Rachel Caine - Unknown

Luis and I exchanged a look which clearly said, This is not good news. “Why?” Luis asked.

“Not here. Just get out and come with me. Do it now.”

Around us, police were quietly drawing their weapons, although thus far, no one was pointing them in our direction. Luis noted it with lightning-fast shifts of his eyes, then focused back on Turner.

“Please,” Turner said. His face was a blank mask, but there was tension around his eyes and mouth, and weariness in the slump of his shoulders. “I need your help.”

As if that was a magic incantation, Luis nodded to me, and we both left the van to stand on the roadway, facing Turner. Dusk was falling, and so was the temperature, but the asphalt had trapped a great deal of heat during the day. It radiated up through my feet and legs uncomfortably.

Turner motioned to the police, who holstered their guns and got into their cruisers, although they didn’t leave their positions.

“I’ve got an abducted kid,” he said. “It fits the pattern you described. Little girl, age eight, got snatched from school. I checked. Her mother washed out of the Warden program.”

Luis traded a glance with me. We both remembered the boy we had rescued from captivity at the Ranch: C. T. Styles. His mother had left the Wardens as well. She had held a grudge. “You cleared the mom?” Luis asked.

“She’s got nothing to do with it. That lady’s practically in ruins. God only knows how she’s going to handle it if this turns out badly.” Which, from the tense, hard set of his expression, he clearly recognized was a risk. Even a probability.

“What about the father?” I asked.

“He seems okay, too. No connection back to the Wardens, and I’m not turning up anything questionable on him. I think they’re both okay.”

“Perhaps it isn’t related,” I said.

“Maybe it’s not. But it’s still a little girl, missing. I figured you’d want to step in.” Turner squared his shoulders and looked first at Luis, then at me. “I could really use your help. If this is connected, it’s our freshest lead. It’s the best possible place to start.”

“We’re already—”

“Let me rephrase,” Turner said, and this time I saw the flare of banked anger in his eyes. “You’re going to help me with this or I’m going to find all kinds of reasons to make you wish you had, starting with dressing funny and ending with suspicion of terrorism, which means you’ll end up so deep in a hole you’ll never see the sun again. So give the keys to your van to one of the officers; they’ll drive it back to your house for you. You’re coming with me.”

I thought uncomfortably of Rashid, certain to reappear at any time. Luis, I was sure, was thinking the same. He would find us regardless of where we might be, but Rashid had not struck me as someone willing to keep a low profile. He might, in fact, find it amusing to advertise his nature in public. If the police began shooting, we could be injured.

Rashid would probably find that very funny.

“Let me make it real easy for you,” Turner said. “You have two choices. One, get in my car and drive back to Albuquerque and help me find this girl. Or two, turn around for the cuffs, because I will charge you with something.”

“With what?”

“You’re kidding, right?” he asked. “There are all kinds of ways I can make your life hell, Mr. Rocha. You really don’t want to test me. I can be very creative.”

I was fairly sure he was serious.

Luis shrugged and tossed the van’s keys to a nearby patrolman in a starched khaki uniform, who plucked the jingling metal out of the air. “Insurance and registration is in the glove compartment,” he said. “In case you get stopped by even more cops. Oh, and I’ll expect it filled up. Washing it wouldn’t be out of the question, either.”

The officer did not seem amused.

Turner held open the sedan’s back door, and Luis and I slid inside. In less than a minute, we were speeding away toward Albuquerque.

It was home, and yet I had the conviction that we were also headed toward a lethal combination of grief and trouble.

Although it seemed trouble was a constant companion, these days.

Ben Turner was a very fast driver, disobeying the posted speed limits with the abandon of a law enforcement man on a mission.

I sat in the back, struggling to control the nausea that roiled within me. Turner’s car was not the most pleasant experience—either sensory or psychic—that I had ever encountered. He’d had blood spilled on the seats. Bodily fluids of all sorts. And death. The car reeked of death—perhaps not in a physical sense, but the impression of a bad and lingering agony was embedded into every part of the vehicle. Something terrible had happened here, before. Something that would never completely go away.

I was struggling with the urge to blow the door off its hinges and leap from the car. The only thing that stopped me was the absolute certainty that Luis would suffer for it if I did so.

And then I was distracted.

“Shit!” Turner yelped, and in the same instant hit the brakes. Tires screeched, and Luis and I both reflexively threw out our hands to brace ourselves as the sedan’s nose tipped down, fighting its own momentum.

Rashid had appeared in the middle of the road, perhaps five hundred yards away. Arms folded, a shark’s smile on his face, watching the car hurtle toward him at killing speed.

Turner, face gone white, fought desperately with the vehicle.

“Just hit him,” I said, through gritted teeth. “It serves him right.”

Turner paid no attention to my excellent advice. He managed to bring the car to a smoking, sliding halt no more than a foot from Rashid’s immobile body.

For a moment, no one moved. White, stinking smoke from the scorched tires blew into my window, and I coughed and choked. The cloud of smoke moved toward Rashid, but he simply waved it away, still smiling.

Ben Turner looked stunned, but in the next flash of a second, his face turned beet red and screwed up in righteously justifiable anger. He opened his car door and got out, yelling, “You idiot! You could have gotten us all killed—”

Rashid simply looked at him. To his credit, it didn’t take Turner long to realize his mistake, to take in the slightly-off color of the Djinn’s skin, the shine of his eyes. He turned to look through the windshield at Luis, then at me. Then back at Rashid. His lips compressed into a thin, angry line.

“Djinn. So I guess he’s with you two,” Turner said.

Rashid made a rude sound. “Not in any sense, I assure you.” On that, we were in complete agreement. He stalked around to the passenger door of the front seat, opened it, and got in. Leaving Turner standing outside, staring in at us.

We all stared back at him.

“Seriously,” Turner said. “He’s a Djinn.”

Rashid reached out and touched a finger to the ignition of the car. It fired to life without benefit of the key, dangling from Turner’s shaking fingers. “Yes,” he said. “Seriously.”

Turner blinked, as if the world had gone out of focus, and shook his head. He slipped back into the driver’s seat, looked at the key in his hand, then dropped it into the drink holder next to him. He put the car in drive and accelerated away, fast. I looked behind us and saw the heavy black streaks of skid marks disappearing behind us.

“Didn’t really think you’d show up again,” Luis said to Rashid.

I turned my head back. “I did.”

Rashid was watching me with a predator’s hot intensity. Waiting for weakness. Well, I had that in abundance, but I was not willing to demonstrate it on his command. “You found something,” I said. “Correct?”