Undone (17 page)

He lost control of the vortex.

I had my hand around his throat before he could claw the clinging sheets from his eyes, and the Earth power coursing through my veins made me far stronger than a human of my size. It would have been easy to crush him.

I held him still instead, staring into his wide, frightened eyes. Thinking of Manny's open eyes, the last time I had seen them. Open and so empty.

“You hired the Fire Warden to burn Manny Rocha's office,” I said. “And to kill Manny and Luis, if possible. Yes?”

He clawed at my hand, but he would have had more luck opening a vise with feathers. “Yes,” he choked out. “Yes!”

“Were you responsible for the shooting?” He didn't answer. His pupils were huge, his face growing purple. It occurred to me that he might need breath to speak, and I loosened my grip enough to let a trickle of air into his lungs. “I'm not in a good mood, Warden Sands. Please answer swiftly.”

“No,” he gasped. “No!”

“Why did you destroy Manny's office, then?”

“I—can't breathe—”

“That is the point of choking you,” I pointed out. “Haste, please, if you want to live.”

Scott's face was distended, his eyes bulging, and there was true panic in him now. He'd kill me if he could, but I had the upper hand, and it was crushing his throat.

“Orders,” he managed to scrape out. “From the Ranch.”

“The Ranch,” I repeated. It meant nothing to me. “Whose ranch? Where?”

“Mistake,” he wheezed. “Papers. Had to kill them, in case they knew.”

He wouldn't speak another word, not even when I squeezed tighter. At last, I dropped him semiconscious to the floor and crouched down next to him, staring into his eyes. The terror in him was close to madness.

“You fear your masters more than you fear me,” I said. I didn't need his acknowledgment; it was clear enough. “Do you really think that's wise, Warden Sands? I think you understand how little I care about your pathetic life just now.”

He blinked at me and said, “You don't know. You don't understand.”

“Clearly, I don't care.”

He laughed.
Laughed.
It was a raw, broken sound, and then he rolled over to his hands and knees, the robe loose and dragging as he crawled.

He reached the windowsill and glanced back at me, and I saw the light of madness in his eyes.

“You can't fight her,” he said. “I'd like to see you try, bitch.”

And then he pitched forward, out into empty space.

I moved to the window and slapped aside the blowing, lashing curtains. Beyond, the fragile blue of the New Mexico sky burned over the mountains, and the sun shone brightly.

There was no sign of Warden Scott Sands on the pavement below. It was as if he had . . . flown away.

Wardens had unique powers, it was true, but even had he been capable of such a feat, he would have still been visible against the clear morning sky.

He was simply . . . gone. As if—and this struck me deep, and badly—as if he had walked away, into the aetheric. Wardens could not. Djinn could . . . but Sands was no Djinn. And there were only a few of my kind capable of carrying humans unharmed through the aetheric. Fewer still who would be at the beck and call of humans.

I stayed where I was for a long moment, staring out at the impossible, and then I walked slowly across the broken glass to the shattered door. I heard the sirens below on the street, likely responding to my explosive entry into this apartment.

Once again, I felt the net drawing tight around me, and I didn't know how to stop it. This was human business, Warden business, and a Djinn had no place in it.

My phone rang. This time, as I took the stairs down to street level, I answered it.

“Hey,” a male voice said. “It's Lewis Orwell. And you're in one hell of a lot of trouble.”

“I know,” I said.

“You kill anybody, Cassiel?”

“No.” Not technically. “Possibly the four in the car who shot Manny. Do they count?”

He sighed. “That's a question we don't have time to get into. You kill any Wardens?”

“No.”

“Because I've been told you did.” He paused for a second. “Manny's dead. Did you have anything to do with it?”

“No,” I said. “I was there. I saw it.”

Someone was coming up the stairs. I froze on the landing where I was, pressed my shoulders to the concrete, and willed myself invisible. This was an Earth Warden trick, using only a fraction of my power, and it worked beautifully; the police officers jogged past me, heading up. I waited until they had turned two flights before continuing on my way.

“I need your help,” I said.

“Can't. We've got big-time problems of our own right now. All the Wardens I can grab are coming with me, out of the country. Most of the Djinn are coming, too. The best I can do for you is to tell you where to find some resources.”

“Resources?”

“Money. Identification.” I heard the sound of the ocean, strong and rhythmic, through the speaker of the phone. “I need to go. You won't be able to reach me again until I get back, so be careful. Are you ready for the information?”

“Yes,” I said. “Ready.”

Unexpectedly, what he gave me was not addresses, but coordinates—numbers. I memorized them and repeated them back, and then, just as quickly, Lewis was gone, the phone call ended.

When I tried to call back, the number didn't respond.

The Wardens were facing dangers that had nothing to do with me. Even the Djinn were involved. I had the strong feeling that my survival now rested solely with me, and if I wished to find any kind of justice for Manny Rocha, any kind of justice for his wife and his daughter, then I would need to save myself first.

Alone.

I descended the remaining flights of stairs and slipped out a service entrance. My appearance was no longer simply exotic, but dangerously obvious. I would need
things.

Luckily, the human world was full of them.

 

I dyed my hair in the restroom of a gas station. The harsh chemical smell clung to me even after I had wiped away the excess and dried my hair as best I could using the bathroom's blower mechanism. It no longer looked like a white puffball, at least. Instead, it looked like a
pink
puffball, lighter at the ends. I resembled, I realized, one of the unhealthy-looking pink snacking cakes in the convenience store's shop.

With the last of my cash, I bought changes of clothes and makeup. I deliberately chose unusual styles, in garishly colored layers, and made up my face in dramatic neon strokes. I looked young and outrageous, and I noticed that following this transformation most humans avoided eye contact with me.

