Indeed.
I cannot speak for Luis, but I stayed alert at all times, ready for any sort of attack, whether magical or physical. I learned that alertness carries a price. By the time we were finished packing the items in the bedroom and marking them, it was late—dark outside.
“You throw out everything in the fridge?” Luis asked at last, sinking wearily down on the stripped mattress. I shrugged. “Guess it’s pizza, then.”
He called a number taped to the refrigerator’s door. He must have realized it was useless to ask me what I preferred in the area of pizza, because he ordered something called a combination, and pulled a couple of beers out of the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, toward the back, that I had left, in case he wanted them. He tossed one to me, and I caught it.
We twisted off the caps and drank in silence. I wondered if he was also waiting for the attack, and feeling the slight, indefinable strain of it.
The pizza came, borne in a sagging cardboard box by an unenthusiastic messenger. Luis paid for it, locked the door, and we sat down together on the couch to eat.
I took the first bite, and it was lucky that I did. My senses were sharper than a human’s, mostly because they had received relatively little use, and I tasted the poison immediately. I spat out the bite.
“Don’t like the mushrooms?” Luis asked, and was on the verge of putting his own slice into his mouth when I knocked it out of his hand. “Whoa! Okay, you reallydon’t like mushrooms.”
“Amanita virosa,”I said, pointing at the innocent-seeming chunks of mushroom. “Deadly within a day.” I moved to point at finely diced white cubes scattered among the chunks of sausage and wheels of pepperoni. “Aconite. Wolfsbane. Very fast acting, difficult to treat. There’s more.”
Luis had a stunned look on his face as he sank back on the couch, staring at the food. “Somebody poisoned the pizza?”
“The pizza was made correctly,” I said. “ Amanita virosais genetically very similar to Agaricus bisporus, the table mushroom. And I expect that the aconite was converted from garlic. It would be easier to do it from horseradish, of course, but someone spent time changing the toppings with great care.”
It took him a moment, but Luis followed my logic. “An Earth Warden did this. Poisoned it by genetically twisting certain ingredients.”
“Also by accelerating the decay rate in the meat.”
He visibly shuddered. “How the helldoes somebody think of that?”
“They knew we’d be looking for a direct attack. This was more subtle.” It would have worked, too, if I hadn’t been possessed of more acute senses than normal. The inside of my mouth tingled, but I knew I hadn’t absorbed more than a light dose. “Would you have known?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Probably not right away.” Luis looked very shaken. “What about the beer?”
“We’d have felt any attempt to change it while we were here, and I don’t taste anything wrong with it.” I smiled slightly. “No more than there usually is, with beer.”
He responded by picking up his bottle and glugging down several swallows, still staring at the pizza box. “Do you know who it was?” he asked me.
I contemplated the pizza box, touched the damp cardboard, even trailed my fingers over the offending poisonous mushrooms. “No,” I finally said. My senses were blunted and imprecise, frustrating. I should have known, should have been able to tell who had done this thing, but trapped as I was, heavy in flesh, the trail went cold.
“All right, that’s it,” he said. “If I can’t trust the food I put in my mouth, avoiding a fight ain’t going to work.”
I raised my eyebrows. “So?”
“So. We’re taking the fight to them.”
It wasn’t so simple as that. Without knowing who and where, we were moving blind—and with our usual sources of information, through the Wardens, cut off from us, we had little in the way of resources.
While Luis slept, wrapped in an old quilt on the couch, I sat on the floor with a small lit candle and silently called the name of a Djinn, in repetitions of three.
It took me well into the night, and more than one candle, but I finally had a response. The flame flickered, flared, and guttered out in a hiss of molten wax, and darkness fell around me like a heavy cloak.
I didn’t move.
When the candle sputtered back to life, a Djinn had appeared across from me.
“Quintus,” I said. “Thank you.”
He nodded slightly. His eyes glowed with banked fire, and I knew that inviting him here was a dangerous game. He had shown me no special enmity, and had, in fact, saved my life, but that didn’t mean he would do it again. Or that he wouldn’t have changed sides.
“I’m sorry about Molly,” I said. “I didn’t kill her.”
He didn’t blink, and his expression stayed remote and calm. “No,” he said. “I know that you didn’t. If you had, I’d have ripped you apart and fed you to pigs within the hour.”
The venom in him was chilling. So was the fact that he didn’t bother to manifest himself completely; his eyes were on a level with mine, but he dissolved into dark gray rolling mist below his waist.
“What do you want, Cassiel? I’m tired of your chanting.” Quintus smiled, but it wasn’t at all friendly. “Most human calls can’t reach us. Yours seems to be especially annoying.”
I was glad to know it. It might one day mean my death, if I annoyed them too badly. “Do you know what happened to Molly?”
His eyes narrowed, and it seemed to me that his face sharpened its lines, took on more definition along with more anger. “She was murdered. It was quick and vicious, and I was elsewhere. What more do you want?”
“I want to know how far you traced the killer.” I had absolutely no doubts that he’d done so. I’d raced after the car full of gunmen who’d shot down Manny, and if Quintus truly cared for the woman, he’d have done the same.
Seconds passed, thick and ominous. “It’s not that simple,” he finally said. “Even the Djinn can’t fight shadows.”
“How far did you trace the attack, Quintus?”
He looked past me, at Luis, who was snoring lightly on the couch. “I traced it to the end.”
“What does that—”
“Don’t ask me, Cassiel. I can’t tell you.” Not, I realized, that he wouldn’t.He couldn’t.“There is a geas on me.”
A geas was a special kind of restraint, one that only a Conduit could apply—or an Oracle, I supposed. It was beyond the power of a normal Djinn, even the mightiest of us.
I had narrowed our pool of suspects considerably—and made it infinitely more dangerous. “We are going to Colorado,” I said. “We think the attacks are originating there.”
I was careful not to make it a question; a geas would force him to silence in response, or even to a lie. But a statement might pass.
It did. Quintus seemed to relax a fraction. “I hear it’s nice this time of year,” he said. “Cassiel, be careful. There are more things happening than you can see.”
I tried again. “We’re going to The Ranch.”
Quintus went silent, staring at me. I couldn’t sense anything from him, not even a flicker of struggle. The geas was a very strong one, and watchful.
He had, however, confirmed by his very silence what Warden Sands had said—our enemies were at The Ranch.
In Colorado.
Now we just had to find it. According to the maps I had studied, Colorado contained more than one hundred thousand square miles of land, and much of it was wilderness or ranches.
“Cassiel,” Quintus said. “I know you have to do this. If you don’t, you’ll be killed.” He was giving me information, as much as he could. Warning me. “They won’t stop coming for you.”
I looked toward Luis. “Not only me. And it may touch more than the two of us. It already has.” I returned my attention to Quintus quickly, warily, but he hadn’t moved. “Our enemies are near a river.”