Текст книги "Unseen"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

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“Oh,” he said, after a second’s stunned silence. “I guess you do know what you weren’t talking about. Sorry. Just didn’t want to get that wrong, and madre, Cass, I still don’t know if you—”

I stood, turned, and straddled his lap as he sat on the couch, kneeling on the cushions to either side. At that distance, there was no possibility of barriers or mistakes for either of us. And I kissed him.

There was something so astonishingly sweet to the taste of him, sweet and spicy together, heady and overwhelming and powerful in ways that I could only dimly grasp. Kissing him seemed to temporarily still a howling hunger inside me, but it only moved to a different place to set up new, strange aches. While our lips were sliding together, damp and striving, I couldn’t feel the pressure of the world around us, the weight of all that responsibility and fate and desperation.

All I felt was light, and silence, and a trembling, silvery sliver of breathless anticipation.

I pulled back just far enough to breathe into his open mouth, “Is that clear enough?”

“ Claro,” he whispered back. He put a finger to my lips and said, “We can’t do this here, querida. Ibby. Come with me.”

I nodded, and followed him to the bathroom—not the one in the hall, which was close to Ibby’s room, but the one in the master bedroom. He closed the door after me and turned the lock, as I stripped away my white leather jacket. It would need repairs later, a simple enough matter when I had energy to spare, but for now it simply looked grubby and battered. I began to unbutton the soft pink shirt beneath, but Luis reached out and stilled my fingers. “No,” he said. “Wait. I know you already made it pretty clear, but—I just want to put it out there. You sure you want to do this? All the way?”

“I already said that I did.”

“Cass—” He shook his head. “Okay. Then slow the hell down, will you? It ain’t a race to the finish line.”

He took his time at it, slowly slipping each button through its anchoring hole, and tracing warm fingers down over the revealed pale flesh. Three buttons down he uncovered the pale pink of the satin bra I wore, and I felt his heartbeat move just a bit faster. Mine was well ahead of his, heating my flesh to warm ivory, pounding in my temples and veins, pooling heat like sunlight into the lower part of my body. Preparing me, I realized.

He slipped the blouse from my shoulders, and I shivered, though the air in the bedroom was warm enough. The shivers intensified as he trailed his fingertips over my bare skin. He bent very close and put his lips to my ear. “Turn around,” he murmured. I did, not moving any farther away from his body than the movement required. He unhooked the clasp of my bra and slipped the silky straps down my arms. The fragile thing fell to the floor, next to my shirt. Then he reached around my waist and unsnapped the leather pants, then unzipped them and slid them slowly down my bare legs. I found myself leaning back against him, mesmerized by the simple, catastrophic explosions of feeling in my body as he slipped his hand inside the thin underwear ...

I gasped and bit my lip as an entirely new sensation fired through me, and found myself pressing against his fingers. A sound escaped me, completely beyond my control. I had no idea what was guiding me, but it must have been something coded deep into the human form. I’d always thought that Djinn who grew fond of wearing skin were somehow flawed, but now—now I understood. There were delights in a Djinn’s natural form, of course, but nothing quite so ... intense.

“Easy, girl. We’ve got a long way to go,” Luis said, still in that low murmur that somehow only intensified the pleasure I was taking from his touch. “Let’s get these off of you first.”

He pulled his hand away, which made me almost cry out in protest, and slipped the underwear down my legs. I realized that I was naked, but I didn’t feel exposed or vulnerable. Quite the opposite. I felt ... powerful. Clothed in trust.

I turned to face Luis, breathing hard, and found that he was still dressed. I helped him pull his charred, ragged shirt over his head, and before it hit the carpet I had my hands on him. I’d seen him without his shirt before, but that had been like looking through an obscuring filter. Now, in this moment, I saw how beautiful he really was. The light and shadow of his muscles as they tensed and relaxed; the smooth, velvety skin, the deeper brown of his tightened nipples. The dark hair that drew a line straight down beneath his waistband, and tickled my fingers as I unfastened the riveted button. It yielded with a soft snap, and I unzipped his pants and hesitated, not sure what he wanted of me. Luis gave me no signals. He watched me with intense, opaque brown eyes. I could feel the emotions roiling inside of him, and when I looked at him in Oversight, overlaying the aetheric world native to the Djinn with that of the human reality, I saw him glowing in incandescent, intense colors—colors of passion, of need, of life itself. Breathtaking, and overwhelming.

