Текст книги "Undone"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

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I accepted that without argument. By human standards, it was true enough. “I should not have acted so quickly,” I agreed. “I need more power.”

I put it bluntly, to see both how it felt on the tongue and how he would react. The taste of it was fine. His reaction was instructive, in that his eyes widened, and I saw a spark of something that might have been excitement, quickly buried.

“All right,” he said, and his tone seemed deliberately casual. He held out his hand. I took it, and almost immediately, the beast inside of me, the hungry, desperate part, began to greedily devour what was offered. My sensible mind faded, pushed aside by need.

I felt Manny try to pull away. It sparked instincts in me—not Djinn instincts; the primitive impulses of a ruthless, successful predator.

The human impulse to hunt was complicating my needs.

No!

My distaste of those human instincts was all that saved him. I let go, wrenching the flow of power shut between us, and backed physically away, arms wrapped around my aching stomach.

Manny collapsed. It was slow, almost graceful, and he was never unconscious; he simply lacked the strength, or the will, to keep on his feet. Or his knees. He fell full length on the carpet and rolled onto his back, eyes dark and wide, gasping for breath.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I was. I was also well aware that I should not touch him again, not now. “Did I hurt you?”

“Not—exactly,” he said. He groaned and rolled painfully onto his side, then up to a sitting position. I could see the trembling in his muscles, as if he’d received a violent electric shock. “Let’s not do that again, okay? You’re kind of hard on your friends.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“You can say it again. It won’t offend me.” Manny rested his back against the bare wall, pulled up his knees, and rested his forearms on them. “Christ. We’ve got to work on that. You can’t take it out of me like that. If we’re in real trouble, you could kill us both, not to mention anybody we’re trying to help.” He rested his head against the wall and sighed. “And at the risk of sounding like a woman, that hurts when you do it wrong.”

I stayed silent. I felt a strange burn of shame, deep down, that wouldn’t be smothered. I hurt him.I hadn’t meant to do so, but that hardly mattered. If I’d killed him, he leaves behind others.The interconnectedness of human life had never truly made itself real to me until I had sat at the table, eating food prepared by his wife, watching his daughter laugh and smile.

Manny didn’t speak again. I crouched down across from him, eye level, and stared deep into his eyes.

“I can’t promise,” I said. “I will do my best, but I may not always be able to control this. You must be prepared to defend against me.”

His gaze didn’t waver. “That’s not real comforting.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.” I smiled slightly, but I didn’t imagine that was comforting, either. “I assume the Wardens are keeping track of what I do.”

He had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “I turn in reports, yeah. They want to make sure you’re not—”

“Out of control.”

“Exactly.”

“Am I?”

It was Manny’s turn not to answer. He held the silence, and the stare, and I could not read his impenetrable human eyes at all. So much lost in me. So much that could go wrong.

“Help me up,” he said, and held out his square, muscular hand. I did, careful to keep it only to surface touching, although I could sense the power coursing through him even through so light a contact. “Get your coffee. Let’s go to work.”

Work was a new and interesting concept for me. I understood duty, of course, and using one’s skills and powers for a purpose. But workwas a completely different thing, because it seemed so . . . dreary.

Manny Rocha had an office. A small, cheap single room in a building full of such accommodations. The sign on the windowless door read, ROCHA ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES. He unlocked the office and stepped inside, gesturing for me to follow as he picked up a scattering of envelopes from the carpeted floor. “Sorry about the mess,” he said. “Been meaning to pick up a little.”

Whatever Manny’s skills might entail, clearly organization was not one of them. Mountains of paper and folders towered on every flat surface, leaning against each other for drunken support. There was not a single spot, other than his chair behind the broad, rectangular desk, that held clear space.

“Yeah,” he said, seeing my expression. “Maybe messdoesn’t really cover it. I’ve been meaning to get around to it—it’s just that—”

“You hate such tasks.”

“Filing. You got it.”

“How would you prefer it to be filed?”

He stopped in the act of picking up a handful of fallen papers and turned toward me. “What?”

“How would you prefer it to be filed?” I repeated, exercising patience I had not known was available to me until that moment.

“Listen, if you can file this shit, you can do it any way you want.” He sounded both hopeful and doubtful, as if I might believe that the filing of papers was beneath me. What he did not seem to understand was that when everythinghumans did was beneath me, a mundane task such as filing made very little difference.

