Текст книги "Unknown"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

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Luis did his best, but Ashworth gave no indication, throughout the explanation, as to whether or not he believed a word of it. When Luis came to the point where we’d left the boy’s body behind, I heard a soft hiss from Rashid, behind me. I resisted the urge to turn.

“It was not my first choice,” I said. “But it was necessary. She intended for us to be caught with the body. She hoped we wouldn’t notice his passing until it was too late.”

“She,” Rashid repeated. “Name this enemy.” I didn’t. He gave another soft sound of disgust. “There is no great villain in this, Ashworth. Only the twisted desperation of one who was once a queen among our kind. Don’t believe her. The humiliation of being cast down into skin has turned her.”

“I’ll believe what I like, Rashid. Thank you for your input.” I’d never heard a human rebuke a Djinn in quite that way, firm and authoritative—not a human who didn’t arrogantly assume that owning a Djinn protected them from retribution. The aggression raised fierce, cold instincts in me, even though it was not directed toward me. I wondered what it did to Rashid. “I was at the Ranch,” Ashworth continued. “I understand what you two think you saw.”

“We don’t think,” Luis said. “We know. She exists. We may not be able to find her yet, but we will. And we’re going to get my niece back, safe and sound.”

Ashworth didn’t comment on that. He said, instead, “Not many Wardens left these days. Some are off chasing ghosts, some lying low, the rest just trying to hold things together. A good portion of them died fighting the Djinn in the rebellion. Some say there’s still a war going on, one of attrition. Fewer Wardens, stretched thinner. Enemies picking them off, one by one.”

“Some say it could benefit the Ma’at,” Luis pointed out.

Ashworth’s face twisted in a tired grimace. “People talk nonsense most of the time. I have no interest in making the Ma’at any kind of replacement for the Wardens. You should know that, better than most. The world needs Wardens; if she didn’t, they wouldn’t be here. They’re part of the natural order, same as the Djinn. Same as regular human beings, animals, plants, insects, protozoa. Ma’at, boy. Everything in balance. Now. Why are you here? You could’ve turned around and gone straight back home, nothing to stop you.”

“Guess just wanting to visit Vegas isn’t a good excuse.”

Luis’s attempt at humor—never more than half-hearted—fell into a cold silence. Ashworth didn’t reply. He shifted his gaze to me. “You really do think this creature’s real.”

“Yes,” I said. “She’s real. She’s a threat to the Djinn. A genuine threat. And until we can locate her again, we are fighting shadows. She can target us. We can’t target her in turn.”

Rashid made that sound again. I turned to face him, and he folded his arms across his chest. “Yes?” he asked.

“You have something to tell me?”

“Not really,” I said. “I presume when you’re screaming your last, the way Gallan screamed, you will take my words more seriously.”

I left that deliberately ambiguous. He would know of my friend Gallan’s death—the death of a Djinn never went unremarked, and Gallan had been no minor power. What Rashid did not know, from the sudden burst of brightness in his eyes, was whether or not I had been the cause of it.

I knew well enough what he suspected.

“I take you seriously now,” Rashid said. “Believe it.”

“Enough,” Ashworth snapped. “The both of you. You’ll not be settling any grudges in my office; I just redecorated. Luis, what the hell do you want from me? I can’t offer you any real help. And I don’t have any real information.”

“Then there’s one other thing you can do. You can lend me a Djinn,” Luis said.

There was a sudden, startling quiet among the four of us; Ashworth’s gaze leapt to Rashid, and mine moved to focus on Luis as I struggled to process what he had just said.

He hada Djinn. He had me.I felt a sudden, baffling surge of rage and confusion, and I wondered if it was . . . jealousy? Surely not. Surely I had not sunk so low.

Rashid’s voice came from behind me. Very close behind, so close that I felt the whisper of air on the back of my neck. “You must not be performing to his expectations,” he said. “How very sad for you.”

I turned, slammed the palm of my hand into the flat of his chest. It should have sent him flying across the room, splintered paneling, crumbled concrete in his wake.

Instead, Rashid simply stood there, smiling at me with a terrible bright light in his violet eyes. Then he took hold of my wrist, and snapped my arm.

I cried out as the bones broke, twisted, and ripped into muscle. Pain tore through me in a livid white wave, loosening my knees, and darkness flickered over my eyes.

“Rashid!” Ashworth shouted, and surged to his feet behind the desk. Luis, however, was faster. His armchair tipped over, and before it hit the carpet with a dull thud he was next to me. He pointed a finger at Rashid, and for a second I saw—or thought I saw—black flames lick up and down his arms. I blinked. It was an effect of the pain, surely.

