Her face shut down, and I knew I’d made a mistake leading her down a memory path that would inevitably bring up images of Pearl, and her time shut up at the Ranch.
Time, events, that she still hadn’t fully revealed to either of us.
She turned her head and buried her face in the soft material of Luis’s shirt, like a younger, shyer child. “I don’t want to go to any school,” she said. It was almost a wail. “Tío, don’t make me go!”
He kissed her hair again and hugged her tight. “No, sweetie, I won’t,” he said. He sounded miserable, and whether Ibby knew it or not, I could sense that he was lying. “I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.”
My body felt a sudden bite of chill, even though I rarely felt shifts in temperature unless they were extreme and sudden. I cocked my head and studied him. He mouthed, Not now, very clearly, and I inclined my head just a fraction.
For Ibby’s sake, I would let his lie go unchallenged.
For now.
The day passed without much incident—or at least, much beyond the normal chaos of having a restless child-Warden roaming a household. Luis and I were required to be on call for the Wardens at all times, but remarkably, this was a day without an emergency, other than a few small aetheric maintenance requests to relieve seismic pressure in one area and build it in another to maintain the balance.
It seemed almost artificially calm, and it worried me.
Luis didn’t discuss the order from Marion Bearheart until Ibby went to take a bath that evening—a thing that I supervised, albeit from the hallway, as Isabel’s body image was starting to form and she was going through a period of shyness. As she splashed in the tub and soaped her hair, I looked down the hall toward the kitchen, where Luis retrieved a bottle of beer, opened it, and then turned to face me. I glanced at the bathroom. Ibby was singing something in Spanish, and making fanciful shapes in her shampoo-inflated hair.
“You lied to her,” I said quietly, still watching her. She wasn’t paying us any attention. “What did Marion tell you on the phone?”
Luis took a deep drink of beer before he said, “Marion said I could bring her, or they’d come and get her, but either way, it was going down. I was tempted to tell her to bring it, but I was afraid she’d take it literally. Marion’s kind of like that. She’s not giving us any choice.”
“And will you fight them when they come for her?” I asked. “Because you know Ibby will resist. She’s too afraid to surrender again.”
“I know she will. And the truth is, I haven’t decided yet.” He sounded very troubled, and very serious. “I can’t let her get dragged off again, not on my watch. Not gonna happen. But if Ibby and I put up a fight, people will die on their side, and maybe on ours. And innocent people for miles around, probably.”
“Not only that,” I said, equally softly. “If Ibby fights with lethal force, it only proves their point that she can’t be left on her own among other children. It will destroy any chance she has for a free future. And she will kill, if she thinks you are in mortal danger. She saw you die before, even if it was a false vision. She won’t allow it to happen again without acting.”
He closed his eyes and pressed the cold bottle to his forehead. “Jesus, what a mess. I should have asked—what are you gonna do?”
“Like you, I have not decided,” I said. “But I don’t care for the idea that anyone should try to take her by force, even if they believe it’s in her best interests. I don’t like that all.”
“Well, we’ve got that in common.”
“Neither do I want to see her, or you, die,” I continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Or myself. I find I rather value myself.”
He laughed. “No kidding.”
“I am an important asset to the Wardens,” I said, possibly too earnestly and too literally. “Should I not admit I am valuable? Is that wrong?”
“No, it’s not wrong, Cass,” he said, and put the beer down. He walked to me and put his hands on my upper arms. His right was cold, his left warm, but the temperature quickly equalized; I forgot the sensation as I looked into his eyes and saw the regard and strength there. “You maybe stretch the reasonable limits of self-confidence sometimes, but it’s not wrong. You are valuable.” His hands glided up my arms, and his voice softened and deepened. “God knows, I can’t put a price on what I feel for you. You know that, right? You feel that?”
I put my hands flat on his chest, but not to push him away; I savored the feeling of his lungs moving, his heart pumping. Life, in all its odd, complex glory.
Luis, too, was irreplaceable. As was Isabel. As had been Manny and Angela.
And in that moment, I knew the decision had already been made for me—that I couldn’t possibly allow Luis and Isabel to fight without me, whether the cause was good or bad. And yet I knew that fighting might bring terrible consequences.
There might come a time when we would all have to surrender.
Luis might have known it, too, but he wisely didn’t pursue the subject. He kissed me instead, a sweet, warm lingering of lips and tongues, and I felt tension gathering inside, golden-hot, when I heard Isabel say, “Tía Cassie?”
Unthinkable as it might have been, I’d forgotten her completely. I broke free of Luis’s embrace and turned, to find that she’d emptied the bathwater, wrapped herself in a towel, and was standing there on the tile floor, dripping. Her eyes were huge, and full of curiosity.
“Are you in love with my uncle Luis?” she asked.
I looked at Luis, who stared back, on the verge of laughing. He spread his hands helplessly. “Hey, she didn’t ask me,” he said. “Good luck.”
In this, at least, I was determined to be truthful. I sank down to one knee in front of Isabel, which put us almost on eye level, and said, “Yes. I love your uncle very much. Is that all right?”
She cocked her head a little to one side, thinking; clearly, she hadn’t expected such a direct response. From the choked sound Luis was making, neither had he. “I suppose,” she said, a little severely. “But don’t make him sad. I won’t like it if you make him sad.”
She continued to watch me with a serious expression, until I nodded with equal gravity. What Luis might not have picked up from her words was the underlying threat. She still doubted me, at some very deep level; my once-Djinn-sister Pearl had gone to great lengths to try to create me as the villain in Ibby’s life, to paint me as a monster and a cruel murderer, to twist the child in the direction that Pearl wished her to go, for whatever obscure and dangerous reason. It would take time for Ibby to get over that completely, even if on a rational level she was trying to believe in me again.
I didn’t yet know what Pearl was trying to achieve by abducting and altering these children, but I knew one thing: They were powerful, and dangerous when angered.
The subtext of what Ibby had said was quite clear: If you hurt him, I’ll hurt you back. And she meant every unsaid word of it. She might not want to hurt bad people, but she would, for Luis, make a definite exception to her rule ... even if the bad person was me.
I nodded, holding her gaze. There was no doubt between us what she meant, or what I had agreed. Ibby, satisfied, grabbed her pale pink nightgown, the one with bright cartoon characters woven in the fabric, and shut the door to change.
Luis had watched the entire exchange, and now, as I glanced toward him, I saw that he hadn’t missed any of the subtexts, either. “Dios,” he breathed. “She really would take you on if she had to, wouldn’t she?”
I nodded. “For you, she’d take on anyone. You’re all she has, Luis.”
“No,” he said. “She has you, too. Even if she doesn’t really know that yet.”
I wanted to believe that, but I had choices to make—small ones now, and larger ones looming like storms in the distance. The wrong decision at any time would have catastrophic consequences, not just for me but for everyone I had come to love in the human world. I had, in a very real sense, been sent here by the Djinn to halt a disastrous, still-unknowable chain of events that Pearl had put in motion, by breaking a weak link in the chain itself.