I looked into his eyes as I carefully slid his pants down his legs and left him in his underwear—tight, defining a growing tribute to our attraction. Then I took a deep breath and pulled those down as well.

Then, with nothing between us, and before I could allow any sensible objections to overcome me, I stepped forward, pressed my body against his, and kissed him.

Power flowed out in a torrent from him at that first touch of our lips, thick as melted amber, drenched with the essence of all living things, the slow pulse beat of Mother Earth herself. I felt my skin scrubbed clean, and my hair blew back in an invisible wind. I felt ... reborn. New. Perfect.

His lips warmed to fever heat against mine, damp and urgent and sweet to taste, and I shuddered against him as his hands traveled down my spine to the small of my back, then caressed the swell of my hips. His lips parted, and I felt the soft stroke of his tongue against mine. My blood felt on fire now, and my heart pounded hard. I didn’t know how much of what I felt came from his use of Earth power, and I didn’t care. It was intense and beautiful and utterly involving.

I couldn’t believe I had avoided it for so long, being daily in his company. I’d yearned for it, and yet I hadn’t even known why.

An odd sensation—the areas of the flame tattoos on his arms felt different. The flame tattoos seemed warmer, as if the dark borders banked in actual fire instead of only ink.

Luis broke off the kiss and buried his face in the hollow of my neck, breathing hard. His breath pistoned hot against my skin and fluttered my pale hair. “Slow down,” he finally said. “You’re going to get me off too soon. Relax. I told you, it’s not a race.”

“Then what is it?” I asked. “Because my body seems to want to rush to the finish.”

He laughed. “Stop feeding back my energy and I’ll show you. Shower first, though.”

“We’re clean.” Thanks to that initial burst of power from him, which had scrubbed our skin and hair and left us deliciously fresh.

“That’s not why we take the shower,” he said. “You trust me?”

“Yes.” I always had, at a very deep level. This was not different ... and yet, it was. This was a physical kind of trust that I found hard to imagine outside of this moment, and yet here and now it seemed perfectly inevitable, and perfectly right. “Of course I do.”

He slipped his hand down to grip mine. “Then come on. Get wet with me, girl.”

Somehow, that phrase had connotations I had never really considered ... ones shadowy and exciting, a sudden burst of spice on the tongue. It made my breath quicken, and my pulse beat faster.

I allowed Luis to pull me along to the bathroom. That door, too, he shut behind us, and locked with a quick snap of his wrist. He sensed me watching him, and raised his brows. “Only so Ibby—look, I don’t want you to think I’m trying to push you into anything. Is that what you think? Because you can stop this anytime you want.”

I smiled. “Do you believe you couldforce me to do this if I didn’t want it?”

“Ah, good point. You’d hurt me so bad.”

“At the very least,” I said, and put my pale hands on his darker shoulders. “And I hope I am not driving youto do anything beyond what you wish.”

He laughed. “ Chica, you don’t know guys very well.” He took a second to sweep his gaze down my body, and then let out a slow breath. “Their loss, too. You are so beautiful.” He moved his focus back to my focus. “You don’t believe that, though, do you?”

I didn’t, in truth; to me human beauty was a very different thing—a thing of weakness, of vanity, of misdirected goals. I was strong, tall, perfectly serviceable in form, but I had never felt any need to be beautiful.

Now, suddenly, I did. For him, I did.

“I believe you believe it,” I said in a very low voice, and kissed him again. This time, I kept myself from reaching out to the core of his power, and this was merely flesh, warming and responding, perfect and natural. He backed me against the wall, and I gasped at the cold lick of tile on my skin, but the mild sting was quickly forgotten in the blur of the moment. Luis broke away to lean into the shower and turn on the controls, and as the water began to spray he pulled out towels from a cabinet and put them at the ready. In a moment steam was billowing inside the shower’s glass cubicle, and I saw moisture beading on my skin.

We stepped under the hot spray together, sealed so close together the water had a difficult time finding entrance between our bodies. The sensations overlapped, melted, blurred into a blood-warm, pulsing tide. I couldn’t distinguish between the heat of his hands, and the spray of the equally hot water. It was like being caressed everywhere, all at once, and as Luis’s fingers slipped again between my legs I put my arms around his neck for support.

