Undone (37 page)

Luis became aware of Gallan's sudden manifestation in the back of the jeep at the same time that I did, and involuntarily swerved. Gallan—crouching, holding to nothing for support—swayed gracefully with the motion of the vehicle. The wind whipped his long golden hair into a silk war banner. He was dressed in white, all in white, and his eyes were the color of a tropical sea at midnight.

I turned in the seat to look at him, and for just a moment, the full Djinn glory of him blinded me with tears.
This
was what I had lost. What I had once been.

“You came,” I said. My voice sounded weak, far too human. “I wasn't sure you would.”

Gallan shrugged. “Ashan has other things to concern him,” he said. “There are a few of us who have been left to keep watch. And I have been watching, Cassiel.”

“I need your help.” I glanced at Luis. “
We
need your help. Please, Gallan.”

I got a brilliant, cutting smile in return from the Djinn. “
Please.
How very human of you. It's not like you to beg, my love.” The smile dimmed quickly. “I will deal with you for this boon.”

“We don't need deals,” Luis said. “We need help.”

“Help comes at a cost. Tell him, Cassiel. Tell him how True Djinn exact their prices.”

“Gallan—”

I glanced at Luis. “True Djinn—you would call them Old Djinn—do nothing without compensation. No favors, no kindnesses. There is always a price, in the end.”

“And what's his price?”

Gallan lost his smile altogether. “My price is Cassiel.”

“No,” Luis snapped, before I could reply. “Not happening. Feel free to fuck off now.”

“We need his help!” I said.

“Not if it means your life, we don't.”

“I wouldn't kill her,” Gallan said, as if the whole concept of killing was beneath him. I knew better. “I have many uses for Cassiel that don't involve her gruesome death. Many pleasant uses, in fact. I think you have imagined them yourself.”

The look Luis sent him in the mirror was pure, hot contempt. “So you're a rapist, not a murderer.”

Gallan's smile didn't waver. “Not if she consents,” he said, and turned his attention to me. “Do you consent, Cassiel? Do you submit yourself to me in exchange for my help in retrieving the child?”

This was a different Gallan than I had known—no, not different; only I was different. His cruelty and capriciousness had been alluring when I'd been a Djinn; I'd only understood the power, not the cost it exacted. I had always found Gallan attractive, always been drawn to him.

I looked into his face now and saw only a cold, calculating predator.

“No,” I said. “I don't consent. But you will help us, anyway, Gallan.”

He laughed. “Why would I do that?”

“Because you can. Because it's right. Because it's
necessary.
”

“I'm not a human,” he reminded me almost gently. “Arguments of right and wrong won't sway me.”

“They should. We—the True Djinn—have lost that.” I remembered what the New Djinn Quintus had said to me. “Long ago, in the beginning, we cared, didn't we? We wished to help. To protect. Now only the New Djinn feel this, and we feel nothing.
Nothing
, Gallan. We amuse ourselves in cruelty and meaningless games. We were better off slaves to the Wardens. At least then we had a purpose.”

Gallan—who had been a slave once, where I had not—snarled at me with startling fury. His teeth turned sharp as daggers, and the bones beneath his face shifted to sharper angles. “You were cast out, Cassiel. Don't make it worse.”

Luis pulled the jeep off to the side of the road, killed the engine, and turned in his seat to look at Gallan. If he was afraid—and he had to be; no human could look on the face of an angry Djinn and not feel some kind of fear—he hid it well. “Look, either help or don't help. It's your choice. But don't threaten my friend, and don't act like the Djinn hold the keys to the universe. You need us. You need humans; you always have.”

“No. We allow humans to exist. We don't need them.” Gallan's eyes turned a muddy shade of red. “But you do need
us.
Choose, Cassiel. Do you agree to submit yourself to me or not? Because that's my price. You know I can't change it.”

I shook my head. “No, Gallan. I can't.”

The angry glow faded from him, and he became almost human now. Almost, but never. “No?”

