Whatever Luis was doing spilled over, out, traveling in a wave over the men and sending them slumped to the floor. When that wave finally lapped against me, I felt my senses slide toward darkness. I took a step back and braced myself against the door.
It receded. I blinked away the sparkling afterimages.
All the men were down. As I watched, Luis let go of the boy and went to each of the others, one by one, to clamp his fingers down on their skulls and do—something.
It took long, long minutes, and I felt his power failing on the last of them. He finished and climbed slowly, painfully to his feet, then collapsed into one of the folding chairs.
I edged around the fallen men—still not moving—and crouched down next to him. The metal of the gun felt heavy and cold in my hand.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Changed their minds,” he said. “Literally. Wardens can put me away for pulling that kind of shit, but if I didn’t do something, they’d keep coming. They’d come for Isabel, and I couldn’t let that happen. It was that or kill them, and keep on killing the next bunch, and the next. Anyway, like I said, the Wardens got more to worry about than chasing down rule breakers.”
He sounded exhausted. I placed a hand gently on his shoulder, careful not to draw any more of his strength away.
“They’re not dead?” I asked. They weren’t moving.
“Asleep. They’ll wake up in the next few minutes. When they do, they won’t remember much. Lolly—that’s the punk-ass son of a bitch in charge of the Norteños around here—will only remember that we’re even now. Life for a life.” Luis wiped sweat from his forehead with a trembling hand. “And he’ll feel guilty. About Manny and Angela.”
“You can do that?”
“Not officially, I can’t.” He gestured, and I helped him lever himself upright. “Let’s get out of here.”
I glanced back as I shut the door to the room. The young leader, Lolly, had gotten to his hands and knees. I was afraid for a moment that he would turn and see me and remember, but he seemed transfixed by the coffins that stood just a few feet away.
He stood and walked to Angela, and I saw his hands grip the wooden side. His shoulders began to shake. I couldn’t imagine that he had shed tears for the dead in a very long time.
It must have hurt.
I was glad.
Chapter 11
WHAT LUIS HAD just done was a grave breach of the rules of the Wardens, and I understood why; Earth Wardens—the truly powerful ones—could manipulate memory. If it was done subtly enough, the victim might never suspect anything had happened at all.
It was a power that was fearfully easy to abuse, and difficult to detect. Under normal circumstances, I thought that Luis would never have done such a thing, but now, with the Wardens either withdrawn to their own affairs or potential threats . . . he couldn’t afford to rely on them for help.
Or me.
“Why didn’t you kill them?” I asked Luis. We were out of earshot of Sylvia and the funeral director, who were near the door. Luis shook his head. He was moving slowly, concentrating on the steady motion of his feet, as if it was the most difficult thing in the world at the moment.
“It’s a pride thing. You kill a Norteño, you get killed, or everybody near you does. There’s no end once you start that. It can roll on for years. Wipe out whole families.”
Blood feuds. One of the common threads of human culture, this inability to forget or forgive. It was something they had in common with the Djinn. When I had heard the boy speak of hurting Isabel, I had almost killed him. I wouldn’t have hesitated if Luis hadn’t been there. I’d have simply ended the threat, with no regard for the consequences. I would have walked away from the resulting war with no thought of guilt.
I had to admit to myself that Luis’s way was likely better.
The funeral director stepped into our path and said, in his low, gentle voice, “Is everything all right, Mr. Rocha?”
“Everything’s fine,” Luis said hoarsely. “My friends got a little carried away by their grief. I’ll pay for the damages.”
The funeral director’s eyes widened, and he moved off down the hall with what might have been unseemly haste. Luis watched him go.
“Another reason not to kill anybody,” he said. “Considering the room’s booked in my name.”
Sylvia stood by the exit, looking sad and angry. She was restlessly crumpling a tissue in her hands, over and over, and she sent Luis a filthy look as we approached.
I tried to remember that she had lost a child, but in that moment, it was difficult.
“You and your friends,” she said in a low, vicious tone, “had better not show your faces at my daughter’s funeral. God help you if you do.”
“Sylvia—”
Her eyes glittered, but the tears in them seemed more like armor than grief. “You brought the Norteños here? And then you let them walk away? What kind of a man are you, you don’t defend your own?”
She slammed open the door and stalked away. Luis hurried after her—as much as he was capable at the moment—and opened the passenger’s door of the pickup truck. He had to lift her up on the step.
She did not appear grateful.
It was a stiff, silent drive home, with Sylvia sitting rigid between us. In the passing flare of headlights, her expression remained remote and furious. She put away the handkerchief and took out a set of black, polished beads. She kissed the silver crucifix that dangled from it, and then began to work the beds through her fingers, lips moving silently. Rosary beads. I was surprised the custom had not changed from so long ago.
Luis seemed to have no trouble navigating, but I could sense his weariness. He yawned hugely as he parked the big, black truck in front of Sylvia’s house, which blazed with warm light, and opened his driver’s-side door to descend.
I hopped out and extended my hands to Sylvia. She frowned at me, and then evidently decided that I was less objectionable to her at the moment than Luis.
I lifted her effortlessly and set her feet on the concrete sidewalk. She stepped back, momentarily too amazed to frown, and Luis rounded the hood of the truck. He looked from Sylvia to me and sighed.
“Thanks,” he told me. Not as if he meant it. “Sylvia, I’d like to say good night to Isabel. If you don’t mind.” He hated asking, but seemed to recognize that insisting would only cause the woman to stand more firmly in his way.
Sylvia sent us another distrustful look, and grudgingly nodded. “Don’t wake her up if she’s asleep,” she said. “It’s hard enough for her, with the bad dreams.”
Sylvia’s sister Veronica was in the living room, knitting in the glow of the softly playing television set. She stood up to give Sylvia a hug, and then a slightly more restrained one to Luis. None for me, but Veronica—a large, grandmotherly woman with a kinder face than her sister—nodded and smiled instead.
“She’s been very quiet,” Veronica said. “I don’t think she woke up at all.”
Luis moved down the hall, leaving Sylvia to whisper with her sister, and as he reached Isabel’s door, I hesitated.
“Stop,” I whispered. Luis paused, hand in the air an inch from the knob.
“What?”
I didn’t know. There was a feeling—a wrongness. Nothing I could identify, either in the human world or on the aetheric. It was almost as if something had been here and gone, leaving only its acrid, bitter aetheric scent.
“You had a Warden watching the house?”
“Ma’at, like I told you. Yeah, of course.”
I shoved Luis out of the way and opened the door myself.
There was no immediate terror leaping to confront me; the room was as we’d left it, only darker. A sparkling night-light glimmered softly against the far wall, casting pink radiance into the corner and across the bed.