Refreshingly different.
I slipped into dreams, of blood and wriggling dark things that scuttled through shadows and clutched at my throat. When I woke I realized that my metallic left hand had clenched tight as a cinched knot. I felt nothing from the metal, only from that phantom, nonexistent hand that still eerily insisted it could feel pain. When I relaxed the metal hand, the pain eased. Phantom or not, it felt . . . real. Pain was, after all, in the mind; if my mind still received messages from nerves no longer there, it didn’t matter how the messages arrived. Pain was pain.
Luis was just finishing his beer. He watched me flexing my hand and said, “You still feel it? Your hand?”
His guess was accurate, and startling. I nodded.
“Not all that uncommon,” he said. “People who lose limbs in some kind of traumatic accident often talk about still feeling them. Sometimes for years after. Has something to do with the body’s perception of itself on the aetheric, I think.”
I couldn’t see my own body in the aetheric, not in any kind of detail. “How do I look?” I asked him. “In Oversight?” It was a bit of an impolite question, among Wardens; it simply wasn’t done to ask directly. But I needed to understand.
His eyes unfocused a bit, and he tapped the bottle against his lips a few times before upending it to capture the last few drops and setting it aside. “You mean your hand? It’s still there. Your aetheric self still has it.”
“What form do I take?”
Luis smiled, very slightly. “A beautiful one. You glow like a nuclear reactor. The Djinn don’t show up that well, you know. You do.”
“Because I’m anchored in flesh,” I said. “Because I’m not a Djinn any longer.”
He tilted his head forward, acknowledging the point. “Not technically, no. But you’re more than just a Warden. Or a human. Don’t kid yourself, Cass.”
“Cassiel.”
“Cass.”
“Stop.”
“Make me.” His voice had gone lower, more intimate. I found myself captured by the shape of his lips on the words he spoke, not the words themselves, and shook myself from a wave of feelings that were difficult to avoid.
“Wrong place, wrong time,” I reminded him. “I doubt Turner would appreciate such a display here, under these circumstances.”
That sobered him immediately. “Or the Jensens,” he agreed, and put the bottle aside to rest his elbows on his knees, leaning toward me. “Cass, for serious now. Is Ibby all right? I need to know. I need you to tell me exactly what happened out there.”
He did, and I hated to tell him, but I sensed the ache in him. He already hurt, infected by his fear and imagination.
“She looked fine,” I told him then, looking down at my hands, one bronze, one flesh. The fingers twined together almost naturally. “I saw no signs of mistreatment or hunger.”
“But.”
I pulled in a deep breath. “But she sounded—not herself. She spoke of her mother, but as if Angela was alive. As if she is doing what she is doing to protect her.” A darker thought occurred to me. “Or . . . as if she believes Pearl is her mother.” That was chillingly likely.
Luis made a sound deep in his throat, and I saw his head tip forward, hiding his face. He said nothing audible.
“I think—” I hesitated, then plunged ahead. “I do think Pearl is using Angela’s image. To make Ibby believe that her mother wishes her to train, to hunt, to kill. To make her do it despite the child’s natural gentleness.”
Luis raised his face then, and his expression was blank, except for the darkness in his eyes. “That bitch is using a dead woman?” His voice was not his own; it was a low growl, angrier than I’d ever heard it. “Using Angie to get at her own kid?”
“I think so,” I said. “I think Isabel wants to please her mother, and she wants her mother back, badly. Pearl would have used that against her. It would have been . . . very easy for her.”
Luis snarled, and his hands clenched into bone- hard fists. Had I been facing him as an enemy, I would have found an immediate and pressing reason to surrender.
I put my right hand on his clenched fist, making the touch as gentle as I could. “No,” I said. “Listen to me. If you fight her directly, Ibby will fight forher. She’ll have to, to defend her mother. Do you understand? We must go at this another way. A better way.”
He shook his head blindly, dark hair whipping, and then buried his face in his hands for a moment. When he finally sat up again and took a deep breath, he had his anger controlled. It was a banked, smoldering fire, but it was under a tight leash. “All right,” he said. “You tell me, how the hell do I let that go on? How do I notknock that bitch’s head off and take Ibby back? Because I’m not really clear on the concept right now.”
“Neither am I,” I confessed. “But if we face her directly, Ibby will suffer, and we won’t accomplish our goal. So please, don’t let Pearl use the child to goad you into fighting the battle on her own terms.”
He stared at me for a second, then said, “You’re talking about tactics now?”
“I’m talking about choices.”
“Like the choice you made to chop your own hand off?” He sounded angry, but it wasn’t really directed at me. He was simply . . . angry. And unable to point it at the person responsible.
“Exactly like that,” I said. “Pearl thought she had given me an either/or choice. Die from the poison coming through the link, or accept Rashid’s offer. I chose instead to change the game.”
Luis blinked. “You think Rashid is in on it with her.”
“I think Rashid is a wild Djinn, not a tamed one. I think if he believes that he can gain an advantage, he will have few human scruples about taking the action. He wanted the list. He’ll continue to try to find a way to take it, because it represents great power, and the Djinn can never resist that.” I felt my lips stretch, unordered, into a smile. “As to cutting off my hand—if I had seen a fourth option, I would have taken it. Believe me.”
“So we can’t trust Rashid?”
I remembered what the Oracle had said to me. “There is no such thing as unlimited trust,” I said. “We can trust him until we can’t. Like anyone else.”
Luis jerked his chin toward Turner, sitting with the Jensens. “Like him?”
“Anyone,” I said. “Even you. Even me. Because if this goes to the endgame, Luis, you won’t be able to trust me, either. Or I, you.”
He shook his head, as if he couldn’t accept that, but I knew he could. He was a pragmatic man, deep down. He knew human nature.
The rest of the trip was spent in pensive silence.
We landed in California in the early- morning hush, although it seemed the human race never stilled itself for long. Lights glimmered; cars moved along roads. Businesses still served, here and there. We grabbed our bags and followed Agent Turner off the airplane, along with the Jensens, to find two black FBI sedans waiting for us. One of the black-suited drivers checked our credentials and loaded the Jensens into the first car, and Agent Turner and the two of us into the second. The FBI car smelled—surprisingly—new, with little olfactory contamination like most other vehicles I’d been inside. I felt less claustrophobic than I usually did. I almost enjoyed the ride.
Almost.
The FBI caravan wound through the sleeping city, and