Текст книги "Unknown"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

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Chapter 6

IMARA HADN’T STRESSED IT,but I clearly understood now that the scroll I carried was not merely the best intelligence we could hope for, but also the most dangerous. She had entrusted something to me that was far more precious than even the most valuable human treasure.

I wasn’t sure that I could protect it alone.

As I raced along the highway on my newly inherited Harley, I used a steady trickle of power to veil me from prying eyes. It wouldn’t be enough to stop a Djinn, but it would keep me hidden from any merely human agents Pearl chose to employ. I wasn’t certain about her Warden child acolytes, however. Their powers didn’t seem to be limited in the way I would have expected. It was entirely possible that they would be able to see and detect me, whatever measures I took to stop them.

It was also possible that the measures I would have to take against them would be . . . extreme. Not a prospect I faced with any sort of pleasure.

I took a less direct route away from Sedona than I had getting to it, traveling back roads and deserted, lonely stretches with only lizards and coyotes as rapidly passing company. I had no desire to run afoul of the law, even accidentally; last night’s events had taught me the value of anonymity, at least. The morning grew bright, edging toward noon, with the fierce amber bead of the sun the only flaw in a featureless sky. I breathed in the smell of the arid, perfect land, feeling freedom here in the emptiness.

And then my cell phone rang, vibrating against my skin. I had tucked it in the bodice of my vest, to ensure that I could detect it over the roar of the engine; even so, I only noticed because it was such a localized buzz, as opposed to the shaking my entire body received from the bike.

I pulled over to the side of the road, coasting to a gravel-crunching stop, and shut off the engine. In its absence, the day was heavy with heat, filled with birds calling and insects droning. I could almost hear the land baking beneath the sun.

I flipped open the phone and held it to my ear. “Yes,” I said.

“Try hello,” Luis said. “Would it kill you?”

“It might,” I replied. “I am trying to minimize risk.”

He sighed. “Did you get it?”

“Yes,” I said. “The girl?”

“I’m going to need you with me. It doesn’t look good.” He paused for a few seconds, then said, with a cautious note in his voice, “Everything okay? You have any trouble?”

With a pang, I thought of the death and destruction I’d left in my wake. Of the ruined Victory, too, although I felt that perhaps I shouldn’t rate a machine so highly as the lives that had been lost.

Then again, it had been a verynice motorcycle.

“A little,” I said.

“How little?”

“I have a Harley now.”

Luis knew me well enough, it seemed. “Holy crap,” he said. “What blew up?”

“Many things,” I said. “But I am alive.”

“I have gotto stop letting you off on your own.”

His protectiveness made me smile, if a little bitterly. “If you hadn’t, you might be dead now.”

“ Chica,you assume a whole lot of helplessness on my part. Check your program. I’m not the damsel in distress.”

I considered that. “Next time,” I said, “I will let you fight the battles.” Then, with a sudden shock, I remembered Isabel’s chubby, pretty face, and the unnatural focus in her eyes. “Luis.”

“Yeah, still me,” he said. “What?”

I didn’t want to tell him, but somehow I found the words. “I saw Isabel,” I said. “She was here. She was with one of Pearl’s agents who attacked me.”

For a freezing-cold second, Luis didn’t say anything at all. When he did, it was very soft. Deadly in its intensity. “Tell me you didn’t hit back at her.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t hurt her. But—”

“Ah, God, what? What?”

It was my turn to pause, to search for words. “Pearl is using her,” I said finally. “She’s too young. It will harm her, whatever I do. I don’t wish this, Luis. Please believe me. I want to spare her all pain, but I’m not certain I can. Or that anyone can.”

“ Fuck,”Luis spat, and then launched into a fluid course of Spanish curses, liquid fire in words. “You sawher. And you let her go? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I did not have a choice,” I said. “I’m sorry.” It was hard to not feel defensive. It was also very difficult not to feel guilty. “I did not hurt her.”