“Very well,” I said. I could have done it in a dozen different ways—from subtle to dramatic—but I chose a Djinn-style flourish. The paperwork vanished from every surface with an audible popof displaced air, even the sheafs held in Manny’s hands, and I expanded my consciousness to analyze the fundamental structure of every folder, every file. Destroying and re-creating at will, even though it was a ridiculous expense of power. “Open the drawer.”

The far wall of his office was a solid block of cabinets with sliding drawers. He hesitated, then opened one at random.

Inside, a neatly ranked system of folders, filed papers.

“I filed them by subject,” I said. “I can change that, if you wish, of course.”

“You’re kidding,” he said blankly. “ Dios mio, you’re not kidding. There’s a folder here on boundary disputes. On acid levels in the water. On—what the hell is this?” He pulled a folder out and frowned at it. “Boundary adjustments in Colorado? That’s not supposed to be here. Hell.”

Manny closed the file drawer and sat down in his chair. Hard. He looked around at his office as if he’d never seen it before, placing his hands palm down on the empty desktop. “Holy shit,” he said. “You—how did you do that?”

I shrugged. “Simple enough. It’s only paper and ink, after all.” Except that I had expended far too much power in doing it, though I decided I would not tell him that. I sat in the leather armchair across from him. “What else shall we do?”

He was staring, and suddenly he barked out a sound it took me a moment to identify as laughter. “You do windows too, Cassie?”

“Cassiel.”

“Right, sorry.”

I sensed I might be in danger of becoming too accommodating. “No. I do not do windows.”

“Then we can go right to the Warden stuff, I guess.” He cleared his throat and reached for the computer keyboard off to the side, sliding it in front of himself. The machine was angled toward him from a corner of the desk. “Can’t believe I can actually see the damn screen without moving things around. Let me check e-mail.”

“You have forty-seven messages,” I said. “Six of them have to do with requests for support from other Wardens. Shall we focus first on those?”

“I never had a Djinn,” Manny admitted. “This how it was before? Working with a Djinn?”

I had no idea, but the idea of being compared to one of my kind enslaved to a bottle turned my too-human stomach, and I knew my expression hardened. “I doubt it.”

He knew dangerous ground when he stepped upon it. Manny nodded. “I guess you can read the e-mails?”

“Of course.”

“Which one is most urgent?”

I gave it a second’s thought. “The new instability Warden Garrity identified in Arizona is classified as a strike/slip fault.”

“Garrity, Garrity—” Manny clicked keys and pulled up the e-mail in question. He read it through, nodded, and said, “Yeah, that’s a place to start. Okay. Here’s what we do—we mark it on the aetheric; we tag it so it’s clearly visible. If there’s a stress buildup, we bleed that off through surrounding rock in smaller tremors. Otherwise, the spring keeps on coiling, and we get a big shake when it releases. Usually that’s no big deal, but it can cause a lot of damage if we don’t head it off.”

I nodded, familiar with the concepts. It was different as a Djinn, but still similar enough. “How do I assist you?”

He took his gaze from the screen to glance at me for a second. “Don’t know. Just follow me and see if you’ve got any ideas.”

I was anchored to human flesh. “I—need to touch you. To rise into the aetheric.”

“No biting,” he said, and held out his hand. I reached across the desk to take it. It was his left hand, and the metallic gold of his wedding ring felt an odd contrast to the skin and bones. “Ready?”

“Ready,” I said. I didn’t know if I was, but surely rising into the aetheric was as natural to me as breathing was to a human.

It wasn’t. Not anymore. It felt wrong, the way I had to fight free of the heavy, dragging anchor of my body. Only Manny’s sure touch kept me from falling back. Even after we had risen, and the spectrums shifted to show us auras and the mysteries of perceptions, I felt the continuing pull to return.

I had not known it was such hard work.

Manny couldn’t speak in the aetheric, but he didn’t need to. I was pulled along like a child’s doll as he arrowed up into the higher plane, leveled out, and looked down on the Earth. It was a dizzying view, all opalescent colors, sparks, whispers. In the aetheric Manny looked startling—younger than in his physical form, slimmer, and almost completely covered with the shifting ghosts of tattoos. I didn’t know what they symbolized, but clearly they were important to him.

His aura was a pale blue, tinged and sparked with yellow and gold. Not as powerful as others I had seen, but powerful enough for the work he was doing.

