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“Christ,” Luis said. “Get Rashid. Maybe he can—”

“Can what?” Rashid was, without any warning, sitting behind us, crouched against the wall, skin gone from smoke to indigo in the artificial light. He looked wrong and very, very beautiful. There was a silvery shimmer under the surface of his skin, a glow that seemed to echo moonlight. “Help you? I might. What are you offering?”

Turner flinched, but to his credit, he didn’t back down. “That all depends. What do you want?”

Rashid’s lips parted in a genial sort of smile. “For rescuing a Warden child from her tormentor? Or for bringing you the tormentor in one piece and alive?”

“Both,” Turner and Luis said, at once. I said nothing, watching Rashid with wary intensity. The two men exchanged a look, and Turner continued. “Not worth much unless you do it fast. I’m going to have cops all over it in ten minutes.”

“But it is ten minutes of pain and fear that you might spare her,” Rashid said, with a kind of horrible satisfaction. “And so much can happen in ten minutes, yes? I have crippled a human in less than a second. Imagine what
he
might be able to do, with such a rich span of possibilities available to him. Especially were he warned you were . . . coming.”

Time slowed to an icy crawl, and I felt every slow beat of my heart as my focus narrowed in on him. On this Djinn who dared to say such things.

So you would have, once,
I heard a whisper say, deep in my mind.
So you might have done, at any rate. Their pain, their weeping, their losses meant nothing to you, all these thousands of years. And now, you know how it feels.

Yes. But I had been created a Djinn, and I had never come from human stock. Rashid had. Rashid should have known better. I couldn’t let that pass.

“If you do that,” I whispered, “if you even
consider
it, I will tear you apart. I swear it.”

He flashed me a mocking smile, unimpressed. “What is the human phrase . . . ? You and . . . what army?” He quoted the phrase like a visitor unfamiliar not just to the language, but to the planet. Which I supposed he was, in all the ways that might have been relevant to this conversation.

“How about me,” Luis said flatly. “How about the Wardens. Every fucking Warden on Earth. You want to go to war with us, Rashid, we’ll go right the fuck now. You pull that shit right now, and David won’t protect you. No one will. It’ll be you, and us. How you like those odds?”

He didn’t. He also wasn’t so much afraid as cautious, I saw. He was not
certain
that David, in his capacity as Conduit for the New Djinn, wouldn’t turn on him for such a thing.

I was. I knew David well enough to know that Rashid’s attitude wouldn’t go unpunished.

Whatever Rashid assumed about the Djinn, he knew there was no doubt that the Wardens would come after him, for something like this. I could only imagine Lewis Orwell’s fury. Or Joanne’s.

The odds were not in Rashid’s favor.

Rashid, acknowledging this, shrugged. “Only a thought,” he said. “A mere hypothetical. If you want me to save the child and stop your villain, then I can do so. For a price. You are free to choose as you like.”

“Wait,” I said. “How do we know the girl’s abductor isn’t Pearl’s agent? If we act immediately, we could lose any chance of tracing him to his destination.”

Luis seemed stunned. “You’d let that kid be
bait?
Jesus, Cass. You’re as bad as he is.”

That stung. “No,” I said. “I simply raise the question.”
Like Rashid
, I thought but did not say. “It may be our only chance of finding Ibby and the other children quickly without waiting for another child to be abducted.”

“You sure you can’t find Ibby or the others through the list?” Luis asked. “Did you try?”

I glanced down at the scroll, and felt that visceral flutter again, that dread. Touching it had torn open something inside of me that I desperately wished to close, a feeling of vulnerability that was anathema to someone like me.

Luis must have seen my worry, or felt it through the connection he held with me. His expression softened, and he leaned closer to say, quietly, “Let me try.”

I shook my head. “No. No one else can touch it, especially a human. I’m not sure what the consequences would be. We can’t take the risk.”

“But we have to
know
. If we can find her this way, we should do it. Right now.” Luis sounded tentative, apologetic, but he was also very, very right. We had to know. If I had the ability to end this, I couldn’t flinch from it, no matter the pain.

