I had not been born human. It was still difficult to truly understand fragility, after so many millennia spent as a Djinn, a spirit of fire and power, immortal and untouchable. But oddly, being Djinn had proved to be the ultimate vulnerability. It takes only a stronger, more determined Djinn to rip away all your power, your fire, your existence, and trap you in a form like this.
A human form.
It had not been my choice to become human, but I have made my peace with it, in most ways. I no longer flinch when touched, or experience uncontrollable flares of fury when I clash with others. Perhaps that is all I can ask from this experience — a teaching, finally, of patience.
I might have wished for a less direct method of instruction.
I had come up here, to this deserted and quiet place, to listen to the earth around me. Connected as I was to Luis Rocha, a Warden who wielded power through the rock, the living things grounded in it, I could feel the slow, steady heartbeat of the world as clearly as I sensed the smaller, faster pumping of the heart within my body.
And I could feel where shadows had fallen, in this sunlit and unforgiving place.
I reached in my pack and brought out the news stories I’d printed from Luis’s computer. There’d been a string of odd disappearances in this part of the mountains — three female hikers over the past few months, yet no bodies found. Traces of them had been discovered in the form of torn clothing, along with abandoned tents and gear. Added to that, there had been two undeniable deaths, but not of women — of men, lone male hikers torn to pieces by some savage animal. Mountain lion, it had been speculated. Possibly a bear. The corpses had been too deteriorated to be certain, or so the official stories claimed.
I wondered.
It was, in fact, no affair of mine at all, and it had merely been an excuse to indulge my wish for solitude. I was more than prepared to forget the dead and missing hikers and spend the rest of the day — and the night — admiring the hush and whisper of the wilderness.
I did not get that chance.
The first warning came as a scrabbling fall of stones far down the trail, then a muttered curse in Spanish that carried clearly in the thin air. Then more rattling rocks, thumps, more cursing.
Eventually Luis, my Warden partner, came into view, puffing and sweating up the steep, treacherous trail. Reaching the ledge where I sat, he heaved in a deep breath, and collapsed in a heap at my side. “Holy crap,” he said, and took out a bottle of water, most of which he downed in a desperate gulp, then dumped the rest over his sweat-soaked head. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and blotted his face with the sleeveless shirt he wore. I cast him a quick look, then went back to my contemplation of the view. Not that Luis was unpleasant to look at; he was, in fact, quite lovely, for a human. Tall, strong, with black hair and skin the color of caramel. Flame tattoos licked up both arms in still-life flickers. “Madre, woman, I’m an Earth Warden and even with all that connection to the Earth this is a crazy hard climb. You could slow down a little.”
“I didn’t ask you to follow,” I told him. I was, however, not surprised that he had. Luis didn’t like to let me stray too far, claiming that I was a magnet for trouble. That might have had some credence, actually; I did seem to draw attention to myself far too much for safety. Djinn arrogance. I couldn’t seem to shake it, even in human form.
“Too damn bad,” he said. “You don’t get to go off roaming by yourself anymore. Where you go, I go. Just … not so fast. And maybe not so graceful.”
I raised my eyebrows, but said nothing. The truth was, it pleased me in an obscure way that he had followed. There was a kind of solid peace that radiated from him, a sense of controlled and focused power.
In a Djinn, that would have been very attractive. I was not quite yet ready to believe there was anything that could make a mere human — even a Warden — attractive.
And yet.
Luis finished his water and stowed the bottle. He was still breathing hard and shining with sweat. I took out a bottle from my own pack and handed it over. Luis made a moan of indecent longing and reached for it, which made me smile. “I really love you right now,” he said, and then thought about it for a second. “Evil bitch.”
That made me smile more. I rested my chin on my crossed arms and looked out across the world, bathed in clean fresh sunlight. Below us, humans toiled and polluted, loved and created, hated and destroyed. Up here, it was almost like being a Djinn again, a creature above the earth, yet completely a part of it. I could feel the slow, sure heartbeat of the Mother herself.
“Energy bar?” Luis, ever practical, was rooting in his backpack for food. I held out my hand, and he passed one of the wrapped bars over. It tasted like flavored sawdust, but it would serve. I was not overly concerned with the needs of my body just now. “So, why’d we haul our asses all the way up here, anyway?”
I hadn’t asked him to come along, and I wasn’t feeling particularly cooperative. “Perhaps I like the view.”
He gave me a filthy look. “You’d better not go with that one. There’s a tram, chica. You know, you get in it, it hauls ass up the mountain all on its own without all the sweating and muscle cramps.”
I couldn’t explain it to him at first, and then I slowly said, “I needed to feel my feet on the ground. I needed to sense the earth around me. I needed — order, in all of the chaos.”
That made him pause. He squinted, wiped sweat from his forehead, and took another drink of water before nodding. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “I got that. Hate it, but I got it. So. Better now?”
“In time,” I said.
“Because it’s going to take us about the same number of hours getting down off this rock, and I don’t want to try it in the dark. Going to get cold, too.” He eyed me at an oblique angle. “Cass. Half an hour, then we got to go, okay?”
“If you’re that worried, maybe we should start back now,” I said, and stood up. He held up his hands in surrender.
“Okay, okay, I confess, I’m done in, Survival Girl. Give me half an hour. I need to rehydrate, or you’ll be watching my body as it bounces down the side of the mountain.”
I snorted, but sank back down into a crouch. It was a very still day, little breeze. He was right; as the sun drifted toward its western horizon, I could feel the heat leaving the air. It would stay in the rocks a while longer, but by full night, it would be cold and clear.
“You ready to tell me why we’re really out here?” he asked me. I gazed at him a long moment, and a random whisper of wind came out of the chasm below us and blew pale hair back from my face. I’d taken the pink highlights out of it, leaving it puffball white. My skin remained pale, as pale as any human I had ever seen. I was — exotic.
Luis called me beautiful, but I did not feel beautiful. I felt … lost. Better, in the wilderness, but still disconnected. Drifting.
“There were reports of something out here,” I said. “Some — thing that comes out at dusk. There have been disappearances, a few deaths.”
“Accidents?”
“Perhaps. Or animals.” Or something else. There was an old, unusual feel to this place, a wildness I had not felt in many places — not since the humans had civilized the world so thoroughly. “I don’t know.”
Luis frowned and looked around, at the scrub brush, and the deeper shadows of the pine forest just below us. “Maybe a mountain lion,” he said. “We’re in their territory.”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t think so.”
I shrugged. I had no evidence; in fact, I had nothing more than instinct, a whisper of something that could not even be defined as suspicion.
Restlessness, likely enough. Our lives had been difficult lately. My first Warden partner, Manny Rocha, had been shot down in a senseless act of violence, along with his wife, and neither I nor Luis had reconciled our emotions. Luis had blamed me, and I had blamed myself; neither of us was right, or wrong. But trust was, at times, a thin shadow between us. I preferred not to shine a bright light on it.