Rachel Caine - Undone

“I don’t know.”

“Great. Just great. Do you have any idea how much trouble you could have been in? What if the kid had died on you? Hell, what if he died later ?”

“I didn’t cause his injury,” I said, affronted. We were standing in the living area of my apartment, and Manny had brought two cups of coffee—a morning ritual, he’d assured me. It was a kind gesture, but he’d done it before I had told him of the child and my actions.

The coffee sat forgotten on the table now.

“Maybe not, but you could have gotten tied up with all kinds of questions, and the police—” Manny pressed a hand to his forehead. “Damn. What am I saying? It might not have been smart, but I’d have done the same thing. I couldn’t have ignored it, either. But I have training. You don’t, Cassiel. You can’t just—jump in. Especially not without me, okay?”

I accepted that without argument. By human standards, it was true enough. “I should not have acted so quickly,” I agreed. “I need more power.”

I put it bluntly, to see both how it felt on the tongue and how he would react. The taste of it was fine. His reaction was instructive, in that his eyes widened, and I saw a spark of something that might have been excitement, quickly buried.

“All right,” he said, and his tone seemed deliberately casual. He held out his hand. I took it, and almost immediately, the beast inside of me, the hungry, desperate part, began to greedily devour what was offered. My sensible mind faded, pushed aside by need.

I felt Manny try to pull away. It sparked instincts in me—not Djinn instincts; the primitive impulses of a ruthless, successful predator.

The human impulse to hunt was complicating my needs.

No!

My distaste of those human instincts was all that saved him. I let go, wrenching the flow of power shut between us, and backed physically away, arms wrapped around my aching stomach.

Manny collapsed. It was slow, almost graceful, and he was never unconscious; he simply lacked the strength, or the will, to keep on his feet. Or his knees. He fell full length on the carpet and rolled onto his back, eyes dark and wide, gasping for breath.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I was. I was also well aware that I should not touch him again, not now. “Did I hurt you?”

“Not—exactly,” he said. He groaned and rolled painfully onto his side, then up to a sitting position. I could see the trembling in his muscles, as if he’d received a violent electric shock. “Let’s not do that again, okay? You’re kind of hard on your friends.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“You can say it again. It won’t offend me.” Manny rested his back against the bare wall, pulled up his knees, and rested his forearms on them. “Christ. We’ve got to work on that. You can’t take it out of me like that. If we’re in real trouble, you could kill us both, not to mention anybody we’re trying to help.” He rested his head against the wall and sighed. “And at the risk of sounding like a woman, that hurts when you do it wrong.”

I stayed silent. I felt a strange burn of shame, deep down, that wouldn’t be smothered. I hurt him. I hadn’t meant to do so, but that hardly mattered. If I’d killed him, he leaves behind others. The interconnectedness of human life had never truly made itself real to me until I had sat at the table, eating food prepared by his wife, watching his daughter laugh and smile.

Manny didn’t speak again. I crouched down across from him, eye level, and stared deep into his eyes.

“I can’t promise,” I said. “I will do my best, but I may not always be able to control this. You must be prepared to defend against me.”

His gaze didn’t waver. “That’s not real comforting.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.” I smiled slightly, but I didn’t imagine that was comforting, either. “I assume the Wardens are keeping track of what I do.”

He had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “I turn in reports, yeah. They want to make sure you’re not—”

“Out of control.”

“Exactly.”

“Am I?”

It was Manny’s turn not to answer. He held the silence, and the stare, and I could not read his impenetrable human eyes at all. So much lost in me. So much that could go wrong.

“Help me up,” he said, and held out his square, muscular hand. I did, careful to keep it only to surface touching, although I could sense the power coursing through him even through so light a contact. “Get your coffee. Let’s go to work.”

Work was a new and interesting concept for me. I understood duty, of course, and using one’s skills and powers for a purpose. But work was a completely different thing, because it seemed so . . . dreary .

Manny Rocha had an office. A small, cheap single room in a building full of such accommodations. The sign on the windowless door read, ROCHA ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES. He unlocked the office and stepped inside, gesturing for me to follow as he picked up a scattering of envelopes from the carpeted floor. “Sorry about the mess,” he said. “Been meaning to pick up a little.”

Whatever Manny’s skills might entail, clearly organization was not one of them. Mountains of paper and folders towered on every flat surface, leaning against each other for drunken support. There was not a single spot, other than his chair behind the broad, rectangular desk, that held clear space.

“Yeah,” he said, seeing my expression. “Maybe mess doesn’t really cover it. I’ve been meaning to get around to it—it’s just that—”

“You hate such tasks.”

“Filing. You got it.”

“How would you prefer it to be filed?”

He stopped in the act of picking up a handful of fallen papers and turned toward me. “What?”

“How would you prefer it to be filed?” I repeated, exercising patience I had not known was available to me until that moment.

“Listen, if you can file this shit, you can do it any way you want.” He sounded both hopeful and doubtful, as if I might believe that the filing of papers was beneath me. What he did not seem to understand was that when everything humans did was beneath me, a mundane task such as filing made very little difference.

“Very well,” I said. I could have done it in a dozen different ways—from subtle to dramatic—but I chose a Djinn-style flourish. The paperwork vanished from every surface with an audible pop of displaced air, even the sheafs held in Manny’s hands, and I expanded my consciousness to analyze the fundamental structure of every folder, every file. Destroying and re-creating at will, even though it was a ridiculous expense of power. “Open the drawer.”

The far wall of his office was a solid block of cabinets with sliding drawers. He hesitated, then opened one at random.

Inside, a neatly ranked system of folders, filed papers.

“I filed them by subject,” I said. “I can change that, if you wish, of course.”

“You’re kidding,” he said blankly. “ Dios mio , you’re not kidding. There’s a folder here on boundary disputes. On acid levels in the water. On—what the hell is this?” He pulled a folder out and frowned at it. “Boundary adjustments in Colorado ? That’s not supposed to be here. Hell.”

Manny closed the file drawer and sat down in his chair. Hard. He looked around at his office as if he’d never seen it before, placing his hands palm down on the empty desktop. “Holy shit,” he said. “You—how did you do that?”

I shrugged. “Simple enough. It’s only paper and ink, after all.” Except that I had expended far too much power in doing it, though I decided I would not tell him that. I sat in the leather armchair across from him. “What else shall we do?”