Текст книги "Unknown"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

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I growled softly, and the sound rumbled through the metal of the car. “You’re telling me who he did notchoose. I only need to understand who he didchoose.”

“Only to explain,” Rashid said. “Because we all acknowledge that Rahel would have been, in fact, the logical choice. Instead, we are saddled with . . . Whitney.”

I was not at all certain I’d heard correctly. “Whitney. Who is Whitney?”

“Our newest Djinn,” he said. “And you will be very, very unimpressed. I confess that I am completely baffled by his logic. Perhaps the woman he’s consorting with has finally driven him insane.” Rashid sounded not just bored, but actively angry. Jealous, I assumed, not very charitably. Rashid did seem to me the type to think he was the natural heir apparent of all the powers in the universe.

Of course, from what I had seen of him so far, he might have been correct to do so.

“I will need to see Whitney, then,” I said.

“That might be a problem, since David ordered her not to leave Jonathan’s house.” Rashid cast a scornful glance over me. “I doubt youcan go to her. Not in that form.”

He was right. Humans—and undeniably, I was trapped in human form, unable to shift from it without massive expenditure of power, more than I could safely draw from Luis or any other mortal—could not perform the trick of sifting through the planes of existence, like dialing the tumblers of a lock, to reach the nonspace that held the Djinn stronghold . . . a shifting place, out of phase with the rest of the realities. Once inside, Djinn were insulated from most, if not all, dangers outside; it would take the death of the universe itself to destroy Jonathan’s house.

And it would destroy a mere mortal to attempt the access. I knew of only one who’d accomplished it—Joanne Baldwin, David’s sometimes human, always presumptuous lover. But she’d been a Djinn at the time, so that hardly counted.

I held Rashid’s gaze without blinking. “If I can’t go to her,” I said, “then you must. I need the list. Tell her.”

“No,” he said. “Ask her yourself. If you can.” He bared his teeth. “Or ask the Oracle. She can give you access. Of course, the Oracle’s not as tolerant as she once was. She’s become . . . more powerful. Less accessible.”

That didn’t bode well for my chances, but my chances of getting to this Whitneywere even smaller, considering her location and my human-form disability.

I looked at Luis and said, “I will go to Sedona to see the Oracle.”

“Wrong,” Agent Turner snapped. “You’re going nowhere except where I take you. I told you, I need your help!”

“You need help,” Luis agreed. “Tell you what, I’ll go with you. Let her do this. She gets her hands on that list of potential targets and we can start preventing this crap before we’re chasing after missing kids in trouble, maybe suffering or dying. Yeah?”

Turner didn’t like it, I could see that from the stony look on his face. Still, he knew that Luis was right; if there was a way to prevent more missing children, more deadchildren, he would have to risk it.

“Fine,” he said. “So how does this work? You just blip out, or . . . ?”

“Like this?” Rashid gave him a vicious smile and disappeared so suddenly that Turner involuntarily veered the car to the right, staring. Air made a small thunderclap of sound rushing in to fill the space he had occupied.

Turner looked at me in the rearview mirror.

“No,” I said wearily, and settled back in the seat to close my eyes. “Not like that. Not anymore.”

More was the pity.

In Albuquerque, Agent Turner let me off at my apartment, where I had left my motorcycle parked beneath a shaded awning. He was impatient to be gone, but Luis got out with me, walked me around a corner of the building, and turned to me. It was a cool evening, clear and dry, with the smell of sage and pine flavoring the air. The barely seen smudges of the mountain peaks rose up to the north, lifting part of the city out of its bowl. Overhead, stars sparkled cold in a vast, otherwise empty sky.

Beautiful and only lightly tamed, this place—like the man facing me, hair stirring just a bit in the breeze. Artificial lights glinted on his skin, shadows darkened his eyes, and he said, “You be careful. Remember what happened last time.”

Last time, Pearl had sent her forces after me on the way back from Sedona. She’d broken my leg. She’d almost killed me—and would have succeeded, if Luis hadn’t come to my rescue. As I thought about it, my still-healing arm twinged. The bones were fixed together, bonded and straight, but nerves were still repairing themselves.

I nodded without speaking. I was no longer sure how to speak to him; something had changed between us, something fundamental had shifted beneath our feet. I wasn’t sure if I had forced that change, or he had, or if it would have happened no matter what we did.

