, but it also felt artificial.“What kind of arrangements? I’d think you’d want to get out as quickly as possible.”

“I really can’t go into details,” she said. “But it was entirely accidental that we ended up staying here, on the ship. We won’t be any trouble to you. I’m quite content to stay in the cabin.” She gave me a cool smile. “It’s so difficult to find privacy these days out in the real world.”

I wondered, because a curl of hot magenta drifted over her aura. Resentment, maybe. She wasn’t the It Girl anymore when it came to the paparazzi, and she knew it. It probably took a great deal of effort to get herself photographed at all, except in retirement magazines talking about how she was “still young at sixty-five.”

“Routine questions, Miss Clark. We just want to be sure we’re aware of any problems that might come up,” I said.

“Such as?”

“Oh, I don’t know . . .Trouble between you and another passenger, maybe a stalker? Business disagreements?”

“Alas, I don’t have that many enemies, Miss Baldwin. I’m sure I’d feel much more important if I did. No, I have no fears, and I’m sure that none of my little party represents any sort of difficulty for you.”

I wished I could figure out what was bothering me. She just didn’t seem . . . right.Was she scared? No, not really, but when I concentrated on her aura, I saw flecks like floating ice. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I wassure that it wasn’t normal.

I let the silence go on too long. “Is that all?” Clark asked, suddenly a good deal less welcoming. “I have a strict meditation schedule. Yoga. It keeps me toned and flexible. I highly recommend it.”

“May I speak with your employees?” I asked her.

“No,” Cynthia Clark said. Just the one word, cold and final. I blinked and glanced at David, who was staring at Clark with very dark eyes. I didn’t know what he was seeing, but it wasn’t good. Not good at all.

Then he looked from Clark to where her two employees stood at the other end of the room.

“Jo,” he said, and touched my shoulder. “You should go.”

“I—What?”

“Now.” The touch turned into a painful squeeze. “Now.”

I stood up, but it was too late. I barely sensed the snap of power coming before it hit me like a pile driver to the chest—not just on the physical plane but on the aetheric, too. I knew this sensation.

It had hit me before. It had killed a whole lot of my friends.

The blitz attack sent me into the air in a tumbling, twisting heap. I flew across the cabin and slammed into the solid wall with a wood-cracking thump. I hardly had time to process the shock of pain before pressure closed around me, deep as the black depths of the ocean, and drove all the air from my lungs. I felt my entire nervous system flickering, overloading, on the verge of burnout. There was an unearthly shrieking roar in my ears, like a mental institution on fire, and everything felt wrong, so wrong.

I fought. I flailed, trying to throw it off, but I couldn’t, because there was nothing to grab hold of. I blinked away darkness and saw David moving like a streak of light toward the two at the far end of the room, but he was too far. It was happening too fast, unbelievably fast. . . .

I was going to die, and he wouldn’t be able to stop it.

You can stop it, Joanne. All you have to do is let go.

The thought bubbled up on some black, greasy tide from the depths of my soul. It was solid as a life preserver in a storm, and I grabbed it, desperate to stop the pain, the shrieking, the sickening and inevitable feeling of every cell in my body being crushed into slime .

You have to let go,it told me. Let go, Joanne. You can save yourself if you choose.

With the weight of mountains on my chest, with my entire body screaming for release, with my bones turning to powder inside and my nervous system frying like a burned-out bulb, I believed it was the only choice.

Then I felt the eager, hot twinge of the black mark on my back, and I knewwhere that thought was coming from.

No.

Time had proceeded only a tiny fraction of a second. David hadn’t even reached the far end of the room yet, although the Djinn could move at the speed of thought. I was being crushed into greasy paste by a force so vast it felt like Earth herself had landed on me, and the idea of waiting an instant, a single breath, for help was almost impossible.

Save yourself. You can. It’s easy.

Yes. All I had to do was shatter the containment that David had put around the black torch, and it would burn away all my problems.

Forever.

I held on. I don’t know how; it wasn’t inner strength, it wasn’t courage, and it wasn’t anything I could be proud of. Maybe it was just paralyzing terror. The instant passed, and even though I felt death’s breath on my lips, the taste was all that lingered; David reached Cynthia’s personal trainer, and that man—whoever, whateverhe was—had no more time for killing me.