What he was doing to me sparked miniature explosions inside of me, tremors that signaled something much, much greater on the approach. I found myself arching against his body, head back, lip caught between my teeth. That seemed to please him as much as it did me, a mysterious alchemy of feelings that I had never truly imagined was possible among humans. He didn’t speak. The water pounded down on us, hot as blood, and at last, at last, he lifted me by the waist, strong arms flexing and shedding water in bright silver streams, and braced my back against the warm, damp tile wall.

“Ready?” he asked me. I didn’t know what he was asking, but I nodded. I knew in principle, of course, but knowing and feeling were proving to be completely different things. “I’ll go slow.”

I had expected pleasure, not a searing, startling flash of razor-edged pain, and cried out more in panic than delight, putting my hands flat against his chest in protest. Luis froze, shocked, and held himself very still as I regulated my breathing again. In the next instant the pain wasn’t as great, but the surprise remained. I felt betrayed by my body, which had led me to suppose this would be nothing but sweet sensation.

Luis seemed just as astonished. After a few long seconds, he said, “Jesus, Cass, you didn’t tell me you were a virgin. I didn’t think ...” He pulled in a deep breath, and I saw he was angry at himself. “Stupid. Of course you’re a virgin. You came straight into human flesh—you haven’t been with anybody—”

He was right. I hadn’t been in this compromising, exceptionally intimate and vulnerable position with anyone else since my rebirth in human skin. I was, in many ways, more virginal than any human woman or girl, and yet I felt—not at all ignorant or unready.

Just betrayed by my own biology.

“It’s all right,” I said, and kept my voice low and steady, staring into Luis’s warm, cinnamon-colored eyes. “I’m all right.”

“No, I hurt you. I didn’t mean—”

I wrapped my legs around his waist and slowly, inexorably pulled him closer. Farther into my body, until we were completely joined. Then I fitted my hands around his face and smiled. “Since taking human form, I’ve had a great deal of pain,” I said. “That was a ... momentary discomfort. It’s done. Now help me forget it.”

He made a groaning sound low in his throat and dropped his head forward, into the warm space between my shoulder and neck. I felt his legs trembling, and then, by slow, gentle increments, he began to move.

“Tell me if I—” He was, even now, struggling to be gentle with me. With me, a being so old and powerful that even fellow Djinn had always treated me with caution. It made me laugh, and it made me warm with sweetness toward him. I solved his hesitancy by showing him my own urgent need, a furious bonfire of lust and heat, passion and delight.

No one had ever described what it felt like, to be consumed in that fire together, in an all-consuming, mind-destroying blur of hands and mouths, thrusts and silky caresses.

There were no words, and no real equivalent in the Djinn world. It was a humbling realization, one that made me understand, finally, why so many of my kind found solace in human form.

The world broke apart into sounds, and lights, and colors, frantic racing hearts and sweating skin, and then a slow, featherlight spiraling descent from an aetheric height I hadn’t known humans could scale. When Luis finally let me slip away, we stayed in the sheltering heat of the pounding water until it turned cool on our skin.

He shut it off, and we looked at each through the fog of steam still in the air.

Luis smiled. It was a beautiful, unguarded expression, and I saw in that moment that he truly had loved me for some time now—months, perhaps. I felt the same tide of emotion inside my own body, and felt a similar wild, uncontrolled smile bend my lips. I ached in odd places, felt strangely warm in others, and a lassitude had settled in that made me want to curl up on the damp tile floor and sleep. All that stopped me was the knowledge that there was a warm, waiting bed just a few steps away.

Luis dried us both with a burst of power, and I followed him to the wide, clean bed, draped in dark red silk, that was his place of rest. I’d never touched it before, but now I sank without hesitation onto the soft mattress, beneath the weight of the covers, and then burrowed through the cool sheets to meet him in the middle. We were both still warm, and a little damp, and our lips met in slow, dreamlike kisses as we twined together, again.

Luis eventually chuckled, a rumble deep in his chest, and I pulled back to regard him questioningly.

“I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he said. “You know?”

“I’m fairly certain our shoes—”

“No, I mean we get interrupted a lot by people trying to kill the hell out of us. Seems like every time we get anywhere near doing this, someone comes along and tries to ruin our good time.” He looked around. “Nothing yet. I think that might be a good sign.”

I kissed him again, savoring the sweet spice of his mouth. “Yes,” I agreed. “I think it’s a very good sign.”

Nothing disturbed us for hours, and hours, except when we fell asleep at last curled together in delicious, delirious exhaustion.