“You,” Luis said. “Let go of her. Now.”

Rashid did, still smiling, and stepped back. Luis took my arm in both his hands, and his touch was extraordinarily gentle and warm. I felt the warmth cascade into me, power twining in intimate circles around the damage. I swayed closer to him as my strength left me, and he caught me with one arm around my body, holding the injury clear as the healing continued.

“Point made,” Rashid said, sounding bored and waspish. “She’s no better than a human, is she? Hardly of much use at all. You doneed a Djinn. But why, I wonder?”

“I need one who thinks he’s invulnerable,” Luis said through gritted teeth. “You’ll do fine.”

Rashid frowned, and a little of his overwhelming arrogance flickered away. Not enough to matter, however. I found some strength left after all, and pushed away from Luis to stand on my own. My arm felt fragile and barely knitted together, and I knew I shouldn’t test it, though the healing was vastly accelerated. Rage had subsided to a low, hot burn deep within me, but I was less pleased with what had replaced it: fear. Was this how humans lived, so afraid of pain, so aware of their fragile and temporary bodies?

I didn’t like it. Not at all. “What are you doing?” I asked. Luis sent me a dark, urgent look that almost demanded my silence. He went back to a silent war of stares with Rashid, who, finally, crossed his arms across his chest, lowered his chin, and gave a wolfish smile. “You think you can challenge me with threats of danger? Little man, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, sure, you’re a big man, breaking the arms of women without giving them chances to fight back,” Luis said. “Big talker. I get that. But what I’m asking is for something that’s going to take some balls and some brains. Maybe you should go get somebody, you know, better. I’ll wait, man.”

Rashid’s eyes grew molten, and I thought for a dull, terrible second that he would simply burn Luis down to the ground for that. He was fully capable.

Instead, Ashworth snapped, “Enough, you two. We don’t have time or luxury for this. Rocha, tell mewhat you want, and don’t be coy about it. Now.”

It must have taken a sincere and awesome act of will to turn his back on Rashid, but somehow Luis managed it. For security, I kept an eye on the Djinn. I didn’t for even an instant trust him. He was a jackal, sniffing for opportunity, and I had a sudden and sickening experience—for perhaps the first time in my long existence—of being the wounded prey.

“I need a Djinn who can verify where this boy came from,” Luis said.

“The dead boy?”

“Yes. Time’s critical. Traces fade. I need somebody who’s not full of bullshit and bluster.” That, of course, was specifically thrown at Rashid, and I watched the Djinn consider, again, whether or not to kill us. If he decided to act, there would be little Ashworth could do to stop him, and while Luis and I would put up a fight, it was a foregone conclusion how it would end.

Wasn’t it?

I don’t know what expression must have crossed Ashworth’s face, as he assessed all these things, plus of course the potentially lethal damage a fight could do inside his dark-paneled sanctum. Finally, he said, with absolutely no emphasis, “I think we could work something out. However, it would have to be done as a strictly voluntary effort on the part of the Djinn. That’s our code.”

“Of course,” Luis said, and hesitated before continuing. “Thing is, from everything we know about this situation, tracing this dead boy back to the ones behind him could be dangerous. Even for a Djinn. I wouldn’t want anybody to misunderstand the risks involved.”

Rashid was still giving us that unsettling predator’s smile. Now he said, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Ashworth sighed.

“Then I pronounce you all friends and allies. Mazel tov,” he said, in a tone that was weary with disgust. “Now all of you, get the hell out of my office, out of the hotel, and go kill each other someplace where I don’t have to worry about cleaning it up.”

Chapter 4

I KNEW LITTLEabout Rashid. My kind looked on our younger, upstart cousins with little respect, and we’d rarely taken the time to know or acknowledge them individually.

Except, of course, for Jonathan.

Even now, thinking of him, I felt a knot in my chest. Jonathan had come on us like a black storm of power, unlooked-for. He had lived as a mortal man, and he had been the first of all those we now called Wardens; his bond to the Earth was something even those of us who remembered formless voids could not explain, or imagine. His death had woken her to fury and grief, and she had preserved Jonathan’s soul by creating a new form around him. A new kind of life.

She had made him a Djinn, by gathering in the dying life force of thousands near him. Not only him—another had been created that day. Jonathan’s friend David, who had died with him. The first of many, after them.