All I knew was that it felt . . . different. And it hurt to leave him.

Luis lifted his hand and touched the side of my face. The skin of his palm felt warm against my skin, and I closed my eyes in an involuntary spasm of delight. I sensed the power coursing in his veins, natural as the blood that ran with it.

“Take what you need,” he said. “I’m not sending you out there unprepared and underpowered.”

He didn’t know what he was asking. Not really. I pulled in a quick breath and opened my eyes again, meeting his.

“I could hurt you, doing this too quickly,” I said. “I don’t wish to do that.”

Luis laughed, but it was soft and humorless. He shook his head. “You aren’t going to hurt me any worse than anybody else has,” he said. “I didn’t grow up soft, chica.I took bullets before, you know. Knives. Took a hell of a beating when I was jumped into the gang. So just do it already, we’re burning starlight.”

Drawing power was usually a slower process, and I had almost always been careful to draw at levels that didn’t risk his comfort, much less his life. But Turner was waiting, and the clock on a child’s life was ticking, and we had no time for the niceties even if the FBI agent was inclined to allow us our leisure.

I slowly put my hand over Luis’s where it rested on my cheek, feeling the pulse under my fingers race faster.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I will try not to hurt you.”

And then I let loose the hunger inside of me. It was not so much a matter of taking from him, as allowing the barriers to drop; the void in me, the cold, hungry vacuum where once the life force of a Djinn had been, sucked power from him in a ravenous stream. Too much, too much . . .it felt astonishingly good to me, like being bathed in light, but I also felt the sudden stabbing pain of overloaded nerves. My pain, but also his.

Luis trembled, but he didn’t try to pull himself away from me. His eyes continued to focus on mine, dark and drowning, and I forgot how to breathe as he poured life from his body to mine. There was an intimacy to it that went beyond mere bodies, went into realms of spirit, of pure and perfect life.

It was so hard to pull away.

I finally sucked in a shaking gasp and slammed shut the barriers between us again. I hadn’t felt so powerful, so alivein a very long time, and it was so very hard to give that up. Even so, this rich, intense intoxication was only a fraction of what I’d been as a Djinn. I could drain a dozen like Luis, a hundred, without coming near that lost perfection.

That was exactly what Ashan had meant to do to me, in throwing me into human flesh. He didn’t need to torment me. He knew that every time I came up against the natural barriers, I would torture myself, thoroughly, with my hunger and possibilities.

It troubled me less than he’d planned, however. I couldbe tempted, but I was also, by nature, a practical sort of predator; draining a hundred Wardens would kill them all in the process, and even then, I would never again be what I had once been. It was easy to forget when I was fighting for survival, subsisting on barely enough energy to live; it was worse still when I had a taste of the power.

Luis was shaking, but he kept his hand on my face until I tightened my pale, thin fingers around his and pulled them away. His pulse was thundering now, and his face had gone starkly pale under its copper. He was not precisely gasping, but his breathing was more ragged, and more rapid, than I would have liked. I reached out to lay my hand flat against his chest, feeling the too-quick laboring of his heart.

“I’m okay,” he said before I could speak. He smiled, but I saw the pain underneath it. “Is that better for you now?”

I nodded, unwilling or perhaps unable to speak. My eyes were glowing, I knew it; I’d rarely been able to afford that sort of display, but it was raw nature, and I had no doubt that I looked . . . different just now, as I struggled to manage the power he had given me in such an intensive burst. I could see the change in his expression. I just could not decide what precisely it was that had created such an indescribable tension in his face . . . fear? Or desire? Something of both, perhaps.

He surprised me by saying, in a low, rough voice, “If we didn’t have someplace to be right now, I would take you inside and get down to business.”

I blinked. “I don’t understand.”

He took in a deep breath, then let it out, and finally, I recognized the waves of emotion coming off of him, resonating within me. They were just . . . unexpected.

“No,” he said. “Don’t suppose you would. You watch your back, Cassiel. I mean that.”

Our hands were still linked, fingers wound together in pure, primal need.

“And you,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. “I will know if you need me.” Immediately, I realized that there were several likely interpretations of that, and immediately amended it to, “Need me to help.”

He laughed. It was still soft, but this time, it was lightened with considerable humor. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. I’ll keep you on the psychic speed dial. What is that, pound 666?”