He was silent for so long I wondered if he had simply put down the phone and walked away. Then he said, flatly, “Did you get what you went for or not?”

“Yes.”

“Then get your ass here fast, you hear me? Fast.”

I kicked the Harley to growling, rumbling life. “I am coming,” I said, hung up, and shoved the phone back in the bodice of my vest. This time, when I opened the throttle, I backed it with bursts of power, pushing the machine to its limits.

By the time I reached Albuquerque, both I and the motorcycle were exhausted. I slowed, because even with the clouding veil I maintained, the simple mechanics of navigating through traffic required me to be more cautious, even though I had ceased to fear attracting the attention of the police.

I pulled out the phone and dialed one-handed to shout, “I’m here. Where are you?”

“Christ, what are you riding, a tank? Just come to the house.”

The house was far from safe, but he knew that. Maybe he was actively hoping for another attack. Spoiling for it. As angry as I sensed he was, that was not beyond the realm of possibility.

“On my way,” I said, and hung up. It was a relatively simple matter to guide the big bike through the night traffic, under the glare of sodium– yellow and tungsten-white streetlights, to the quiet street that held Manny and Angela’s—now Luis’s—home. I cut the engine and coasted to a stop at the curb, dismounted, and was halfway up the walk with the scroll before the kickstand actually hit the concrete.

Luis had already opened the door. He looked me swiftly up and down, and I was warmed by the flash of concern in his eyes, however brief. Then he nodded and stepped aside to let me in, locking the door behind me.

On the worn, comfortable couch sat Agent Ben Turner, looking very tired. He was holding a mug that steamed with what must have been coffee, from the smell of it spicing the air. Luis likewise had a mug sitting on the coffee table, and a third had been poured already for me. I took it and sat on the opposite end of the couch, and gratefully drank. The caffeine would help mask my physical needs, if not those of the languishing Djinn within.

“You said you saw Ibby,” Luis said, and his dark eyes were fixed and intent on my face. “What happened? Tell me everything.”

I glanced at Agent Turner. “Everything?”

Turner sighed. “Don’t hold back on my account. I’m in the shit now, sure as death and taxes.”

“You can refuse to pay taxes,” I said. “Death rarely asks.”

Luis made an impatient sound, and I raised a hand to slow him down. “I know,” I said. “I will tell you.” It wasn’t comforting to either of us, but I told the story, and he heard it. Turner choked on his coffee when he heard of the carnage among the bikers, but said nothing.

Luis pushed the issue. “You got a problem?” he asked.

“You mean, do I have to do anything about it? No,” Turner said. “It’s local business, not federal. Until it becomes federal, I’m just . . . an interested bystander.”

“Even if it’s criminal behavior?”

“Criminal like what? Like getting out alive, after being jumped by a gang and threatened with a gun?” He shook his head. “Not my business. I’m fine with it.”

I hadn’t been particularly worried, either way, but Luis clearly had been, and now he sat back in the threadbare armchair and relaxed, sipping coffee. “But she seemed okay,” he said to me. “Ibby. Physically?” He was searching for any hope to cling to, and I gave it freely.

“She looked healthy,” I said. “She wasn’t injured.”

I couldn’t tell him, I realized, about Isabel’s words about her mother. That would hurt him far more than necessary; there was nothing he could do, at this moment, to relieve Ibby of that burden. Or himself.

So I would carry it for him, a little longer.

“You said you’ve got this thing you went out there for,” Turner said, and sat his coffee cup down on the table to lean forward, elbows on the wrinkled knees of his suit pants. “The list?”

“I do.” I didn’t move to produce it, however. Before I did that, I anchored myself quickly to Luis’s warm, steady presence, and rose into the aetheric, focusing on Turner.

It was not that I had a reason to distrust him. Quite the contrary. But something the Oracle had said stuck with me—that no trust could be absolute.