I unrolled the scroll to find Isabel Rocha.

There was no location next to her name. That in itself was odd; adding to the sense of wrongness was the fact that the text of her name pulsed, faded, pulsed, jittered—as if something was struggling to remove it, and failing. For now.

I touched her name with my fingertip, and the glow flared as before, but instead of that immediate knowledge I had felt before—even the knowledge of terror and pain—all I felt from touching Ibby’s name was a kind of voracious, hungry darkness. It howled through me like a storm.

Trap.
And Imara had warned me.
Touching it will make you vulnerable.
She’d told me that Pearl had become something like a Conduit, like an Oracle, something with power to touch the flow of time and space and reality directly.

With the power to
corrupt
the flow.

I gasped aloud, and tried to pull my hand away from the scroll, but the darkness surged up through the contact, licking through nerves and veins and flesh. I saw the nail turn black, and then lines of indigo shot up my finger. Quick as a breath they spread into my left hand, a midnight tracery that brought with it an icy, fatal numbness.

Pearl’s madness, her power, her furious hunger for revenge, all distilled into a black poison that had been crafted solely for this purpose, for
me
. Imara had known this. She’d known the risk even as she allowed me to take it. She’d tried to warn me how dangerous it could be.

I gritted my teeth and focused, trying to halt the progress of Pearl’s invasion within my body. I could feel her black joy, her triumph. It was happening quickly, devastatingly quickly. I distantly heard Luis’s sharp intake of breath, and felt him moving toward me as he realized something was wrong. Too late, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing he could do.

Then my hand was knocked away from the scroll, and the paper fell to the floor and rolled away, snapping into that tight, protective casing that looked like polished bone. Featureless and faintly shimmering with power. Turner hesitated, then reached down toward it. “No!” I screamed. “Don’t touch it!”

He hesitated, then slowly backed away, leaving it where it had fallen.

I stared down at my limp left hand. It was blackened and numb where it lay in my lap.

Dead.

“Madre,”
Luis whispered, and shoved me back to kneel in front of me, taking the damaged hand in both of his. I saw power flare from him, seeking entrance, and felt a tantalizing flicker of heat within the tissues.

Something fought back. I felt the snap of attack, from within my hand to strike at him, and Luis broke off, panting. He gave me a wild look of utter horror. “I can’t,” he blurted. “It’s not—I can’t stop it. I can’t even touch it. You have to do something. Fast, Cass.”

“I can’t.” My voice sounded level and calm, unnaturally so. “It’s inside me now. I can’t even keep it contained in my arm much longer. My power is yours; if yours can’t stop it, mine can’t either. The battle’s already lost.”

What I meant, what he must have understood, was that I was going to be destroyed. There was nothing to be done, nothing magical that either of us could do or try.

Turner watched, confused and shocked. No help from him. No help possible.

I looked at Rashid.

He smiled, and from his crouch in the corner, said, “For a price, my razor-edged angel. It will cost you.”

“What price?” I asked. My mouth was dry, my skin felt tight and clammy. I was afraid, but I also knew the dangers of showing my desperation.

“Do you really have time to bargain?” He cocked his head, just a little, and stared at me with inhuman, unfeeling eyes. “I think you don’t. I can stop it. Say yes.”

“To what?”

His grin turned feral. “To whatever I want, of course.” His tone dripped with all manner of salacious innuendo, but his eyes . . . his eyes flicked toward the scroll, where it sat radiating power. A direct connection to the Oracles. To the Earth herself, perhaps. Power beyond measure, especially in the hands of a Djinn.

I had promised Imara never to let it out of my hands.

I sucked in a deep, trembling breath. “No,” I said. I was not willing to take that particular risk. Not even at the cost of my life. Rashid was a wild, random creature. In his hands, this list could wreak incalculable damage as easily as overwhelming good.

I felt one of the barriers I had built to wall off my poisoned hand break, like a levy under a black tide. More darkness flooded into my hand, and began to spread.

“Yes,” Luis said. “Dammit, do it, Rashid.
Do it!
Save her!”

