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I didn’t spill the water.

“You okay?” he asked me in a faint, rough voice. I handed him the carafe, and he guzzled down more than half its contents without a pause. “We need food. Protein and carbs, the more the better.”

I took the water from him and finished it before asking, in a voice I hardly recognized as my own, “The girl?”

Luis gave me a slow, exhausted smile. “She’ll be okay,” he said. The smile, warm and sweet, faded too quickly. “Physically, anyway. No idea what happened to bring her to this. Could be too bad to get over it as easily as this.”

If
this
had been easy, I could not imagine hard. I started to get up, but my legs wouldn’t respond. Luis took my hand.

I tried to pull away, but even in his weakened state, Luis was a strong man. “No,” I said. “You’ve spent too much power already.”

“You need it more than I do right now.” His last reserves of power cascaded into me, flooding warm through my nerves, sparking waves of pleasure as it passed. An echo only—he had little to give me, but it was enough to sustain me for another day, perhaps two, until he recovered.

If I didn’t use my power recklessly.

I didn’t mean to do it, but my hand seemed to move of its own volition, breaking away from his grip and moving up to touch his face.

Luis’s eyes widened, and for an instant we were staring at each other with all the doors open, all the walls thrown down.

Then I dropped my hand, dragged myself to my feet, and walked off in search of the proteins and carbohydrates his body so desperately needed to replace. I met Detective Halley in the hall heading toward the room, laden with a tray full of food. Hamburgers, hot dogs, some sort of stew in a bowl.

“She going to make it?” Halley asked, holding on to the tray.

“Are you withholding food from us if she doesn’t?”

He blinked, shook his head, and handed the food to me. “You tried. Can’t ask more than that, I guess.”

“Then I am pleased to tell you that Luis believes she will recover.” I started to take the food into the room, then turned back to him and asked, “How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That we would need this.”

He shrugged. “I asked my sister- in-law. She said if you made it through, you’d be hungry as a cloud of locusts.”

Halley, I decided, would be allowed to live after all.

 

The girl woke up after a deep, but natural, sleep. That was not significant.

What was significant was
how
she woke up . . . crying, screaming, panicked, and desperate.

Her distress set the room on fire.

It happened very quickly—one moment the child was shrieking in terror, and the next, the bedding around her burst into hot orange flames. So did the cushions on the chairs nearby, and the cheerful yellow curtains draping the windows. Colorful characters charred on the walls.

This was the worst thing that could happen. Luis’s powers were focused around Earth; a Weather Warden could have found ways to shut down this sort of event, but for an Earth Warden it was much more difficult.

My powers were limited by Luis’s, though I could wield them more creatively; I quickly altered the composition of our skin and lungs to make us fire- resistant, though making us fireproof was beyond my capabilities. It was good that I did this, because Luis plunged into the flames, grabbed the child, and pulled her off the bed and into his arms. If he’d been a normal human, he would have sustained terrible burns.

The moment the girl was in Luis’s arms, the flames began to die away, hissing and sputtering into nothing an instant before the overhead fire-suppression system began raining and sounding its alarm. I cut the flow of power, and Luis’s body and mine reverted to their normal states.

“What the hell . . . ?” A crowd of people had formed in the doorway to the room, but two broke away from the pack to rush inside, looking very much in command. One, dressed in a white coat, I assumed was a doctor; the other was, of course, Detective Halley. It was Halley who’d spoken. “What happened in here?”

The doctor ignored such concerns and moved to take the girl from Luis’s arms. “No,” Luis said. “Not a good idea.”

“I need to examine her for burns!”

“She’s not hurt. She’s just scared.”

“And dangerous,” I said. “And wrong.”

Luis’s gaze brushed mine. He knew what was wrong with her her, just as I did; the child’s powers should have been dormant until her body had time to grow the channels through which they would run. She was too young—
far
too young—to bear this kind of burden. It would be difficult enough at adolescence, with the sort of raw ability she had just demonstrated.

