Undone (5 page)

Mellowed?
I glowered at him. Of all he had said, that was the most offensive.

“Will she keep her promises?” Lewis asked.

“Don't ask him,” I said. “Ask me. They would be my promises.”

They all looked at me. David gave me a trace of a smile. “She's right,” he said. “But if you don't mind me saying it, Cassiel's never been one to lie. She wouldn't deceive you. It would be”—his eyebrows quirked; such a human gesture—“undignified.”

I couldn't disagree with it. I fixed Lewis with a long, challenging look, and got a half-bitter smile from him in response. “You don't exactly come begging, do you?” he said. “Hungry?”

For a moment, I thought he meant hungry for food, but then I knew what he was offering. I didn't look at Joanne or David. I held his stare. “Very,” I said evenly.

“Want a taste?”

Lewis held out his hand to me. I stood up, looking down at him, trying to read his expression. It was a test, I knew that. But what kind of test, I couldn't tell.

I slowly reached out and took his hand in mine, as if we were merely shaking hands in the human fashion. A complicated set of emotions sped through me . . . fear, most strangely. Hunger. Longing. An almost irresistible urge to take, and take, and take . . .

I allowed myself to merely touch on his power, drawing a thin thread of it into myself. It flowed through my veins like gold, and despite everything, I could not resist a slow, trembling sigh.

And then I let go, stepped away from him, and settled back in my chair.

Lewis lowered his hand back to rest on his knee. There had been no change in his expression at all, but suddenly I knew what he was thinking and feeling. The power I'd taken from him granted me that kind of access, an intimacy that was startling because it was so different from what I'd experienced with Joanne. It was as if for a moment I
was
Lewis, and I could see all his past . . . his longing for Joanne, never to be truly sated. His solitary life. His discomfort with the responsibility he now held. His deep, abiding wish to simply
be
.

“You should have been a Djinn,” I said, surprising myself, and Lewis blinked.

“Probably,” he said. “But here we are. So, you obviously have control of what it is you do. I know you could have grabbed for all the power you could hold, but you didn't. Why?”

Because it was a test.
That was true, but also not true. “I am not a beast,” I said. “I can control my needs, just as you can.”

I didn't look toward Joanne, but I saw a spark go through him, a tiny tremble that meant he'd understood precisely what I meant. “How can I be sure of that?” he asked, a little more sharply. He didn't like a stranger knowing his secrets.

“You have my promise,” I said. “I will never take more than I need, and I will never deliberately injure or weaken a Warden in the process, unless they are attempting to do harm to me.” I had with Joanne, but I'd been new and afraid. I understood better now.

“And you'll ask permission first,” Lewis said.

“Yes. I will ask, unless it is an emergency.”

“You realize this is a promise,” Lewis said. “You sure you can keep it?”

“It's no more than the promises humans make with each other to live in peace together.”

“People break those all the time,” Joanne murmured.

I knew that far better than she did. “No doubt they do, when they are threatened. I make the same promise, with the same understanding. If I am not threatened, I will live in peace with you. But I won't die quietly.” I didn't try to explain or insist. I just waited. They would trust me or not; there was nothing I could do to convince them. Lewis glanced at David, then Joanne. I didn't see them make any obvious signals, but he must have gained some understanding, and I realized with a jealous rush that they were communicating on a level I would never again attain.

They were speaking in the aetheric.

I focused on the silent fourth in the room, who had so far not participated at all. He was watching me, but like Lewis, he guarded his expression well.

Lewis said, “All right,” and got up from the bed. I rose, too, automatically taking a step back, as if there were any place to run if he decided to send me away from the Wardens. “You're on a trial basis, and I want you far away from here—we've got way too much to deal with at the moment. I'm assigning you to partner with a Warden. You'll help him do his job, and in return, he'll give you regular access to the aetheric.”

The man who'd been sitting unintroduced, on the couch, rose now. Lewis nodded toward him. “This is Manny Rocha,” he said. “Manny will be your partner, at least for the first couple of months. If you make it through that, we'll see. If at any time Manny finds you hard to get along with, or if you don't do the job or keep your word, you're cut off, and we don't help you anymore. Deal?”

I didn't know this Warden, this Manny Rocha. He seemed bland and unexceptional to me—shorter than Lewis or David, slender, of no special significance. No Djinn that I knew had ever spoken his name, either in praise or damnation.

“No,” I said, and saw a flash of surprise go across every face in the room. “Not so simple as that. The Wardens do not serve for the joy of service. You are paid, are you not?”

Lewis worked it out first, and laughed out loud.

“What the hell?” Joanne asked blankly.

“She wants a job,” Lewis said. “Which proves, more than anything else, she's really becoming human. Okay, done, at standard entry-level rates. We'll work out housing and all that crap later. Agreed?”

I had no idea if it was fair, but I did not think Lewis would cheat me. He'd know how important fair dealing was to Djinn. I nodded and held out my hand to Manny Rocha. He hesitated. I thought I understood why.

“I won't take power from you unless you agree,” I said. “And I will always ask, unless there is an emergency.” After sipping from the wellspring of Lewis's power, I had no need of Manny Rocha at all. He looked just a little relieved, and gave me a brisk, competent sort of handshake. Just the touch of flesh, nothing more.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, the first words he'd spoken. He had a neutral voice, with a hint of an accent—calm and soothing. “Don't screw this up. If you do, it won't be just the two of us that suffer. It's all the people we could have helped.”

I looked at him for a long moment, frowning. He meant what he'd said. An altruistic Warden? I supposed there must have been a few, but I was shocked that Lewis had been able to turn one up so quickly.

Of course, the worst of them had been weeded out over the past few years, thanks to the Djinn uprising and other factors. Lewis himself had begun to cleanse the ranks of corruption and graft. So perhaps Manny was, as he appeared to be, an honest man.

