I stared at him steadily. “Why?”
“Maybe I just like a good fight.” His lips twitched, briefly. “I’m not on your side. I’m on no one’s side. I simply like mayhem.”
“Rashid.” I heard the desperation in my own voice, and I know he did as well, though he never looked up from his contemplation of a sealed package of bandage. “Deal with me.”
“All right.” He sat back, crossed his legs with such fluidity that he might have been a yogi, and leaned against the wall. “Bargain.”
“I wish you to direct me to where Luis Rocha is being held—the man named Luis Rocha whom you met, the Warden who is my partner,” I quickly clarified. I had been a Djinn once. That would have been the first maliciously exploitable hole I would have seen. “I wish you to fight by my side against whatever comes to save his life, and the lives of the other Wardens and humans we may find. Will you bargain for this?”
Rashid closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. They blazed with opalescent, changing colors. “If I do,” he said, “there’s only one thing I will bargain for.”
I knew what he wanted. The scroll. I couldn’t allow it to leave my hands. I couldn’t.
“Ask for something else,” I said.
Rashid’s teeth flashed in a mirthless grin. “I am not extremely prone to being ordered around, you know. What do you offer, then?”
These were not idle discussions, not this time. I had made a formal offer, and now we were dealing . . . and deals, to the Djinn, were extremely important. There was an art to it, of course; the Djinn delighted in finding ways around, under, and through deals to their own advantage, and the disadvantage of those they treated with. A kind of supernatural game of skill and treachery. For all my age, however—and I had been a Djinn far longer than Rashid—it was a game I was not well versed in. I had avoided humankind most of my existence.
Rashid was a veteran of such encounters. There was a very real risk that in this, at least, I was out of my depth.
“Give me a direction to follow before we go any further,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because time will be short, and I want to be at least driving in the right direction!”
He accepted that with a placid nod. “Toward Rose Canyon. As you suspected.”
I was already headed that way, generally. I felt a tight knot in my chest loosen enough to allow me to take a steady breath.
“What is your offer?” Rashid asked. I glanced at him again in the rearview, but there was nothing to be read in his expression. His eyes were once again closed, his body relaxed. He could have sat for a thousand years in that position, or that was the strong impression he gave.
“Future favors,” I said. “When I regain my position—” He shook his head. “A stupid bargain. You are very likely to die in flesh, Cassiel. And even if you succeed in returning as a Djinn, the change in form would release you from obligation.”
He was right, by the letter of Djinn law; changing from a human to a Djinn—necessary, to regaining my position at all—would mean that I would shed any promises or obligations I vowed in mortal form as well. If I wished to keep them, I could, but it would not be required of me.
A poor bargain for him, indeed. It put him completely at my mercy.
“Then what, as a human, can I offer you that would be of any value?” I snapped. “I’m flesh and bone and blood. I’m nothing.”
Rashid’s eyes opened, and in the same instant, he disappeared from my view. Gone.
No.
I had a fatal second of horror, thinking I had succeeded in destroying the deal with my flash of temper—and then he was back, sitting in the passenger seat next to me, back twisted toward the door to face me. Still cross-legged. I considered ordering him to put on a safety belt, but truly, there was no point.
“Nothing,” he repeated. “Is that what you think? That becoming mortal makes you nothing? Then what does that make me? The shadow of nothing? The ghost of nothings past?” I’d sparked a fire in his eyes, orange and red and banked with control. “No wonder the Old Djinn and New Djinn were at war. Djinn have made bargains with mortals for tens of thousands of years. If humans are nothing, what benefit did that have?”
I blinked. I’d been a little prepared for an explosion of fury, not for this precise, reasoned anger. Nor its implications.
“You still don’t understand,” Rashid continued. “You’re in human form, but you are not human. Perhaps you’re getting there; I see signs, here and there. But were you a true human, you would know that what you could offer me is precious. Risk, and chance, and the highest of stakes. A Djinn risks little. A human risks everything in dealing with us.”
“You want my life?”
“No,” he said, and abruptly his eyes faded to a black so deep it seemed like the heart of night. “I want to feel your life. My price is this: Promise to bind yourself to me as a lover. Through this, I will feel mortal things again. Mortal emotions. Mortal joys.”
Rashid was lonely. It was that simple.
Insane, but simple.
What he was asking was startling, but not unprecedented. There had been human/Djinn lovers before; David and the Warden Joanne were the most visible of these, at the current time. And Rashid was attractive to me; as a Djinn, he could make himself attractive to me. Whether he was attracted to my human form, my aetheric presence, or the simple fact that I had been so very powerful, I could not say.
“You can choose any human,” I said. “Any one of them would do. There are many who’d leap at the chance to be your lover, you know.”
“They’re not like you,” he said, and that made my breath stop in my lungs. It was a simple admission, but a significant one. As if he sensed this, he turned toward me and said, “It’s not human love, Cassiel. It’s admiration. You burn. I’m cold. Nothing more.”
It was a fair price.
And still, I found myself saying, simply, “No.” Nothing else. Nothing more. Just a plain, unemotional denial.
Rashid’s eyes stayed black. “I told you, I’m not asking for your love,” he said. “I wouldn’t even want it.”
“And I can’t give it. In whatever form.” I swallowed hard. “Choose something else.”
He was silent. There was a subtle shift in his body; it still looked calm and meditative, but I sensed a readiness to move, to act, a restless hunger at odds with his outer stillness. “You’re certain. If it’s merely a matter of your scruples, I can play the villain. Force you to compliance.”
“No,” I said flatly. “No bargain.”
“Not even for the life of the one you do love?” Rashid knew. He understood why I had refused. Hence, the cold darkness in his eyes. Djinn do not understand rejection. They do not bear it well. “He is suffering now. Greatly. Soon, he will die, and what will your morality matter then? It’s a matter of flesh, nothing more.”
“If it was nothing more, why would you want it?” I shot back, and saw his face change. His eyes flickered just a little, with hot blue. “Name another price, Rashid. Anything else except the scroll, or being your lover.”
He shrugged. “Your firstborn.”
Surely he was joking. That was an ancient human folktale. Djinn did not collect children; they had no use for them. The idea that Rashid would want to make a pet out of my child—presuming I could even create life within me in that way, which seemed impossible—was ridiculous, and strangely chilling.
“My firstborn,” I repeated. “You cannot be serious.”
“I am,” he said. “Your firstborn child. You will give him to me. Swear this.”
“No.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Twice you refused me. Once more, and I will go.”