Текст книги "Unknown"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

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As a Djinn, I had a less obvious presence on the aetheric, but anchored as I was now in human flesh, I had a form of some kind. I couldn’t see it for myself, and there were no mirrors in this plane, but I assumed it was fairly close to the shape I had donned in the human world. After all, this form had been—on some level—my own choice.

Luis and I hovered close together, and his wraith form took the hand of mine. I felt the indefinable click of power cementing into place, and then we rose together—up, far up, to dizzying heights. Beneath us, Albuquerque spread out into a map, but it glowed not with physical lights, but aetheric energy. History pooled and glowed in the older buildings, violet and green. Old battles and crimes stained the map in angry reds. But what we were looking for was easy to spot, even among the confusion . . . a spark of power like no other color showing. A Warden, moving among the streets. I saw the white flare of our own two presences as well. The attacking Warden was close, but not close enough to be within our physical line of sight. Weather Wardens did not need to be.

As we watched, the Warden reached out for power, gathered it in like a black vortex from the world around him, and flung it out in a focused, cohesive blow. It was not aimed for the house in which our physical forms stood.

It was aimed up, at the warm, stable weather systems covering the city. There was little for the Warden to work with, but all clouds contain stored energy, and there were enough to make a difference.

The Warden slammed together a storm, working in a crude, brute-force way that spoke of little training. This was odd, because in general the Weather Wardens were among the most precise; they had to be when working with such massive and volatile forces, which could so quickly spin out of even a gifted user’s control.

Luis silently noted the Warden’s location, and the two of us plummeted down through the shimmering layers of force and color, back in a dizzying fall to our bodies. I felt a second’s disorientation, and then grounded myself in my flesh and whirled to run with Luis to the back door of the small house. He hit it first, slamming it open and leaving it to swing on its hinges, and jumped down the three shallow concrete steps that led down to the packed earth and sparse grass of the backyard. The back fence was sagging chain link, and beyond it we saw a figure in a black coat, running.

Overhead, clouds swirled, gray and troubled. Lightning flashed within them, still randomly aggressive but building up to a level that could become dangerous. I noted the risk, but we had little choice; a Weather Warden could rip the house down around us with surgical precision, and there would be very little we could do to stop it. Luis’s powers were primarily those of stability, of life, of healing; there would be little overlap to cancel the more ephemeral, destructive powers of air and water.

There was a gate in the back, locked with a padlock. Luis reached out and snapped it off with barely an effort, turning the metal brittle and fragile with a pulse of power, and then we were out into the alley. It was piled with trash—boxes, cans, and plastic bags awaiting pickup by the city. The stench was horrifying, and after the first choking gasp I vowed to stop breathing until I was out of this miasma. A useless vow, of course, but it made me feel better.

Luis was a powerful runner, and he quickly pulled ahead of me as he dodged the trash and occasional stinking puddle in the alleyway. I gritted my teeth and forced my body to greater effort; my long legs ate up the distance between us, and I drew level with him just as we reached the end of the alleyway. My held breath exploded out, and I gasped in sweet, untainted air as we both scanned the street for the Warden we’d been pursuing.

He was standing about a block away, stock-still, staring upward. As I touched Luis’s arm to alert him, the Warden reached up a commanding hand to the heavens, and lightning leapt from the low, gray clouds in a furious pink-tinted rush, grounded in the Warden’s left palm, and exited from his right . . . straight at us.

“Down!” Luis shouted, and we both dove for the pavement as the energy sizzled toward us. One point was in our favor: The Warden seemed to have little fine control, though an overabundance of power. He was not able to redirect the strike toward us when we fell. Instead, it hit and charred a metal storage shed behind us, melting a wide, smoking hole in the side.

Luis slammed his open palm down on the sidewalk next to his head, eyes focused on the Warden, and a line of force ripped through the ground, rising and falling like an ocean swell, cracking pavement and shoving aside everything in its path. It hit the pavement on which the Warden stood, tossing him off his feet and rolling him onto the thin grass of someone’s yard. The grass was little to work with—thin, brittle, ill-watered—but I poured energy into it, forcing it to grow in long, rubbery runners that wound around the Warden’s thrashing legs. It wouldn’t hold him, but it would slow him down.

Luis softened the ground into mire, sinking the Warden’s legs but leaving his upper body supported to prevent smothering. In seconds, the Warden was mired as his feet and lower legs sank into the soft mud, and were trapped as it hardened.

Luis offered his hand to help me to my feet, and we walked across the street to where the Weather Warden lay panting and helpless, locked into the earth.

He could not have been more than twelve years old.

Luis and I exchanged looks; I do not know what mine said, but his was appalled. Just a boy,it said.

A boy who’d tried twice to kill us. I was less appalled, and more interested in why.

