Luis’s hand pressed down, cascading life energy into me, and I felt myself rise to meet it, a wave upon the shore, and the moan purred in the back of my throat, sinful and delicious.
I opened my eyes and saw Luis watching me. His dark eyes were still unreadable, but there was a vulnerability to him now. He saw me—not as his brother’s human-formed Djinn, not as a burden, but as something else entirely. His hand moved slowly up the sensitive interior of my leg, and even through the layers of denim and leather, I felt it in every nerve.
And then he sat back and left me cold and alone, spiraling down into the breathless dark.
“Better?” His voice was low in his throat, almost harsh. “Sorry. Sometimes that happens; it’s because the nerves—well, whatever. I didn’t mean to—anyway. Sorry.”
I wasn’t sorry at all, but his retreat confused me. I concentrated on slowing my racing pulse. My human body had responded in ways that brought back vivid flashes of sense memory. . . . The dream, the one I thought I’d suppressed. The heat he’d poured into me for the healing should have cooled, but instead I felt it growing and concentrating inside me into a golden liquid glow.
I wanted more. More of his touch.
Luis was no longer looking at me. He faced the floodlit night outside of the front windshield, and his face was tense. Unreadable, yet again. “We should go,” he said. “Miles to go, and I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been to sleep in days.” He started the car. “You good to go?”
He was right, of course, but I felt there was something false in it. He’d put up barriers again, strong ones. “Yes,” I said, and moved my legs off of his lap. There was still a little pain, but it was nothing like it had been. The warmth persisted. “I’m good to go.”
Luis put the truck in gear, and we accelerated out into the night.
Evidently, the fact that I had a driver’s license did not convince Luis of my actual driving ability, at least not with his vehicle. He flatly refused to allow me to take the wheel, although he had already admitted his own weariness.
I missed being on my motorcycle. There had been something solitary and wild about it, something I couldn’t get from a ride within a vehicle even with the window rolled down. I still felt caged. Trapped.
I still felt the imprint of Luis’s hand on my thigh, and now it angered me that I was so weak. It’s only flesh, I told myself.
But flesh had its own power.
“How did you find me?” I asked Luis at last, when the silence got too thick. The road was long, dark, and almost empty, and I sensed that he was growing very tired. The question snapped him back to alertness. I saw his knuckles whiten as he gripped the steering wheel harder.
“I had an idea where you’d go,” he said. “You can’t run to the Wardens right now; the Djinn wouldn’t have you. So the local Oracle was a safe bet.”
I hadn’t realized my logic would have been so transparent. “So naturally, you came running to my rescue,” I said. My tone was dry and sarcastic, and earned me another glare. Ah, we were back on more familiar footing now.
“No,” he said. “I came to get you and take you back to answer questions. I’m a Warden, Cassiel. My brother might have bent the rules for you, but I won’t. And I won’t have you going on your own Djinn crusade for vengeance, either.”
I had not expected that, and perhaps I should have; Luis owed me little, and he had his own life and career to think of. And Isabel. “Did you sense anything about the one who attacked me on the road?”
“Other than Earth powers? Nope. So, there have been three separate attacks—fire, at Manny’s office; weather, on the plane; and now earth, on the road. What does that tell you?” Luis didn’t wait for my answer. “I’ll tell you what it tells me: We’ve either got an undiscovered triple-threat Warden who can control all the elements, or there’s something else going on here. Something bigger than anybody suspects.”
“It’s more than that,” I said. “Manny and I were attacked before that, at a farm.” And that power I hadn’t been able to identify; it had elements of both weather and earth. Curious.
“Add in the involvement of Magruder and Sands, and the fact that one’s dead and the other one’s missing—”
“It’s more than just random violence,” I finished. “And the shooting—”
“The shooting was my fault,” Luis said. “I knew it was dangerous, coming back to town. The Norteños aren’t exactly known for their forgive-and-forget attitude.” He swallowed hard and blinked rapidly, as if he was holding back a wave of sorrow. “What happened to Manny and Angela is my fault, and I’m going to make it right.”
“I do not think it was your fault,” I said. “It was mine, as well, if so. As you said, I should have stayed. I should have tried to save lives instead of take them.” Manny’s empty eyes still haunted me, even more than Angela’s. Angela had never had a chance to live, but Manny—I had felt him go, when I was returning from the car crash. I’d felt him let go. “If I had tried—”
Luis shook his head slowly. “Too late for any of that,” he said. “We made choices. Now we have to live with them. Sucks, but there it is.” He took in a deep breath and let it out. “You know, Manny always was the serious one. The hard worker. I was always skipping school, hanging with criminals; he was the one who made our mama proud.” Another shake of his head, as if he was trying to deny the truth of his own words. “Doesn’t make sense. None of this makes any sense.”
I did not tell him that life rarely did; he wouldn’t appreciate hearing it, even if it was true. “How did you become a Warden?”
“Didn’t it tell you in my file?” He knew I’d studied him. I didn’t know if that should feel embarrassing or not. “Yeah, well, I got in trouble. Usual stuff—burglary at first. Thing was, I was breaking into places without the breaking part—I just unlocked doors and went inside. It’s easy, you know. And I didn’t know it was going to attract attention. I just figured, hey, cool, superpowers. Made me real popular with my homies, at least until the Wardens showed up at my bail hearing, posted for me, and carted me off to the inquisition. I was kind of surprised they didn’t kick me right back. I wasn’t exactly well behaved. But I guess they saw something I didn’t. They put me through school, gave me a job. Two years later, they brought Manny in, too.”
He was the younger brother, yet his powers had manifested earlier, and more vividly. I wondered how Manny had felt, trailing behind.
The way he said his brother’s name woke a ghost of pain in my chest—there was a certain emptiness in it, and vulnerability. I found myself wanting to take his hand, not to draw power but to give comfort. That was how humans did such things—flesh to flesh.
I was reaching out to him when the next attack descended on us with shocking suddenness.
The lights of Albuquerque blacked out ahead, and I felt the sudden burn of power being released in the physical world. “Luis!” I snapped, and braced myself against the dashboard with one hand. It was good that I did; he slammed hard on the brakes, and I felt a heavy thud from behind as my motorcycle slammed into the cab of the truck. The tires screeched and jittered, but held against a skid.
“Shit,” he breathed, and slammed the truck hard into reverse, gave it gas, and whipped it in a fast, reckless turn. “Can you do anything about that? Because I’m a little busy.”
He offered me his right hand, steering with his left. I grabbed hold and rose into the aetheric for a look. Night fell away, and the world erupted in a chaos of color. Reds, maroons, oranges, hot flashes and sparks of yellow.
We were in trouble.
“It’s coming in!” I shouted. “From the right!”
The passenger’s side. I had just enough warning to duck, and the wind hit the truck with so much force that the entire heavy vehicle rocked up on the left two wheels, threatened to overturn, then settled down with a heavy, rattling thump.