“How did this happen?” I asked him quietly. Luis cradled the child in his arms, and she clung to him with her small arms around his neck, blue eyes wide and terrified. I retrieved a thick, nubby blanket from the closet, which was the only place in the room that had been protected from both the flames and water dousing, and took it to Luis. He wrapped it tight around the girl.

“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered, very seriously. “I really didn’t.”

“I know,
mija
,” he said. “Don’t you worry, nobody blames you. I’m Luis. What’s your name?”

She considered the question very seriously before answering, “Pammy.”

“Pammy, what’s your last name?”

“What’s yours?” she asked. Luis smiled.

“Rocha.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“Maybe so. It’s Spanish. Is yours funny?”

“Gegenwaller,” she said, very proudly. “It’s
German.
”

Luis shot a glance toward Detective Halley, who nodded and pushed his way out of the crowd in the doorway. He had the information he needed, and he would begin his search. “Pammy Gegenwaller,” he said, “where are your parents?”

Her face just shut down, becoming a still, empty mask far too old and experienced for her few years. “They’re not important,” she said. “The lady said so.”

“The lady,” I said. “Who is the lady?”

Pammy turned her face away, pressing it against Lu-is’s neck.

“Hey,” he said, and jiggled her gently in his arms.

“That’s Cassiel. She’s nice. She won’t hurt you.”

“She will,” Pammy said. “Just like the lady.”

Some of the paralysis among the medical staff finally broke, and as if by common consent, a swarm of them broke the invisible barrier at the threshold and surged around us. A nurse plucked Pammy from Luis’s arms, and as she yelled in protest I saw a flash of pain and fear go across his face. “Wait!” he snapped. The nurse paused, frowning, struggling to hold the flailing child. Luis put a hand on Pammy’s forehead and murmured, “Sleep now, sweetheart. You’re safe. You have to trust these people, they want to make you better. Okay?”

He was using his powers in a strong but subtle way, a kind of sedation that swept over the girl and relaxed her body. Her eyes drifted closed, and she rested her head on the nurse’s shoulder.

Luis removed his hand. “She should stay asleep for a while,” he said. “Keep someone with her. I left a suggestion with her that she’ll trust you, but if she gets frightened that could change. Keep her calm and you shouldn’t have any trouble. Don’t leave her alone.” He reached in his pocket, took out a small notepad and scribbled down a note, which he handed to the woman. “Call that number. It’s the Warden hotline, they’ll assign someone with the right power profile to come help. If nobody’s available, I’ll come back. My number’s on there too.”

“All right, let’s move her to a fresh room. Somebody get maintenance in here! And call the fire department—they have to sign off on this!” the head doctor bellowed. The nurse took Pammy away, heading from the room. Luis and I followed, but he stopped once we were in the hallway. The air reeked less of smoke and melted plastic, and I took several grateful breaths.

“You understand what she said?” he asked. “What just happened?”

“The child was a latent Warden,” I said. “Someone woke her powers, far too early for safety. Someone female. Someone like me.”

“A Djinn,” Luis agreed. “And I think we both know who that would be.”

Pearl.

Pammy had been at the Ranch, where Pearl trained her captured Warden children—but trained them for what? To do what? “She was rejected,” I said. We had seen other examples of it—children who had been brought to Pearl for evaluation or training, but had failed whatever obscure standard she had applied. Many had been used as perimeter guards for the Ranch, where the group kept a stronghold.

Pammy had either escaped, or been returned because she had become uselessly sick. “Pearl had to change her location,” I said. “Perhaps she’s changed tactics as well.” We had found her stronghold in Colorado, and by the time we had assembled sufficient strength to try to take it, it had been destroyed, only her expendable human allies left behind. She’d taken the children with her.

We had spent weeks trying to find any sign of where she might have gone.

“Maybe,” Luis said, “and maybe this
is
her goal—maybe Pammy didn’t fail. Maybe she’s exactly what Pearl wants her to be: a child time bomb.”

I considered it, then slowly shook my head. “No. Pearl is not interested in random destruction. She has a purpose, though the purpose is not yet clear. But if she returned this child, Pammy fell short of her expectations.”