I gagged in a trembling breath, rolled on my side, and sobbed in agony. My nerves continued to burn, and the entire circuit board of my brain seemed on the verge of overload. I hadn’t been hurt that suddenly, that deeply, in a long time. The taste of mortality is ash and blood, and I coughed until I could stop gagging on it.

Getting up was like free-climbing the Empire State Building in a hurricane, but I used an overturned table for support until I could feel my legs. They weren’t quite right, somehow. Most of me wasn’t, at that moment. This was going to hurt later. A lot. For a long time.

I forgot all of that when David screamed, “Jo! Cover!”

Fire rolled out from him, blistering white, and I lunged for the sofa, where Cynthia Clark still sat frozen in shock by the explosion of violence. I shoved her down into the cushions and threw myself on top of her. I couldn’t reach the other innocent in the room—her personal assistant—but I extended the fastest, hardest shield of interlocked molecules I could over the woman’s prone body. She’d sensibly dropped to the floor and curled into a ball on the rug.

No time for any other defenses. Whether David had called the fire, or his enemy had, it filled the room like an airburst of napalm. I felt the back of my clothes and my hair smolder, and smelled instant, toxic charring of plastics and carpet and furniture. The flame would have incinerated all three of us if I hadn’t shielded us; mortal flesh would have burned off like flash paper.

It hadburned the flesh off of David’s opponent.

The blast flamed out, leaving a thick swirl of smoke, and I raised my head to see my Djinn lover facing a skeletal, blackened thingthat was certainly not human, never human—something that should be dead, and yet was still standing. It wasn’t a Demon, though it had some characteristics that reminded me of the way a Demon’s bones curved and spiked.

It looked like it was made of glass. In fact, only the smudges and soot that clung to it made it visible at all. I blinked and clicked into Oversight.

It was invisibleon the aetheric.

Ghosts,Venna had named them.

The forerunners of the end of all things.

David let out a wordless roar of fury and fastened his hands around the creature’s throat. He was glowing like liquid gold, dripping with living fire.

But where he touched this thing, his fire went out. And darkness began to creep up his arms. No, not darkness—oh God, I knew what that was.

Ash, and dust.

He was being destroyed, just like the Djinn who’d died in the hallway. The touch of this thing was toxic to them. That Djinn must have come across it somehow, maybe even been sent by Ashan to warn us of the danger—and it had killed her.

It had erasedher.

Just as it was trying to do to David.

“Let go!” I shouted, and rolled over the top of the couch to land on my feet. I staggered, but I didn’t have time for weakness. “David, back off!”

David didn’t want to, but he did, breaking away and lunging to his left as I strode forward, gathering up raw power in both hands. As I moved, a silver sword formed in my grip—not metal but ice. Hard as steel, reinforced with a binding that left the cutting edge as thin as a whisper.

If this thing could survive David’s heat, I wanted to see how it felt about chills.

The blade hit, bit, and cut, slicing through fragments of muscle and cooked skin, through crystalline bones that glowed blue where the ice slashed.

I chopped right through its neck. I paused, holding in my follow-through, to see what would happen.

The creature’s head stayed on. As I watched, it wobbled a bit on the skeletal column of glassy vertebrae, then settled back into place.

It smiled with needle-sharp crystal teeth. If it had ever been human, other than a casual disguise, it certainly wasn’t playing at it now. This was something out of a big-budget nightmare, and I took a step back from it, fast.

“David, get everybody out!” I yelled. I could sense this thing orienting on me, predator to prey. The last thing I needed right now was mortal trip hazards and speed bumps; it was going to be all I could do to protect myself, much less Cynthia Clark and her employee.

I sensed David grabbing up the noncombatants and hustling them to the door.

The creature facing me opened its mouth and flicked a tongue like a whip at me. It was more like an icicle than living tissue, but it moved like a cobra. The end was as sharp as a needle, and I barely avoided the stabbing turn of it in midair. A return stroke with my ice-knife passed through the tongue without any effect at all.