“You didn't think I'd turn you down?”

“You can't. You need me.”

“Not as much as you believe. Good-bye, my friend. We won't meet again.”

I turned face forward. My last glimpse of his face showed him startled, round-eyed, and lost.

“The lady said no,” Luis said. “Thanks, anyway. Now, if you don't mind, we've got work to do.”

Gallan misted away without another word.

For a moment, neither of us spoke, and then Luis said, in carefully neutral tones, “That was awkward.”

“That was exceedingly dangerous,” I said. “And unproductive.” My heart was racing, and I struggled to calm it. My palms felt damp. “He could have killed us.”

“He didn't.”

“I thought Gallan was the best of the True Djinn. The kindest.”

Luis started the truck. “If he's the kindest, I'd hate to see the meanest.”

I gave him a look. “You already have.”

“Oh,” he said, puzzled, and then his frown cleared. “
Oh.
You're talking about you.”

“Once,” I said, and looked away. “And perhaps still.”

 

We drove past the hidden entrance to The Ranch and on to Lake City, which, though small, was still the largest community in the area. Luis left me to fill the jeep with gas as he went inside to buy food at the small store. When he came back, he pointed down the street, toward a building lit with pink and green neon. “There's a motel,” he said. “We could both use a bath and some rest, and I need to use the phone.”

“The phone?”

“You called for help,” he said. “It's time for me to do the same.”

The motel was old, but surprisingly well maintained. The clerk sold us two rooms with an adjoining door, which Luis requested instead of only one; I thought that odd, since we had few secrets now. He handed me my key as we walked outside. “Get cleaned up and eat something.” He had gotten a bag of food at the gas station—two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, some potato chips, some sodas in cans. “I'll leave the door open to my room. Twenty minutes.”

I nodded.

Twenty minutes seemed a short time. I washed away grime, dried blood, sand, a thousand tiny irritants in the shower, and used the thin motel shampoo on my hair. I had no clean clothing—again—but I wrapped a blanket around me and opened the door to Luis's room through the connecting passage.

He was on the phone. Like me, he had showered, and his hair was flat against his head, dripping at the ends with beads of water. He had wadded up the neon yellow paper jumpsuit they had given him at The Ranch, and like me, had wrapped himself in a blanket for clothing.

He held the receiver in the crook of his shoulder as he wrote furiously on a piece of cheap paper with a pen provided by the motel. “Yeah? You're sure that's the number?
Gracias
, man. I owe you big time.
Adios.
”

He hung up, ripped off the sheet of paper, and pressed the posts of the phone to end the call. The phone was very old, with a rotary dial, and he fumbled with the unfamiliar operation as he entered a string of numbers.

I sat on the bed and ate my sandwich. It was surprisingly good.

When Luis finished his call—which was conducted largely in Spanish—he hung up and dried his hair with the thin cotton towel slung across the back of the chair. “We've got a couple of hours,” he said. “I called in some support.”

“Who?”

“Trust me, you don't need to know. But they're sneaky little bastards. And they know how to run an infiltration operation better than just about anybody. They've done it a hundred times, taking down things the Wardens never even noticed. Never
had
to notice, because these guys took care of it before it became a problem.”

“The Ma'at,” I said. “Yes?”

He seemed surprised I knew. “Yes. Officially, I'm not supposed to know them.”

“You called one to watch Isabel.”

“Yeah, but he was a friend first, a Ma'at second. These guys aren't any kind of friend, not to me.”

I chewed a bite of sandwich. “You admire them.”

“Hell, yeah, I admire them. For one thing, they actually learned to work together—Djinn and human—when the Wardens were still stuck on that whole master/slave thing. And what they do isn't brute force, it's subtle.” Luis flashed me a smile. “And okay, I dated a girl once who was Ma'at.”

I felt a strange surge of antipathy. “Were you speaking to her just now?”

