Rashid bared his teeth. “No,” he said. “Not by my own consent.” Tricked, then. Ambushed and overcome. There was a fire in the violet eyes now, eerie and full of impotent anger. “I can’t help you, Cassiel.”
“I know.” Djinn who were bound were impossibly constrained, if their masters knew how to properly set the boundaries—as this one did, apparently. “When you go back to the school, warn Luis if you can. I’ve left him a message, but I trust no one else there. Just tell him there’s a traitor. Can you do that?”
“I can.” He shrugged. “It still won’t do you any good.”
“Just do it. Thank you.”
“You’re not going back to them? Even knowing this?”
I shook my head. “The reasons I left are even more important now. Luis will find the traitor. I have to go on.”
“And if he can’t?” Rashid asked. “If I’m ordered to kill those children, I won’t have a choice. I don’t wish to do that.”
“I know,” I said. “But I know Luis. He won’t hesitate to protect Isabel, at any cost. If you can find any way to delay, to exploit any weakness in your master, take it. If you give Luis an opening, he will free you. I know he will.”
Rashid bowed his head. “As you say.” He didn’t seem convinced.
“Are you going to keep our agreement? Are you going to save the children who were abducted?”
He flashed me a sudden, blinding smile. “I will,” he said. “Be safe, Cassiel. Watch for others. Your friends may not be your friends.”
As he’d been the closest thing I still had to a living friend among the Djinn, I didn’t think the warning was necessary, but I nodded in turn. The shadows swirled around him, arabesque patterns of black against his skin like living tattoos, and then he was swallowed up.
Gone.
I had no doubt he would fulfill his promise to me. That meant children saved.
All in all, a morning on which I’d won.
It still felt like a hollow sort of victory, since Rashid, despite all his evidence of freedom, was held captive, and a potentially deadly weapon against those I loved.
But I couldn’t turn back. I couldn’t.
I drove through the day, and well into the night beyond the snow line, until I was too tired to continue. I slept curled on a bed of leaves and pine needles, warded against the cold by layers of more forest litter. It was not a comfortable rest, but it did the job. I woke with the earliest songbirds, did my toilet duties (a thing that had ceased, finally, to horrify me), and washed my face and hands in a cold stream that left me tingling and shivering. I drank as much as I could hold, then got back on the motorcycle for another long day’s ride.
At noon I spotted a roadblock on the freeway ahead, and slowed to assess the situation. It seemed simple enough—an overturned semi truck, with its contents spilled over half the lanes of traffic. Unfortunately, its cargo had been living—cattle, probably destined for an unpleasant end in the slaughterhouse. Some had seen an earlier demise than planned due to the violence of the crash; others wandered aimlessly, confused and frightened. Some were wounded, and limped or lay crying out in pain.
Simple enough for me to edge around the mess and keep going, but there was something in it that stopped me. Wounded men roused little in the way of pity from me, unless they were innocent bystanders in a conflict; humans had a violent, bloody past, and a violent, bloody present to match it. Cows, on the other hand, seemed destined from birth to a hard life and a bad end through no fault of their own.
I liked cows.
I parked the bike and walked past two or three stopped trucks to reach the wreck. Some people were trying to help round up the strays. I wasn’t as concerned about them as I was the ones lying wounded in the road, struggling to breathe. I knelt next to one massive female with a broken right leg, and straightened and set it. That took a little more power than it would have on another animal; with so much stress on the bone, any flaw would cause the mended area to snap again, possibly in a worse configuration. The cow, sensing that the pain was gone, tried to get up, but I held her down until I was sure the repair would hold. Then she struggled up to her hooves, blinked at me with warm, simple eyes, and put her nose against my chest in a gesture that might have been affection. I patted her head with awkward good humor. “I didn’t save you,” I told her. “I only stopped the pain.” For a cow, there were no roads that didn’t end on someone’s dinner table; this one had been a dairy cow once, but her days of prime milk production were over, and a farmer had no doubt rid himself of the burden of buying her hay.
Her trusting mind held memories of a child feeding her treats, of the sun’s blaze on her skin, of the soft, sweet taste of grass and clean water, with the sharpness of dandelions cutting through. Of pain from calving, of pleasure from the rain falling down over her, of caring for her offspring and seeing them taken away either by time, or elements, or humans.
She’d had a good life, by cow standards.
I patted her head again. “Run,” I whispered to her. “Run now.”
She looked at me, as startled as it was possible for a cow to be, because I put an image in her mind of danger—of wolves circling for the hunt. She edged backward nervously, then wheeled with surprising grace and trotted away, moving faster and faster until she was headed for the truck driver, who waved his arms to scare her back into the makeshift corral.
She kept running. He threw himself out of the way, and she achieved the grassy edge of the road and plunged into the trees beyond.
I went on to the next injured cow.
Run.
It was the only freedom they could know. And maybe it substituted, a little, for the damage that I’d done in the world ... and gave a little release to my own feelings of being trapped by my own existence.
Run.
I wished, for a moment, that I could follow my own advice. I wanted to run. The question I hadn’t settled yet in my own mind was whether I would be running toward Pearl ... or back to Luis. I knew what the logical thing, the necessarything, was, but that image of Rashid kept haunting me.
There was a Djinn at the school, under the control of another with unknown motives. And Rashid was right ... Anything could happen. A creature of Rashid’s might wouldn’t be easily countered, or controlled, even by Marion. If she wasn’t aware of the problem ...
No. It wasn’t my problem. I’d delivered the information to Luis’s cell phone, and Rashid had promised to tell him as well. I’d already done as much as I could do.
I was ready to leave the accident scene and continue when I heard a shriek of horror and anguish cut through—not animal grief or injury, but human. A woman’s cry.
She staggered out of one of the wrecked cars, holding a bloodied child in her arms.
Isabel.
I realized in the next instant that it wasn’t my Ibby—it couldn’t have been—but the impact of the horror was visceral. By the time reality sank in, I was already moving, running for the woman. She sank to her knees, still holding the limp form of the girl in her arms. Ibby’s age, or very close; like Ibby, the child had dark, sleek hair, and what skin that wasn’t covered in blood was a similar coppery brown. She was wearing a blue Princess shirt, with butterflies and rainbows. It looked like something Ibby would have liked.
“Give her to me!” I demanded. The woman—young and very shocked—wasn’t responding. She had a broken leg and, I thought, a concussion. “Let me have her!”
The child didn’t have time for any hesitation; she was bleeding out very quickly from a slash across her femoral artery—the only injury she’d sustained, but a deadly one that had already gone on much too long. I grabbed her and laid her down on the pavement, focusing all my will and strength on her thin, failing body.