Damn.I couldn’t hurt this thing, at least not with these weapons.

I retreated. I changed out ice for steel and tried again. This time, I sliced a piece out of the tongue, which fell to the floor and writhed like a slug in the sun. Whether that hurt the creature or not, it charged me, and I tried to make like a matador. That didn’t help. It had reach and speed, and what had been its fingers in human form were now claws, diamond-sharp and lightning fast.

I felt the slices like chilly tugs on my side, but there wasn’t any pain, not at first. I didn’t allow myself to look down, I kept moving, turning, keeping myself away from the razor-edged whirlwind that was hissing through the air in pursuit.

Then I hit a corner, and there was nowhere left to run. I slashed, trying to slow it down, but the creature was just too damn fast, and too damn powerful. It smashed through the shield I put up. I didn’t have time to try any Earth powers; fire wouldn’t work, and weather tricks wouldn’t buy me more than another fragile breath.

I was going to lose.

A small, white ball of light hit the thing from the side and plunged beneath the crystalline structure. It lit the creature up like an arc light from within. I couldn’t even estimate the heat; it felt like a nuclear bomb compressed to the size of a baseball, forces well beyond my ability to summon, much less command.

All I could do was duck and cover. Again.

The creature shrieked in that horrible, soul-destroying range again and became a photonegative blast of flame that cooked everything within a foot of it—but not an inch beyond. The inverse flame became white flame, then reversed itself into a tiny, glittering spark . . . and the creature was gone except for a shower of glittering crystalline powder.

A wave of intense pressure passed over me and shoved me hard into the corner.

The white ball of light expanded into a softer glow, and as the wave passed over me I squinted into it and saw the Djinn Venna standing where the creature had been, her pink HELLO KITTY sneakers buried in half an inch of crystal powder.

She looked worse than I had ever seen her: pallid, trembling, afraid.She sank down into a crouch, just a frightened little girl, and I couldn’t help but move toward her. I picked her up in my arms, and she shuddered and buried her face in my chest.

Her warmth changed, cooled, became gentle against my skin. I felt my wounds starting to heal, though very slowly. My body began murmuring a shocked report of damages, but I told it to be quiet. Shock felt nice, at the moment. Soothing. I’d take whatever comfort I could get just now.

David reached us a second later, wrapping his arms around us both. “All right?” he asked, and looked into my eyes. He didn’t like what he saw there, clearly, but he liked what he saw in Venna a whole lot less.

I didn’t blame him.

“It’s one of them,” Venna said. “One of the ghosts. It didn’t belong here. It can’t be here.”

The confidence of the Old Djinn in their well-ordered universe had just been shattered, and beings that had never feared much in their long, long lives looked into the abyss that humans faced every day—the dark chasm of uncertainty of the future.

“It’s okay, Venna,” I said, and smoothed her long blond hair. “You did great. Ghost or not, you completely kicked its ass.”

“I can’t do it again.” Venna looked at David and took a deep breath. “It took part of my ass with it. And I don’t think I can get any of that back. Maybe ever.”

Cynthia Clark hadn’t boarded with a personal trainer, as it turned out. In fact, she didn’t remember a thing about the entire incident. There didn’t seem to be much point in trying to convince her that she’d been hypnotized into covering up for some otherworldly demonic glass monster. She wouldn’t even believe that David and I hadn’t set her room on fire deliberately, so I figured the whole monster thing was right off the table.

I staggered away to the nearest public lounge while David tried to settle things to everyone’s satisfaction. I was checked out by a small army of Warden medics and Lewis himself—none of whom were happy with me, or my descriptions of events, come to think of it—and eventually was told that I was in no imminent danger of death or coma, but healing was a long way off.

I was still lying there, feet up, grateful to be breathing, when I spotted Aldonza hurrying past, rolling a luggage cart. She did a quick jerk of surprise when she saw me, and loitered. “Are you okay, miss?” she asked, which told me just how terrible I looked. “Can I get you something?”

I didn’t raise my head from the leather pillow. “I’m okay, Aldonza. Sorry about the cabin.”

“The cabin?”