But it was Jonathan who had been given the heart of the Mother, and it was Jonathan who, regardless of his human origins, had wielded more power over the Djinn– allthe Djinn, old and new—than any other, before or since.

We had never accepted him, but all of us, however unwillingly, had obeyed him. For thousands of years, the True Djinn had bent our necks to one we should have, by rights, despised; and some had, though quietly. But there was also respect in even the most militant of us. And yes, love. Jonathan had shone with a kind of purity that I could never understand, nor hope to imitate.

I had even grieved for him when he was lost to us. But there will not be another Jonathan, another New Djinn who can charm and bully us into becoming one people. The True Djinn will always stand apart. We are too arrogant to do anything else.

And that was the gulf that lay between me and Rashid, and always would.

We walked out of Ashworth’s office into the chiming dimness of the casino, none of us speaking. Rashid was on one side of me, Luis on the other. People avoided our path, though whether consciously or unconsciously, I don’t know. I caught sight of us striding together on a security monitor; Luis looked utterly focused, tall, and dangerous; Rashid had moderated the alien nature of his coloring just enough to keep himself from drawing stares, although in this strange place that probably wasn’t necessary.

My pale, severe face, white hair, and pale leathers seemed to glow like a ghost between the two of them.

We looked . . . like nothing any sane human would want to challenge. Heads turned to follow us as we moved through the crowds, and I felt eyes assessing me, measuring, coveting.

It was oddly interesting.

Outside, the hot wind dried a faint trace of sweat from my face, and Rashid’s skin darkened, just a touch, to better absorb the sun’s harsh rays. Luis slipped on a pair of sunglasses. We stood in the shadow of the false pyramid, not far from the false Sphinx, and faced each other without speaking.

Then Rashid said, “Take me to where you left the boy.”

Luis nodded and led the way to where we had parked the van. He slid open the back and gestured for Rashid to get in, but the Djinn simply stood there, frowning, head cocked.

“You came in this?”

“Yeah, obviously, not up to your standards, I get that. Just get in.” Rashid curled his lip and stepped into the van, dropping into the seat with obvious distaste. Luis looked at me and rolled his eyes. “I thought youwere bad. I see it runs in the Djinn family.”

I said—and Rashid said, from within the van—“We are notfamily!”

Luis burst out with a short bark of laughter. “Sounds to me like you are.” Before sliding the door shut, though, he fixed Rashid with a long look, and leaned in to say,

“You touch Cassiel again, you hurt her again, and you and me, we’re going to have a disagreement, Rashid. It’ll end in a world of hurt. You understand?”

Rashid turned his eyes straight forward, not even so much as acknowledging the threat. Luis slammed the door, sighed, and said, “Try to get along, okay? This is tough enough without bar brawls with our supposed allies.”

Like Rashid, I didn’t bother to acknowledge his words, although they were undeniably wise.

I heard Luis say, grumpily, as he rounded the front to climb into the driver’s side, “Freaking Djinn.”

I smiled. Just a little.

Luis drove us to the approximate location where we’d stopped, and I led the two of them through the sand and scrub out into the wilderness. Luis kept up a steady whisper of curses under his breath as he trudged. He hated the desert, I believe. Certainly he was not in favor of its heat, although Rashid and I both gloried in it; Djinn were creatures of fire, and even as muted and diminished as I was, I could still feel the tingle of ecstasy along my nerves.

Luis sweated.

We arrived at the hillside where I’d buried the boy, with its view of ocher and red gullies and a burning blue sky, and Rashid crouched down, drew thin, clever fingers through the dirt, and looked up at me in surprise. There was something that shone in his eyes, momentarily, like respect. Then it was gone.

“How?” he asked. Luis looked at me, frowning.

“How what?”

“She knows.”

I did. he was asking about how I had touched the spirit of the Earth here, in this place.

I shrugged. “She came,” I said. “You can’t summon her. You know that.”

Rashid did, in fact, know. He watched me for another moment, then nodded and raked fingers through the dirt again. “You didn’t kill the boy,” he said. “I stand corrected.”

“I told you we didn’t,” Luis snapped. “Can you hurry up and track where he came from? Some of us need shade around here.”

For answer, Rashid plunged his hand down into the dirt, all the way to his elbow, and then drew it back out with a sharp twist. He shook the dust from it and nodded, eyes gone bright, but somehow distant. “The trail is clear,” he said. “But fading. I will leave you and follow it. It will be faster.”

“Rashid,” I said. “Don’t go too close.”

He made an impatient gesture. “I’m not afraid of your phantom enemy.”

