For the first time since falling into human flesh, I was alone. Truly alone.
I sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes shut, and tried to remember what it had felt like to be a Djinn. The memories faded so quickly, anchored in skin. The power from Manny resonated inside, a slow and constant rush, and for some time, nothing intruded.
Until I felt the world shift.
Something had happened, subtle and vile, on the edges of my awareness. It was not in the air—there were Wardens at work, molding the forces there, but all was well. Fire, then? No, I sensed nothing but silence from that quarter.
The vile thing was happening to a living creature, and so it whispered through the power Manny had granted me.
And it was happening here.
I shot to my feet, eyes opening, and cast about for any sense of direction. Yes, there, there, to my right and not far away . . .
I unlocked and opened the door and stepped out on the landing my apartment shared with two others. The pulse was weak now, the life fading.
I descended the two flights of stairs at a run, arrived at ground level, and turned the corner.
A child lay on the ground, with a knot of other children around him. No one was touching him, and I got no sense of malice. Only confusion, and a dawning awareness of something wrong.
There was a machine next to him—a bicycle.
He had fallen.
“Move,” I ordered the children, and they scattered like bright birds. I knelt next to the boy, my hands moving slowly above him, sensing the rightness of his body, and then the wrongness in his skull.
The bone was broken. The brain—
“Get his people,” I said, intent on the task before me.
“What?”
“His father! His mother!” My brain struggled to parse words. “Parents.”
Two of the children ran, shouting at the top of their lungs. I slid my hand carefully behind the boy’s head, and under the feather-soft hair I felt the depression where he’d struck the curb. Blood flooded warm across my fingers.
I needed Manny, but he was away, and I was alone.
The Djinn part of me said, It is an accident. It is the way of living things.And the Djinn part of me was content to let it be so.
But the human part, the human part screamed in frustration, too urgent to ignore.
I pulled from the reserve of power inside and poured it through my fingertips. Of all that the Djinn knew, we knew this—the template of things. We could build, we could destroy . . . and we could, on occasion, heal, if we held enough power inside, and the injury was fresh and contained.
I felt the bone shift, and the boy screamed. The sound pierced me like cold metal, but I gritted my teeth and kept focusing on my work, sealing the bone together. I concentrated then on reducing the swelling of his injured brain tissues. The cut in the scalp was stubborn, and continued to leak red despite my commands.
Human hands closed around my shoulders and yanked me away from the shrieking child. I fell backward, surprised.
A human man was looming above me, face dark red with rage, a fist clenched. “What are you doing to my kid?” he shouted.
The boy squirmed away from me, got to his short legs and hurried to his father’s protection, wrapping his arms around the man’s waist. I remembered Isabel grabbing on to Manny’s knees, and the fierce love and protective instinct I’d sensed between them.
“I did not hurt him,” I said. I didn’t move. Violence hung like a black cloud around the man, and any provocation could unleash the storm. “He fell from his bicycle. He struck his head.”
The words had the desired effect, as did my calm tone and direct gaze. The man’s posture shifted, his fist relaxed, and he looked down at his child. He lifted the boy in his arms and touched the back of the small head.
His fingers came away bloody. “My God—”
“You should see a doctor,” I said. Not that the child needed one, but I thought it sounded like a human thing to say. “I don’t think he’s hurt badly, but—”
The boy began to cry, wails of pain and fright, and buried his face in his father’s chest. The man stared at me for a moment, then nodded once, a dry sort of thanks, before carrying his child away.
One of the other children grabbed the bicycle and wheeled it after them. One wheel wobbled badly.
I sat there breathing hard, blood on my hands, blood cooling in the gutter, and wondered what I had just done. I’d reacted virtually without thinking. I’d spent my precious hoard of energy almost down to the last trickle, and I knew that I would have continued to give until the well ran dry, once I had engaged in the battle for the child’s life.
That frightened me. Djinn were not so careless, nor so caring of others. He was human. Humans die.That was the Djinn philosophy, and it was true.
Yet I had not even once thought of withholding my help.
I got up, sore and tired, and went back to my apartment to wash and sleep, and worry about what was happening to me.
“You what?” I had not expected Manny to be angry, but he clearly was; his face was darkening in much the same way as the boy’s father’s had when he’d been contemplating violence. “How could you be so damn careless? You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re not a healer—you can’t just—” He got his temper under control by taking several slow, deep breaths. “How’s the kid?”
“I don’t know.”
“Great. Just great. Do you have any idea how much trouble you could have been in? What if the kid had died on you? Hell, what if he died later?”
“I didn’t cause his injury,” I said, affronted. We were standing in the living area of my apartment, and Manny had brought two cups of coffee—a morning ritual, he’d assured me. It was a kind gesture, but he’d done it before I had told him of the child and my actions.
The coffee sat forgotten on the table now.
“Maybe not, but you could have gotten tied up with all kinds of questions, and the police—” Manny pressed a hand to his forehead. “Damn. What am I saying? It might not have been smart, but I’d have done the same thing. I couldn’t have ignored it, either. But I have training.You don’t, Cassiel. You can’t just—jump in. Especially not without me, okay?”
I accepted that without argument. By human standards, it was true enough. “I should not have acted so quickly,” I agreed. “I need more power.”
I put it bluntly, to see both how it felt on the tongue and how he would react. The taste of it was fine. His reaction was instructive, in that his eyes widened, and I saw a spark of something that might have been excitement, quickly buried.
“All right,” he said, and his tone seemed deliberately casual. He held out his hand. I took it, and almost immediately, the beast inside of me, the hungry, desperate part, began to greedily devour what was offered. My sensible mind faded, pushed aside by need.
I felt Manny try to pull away. It sparked instincts in me—not Djinn instincts; the primitive impulses of a ruthless, successful predator.
The human impulse to hunt was complicating my needs.
No!
My distaste of those human instincts was all that saved him. I let go, wrenching the flow of power shut between us, and backed physically away, arms wrapped around my aching stomach.
Manny collapsed. It was slow, almost graceful, and he was never unconscious; he simply lacked the strength, or the will, to keep on his feet. Or his knees. He fell full length on the carpet and rolled onto his back, eyes dark and wide, gasping for breath.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I was. I was also well aware that I should not touch him again, not now. “Did I hurt you?”
“Not—exactly,” he said. He groaned and rolled painfully onto his side, then up to a sitting position. I could see the trembling in his muscles, as if he’d received a violent electric shock. “Let’s not do that again, okay? You’re kind of hard on your friends.”