“Miss Clark’s cabin. It’s—ah—kind of a mess.”

Aldonza got a blank, terrified look on her face and hurried on. I could hear her horrified cry all the way down the hallway.

A half hour later, a whole phalanx of stewards rolled by, carting La Clark’s salvaged baggage and armloads of expensive clothes. They were moving her to a new cabin.

They moved her into mine, as it turned out. I didn’t find that out until I struggled up from my temporary resting place and met Cherise in the hall, dragging her suitcase and looking half-mournful, half-impressed. “Did you know that Cynthia Clarkis going to be sleeping in your bed?” she asked. “That’s kind of awesome, in a sucky kind of way. Anyway, we’re down the hall, and Moses on a motorcycle,what the hell happened to you, bitch?”

I was better, really I was. I was limping—broken bones had been repaired into merely cracked and hurting bones—and I was singed and bloody and looked like some Halloween fright mask, but hey, I was breathing, upright, and thinking straight again. “You should see the other guy,” I said, and coughed. It turned into a lung-bursting hack like a fifteen-pack-a-day smoker’s. I could still taste that awful taint of death, even though I thought that it was all in my head now.

“Uh, thanks, I faint at the sight of gross anatomy. Come on, sweetie. You need a bunk.”

I didn’t argue about it. I’d been inclined to think I could walk it all off until I’d walked about ten feet, and then priorities had shifted again, drastically.

Rest seemed like a very good idea. I accepted Cherise’s support, staggering the rest of the way to our new cabin.

“Ouch,” Cher sighed, as the door swung open on a cramped little room with two narrow beds facing each other. “Looks like we’ve been bumped to coach. Or maybe servants’quarters.”

“Don’t care.” I sank down on the closest flat surface—luckily, it had a mattress—and covered my eyes with my forearm. I needed to think. Howhad that creature gotten on the ship? And why? Was it just biding its time, waiting to kill as many Wardens as possible?

Had it killed the nameless Djinn we’d found in the hallway?

Most importantly—were there more?

David had sensed it, though not with any accuracy. Venna had been able to nuke it, though only at a drastic cost to herself.

We just couldn’t fight an army of these things, and I had the sense that these were just incidental players in Bad Bob’s upcoming melodrama.

Crap.Why did this keep happening to me?

“Jo?” The mattress dented on my left side as Cherise perched on the edge. “You crying?”

“No,” I lied. “Fuck.” I swallowed hard. “I can’t do this. Wecan’t do this. We’re sailing away into the middle of nowhere with a bunch of innocent people and we’re all going to die, Cher. I can’t stop it. God, we’ve screwed this up.”

“Hey.” She moved my arm away from my eyes and looked down at me with such gravity that she didn’t look like Cherise at all. “What’s going on?”

“Did you hear me? We just about got our asses kicked!”

“But you didn’t,” she said. “You told me before we got on this ship that it was going to be hard, and people were going to die, because you can’t go to war if you don’t expect casualties. You didn’t want me to come with, remember. You wussing out on me now, Rambette?”

I sniffled. “No.”

“Good, don’t even. You’re a Warden. You don’t let anythingstand in the way of what you think is right. You have the most lustworthy guy I’ve ever seen madly in love with you. You have fabulous hair. You’re strong and beautiful and smart and evil pees itself when it sees you coming. So don’t you fold up on me, Jo.” Cherise’s mask slipped, just a little. “Because if you do, I don’t think I can keep it together on my own.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “You’re way tougher than me.” I hugged her. “I’m just so tired. I just want to rest.”

“Then rest,” she said, and let go. I settled back on the bed. “But don’t you dare think you’re not up to this. You’re a hero, babe. Heroes don’t wuss.”

“Do they whine?”

“Only to their bosom sidekicks.” She flashed me her bosom to prove she had the cred. Cherise, motivational speaker to the stars.

I managed a weak laugh. I didn’t feel like a hero, not at all. I didn’t think Venna did, either, and I knewDavid didn’t. He was too worried for me, and his anxiety was feeding mine, like a deadly and accelerating loop.