Chapter 2

BEFORE DAWN,there was a knock at the front door.

Luis woke up fast, sliding out of my arms and out of the bed before I’d finished opening my eyes. He had a pair of blue jeans draped at the end of the bed, and pulled them on with hardly a pause, still zipping and buttoning as he moved to unlock the bedroom door and go down the hall.

I found a thick black robe hanging on the back of the closet door, and belted it as I followed him. He’d already reached the door and was reaching for the knob as the knock came again—an official kind of summons, fast and confident.

“Yeah?” he yelled through the wood, and motioned me off to the side. “Who is it?”

“Police, Mr. Rocha,” said a male voice from the other side. “Open up, please.”

“Let’s see a badge first,” Luis said, and cracked the door just enough. I glimpsed something that glittered brass in the porch light, and Luis nodded and stepped back. A uniformed officer came inside, noticed me in the next instant, and I found myself being summed up in a quick, head-to-toe glance that held no trace of emotion—just analysis.

There was a strong tingle of power from him, and a quick look on the aetheric assured me that he was, in fact, a Warden. One of the few who had assumed a mainstream occupation ... but I supposed that there were considerable advantages to having Earth powers, as a police officer. Strength, and speed, and the ability to bring down a fleeing suspect with knots of grass and the flailing limbs of trees, to begin with—and I hadn’t considered how useful Earth powers might be for tracing a suspect, or evaluating clues left behind. Theoretically, an Earth Warden could be a walking laboratory, much like a Djinn, within those close confines of the limitations of his power.

If he was at all pleased to meet us, I couldn’t see any trace of it in his manner, which was cool and businesslike. “Warden Rocha,” he said, and held out his hand, palm out. The Warden’s stylized sun symbol glittered there briefly, fired by a tiny burst of power—another form of a badge of authority, and one I didn’t have, though I could have easily enough. He transferred his cold, guarded gaze to me. “Cassiel. I’m Lieutenant Cardenas.”

I supposed that I didn’t merit the title of Warden, even though I certainly did the work. Interesting. That offended me a little. “And which organization are you representing at the moment? The Albuquerque Police Department or the Wardens?”

“Warden Bearheart sent me,” he said, which was answer enough. “She wants you two to bring the girl with you and come to meet her people for handover.”

“Handover,” Luis repeated, in a voice that wasn’t anything like friendly. “What the hell do you mean, handover?”

Cardenas shrugged. “As in, you bring her, you hand her over, you drive away. That kind of handover. Didn’t think there was anything unclear about that.”

Luis made a move, and I grabbed his arm in a tight, sanity-inducing grip, hauling him to a stop. “No,” I said. “We’ve had enough trouble with the police.” I meant that hehad, and he knew that; I saw the fury slowly bank itself down in him, and he took a deep breath and nodded to me to let go. I did, but I didn’t back off far.

“Maybe you don’t know,” Luis said, his tone gone carefully flat, “that my niece is only five years old.”

“Almost six,” Cardenas said. “And I understand how you feel, but this ain’t optional. She needs to go to Warden Bearheart. Nothing bad’s going to happen to her.”

“No.”

“You know what you’re saying?”

“No way is Ibby being handed off.”

“I ain’t arguing about it,” Cardenas said. “Just delivering the message, that’s all. You can do whatever you want about it. I’ve got plenty to do without being your own personal message service, so if you want to tell Bearheart no, you call her up yourself.”

Luis’s jaw was stubbornly set, but he wasn’t being reasonable; his reaction was emotional, and I intervened on his behalf. “And where would Warden Bearheart like us to go?” I asked. When Luis shot me a furious look, I said, “It doesn’t obligate us to anything to know the intended destination.”

He had to nod, unwillingly, at that. “All right,” he said. “And why do this now? Ibby’s under control. She’s doing just fine.”

She was not, in fact, fine, and he knew that, but I understood his intense desire to protect the child from more trauma and harm. The Wardens didn’t have a spotless reputation for caring for their own, and I knew that made him wary, and very reluctant. Still, I had heard no ill of Marion Bearheart, and nothing but good about her healing craft. If anyone could heal Ibby’s wounds, it would be someone like her.