He pointed, and I nodded, bracing myself for the fall. When it came, it was shockingly fast. The ground rushed toward us, and the snap of energy whipped us to a hovering stop above a landscape alive with a twisting line of fire. Not real fire, but energy, stored deep beneath the planet’s skin. Building toward explosion.

Had I still been Djinn, I would have simply admired the violence of it, the beauty of the incredible forces at work. But Djinn weren’t at risk from such things, and so had nothing to fear. We did not build. We rarely died.

Humans were not so fortunate. For the first time, I found myself wondering about the fates of those milling thousands in their homes, towns, and cities, oblivious to the explosive danger under their feet.

I found myself caring.

I wasn’t sure whether I found that intriguing or annoying.

Bleeding off the energy through surrounding rock was a delicate, slow process, but gradually the fault’s energy faded from a throbbing, urgent red to a pale gold, stable and calm. It would present a constant threat, but with regular maintenance from the Earth Wardens, it would only threaten, not destroy.

When Manny released his grip on me, it was like a giant steel spring snapped tight, and I spun out of control away from him, hurtling through the aetheric, through the oil-slick layers of color. The descent was sickening. Terrifying.If I had been able to scream, I would have; how was it humans traveled this way, dragged down by their anchoring bodies?

I slammed back into flesh with a spasmodic jerk that nearly toppled the armchair. Across from me, Manny Rocha barely flinched as he settled into the human world again.

He opened his eyes to look at me, and there was a glow in his eyes that took me by surprise. Power, yes, and something else.

Rapture.

It faded quickly, as if he didn’t want me to see it in him. “You okay?” he asked. I shook my head. My mouth was dry, my stomach empty and growling. Worse than that, though, I felt . . . exhausted. Drained again. I felt a soul-deep stab of frustration. I can’t live this way, off of the scraps of others. I am Djinn!

Ashan had made me a beggar, and in that moment, I hated him for it so bitterly that I felt tears in my eyes. Now I would weep like a human, too. How much more humiliation could I bear?

Manny’s hands closed on my shoulders. I drew in a startled breath, and my pale fingers circled his wrists. I had intended it to be defense, to throw off his touch, but the sense of his skin on mine stilled my panic.

“I need—” I couldn’t speak. I’d taken so much this morning, and yet it was already spent. I felt on the verge of collapse, horribly exposed.

Manny understood. “Promise you won’t take more than I give?”

I nodded.

It was trust, simple and raw, and I did not deserve it.

It took a wrenching, painful effort, but I took what was offered, and nothing more.

Perhaps I could learn to deserve it.

Chapter 4

WE HAD WORKEDonly a half day at reducing the stress in the fault, but Manny decreed that I needed rest.

“I’m fine,” I told him sharply, as he gathered up his keys on the way to the door.

“Yeah, you’re fine now,” he said, “but you’re going to need some sleep. Trust me on this, Cassiel. Wardens go through this when we first start out. It’s natural to have to build up your endurance.”

Not for a Djinn,I thought but did not say. None of this was natural for a Djinn, after all.

Manny had locked the office door behind us and we were on our way to the elevators when a stranger stepped out to block our path. Clearly one of my kind, to my eyes; he was wreathed in golden smoke, barely in his skin, and his eyes were the color of clear emeralds.

Not a stranger, after all. Gallan.He didn’t so much as glance at Manny; his stare stayed on me. I came to a halt and reflexively put a hand out for Manny to stay behind me.

“What do you want?” I asked. Gallan—tall in this form, long-legged, with long, dark hair worn loose—seemed to find me amusing in my fragile human form. He leaned against the wall, with his arms folded, still blocking our path.

“I came to see if it was true.” His eyebrows slowly lifted. “Apparently, it is. How did you anger him so, Cassiel?”

There was only one him, for us. Gallan was, at times, a friend and ally, but first and foremost, he was a Djinn. An OldDjinn, one of Ashan’s, and I could no longer trust him. “It’s not your business.” I meant it as a warning. He couldn’t have taken it any other way, but something about it amused him.

“Have you seen any others? Since—” His gesture was graceful, vague, and yet all inclusive. Since this happened.The event being, of course, too embarrassing and humiliating to mention directly.

“No,” I said sharply. I had, but there was no reason to tell him. “Leave, Gallan. I don’t want company.”

“You never do.” He smiled slowly. “Until you do. Tell me that it is completely done between us, and I won’t trouble you again.”

