It explained much, including why the government had initially wanted Luis to bring Ibby, and me, to an area they controlled ... Area 51. They wanted me, and they weren’t inclined to change their minds.
I signaled the waitress for another cup of coffee and, after due consideration, for another piece of pie. Watching him eat was making my taste buds crave another. “And you? They’ll know you spoke to me.”
“Yeah, they’ll know,” he said. “Fact is, though, they don’t know what we talked about, and technically I don’t know enough to have warned you off anyway. My story is that I tried to persuade you to come in, but you didn’t want anything to do with it. You told me you were heading for Mexico.”
I raised my eyebrows. “And where amI going?”
“Anywhere but Mexico. Look, I don’t care. I don’t want to know.” Turner was concentrating very carefully on his pie, and no longer meeting my eyes at all. “I’ve seen the stakes. You need to get where you’re going and put an end to this. I don’t care if you do it by our rules or not. I’ve seen what Pearl has done to these kids. So have you.” He suddenly looked around, frowning. “Where’s your shadow?”
“Who?”
“You know who I mean. Big, tall guy, badass tattoos ...?”
“Luis has other commitments,” I said coolly. “He’s not involved at present.”
“Huh.” Turner chewed his pie thoughtfully. “I’d have placed a bet that I’d never seen the two of you apart.”
“You’d lose,” I said.
“I wouldn’t be the only one.”
My pie and extra cup of coffee were delivered, and I slid the waitress a larger bill than necessary to pay for us both. “Margaret,” I said. She looked up, startled, and I focused on her tired, faded green eyes. “Margaret, we were never here. You don’t remember serving us at all.” The money was for my FBI friend’s benefit. The pulse of power—illegal to use in this way, for a Warden—was the real weapon I was wielding. In her mind, our faces blurred and became indistinct. “Keep the change.”
She smiled vaguely and wandered on. I ate my pie quickly, savoring every bite, and drained the coffee in one long gulp. “The sun’s up,” I said. “You should go before you’re late to work.”
He looked at his watch. “I’ve still got plenty of—”
“Ben.” Now I had his eyes, too. “No, you don’t. You need to go, now. I’m sure you have paperwork to com plete. Just forget you saw me today.”
I had him now, too, caught in the hold of my gaze, and my borrowed powers. The pupils of his eyes widened, and I sensed that he was thinking now about getting to work, and wondering vaguely why he’d come all the way out here to eat pie, of all things, for breakfast.
Before he could focus again, I slipped out of the booth and walked quickly away, out into the hot spill of the morning sun. In ten seconds, I was on the bike and riding away.
I’d lost another ally. More critically, perhaps, I had gained an adversary of definite ability ... the entire system of human law enforcement, which could be easily brought to bear upon me because of its vast size and scope. I was no Djinn, to slip quietly away. I was flesh and blood—powerful, but fragile. I could be hurt, imprisoned, or killed.
So be it. I would risk all that, and more, in order to ensure that Pearl was stopped from hurting another child as she’d hurt Isabel.
That was my only mission now.
My first stop was at an Albuquerque map store that sold detailed laminated illustrations of every area of the United States. I bought sets detailing roads, another with painstaking topographical detail, and colored markers. Then I stored it all in a plastic tube that I slung across my back, and rode my motorcycle to the interstate. It didn’t much matter which direction I chose, so long as it was out of Albuquerque and heading toward a major city, so I picked the widest, straightest roads possible, and opened up the throttle. The buffeting of the wind numbed my skin and froze my hair into unruly spikes, and hours passed before I spotted a quiet, out-of-the-way motel that seemed clean. It had only two other vehicles in the parking lot—one, a battered pickup, almost certainly belonged to a staff member. The other was a dusty dark red sedan with out-of-state license tags and children’s toys in the back window.
I paid for a room. It was all I wanted—simple, well maintained, without any of the luxuries so many travelers seemed to expect. I bought a bottle of water from a machine, sat down at the old, narrow table with my maps, and put down everything I knew.
Then I rose up into the aetheric and zeroed in on the closest of Pearl’s compounds. That one, the Colorado facility, was long gone, dead and closed down, with nothing left to even mark it in the physical world. It wasn’t so easy to erase the stains in the aetheric, though. A darkness still hovered there, and I directed my insubstantial body to step inside that quivering cloud.
It felt like heat, and rot, and hate, and even the ghost of it made me feel drained and exhausted—but I had what I needed, as quick as the encounter had been. I had the taste of Pearl’s madness.
Now all I had to do was verify the information Rashid had given me ... information that could be a lie, a trap, a useless waste of time, or—and this I believed—a golden opportunity to finish Pearl once and for all.
Tracking on the aetheric is simple for Djinn since it’s their primary home, the environment in which they feel most alive, most comfortable. For humans, it is a closed door. For Wardens, there is access, but it is limited, and even the most gifted find it extraordinarily difficult to read the subtleties of that world; human senses, enhanced though they might be, are not meant to take in what is natural for Djinn.
But I had an advantage—I was a blind woman remembering sight. I could interpret what I could see in ways that most of the Wardens never could.
Distance was no barrier on the aetheric; my self-projection could travel easily enough without regard to the laws that governed the natural world. My next stop was California, where Pearl had established her second known camp. Like Colorado, this place had been closed and abandoned, but the traces were stronger. I didn’t dare venture too close. The shimmering blackness above it warned me that it would burn. I recalled the fate of my friend Gallan all too well—he’d been the first Djinn to come in too close to Pearl’s orbit, and he’d been destroyed. Utterly destroyed—unwound from the world, erased from existence. There were ways to kill Djinn, but in my opinion that was the worst.
The California facility still had a faint black shadow stretching out into the aetheric, fading to a thread-thin line. I followed it, careful to stay out of accidental touching range. Around me, lights flared and rolled in confusing shapes, coming and going in a brilliant neon flood. I was in an area rich with human history, from the ancient tribes who had first inhabited it to the flood of immigrants searching for land and gold to the modern-day prospectors panning for fame and fortune in an inhospitable land. Djinn were more difficult to spot than Wardens—Wardens flared with brilliant sparks, but Djinn were subtler, more inclined to fade into their natural environment.