Rachel Caine - Unknown

And it would destroy a mere mortal to attempt the access. I knew of only one who’d accomplished it—Joanne Baldwin, David’s sometimes human, always presumptuous lover. But she’d been a Djinn at the time, so that hardly counted.

I held Rashid’s gaze without blinking. “If I can’t go to her,” I said, “then you must. I need the list. Tell her.”

“No,” he said. “Ask her yourself. If you can.” He bared his teeth. “Or ask the Oracle. She can give you access. Of course, the Oracle’s not as tolerant as she once was. She’s become . . . more powerful. Less accessible.”

That didn’t bode well for my chances, but my chances of getting to this Whitney were even smaller, considering her location and my human-form disability.

I looked at Luis and said, “I will go to Sedona to see the Oracle.”

“Wrong,” Agent Turner snapped. “You’re going nowhere except where I take you. I told you, I need your help!”

“You need help,” Luis agreed. “Tell you what, I’ll go with you. Let her do this. She gets her hands on that list of potential targets and we can start preventing this crap before we’re chasing after missing kids in trouble, maybe suffering or dying. Yeah?”

Turner didn’t like it, I could see that from the stony look on his face. Still, he knew that Luis was right; if there was a way to prevent more missing children, more dead children, he would have to risk it.

“Fine,” he said. “So how does this work? You just blip out, or . . . ?”

“Like this?” Rashid gave him a vicious smile and disappeared so suddenly that Turner involuntarily veered the car to the right, staring. Air made a small thunderclap of sound rushing in to fill the space he had occupied.

Turner looked at me in the rearview mirror.

“No,” I said wearily, and settled back in the seat to close my eyes. “Not like that. Not anymore.”

More was the pity.

In Albuquerque, Agent Turner let me off at my apartment, where I had left my motorcycle parked beneath a shaded awning. He was impatient to be gone, but Luis got out with me, walked me around a corner of the building, and turned to me. It was a cool evening, clear and dry, with the smell of sage and pine flavoring the air. The barely seen smudges of the mountain peaks rose up to the north, lifting part of the city out of its bowl. Overhead, stars sparkled cold in a vast, otherwise empty sky.

Beautiful and only lightly tamed, this place—like the man facing me, hair stirring just a bit in the breeze. Artificial lights glinted on his skin, shadows darkened his eyes, and he said, “You be careful. Remember what happened last time.”

Last time, Pearl had sent her forces after me on the way back from Sedona. She’d broken my leg. She’d almost killed me—and would have succeeded, if Luis hadn’t come to my rescue. As I thought about it, my still-healing arm twinged. The bones were fixed together, bonded and straight, but nerves were still repairing themselves.

I nodded without speaking. I was no longer sure how to speak to him; something had changed between us, something fundamental had shifted beneath our feet. I wasn’t sure if I had forced that change, or he had, or if it would have happened no matter what we did.

All I knew was that it felt . . . different. And it hurt to leave him.

Luis lifted his hand and touched the side of my face. The skin of his palm felt warm against my skin, and I closed my eyes in an involuntary spasm of delight. I sensed the power coursing in his veins, natural as the blood that ran with it.

“Take what you need,” he said. “I’m not sending you out there unprepared and underpowered.”

He didn’t know what he was asking. Not really. I pulled in a quick breath and opened my eyes again, meeting his.

“I could hurt you, doing this too quickly,” I said. “I don’t wish to do that.”

Luis laughed, but it was soft and humorless. He shook his head. “You aren’t going to hurt me any worse than anybody else has,” he said. “I didn’t grow up soft, chica. I took bullets before, you know. Knives. Took a hell of a beating when I was jumped into the gang. So just do it already, we’re burning starlight.”

Drawing power was usually a slower process, and I had almost always been careful to draw at levels that didn’t risk his comfort, much less his life. But Turner was waiting, and the clock on a child’s life was ticking, and we had no time for the niceties even if the FBI agent was inclined to allow us our leisure.

I slowly put my hand over Luis’s where it rested on my cheek, feeling the pulse under my fingers race faster.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I will try not to hurt you.”

And then I let loose the hunger inside of me. It was not so much a matter of taking from him, as allowing the barriers to drop; the void in me, the cold, hungry vacuum where once the life force of a Djinn had been, sucked power from him in a ravenous stream. Too much, too much . . . it felt astonishingly good to me, like being bathed in light, but I also felt the sudden stabbing pain of overloaded nerves. My pain, but also his.

Luis trembled, but he didn’t try to pull himself away from me. His eyes continued to focus on mine, dark and drowning, and I forgot how to breathe as he poured life from his body to mine. There was an intimacy to it that went beyond mere bodies, went into realms of spirit, of pure and perfect life.

It was so hard to pull away.

I finally sucked in a shaking gasp and slammed shut the barriers between us again. I hadn’t felt so powerful, so alive in a very long time, and it was so very hard to give that up. Even so, this rich, intense intoxication was only a fraction of what I’d been as a Djinn. I could drain a dozen like Luis, a hundred, without coming near that lost perfection.

That was exactly what Ashan had meant to do to me, in throwing me into human flesh. He didn’t need to torment me. He knew that every time I came up against the natural barriers, I would torture myself, thoroughly, with my hunger and possibilities.

It troubled me less than he’d planned, however. I could be tempted, but I was also, by nature, a practical sort of predator; draining a hundred Wardens would kill them all in the process, and even then, I would never again be what I had once been. It was easy to forget when I was fighting for survival, subsisting on barely enough energy to live; it was worse still when I had a taste of the power.

Luis was shaking, but he kept his hand on my face until I tightened my pale, thin fingers around his and pulled them away. His pulse was thundering now, and his face had gone starkly pale under its copper. He was not precisely gasping, but his breathing was more ragged, and more rapid, than I would have liked. I reached out to lay my hand flat against his chest, feeling the too-quick laboring of his heart.

“I’m okay,” he said before I could speak. He smiled, but I saw the pain underneath it. “Is that better for you now?”

I nodded, unwilling or perhaps unable to speak. My eyes were glowing, I knew it; I’d rarely been able to afford that sort of display, but it was raw nature, and I had no doubt that I looked . . . different just now, as I struggled to manage the power he had given me in such an intensive burst. I could see the change in his expression. I just could not decide what precisely it was that had created such an indescribable tension in his face . . . fear? Or desire? Something of both, perhaps.

He surprised me by saying, in a low, rough voice, “If we didn’t have someplace to be right now, I would take you inside and get down to business.”

I blinked. “I don’t understand.”

He took in a deep breath, then let it out, and finally, I recognized the waves of emotion coming off of him, resonating within me. They were just . . . unexpected.