“Neither was Gallan,” I interrupted. “Who is gone. Rashid. I don’t like you. But neither do I wish to see you destroyed. I am warning you: Don’t go too close.”

He heard the urgency of what I said, and finally, unwillingly, nodded. Still, I didn’t feel he had truly understood. I stepped forward, touched his hand, and said, while looking directly into his glowing eyes, “She was once one of us. A Djinn. She will kill you if she can.”

He shook his head, rejecting the idea—mostly, of course, because it came from me. I controlled a flash of anger and continued. “I would ask another task of you.”

That made his eyes widen. He cocked his head, a trace of a frown between his brows. “What?”

“Find the boy’s people,” I said. “His family. Those who lost him. I would wish—I would wish to return him, if we can.”

He stared at me, no expression on his face for a long moment, and then gave a sharp, dry nod.

And then simply . . . faded. Gone. I saw a shimmer on the aetheric as he sped away.

Luis sighed. “So, I’m taking bets. Did we just do something really smart, or really, dramatically stupid?”

“I see nothing to say it can’t be both,” I said. “There is, after all, an endless supply of stupidity.”

We silently gave our respects to the dead child whom we were, once again, abandoning, and returned to the van for the long drive back to Albuquerque.

Before we got there, we ran into a roadblock of flashing lights.

Standing in front of the angled police cars was FBI agent Ben Turner, part-time Fire Warden, looking very grim indeed, and very much as if he had not slept since we’d last seen him. When Luis slowed to a halt and rolled down his window, Turner leaned in, took a quick, comprehensive look around the van, and said, “You both need to come with me. Right now.”

Luis and I exchanged a look which clearly said, This is not good news.“Why?” Luis asked.

“Not here. Just get out and come with me. Do it now.”

Around us, police were quietly drawing their weapons, although thus far, no one was pointing them in our direction. Luis noted it with lightning-fast shifts of his eyes, then focused back on Turner.

“Please,” Turner said. His face was a blank mask, but there was tension around his eyes and mouth, and weariness in the slump of his shoulders. “I need your help.”

As if that was a magic incantation, Luis nodded to me, and we both left the van to stand on the roadway, facing Turner. Dusk was falling, and so was the temperature, but the asphalt had trapped a great deal of heat during the day. It radiated up through my feet and legs uncomfortably.

Turner motioned to the police, who holstered their guns and got into their cruisers, although they didn’t leave their positions.

“I’ve got an abducted kid,” he said. “It fits the pattern you described. Little girl, age eight, got snatched from school. I checked. Her mother washed out of the Warden program.”

Luis traded a glance with me. We both remembered the boy we had rescued from captivity at the Ranch: C. T. Styles. His mother had left the Wardens as well. She had held a grudge. “You cleared the mom?” Luis asked.

“She’s got nothing to do with it. That lady’s practically in ruins. God only knows how she’s going to handle it if this turns out badly.” Which, from the tense, hard set of his expression, he clearly recognized was a risk. Even a probability.

“What about the father?” I asked.

“He seems okay, too. No connection back to the Wardens, and I’m not turning up anything questionable on him. I think they’re both okay.”

“Perhaps it isn’t related,” I said.

“Maybe it’s not. But it’s still a little girl, missing. I figured you’d want to step in.” Turner squared his shoulders and looked first at Luis, then at me. “I could really use your help. If this is connected, it’s our freshest lead. It’s the best possible place to start.”

“We’re already—”

“Let me rephrase,” Turner said, and this time I saw the flare of banked anger in his eyes. “You’re going to help me with this or I’m going to find all kinds of reasons to make you wish you had, starting with dressing funny and ending with suspicion of terrorism, which means you’ll end up so deep in a hole you’ll never see the sun again. So give the keys to your van to one of the officers; they’ll drive it back to your house for you. You’re coming with me.”

I thought uncomfortably of Rashid, certain to reappear at any time. Luis, I was sure, was thinking the same. He would find us regardless of where we might be, but Rashid had not struck me as someone willing to keep a low profile. He might, in fact, find it amusing to advertise his nature in public. If the police began shooting, we could be injured.

Rashid would probably find that veryfunny.

“Let me make it real easy for you,” Turner said. “You have two choices. One, get in my car and drive back to Albuquerque and help me find this girl. Or two, turn around for the cuffs, because I willcharge you with something.”

“With what?”

“You’re kidding, right?” he asked. “There are all kinds of ways I can make your life hell, Mr. Rocha. You really don’t want to test me. I can be very creative.”

