Unknown
(The second book in the Outcast Season series)
A novel by Rachel Caine
To Alan & Sivi Balthrop, and their lovely family,
with much love and respect. Thank you for giving
me such constant, loving support!
To A. J. Merrifield, for being just so damn cool.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are too many debts to acknowledge in the course of writing this book, but I would like to gratefully recognize the following virtues:
Prudence (from my mother, Hazel, who keeps me grounded)
Justice (from my beta readers, blessed be they)
Courage (from my agent, Lucienne Diver, who surely needs it to deal with me)
Faith (from my husband, Cat, who replies to all my complaints about the progress of my book with a simple “I know you can do it.”)
Hope (from the Sales & Marketing Department)
Charity (from my lovely editor, Anne, who gave me the time I needed)
I am nothing without these virtues.
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
MY NAME IS CASSIEL, and I was once a Djinn—a being as old as the Earth herself, rooted in her power. I cared little for the small, scurrying human creatures who busied themselves with their small lives.
Things have changed. Now I am a small, scurrying human creature. In form, at any rate. Thanks to a disagreement with Ashan, the leader of the True Djinn, I can only sustain my life through the charity of the Wardens—humans who control aspects of the powers that surround us, such as wind and fire. The Warden I’m partnered with, Luis Rocha, commands the powers of the living Earth.
I have made mistakes, in my short existence as a human. I have made promises I could not keep. I have lost those I learned to love.
I will not let it happen again.
Even if every instinct tells me I must.
Chapter 1
SO MANY MISSING CHILDREN.
Their faces looked at me from the flat surfaces of posters and flyers, tacked to a long board opposite the row of chairs—a sad parade of even sadder stories.
Although several young girls with brown hair and vulnerable smiles looked back at me, Isabel Rocha’s picture was not on the wall. I found some comfort in that. I will find you, I promised her, as I did each day. On your mother and father’s souls, I will find you.
I had allowed her mother and father to be murdered. I would not allow Isabel to share the same fate.
I sat with Luis Rocha in the hallway outside of the offices of the FBI, which he had carefully explained was a place where I could not, for any reason, cause trouble. I failed to understand why this hallway should be different from any other in the city of Albuquerque, but I had agreed, with a good bit of annoyance.
Luis was in no mood to debate with me. “Just do it,” he snapped, and then fell into a dark, restless silence.
I watched him pace in front of me as his dark gaze took in the wall of photos, a tense, revolted expression on his face. He stopped, and the expression altered into a frown. He pointed one flyer out to me. “That’s Ben Hession’s kid. Ben’s a Fire Warden.”
I nodded, but I doubt he noticed. He lowered his finger, but his hands formed into fists at his sides, emphasizing the sinuous flame tattoos licking up and down his arms. Once again, I wondered at the choice; Luis Rocha controlled Earth, not Fire. In that, he and his brother Manny had been alike, though Luis’s power outstripped Manny’s by leagues.
Manny had been my Warden partner, assigned to me by the highest levels of his organization to teach me to live as a human and use my powers—for I still had some, although nowhere near as many as I had as a Djinn—usefully. How to become a Warden in my own right. Manny had been a sweet, patient soul who had given of himself to sustain me in this new life.
And I had let him die. Now it was Luis’s responsibility to look after me, and mine to never allow such a thing to happen again.
A tired-looking man in a rumpled suit stepped outside of his office and gestured to us. As he did, his coat swung open to reveal the holstered butt of a gun attached to his belt. For an ice-cold instant I had an unguarded memory, a sense-memory of the shock and rage washing over me as I watched the bullets strike Manny, strike Angela . . .
It’s a memory I don’t care to relive.
Something must have changed in my face or my manner, because his altered in response. His eyes sharpened their focus, narrowing on me, and his hand moved closer to his body. Closer to the weapon.
I looked away, at Luis. “He has a gun,” I said.
“He’s FBI,” Luis told me, and folded his arms across his chest. “He has to carry one. It’s a tool for him.”
“I don’t like it,” I said. He shrugged.
“Deal.”
The FBI man stared at me as if I had said or done something that alarmed him, then transferred his attention back to Luis. “Luis Rocha?”
Luis nodded and walked toward him. I rose to follow. “That’s Cassiel,” he said. “You might have heard.”
“I heard,” the FBI man said. “I just didn’t believe it. Guess they weren’t kidding.” He offered me a half- nod—not a welcome, just an acknowledgment. I returned it exactly. “Inside. I don’t want to talk in the hall.” He looked right and left, as if someone might be listening although no one was in view except the silent, sad wall of photographs. Luis moved ahead of him into the office.
I stopped for a moment to lock gazes with the man again. He was tall, though only an inch or so taller than I, and whipcord thin. He had a bland, quiet face and dark, oddly empty eyes, as if he hid everything except what he wished me to see. His clothing was just as bland—a plain shirt beneath a plain dark suit and tie.
“Inside,” he repeated. “Please.”
There was something about him I could not explain, something beneath the surface. It occurred to me, finally, as he swung the door shut behind me, closing the three of us within a plain box of a room with tinted windows along one wall. I turned and said, “You’re a Warden.”
“Undercover,” he said. “It pays to have a few of us seeded inside the various intelligence-gathering agencies, so we can keep on top of things. First time I’ve been contacted directly, though.” His gaze found me again, very briefly. “Also the first time I’ve met a Djinn face-to-face.”
“You still haven’t,” I said. “I am no longer a Djinn.” It still hurt to say it.
“You’re not exactly human either, the way I understand it. Close enough for government work,” he said, and indicated the chairs on our side of the plain, institutional desk as he took the battered one behind it. “So, why come to me?”
“Because the FBI investigates cases of missing children,” I said. “And we have a missing child.”
“We,” he repeated a little slowly. “The two of you.”
Luis cleared his throat and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Yeah, well, the missing girl is my niece,” he said. “Cassiel’s an interested party. And my partner.” He let two seconds go by, then added, “Not that way, okay?”
“Okay,” the FBI man said, without a flicker of expression. The nameplate on his desk read SA BEN TURNER. “So tell me what you’ve got.”
I let Luis tell it, in his own way—the abduction of his recently orphaned niece, our pursuit, our discovery that the children of Wardens were being selectively abducted and taken to a hidden location, where they were being trained. Molded.
Turner did not interrupt. Not once. He listened almost without blinking, and when Luis finally paused, he said, “So who is this you’re talking about? What’s their goal?”
Luis looked at me.
“The one who leads them was once a Djinn,” I said. “You would call her Pearl. She . . . is extraordinarily dangerous, and she is insane. As to goals, I think the children—and all humanity—are insignificant to her. Her goal is much larger.”