He raised my hand as if it was the most natural motion in the world, and for an instant I felt the softness of his lips burning against my skin. Then he let go, took a step back, and turned to walk back to Turner’s idling sedan.

I pressed my back to the rough, warm wall and breathed, breathed, breathed.

Then I went inside, recovered my helmet, and got on my motorcycle for the trip to Sedona.

Chapter 5

THERE IS NOTHING,in my human experience, as freeing as a fast ride on a powerful motorcycle. It’s a great deal like being a Djinn, in certain ways; there is momentum, power, a sense of barely controlled ferocity raging beneath the surface. A connection to all things—to the wind battering and caressing you by turns; to the ground beneath you, coated in a layer of man-made surface that nevertheless contains its own power, its own connections to life.

It is also loud and exhausting, and by the time I finished the long ride following Interstate 40 west to Flag-staff, I had eaten enough grime and dust to last several human lifetimes. It was now deep night, and traffic was almost nonexistent save for some long-distance trucks still plying their trade.

I stopped for a rest. I had human bodily needs; I could go without food, but water was a necessity that I found I needed both to dispose of and take in. Rest-rooms at gas stations were an unpleasant and shocking surprise; I had never considered the serious drawbacks of such lazily-cleaned rooms. I was completely unable to ignore the filth, and wasted a burst of power to turn the sinks, floors and porcelain toilet into sparkling, clean examples of their kind before using the facility. I felt that was a much less judgmental response than simply blowing the place off the face of the Earth, which was also a distinct temptation, especially when the storekeeper overcharged me for a bottle of cold water. I paid without complaint, however. I had learned from our earlier problems with law enforcement. Although I could easily overpower, or at least evade, it would be much easier to simply avoid being noticed at all.

That ship quickly sailed, however.

Outside, a whole noisy, thundering fleet of motorcycles pulled in, blocking my own vehicle against the building. Where I was wearing pale pink leather, these other riders were in battered blacks, studded with metal. Their vehicles were better kept than their persons, which were scruffy, badly washed, and—from their expressions—not especially friendly. Big, bulky men, for the most part; those who were smaller or thinner seemed even harder by contrast.

They surrounded my Victory in a ring of metal and bodies.

They were silent when I exited the store, downing the last of my water. I paid them no attention and threaded my way between the bikes until I reached my Victory, which was a calm, gleaming island in the sea of chrome and attitude.

There was no chance, once they saw me, that this was going to end well. I saw it in the predatory smiles, the shift in body language, the gleam of their eyes.

End well for them,of course.

I straddled the motorcycle, tossed the empty bottle effortlessly in the trash twenty feet away, and said, simply, “Move.”

They laughed.

“That’s a whole lot of bike for you, lady,” one of them said. “You sure you can handle it?” That woke suggestions from several about what else I could handle, or might want to.

For answer, I gave the speaker a brilliant, false smile. “Your bike is also nice,” I said. “Is it a ten speed?”

This was an insult that someone had offered me once, which I had of course ignored; Luis had been the one to explain the pointed joke to me, after the fact. Intellectually I understood why a prideful human might be offended by such a comparison, but it still meant nothing to me, really.

However, it didmean something to this man, whose entire self-image was bound up with his motorcycle, his image, and his pride .

“What’d you say, bitch?”

“I believe I said move.” Perhaps I should have added, please.I wasn’t much in the mood.

The man who’d spoken got off his motorcycle and came to walk around mine, and me. I didn’t bother to turn my head to watch him as he went behind my back; better to appear completely relaxed and unconcerned than to show an instant’s doubt with a pack like this. “I didn’t diss your bike, bitch. Why you got to go insult mine? That’s a Harley Softail Superglide, not a goddamn Schwinn. You’re riding, what, a Victory? That shit ain’t even been on the road ten years yet. This Harley’s been riding longer than you’ve been alive.”

That made me smile. “Oh, I doubt that,” I said, and looked him squarely in the face. “Are you going to fight with me now?”

They laughed. It was spontaneous and genuine, but there was also an edge of menace to it that might have raised hackles on anyone else.

“Oh, baby, you don’t want to go there,” he said. “You really don’t.”

I smiled.

“If you’re not man enough to fight,” I said, “I think you should get on your bike and pedal away.”

The laughter faded. The smiles died. And what was left was cold, hard, and intense as the night sky overhead.