I felt my pale cheeks heating—a human response. Pulse beating faster. I didn’t know if it was fright or something else. Something just as primitive.

“Leave.”

“Tell me again.” His eyes took on a brilliant gleam, sharp enough to cut.

“Leave.”

“Again.” He took a step toward me, and I felt the heat of him, the smoke, the fire. “Once more and it’s done, Cassiel. Once more and you’ll never see me again.”

The word locked in my throat. Threes are powerful to us, compelling. I could dismiss him, and he would go.

I could not say it.

Another step brought him even closer to me, close enough to raise a hand that trailed light a Crai6" t the edges of my vision. He stroked my cheek, and I shuddered.

Gallan leaned closer, so close he eclipsed the world, and those eyes were as hungry as gravity.

“Do what he wants,” he whispered, barely a breath in my ear, “and come home, Cassiel. Come home.”

He melted away into mist. I caught my breath on a cry—rage, loss; I wasn’t certain what emotion tore a hole through me, except that it was violent and painful.

Manny put a hand on my elbow. “Who the hell was that?”

I barked out a sound that was not quite a laugh. “A friend.” I got a look of utter disbelief in return. “A very old friend.”

The human world seemed so limited and lifeless, after the glitter in Gallan’s eyes. I felt sick and faint and lost. It must have shown, because Manny’s grip tightened on my arm.

“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”

Days passed, and Manny was right: I did build up endurance over time. Soon the clumsy process of entering and exiting the aetheric felt natural to me, and I learned to ration my own resources until I could stay with Manny until he, not I, tired.

“I couldn’t do this before,” he admitted to me one afternoon, after a long day of working with a team of Fire Wardens to help contain a major conflagration across the border in Arizona. “Work all day like this, I mean. You help a lot. You’re learning fast.”

It was surprisingly touching, receiving even such a casual compliment. I nodded carefully, wiping my forehead free of a light beading of sweat. We were outside at the fire, not in the office, and we stood at the boundary of the area in a section deemed safe. I had not seen the Fire Wardens, but that was because (Manny assured me) they were in the thick of the blaze, fighting it from within. That seemed a grim risk to take, but this time, at least, they were successful. The flames were dying.

No doubt the human firefighters around us were a part of that, as well—they were filthy, exhausted, hunched empty-eyed on camp chairs as they drank cold water or ate what the volunteers had brought for them. Brave, all of them. None of them had to be here, and I was only now beginning to realize whythey were here. Some of them because it was a job, most certainly, but some because it was a calling. A thing of honor.

I could not help but honor them in turn.

Manny checked the fire again—we had raised fire-breaks of earth and green vegetation, which a faraway Weather Warden had saturated with steady downpours—and said, “I think we’re done here. Looks like they’re mopping it up now. Come on, I have a stop to make.”

Another one? I had been hoping for home, a bath, and bed, but I kept silent as we walked to Manny’s battered pickup truck. It wore a new layer of ash and smudged smoke over the old dirt; he shrugged and, with a slight pulse of will, cleared the windshield, leaving the rest of the dirt intact. “Looks strange to have a clean vehicle out here,” he told me, when I sent him a questioning look. “You get noticed. Better to blend in.”

I was getting used to the stink of the internal combustion engine, but it still seemed wrong after the cleaner organic compounds in the smoke of the forest. I rolled down the window and took in slow, shallow breaths. After a moment, I realized that I was covered with a faint layer of soot, and the need for a bath climbed higher on my priorities. Just a little,I thought. Just enough to make myself clean.

It was a selfish use of my hoarded power, but I couldn’t stand being dirty. I used a light brushing of it to sweep off the soot, just as Manny had cleaned his windshield.

Manny glanced my way. “You okay?”

My power levels were still adequate, if not strong; I wouldn’t need to draw again for some time. “I’m fine,” I assured him. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll love it,” he said, and grinned in a way that convinced me this was one of his attempts at a joke.

“The fire,” I said. “I thought there would be more attention put to it by the Wardens.”

Manny sent me a cautious glance. “Yeah, usually there would be. There’s something going on, on the East Coast. Most of the stronger Wardens are out there, or heading there. So we’re on skeleton crew, working with whatever we can.” His smile reemerged. “That’s why we have to make this stop.”

We drove fifteen miles on a rutted dirt road and turned into an equally rutted dirt driveway, crossing a metal grating with bone-jarring thumps. When Manny braked in a cloud of dust, I looked around for landmarks.

