Rachel Caine - Undone

He and Joanne exchanged a quick glance. “For now,” he said. “You never know how long those kind of things will last in times like these. You’re Cassiel. Until recently, you were a Djinn.”

I nodded.

“And now you need the help of the Wardens to draw the energy you need to stay alive.”

Nothing to do but nod again, no matter how much I resented it. I had the feeling that Lewis’s dark eyes did not miss my reluctance.

Instead of asking me another question, he looked at David. “What’s her story?” he asked.

David took his time composing his answer, but he didn’t look at me for permission, or apology. “Cassiel has always been on Ashan’s side,” he said. “A True Djinn, very old. Not exactly an ally to mankind in the past. I can’t tell you much about her. Among the Djinn she’s known as being stern, unforgiving, and arrogant, but Ashan cutting her off from the other Djinn seems to have mellowed her. A little.”

Mellowed? I glowered at him. Of all he had said, that was the most offensive.

“Will she keep her promises?” Lewis asked.

“Don’t ask him,” I said. “Ask me. They would be my promises.”

They all looked at me. David gave me a trace of a smile. “She’s right,” he said. “But if you don’t mind me saying it, Cassiel’s never been one to lie. She wouldn’t deceive you. It would be”—his eyebrows quirked; such a human gesture—“undignified.”

I couldn’t disagree with it. I fixed Lewis with a long, challenging look, and got a half-bitter smile from him in response. “You don’t exactly come begging, do you?” he said. “Hungry?”

For a moment, I thought he meant hungry for food, but then I knew what he was offering. I didn’t look at Joanne or David. I held his stare. “Very,” I said evenly.

“Want a taste?”

Lewis held out his hand to me. I stood up, looking down at him, trying to read his expression. It was a test, I knew that. But what kind of test, I couldn’t tell.

I slowly reached out and took his hand in mine, as if we were merely shaking hands in the human fashion. A complicated set of emotions sped through me . . . fear, most strangely. Hunger. Longing. An almost irresistible urge to take, and take, and take . . .

I allowed myself to merely touch on his power, drawing a thin thread of it into myself. It flowed through my veins like gold, and despite everything, I could not resist a slow, trembling sigh.

And then I let go, stepped away from him, and settled back in my chair.

Lewis lowered his hand back to rest on his knee. There had been no change in his expression at all, but suddenly I knew what he was thinking and feeling. The power I’d taken from him granted me that kind of access, an intimacy that was startling because it was so different from what I’d experienced with Joanne. It was as if for a moment I was Lewis, and I could see all his past . . . his longing for Joanne, never to be truly sated. His solitary life. His discomfort with the responsibility he now held. His deep, abiding wish to simply be .

“You should have been a Djinn,” I said, surprising myself, and Lewis blinked.

“Probably,” he said. “But here we are. So, you obviously have control of what it is you do. I know you could have grabbed for all the power you could hold, but you didn’t. Why?”

Because it was a test. That was true, but also not true. “I am not a beast,” I said. “I can control my needs, just as you can.”

I didn’t look toward Joanne, but I saw a spark go through him, a tiny tremble that meant he’d understood precisely what I meant. “How can I be sure of that?” he asked, a little more sharply. He didn’t like a stranger knowing his secrets.

“You have my promise,” I said. “I will never take more than I need, and I will never deliberately injure or weaken a Warden in the process, unless they are attempting to do harm to me.” I had with Joanne, but I’d been new and afraid. I understood better now.

“And you’ll ask permission first,” Lewis said.

“Yes. I will ask, unless it is an emergency.”

“You realize this is a promise,” Lewis said. “You sure you can keep it?”

“It’s no more than the promises humans make with each other to live in peace together.”

“People break those all the time,” Joanne murmured.

I knew that far better than she did. “No doubt they do, when they are threatened. I make the same promise, with the same understanding. If I am not threatened, I will live in peace with you. But I won’t die quietly.” I didn’t try to explain or insist. I just waited. They would trust me or not; there was nothing I could do to convince them. Lewis glanced at David, then Joanne. I didn’t see them make any obvious signals, but he must have gained some understanding, and I realized with a jealous rush that they were communicating on a level I would never again attain.

They were speaking in the aetheric.

I focused on the silent fourth in the room, who had so far not participated at all. He was watching me, but like Lewis, he guarded his expression well.

Lewis said, “All right,” and got up from the bed. I rose, too, automatically taking a step back, as if there were any place to run if he decided to send me away from the Wardens. “You’re on a trial basis, and I want you far away from here—we’ve got way too much to deal with at the moment. I’m assigning you to partner with a Warden. You’ll help him do his job, and in return, he’ll give you regular access to the aetheric.”

The man who’d been sitting unintroduced, on the couch, rose now. Lewis nodded toward him. “This is Manny Rocha,” he said. “Manny will be your partner, at least for the first couple of months. If you make it through that, we’ll see. If at any time Manny finds you hard to get along with, or if you don’t do the job or keep your word, you’re cut off, and we don’t help you anymore. Deal?”

I didn’t know this Warden, this Manny Rocha. He seemed bland and unexceptional to me—shorter than Lewis or David, slender, of no special significance. No Djinn that I knew had ever spoken his name, either in praise or damnation.

“No,” I said, and saw a flash of surprise go across every face in the room. “Not so simple as that. The Wardens do not serve for the joy of service. You are paid, are you not?”

Lewis worked it out first, and laughed out loud.

“What the hell?” Joanne asked blankly.

“She wants a job,” Lewis said. “Which proves, more than anything else, she’s really becoming human. Okay, done, at standard entry-level rates. We’ll work out housing and all that crap later. Agreed?”

I had no idea if it was fair, but I did not think Lewis would cheat me. He’d know how important fair dealing was to Djinn. I nodded and held out my hand to Manny Rocha. He hesitated. I thought I understood why.

“I won’t take power from you unless you agree,” I said. “And I will always ask, unless there is an emergency.” After sipping from the wellspring of Lewis’s power, I had no need of Manny Rocha at all. He looked just a little relieved, and gave me a brisk, competent sort of handshake. Just the touch of flesh, nothing more.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, the first words he’d spoken. He had a neutral voice, with a hint of an accent—calm and soothing. “Don’t screw this up. If you do, it won’t be just the two of us that suffer. It’s all the people we could have helped.”

I looked at him for a long moment, frowning. He meant what he’d said. An altruistic Warden? I supposed there must have been a few, but I was shocked that Lewis had been able to turn one up so quickly.

Of course, the worst of them had been weeded out over the past few years, thanks to the Djinn uprising and other factors. Lewis himself had begun to cleanse the ranks of corruption and graft. So perhaps Manny was, as he appeared to be, an honest man.