Rachel Caine - Unknown

“I do.” I didn’t move to produce it, however. Before I did that, I anchored myself quickly to Luis’s warm, steady presence, and rose into the aetheric, focusing on Turner.

It was not that I had a reason to distrust him. Quite the contrary. But something the Oracle had said stuck with me—that no trust could be absolute.

Overlying the vague outlines of his physical form lay his aetheric one, driven by subconscious desires and needs in his mind and soul. Some humans had radically different aetheric forms. Some were monstrous and twisted, the way some of the bikers had been who’d perished on the road.

Agent Turner’s spiritual self was merely . . . routine. He seemed much the same, though possibly taller and broader, more powerful in his spirit than in his body. Like most Wardens, he radiated waves of energy, though his were weak in comparison to the rich, lustrous radiance of Luis’s form.

I watched carefully. Sometimes, in the aetheric, one could detect lies, and deception, and fears. But I saw nothing.

Agent Turner simply seemed . . . tired.

I dropped down into my flesh again, stretched a little, and then nodded to Luis. I reached inside my heavy leather jacket and took the warm weight of the scroll case from the interior pocket.

“That’s it?” Turner leaned forward even more, chest almost pressed to his knees, trying to peer at the list in my hands. “That’s a list of all the kids with Warden powers?”

“Yes,” I said. “Worldwide. Constantly updated.” He held out his hand for it. “No. No one touches it but me.”

He frowned, and I thought for a moment he’d order me to hand it over—which would have been ineffective, at best—then shrugged and settled back in his chair. “Look up the kid we’re looking for right now, the latest disappearance,” he said. “Gloria Jensen.”

I opened the scroll and rolled it until I reached the middle of the alphabetical list. There were two Gloria Jensens. “California?” I asked. Turner shook his head. “New Jersey?”

His face took on a pinched look. “That all you’ve got?”

“Yes,” I said, and allowed the roll to slide closed. “Two of that name, one in California, one in New Jersey.”

“This one was taken from her home right here. New Mexico.”

Luis said, “Wait. Does the list show where they’re from , or where they are ?”

It was an excellent, startling question, the answer to which Imara had never made clear to me. “I don’t know.”

“Then what the hell good is it?” Turner snapped.

There was a way I could know for certain, but Imara had cautioned me—strongly—that it made me vulnerable. Still, I saw no real option, if this list was to be of any practical use to us at all. I took a deep breath, opened the list again, and brushed my fingertip over the name of the first Gloria Jensen.

She was in a school auditorium, wearing a cheerleading uniform, screaming as a basketball soared through the air toward a hoop; I saw it clearly, experienced an echo of her youthful excitement and joy. “It’s not this one,” I said. “Not New Jersey.”

I slid my finger down to the second name.

Darkness. Fear. Pain.

I gasped and wrenched my finger away, involuntarily raising it to my mouth as if I had burned it. My heart began to pound in startled reaction, and I felt a visceral impulse to throw down the scroll, to never feel that again.

“Cass?” Luis’s hands came down on my shoulders, strong and steadying. “You all right?”

I nodded, still breathing too fast, and unrolled the scroll again.

Darkness. Fear. Pain. Alone. The rumble of an engine, a constant bouncing vibration. The smells of rust and oil. “She’s in a car,” I said. “In the trunk. The car is in California. This is the one who was abducted.”

“Where?” Turner’s voice, sharp with urgency. “I need exact details, dammit!”

“I know,” I whispered, and mimed a pen, writing. Luis’s presence removed itself, returned a moment later. He pressed a pen into my right hand, while my left forefinger kept the connection to Gloria Jensen open. I scratched down the information that poured into my consciousness, without understanding where it was coming from, or how. The wildly out-of-control feeling of it made it seem as if I had grabbed hold of the tail of a tornado, something insanely beyond my power to control.

I wanted, desperately, to back away, but I forced myself to stay focused. Stay connected. The pen scratched, moving without my conscious direction, and then stopped. As the pen slipped from my fingers, my finger jerked away from the scroll. I couldn’t force myself to stay in contact with the child, not even for another moment.

“I can’t help her ,” I heard myself say, numbly. “I can only feel. Only feel.” My fingers felt scorched, but it was only an impression, the only way my nerves could interpret the kind of psychic pain that I had inflicted upon myself. Something inside of me was wailing in terror, still. Was this what the Oracle felt? Imara had said she felt them all . . . all their joy, their pain, their fear. This, times a billion. Times six billion.

I could not even stand to feel such things from one. The prospect of the job of an Oracle made me aware, for the first time, of the awesome scope and responsibility of such a thing. The strength of character it required.

Luis slid the piece of paper out from beneath my trembling hand and read it. Turner rose and looked over his shoulder. “La Jolla,” Luis said. “These are a list of cross streets, it gives us a direction.”

“Can you give me a type of car?” Turner asked, already reaching for his cell phone. I shook my head. “But it has a trunk. How big?”

“Small,” I said. The child had been cramped, struggling for breath. Hot and sweating, terrified. Injured. “She has a broken arm.”

“Christ,” Luis said. “Get Rashid. Maybe he can—”

“Can what?” Rashid was, without any warning, sitting behind us, crouched against the wall, skin gone from smoke to indigo in the artificial light. He looked wrong and very, very beautiful. There was a silvery shimmer under the surface of his skin, a glow that seemed to echo moonlight. “Help you? I might. What are you offering?”

Turner flinched, but to his credit, he didn’t back down. “That all depends. What do you want?”

Rashid’s lips parted in a genial sort of smile. “For rescuing a Warden child from her tormentor? Or for bringing you the tormentor in one piece and alive?”

“Both,” Turner and Luis said, at once. I said nothing, watching Rashid with wary intensity. The two men exchanged a look, and Turner continued. “Not worth much unless you do it fast. I’m going to have cops all over it in ten minutes.”

“But it is ten minutes of pain and fear that you might spare her,” Rashid said, with a kind of horrible satisfaction. “And so much can happen in ten minutes, yes? I have crippled a human in less than a second. Imagine what he might be able to do, with such a rich span of possibilities available to him. Especially were he warned you were . . . coming.”

Time slowed to an icy crawl, and I felt every slow beat of my heart as my focus narrowed in on him. On this Djinn who dared to say such things.

So you would have, once, I heard a whisper say, deep in my mind. So you might have done, at any rate. Their pain, their weeping, their losses meant nothing to you, all these thousands of years. And now, you know how it feels.

Yes. But I had been created a Djinn, and I had never come from human stock. Rashid had. Rashid should have known better. I couldn’t let that pass.

“If you do that,” I whispered, “if you even consider it, I will tear you apart. I swear it.”