There were none, except for a small house and a large storage building—a barn?—still distant. No sign of anyone nearby.

Manny got out of the truck and walked away. I frowned, debating, and then followed without being summoned.

“Where are we going?” I demanded again, more sharply. Manny pointed. “Where?”

“Right there,” he said, and I heard that tone again, as if this was providing him some subtle amusement. And he kept walking toward the area he’d indicated.

Which was, in fact, a cattle pen.Inside of it, the huge beasts milled, bumped against each other, made low sounds of either contentment or distress.

As I walked nearer, I began to perceive the smell.

I stopped. “No.”

“Part of the job, Cassiel,” Manny said without pausing. He vaulted up on the metal bars and over the railing, landing with a thump inside the pen, his boots barely avoiding a thick clump of cattle waste.

The beasts took little notice of his arrival. I held my breath, hovering at the barely acceptable limits of the rich, earthy stench, as Manny touched each creature. He was marking them, I realized, each with a touch that showed in the aetheric. “What are you doing?” I choked, and put my hands over my nose and mouth as the smell threatened to overwhelm my defenses.

“Checking them out,” he called back. “We’ve had some outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease around here, and even one case of mad cow we were able to cure. But we have to stay on top of it. One scare like what happened in Britain, and the beef industry is in real trouble. Used to be another Earth Warden around here who specialized in this stuff, but he’s gone.”

“Can’t you do it from a distance?”

“Yes.” He flashed a grin in my direction. “It just isn’t as much fun as seeing the look on your face.”

I gave him a long, long stare. I imbued it with all the Djinn haughtiness at my command, which was quite a bit, even now. “I will wait in the truck,” I said, and turned to go.

A strange silence fell over the land, a hush that prickled along my nerves like a storm of needles, and I stopped, turning my head, searching for the cause of it. Something . . .

“Cassiel!” Manny cried.

I whirled, heart pounding, as I felt the surge of power roar through the air, swirling around the cattle pen.

A whirling, invisible cyclone of energy separated me from Manny.

A cow trumpeted in panic and pain, shook its head, and toppled to its knees. It hit the trampled ground with a thud and thrashed, screaming.

Another.

Another.

“Manny!” I screamed it, and although it was an enormous effort without his help, I launched myself up into the aetheric with all the power I had in reserve.

It didn’t help. Djinn senses were beyond me; what was left was inconsistent, confusing, a blur of forces that twisted in on itself like a hurricane, spiraling tighter and tighter. Manny was backing away from it, but there was nowhere to go; the cattle were panicked, as much of a danger to him and each other as the power encircling them. He could have fought through them to the metal fence, but not beyond, with the forces swirling just outside and moving inward.

It was a noose, and the noose was drawing tighter. I did not stop to think. I plunged into the storm.

The force hit me with staggering intensity, whipping my fragile body, punching into my head and soul like red-hot needles. I struggled on and felt cold metal under my searching hands. The fence.I wriggled between the bars and fell into soft dirt, bathed in the stench of the cattle and their leavings. That no longer mattered.

I crawled. The pressure against my head eased first, and then my shoulders, as I inched farther into the temporarily safe area inside the cattle pen.

Not so safe as all that. I heard the panicked bellows of the cattle, and massive sharp hooves stomped the ground beside my head. I heaved myself up just as Manny’s hands closed around me, whirling me around to face him.

“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted at me, and swung me out of the C me>

The cow entered the wall, wailed an eerie cry, and toppled to its knees, then to its side.

Dead.

I felt the breath stop in my lungs. I might have died.It had not occurred to me because Djinn didn’t think of such things, of the way fragile bodies could so easily shatter. Suddenly, Manny’s anger at me made sense.

The power took on a reddish hue and crept in another foot, forcing the cattle back. Whether we risked the barrier or not, we would eventually be injured, and probably killed, by the panicked beasts.

My once-Djinn nature mightprotect me a second time, but I couldn’t rely on it, and I couldn’t risk Manny’s life.

My hand slipped down his arm to grab his hand. He flinched, then nodded, tight-lipped. “Do it,” he said.

“Together,” I replied.

Compared with the white-hot geyser of Lewis Orwell’s abilities, Manny was weak, but strong enough—and canny enough—to allow me to take his power, allhis power, amplify it, and feed it back to him. It was, I thought, the reason that humans had made Djinn their servants—our ability to channel, magnify, and refine their powers so completely.

