It was good that he was. In another second, as he pulled me at a run away from the spot where the ambulance had been, a white- hot comet of fire hurtled out of the darkness, growing in size as it went, and detonated on the empty grass where the ambulance had been. It would have been utterly wrecked, and us with it. As it was, I felt the pressure wave and heat on my back, and smelled a faint scorch as the ends of my hair blackened. I stumbled against Rashid, who held me upright and pulled me onward, in a crashing run through underbrush, whipped by branches and slashed by thorns, pursued by something that I sensed coursing darkly through the trees like a bounding black pack of dogs. Our pursuers were silent. I tried to turn to face them, but Rashid wouldn’t allow it. Wouldn’t let me so much as slow to look.
“Let go!” I hissed at him. He sent me a burning look out of lambent eyes and ignored me. When I stumbled and almost fell, my feet twisted in tangled roots, he hissed, grabbed me, and threw me over one shoulder with his hand gripping the backs of my thighs. It was a ridiculous, helpless posture, but I dared not struggle. He was moving too fast, and with too much purpose. I tried lifting my head to see what was behind us, but between the veil of my blowing hair and the darkness, I could make out nothing.
And then, quite suddenly, Rashid’s body tensed, exactly as a human’s would have for a great effort, and I felt a tremendous force flow from him to hammer against the ground as he leapt. We rose into the air in a parabolic arc, and below . . . below . . .
Below was a chasm, a deep one, full of sharp rocks and killing drops. Too wide for a human to attempt to jump, no matter how foolhardy. Had I been running on my own, I would have stopped.
Looking down, I saw our pursuers burst out of the scrub into the small clearance between the brush and the cliff. Black as the shadows, vaguely dog-shaped, but with the physiques of bears and the speed of panthers. Nothing natural. Chimeras, forced together by the twisted but powerful skills of an Earth Warden of exceptional talent and madness. Two of them, moving faster than the others, toppled over the edge of the cliff and fell in a shower of stones and dirt to the rocks below—a drama that I watched as the arc of our jump began to decline again, and the far side rushed up at us with frightening speed.
Rashid landed, legs tensed, and barely paused before breaking into a run, again.
He only got a few steps before he stopped and bent to lower me back to the ground. I backed a step away from him, caught between a furious snarl and gratitude, and realized why he’d put me down.
“Well?” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “I’m yours to command, mortal. Temporarily.”
From all around us came the metallic clinks of weapons being made ready.
Chapter 9
LIGHTS BLAZED ON,brilliant as morning, illuminating us from two sides, and I saw human shapes stepping out of the trees—dressed in dark trousers, with bulky black vests and dark blue all-weather jackets. Most were armed with assault rifles. Those who weren’t were armed with handguns.
All weapons were pointed at the two of us. This didn’t pose much of a challenge for Rashid, but for me . . .
Agent Ben Turner stepped out of the shadows. His gun was in his holster. He looked exhausted, hollow-eyed, and angry.“You,” he said. “Down on the ground, hands behind your heads. Both of you. Do it now!” He speared Rashid with a glare. “I know you probably aren’t worried about us, but if you don’t comply, she gets shot. Understand?”
Rashid nodded, and without a flicker of his oddly amused smile, lowered himself with Djinn grace to his knees and laced his fingers behind his head.
Then he looked up at me, eyebrows raised.
“Unless you’d prefer to try martyrdom,” he said. “Entirely your choice, of course.”
I dropped to my knees, turning my glare instead to Agent Turner.
Who had tried to kill me.
I slowly laced my fingers together behind my head—one set flesh, one set metal—and watched as he nodded to his FBI team of agents, who swarmed forward to shove both Rashid and me forward and snap cold steel around our wrists before hauling us both to our feet again.
There was something odd about the handcuffs, and I tested them with a frown.
As I reached for power, a sharp, painful shock went out from the cuffs. “New thing,” Agent Turner told me, reading the surprise in my face with eerie accuracy. “We’ve been developing a few tricks the last few years. Some of us weren’t convinced the Wardens were a great thing for this country, what with all the egos and the corruption and unpredictability. We developed some countermeasures. That’s one. You try to use your powers, and you get shocked. The bigger the draw, the bigger the shock in reaction. So don’t try it. Trust me.”
“We,” I repeated. “So your loyalty is not with the Wardens.”
He shrugged. “Double agent,” he said. “I’m spying on the FBI for the Wardens. On the Wardens for the FBI. But only one of those is for real, and that’s the FBI side. As far as I’m concerned, if every Warden on Earth disappeared tomorrow, we’d be a hell of a lot better off. Speaking of that—” He reached out, flipped back the leather of my jacket, and found the scroll.
No!
I tried to fight him, but bound as I was, there was nothing I could do. I subsided, panting, as he pulled the case from my pocket. He smiled, and searched for the catch to open it.
There wasn’t one. It had sealed itself into a perfect hard shell, like hardened ivory. After a moment of fruitless poking at the thing, Turner put it in an inside pocket of his own jacket. “Something for the techs,” he said. “They’ll figure out how to crack into it. Once we have the list, we can start to manage this effectively.”
“To stop the abductions?”
“For a start,” he said. “More than that, we can start managing the Wardens, instead of letting them have an unlimited supply of governmental support and cash.”
His problems with the Wardens were, frankly, not my concern. Let Lewis Orwell and Joanne Baldwin deal with the political aspects of their organization; my concerns were much more basic. More personal. “You sent the man after me.”
“Him? Oh, Glenn, the guy with the car? Yeah. He was only supposed to tail you, and grab the scroll if he could. I assume, since you still have it, that it didn’t work out. Did you kill him?”
“Would you care if I had?”
Turner smiled thinly. “Oddly enough? Yes. I’d like to keep the funeral costs down on this operation if I can. And he was acting on my orders. That means I’m ethically responsible for him.”
I shrugged, which wasn’t particularly easy with my hands bound so closely behind me. “He shouldn’t have tried to threaten me with a knife. Or underestimated me. And your ethics are hardly what I would consider to be spotless.” I hardened my gaze and focused in on his face. “Where is Luis?”
“Not here,” Turner said. “So don’t go nuclear on me. It wasn’t my idea to take him anyway.” I didn’t blink. “He’s safe.”
“No,” I said. “He’s not.” I had not heard from him since Rashid and I had been taken prisoner, and although the connection remained, like a hiss of static between us, I thought Luis was unconscious. “He was being hurt.”
Turner frowned and said, “No, that’s impossible. I know—” He stopped himself, but it was too late; he’d already admitted to me that he knew far too much. I felt a primal growl building in the back of my throat, and I knew that my eyes were growing brighter, creating their own light stronger even than the brilliant halogen spotlights being directed on me. “He’s safe. That’s all you need to know. The Wardens aren’t in charge of this anymore. This is a government matter, and we’re taking control.”