The leader said, in a low voice, “You are a piece of work, bitch. I ought to smack the living shit out of you. Teach you not to talk back.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Are you trying to frighten me?” I asked. When he didn’t immediately answer, I said, helpfully, “I’m only trying to understand what you want. If you’re hoping to frighten me and make yourself feel mightier, then I’m afraid we’re both wasting time. And I can’t afford that. I’m in a hurry. If I have to kill you, I’d like to do it quickly.”

He stared at me hard for a few seconds, and then one of the other men nudged him and jerked his chin up at the eaves of the store. There was a security camera there, which I already knew. The leader stared at it, then turned back to me. “You know what? You’re fucking brain damaged. Better run on to your crystals and moonbeams and pyramids and stop messing with the real world before you get what you’re asking for.” He smiled, entirely falsely. “Have a nice fucking day.”

Silence. The desert air blew cool over my skin and tossed my pale, pale hair around my face, but I didn’t blink. Neither did the biker standing across from me.

These men had not survived to reach the status of roaming predators by accident. Some sense warned him that I was deadly serious, that I was not someone to toy with idly. Between that, and the silent witness of the camera, they would either let it go, or bide their time.

He looked at his friends, shrugged, and gave a sharp nod. Those blocking my motorcycle backed their vehicles away, a complicated maneuvering done in close quarters, accomplished with skill, grace and efficiency. They left me a clear path from my front tire to the highway.

“Thank you,” I said. I had promised Luis to try to use that phrase more often, and this seemed an appropriate moment. I kicked the Victory to life, donned my helmet, and eased out onto the road, opening up the throttle once I’d gained an opening.

I heard a full-throated roar behind me, and looked in my side mirror to see the entire pack of black-clad bikers spilling out into formation behind me, following. So. They had been biding their time, after all. Well, it was their choice. I had been very clear about the fact that I was in no mood to play games to enhance their egos. I considered the best way to disable their Harleys without undue violence; I could easily shred their tires, for instance. I could soften the metal of the frames, breaking the bikes apart under their own torque. I could simply disengage a few critical connection points to force them out of control.

I was spoiled for choices, and spent a few empty miles considering which of them might result in the least amount of injuries. They pulled steadily closer.

The leader yelled something at me, and I felt a raw, wild excitement in his voice. He meant to take his power back, redeem himself in front of his men.

He meant to fight.

I was not necessarily opposed to obliging him . . . and then I felt a raw surge around me. Wild energy, sweeping through the aetheric and down into the real world like an invisible tornado.

“Get away from me!” I shouted to the bikers, who had closed in around me, engines roaring. The leader leered at me. He thought I was afraid.Idiot. “Get out of here or you’ll be killed!”

For answer, he pulled a pistol from under his leather vest and pointed it at me. “Don’t threaten me, bitch.”

I hadn’t been. I’d been warning him.

It happened before either of us had a chance to make our next moves in this pointless chess game. I felt heat, unnatural heat, emanating from the gas tank of the Victory, and realized my time was up. I couldn’t stop combustion, but the gasoline was a product of the Earth, and subject to Luis’s Warden powers. It took only a minor adjustment to render it inert within the tank of my motorcycle, a second of concentration, and I felt the Victory lurch as the inert fuel fouled the engine. It coughed, sputtered, and died.

The biker riding close on my right wasn’t as lucky. His motorcycle simply exploded. Fragments blew out in a terrifyingly beautiful ball, like a flower with a heart of fire blooming lethal, twisted petals. The man riding it simply . . . ceased, as a coherent presence. I felt the psychic blow as the impact rippled the air, but I couldn’t note it in any significant way. I didn’t have the time. I dived off the wobbling Victory just as the other motorcycle exploded and flattened myself; heat rippled over me, and an expanding wave of concussion pressed me into the pavement for an instant, then passed. I had two pieces of luck—first, the Victory took the brunt of the shrapnel. Flying metal shredded the beautiful form of my bike, mutilating it, but it protected me from the worst of it for a critical instant as it was blown out, over me, and spun end over end to crash into the ditch on the side of the road. I curled into a ball, well aware of the danger as the bikers lost control all around me; one thick wheel came within a half inch of my face, but somehow missed doing worse than laying greasy road marks on the edge of my sleeve. Metal shrieked and crashed, men yelled, and I smelled burning rubber even over the stench of burning human flesh.