That would, I thought, be interesting.

I cocked an eyebrow. “I won't
screw it up
if you won't,” I said. “Are you sure you want to work with me?”

His grin surprised me. It changed him completely, made him real and full of secrets. “I like a challenge,” he said. “That's why they picked me. That, and my work's really pretty boring. You might liven things up a little. Also, I think I was probably the only one insane enough to say yes.”

I had never had the impulse to laugh. Smile, yes, but laughter was a new thing, and when it bubbled from me, uncontrolled, I was unsettled. So many odd things about living in this flesh.

But somehow, I felt it might not be as bad as I'd feared.

Chapter 3

I'D NEVER EXPECTED
that Manny Rocha didn't live close by. Human distances baffled me, but when he showed me a map of the country—
country
, another thing to learn; I was a citizen of the United States now, according to the paperwork that Lewis had provided me—I discovered that it was far removed from Florida. As Lewis had warned me, he wanted me well away from Joanne, David, himself, and whatever crisis loomed for them—less, I suspected, from any concern for me than a desire not to trip over me in the heat of battle.

Manny pointed to an almost square state near the center of the map. “That's New Mexico,” he said. “It's another state. We're in Florida right now, here.” He tapped the squiggle of irregular lines on the map. “Going here.” His fingers moved a long, long way between the two. “Now, usually I'd fly, but I don't want you freaking out. Last thing I want to do is deal with you and Homeland Security at the same time.”

Freaking out
, I realized, meant “losing control.” I frowned at him. “I will not
freak out.
”

“Yeah, great. I still think I'd rather drive,” he said.

I looked again at the map. “How many minutes is this drive?” I was still struggling with the concepts of artificial time, but from the look on Manny's face, I had not struggled hard enough. “Hours?”

“Days,” he said. “That's a couple of days, lady.”

Days.
Trapped in a clanking, stinking metal monster. No. “Is there no other way?”

“Like I said, we could fly, but—”

Flying. I was most comfortable in the air. “Fine.”

“You have to understand, there are rules—”

Everything had rules in the human world. Annoying. “I will not freak out.”

As Manny had supposed, I was wrong about that.

 

So many
rules.
I had no baggage, except for a leather bag to carry the identification the Wardens had given me, and a handful of currency that Manny, muttering under his breath, had withdrawn from a machine he'd called an ATM. I had watched the process carefully, then checked the plastic cards that the Wardens provided. I had one with my image imprinted on it that read at the top DRIVER'S LICENSE, which meant I could operate a motor vehicle. Not that I would ever wish to. I had a gold, shimmering card with the image of an ancient goddess on its surface.

“Credit card,” Manny explained, when I held it up. We were standing in line at the airport. “For buying things. But don't buy things.”

“Then why did I receive one?”

“Because my bosses are crazy?”

I held up the next card.

“Yeah, that's an ATM card. Somewhere in there, you should have information about your PIN number. That's like a code you put into the machine. If you have the right code and the right card, you get money. Money comes to you from the Wardens. It's compensation for the work you do for them.” Did my ears deceive me, or did Manny Rocha seem to resent that? “But you have to pay attention. You can't pull out more money than you have in the account.”

That seemed straightforward enough. I put the ATM card, credit card, and driver's license back into my purse, and pulled out a small dark blue booklet with pale blue pages. The inside front cover once again held my image. I stared at it for some time, but the image did not move.

“Passport,” Manny said before I asked. “You need that. Keep it out, along with your tickets.”

All around me, people were waiting. Some stood patiently, some fidgeted, some seethed. Traveling seemed to be a tremendous effort. I began to see why Manny might prefer to drive, despite the horrible, suffocating, noisy box on wheels. The journey would at least be under his control.

I watched the security process with great interest, but despite my study, when it came time for me to copy the actions of those who had gone before me, I found it clumsy and humiliating. I placed my bag in the plastic bin, which rumbled away through the machine—
X-ray machine
, according to Manny—and slipped off my shoes at the impatient motion from the guard and added those to another bin.

But when I walked through the portal, alarms sounded. I froze, frowning, as two large men in matching clothes came toward me.

“Back up,” one ordered. “Got any metal on you?”

Metal. I looked down at my clothing. I had a belt, yes, with a metal buckle. I removed it.

Alarms again. I felt an unfamiliar pressure in my chest. Anxiety? It was infuriating. These rules were
infuriating.
I had held power since before the ancestors of these humans had learned to scratch pictographs in rocks, and they were making me feel . . . afraid.

I gritted my teeth and removed my jacket when they ordered it. In my shirtsleeves, with bare feet, I walked through the portal, and no alarms sounded.

The relief was even more humiliating than the anxiety.

Manny Rocha breezed through without a pause, and stopped next to me to pull on his shoes and pick up the bags and detritus from his pockets. “Just remember. Flying was
your
choice.” He paused a second, then said without looking directly at me, “I thought you'd lose your temper.”

I almost had. “I did not.”

“Yeah. Good. Let's keep it that way.”

I had been powerful once. Powerful enough to reduce this building to smoking ash. Instead of comforting me, that thought made me feel heavy in my skin, and helpless. Again.

I put on my shoes, belt, and jacket; grabbed my single bag; and followed Manny as he set out down the long, broad, busy hallway.

 

There were Djinn in the airport.

I don't know why that came as a surprise to me; it shouldn't have, but I had not thought there were so many of us walking the earth, much less lingering in this transient place. I waited for Manny to point them out to me, but he seemed oblivious, and when we took our seats in the area designated for our flight, I decided to open the subject.

“Djinn?” he repeated, frowning, and looked around sharply. “Where?”