I walked up to the shattered car. Inside were shattered humans. Some were even alive, though I did not think they would be for long. For a moment, I wondered if I should feel something for them—regret for ending their lives? They were young, but they had fired guns at a child younger still, and that I could not forgive.
I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the emergency number Manny had shown me to report an accident, and began the walk back to the house. After a few moments, I realized how exhausted I was, how much that effort had drained from me. More than I’d expected.
More than I could afford.
Manny will help,I thought, and something flickered inside of me, a pale shadow of a connection. Manny?
The connection snapped, a physical sensation that brought with it a white-hot flash of pain. I stopped, panting, and braced myself with my hands on my knees.
Manny?
I forced myself to a jog. People were peering from their windows, looking at the steaming wreckage in the middle of the street; a few noticed me, but there was little to connect me to the event other than proximity. I kept moving. I heard sirens, but the emergency and police response was from behind me.
I turned the corner and slowed to a walk. Manny’s house was within view, eerily quiet now that the shooting was done. I could not see anyone. Likely they had all gone inside, which would be a sensible thing to do. . . .
No, I saw Isabel. She was huddled next to the fence, clearly terrified. Her small fists were balled up to cover her mouth.
And then I saw Luis Rocha, on his knees next to two prone human bodies. There was blood on his hands, splashed on his shirt. Thin threads of it on his face. As I watched, he put the palm of his right hand on the chest of the man lying on the ground. He braced it with the left, then pumped, hard, five times. Leaned forward to tilt the head back and breathe into the open mouth.
He was gasping and sweating with effort. Luis’s eyes fixed on me, and all the pieces flew together, took on weight and meaning. It all hit me with the force of a head-on collision.
Manny. Manny was lying on the ground. Manny was bleeding.
He was trying to save Manny’s life. Next to Manny, Angela was already dead, with a bullet lodged in her brain. I could sense the inert darkness in her. Her life, her energy, was gone, fled beyond where I could chase.
“Get over here!” Luis screamed at me. I vaulted the fence and ran to his side, knelt beside him, and took his hand. I had no power left, barely enough to continue to nourish my human body, but what I had, I gave.
It was not enough. Luis’s Earth powers were already depleted from his efforts, and although I tried to amplify what was left, it was too little, the damage too great.
Manny’s heart had been shredded by the force of the bullet. Another had broken his spine.
He was dead. The last wisps of energy faded out of him, left the body empty and dark in front of me.
Luis realized it at the same moment, and as I glanced up at him, I saw the overwhelming horror and loss dawn in his face.
“No,” he said. “No. No!”
I said nothing. There was too much inside of me, too much to understand, to feel, to process. Manny was gone.He would never laugh at me again, or be angry, or take my hand and give me some of his life. He had no life to give. He was no longer in the flesh stretched out before me.
Angela. Angela would never make her child another meal, touch her with love and kindness, wipe away her tears. Angela had made me food in her kitchen, and smiled at me.
They were my friends.
They were dead.
I was unprepared for the harsh burn of grief. It made the world unsteady around me, made me tremble deep within, and I could think of nothing, nothingto do. Tears stung in my eyes, and I felt them fall, cold as diamonds.
Luis’s dark eyes locked on mine, and they ignited not with tears, but with fury. “Where were you?” he screamed, and grabbed me by the shoulders to shake me with brutal force. “You bitch, where did you go? They were dying! They were dying!”
I understood then. Angela and Manny had fallen as I’d taken up the pursuit of the car. I had left Luis alone with them, with the overwhelming task of trying to save one or the other . . . or neither.
I had spent my energy in vengeance. Would it have made a difference if I had immediately linked with Luis and struggled to heal the damage done? No,something inside of me said, but I couldn’t be sure of that. If I’d acted for life, instead of death . . .
Luis shook me again, screaming at me in Spanish. I knocked his hands away with a sharp impact of my forearms against his and took in a steadying breath. My heart was racing, my tears falling in cold streams. I felt dead inside, not merely from the expense of power but from the loss of something I had not even known I could value.
“Isabel,” I said. Luis, face still contorted in fury and grief, rocked back on his heels, away from me, and looked at his niece. She was weeping, curled in a ball with a dirty-faced doll clutched to her chest.
“Oh, mija,” he whispered, and the anger melted from him. “Oh, no.”
He got to his feet, moving like a man twice his age, and picked the girl up in his arms. I put a hand on her back—partly to comfort, and partly to sense her physical condition.
She was unharmed, though Luis’s hands left streaks of her father’s blood on her clothes.
“Take her inside,” I said. “Call the police.”
He walked up the front steps to the door. Isabel’s eyes were open but seeing nothing. She was sucking her thumb.
Luis turned her face away from her parents and me, and sent me a glare that would have quailed even Ashan. “You should have stayed, you Djinn bitch,” he told me. “If you’d stayed, they’d be alive.”
I knew, as I knelt next to the dead body of the man who had been my Conduit, and my first real friend, that Luis was right.
I should have stayed.
Chapter 7
STRANGE, HOW ONEperson’s tragedy so quickly becomes someone else’s job. The ambulance attendants first, though their efforts were small; they knew well that neither Angela nor Manny would ever rise again. They left the bodies there, in the front yard, for the police. As they walked away, they were talking about stopping for a meal.
As if life went on.
I wanted to destroy them, snuff them out like candles, but I knew that Manny and Angela would not want it so. I didn’t have the power to do it, either.
I stood, still and quiet, waiting. I won’t leave you,I told them. Not again.
The police arrived moments later—a marked cruiser, with flashing lights and sirens. One of the officers immediately made a straight line for me; the other began moving back crowds of neighbors and passersby who had gathered to gawk.
“Ma’am?”
I focused away from Manny’s bloody, empty face to the smooth expression of the policeman opposite me.
“What’s your name?”
“Cassiel,” I said. He wrote something down and waited, as if I should have more to say. Ah yes. Last names. Humans had last names, denoting family lineage. “Rose. Cassiel Rose.” So read the identification card in my pocket. When he asked, I produced it, and he wrote down more information before handing it back.
“Can you tell me what happened here?”
I did, as best I could. The black sedan approaching, the gunfire. Chasing the car. I stopped short of admitting that I’d caused the crash.
He let several beats of silence go by when I was finished. “You . . . chased them.”
“Yes.”
“You chased a car full of gang-bangers who’d just shot up a house.”