I took some deep breaths. Then I took some more, and let myself drift away from the pain and fear. I imagined myself floating in water, in a sparkling blue pool, with calm clouds whispering by overhead. The sun was warm and soft and kind, and I had on the perfect blue bikini that David liked so much.

The Grand Paradise’s rocking motion lulled me into a mindless calm, and as I hung there, suspended, I felt my body reaching for relief. It healed itself, bit by bit, cell by cell, using power drawn from the energy around me. The temperature of the cabin lowered in response, and I heard Cherise get up and check the thermostat, then break out the blankets. One settled over me, thick and soft.

“You okay?” Cherise whispered. I didn’t open my eyes.

“Yep,” I murmured. “Check it: Heroes don’t wuss.”

I was hoping that Venna had been wrong about her damage. I mean, shock, right? But no. Venna had been not just injured but diminishedby the battle in Clark’s cabin.

When David told me that, sitting on the edge of my narrow bed in much the same way Cherise had earlier, I could tell that he was trying not to give away how much it disturbed him. He had on his just-the-facts-ma’amface, and he’d damped down the link between us to a low hum, suggestions of emotion, nothing more.

That was as close to cutting himself off from me as he could manage, since our wedding ceremony had joined us together on that powerful level.

I didn’t like it.

“She’s all right,” David told me. He was looking at me, but not—eyes unfocused, and miles away. “Physically . . . aetherically . . . she’s all right, she’s just . . . less than she was. As if pieces of her had been burned away.”

“Or eaten,” I said.

“You’re thinking of an Ifrit,” he said, and the focus sharpened in his eyes. “That wasn’t an Ifrit.” No, it definitely had notbeen an Ifrit. Those were Djinn, badly damaged and transformed, yes, feeding on their own kind, but still recognizably of the Djinn DNA family.

This thing . . . not so much.

“What if it was part Ifrit?” I said slowly. I struggled up to a reclining position, with my pillow bracing my aching back. “Part Demon, too? Some kind of hybrid?”

“That would be bad,” David said, very softly.

“Yeah, it’d suck like an industrial-strength Hoover. Demons are hard to kill; Ifrits can consume pieces of other Djinn, right?” As I understood it, Ifrits were the result of damage occurring to a Djinn’s ability to process energy from the aetheric. Starving and desperate, they did what any living creature might do to survive; they turned cannibal, stealing energy from their own kind. Dark, nightmarish vampire Djinn, usually with a nearly complete lack of higher mental faculties. Maddened by hunger.

Marry that to a Demon, and you’ve got a truly terrifying weapon against the Djinn, not to mention anyone else who gets in the way, like Wardens.

In a word, one of Venna’s ghosts—invisible, deadly, and adaptable.

“Can she recover?” I asked, thinking again of Venna. David gave me a highly suspect shrug. “Check that—can she recover in time to do that again?”

“I don’t know. I’m not her Conduit.”

“Cop-out.”

“Hey!”

“You know. You may not be able to help her, but you know whether or not Ashancan help her.”

“Ashan isn’t saying much,” David said. “You know how he is.”

Oh, I knew. We’d hit the same brick wall when trying to help another of Ashan’s Old Djinn, a particularly arrogant specimen named Cassiel who’d pissed the old dude off and been cast out to fend for herself for her troubles. She hadn’t quitebecome an Ifrit. Instead, she’d decided to go the less conventional route of binding herself to the Wardens for her daily dose of life energy . . . and I wasn’t at all sure that had been a good idea, still. Thank God, she wasn’t here with us, causing trouble. Wherever she was, I hoped she was doing better than we were.

Ashan had refused to talk about that incident, too. He wasn’t, in general, the chattiest of all my many enemies. He’d read the guidelines for villainy, the first one being Don’t monologue.

“Is she staying?” I asked. Because Venna being Venna, she could stay or go, exactly as she pleased. In her place, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have gone off to the Djinn Day Spa for the next several millennia, and left us human idiots to our own devices.

“Of course she’s staying,” David said, and smiled just a little. “Venna’s more like you than she’d like to admit.”

“Apart from being cuter.”

“Debatable.”

“I don’t have any HELLO KITTY shoes.”