That put a bleak light in Luis’s eyes. “Christ,” he said. “The kid could probably blow up the hospital if she got angry enough. That’s not enough power?”

“Not for Pearl,” I said. “Not yet.”

He sighed. “I need three shots of whiskey and about a day and a half of sleep. We can’t keep going like this. Time to stand down for a while.”

I didn’t want to, but I also felt the drag of exhaustion, and the faint, fine trembling in my muscles. My flagging brain interpreted sights and sounds as too slow, too fast, too bright, too loud; I did need rest, and if I needed it, Luis
desperately
needed it.

“Home?” I asked.

“Home,” he said. “Now.”

HOME FOR LUIS
was his brother’s home, which he had decided to keep after Manny and Angela’s death. Partly this had been to allow little Isabel some continuity and familiarity in her life, although expecting her to return was less logic than sheer, bloody-minded determination. Partly it was convenience. Luis had moved from Florida, and had not yet rented an apartment before the murders.

I had an apartment, but it was not a home—merely a way station where I kept my few belongings, slept, and cleaned my body.

The Rocha home was . . . more.

“I should take you back to your place,” Luis said as he unlocked the front door of the small, neat house; that took a while, because he had installed new locks and an alarm system. His words lacked conviction, and I ignored them, moving through the opened doorway into the familiar living room. It was comfortably furnished, with things that did not quite match—the sign of people who had bought their possessions over time, and because of love, not fashion. Unlike his brother and sister- in-law, Luis kept it very neat, but there was a sense of peace in it. Order. Love. Some sadness.

It eased some anxious, tired knot in my soul.

I locked the door behind me and sat down on the couch. Luis glanced at me without speaking and went into the kitchen. He came out again with two glasses—both decorated with colorful cartoon characters—and a bottle of amber liquid, which he set on the coffee table before sinking down next to me with a sigh that spoke of utter weariness. “Drink?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do I?”

He poured me a thin line of liquor and handed it to me. “Try.”

I sipped carefully and made a startled, strangled sound as the fiery, smoky flavor coated my tongue and throat. Luis leaned forward and tipped a much more generous portion into his own glass, lifted it vaguely in my direction, and said, “
Salud,
” before downing the liquid in two heavy gulps. I took a larger sip. It didn’t burn as much the second time, and had more flavor.

Luis refilled his glass. I drained mine in three more slow sips, feeling an odd calm begin to work through me. Distilled chemical sedation. I began to understand why people sometimes pursued this course of action.

Luis put his glass down empty, refilled mine, and poured himself a third helping. “Last call,” he said, and capped the bottle. “How is it?”

“Interesting,” I said. I wasn’t quite sure I approved of the changes in my metabolism, but somehow that disapproval remained theoretical, and far away from the warmth that coursed through my body. I felt looser now, less on guard.

Less constrained. It sparked dangerous memories of being free, powerful, utterly different than what I was now.

Luis watched me over the rim of his glass as he drank—this time, much slower, almost matching my careful sips. “You were good today,” he said. “
We
were good today.”

It wasn’t often the case. Luis and I didn’t know each other as well as Manny and I had; I had been comfortable with Manny, and I had understood the dynamics of our relationship, which were almost all professional in nature.

Luis was . . . complicated. I responded to him more strongly, both in terms of the power passed between us, and in purely physical ways. Since becoming human, my flesh had surprised me more than once, and continued to act in mysterious ways that seemed divorced from the cold logic of my thoughts. I was not sure how humans combined these things. Or Djinn, for that matter; I had never been one of those who enjoyed assuming human form and playing at being mortal. Some, like David, almost
were
human. Others, like Ashan, wore flesh as a skin-deep suit, nothing more.

I wasn’t sure which more accurately described me; it seemed to be a shifting question.

I sighed and leaned my head back against the couch cushions. “Do you think she will recover?” I asked, cradling the glass between my long white fingers. Luis finished his last sip of whiskey.