The aura was stronger here. Don’t scare the child, I told myself, and forced myself to move slowly and softly to the bed.
She was a featureless lump beneath the covers. The pink light played out its endless soothing loop, catching the shadows and creases of the blankets.
I slowly pulled them down, and heard Luis’s gasp.
The bed held only a stuffed pillow and a rag doll, whose black yarn hair spilled out over the pillow. I put my hand in the hollow where Isabel had been. “Cold,” I said. “She’s been gone a long time.” Perhaps since the first time Veronica had checked on her. I sat back on my heels, studying the bed carefully. There was no sign of a struggle, nothing overturned. No hint on the aetheric of trauma.
Isabel had not been harmed.
Not here.
That maddening ghost of a trace eluded me. I had sensed it before, but I couldn’t force the memory to appear. It hovered like a fog at the edges of my awareness, but never came close enough to drag into the light.
My hand remained in the hollow of Isabel’s bed, where her body had slept. I could feel each individual fiber of the cool cotton sheet. I could smell the sweet perfume of her hair on the pillow.
Gone.
Luis had moved to the closet and now was conducting a methodical search of the room, calling Isabel’s name in a calm, loud tone that grew gradually louder, gradually less calm as each hiding place was eliminated.
His hands were shaking. Not just trembling, but shaking, like a man gripped by extreme cold.
After he’d looked beneath the bed, he looked across it at me, and I said, “She’s not here, Luis.”
His face flushed red, then pale. “She’s here. She’s hiding, that’s all. ISABEL!” He bellowed it this time, got to his feet, and charged out of the room. I heard the sound of his footsteps, his calls, the sounds of doors being opened and shut. Sylvia’s strident demands to know what he was doing. Veronica’s softer protests.
The screams when Luis finally told them the child was gone.
I stayed there motionless and silent, staring at the dirty rag doll. It was the one the child had been holding the first time I’d seen her in her front yard. One black button eye was missing, and a seam beneath the right arm had given way. Discolored, soft stuffing poked through.
She’s gone.
Someone had taken her. It hadn’t been the Norteños; I had their scent now, I knew they wouldn’t have bothered to abduct a child unless they expected money or blood in response. Lolly had not acted like a man who’d given such orders, though he might have, if pushed. He’d not gone so far, not yet.
Someone else had. Someone with roots in power. A Warden. A Djinn. Someone I had likely touched, possibly even trusted.
They had just made a terrible, terrible mistake in their choice of victims. I had killed for Manny and Angela in a fit of rage and shock. I would do it with cold, measured violence this time, to regain the child.
Outside the room, Sylvia was calling the police. I heard Luis slide down the wall, beaten down this time by his grief, but his grief was different from mine. Mine was a cold, alien thing.
I stood up and retreated to the hallway, where he sat like a broken doll. I crouched down to look into his eyes.
“She’s gone,” I said, “but I think I know what path we have to follow.”
“The Norteños—”
“No. They might have shot into the house, but they’re not so stupid as to invite a child-abduction investigation. They would be destroyed by it.”
His hands were still violently trembling. “Some predator, then. Some bastard predator.”
“No,” I said slowly. “I don’t think so. I think it had to do with us.”
“Us.” The flat panic in Luis’s eyes receded. “What do you mean, to do with us?”
“Someone wants us stopped; we have ample evidence of that. Together and separately, we’ve been marked. How better to stop us than to take the child, knowing we both care for her safety?” I willed him to understand me. When I was not certain he did, I reached out and gripped his cold hands in both of mine. “Luis. There is a trace of power in that room. Warden or Djinn, I can’t tell, but we must find out. Question the one who was supposed to watch over her. Either they were bought off or disabled. We need to know what happened.”
His fingers twisted and gripped my wrists, hard.
He pushed me away. I rocked backward, but it’s not so easy to overbalance a Djinn, even so little as I now was. My grace seemed to anger him even more.
“This is your fault.” He almost spat it in my face. “It started with you, you coming here and making trouble. If anything happens to Isabel—”
“If anything happens to Isabel,” I said, “I will take my payment in blood and screams. And then you may take yours, from me. I won’t fight you. I’ve done enough harm here already.”
Because he was right, of course. This had all started with my arrival. Whatever I had done to trigger these events, trigger them I had; I owed Luis Rocha a debt I could never pay, even before the abduction of his niece.
Someone, somewhere had struck at me, and shattered the lives of everyone standing near me.
That, I could not forgive.
As a Djinn, I could never forgive.
Luis was unable to raise the Ma’at who was supposed to be watching Isabel. I couldn’t find him on the aetheric.
It was a very bad sign. “He wasn’t bought off,” Luis said. “Not Jim. No way in hell. He was a friend, and a good one.”
He was likely dead, then. Our enemies had assassinated him quietly, without attracting anyone’s attention, and then come for the girl. It had been well planned and executed.
It made me wonder why they had not done the same for us.
The police arrived. They were not the same as the ones who’d been involved in Manny and Angela’s shooting, but they made the natural connections—Luis’s former gang affiliation, the deaths of Isabel’s two parents. Luis was taken away for questioning, although both Sylvia and I insisted he had never been out of our sight long enough to accomplish the abduction of the child.
With the arrival of detectives—a higher order of policemen, I realized, like the difference between Djinn and Oracles—the questions took a personal turn. Luis had arranged to have me cleared of blame in Scott Sands’s disappearance, but this was three times in only a few days that I had been standing at the center of a criminal investigation.
I supposed it was natural for them to find this odd, but the feeling grew within me that we were wasting precious time while the police collected their painstaking samples, took photographs, questioned suspects, and conducted a spiral search of the house, the yard, the neighborhood.
“Look, it’s still possible the girl could have run away,” one of the detectives said to me as I stood on the porch outside, under the glare of portable lights. Yellow tape flapped all around the house. There were news vans now parked at both ends of the street, held back only by the barricades, and Sylvia’s neighbors had turned out in force to murmur and gawk. “Did she seem upset?”
“Of course,” I replied. “Her parents were killed. But I don’t think she’s run away.”
The detective quirked one perfectly shaped eyebrow. She was a small blonde with a tendency to smirk that irritated me beyond bearing. “Why not?”
“Because she left her suitcase,” I said. I had seen it sitting in the corner of the room, covered with pink flowers and Barbie doll stickers. “And she left her doll.”
I had succeeded in wiping away her smile. “I see.”
“It’s possible, if she decided to run away, that she would go home,” I said. “But for such a small child, it’s too long a walk, even if she knew the way.” There {he aw were many dangers in the world, predators ready to snatch up the unprotected. I felt sickened by the prospects, but I knew in my heart—what a human feeling—that Ibby had not gone. She had been taken away.