I didn’t look back, but I heard Luis say, very quietly, “I’m sorry.” I didn’t know if he meant it for the boy, or for me.
I made the boy a grave on a hillside, near an overhanging fragrant bush that offered a little shade. It overlooked a valley lush with the rainbow of the desert—russets, ochers, and tans, dotted with vivid greens and the occasional struggling flower. It had a kind of empty, wild beauty. It was all I could offer as apology, as acknowledgment of what Luis had said—that somewhere in the world, someone was missing this boy.
I stripped away the blanket and carefully, using bursts of Luis’s power, removed any traces that might link the boy back to us before wrapping it tightly around him again, in an obscure wish to give comfort. Conscious of the press of time, I knew I couldn’t hesitate, yet something made me do just that.
I looked down on the boy’s silent, empty face before covering it, and said, “Be at peace, child. I will stop those who hurt you.”
Then I leaped out of the grave and triggered a heavy landslide of dirt to cover him. The earth flowed and shifted, thumping heavily down, and I felt myself flinch from the sound. Not a Djinn reaction, a human one, a primal recognition of what it meant to be beneath the ground. To be gone from the world.
I sent out a thought that might have, in a human, been a prayer, as the earth settled in place above him.
I felt the Mother stir slowly and quietly beneath my feet, a sense gifted to me through my connection to Luis—although even Luis rarely felt Her presence so clearly. A tendril only, a whisper, questioning, like a murmur in sleep. This borrowed touch, fleeting and faint, made me drop to my knees and press my hands flat into the sand. I gasped in ragged breaths, begging with all my soul for the blessing of her awareness, of her embrace.
I had forgotten how alone I was, until for a single, shining instant, I was found.
Then sense faded, and I was alone, lost, and afraid once more.
Human, again.
I rose, still breathing hard, and wiped the tears from my dusty face before heading back to the van.
“Here they come,” Luis said, less than half an hour later, glancing in the rearview mirror. “You know the drill, Cass. Stay cool.”
I nodded. The van was completely empty of any trace of the boy. No doubt there would have been witnesses that saw the boy back near the Rocha house, but one thing I had quickly learned about Luis’s neighbors: They were not eager to help the police.
It was highly doubtful any of them would talk.
I looked in the mirror on the passenger side and saw the lurid red and blue lights, and heard the rising wail of a siren. Luis immediately slowed the van, pulling off to the gravel shoulder of the road.
The police car pulled in behind.
It went as Luis had no doubt assumed it would; we were ordered to get out of the van and lean against the hot metal of the vehicle. The policemen—two large men who kept their ready hands near the butts of their guns—searched the van, then each of us. Luis stayed bland and calm. If I fumed at the casual way that they dared to touch me, I kept the reactions carefully hidden. That was one thing that Detective Halley had done for me; he had taught me to handle these official invasions with some semblance of control.
All licenses and registrations were current, and, as I had expected, the police had nothing but an anonymous report on which to question us. Without some physical evidence, they were forced to let us go.
I didn’t imagine for a moment that they were happy about it.
Luis let out a slow breath as the police car, its lights still flashing, disappeared behind us. He kept the van to a careful speed, mindful of all road laws, and at the next turning pulled off in the parking lot of a diner that advertised HOME COOKING. It smelled like grease, even from where I sat a hundred feet away.
“Are we turning around?” I asked. I sincerely hoped we weren’t stopping for food. Not here.
“I was thinking about it,” Luis admitted, then shook his head. “No, it’s no good. We need information, and we’re not going to get it sitting around waiting for Pearl to send another kid after us. The Ma’at know things we don’t. Let’s see what we can get out of them.”
Activity. I felt a slow smile spread across my face, warm and genuine. “Sounds like fun.”
“Your definition of fun sometimes worries me.” Dark eyes examined me for a moment. “You want something to eat?”
I shuddered. “Not here.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes.”
“Not even pie?”
I did love pie. I turned my gaze to the diner, and said, “Not here.”
“You’re too picky.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “Perhaps I have a better-developed sense of self-preservation than you do.”
He frowned. “You just got no appreciation for the little things.”
I continued to smile as the hot breeze blew in through the open window, washing away the stench of burning food. “Then how is it that I like pie?” I asked him. “Or that I like you?”
“Hey, I’m not a little thing. Don’t you go spreading that rumor.”
“Everything is small,” I said, and my smile faded.
“Everything. Even me.” The memory of that brush of the Mother’s touch ached inside me, woke needs that had slept since I’d been cast down into human flesh. I wanted, needed . . .
Luis took my hand in his, a human touch that was irrationally comforting. “Stay with me, Cass. We’re going to find a way out of this.”
I knew the way out. I kept my gaze trained on the desert as it swept by outside my passenger window, and I tried not to think about how much destruction lay along that path to victory.
I would lose him.
I would lose them all in winning, and it would be such a fierce, cold victory. A world empty, new, swept clean of the complications of humanity. The way Pearl had swept the world clean, once. For the good of the Djinn, or so we had pretended.
It had not been worth it then. I was far from sure that it would be worth it now.
Las Vegas was a dizzying wonderland of lights that reminded me of nothing so much as the aetheric. It was filled with spinning, brilliant colors that seemed to blend one into another, too many for the eye to take in. It seemed to burst out of the ground in fantastic shapes, more a defiance of nature than its product. Where Albuquerque often seemed shaped by its environment, Las Vegas seemed to deliberately ignore the land upon which it sat.
There was a certain magnificent idiocy in that, a denial of all the reality so evident around us. Humans. I would never truly understand them, even if I survived in this body a hundred years. That made me wonder . . . would I grow old? Develop infirmities and diseases? Could I actually create life, the way humans did, to live on after my time on the Earth?
The thought made me involuntarily look at Luis, who was navigating the van through traffic with the ease of someone who was a frequent visitor to this town. He glanced back. “What are you thinking?” he asked.
“I don’t think you would want to know,” I said, very truthfully. I couldn’t imagine Luis would find it comforting to consider the prospect of a child, much less being the father of my child.
Although, if the earlier events had been at all indicative of his feelings, and not simply raw physical needs let loose by the whiskey, then . . . perhaps. But it seemed not to be the time to pursue the thought.
“Okay,” he said. “So we’re going to meet with the head guy for the Ma’at. You’re going to mind your manners, right?”
“Of course.”
From the rude noise he made, Luis evidently did not believe me. That was, perhaps, appropriate. “Just try not to destroy anything. Or make enemies out of the only real allies I’ve been able to scrounge up. It’s not like we’re neck deep in people willing to help us, you know.”