Overlying the vague outlines of his physical form lay his aetheric one, driven by subconscious desires and needs in his mind and soul. Some humans had radically different aetheric forms. Some were monstrous and twisted, the way some of the bikers had been who’d perished on the road.

Agent Turner’s spiritual self was merely . . . routine. He seemed much the same, though possibly taller and broader, more powerful in his spirit than in his body. Like most Wardens, he radiated waves of energy, though his were weak in comparison to the rich, lustrous radiance of Luis’s form.

I watched carefully. Sometimes, in the aetheric, one could detect lies, and deception, and fears. But I saw nothing.

Agent Turner simply seemed . . . tired.

I dropped down into my flesh again, stretched a little, and then nodded to Luis. I reached inside my heavy leather jacket and took the warm weight of the scroll case from the interior pocket.

“That’s it?” Turner leaned forward even more, chest almost pressed to his knees, trying to peer at the list in my hands. “That’s a list of all the kids with Warden powers?”

“Yes,” I said. “Worldwide. Constantly updated.” He held out his hand for it. “No. No one touches it but me.”

He frowned, and I thought for a moment he’d order me to hand it over—which would have been ineffective, at best—then shrugged and settled back in his chair. “Look up the kid we’re looking for right now, the latest disappearance,” he said. “Gloria Jensen.”

I opened the scroll and rolled it until I reached the middle of the alphabetical list. There were two Gloria Jensens. “California?” I asked. Turner shook his head. “New Jersey?”

His face took on a pinched look. “That all you’ve got?”

“Yes,” I said, and allowed the roll to slide closed. “Two of that name, one in California, one in New Jersey.”

“This one was taken from her home right here. New Mexico.”

Luis said, “Wait. Does the list show where they’re from, or where they are?”

It was an excellent, startling question, the answer to which Imara had never made clear to me. “I don’t know.”

“Then what the hell good is it?” Turner snapped.

There was a way I could know for certain, but Imara had cautioned me—strongly—that it made me vulnerable. Still, I saw no real option, if this list was to be of any practical use to us at all. I took a deep breath, opened the list again, and brushed my fingertip over the name of the first Gloria Jensen.

She was in a school auditorium, wearing a cheerleading uniform, screaming as a basketball soared through the air toward a hoop; I saw it clearly, experienced an echo of her youthful excitement and joy. “It’s not this one,” I said. “Not New Jersey.”

I slid my finger down to the second name.

Darkness. Fear. Pain.

I gasped and wrenched my finger away, involuntarily raising it to my mouth as if I had burned it. My heart began to pound in startled reaction, and I felt a visceral impulse to throw down the scroll, to never feel thatagain.

“Cass?” Luis’s hands came down on my shoulders, strong and steadying. “You all right?”

I nodded, still breathing too fast, and unrolled the scroll again.

Darkness. Fear. Pain. Alone. The rumble of an engine, a constant bouncing vibration. The smells of rust and oil.“She’s in a car,” I said. “In the trunk. The car is in California. This is the one who was abducted.”

“Where?” Turner’s voice, sharp with urgency. “I need exact details, dammit!”

“I know,” I whispered, and mimed a pen, writing. Luis’s presence removed itself, returned a moment later. He pressed a pen into my right hand, while my left forefinger kept the connection to Gloria Jensen open. I scratched down the information that poured into my consciousness, without understanding where it was coming from, or how. The wildly out-of-control feeling of it made it seem as if I had grabbed hold of the tail of a tornado, something insanely beyond my power to control.

I wanted, desperately, to back away, but I forced myself to stay focused. Stay connected. The pen scratched, moving without my conscious direction, and then stopped. As the pen slipped from my fingers, my finger jerked away from the scroll. I couldn’t force myself to stay in contact with the child, not even for another moment.