“There’s a rendezvous point in Nevada,” said the police officer. “I was told to give you the map.” He reached into a breast pocket and took out a compactly folded piece of paper. It was simply a computer printout of a state map, with no directions or locations highlighted. He held it out to Luis, who didn’t make a move to take it. I passed my hand over the map, using a small amount of power even as Cardenas said, “That won’t work; I already tried it. It’s—” His voice died, because under my touch, an invisible route sparked to life in glowing blue. I quickly killed the glow before it could reveal much. The Wardens were being secretive with the purpose of all this, and highly security-conscious. This map had been keyed specifically to Luis and me. I folded the paper.

“Thank you,” I said very firmly. “Was there anything else?”

“Guess not,” Cardenas said, and turned to go. Luis stopped him at the door.

“Wait. Did she say anything about why she wanted Ibby? Does she think we’re not safe here?”

“No clue. Like I said, I’m just the messenger. You want answers, get Bearheart on the phone. If she’ll take your call, you’re higher up than me.”

Luis weighed the risks, and finally nodded. “Fine,” he said. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” Cardenas the Warden disappeared, and Cardenas the policeman reasserted himself. “Sorry about your loss, by the way. I worked that drive-by of your brother and sister-in-law. Bad stuff. I heard the gang’s almost out of business these days. Local jefehad himself some kind of meltdown, decided to go straight and start doing charity work.” There was knowledge in that stare, and it worried me; Luis had taken steps on his own, and I’d seen him do it. In altering the gang leader’s mind, he had violated one of the principal ethical codes of Earth Wardens. Of course, luckily for him, the Wardens were pressed on all sides now with emerging threats, so disciplining their own probably didn’t rank highly at the moment.

“Sounds like a good outcome for a scumbag like that,” Luis said. “Better if he’d had his change of heart before he pulled a gun on my family.”

“Yeah.” Cardenas nodded. “Better if that had been the timing, for sure. How’s the little girl doing?”

“Nightmares,” I said. “But she seems to be adapting.”

“Kids do that. Got two myself.” He touched the shiny brim of his uniform cap. “If something like that happened to my family, I might want the same kind of change of heart for that guy, too. If I couldn’t put a bullet in him, I mean.”

He was, I realized, obliquely telling Luis that although he knew—or at least suspected—the illegal alterations Luis had performed on the gang leader, he wasn’t going to report it. I hadn’t realized how much of a danger that might have been until I felt the cold, close passage of it.

Luis had gone just a fraction of a shade more tense, and now he nodded and opened the door. Cardenas gave us both good-byes and walked down the path to the police cruiser waiting at the curb. We watched it drive away. I still had the piece of paper clutched in my hand.

“Let’s see it,” Luis said. I unfolded the map out on the nearest flat surface, and moved my palm over it to wake the glowing symbols again. Blue flowed down roads, over what appeared to be open spaces, ending in a deserted area marked by a simple sun symbol. On the map, there were borders, but no reference marks.

Luis whistled. “What do you think about that?”

I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t think anything.” Because I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Area 51?” When I didn’t react, his eyes widened. “Come on, seriously? You never heard of Area 51? Dreamland?” When I shook my head, he sighed. “Got to get you a pop culture makeover one of these days. Boiling it down, this means the spooks all of a sudden like us enough to throw open the borders to one of their most secure facilities. Wardens have never been welcomed there before; maybe they’re letting us in because they don’t like all this weird Church business a whole lot more. They’ve had some bad experiences dealing with those kinds of cults.”

His moment’s fascination with the map faded, and he walked away, clearly thinking.

“What?” I asked him. I couldn’t follow what logical—or illogical—leaps he was making, but I could sense the changes in his mood quickly enough, and it had darkened considerably.

“Area 51’s a hell of a secure spot,” he said. “But I really can’t see the government letting the Wardens set up shop in there. If they’re letting us in at all, they’ve got some kind of ulterior motive about it.”

“Like what?” I asked. He turned and looked at me for a long second, then shook his head.

“Could be Ibby,” he said. “Could be they want all these kids for themselves. Could be they want you, Cass.”

“Me,” I repeated, surprised. “Why?”

“Because the feds have never had an actual Djinn, they never could even come close to grabbing one. You, you’re vulnerable, and you’re the next best thing—you can spill all the weaknesses, and give them an idea of Djinn strength, too. I don’t like it, and no way am I going to risk Ibby, either.”

I had never thought of myself as vulnerable, and the idea surprised me far more than I’d expected. “I could fight them,” I said.