Another gas tank exploded. Screaming erupted.

I rolled clear, moving fast, and dropped into the ditch where my Victory had landed in a sad and twisted heap. It was good that I did, as more explosions sounded, flinging lethal shrapnel—including human bones—through the air above me.

Someone else landed in the ditch with me . . . the leader of the bikers, his leather vest shredded and torn, skin shimmering with blood, eyes wide and dazed. Not dead, surprisingly. Not even badly wounded, beneath the splatter of blood. Unlike some of his fellows, he still had all his limbs.

“Jesus,” he panted, and crawled to put his back to the raw earth of the ditch. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! What the fuck?”

“They’re not after you,” I told him, and got a blank, uncomprehending look from him. “I told you to leave me alone.”

“Fucking hell, lady, who’d you piss off, the fucking Marines?”

“I wish,” I said. I’d learned the expression from Luis, but from the man’s look, I wasn’t sure I had delivered it properly. “Stay down.”

“Like hell I will. Those are my brothers up there!”

I didn’t know if he meant literally, as in blood relations, or figuratively; it was difficult to determine human relationships at the best of times for me. “Stay down!” I almost snarled it this time, and grabbed him bodily by the shredded leather vest as he tried to put his head up above the road level. “This isn’t your fight!”

It was, however, mine. I looked down at the mournful remains of my beautiful Victory, sighed, and bent my knees to jump up and out of the ditch.

The biker hit me in a flying tackle from the side, taking me completely by surprise. He slammed me down into the packed dirt and scratchy weeds an instant before another motorcycle skidded drunkenly off the road and crashed down right where I had been standing. It had been blown over by another explosion, which hit my ears with a dull crumpof sound that told me my hearing had already begun to shut itself off in trauma.

The Harley was undamaged, except for some superficial dents and splatters. I stared at it, then shoved the biker off of me without much regard for his shouted concerns. I turned back to reach into the waistband of his blue jeans and pull out a semiautomatic pistol from a holster he’d concealed there. I checked the magazine– full, and stocked with hollow points—and slammed it home before removing the safety catch.

“Stay. Down,” I said, soft and precise, and straddled the Harley, which was still somehow running. The vibration of the engine sent waves of heat through my body, almost sexual in its intensity, and I took a deep breath before backing the Harley out of the ditch, up the other side, and back another few feet.

The road was carnage. Broken bodies, some weakly moving still. Shattered vehicles. Blood and bone.

And nothing else. No enemy. No face to put to my would-be killer.

Without the anchor of Luis’s presence, it was very hard for me to view things on the aetheric plane, where the reality of mere physics took on different aspects; it was like trying to fly while holding a concrete block. I managed it for only a few long seconds, overlaying the burning wreckage and bodies and serene moonlit desert with the floods and flows of intention, power, and truth.

Most of those lying on the road did not benefit from the illumination of their souls; their crimes had warped them into hideous shapes, disfigured their faces beyond recognition. I didn’t linger on their self– mutilations. Energy rose up from the destroyed motorcycles in shimmers of gauzy color, but there was something more.

The hot, glowing presence of two Wardens, drawing power.

I saw something lance at me across the aetheric, straight and intense as it cut through everything in its path. It was narrow, and it looked exactly like a laser beam, save that its lurid red color didn’t exist at all in the real, physical world.

I pulled broken metal up from the road in a rush, building a steel shield between me and the beam rushing toward me. It hit my improvised defense and blasted it to even smaller component pieces, but the shield had taken the energy and dissipated it into a splash that only melted and seared the remains into a ball of slag.

I snarled and throttled the borrowed Harley into a full scream of power. Tires dug sand, then gravel, and then I was airborne as momentum carried me forward over the ditch and onto the surface of the road. I avoided the worst of the wreckage and aimed the motorcycle for the spot where the beam of power had originated.

This time, the Warden was an adult—young, but fully a man, probably only a few years younger than Luis. He looked scared, but determined, and as I came for him, he readied his defenses.

I didn’t hold back. I slammed him backward, off his feet, and the ground opened beneath him. He dropped dozens of feet, and as he fell, the sides of the pit caved in over him. Burying him alive. Pinning him down with tons of crushing weight.

Destroying him.