I sank down to a crouch beside the boy, and examined him more closely. He was typical for the age, I supposed: a defiant glare, a childish, undefined face. Black eyes, black hair, coloring much like Luis’s. “Your name,” I said. “Give it.”

He responded in Spanish. It was easy enough to guess the content of it, especially when accompanied by an aggressive hand gesture. I felt him gathering power again from the clouds overhead.

I reached out, thumped a forefinger against his forehead, and disrupted his concentration. The power fell into chaos, and the child blinked at me, startled.

“Name,” I said again.

“Candelario,” he said. “ Puta.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Candelario,” I repeated. “I assume that other was not your last name.”

Luis said, from behind me, “Not unless his name translates to whore.”

I thumped the child-Warden’s head again. “Stop. I can kill you if I wish, you know that?”

His concentration faded, and I felt him let the powers he’d been gathering up fade along with it. “So?” he challenged me. “You kill me, it don’t matter. You’re messing with her.”

I knew exactly who he meant. Pearl.My sister Djinn, once. My enemy. My conquest, or so I’d thought.

Pearl, insane and predatory, who had wiped an entire race of protohumans from the face of the planet once, in her jealousy and madness. She should by all rights have been destroyed, long gone from this Earth; I had seen to that. But instead she lived on, drawing strength and power in steady, parasitic increments from these hijacked Wardens.

These children.

Candelario was like Pammy—a victim, although it was likely he didn’t know this, and would never accept it. He almost certainly believed that he was chosen, special, a trusted soldier in a war against evil. Pearl had convinced many. It was a signal weakness of the human condition, to be so easily swayed by those who wished them ill. To be rotted from within by their own belief in their virtue.

“Where is she?” I asked the boy. He spat at me. “She is using you. She is not your protector.”

“You don’t know anything!” he shot back. “Let me go or she’ll kill you all!”

“I doubt that,” I said. “Or she’d already have done so.”

Something shifted inside the boy—a change so basic that it seemed that the bones inside of him moved along with it. His face seemed to grow sharper, more adult. More like . . . someone else.

“Do you?” An entirely different voice than the boy’s, although using his vocal cords. “Really, do you doubt it, my sister? I thought you knew me better.”

Pearl. Pearl was speaking through this boy. I caught my breath. I felt Luis’s warm hand grip my shoulder, and I put a palm down flat on the warm ground, taking in power and feeding it through the cycle between us. Preparing for the strike, if it would come.

The boy’s eyes were still black, but now it wasn’t adolescent anger in them, it was something worse. Focused malice. Real evil.

“You send out your troops ill-prepared,” I told her. “His attack was crude, you know.”

“I’m not interested in subtlety,” Pearl said. “You should know that about me, Cassiel.”

Oh, I did. All too well. “Then why not come to me directly? I’m your enemy. Not this one.”

“You’re wrong,” she said, and there was such deep, ancient anger in it that even I shuddered. “I have nothing butenemies. Doubt me not, sister mine. I will destroy this world and everything living on it. You’re a fool if you believe otherwise.”

With that, she was gone. Just . . . gone, leaving no clues, no comfort. She did not explain herself. She never had, and never would; I would have to guess at the dark motives behind her plans. But it would have to do with hatred and jealousy, just as it had before.

We had all felt it, when she had struck in those long-ago mists of time. Almost a million thinking beings killed in an instant, a mass murder on the scale of a god, a million souls screaming in pain and confusion. It had destroyed Pearl’s mind, or what remained of it; in response, she had begun to rip at the universe around us, damaging things that should never have suffered injury. Things that lacked the capacity to heal.

I had destroyed Pearl, or I thought I had. I was the original murderer, among the Djinn. The first of us to kill one of our own.

Ironic, that some seed of her had survived, had somehow cast down roots among the new species that filled the emptiness she’d left on the planet with her crimes. Humanity was where Pearl hid. Humanity was where her power lay.

And so Ashan, the leader of the True Djinn, had ordered me to repeat not mycrime, but Pearl’s. By ending humanity, I would also, once and for all, end Pearl. So he believed, and it was likely true.

If I acted, I would become a monster. If I failed to act, Pearl would use the power she sucked from these humans to destroy my people.

Choices.

Candelario resurfaced, still glaring. I could see that he had no idea of what he had said—or what she said, using him as her remote tool. She hid within him, within all of them, like a virus.

This was, I realized, not a serious attack at all. Candelario was a crude instrument, powerful and poorly trained. A failure, she would classify him. Expendable. She sent him to me expecting him to be destroyed.

I exchanged a look with Luis, and then cupped a hand behind the boy’s head. Bravado or not, he was sweating; I felt the clammy moisture against my fingers.