“I can’t help her,” I heard myself say, numbly. “I can only feel. Only feel.” My fingers felt scorched, but it was only an impression, the only way my nerves could interpret the kind of psychic pain that I had inflicted upon myself. Something inside of me was wailing in terror, still. Was this what the Oracle felt? Imara had said she felt them all . . . all their joy, their pain, their fear. This, times a billion. Times sixbillion.

I could not even stand to feel such things from one.The prospect of the job of an Oracle made me aware, for the first time, of the awesome scope and responsibility of such a thing. The strength of character it required.

Luis slid the piece of paper out from beneath my trembling hand and read it. Turner rose and looked over his shoulder. “La Jolla,” Luis said. “These are a list of cross streets, it gives us a direction.”

“Can you give me a type of car?” Turner asked, already reaching for his cell phone. I shook my head. “But it has a trunk. How big?”

“Small,” I said. The child had been cramped, struggling for breath. Hot and sweating, terrified. Injured. “She has a broken arm.”

“Christ,” Luis said. “Get Rashid. Maybe he can—”

“Can what?” Rashid was, without any warning, sitting behind us, crouched against the wall, skin gone from smoke to indigo in the artificial light. He looked wrong and very, very beautiful. There was a silvery shimmer under the surface of his skin, a glow that seemed to echo moonlight. “Help you? I might. What are you offering?”

Turner flinched, but to his credit, he didn’t back down. “That all depends. What do you want?”

Rashid’s lips parted in a genial sort of smile. “For rescuing a Warden child from her tormentor? Or for bringing you the tormentor in one piece and alive?”

“Both,” Turner and Luis said, at once. I said nothing, watching Rashid with wary intensity. The two men exchanged a look, and Turner continued. “Not worth much unless you do it fast. I’m going to have cops all over it in ten minutes.”

“But it is ten minutes of pain and fear that you might spare her,” Rashid said, with a kind of horrible satisfaction. “And so much can happen in ten minutes, yes? I have crippled a human in less than a second. Imagine what hemight be able to do, with such a rich span of possibilities available to him. Especially were he warned you were . . . coming.”

Time slowed to an icy crawl, and I felt every slow beat of my heart as my focus narrowed in on him. On this Djinn who dared to say such things.

So you would have, once,I heard a whisper say, deep in my mind. So you might have done, at any rate. Their pain, their weeping, their losses meant nothing to you, all these thousands of years. And now, you know how it feels.

Yes. But I had been created a Djinn, and I had never come from human stock. Rashid had. Rashid should have known better. I couldn’t let that pass.

“If you do that,” I whispered, “if you even considerit, I will tear you apart. I swear it.”

He flashed me a mocking smile, unimpressed. “What is the human phrase . . . ? You and . . . what army?” He quoted the phrase like a visitor unfamiliar not just to the language, but to the planet. Which I supposed he was, in all the ways that might have been relevant to this conversation.

“How about me,” Luis said flatly. “How about the Wardens. Every fucking Warden on Earth. You want to go to war with us, Rashid, we’ll go right the fuck now. You pull that shit right now, and David won’t protect you. No one will. It’ll be you, and us. How you like those odds?”

He didn’t. He also wasn’t so much afraid as cautious, I saw. He was not certainthat David, in his capacity as Conduit for the New Djinn, wouldn’t turn on him for such a thing.

I was. I knew David well enough to know that Rashid’s attitude wouldn’t go unpunished.

Whatever Rashid assumed about the Djinn, he knew there was no doubt that the Wardens would come after him, for something like this. I could only imagine Lewis Orwell’s fury. Or Joanne’s.

The odds were not in Rashid’s favor.

Rashid, acknowledging this, shrugged. “Only a thought,” he said. “A mere hypothetical. If you want me to save the child and stop your villain, then I can do so. For a price. You are free to choose as you like.”

“Wait,” I said. “How do we know the girl’s abductor isn’t Pearl’s agent? If we act immediately, we could lose any chance of tracing him to his destination.”