It took fully a minute for him to die, smothered beneath the sand, but I didn’t wait to watch. This was war, and the Djinn in me had come forth, the part that cared little for the disposable lives of humans.

I went after the second glowing spot of power.

A figure dressed in dull brown started out of concealment behind a low jut of rock, illuminated by the fires glowing behind me. For a frozen moment, as I closed the distance, I felt recognition strike me. It was too far to see her face, but I felt the familiar aetheric sense of her, a warm connection I hadn’t known I’d missed until it returned, overwhelming in its relief.

That was Isabel. Ibby.Manny and Angela’s child.

My child,something in me whispered.

Ibby was no longer the sweet, smiling girl I remembered, or even the traumatized one who’d seen her parents die as she shivered and wept in my arms. She looked older than five now, although physically her body hadn’t matured unnaturally; there was something within her that had warped, bringing an adult, cold distance in her expression. A precision to her movements. Confidence, and calculation, although she was afraid.

But she still lookedlike Isabel.

Pearl. Pearl had done this to her. Rage swept through me, turning fear to ash, and in that moment I really wouldhave destroyed the human world for what Pearl had done—except that it would have meant destroying Isabel, as well.

I let off the throttle of the motorcycle. Ibby was standing by the side of the road, watching me, body tensed. Ready to attack. Ready to run.

Why? Why was she here?

Pearl, again. Pearl was training Ibby as a weapon. How better to use her, than to use her against me?

Oh, Ibby.But she had not led the attack. She’d been here either as hostage, or apprentice, but she was not ready to fight someone like me. She was so young. Too young.

It reduced me to fury and grief.

“Ibby,” I said. I had no doubt she could hear me, even over the throbbing growl of the Harley. “Ibby, it’s me. It’s Cassiel.”

It was a ridiculous thing to say. She knew who I was. I could see that in her face, in the caution and tension, the fear. It shattered my heart to see her fear me; she had always been so accepting of me, so . . . loving.

I kicked the stand of the motorcycle and eased off the bike, walking toward her. I must have looked frightening—stained with smoke and blood, a memory of that terrible day when she’d lost her parents.

She didn’t react, other than to narrow her eyes.

“Ibby,” I murmured. I came closer, moving slowly. “Oh, my girl.”

Her dull brown clothing was a kind of camouflage, a soldier’s gear cut down to fit a child. It should have looked ridiculous, like some sort of costume; instead, she filled it with deadly confidence.

She is only five years old.I felt that strike me hard as a fist, and I ached to stop time, reverse the hurts that had been done to her, take her in my arms and rock away the anguish.

Even if the anguish was only my own.

“I can help you,” I told her softly. I took another step on the gravel, and I saw her tense, readying herself. I stopped and made sure my hands were loose and un-threatening at my sides. I attempted a smile. “I want to help you, Ibby. Don’t you believe that?”

I felt a slight whisper in the aetheric, a brush of power. She was readingme. That was . . . impossible. Isabel was a mere child, nowhere near old enough—even should she have the inborn ability—to wield those kinds of powers, never mind with such utter precision. Reading the truth was an Earth power, like healing.

I also sensed another power in her, jittering and familiar. Fire.

Five years old, and already burdened with two kinds of Warden powers. It would shatter her like glass, or worse, warp her into an unrecognizable, twisted mockery with no hope of returning to the person she was meant to become.

In that instant, I hated Pearl, with such a pure and burning passion, such an utterly impotentpassion that it made me tremble and close my eyes to hold it inside. Please,I thought. Please let me find a way to destroy her, to wipe her from the Earth. She destroys everything she touches.

Ibby chose that moment to respond. “My mommy wants me to do this,” she said. She sounded utterly certain.

My eyes flew open, and I felt the breath congeal in my lungs. “What?” I whispered.

“Mommy says I have to be stronger now,” Isabel said. “Or the bad people will win. The bad people who hurt her, like you.” Something flashed in her dark, wide eyes, something awful. “I won’t let you hurt my mommy again, Cassie. I won’t.”

The realization almost drove me to my knees. Pearl, what have you done?Whether it was the strain of such unnatural power already pulling Isabel apart, or Pearl’s vile manipulations, I couldn’t tell, but I realized with a wrench that Isabel thought she was protecting her dead mother.A mother that, impossibly, she thought was still alive. And no child would flinch from that. Certainly not the child of warriors like Manny and Angela.