“Yeah, sure you could. But this is something you don’t understand about humanity, querida—you can kill one, or five, or ten, but they keep on coming. I guarantee you, in Area 51, if they want you, they’ve got you.”

Unsettling. “Then what do you want to do?” I asked.

He locked the door behind Cardenas. “I want to find out what the hell Marion thinks she’s doing, because I’m not taking Ibby—or you—blindly out into the field of fire. Not ever again.”

It took two hours to get a return call from Marion Bearheart. When it finally came, Ibby was eating cereal in the kitchen with us, and Luis gestured for me to finish pouring her orange juice and follow him into the other room. Ibby watched us go, too much awareness and calculation in her face, and I wondered just how much we could really keep from her. I leaned over to stroke her silky hair back from her face. “Just a moment,” I promised her. “You’ll drink your juice?”

That got a well-remembered, brilliant smile from her. “I know, juice is good for me,” Ibby said, which wasn’t the same thing.

“Promise me.”

“I promise,” she sighed, and reached for the glass to down a mighty mouthful, to prove her point. I kissed her forehead and followed Luis.

He was pacing, with the cordless phone held to his ear. I knew that particular style of restlessness in him; it meant he was deeply worried, and very angry on some level he was determined not to convey. His knuckles, however, were pale where he gripped the receiver. “Yeah,” he was saying. “Yeah, I knowthe kid needs help, Marion; that’s not what I—” He paused, clearly interrupted, and his dark eyes met mine briefly before the pacing carried him onward. “Ibby lost her mother and father; that’s enough trauma for any kid her age. Then those nutcases triggered her powers too early. They filled her head full of lies about the Wardens; they told her I was dead—showed her I was dead. They showed her how Cassiel killed me. And now you want to put her in some kind of camp—No, shut up and let me finish. I don’t care if you call it a ranch or a camp or a hospital or a school; it’s nothing but more of the same. She’s had enough terror and brainwashing for a lifetime, Marion. She needs a home, and I’m not sending her anywhere like that!”

Marion was patient—and kind—enough to allow him to finish his rant without interruption. Then she responded, something quiet and brief, and Luis hung up the phone. He stood there, head down, shoulder-length hair—now more than a bit ragged, from the fire we’d faced—hiding his expression, and then turned and walked away from me without saying a word.

I followed him into the kitchen. He poured coffee and sipped it, watching Isabel eat her cereal with narrowed eyes. She glanced up at him with a smile, and he smiled back. It looked almost natural.

“Ibby,” he said, “how would you feel about going away to school?”

She didn’t answer immediately. She looked up at him, no particular expression on her sweet-featured face—perfectly composed. There was an unsettling amount of calculation in the level stare she gave him, and then Ibby said, “I don’t like schools anymore.”

“I know, mija, but this is a good school, one that will help you.” He sank down at the table next to her and took her small hand in his large one. “You don’t say it, but you’re scared, aren’t you? And hurting. You still miss your mamiand papi—I know you do.”

That broke through the crystal shell of her artificial calm, and she looked away and said, in a small voice, “All the time.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Luis said, and kissed the top of her head with such gentleness it made my heart ache. “I hate it that they’re gone and they can’t be here to tell you how brave you’ve been, and how strong you are. But being strong isn’t everything. It doesn’t make you happy, does it?”

He’d struck a nerve, one that I didn’t even understand. Why wouldn’t strength make one happy? Would weakness? No matter which direction I turned the question, it remained unanswerable for me. A quintessentially human thing, I supposed.

Ibby’s dark eyes had filled with tears. “No,” she said, in an even smaller, more fragile voice. “Being strong makes me sad, too. I don’t want to hurt people. Even the bad people. I just want people to leave me alone.”

That, too, I failed to grasp. Among Djinn, things were much more straightforward. One had allies, friends, adversaries, and enemies. Behavior of others dictated responses, measure for measure. I couldn’t imagine having an ethical stand that would somehow keep me from striking out at those who wanted to hurt me. There could be no justice unless someone was willing to wield the sword.

But I saw in Ibby something else ... something that I was almost certain was placed there by her mother, Angela. I did not doubt that Angela would defend her child to the death, but Angela was one who forgave others. She had tried to find the good in people even when it was vanishingly small, or absent altogether.

She had passed that noble desire on to her daughter, and now it was a slender, precious thread holding Isabel away from the pit into which our enemies had tried to plunge her. They’d sought to use her as a weapon, but Ibby wasn’t anyone’s tool.