“Mirabel? No. She's off in China, last I heard. I haven't talked to her in years.” He studied me through half-closed eyes. “Why?”

I didn't wish to explain, so I didn't, methodically finishing the sandwich and drinking the soda. Luis shrugged and fiddled with the few items on the small desk.

I felt the vibrating disturbance of air a second or two before Luis, and came to my feet, holding the blanket in place, as a shadow thickened and took on form and edges in the corner of the room.

When he stepped from the shadows, Gallan was a changed Djinn. Changed in attire, yes—from brilliant white to neutral gray—but also in other ways.

Most notably, in the way he looked at me.

I held out a warning hand to freeze Luis in place as he gathered his breath for a challenge. Gallan's dark eyes had locked on mine.

“I'm a fool,” he said. “Forgive me.”

I had never heard Gallan apologize to anyone, not in all the slow turnings of the world. I blinked.

“I saw it,” he said. “I went to look at this place you spoke of, this
Ranch.
And I saw it.”

“Saw what?” I could hardly hear my own voice over the thundering of my heart, because there was fear in Gallan's eyes, and I had never seen that, either.

“I saw the end of the Djinn.” His gaze on mine bored like a diamond-edged drill. “I saw the end of us, Cassiel. I
saw.
”

He swayed. I moved forward as Gallan—a True Djinn, stronger than any human—crumpled slowly to his knees and bent his head.

“We brought this on ourselves,” he said. “You were right.
You were right.
I beg your forgiveness.”

Luis muttered something under his breath, and said, “Don't trust him.”

I didn't. I knew Gallan, and this was not the Djinn I knew. Not
any
Djinn I knew.

“I will help,” he said. “I must help you.”

I felt a cold hand grip my spine and shake it. “What did you see?”

He shook his head, a violent spasm as if he tried to throw the image of it away and could not. “I can show you,” he said, and extended his hand.

I looked at Luis Rocha, who shrugged. “It's your call. I don't trust the guy, but that's probably just me.”

I transformed the material of the blanket wrapped around me into cloth—enough to make trousers and a shirt—and took Gallan's hand.

We rose into the aetheric.

Gallan, on this plane, was a shadow, quick and quiet, and I felt heavy and obvious in my human aura. He pulled me with him, heading through a maze of living trees and rocks that gave way to darkness and whispers.

There was no darkness on the aetheric, but it was here, bitter and void of any hint of energy.

We were above the compound called The Ranch.

There were no signs of people, no sources of even electrical power. It was as if every ounce of life had been drained, not just inside the compound, but out. The devastation went on in all directions, stretching almost a mile—death incarnate.

Only the pearl-and-bone yin and the parklike yang remained, glowing in the darkness in white and green.

Pulsing.

Hungry.

I felt it pull at us. Gallan backed away, drawing me with him, and rose far up into the aetheric sky until the pulsing, living entity was far below us.

I still felt the drag. So did Gallan. I realized that I was feeling it through him—this thing called to Djinn, lured them.

Gallan was weakening. I took the lead to pull him onward, back toward my mortal body; this time, at least, the anchor of flesh seemed to be an advantage. A salvation.

I crashed back into flesh and opened my eyes to see Gallan still kneeling where he had been, swaying.

He was unraveling.

“I got too close,” he said. “Help me, Cassiel.”

“Luis!” I grabbed Gallan's arm, but it felt more like mist than flesh, and my fingers sank sickeningly into moistness.

Luis tried, but when he reached out, his hands passed entirely through the Djinn, leaving trails of smoke behind. Gallan's eyes were desperate, his mouth open, but he made no sound now.

He was trapped on the aetheric, and this manifestation was failing.

Fading into smoke.

I grabbed Luis's hand and launched us both into the aetheric, trying to follow Gallan's essence, but the darkness disoriented me, whispered to me, taunted and pushed in strange currents.

I heard screams, and the screams of the Djinn are not meant for human ears. I fell back into flesh, and so did Luis.