“Sleep,” I said, and took a small measure of Luis’s power to course through Candelario’s nerves. The boy went limp, head gone heavy against my hand, and Luis softened the ground around his feet while I pulled him free. The grass was tenacious where it had twisted around his legs, but I finally convinced it to withdraw. I eased the boy to his back on the grass and looked up at Luis. “What now?”

He would be a bad enemy to leave at our backs; he might not be clever, but I sensed that he would be implacable. If he couldn’t hurt us, he could threaten those around us, innocents caught in the crossfire of powers that they couldn’t understand.

Luis was quiet for a moment; then he said, “I’ll call Marion.” Marion Bearheart, I understood this to mean; she was a powerful Warden in her own right, and she had been left here to oversee the skeleton crew of adepts remaining in the country while the majority of the Wardens were off chasing some other threat—what, I did not know and did not care. It was none of my concern.

Marion Bearheart was also the head of a division of the Wardens which concerned itself with policing those with powers. They were police, judge, jury, and executioner when required.

We had little choice but to involve her. Only her resources could deal with this boy in anything other than a fatal manner.

Luis turned away to make the call on his cell phone, and I considered the boy on the ground. He looked thin, but not unhealthy. No scars or bruises that I could see. He had not been abused, or at least not in a way that left marks. Still, there clung to him an aura of desperation, of darkness, and I wondered if, on some level, his subconscious mind understood how little he meant to the one he followed so ardently.

I dug into his coat pockets, turning up the detritus of a young life—sticks of gum, a small cellular phone, a bus pass which showed he had arrived in town recently, coming to Albuquerque from Los Angeles, which I remembered was in the state of California. Many hours away. In another pocket I found a thin wallet, quite new, which contained only a library card for a place called San Diego, and some thin green sheets of money—not many. None of the other things that men like Luis normally carried in their wallets—no plastic cards, no slips of paper, no receipts for purchases. Only the cash, and the one simple card.

I held the card up to Luis as he finished up his phone call. He frowned as he read it. “San Diego?”

“What’s in San Diego?” I asked.

“Awesome shoreline, big naval base, great weather. Apart from that, I have no idea.” He handed it back. “Marion’s dispatching a team to take the kid into custody while they see what’s been done to him. Twelve is too young for anyone to be using the kind of power he did today. It could hurt him.”

Regardless of whether or not it hurt him,it would certainly, inevitably bring tragedy to those around him. Candelario was too powerful, and had none of the training and balance of an adult Warden. (Though I wondered, from time to time, how much difference that made with many of the Wardens, who had a tendency to act like spoiled children in their own right.)

“How long before they arrive?”

“You’re kidding, right? We’re short-staffed everywhere. She’s got to send a team out from Los Angeles. They’ll fly in, but it’ll still be tomorrow before they get here. We need to keep him on ice until then.”

I didn’t understand on iceuntil I framed it in the context of his words. Keep him controlled and unconscious,I interpreted. “Is that not kidnapping?”

“Sure,” Luis agreed. “If anybody is missing the kid. Which they might be, but we can’t give him back like this. He’s been brainwashed, like the rest of Pearl’s kids. Maybe Marion’s people can deprogram him and deactivate his powers until he’s old enough to grow into them.”

That was a positive interpretation. The other side—the likely side—was that the Wardens would be forced to remove Candelario’s powers completely, to ensure he didn’t harm himself or others.

But neither of us could afford to take a personal interest in the child’s rehabilitation. Isabel,I reminded myself. Isabel must be saved.Manny and Angela’s child, Luis’s niece. And something—though I hated to admit it—something to me as well. I dared not define it more than a simple admission that I had a connection to the child.

More than that implied threads which bound me into this half-life of human existence, and I was not yet ready to truly explore the depth of these connections.

None of which solved the problem of the boy lying at my feet. “What do we do with him?”

Luis shrugged. “Take him back to the house, I guess,” he said. “Can you shield us?” He meant, from prying eyes—a thing which, in fact, I had already done when I realized how this might look to the random humans in the area. It was not invisibility, but it was similar; they would see us, but their brains would attach no significance to it. No memories would capture us.

Luis, on my nod, picked up the limp body of the boy in his arms, and we walked calmly across the street, down the alley (where I, at least, held my breath), and into the backyard of Luis’s house. I refastened the lock on the gate, repairing the damage, and followed Luis inside.

He took the boy to Isabel’s room, still furnished with all her little treasures and brightly colored toys, and stretched him out on a bedspread covered with cartoon characters. In a curiously kind gesture, he removed the boy’s shoes and put them beside the bed, then touched his fingertips to the child’s forehead. I sensed the sleep I’d given grow deeper.

He wouldn’t wake for hours. “Unless you are planning to be here when he comes out of it, we should restrain him,” I said.