Luis seemed stunned. “You’d let that kid be bait?Jesus, Cass. You’re as bad as he is.”

That stung. “No,” I said. “I simply raise the question.” Like Rashid, I thought but did not say. “It may be our only chance of finding Ibby and the other children quickly without waiting for another child to be abducted.”

“You sure you can’t find Ibby or the others through the list?” Luis asked. “Did you try?”

I glanced down at the scroll, and felt that visceral flutter again, that dread. Touching it had torn open something inside of me that I desperately wished to close, a feeling of vulnerability that was anathema to someone like me.

Luis must have seen my worry, or felt it through the connection he held with me. His expression softened, and he leaned closer to say, quietly, “Let me try.”

I shook my head. “No. No one else can touch it, especially a human. I’m not sure what the consequences would be. We can’t take the risk.”

“But we have to know. If we can find her this way, we should do it. Right now.” Luis sounded tentative, apologetic, but he was also very, very right. We had to know. If I had the ability to end this, I couldn’t flinch from it, no matter the pain.

I unrolled the scroll to find Isabel Rocha.

There was no location next to her name. That in itself was odd; adding to the sense of wrongness was the fact that the text of her name pulsed, faded, pulsed, jittered—as if something was struggling to remove it, and failing. For now.

I touched her name with my fingertip, and the glow flared as before, but instead of that immediate knowledge I had felt before—even the knowledge of terror and pain—all I felt from touching Ibby’s name was a kind of voracious, hungry darkness. It howled through me like a storm.

Trap.And Imara had warned me. Touching it will make you vulnerable.She’d told me that Pearl had become something like a Conduit, like an Oracle, something with power to touch the flow of time and space and reality directly.

With the power to corruptthe flow.

I gasped aloud, and tried to pull my hand away from the scroll, but the darkness surged up through the contact, licking through nerves and veins and flesh. I saw the nail turn black, and then lines of indigo shot up my finger. Quick as a breath they spread into my left hand, a midnight tracery that brought with it an icy, fatal numbness.

Pearl’s madness, her power, her furious hunger for revenge, all distilled into a black poison that had been crafted solely for this purpose, for me. Imara had known this. She’d known the risk even as she allowed me to take it. She’d tried to warn me how dangerous it could be.

I gritted my teeth and focused, trying to halt the progress of Pearl’s invasion within my body. I could feel her black joy, her triumph. It was happening quickly, devastatingly quickly. I distantly heard Luis’s sharp intake of breath, and felt him moving toward me as he realized something was wrong. Too late, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing he could do.

Then my hand was knocked away from the scroll, and the paper fell to the floor and rolled away, snapping into that tight, protective casing that looked like polished bone. Featureless and faintly shimmering with power. Turner hesitated, then reached down toward it. “No!” I screamed. “Don’t touch it!”

He hesitated, then slowly backed away, leaving it where it had fallen.

I stared down at my limp left hand. It was blackened and numb where it lay in my lap.

Dead.

“Madre,”Luis whispered, and shoved me back to kneel in front of me, taking the damaged hand in both of his. I saw power flare from him, seeking entrance, and felt a tantalizing flicker of heat within the tissues.

Something fought back. I felt the snap of attack, from within my hand to strike at him, and Luis broke off, panting. He gave me a wild look of utter horror. “I can’t,” he blurted. “It’s not—I can’t stop it. I can’t even touch it. You have to do something. Fast, Cass.”

“I can’t.” My voice sounded level and calm, unnaturally so. “It’s inside me now. I can’t even keep it contained in my arm much longer. My power is yours; if yours can’t stop it, mine can’t either. The battle’s already lost.”

What I meant, what he must have understood, was that I was going to be destroyed. There was nothing to be done, nothing magical that either of us could do or try.

Turner watched, confused and shocked. No help from him. No help possible.

I looked at Rashid.

He smiled, and from his crouch in the corner, said, “For a price, my razor-edged angel. It will cost you.”

