He seemed so reasonable, but there had been nothing at all reasonable about the pain Luis had been feeling. “I will see Luis Rocha,” I said. “Now.”
“No,” Sanders said in reply, flatly. “You won’t. Now sit your ass down on the ground, legs crossed, and don’t get up until we tell you. I’ve got bigger problems than you.”
I really doubted that.
Sanders turned away, pulling Turner with him; the two men conferred, backs to me, and Turner set off at a run through the trees with an escort of three others.
“Are you still standing up?” Sanders asked, without looking over his shoulder at me. “Because one way or another, you’re going to be on the ground in about ten seconds.”
Impossible to manage all the impulses to violence that erupted inside me; he was angering both my human and my Djinn instincts, to deadly effect. I wanted nothing so much as to rip my hands free of these confining restraints and pour power through the man until he was a smoking hole in the ground. The rage was, in fact, frightening in its intensity, all the more so because it was entirely impotent at the moment.
“I’d do as he says,” Rashid murmured, and when I looked over, the Djinn was seated calmly on the ground, legs crossed, looking as if he’d chosen the posture for meditation instead of by intimidation. “They’ll kill you. They have orders to shoot until you’re no longer moving.”
The agents around me were aiming their guns, and Rashid was correct; none of them looked in the least like they would hesitate to fire if they felt it necessary.
I sat down next to Rashid, concentrating on regulating my breathing and the impulse to try to use my powers. The handcuffs were delivering stronger and stronger jolts, sensing the energy rising inside me, and my hands and forearms felt burned and tender from the repeated stabs of pain. I stayed perfectly still, eyes closed. Beside me Rashid was as immobile as the mountains.
Waiting.
Luis.
Nothing came back to me, save that wordless static. He was still alive, but incapable of conscious thought. Drugs, most likely. Or they’d hurt him so badly that his body had, in self-defense, taken away his awareness of the damage. Either way, it was not good news.
Turner had betrayed us, and now there were much greater concerns. Not just Pearl; the government. I had no doubts that Agent Sanders thought he was in control of the situation, and the day; he had no idea just how out of his depth he—and all his merely human colleagues—really were.
“This isn’t useful,” Rashid observed, after at least fifteen minutes of total silence. I pulled myself back from the contemplation of my own, maddening lack of control. “I agreed to help you fight, not help you surrender.”
I bit back my first response, which came with another jolt of pain from the controlling handcuffs. “Can you leave?”
“If I wish.” He let a beat go by. “It wouldn’t negate our agreement. We made a bargain. The fact that it didn’t turn out well for you—”
“Is beside the point, I know. I wasn’t born human.” I tried to moderate the snarl in my voice. “Could you take me with you?”
“Of course,” Rashid said placidly. “The question would be whether or not you’d survive. The odds are not good on that point. I’m not one of those Djinn who can safely convey humans through the aetheric and bring them out alive, and no matter how fast I am, they do have countermeasures.”
“Such as?”
“Ma’at,” he said. “One or two, not powerful enough to be Wardens, but powerful enough to interfere with you, slow you down. That would be enough to allow bullets to reach you. I believe if I try to take you with me, you’ll be dead.”
I considered that. My shoulders ached from the restraints, and I was thirsty. Exhausted. I needed sleep. But more than anything else, I needed to know that Luis was all right.
“I know we can’t alter the agreement,” I said, very carefully. “So I am not attempting to do so. I only say that should you wish to leave this place, no one will be able to stop you. And should you take the scroll from our friend Mr. Turner, I don’t suppose anyone can stop you from doing that, either.”
“Or destroying him like a small bug,” Rashid noted.
“Or that, of course.”
He didn’t move. I had supposed that a mere mention of the fact that he might lay his hands on the scroll would cause him to flicker out of existence and into Mr. Turner’s very nightmares, but instead Rashid sat, patient and silent.
I asked, “Are you waiting for something?”
“No,” he said. “But there’s no great hurry. I can take the scroll from him anytime I please. He is not the rightful owner. Therefore, it’s fair game to take it, so long as I return it to you.”
Was it? I didn’t know that; I supposed it made sense, by Djinn logic. I was specifically given the list—officially granted it by an Oracle. That meant it was my possession, exclusively, until such time as I voluntarily gave it up. Humans didn’t have those types of rules of ownership, which reflected the transfer of power on the aetheric; hence, Turner hadn’t thought twice about taking it from me.
But, I realized, the scroll itself wasn’t just some mere piece of paper locked in a case. It was living.
It was capable of reacting, as it had when it sealed its case shut.
I smiled slowly. “And if you take it into your hands without me granting it to you, it won’t open for you, will it?” I asked him. “That’s why you wanted to bargain for it, not simply take it from me. I have to give it.”
Rashid didn’t bother to deny it. “So in liberating it from your friend Mr. Turner, I am only its temporary custodian. Not a thief.”
“Not a thief at all,” I agreed. “Well then.” I felt my smile fading. “While you have it, you’ll be a target. Whatever you do, you must not let it be taken by Pearl or those she commands.”
“And now you’re putting conditions on me,” Rashid said, and shook his head. “Cassiel. I’ll do as I please, when I please, and you will have to trust that these things will also please you.” He looked up at me, and his eyes were bright and direct, entirely inhuman. “Time to go.”
He’d sensed something, but I didn’t know what. I nodded. That was all the goodbye we said, or needed; Rashid simply melted away, a whisper on the wind, and his empty handcuffs thumped to the ground where he’d been.
That got a reaction from the agents watching us—quick steps in to tighten the cordon, and one small red-haired woman with a pretty, no- nonsense face snapped, “Where is he?”
For all that they’d been briefed on the nature of the Wardens, the nature of the Djinn, the primal terror of a human confronted with the unknown was still there, showing in the tense lines of her body and the flash of disbelief in her blue eyes. She repeated her question, more loudly, pointing her weapon straight at me in unmistakable threat.
I ignored her as I tried to locate what had triggered Rashid’s sudden decision to depart. Nothing obvious; the government agents had control of this side of the chasm, separated from Pearl’s area by a harsh divide that would be difficult to cross without attracting notice. Likewise, Pearl could send her child-soldiers here, but even Pearl had her limits. I didn’t imagine she would stage an all-out assault against an armed camp of the FBI. Her followers weren’t Djinn; they couldn’t travel the aetheric at will. So their approaches would be human in nature—extra-human, possibly, but not Djinn.
I sensed no power stirring in the aetheric toward us. When I directed my attention toward Pearl’s camp across the divide I got a sense of shielded, harnessed, focus energy, like the potential of a bomb, tightly contained. Was Pearl there? I wasn’t sure she was. I wasn’t sure she was anywhere, in a purely physical sense. Her followers, yes, but Pearl could manifest herself in ways I didn’t fully understand, and that meant she couldn’t be tied down to a single focus.