I was fairly sure he was serious.

Luis shrugged and tossed the van’s keys to a nearby patrolman in a starched khaki uniform, who plucked the jingling metal out of the air. “Insurance and registration is in the glove compartment,” he said. “In case you get stopped by even more cops. Oh, and I’ll expect it filled up. Washing it wouldn’t be out of the question, either.”

The officer did not seem amused.

Turner held open the sedan’s back door, and Luis and I slid inside. In less than a minute, we were speeding away toward Albuquerque.

It was home, and yet I had the conviction that we were also headed toward a lethal combination of grief and trouble.

Although it seemed trouble was a constant companion, these days.

Ben Turner was a very fast driver, disobeying the posted speed limits with the abandon of a law enforcement man on a mission.

I sat in the back, struggling to control the nausea that roiled within me. Turner’s car was not the most pleasant experience—either sensory or psychic—that I had ever encountered. He’d had blood spilled on the seats. Bodily fluids of all sorts. And death. The car reeked of death—perhaps not in a physical sense, but the impression of a bad and lingering agony was embedded into every part of the vehicle. Something terrible had happened here, before. Something that would never completely go away.

I was struggling with the urge to blow the door off its hinges and leap from the car. The only thing that stopped me was the absolute certainty that Luis would suffer for it if I did so.

And then I was distracted.

“Shit!” Turner yelped, and in the same instant hit the brakes. Tires screeched, and Luis and I both reflexively threw out our hands to brace ourselves as the sedan’s nose tipped down, fighting its own momentum.

Rashid had appeared in the middle of the road, perhaps five hundred yards away. Arms folded, a shark’s smile on his face, watching the car hurtle toward him at killing speed.

Turner, face gone white, fought desperately with the vehicle.

“Just hit him,” I said, through gritted teeth. “It serves him right.”

Turner paid no attention to my excellent advice. He managed to bring the car to a smoking, sliding halt no more than a foot from Rashid’s immobile body.

For a moment, no one moved. White, stinking smoke from the scorched tires blew into my window, and I coughed and choked. The cloud of smoke moved toward Rashid, but he simply waved it away, still smiling.

Ben Turner looked stunned, but in the next flash of a second, his face turned beet red and screwed up in righteously justifiable anger. He opened his car door and got out, yelling, “You idiot!You could have gotten us all killed—”

Rashid simply looked at him. To his credit, it didn’t take Turner long to realize his mistake, to take in the slightly-off color of the Djinn’s skin, the shine of his eyes. He turned to look through the windshield at Luis, then at me. Then back at Rashid. His lips compressed into a thin, angry line.

“Djinn. So I guess he’s with you two,” Turner said.

Rashid made a rude sound. “Not in any sense, I assure you.” On that, we were in complete agreement. He stalked around to the passenger door of the front seat, opened it, and got in. Leaving Turner standing outside, staring in at us.

We all stared back at him.

“Seriously,” Turner said. “He’s a Djinn.”

Rashid reached out and touched a finger to the ignition of the car. It fired to life without benefit of the key, dangling from Turner’s shaking fingers. “Yes,” he said. “Seriously.”

Turner blinked, as if the world had gone out of focus, and shook his head. He slipped back into the driver’s seat, looked at the key in his hand, then dropped it into the drink holder next to him. He put the car in drive and accelerated away, fast. I looked behind us and saw the heavy black streaks of skid marks disappearing behind us.

“Didn’t really think you’d show up again,” Luis said to Rashid.

I turned my head back. “I did.”

Rashid was watching me with a predator’s hot intensity. Waiting for weakness. Well, I had that in abundance, but I was not willing to demonstrate it on his command. “You found something,” I said. “Correct?”

“No, I came back because I find your company so inspirational. Of courseI found something.” His mouth stretched and settled into something that was almost a smile. “I found the boy’s bloodline. His sires are gone from the world.”

“Siblings?”

“No. Distant branches. Nothing close.”

I shook my head and translated that for Luis. “His parents are dead. No brothers, sisters, or cousins.”

“Yes,” Rashid confirmed. “His father was a Warden, killed in Ashan’s uprising. His mother was mere human, dead of disease.”

“Orphan,” Luis said. “An orphan with latent Warden powers.”

Rashid said, “He was listed so on the rolls.”

Both Turner and Luis sent him identical looks. “Rolls?” Turner was just a beat faster at the question than my Warden partner. “You mean there’s a list?”

