“Cassiel,” Luis said, and held out his hand. I hadn’t realized that my reserves were sinking, but he was right. I needed power. The golden flow poured into me, waking shivers, and I cut it off as quickly as possible to keep my attention focused outward. “Put them out. Down, if you have to.”
I nodded. The policemen had their guns drawn, but unless they were very fine shots I doubted they could bring down any of these animals before being gutted. The bears were charging, one on Luis’s side, one on Officer Styles’s.
“Go!” Luis shouted, and let go of me. I spun away from him, facing the nearest threat. It was another mountain lion, already in the air. Her muzzle was drawn back, exposing her fearsome sharp teeth, and the roar was meant to freeze me in place.
Instead, I waited until the last instant, stepped aside, and straddled the lion’s back to slap my hands on its skull from behind as it landed. She roared again and twisted, but I found the blood vessels I needed, and squeezed.
She went limp. Still breathing, but down. I kept her at that level as I jumped across her body to veer in front of Officer Styles, who had his gun trained on the charging black bear.
This animal was not as large as some, but large enough—at least half a man’s weight, all muscle and fury. Black bears were, for the most part, good-tempered, but this one had been driven almost to the edge of madness. He was in terrible pain, and he would savage anything that came within reach of his claws and teeth.
I repeated the trick of knocking out the animal, but this time it was more difficult. I had to concentrate on the mountain lion, as well, and the bear was strong and very, very angry. When it finally collapsed into a messy tangle of broken grass, it was breathing heavily and making a noise that sounded terribly like a moan of fear.
I looked around. Luis had brought down the last mountain lion, and the other bear—cannier than the others—was pacing angrily in jerky paths, charging Luis, then backing away. Never quite committing. That one, I thought, was not fully under our enemy’s control.
All in all, we had managed to come out of this well, without unnecessary death.
I should not have been so sure of that.
My first hint of more trouble was from the other policeman—CAVANAUGH, his name tag read—who put a hand on my shoulder and pointed off toward the east. A black smudge of smoke was rising about a hundred feet away. As we watched, it spread into a line, and as the dry grass caught like tinder, flames blazed six feet into the air.
The wind was toward us.
Within seconds, the smoke had reached us, thick and choking. The fire would not be far behind, and grass fires could race faster than a running man. I couldn’t leave the animals helpless to burn alive, but if I freed them from control, they would turn on us.
“Run,” I snarled to Styles and Cavanaugh. “Get to the car!”
They did not argue. They pelted through the smoke, into the grass, heading in the right direction. I hoped there would be nothing there to meet them, but I had other problems.
Luis coughed wetly as he stumbled to my side. “Gotta go!” he shouted. I nodded.
“Go first!”
He clearly didn’t wish to, but he loped into a run and was immediately lost in the thickening smoke. I was coughing now myself, and my nose and eyes were dripping fluids. The air was filthy and thick.
I released the animals all at once, with a snap of power, and three mountain lions and one bear rolled up to their paws.
All oriented on me.
All forced to ignore their natural instincts, which would have taken them from the fire into safety.
They moved to circle me.
I waited until one darted toward me, then dodged and jumped the circle, and ran.Not toward the road—I could not be sure that the others had made it to safety yet, and I didn’t want to draw an attack to them.
I ran to the north, toward the trees. I fed my muscles on pure golden Earth Warden energy, putting on a burst of speed that kept the mountain lions bounding a few feet behind me. The smoke was blinding, and I felt a blast of heat loom at me from the right, hot enough to sear. I smelled my hair burning, an acrid and stomach-turning stench, and veered to the left as flames flickered and took hold in front of me.
It was no use. The field was fully in flame now, driving me toward the road in a broad, shrinking arc.
Out of desperation, I softened the ground beneath my feet and dropped into a sinkhole of powder-soft sand, plunging grave deep into the earth. I hardened the top as quickly as possible, and felt the thunder as the animals charged on, chasing shadows.
The pressure of the sand and earth around me was intense—cool, insistent, constant. I struggled not to fight it, concentrating instead on holding my breath and staying calm, calm, calm. Seconds ticked by, slow as torture. I counted every pulse beat.
When I could no longer resist the need to struggle for breath, I reversed the process, hardening the sand beneath my feet in stages, and rose from the ground like a dusty, pink-haired Aphrodite. . . .
. . . Into a blackened, stubbled, smoking emptiness like the shores of hell. The fire had passed over me and was sweeping toward the road, leaving smolders and sparks behind, and little else.
There was no sign of the mountain lions or the bears. They had lost me, and continued to race on to the safety of the trees, or veered toward the road.
I felt exhausted, bruised, and smoke soaked as I limped toward the line of flames and black billows. Before I reached it, the last of the grass was consumed to twisted ash, the wind carried sparks across the road, and the field on the other side of the pavement began to burn.
As smoke cleared, blown by the constant wind, I saw that the patrol car was intact, though smoke stained, and so was the Victory. The car doors opened.
Both policemen were safe.
There was no sign of Luis.
Chapter 13
I SEARCHED UNTILmy strength failed, but there was no trace of him. No sign of his body, either. It was dimly possible that he had been caught by the animals and dragged into the trees, but I thought he was too good an Earth Warden to have gone without a trace. And without a fight.
He had simply vanished into thin air, like his niece before him.
And now I was alone.
I had, at least, earned the respect of the two policemen. Styles required no explanations of me; he simply accepted it, perhaps too focused on the enormity of his missing child to care about any abilities Luis and I might have displayed. He would, I thought, find some logical reasons to forget or dismiss it all. Humans were well-practiced in the art of denying what did not fit their neatly ordered view of the world.
His partner Cavanaugh, however, seemed less willing to shrug it off. “But howdid you take down a cat like that? I mean, it’s a friggin’ mountain lion, not a tabby, and I can’t even get my cat to the vet without getting my face clawed off.” We were standing at the edge of the road, staring out at the blackened field. I had given up roaming in search of my missing Warden, and simply waited.
What I waited for, I couldn’t say. Perhaps I was just tired of losing people.
“It’s a simple thing,” I said wearily. “Any vet could do it. Pressure points.”
“Pressure points?” he echoed, eyebrows rounding in disbelief. “You’re kidding. I watch the Discovery Channel, and I never heard of anything like pressure points on a mountain lion. And, anyway, those big cats aren’t like African lions—they don’t travel in packs like that. It’s not natural. And the bears—what the hell was going on? I’ve never seen black bears attack like that.”
“The fire,” I said. “Driving animals out into the open.”
He was already shaking his head. “Panicked animals keep on running—they don’t stop to attack everything in their path. I don’t get it, but I don’t think I want to, right? This is some kind of CIA thing—you’d tell me but you’d have to kill me?”
And then Officer Styles turned and said, “You’re an Earth Warden.” I was temporarily surprised into silence. He didn’t wait for my answer in any case. “Christ, I can’t believe this.”