Not that I could make much sense out of it. For one thing, my aetheric vision was clouded, indistinct. Like I needed a laser corrective procedure for my inner eye. For another, my range of perception had gone from nearly infinite to something frustratingly human. I could barely see the horizon, much less make out what was happening there. Energy, yeah, but what kind? A naturally occurring storm? One cooked up inadvertently by the Djinn Smackdown that had occurred back at my apartment, and that the Wardens had failed to fix? All too possible, unfortunately. I couldn’t even get a sense of whether or not it was dangerous.
Maybe it was just a squall, bringing nothing but a quick rain shower and some disappointed tourists.
I dropped back into my body. Not by my choice, more as if my aetheric strength had just failed. Wham, and I was falling back down so fast I might have been a missile fired from on high. I hit flesh so hard I staggered, tripped, and went down. I came up spitting sand, disoriented, and angry.
Detective Rodriguez, who’d drawn to a stop, didn’t offer me a hand.
“Dammit,” I muttered, and dusted myself off. He didn’t say anything, just waited until I moved on. The beach glimmered white, sparks of quartz reflecting the last light of day. Surf pounded the sand in muscular, flexing rolls, broke into foam and retreated. I felt my frustration erupt in a white burst of fury, and rounded on him, fists clenched. “Look, would you leave me alone? I just want to be alone, okay? I’m not running away!”
“You don’t leave my sight,” he said flatly. “Not until you tell me what I want to know about Quinn.”
Just run, I told myself. Just run and forget everything.Nice advice. I wished I could follow it, but my brain wouldn’t shut down, and it was seriously compromising my endorphin rush. I wanted Lewis to show up. And now I was starting to think that seriously hurting Detective Nosy might not be a bad idea, because he was really starting to piss me the hell off.
Can I take him?I looked over at Rodriguez, who was continuing to jog effortlessly at my side. He had that kind of mechanical, thoughtless motion that meant he probably trained a hell of a lot harder than me, and could run me into the ground without breaking a sweat. He glanced over at me, dead-eyed, and I was honest enough to answer my question with a solid No.At least, not without using Warden powers, and I didn’t have those. Not enough to matter, and not enough to burn gratuitously.
“Why didn’t you call the cops?” he asked. “After what happened at the TV station?”
“Oh, you mean the unprovoked assault?”
He had the grace to look grim about it. “You made me angry.”
“Don’t sweat it, you’re not the first guy who’s gotten physical with me.” I grinned when I said it, but it didn’t hold a lot of humor. “Your partner got there long before you did.”
“All I want is the truth.”
“No, you don’t. You want to believe that Quinn was some kind of fallen hero, and buddy, I can’t help you.”
Silence. We ran, wind tossing my hair in its neat ponytail, surf crashing like the heartbeat of the world. Sweat was forming along my back and under my breasts, trickling and wicking up into the jog bra. My Achilles tendons were already screaming. Way out of practice. I told them to shut the hell up and pressed harder. Night was falling like a thick, humid blanket, and it would have felt suffocating if not for the continuing ocean breeze. By my inner alarm clock, it had been over thirty minutes. No sign of Lewis, but it had sounded like he was in trouble, and maybe he was running late. He’ll call. If he was conscious. If he wasn’t fighting for his life.
“What did Quinn do to you?” Rodriguez asked.
I took a ragged breath. “I told you.”
“You said he was a rapist and a murderer.”
“There you go.”
“You’re still alive. So the murder part, that didn’t happen to you.”
That didn’t require an answer. I kept going in silence until Rodriguez suddenly reached over, grabbed my wrist, and dragged me to a stumbling halt in the sand.
Surf roared and crashed, stinging us with spray.
I couldn’t see his expression. I pulled myself up into the aetheric again, feeling like I was pulling the weight of the world, and saw him as a dim orange smudge. Whatever he was feeling, I no longer had the capacity to read it, but then the auras and patterns of regular humans had never been all that clear, even on my best days.
I could only trust my gut, which said that Detective Rodriguez might be a hard bastard, but that he wasn’t a killer, and he wasn’t blind to the truth.
“Tom hurt you,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Got any proof to back this up?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then why should I believe you?”
I studied what I could see of him in the dark. “Because you already know something that you didn’t want to believe. Right? You know he wasn’t the sunshine-and-light guy you thought he was all these years. You say you just want the truth from me, Detective. Well, I’m giving you the truth. Right here, right now. And you can take it or leave it. Do you want to listen?”
“It’s why I came out here,” he said. “I’ll listen.”
So I told him. Not about the Ma’at, not about the Djinn, which was a bit of a problem, narrative-wise, but the high points. I’d gone to Las Vegas to help a friend, run into Quinn, and fallen into a nightmare out of my past. And Quinn had tried to stop me from revealing the truth.
When I was done, Rodriguez cocked his head, unblinking, and asked, “Is he really dead?”
“Yes. I was there, and I saw it. But you’ll never bring anyone to trial for this, and if you keep trying, you can only hurt the very people you want to help. I don’t know anything about Quinn’s wife, but if she’s a good person, it can’t help her to know that her husband wasn’t. Just let it go.”
Rodriguez looked impassive. Unreadable. “I can haul you in as an accessory to the murder of a police officer.”
“So you’ve said. I don’t see any hauling on the horizon, Detective.” I backed off a step. “I’m sorry about Quinn. I liked him, too, and you have no idea how profoundly that bothers me, all things considered.”
He let me go. I turned back the way we’d come and kicked it up a notch, running from my memories, legs pumping, heart pounding. The red pulse of effort dissolved the anxiety inside me, washed away doubt and fear and anguish. I was healthy, I was alive, and just for this moment, I was in control.
If Rodriguez had been straight about what he wanted from me, he’d go back to his van. Think over what I’d told him. Probably get on a laptop and match up dates and times from his own records, find out if Quinn had alibis for anything.
He’d find I was being straight. And then he’d go away and leave me with the humpty-dozen other life-threatening crises I had going on.
I was feeling cautiously good about that when the sand suddenly went soft and liquid under my feet, and I disappeared under the surface so fast that I might as well have vanished in a puff of smoke.
Interlude
As the storm approaches the islands, it picks up speed, traveling at fifteen miles per hour, but by now it’s so huge that the increase in speed means little.
Anything trapped in its path is in for the worst. Winds at the outer wall whip ahead at pulverizing speeds, and their forces are so great that they actually press down the waves, creating greasy-smooth swells that hump in huge shudders toward the horizon, a slow-motion shock wave that is an indicator of just how massive that explosion in the clouds really is.
There is no force in nature so huge, so unstoppable, and so intelligent as a hurricane.