“What price?” I asked. My mouth was dry, my skin felt tight and clammy. I was afraid, but I also knew the dangers of showing my desperation.

“Do you really have time to bargain?” He cocked his head, just a little, and stared at me with inhuman, unfeeling eyes. “I think you don’t. I can stop it. Say yes.”

“To what?”

His grin turned feral. “To whatever I want, of course.” His tone dripped with all manner of salacious innuendo, but his eyes . . . his eyes flicked toward the scroll, where it sat radiating power. A direct connection to the Oracles. To the Earth herself, perhaps. Power beyond measure, especially in the hands of a Djinn.

I had promised Imara never to let it out of my hands.

I sucked in a deep, trembling breath. “No,” I said. I was not willing to take that particular risk. Not even at the cost of my life. Rashid was a wild, random creature. In his hands, this list could wreak incalculable damage as easily as overwhelming good.

I felt one of the barriers I had built to wall off my poisoned hand break, like a levy under a black tide. More darkness flooded into my hand, and began to spread.

“Yes,” Luis said. “Dammit, do it, Rashid. Do it!Save her!”

Rashid raised an eyebrow, and didn’t move his gaze away from mine. “ Shehas to say it,” Rashid said. “No one else can answer for her. What say you, Cassiel? Deal?”

I licked my lips. I felt the darkness raging beneath my skin, bubbling like some viscous acid. It didn’t hurt, not yet, but that was only because it destroyed physical nerves as it went. It would no doubt be an agony beyond anything I had ever known, when it reached my centers of power. When it consumed and utterly destroyed my soul and unmade me from the world.

And deep within me, the otherCassiel stirred. The ice-cold core of me, the inhuman persona who had seen stars burn out, seen death in the billions, witnessed atrocity and miracles with the same utter lack of concern.

ThatCassiel knew what to do, where the merely human one failed. I felt her chill in my heart, her clarity in my mind.

I had a choice. It wasn’t one my human self could make.

Only a Djinn could make it.

“No,” I said again, very precisely. “I do not accept your deal, Rashid. Not for that.”

I walked forward and took hold of a bronze sculpture on a side table, a metal representation of two clasped, weathered praying hands. Angela’s possession, one dear to her during her life. I felt the whisper of her devotion and passion soaked into the metal. Her history.

Help me be strong,the human side of me whispered. Help me do the right thing. Help me not be afraid.

The Djinn part of me had no fear at all, only frozen, emotionless purpose.

I raised power and re-formed the metal. It melted in my right hand into a shimmering pool, then lengthened. Hardened.

Formed itself into a sharp, long-bladed hatchet.

Before either Luis or Ben Turner could stop me, I put my hand and wrist flat on the wooden surface of the dining table, raised the hatchet, and put all my strength into the downward blow. I had to do it in one strike.

To my Djinn mind, it was all angles, force, calculation. An entirely academic exercise.

The human part of me had gone away. That was for the best.

I heard Luis screaming, but it was too late.

Now.

The blade slammed squarely into untainted flesh an inch above where the poison stopped, sliced through flesh, muscle, and through the tough bone. All the way through, burying its edge in the wood below.

Its work done, the Djinn in me faded back into watchful silence, satisfied with the precision and power of its work.

The human part of me woke to the horror. I screamed. The pain was tremendous, a hot red storm that threatened to drive me unconscious to the ground; it took all my focus and strength to hold on. Immediately after, shock set in fast, and the flood of bleeding slowed to a sudden, dizzying trickle from the stump. The severed hand took on a strange, disassociated look, as if it had never been a part of me, as if I had only dreamed of ever having such a thing attached to my body.

Rashid had idly noted how many terrible things could happen in a matter of mere seconds.

He was so correct.

