I batted away the attack with brute force, giving Luis a few precious seconds of recovery time, before it came back, fast as a striking snake. It was almost invisible on the aetheric, a shifting mass of color that blended into the general storm of chaos. Difficult to anticipate.
Difficult to stop.
I couldn’t allow them to get a hold on him. Seconds counted in this, and the damage could be mortal, beyond my ability to repair—I didn’t know enough about the human body, didn’t have the fine surgical instincts of an Earth Warden. My healing of the boy had been lucky, and I’d had no risks; this time, failure would be utter destruction.
I threw myself into the aetheric and put myself in the way of the attack. Better me. He can heal me after.
That seemed logical enough, until the attack actually struck me full force.
In the mortal world, I gasped and folded, hands pressed to my chest. The pain was extreme, the panic even worse. Trying to form an effective shield under the assault was near useless; my instincts, my humaninstincts for breath and survival, overrode my logic, made me struggle madly like an animal in a trap.
I felt Luis’s hands on me, holding me. “Cassiel!”
I would not fail. I could not allow it. Weakness was a human trait; I was Djinn. . . .
I screamed, and the world shattered into knives of agony. Death. This is death.
Shadows on the aetheric, and a blazing white outline of a human form in front of me, dazzling my eyes.
Luis. He’d had a chance to prepare himself, while I’d taken the brunt of the attack, and this time, he not only gave me relief from the pain; he struck back, hammering away the assault. He’d done something to shield himself; his heart glowed a brilliant red on the aetheric, and as I watched, the tint spread through his ghostly form, tracing organs, veins, arteries. It tinted his aura into spectrums that reminded me of the hot surface of the sun.
He was beautiful.And as I collapsed, shaking and defeated, he stood against them.
Human, and beautiful.
The attack ended not with an explosion, but with a whimper, fading away into mutters and fitful gusts, rattles of pebbles on scarred metal, a final angry spurt of dust.
Silence.
Luis was whispering under his breath, a long monologue in Spanish that I thought was a string of prayers and curses, followed by more prayers. He was shaking, and somehow I was pressed against him, his arms enfolding me.
Breathe.My lungs ached with the effort, but I forced them to work. Bright sparks of pain leapt through my body, the afterimages of what our attackers had done to us, and I knew I was trembling as much as Luis.
“Hey.” His voice was low and rough. “You still with me?”
I nodded, unable to speak. My body was sticky with sweat, my hands cold as if they’d been plunged into wet snow. When I swallowed, I tasted bitter salt and blood. I waited for him to release me, but Luis didn’t seem inclined to let go. There was something comforting about the warmth of his chest against me, the strength of his arms holding me.
I did not struggle free.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“I couldn’t—”
He laughed softly, and his breath brushed my ear. It woke new shivers, pleasurable ones. “You got in the way and gave me time to get it together. You saved my damn life, chica. What are you sorry for?”
Not doing it well enough, I supposed. There seemed no logic to that, but there it was, immutable and inexplicable. “I’m sorry about your truck,” I said instead.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Damn. Me too. So—did we learn anything from that?”
“They’re strong.”
“We knew that already.”
“They’re vicious.”
“Knew that too.”
I looked up into his face. “They’re in Colorado.”
“Oh.” His arms tightened around me, and his dark c, ant> eyes widened. So did his smile. “ Didn’tknow that.”
Chapter 9
I HAD TRACKEDthe attacker through the aetheric across New Mexico, into mountains to the north. I had lost the trail somewhere near the border, according to the map. I was considering this as we crossed the Albuquerque city limits, but there were no answers to be found on the flimsy paper, which flapped in the wind coming from the shattered passenger’s window, and I folded it carefully and put it away.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“First thing, I’m dropping the truck off at the body shop,” Luis said. “Then I’m crashing for about two hours.” He paused for a moment, and his voice changed timbre. “I have to go to the funeral home at ten.”
Funeral home.An odd combination of words. Homes were for the living, and for a moment I thought about the house—no longer a home—where Manny and Angela and Isabel had lived. Someone else would make it a home, in time, but for now it was a reminder, an empty shell filled with inert, abandoned things.
A place I had once felt happy.
“Should I go with you?” I asked. That earned me another glance, and a moment of silence. “If I shouldn’t—”
“It’s not that you shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s that we have to get you cleared by the Wardens and the cops before you start showing your hot pink head around town. Know what I mean?”
I did. “How do we do that?”
“I’m working on it. You’re going to have to sit down with a couple of representatives from the Wardens, eventually, but I heard yesterday that some odd things turned up at Scott’s apartment, and the Wardens are looking at that differently.”
“And Molly Magruder?”
Luis shrugged. “That one’s a little tougher. I don’t know yet, but they said they’ve got some other leads on that, too. Anyway. I should find you a hotel; you dig in and wait for a while.”
“I could disguise myself,” I said.
“Yeah, you’ve done a great job so far. Pinkhair?”
“No one looks at my face.” I thought I’d done a good job. It stung me that he disagreed. “I don’t like to hide away.”
“Nobody likes it, but it’s the smart thing to do,” he said. He pulled the truck off the road into the parking lot of a small, cleanly kept motel coated in pink adobe. “I’ll get your bike out of the back, but promise me you won’t go anywhere.”
I looked at him, said nothing, and got out of the truck. Luis shook his head and went around to the bed of the truck to wrestle the Victory down the ramp, while I entered the motel office to use my credit card to buy a room. It was a new experience for me, but not unpleasant; the clerk was efficient and impersonal, and the process short. By the time I came out again, Luis had the motorcycle parked in an empty spot next to the truck, and I had a chance fess to survey the damage.
The Victory had come through remarkably un-scarred. The same couldn’t be said for Luis’s truck, which was pitted, dented, and scraped where the paint hadn’t chipped or at least been dulled by the abrasive scrub of sand. The passenger’s window was gone, only jagged fragments remaining. The front windshield was a web of cracks and pits.
Luis was staring at it with folded arms and a miserable expression.
“Man,” he said, “knowing you is expensive.”
I wanted to say something appropriate, something that would mean I valued his company. Something to recognize the moments in the truck when the two of us had been—different.
Luis continued to look at the truck, and for a moment I caught the sadness in him, the loss, and I knew he was thinking of his brother. The brother he would have to see again soon, in the funeral home.
The brother I had failed.
“I want to see Isabel,” I said. That made him turn toward me, frowning. “I understand it’s a risk. But you said she was asking for me.”