“Stop,” I said, and a warning flare, not quite a shock, passed from my splayed fingers into his chest.
He did, but he didn’t retreat, not for a long few heartbeats. When he did, it was fast and decisive, leaving me there without a word as he stalked to the kitchen door. His boots crunched shards of glass and left pale red Tabasco-colored prints in their wake.
I heard him go into another room. Doors opened and closed, wood banged. I followed his wet footprints and found him emptying out drawers from a dresser, tossing the contents onto the neatly made bed. He barely paused when I appeared behind him. “I’m going to need some bags in here,” he said. “Most of this has to go in the trash or to some charity.”
His voice was his own again—calm, controlled, with a dark undercurrent of anger traveling beneath the surface.
I silently fetched him bags, and helped him fill one bag with underthings and clothing too worn to donate, one with donations, one with items he thought Isabel would treasure. That one was the smallest. When he came across a sealed white garment bag in the corner of the closet, he took it down and laid it gently on the bed, unzipping it enough that I could see lace and white satin.
“Angela’s wedding dress,” he said. “For Ibby.”
I met his gaze. It went on a long time. “Which one of us do you really think they’re trying to kill?” I asked him. “You or me?” It had assuredly not been only Manny or Angela, or our enemies would have stopped trying.
The question didn’t confuse him. It had been on his own mind, from the lack of surprise in his expression. “I think the more important question is how long is it going to take them to get their power back together to try again.” Some of the grief receded in him, which was what I’d intended. “They aimed for you, alone, twice. You do realize that, don’t you?”
I nodded. “That might have only been because I am a danger linked with either you or your brother. One or both of you could have been the main target.”
“But why? What’s so special about me or about Manny? He’s a—” Luis took a deep, startled breath. “He was a good man. He was good at his job, but you know—you know he wasn’t a superstar or anything. He was just a guy.”
“And you?”
Luis looked away. “I’m not that much, either. I know where I stand. Look, if I’d been any kind of a real threat, they’d have given me a Djinn before the revolt, and I’d be dead now, right?”
“Joanne Baldwin didn’t have a Djinn,” I said. “At least, not one assigned her by the Wardens. So I don’t believe you can make such a claim. Perhaps you don’t really know yourself at all.”
That got me a very slight smile, an echo of the old Luis. “Who does?”
Indeed.
I cannot speak for Luis, but I stayed alert at all times, ready for any sort of attack, whether magical or physical. I learned that alertness carries a price. By the time we were finished packing the items in the bedroom and marking them, it was late—dark outside.
“You throw out everything in the fridge?” Luis asked at last, sinking wearily down on the stripped mattress. I shrugged. “Guess it’s pizza, then.”
He called a number taped to the refrigerator’s door. He must have realized it was useless to ask me what I preferred in the area of pizza, because he ordered something called a combination, and pulled a couple of beers out of the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, toward the back, that I had left, in case he wanted them. He tossed one to me, and I caught it.
We twisted off the caps and drank in silence. I wondered if he was also waiting for the attack, and feeling the slight, indefinable strain of it.
The pizza came, borne in a sagging cardboard box by an unenthusiastic messenger. Luis paid for it, locked the door, and we sat down together on the couch to eat.
I took the first bite, and it was lucky that I did. My senses were sharper than a human’s, mostly because they had received relatively little use, and I tasted the poison immediately. I spat out the bite.
“Don’t like the mushrooms?” Luis asked, and was on the verge of putting his own slice into his mouth when I knocked it out of his hand. “Whoa! Okay, you really don’t like mushrooms.”
“Amanita virosa,” I said, pointing at the innocent-seeming chunks of mushroom. “Deadly within a day.” I moved to point at finely diced white cubes scattered among the chunks of sausage and wheels of pepperoni. “Aconite. Wolfsbane. Very fast acting, difficult to treat. There’s more.”
Luis had a stunned look on his face as he sank back on the couch, staring at the food. “Somebody poisoned the pizza?”
“The pizza was made correctly,” I said. “Amanita virosa is genetically very similar to Agaricus bisporus, the table mushroom. And I expect that the aconite was converted from garlic. It would be easier to do it from horseradish, of course, but someone spent time changing the toppings with great care.”
It took him a moment, but Luis followed my logic. “An Earth Warden did this. Poisoned it by genetically twisting certain ingredients.”
“Also by accelerating the decay rate in the meat.”
He visibly shuddered. “How the hell does somebody think of that?”
“They knew we’d be looking for a direct attack. This was more subtle.” It would have worked, too, if I hadn’t been possessed of more acute senses than normal. The inside of my mouth tingled, but I knew I hadn’t absorbed more than a light dose. “Would you have known?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Probably not right away.” Luis looked very shaken. “What about the beer?”
“We’d have felt any attempt to change it while we were here, and I don’t taste anything wrong with it.” I smiled slightly. “No more than there usually is, with beer.”
He responded by picking up his bottle and glugging down several swallows, still staring at the pizza box. “Do you know who it was?” he asked me.
I contemplated the pizza box, touched the damp cardboard, even trailed my fingers over the offending poisonous mushrooms. “No,” I finally said. My senses were blunted and imprecise, frustrating. I should have known, should have been able to tell who had done this thing, but trapped as I was, heavy in flesh, the trail went cold.
“All right, that’s it,” he said. “If I can’t trust the food I put in my mouth, avoiding a fight ain’t going to work.”
I raised my eyebrows. “So?”
“So. We’re taking the fight to them.”
It wasn’t so simple as that. Without knowing who and where, we were moving blind—and with our usual sources of information, through the Wardens, cut off from us, we had little in the way of resources.
While Luis slept, wrapped in an old quilt on the couch, I sat on the floor with a small lit candle and silently called the name of a Djinn, in repetitions of three.
It took me well into the night, and more than one candle, but I finally had a response. The flame flickered, flared, and guttered out in a hiss of molten wax, and darkness fell around me like a heavy cloak.
I didn’t move.
When the candle sputtered back to life, a Djinn had appeared across from me.
“Quintus,” I said. “Thank you.”
He nodded slightly. His eyes glowed with banked fire, and I knew that inviting him here was a dangerous game. He had shown me no special enmity, and had, in fact, saved my life, but that didn’t mean he would do it again. Or that he wouldn’t have changed sides.
“I’m sorry about Molly,” I said. “I didn’t kill her.”
He didn’t blink, and his expression stayed remote and calm. “No,” he said. “I know that you didn’t. If you had, I’d have ripped you apart and fed you to pigs within the hour.”
The venom in him was chilling. So was the fact that he didn’t bother to manifest himself completely; his eyes were on a level with mine, but he dissolved into dark gray rolling mist below his waist.