A spray of stones, fired at hurricane speed, began pelting us, like bullets from a machine pistol. The window next to me cracked into icy shards, then blew in. I put up a shield as quickly as possible, but even so we were both bleeding and shaken from the attack, and that was only the opening salvo.
“Faster,” I said. “It’s circling, trying to cut us off.”
“This is insane,” he said, and somehow held the truck on the road as another gust lashed at us. “What the hell do they want?”
“One or both of us dead,” I said. “Hold on. I’m going up.”
I rose into the aetheric again, scanning the boiling mass of neon colors. There seemed to be no center to it, no weak point to target. We were the weak points. I sensed other things from it—a hunger, a blind and furious menace that gave me chills.
Someone hated us on a scale that seemed—even by human standards—insane. I had earned no such enmity during my brief stay in flesh; if Luis had, I could not imagine what he had done to trigger it. But we had to fight it, nevertheless.
Didn’t we?
Luis was readying a counterattack, but I hesitated. Something . . . something was not right.
“Wait!” I snapped, as Luis began to strip the rocks and sand from the rushing wind. The theory was good; the wind itself would do damage, but not as much as the hurtling debris. But there was a sense to this that wasn’t right.
“What?” Luis threw me a wild look. Another gust slammed into the truck, this one head-on, and the impact was vicious. Cracks formed in the windshield. “Wait for what? They’ll pound us into scrap!”
I didn’t bother to reply. I was busy. Instead of sending power out, I gathered it in, close around us, an armored shield within the cab of the truck. Let the metal and glass take the damage for now; I was waiting.
It was a brilliantly focused attack, so tightly wrapped that it punched through my shields like a laser through butter. Aimed not at me, but at Luis.
I lunged forward as he gasped and collapsed forward against the steering wheel. His chest was heaving, his face going dirty-pale.
I had a flash of the singing snap of Manny’s bright presence leaving the world, leaving me, and of the exploded meat of his chest. That had been a bullet.
This was pure power, a fist around Luis’s struggling, pounding heart. Squeezing.
They were trying to crush the life out of him, and I would fail again, lose again.
No. I would not.
I batted away the attack with brute force, giving Luis a few precious seconds of recovery time, before it came back, fast as a striking snake. It was almost invisible on the aetheric, a shifting mass of color that blended into the general storm of chaos. Difficult to anticipate.
Difficult to stop.
I couldn’t allow them to get a hold on him. Seconds counted in this, and the damage could be mortal, beyond my ability to repair—I didn’t know enough about the human body, didn’t have the fine surgical instincts of an Earth Warden. My healing of the boy had been lucky, and I’d had no risks; this time, failure would be utter destruction.
I threw myself into the aetheric and put myself in the way of the attack. Better me. He can heal me after.
That seemed logical enough, until the attack actually struck me full force.
In the mortal world, I gasped and folded, hands pressed to my chest. The pain was extreme, the panic even worse. Trying to form an effective shield under the assault was near useless; my instincts, my human instincts for breath and survival, overrode my logic, made me struggle madly like an animal in a trap.
I felt Luis’s hands on me, holding me. “Cassiel!”
I would not fail. I could not allow it. Weakness was a human trait; I was Djinn. . . .
I screamed, and the world shattered into knives of agony. Death. This is death.
Shadows on the aetheric, and a blazing white outline of a human form in front of me, dazzling my eyes.
Luis. He’d had a chance to prepare himself, while I’d taken the brunt of the attack, and this time, he not only gave me relief from the pain; he struck back, hammering away the assault. He’d done something to shield himself; his heart glowed a brilliant red on the aetheric, and as I watched, the tint spread through his ghostly form, tracing organs, veins, arteries. It tinted his aura into spectrums that reminded me of the hot surface of the sun.
He was beautiful. And as I collapsed, shaking and defeated, he stood against them.
Human, and beautiful.
The attack ended not with an explosion, but with a whimper, fading away into mutters and fitful gusts, rattles of pebbles on scarred metal, a final angry spurt of dust.
Silence.
Luis was whispering under his breath, a long monologue in Spanish that I thought was a string of prayers and curses, followed by more prayers. He was shaking, and somehow I was pressed against him, his arms enfolding me.
Breathe. My lungs ached with the effort, but I forced them to work. Bright sparks of pain leapt through my body, the afterimages of what our attackers had done to us, and I knew I was trembling as much as Luis.
“Hey.” His voice was low and rough. “You still with me?”
I nodded, unable to speak. My body was sticky with sweat, my hands cold as if they’d been plunged into wet snow. When I swallowed, I tasted bitter salt and blood. I waited for him to release me, but Luis didn’t seem inclined to let go. There was something comforting about the warmth of his chest against me, the strength of his arms holding me.
I did not struggle free.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“I couldn’t—”
He laughed softly, and his breath brushed my ear. It woke new shivers, pleasurable ones. “You got in the way and gave me time to get it together. You saved my damn life, chica. What are you sorry for?”
Not doing it well enough, I supposed. There seemed no logic to that, but there it was, immutable and inexplicable. “I’m sorry about your truck,” I said instead.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Damn. Me too. So—did we learn anything from that?”
“They’re strong.”
“We knew that already.”
“They’re vicious.”
“Knew that too.”
I looked up into his face. “They’re in Colorado.”
“Oh.” His arms tightened around me, and his dark c, ant> eyes widened. So did his smile. “Didn’t know that.”
Chapter 9
I HAD TRACKED the attacker through the aetheric across New Mexico, into mountains to the north. I had lost the trail somewhere near the border, according to the map. I was considering this as we crossed the Albuquerque city limits, but there were no answers to be found on the flimsy paper, which flapped in the wind coming from the shattered passenger’s window, and I folded it carefully and put it away.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“First thing, I’m dropping the truck off at the body shop,” Luis said. “Then I’m crashing for about two hours.” He paused for a moment, and his voice changed timbre. “I have to go to the funeral home at ten.”
Funeral home. An odd combination of words. Homes were for the living, and for a moment I thought about the house—no longer a home—where Manny and Angela and Isabel had lived. Someone else would make it a home, in time, but for now it was a reminder, an empty shell filled with inert, abandoned things.
A place I had once felt happy.
“Should I go with you?” I asked. That earned me another glance, and a moment of silence. “If I shouldn’t—”
“It’s not that you shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s that we have to get you cleared by the Wardens and the cops before you start showing your hot pink head around town. Know what I mean?”