“No!” Luis was shouting. He grabbed at me, struck the hatchet from my hands and sent it skittering across the floor, scattering blood drops. “ Dios,no!” He hissed something else, something I couldn’t understand through the hazy fog that descended over my eyes, and took the stump of my arm in a firm grip. Maybe he meant to try to reattach the hand. Earth Wardens had been known to work such miracles, after all.

The hand had other ideas.

My severed hand spasmed, and then it began to move,like a separate and living creature. Tentatively at first—stiff little jabs of the blackened fingers—and then it dug its nails into the wood and curled, looking suddenly like nothing so much as a spider preparing to leap.

Rashid, who had not reacted even as I chopped my hand off, suddenly rose to his feet in a smooth, startled motion as my blackened hand began walking across the table toward me.

Rashid reached out, and a broad-bladed knife from the kitchen counter flew through the air to smack into his palm. He advanced with three fast steps, and with a blindingly quick motion, stabbed the knife into the back of my severed, crawling hand, pinning it to the table. It struggled for a few seconds, scrabbling with its black fingernails, and then went still.

Not limp.

Just . . . still. Waiting.

“Holy fucking God,” Turner whispered, and then shook himself. “We need to get a tourniquet on her. Fast.”

Luis tore his wide gaze from the hand on the table, and I saw him thrust all of it away with an almost physical effort of will. “I’ve got it,” he said. “Cass? You hear me?”

“I hear you,” I said distantly.

Luis’s face was set and hard, but his eyes were so worried. So vulnerable. “Not going to lie to you, this is going to hurt like hell, so I’m going to turn off your nerves for a second. Hang on, okay?”

I nodded placidly.

Then I was sitting on the floor. I don’t know how; it seemed like life had jumped its tracks for a moment, as if a few vital seconds of my life had been erased, crudely and utterly destroyed.

Whatever trauma I had felt, those seconds were gone, utterly vanished. Sometimes the human brain protects itself, creates a fail-safe circuit. That was what Luis had done—triggered that final protection, a kind of static during which the brain resets itself.

I had no memory, because no memory of those moments existed for me. Nor ever would.

There was a towel tied tightly around the end of my arm, which ended abruptly in an empty space. I raised it and stared at it, wondering where my hand had gone. I could still feel it, still feel the phantom muscles flexing. What happened . . . ?I knew, but I didn’t know. Not really.

My head felt light and vague. I pulled in deep, trembling breaths and felt an arm bracing me across my shoulders. “Easy,” Luis said. His voice was wrong, shaking and too high. “Breathe. Come on, breathe.”

I wasbreathing, I thought, with a hot flash of annoyance. Even Rashid was watching me with a frown of concentration. Turner and Luis seemed shocked and horrified.

Ah, yes, of course. I had chopped off my hand.

Their reactions made perfect sense, then.

“I’m all right,” I said. Indeed, I was. My pain had receded, and the light– headed feeling was going away. The absence of the invading darkness left me feeling unreasonably strong. “Were you able to stop the bleeding?” As if I was inquiring politely about the health of a distant relative, or the weather. Something that had no bearing on my own ability to survive the night.

Luis swallowed. His skin looked cream– pale beneath its burnish of bronze. “It’s stopped,” he said. “I deadened the nerves and sealed the blood vessels. But it’s not good, Cass. Christ, why?”

“Pearl,” I said. “If I hadn’t acted, she’d have destroyed me. It had to be done.”

“I could have stopped it,” Rashid said. I gave him a long look. “Perhaps.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” I said. “You wanted the list. I can’t give it to you. I couldn’t depend on your goodwill, Rashid. Or would you say that you would have acted to save me, regardless?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. I’d felt it from him, felt that avarice and pure, selfish desire. I knew him.

I had once been Rashid, or very like him.

“It was the only way,” I said, and for some reason it came out almost kind. I deliberately hardened my tone. “If you want to make amends, Rashid, you may. The girl, Gloria. Go and get her. There will be no bargain. You will do it because I tellyou to do it.”