I was no longer immediately recognizable as the pale albino woman in white who had been spotted at the scene of so many deaths, and that was all I wanted.

Lewis's coordinates led me to the heart of Albuquerque, in Old Town, to a shaded spot next to the blocky tan-and-brown structure of the National Atomic Museum. It was just a bare patch of earth, and a large flat rock. Humans had scrawled obscure messages on its surface, but time was bleaching them into history, and I wondered for a moment how he expected me to find anything in so empty a place.

One of the obscure messages caught my eye, because it was the glyph of the Wardens—an odd place for it to be lurking, most surely. I traced it with a fingertip, and then lifted the rock.

Beneath it was damp earth, but it formed a slight hollow—as if something had been buried beneath. I dug with my fingers and brushed cool metal—a cylinder, a type of container with a screw-on lid. It was welded shut, in a way that any competent Earth Warden would have been able to unseal but that would resist simple human tampering; I burned my fingertips opening it, but the reward was a folded piece of note-paper and three plastic bags.

The note, although unsigned, was clearly from Lewis Orwell, and it said,

 

I presumed that since Lewis had sent me here, there was little need for another phone call. I opened each bag in turn. Cash—several thousand dollars in old bills. Two credit cards, as he'd promised, in the neutral-gender name of Leslie Raine. The identification—a Texas driver's license, birth certificate, and passport—were in the same name. The photograph was of an extremely generic human, androgynous. I concentrated on each of them in turn, adjusting the pigments within the photographs until the image more closely resembled me, including my newly pink hair.

I wrote my name and the date on the back of the note and put it back in the cylinder, sealed it, and buried it beneath the rock again.

It seemed as much my name as any other.

 

I left Albuquerque on a newly purchased motorcycle. The motor vehicle permit that had come with my new identity, I was told, would not allow me to operate the machine legally until I took the tests necessary, but despite my new disguise I didn't feel comfortable placing myself on police property to achieve that goal. I simply asked to see an example of a motorcycle license, which would allow me to make the necessary alterations to the license I had.

I solemnly lied to the vendor that I would go straight to the appropriate authority to obtain the proper documents. He was less inclined to question me once the credit card purchase went through, and I added a black helmet, white leather jacket, gloves, and chaps. I donned those in the changing room, picked up the helmet, mounted the motorcycle, and taught myself the mechanics of it in a few moments.

“You sure you can handle that?” the salesman asked me as I went over the controls. “That's a lot of motorcycle, lady.”

Indeed, it was. The motorcycle was a sleekly designed Victory Vision in gray and steel, and it had cost the Wardens quite a bit of money. Still, I felt it was better than buying a car; I was doubtful that I'd want to be trapped in a steel box for hours on end, but this seemed freeing. Powerful.

I started the engine and savored the shivering purr of power. I pressed the throttle and listened to the finely tuned roar, and for the first time in my human life, it felt entirely natural to smile.

“It's perfect,” I said. I put on the helmet, raised the kickstand, and put the machine into gear.

The salesman waved good-bye to me in my rearview mirror. I concentrated on operating the motorcycle. It was a complex dance of balance, intuition, and control, and I felt a rush of excitement I had not felt since falling into flesh. This—this was freedom. I was alone, I had escaped my enemies, and for the moment, at least, I could simply
exist.

I opened the throttle as I left the city limits, and the motorcycle leaped eagerly into action with a deep-throated roar. The vibration rang through me, clear and clean, and there seemed to be nothing ahead of me but empty, open road. The wind pushed at me like a solid wall, seeking entrance to my clothes, my hair, fanning across my neck in a cooling jet.

In time, my human concerns returned, whispering in the silence.
Manny and Angela are dead. You can't simply run. You owe a debt.

It was a debt that Luis Rocha did not want me to pay. I could leave, and he would be happy with that outcome.

I decided, with deep regret, that I would not be. I needed answers. I needed to be sure that the child Manny and Angela had left behind knew the truth about her parents—their dedication, their bravery, their kindness to me.

She would need to know the truth about their deaths, as well. I had part of the answer, but not all. Scott Sands had been no normal Warden, and there had been a reason he had gone after Manny.

I could not believe that it would simply end.

I would need to find what it meant, or it was likely that Luis and Isabel would never really be safe.

The trip from Albuquerque to Sedona, Arizona, took only about five hours—a remarkably short time, given the pleasurable experience of riding the motorcycle. It felt like effortless gliding, a reminder of all that I had once been. Despite the helmet, I felt less closed-in than I had in either airplanes or cars, and the sense of the wind passing over me, the sun beating hot on my back, gave me a kind of peace I hadn't realized I had missed.

As a Djinn, I had been connected to the Mother through Conduits—for most of my memory that Conduit had been a Djinn named Jonathan, a mortal who had died well before recorded human history had begun. Many thousands of years later—and only a year ago, if so much—Jonathan had chosen to die so that his friend David could live on, and that had splintered the Djinn. It had ultimately divided us, made Ashan the connection for the Old Ones, like me, and David the Conduit for New Djinn.

But there were other ways to reach the Mother than the Conduits, and the place I was going was one. I had chosen the location that was not only closest, but most likely to welcome me; the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona was holy to Djinn as well as humans, and served two purposes. The human worship was unimportant to me, but in that chapel resided an avatar of the Earth herself—an Oracle.

It was possible this Oracle would speak to me, even trapped in a lowly human body.

She had, after all, been similarly trapped once.

I had never visited the chapel in human form; this spot had existed on the aetheric, as well, since time began, and I had never been forced to interact with an Oracle with the burden of skin and bone. As I glided the motorcycle at a low purr into the parking area, the sun was flaring its last on the red sandstone rocks, and it was as beautiful a thing as I'd seen since opening human eyes.