Rashid raised an eyebrow, and didn’t move his gaze away from mine. “
She
has to say it,” Rashid said. “No one else can answer for her. What say you, Cassiel? Deal?”

I licked my lips. I felt the darkness raging beneath my skin, bubbling like some viscous acid. It didn’t hurt, not yet, but that was only because it destroyed physical nerves as it went. It would no doubt be an agony beyond anything I had ever known, when it reached my centers of power. When it consumed and utterly destroyed my soul and unmade me from the world.

And deep within me, the
other
Cassiel stirred. The ice-cold core of me, the inhuman persona who had seen stars burn out, seen death in the billions, witnessed atrocity and miracles with the same utter lack of concern.

That
Cassiel knew what to do, where the merely human one failed. I felt her chill in my heart, her clarity in my mind.

I had a choice. It wasn’t one my human self could make.

Only a Djinn could make it.

“No,” I said again, very precisely. “I do not accept your deal, Rashid. Not for that.”

I walked forward and took hold of a bronze sculpture on a side table, a metal representation of two clasped, weathered praying hands. Angela’s possession, one dear to her during her life. I felt the whisper of her devotion and passion soaked into the metal. Her history.

Help me be strong,
the human side of me whispered.
Help me do the right thing. Help me not be afraid.

The Djinn part of me had no fear at all, only frozen, emotionless purpose.

I raised power and re-formed the metal. It melted in my right hand into a shimmering pool, then lengthened. Hardened.

Formed itself into a sharp, long-bladed hatchet.

Before either Luis or Ben Turner could stop me, I put my hand and wrist flat on the wooden surface of the dining table, raised the hatchet, and put all my strength into the downward blow. I had to do it in one strike.

To my Djinn mind, it was all angles, force, calculation. An entirely academic exercise.

The human part of me had gone away. That was for the best.

I heard Luis screaming, but it was too late.

The blade slammed squarely into untainted flesh an inch above where the poison stopped, sliced through flesh, muscle, and through the tough bone. All the way through, burying its edge in the wood below.

Its work done, the Djinn in me faded back into watchful silence, satisfied with the precision and power of its work.

The human part of me woke to the horror. I screamed. The pain was tremendous, a hot red storm that threatened to drive me unconscious to the ground; it took all my focus and strength to hold on. Immediately after, shock set in fast, and the flood of bleeding slowed to a sudden, dizzying trickle from the stump. The severed hand took on a strange, disassociated look, as if it had never been a part of me, as if I had only dreamed of ever having such a thing attached to my body.

Rashid had idly noted how many terrible things could happen in a matter of mere seconds.

He was so correct.

“No!” Luis was shouting. He grabbed at me, struck the hatchet from my hands and sent it skittering across the floor, scattering blood drops. “
Dios,
no!” He hissed something else, something I couldn’t understand through the hazy fog that descended over my eyes, and took the stump of my arm in a firm grip. Maybe he meant to try to reattach the hand. Earth Wardens had been known to work such miracles, after all.

The hand had other ideas.

My severed hand spasmed, and then it began to
move,
like a separate and living creature. Tentatively at first—stiff little jabs of the blackened fingers—and then it dug its nails into the wood and curled, looking suddenly like nothing so much as a spider preparing to leap.

Rashid, who had not reacted even as I chopped my hand off, suddenly rose to his feet in a smooth, startled motion as my blackened hand began walking across the table toward me.

Rashid reached out, and a broad-bladed knife from the kitchen counter flew through the air to smack into his palm. He advanced with three fast steps, and with a blindingly quick motion, stabbed the knife into the back of my severed, crawling hand, pinning it to the table. It struggled for a few seconds, scrabbling with its black fingernails, and then went still.

Not limp.

Just . . . still. Waiting.

“Holy fucking God,” Turner whispered, and then shook himself. “We need to get a tourniquet on her. Fast.”

Luis tore his wide gaze from the hand on the table, and I saw him thrust all of it away with an almost physical effort of will. “I’ve got it,” he said. “Cass? You hear me?”