Rashid lifted an eyebrow slowly. “You mean you don’t keep your own lists? How careless of you. How do you ensure your progeny are trained properly if you don’t have a record of their potential?”

Luis’s mouth opened, then shut, and he looked at me instead. “Let me get this straight, okay, just so there’s no confusion: The Djinn have a record of kids born with Warden powers?”

He was asking me. It was embarrassing, but I had to admit the truth. “I don’t know,” I said. “If it’s done, I had nothing to do with it. I had no interest in Wardens, much less regular humans.”

Luis stared for a beat, then went back to Rashid. “Can you get us that list?”

“Why?”

“Because the kids on that list are all at risk. It’s our best way to get ahead of this bitch and stop her from taking more kids. If we can lock down all these potential victims . . .”

“You forget,” I said. “Some of their parents are willing participants. And we don’t have enough Wardens to do this.”

“We’ve got enough FBI. And enough cops,” Luis shot back. “To hell with the Wardens, they’re not doing squat for us anyway. We work with law enforcement, we got plenty of firepower. And I don’t think she’ll have planned to fight her way through that.She’s looking for a magical resistance, not a physical one.”

Luis, I had to admit, had a point. But when I glanced at Rashid, I saw that his face was closed and hard. He said nothing.

Luis sighed. “Come on, man. I get it, you’re a bastard. You don’t care. Fine, whatever. I’ll give you all the respect you want, just give me the goddamn list.”

“I can’t,” Rashid said. “Whether I wished to or not, this list isn’t mine to give.”

“Yeah? Then who the hell do we have to talk to?”

I knew, with an ill feeling, before Rashid said anything. “The Earth Oracle.”

Rashid nodded once, sharply. Of course. My last encounter with the Earth Oracle—archangel to the Djinn’s angels—had been uncomfortable, and nearly shattering in its intensity. Not by her doing; the Oracle simply was.There was no being reachable by the Djinn who was as deeply rooted in the mind and soul of the Mother, not even the Fire Oracle, or the one with dominion over water and air. Each had separate, distinct powers and attitudes, and of all of them, the Earth Oracle was perhaps the most approachable—the most willing to understand and assist us with this matter.

It did not change the fact that she had once been halfling-born—the daughter of the Djinn David and his Warden love, Joanne. Imara, she had been called. And Imara had been a special sort of creation, one with no real place in the natural world until Ashan himself had violated the laws of the Djinn and murdered her within the sacred precincts of the Earth Oracle’s temple.

Imara not only had survived, but had become . . . more. Other. She wasn’t a half– powered Djinn anymore. She had gone vastly beyond all of that. Yet, some of her human heritage still lingered, and I retained enough of my Djinn snobbery to remain just a touch uncomfortable with that fact.

I wasn’t sure Imara had any great and lasting fondness for me, either. The last thing I wanted was another, perhaps less cordial, encounter.

“Get it for us,” I told Rashid. He shook his head. “You must be a special pet of hers, if you know of this list at all.”

“I know of it because David told me of it, not because I can lay my hands on it.”

David. I fumed quietly. He led half the Djinn—the less consequential half, by my reckoning—but he was nothing I wanted to cross. I had no connection to him, not as Rashid did; I would have to rely upon his pure goodwill. He had, however, been kind to me before—had, in fact, helped save my life, when Ashan cast me out. So it was possible. “Then I will ask David for it.”

“You could. He might even be inclined to grant it to you, knowing David; he’s so accommodating.” Rashid made a face that implied he did not altogether approve of this trait. “Unfortunately, he cannot be located.”

That stopped me, Luis, and even Turner cold for a long, icy second. “You . . . can’t find him.”

Inconceivable. David was the Conduit of the New Djinn. He was the core and source of their power on Earth and in the aetheric. How could they notfind him? It was akin to mislaying a part of your own body.

“He’s hidden from us,” Rashid clarified. “He told us, before he left, that he would be cut off from us.”

“Then there must be some replacement. Someone keeping open the Conduit for you.”

Rashid inclined his head, but didn’t answer.

“Rashid,” I said. “My patience is not just thin, it is starving, and moments from death. Just tell me.”

Djinn do love their games, but Rashid seemed to understand that I was no longer playing. He turned to face forward, staring out at the road as the car hurtled along its smooth, straight surface, landscape whipping by in a blur of ocher, brown, and green.

“He would have preferred to give the responsibility to Rahel,” Rashid said. “But Rahel likewise cannot be reached. He’s walled both her and himself off from us, to protect us. There are risks.”