It was trust I required, and trust I received, as Manny let go of his own destiny and put it into my hands.

I shaped his power into a sharp edge, something that gleamed like the blade of a knife on the aetheric. I forced the edges finer, finer still, until it was thin as a whisper, and strong as steel.

Then I threw out my arms and cut through the barrier holding us penned. Not only the storm of force around us, but the iron of the cattle pen itself.

I formed a second sharp-edged plane and slammed it down five feet from the first, through force and metal. The metal fence, chopped at two points, fell in the middle to form an exit, a break in the attack large enough for us to escape.

Except that Manny did not take it. Instead, he began slapping the cattle’s thick hides, driving them to the hole I kept open. “Move!” he yelled. The cows, once prodded, saw the clear space and thundered toward it. I could not dodge out of the way. I was transfixed by the crushing load of concentration; the barriers I’d managed to erect were strong, but holding them against the battering attack was like holding a pane of glass against a hurricane—a doomed effort, but one requiring all my attention.

Manny must have realized that just in time. I felt a sudden surge of power from him—just a small amount, because he had little left to give. Just enough to divert the cattle from my unprotected body.

The beasts streamed around me, hot and bellowing, and thundered through the narrow gap. When the last bawling animal was free, Manny hesitated at the edge.

“Go!” I shouted. He plunged through.

I did not think I could keep the barriers in place while moving, but I tried, walking slowly and calmly with my arms outstretched to either side. My fingertips brushed the slick, cool surface of the walls I’d put in place. I felt them shudder.

I felt them shatter when I was still in the middle.

The storm closed around me and shattered me, too.

I came back to consciousness with my eyes full of cloudless blue sky, tasting dust and metal. When I took a breath, it was thick with the smell of cattle.

It was the stench that convinced me. Ah, then. Not dead, unless the humans are correct about hell.

For a moment, as pain washed over me, I wished I’d been granted that mercy, but instead, a face loomed close, blocking out the sun. I expected Manny, but no. A cow, blinking its huge brown eyes, watched me with as deep a curiosity as something so primitive could muster. It nudged me with a damp nose.

“Hey!” Manny’s sharp voice startled the cow, and it pulled back and away, trotting off to join its fellows placidly cropping the trampled grass. This time Manny’s shadow blocked the sun as he leaned over me. “You’re okay. Thank God.”

I felt strangely . . . light. Empty. I held out my hand to him, and it trembled with the effort.

He looked at it, then past my shaking fingers to focus on my face.

“You saved my life,” he said. There was something odd in his voice. “You really did.”

I had no strength left to voice my needs. Part of me was already fraying at the edges, and I was afraid, the way I’d been afraid as Ashan ripped me from the world of the Djinn and sent me falling into flesh.

This time, I was falling into darkness. No one, not even the Djinn, knew what came after that. I was empty, and fading.

Manny’s hand wrapped around mine in a strong clasp, and he sat down beside me as the power trickled slowly from the wellspring inside him, filling empty spaces inside me. I gasped in relief and pain, and wrapped my other hand around his.

The flow of power seemed intolerably slow. It was all I could do not to rip and tear at his control to get at that life-giving flow, but I forced myself to stay down, stay still, be passive.

And in time, the panic lessened, and the emptiness receded. Well before I was complete, though, Manny’s supply of power failed. He could give no more without endangering himself.

“It’s enough,” I told him, in response to his silent question. He helped me to my feet. I looked down at myself and grimaced, because in my haste to reach him I had crawled through filth. I did not have it to spare, but I used a pulse of power to clean myself.

Manny laughed. “Vanity really is your vice of choice, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said somberly. “I believe it’s pride.”

Manny had no idea who might want to kill him. He was, he said, not a man who made enemies; that might or might not be correct, but I felt he was telling me the truth as he saw it.

This had not felt like an attack from another Warden, though I supposed that was possible. While it had been full of power and energy, there had been a formless sense about it, too. I supposed that it could have been a Djinn, but only if the Djinn was merely toying with us. Testing, perhaps—testing me?

A new thought, and one not entirely comforting. I didn’t like having faceless, nameless enemies.

We drove back to town in silence; Manny, I could perceive, was thinking furiously about what had happened. He had walked to the house and spoken to the rancher about the dead cattle; I have no idea what explanation he put to it—perhaps something to do with freak weather or lightning. He kept his thoughts and suspicions—if he had any—to himself.