“Could be remedied.” He lifted my hand to his lips, and I shivered at the gentle touch, not to mention the look in his eyes. “I’m sorry about earlier. I realized I wasn’t helping you recover. It’s hard to remember how much we share now. I don’t want to add to your problems.”

“You were worried,” I said. “Hell, join the club. We have T-shirts and free-drink coupons. Open bar every Wednesday.”

“Come here.” He folded me in his arms, and I let out a long sigh. Most of my remaining tension went with it. “You did very well back there.”

“What, getting myself backed into a corner to be chopped up by the walking meat slicer? Yeah, spectacular job. Mom would be proud.”

“I don’t think many humans could have stood against it at all,” he said. “Fewer still would have tried. I talked with Venna about how she destroyed it. She vibrated it. I think you could do the same?”

“Vibrated—” Of course. Crystalline structure in its bones and claws and teeth. Strong, but hit it with the right oscillated frequency, and you could hurt it, maybe destroy it. “I’d need to experiment to get it right. I don’t suppose you have any remains . . . ?”

For answer, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a single crystal tooth, about the size of a small switch-blade. He held it in his palm for a moment, weighing it, and then handed it to me. “Careful,” he said. “Sharp.”

He was right; it still held a wicked edge. I wrapped it in handfuls of tissue paper from the box on the night-stand and put it in my own pocket for later study.

“Do we know if there are more on board?” I asked. “Because we really don’t need another ugly surprise.”

David got up and opened the cabin door. In walked another Djinn, a brawny, bald-headed sort who looked like he might have moonlighted on a cleaner bottle from time to time. His skin was a dull metallic gray, and his eyes were the color of rust.

He looked around the sparse cabin with an expression like he’d bitten a bug in half, then dragged over the small side chair. Cherise wasn’t in at the moment, for which I was grateful; she’d gone off in search of medicinal ice cream. I could imagine her running commentary on this scene.

“This is Lyle,” David said.

“Seriously?” I blurted. They both shot me an odd look. “I mean, come on. Lyle?”

Lyle smiled. He’d filed his teeth into sharp little points. “You got a problem with that?” He had a surprising Deep South accent, slow and warm. It didn’t sound artificial, as if he was mocking me, either.

Another oddity.

“Uh, no, no problem,” I said. “It’s just not exactly the kind of name I’m used to hearing from supernatural beings. A little too—”

“Human?”

“Country,” I said. “Not even a little bit rock and roll.”

David decided it was time to intervene before my conversational skills cost me a bruise or two. “Lyle became a Djinn during one of the World Wars.”

“Which one?”

“They come so close together,” David said. “First?”

Lyle nodded. “I kept my human name. A lot of Djinn don’t bother. Sorry it doesn’t meet with your approval, Warden.”

“No, you’re not,” I said, and he smiled again. This time, he’d put away the scary teeth, and his dentition was blindingly white and perfectly human-normal.

If anything, that was weirder.

“Lyle was checking for energy signatures,” David said. “Did you find anything?”

“Yes. Weaker than the one you two tripped across, though, and well hidden.” Lyle’s rust-colored eyes darkened just a shade. “They’re hiding as humans.”

“How many?”

“Two.”

“Two more?” My throat threatened to close up around the words, and Lyle sent me a sharp look. I needed to work on my poker face. “What do we know about them?”

“They’re wearing skins,” Lyle said. “The skins used to be people, so they have history and weight in the aetheric. They took care not to kill the skins. I think they knew it was a good disguise. Good enough to fool most Djinn, even.”

He was trying to describe something that I was trying equally hard not to imagine. “These people—can we save them?”

“Not people,” Lyle said. “Like I said, they’re just skins now. Nothing inside.”

I wished he hadn’t said that. Or at least, hadn’t sounded so matter-of-fact about it.

“Why haven’t they attacked us already?” I asked. “They probably know their big brother’s gone, right? What are they waiting for, the all-you-can-eat-buffet light to go on?”

“They’re definitely waiting on some type of signal, if they haven’t struck at us yet,” David said. “They can afford to bide their time. We don’t even really know what they’re capable of doing, not yet.”