“Great. Kidnapping andrestraining. I guess we have to tack assault on to that, since we knocked him down.”

“He was trying to kill us.” I glanced toward the living room. “Also, he burned your couch.”

“Well, that makes it all okay.” Luis sighed and sat down on a delicate white stool decorated with tiny pink flowers, which did not seem at all suitable. “Seriously, Cass, we’re in weird territory here. This kid could make a case that we abducted him, drugged him, tied him up. We could look at major prison time for this if we’re not careful.”

“He attacked us.”

“And you seriously think anybody’s going to believe that? Anybody who wasn’t there, I mean?” He shook his head. “We need him out of here before he wakes up.”

“And how do we do that if the Wardens can’t send someone until tomorrow?”

“Meet them halfway,” he said. “We stick him in the backseat of a car, put a blanket over him, and drive. I’ve got a real bad feeling that if we don’t, we’re going to be sweating in a cell by nightfall.”

I didn’t really see the danger; with the power we had at our disposal, a jail could hardly hold us—at least, not a jail the way normal, nongifted humans constructed them. Holding any kind of Warden was extremely difficult, but Earth Wardens were by far the worst. Jails were made of metal, of stone, of wood—materials worked from the Earth and connected to her by chains of history.

If he was not unconscious, or drugged, Luis could make short work of most locks and stone walls. So could

I, through him.

“You’re not worried about escaping,” I realized. He grunted.

“Thing is, I’m not exactly tops on the Good Citizen list. They’re going to come for me guns blazing, and there are a lot more of them than there are of us.” Interesting that he was now automatically classifying the two of us as facing adversity together. “Trust me, it’s better if we don’t get into a fight. Not that we can’t win it, but we shouldn’t have to try. People will get hurt.”

It wasn’t the nature of the Djinn to be so prudent, but I saw his point, and I nodded. “What do you want me to do?”

“Manny’s van is in the garage,” Luis said. “Get it started, I’ll get the kid. If you could tint the windows a little darker . . .”

Child’s play. I went to the garage and did as he asked, and before long, Luis appeared in the door of the garage with the slight burden of the child in his arms. I opened the back sliding door, and we settled the boy across the bench seat in the back, sleeping quietly and wrapped in a colorful blanket from Isabel’s closet. He looked even younger now than before, and much more helpless. I saw Luis touch his fingers gently to the boy’s forehead, both in gentle affirmation and to ensure the deep sleep continued uninterrupted. I took the passenger seat up front, and Luis closed the back and entered the driver’s side.

“You ready?” he asked. I shrugged. “Yeah, me neither. Here, take my phone. You make arrangements with the Wardens. Shoot for someplace halfway.”

He backed the van out of the garage and into the street. The day remained quiet and sunny, few people around to see us leave. Manny and Angela’s home—Luis’s home, now—looked small and abandoned, and it was quickly left behind us as we made the twists and turns to lead us to the freeway.

The Wardens’ central hotline connected me directly to Marion Bearheart. I knew her by reputation, as I knew most of the prominent Wardens; she had been well thought of by many of the Djinn, although that had never extended to me. She knew of me—that was certain—because I sensed the guarded tension in her low voice.

“We need a meeting place,” I told her, without introduction; there was no need, as she would have been brought up to date by her staff or by Luis in any case. “Halfway between Albuquerque and your team’s starting point. We can’t wait here.”

“You’re sure? Crossing state lines with that boy is a federal offense.”

“I’m fairly certain that we’ve already crossed that line,” I told her, “and in any case, if we stay we’re likely to be betrayed before they can reach us. We need to move.”

She didn’t argue the point, which was a pleasant surprise. “I’ll send the team to Las Vegas,” she said. “It’ll be about a six-hour drive from where you are, and they can get a short-hop flight. Go to the casino with the pyramid, and ask for Charles Ashworth. I’ll alert him that you’re coming.”

“He is a Warden?”

“Wardens are thin on the ground right now. He’s Ma’at.”

“And we can trust him?”

“In this, I believe you can.” I approved that she limited her trust. Most humans didn’t, to their great tragedy. “Call me when you arrive, or if there’s any trouble. How powerful is this boy?”

“Very,” I said. “Far too powerful for someone his age. He lacks control and focus, but in power I would rank him highly.” I paused for a moment, then said, “I believe you will have to remove his powers.”

“That’s a last resort.”

“I believe it will be necessary,” I repeated, and shut off the phone. Luis cast me a doubtful look.

“Las Vegas,” I told him. “I shall sleep now.”

I drifted into darkness, only a little bothered by the noise of the road and the memory of Luis’s hands moving on my skin.

When I woke up, it was because the car was skidding violently sideways, heading for an oncoming truck.