The officer did not seem amused.
Turner held open the sedan’s back door, and Luis and I slid inside. In less than a minute, we were speeding away toward Albuquerque.
It was home, and yet I had the conviction that we were also headed toward a lethal combination of grief and trouble.
Although it seemed trouble was a constant companion, these days.
Ben Turner was a very fast driver, disobeying the posted speed limits with the abandon of a law enforcement man on a mission.
I sat in the back, struggling to control the nausea that roiled within me. Turner’s car was not the most pleasant experience—either sensory or psychic—that I had ever encountered. He’d had blood spilled on the seats. Bodily fluids of all sorts. And death. The car reeked of death—perhaps not in a physical sense, but the impression of a bad and lingering agony was embedded into every part of the vehicle. Something terrible had happened here, before. Something that would never completely go away.
I was struggling with the urge to blow the door off its hinges and leap from the car. The only thing that stopped me was the absolute certainty that Luis would suffer for it if I did so.
And then I was distracted.
“Shit!” Turner yelped, and in the same instant hit the brakes. Tires screeched, and Luis and I both reflexively threw out our hands to brace ourselves as the sedan’s nose tipped down, fighting its own momentum.
Rashid had appeared in the middle of the road, perhaps five hundred yards away. Arms folded, a shark’s smile on his face, watching the car hurtle toward him at killing speed.
Turner, face gone white, fought desperately with the vehicle.
“Just hit him,” I said, through gritted teeth. “It serves him right.”
Turner paid no attention to my excellent advice. He managed to bring the car to a smoking, sliding halt no more than a foot from Rashid’s immobile body.
For a moment, no one moved. White, stinking smoke from the scorched tires blew into my window, and I coughed and choked. The cloud of smoke moved toward Rashid, but he simply waved it away, still smiling.
Ben Turner looked stunned, but in the next flash of a second, his face turned beet red and screwed up in righteously justifiable anger. He opened his car door and got out, yelling, “You idiot! You could have gotten us all killed—”
Rashid simply looked at him. To his credit, it didn’t take Turner long to realize his mistake, to take in the slightly-off color of the Djinn’s skin, the shine of his eyes. He turned to look through the windshield at Luis, then at me. Then back at Rashid. His lips compressed into a thin, angry line.
“Djinn. So I guess he’s with you two,” Turner said.
Rashid made a rude sound. “Not in any sense, I assure you.” On that, we were in complete agreement. He stalked around to the passenger door of the front seat, opened it, and got in. Leaving Turner standing outside, staring in at us.
We all stared back at him.
“Seriously,” Turner said. “He’s a Djinn.”
Rashid reached out and touched a finger to the ignition of the car. It fired to life without benefit of the key, dangling from Turner’s shaking fingers. “Yes,” he said. “Seriously.”
Turner blinked, as if the world had gone out of focus, and shook his head. He slipped back into the driver’s seat, looked at the key in his hand, then dropped it into the drink holder next to him. He put the car in drive and accelerated away, fast. I looked behind us and saw the heavy black streaks of skid marks disappearing behind us.
“Didn’t really think you’d show up again,” Luis said to Rashid.
I turned my head back. “I did.”
Rashid was watching me with a predator’s hot intensity. Waiting for weakness. Well, I had that in abundance, but I was not willing to demonstrate it on his command. “You found something,” I said. “Correct?”
“No, I came back because I find your company so inspirational. Of course I found something.” His mouth stretched and settled into something that was almost a smile. “I found the boy’s bloodline. His sires are gone from the world.”
“Siblings?”
“No. Distant branches. Nothing close.”
I shook my head and translated that for Luis. “His parents are dead. No brothers, sisters, or cousins.”
“Yes,” Rashid confirmed. “His father was a Warden, killed in Ashan’s uprising. His mother was mere human, dead of disease.”
“Orphan,” Luis said. “An orphan with latent Warden powers.”
Rashid said, “He was listed so on the rolls.”
Both Turner and Luis sent him identical looks. “Rolls?” Turner was just a beat faster at the question than my Warden partner. “You mean there’s a list?”
Rashid lifted an eyebrow slowly. “You mean you don’t keep your own lists? How careless of you. How do you ensure your progeny are trained properly if you don’t have a record of their potential?”
Luis’s mouth opened, then shut, and he looked at me instead. “Let me get this straight, okay, just so there’s no confusion: The Djinn have a record of kids born with Warden powers?”
He was asking me. It was embarrassing, but I had to admit the truth. “I don’t know,” I said. “If it’s done, I had nothing to do with it. I had no interest in Wardens, much less regular humans.”
Luis stared for a beat, then went back to Rashid. “Can you get us that list?”
“Why?”
“Because the kids on that list are all at risk. It’s our best way to get ahead of this bitch and stop her from taking more kids. If we can lock down all these potential victims . . .”
“You forget,” I said. “Some of their parents are willing participants. And we don’t have enough Wardens to do this.”
“We’ve got enough FBI. And enough cops,” Luis shot back. “To hell with the Wardens, they’re not doing squat for us anyway. We work with law enforcement, we got plenty of firepower. And I don’t think she’ll have planned to fight her way through that. She’s looking for a magical resistance, not a physical one.”
Luis, I had to admit, had a point. But when I glanced at Rashid, I saw that his face was closed and hard. He said nothing.
Luis sighed. “Come on, man. I get it, you’re a bastard. You don’t care. Fine, whatever. I’ll give you all the respect you want, just give me the goddamn list.”
“I can’t,” Rashid said. “Whether I wished to or not, this list isn’t mine to give.”
“Yeah? Then who the hell do we have to talk to?”
I knew, with an ill feeling, before Rashid said anything. “The Earth Oracle.”
Rashid nodded once, sharply. Of course. My last encounter with the Earth Oracle—archangel to the Djinn’s angels—had been uncomfortable, and nearly shattering in its intensity. Not by her doing; the Oracle simply was. There was no being reachable by the Djinn who was as deeply rooted in the mind and soul of the Mother, not even the Fire Oracle, or the one with dominion over water and air. Each had separate, distinct powers and attitudes, and of all of them, the Earth Oracle was perhaps the most approachable—the most willing to understand and assist us with this matter.
It did not change the fact that she had once been halfling-born—the daughter of the Djinn David and his Warden love, Joanne. Imara, she had been called. And Imara had been a special sort of creation, one with no real place in the natural world until Ashan himself had violated the laws of the Djinn and murdered her within the sacred precincts of the Earth Oracle’s temple.
Imara not only had survived, but had become . . . more. Other. She wasn’t a half- powered Djinn anymore. She had gone vastly beyond all of that. Yet, some of her human heritage still lingered, and I retained enough of my Djinn snobbery to remain just a touch uncomfortable with that fact.
I wasn’t sure Imara had any great and lasting fondness for me, either. The last thing I wanted was another, perhaps less cordial, encounter.