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Neither would I.

I gained the end of the parking lot. There was a chain-link fence there, at the top of a steep slope covered by ice plants; I charged the ten feet up the hill, leaped onto the fence, and climbed toward the top.

I reached the top just as the ambulance jumped that curb, and its momentum carried it up the slope toward me. But without tires, the metal rims chewed ground, finding no purchase, and it never reached the fence before it began to slide backwards, engine screaming in frustration.

I leaped from the fence to the top of the ambulance. I landed with a hollow, booming
thump,
crouched, and looked from that vantage point out into the night.
You’re close,
I whispered.
I know you are.
By making a target of myself, I was hoping to spot the attack before it arrived.

After a split second, I felt power begin to stream through the aetheric, a red-black pulse heading in my direction, and struggled to identify the type of attack. Not Earth powers, this time.

It came as a hot streak of light as large as a man’s head, glowing white hot and trailing flames and smoke. I put my right hand down on the ambulance’s metal roof and pulled up, willing the metal to flow with me, then jumped down to ground level by the rear doors. As I jumped, the roof ripped free, front to back, peeling like a giant tin of sardines, and hit the ground with a thick, heavy
boom
—arched, still connected to the ambulance at the very top, but extended out like a waterfall of cold steel.

I ducked behind and hardened it just in time for the attacking fireball to strike it squarely in the middle. Ten inches from my face, the metal began to glow a dull, muddy red, and I felt the waves of heat boring through. But I hadn’t intended the metal alone to stop it; I heaved up the ground from the other side of the ambulance in a fountain of damp earth and cascaded it overhead, to thump down on the fireball, burying it beneath an organic weight that would not catch fire easily, if at all.

I heard the hiss as the fire began to fail, and the metal in front of me ceased to glow.

I stepped out of the barricade and stared out in the direction from which the attack had come.

There was a shrill, short cry, and then nothing for a long moment before Luis called, “Cass! Got her!”

Her.
My heart stuttered in its rhythm, and I spurred my body back into a run, shattering even the speed at which I’d fled before.
Ibby?

Luis emerged from the darkness into the glow of a streetlight. There was a child in his arms.

It was not Isabel. It was another girl, dressed in the same dull paramilitary uniform, long golden braids spilling down over Luis’s arm and swinging like ropes. I felt my stomach clench, and I slowed to a walk.

I saw the same weary pain in his face. “Had to knock her out,” he said. “Same as the other kids. Somebody amped up her powers, big-time. It’s burning her out. Goddammit, we have to stop this. How many of these kids does she have?”

“Enough to throw them away on the mere chance of killing us,” I said. “You noticed the change?”

He frowned down at the sleeping face of the girl in his arms. “Cleaner,” he said. “Healthier. Not dressed in rags and castoffs like the ones in Colorado.”

“Uniformed,” I said. “And trained. Pearl’s army is becoming a reality. I doubt we are the only ones being targeted, if that’s the case.”

Agent Turner, out of breath, arrived at that moment and heard the last part of my statement. He immediately pulled out his phone and dialed a number, turning away to talk, then back as he finished.

“You’re right,” he said, folding the phone. “Warden HQ has reports of isolated attacks all over. Kids attacking adult Wardens. The Wardens are off balance, they’re not sure what’s going on.”

“Tell them,” I said. “Tell them we have a significant problem, and they should be ready.”

“To fight
kids?
”

“To protect themselves,” I said. “These children won’t hesitate to kill. They’ve been trained not to flinch. If the Wardens do, they’re dead.” More of Pearl’s games.
Sometimes you’re the bull.
She’d use her Warden children as picadors, pricking us, bleeding us, driving us into a fury that she could manipulate.

But perhaps Pearl’s control wasn’t as perfect as she imagined. Isabel hadn’t struck at me with lethal force. She’d knocked me out and retreated instead.

Incomplete training? Or free will?

I could count on neither being true for long.

The next time I faced Ibby . . . I might have to destroy her.

Her, the other children . . . the Wardens . . . the human race.

Destruction radiating out the way the poison from the list had taken my hand.

But if I took that step, that last step, it would not be Pearl making that choice. It would be me, and me alone.

I stared at the blond- haired girl in Luis’s arms. She seemed so innocent. So small. Eight or nine years old, no more than that; the age of Gloria Jensen, whom we were here to see. I wondered who had lost this child, and when. And if they even knew of it yet.

Luis said, “I can keep her out. Let’s get her in the hospital and make sure she’s okay otherwise.”

I followed him and Agent Turner to the door as security and medical personnel spilled out, pelting toward the ambulance at the far end of the parking lot. It hadn’t crashed, although it had certainly been a rougher ride than necessary; there was that mercy. I hoped that not too much damage had been done to the occupants, but I’d done all I could to safeguard them.

I left it to the more creative among them to explain the missing roof, the metal barricade, and the piled wall of wet earth around the scorches and burns.

I had better things to do.

GLORIA JENSEN HAD LITTLE TO TELL US,
after all. She was drowsy from painkillers, neatly bandaged, with her broken arm set in a plastic brace. Her parents, unaware of the incident down in the parking lot, had already made their ecstatic welcomes, and they sat on either side of her bed, touching her as if they couldn’t bear to let her go even for a moment.

Gloria’s eyes widened when she saw me. I had come alone; Turner and Luis had stayed behind with our child attacker. Luis was maintaining the artificial sleep that kept the unconscious girl from further destruction, of herself if nothing else; Turner, I think, just wanted to stay out of my way. He was regarding me with more and more caution.

Gloria told me nothing of significance. She’d been taken from school. She’d tried to fight the man who was taking her. He’d broken her arm in the process of subduing her; he’d tied and gagged her, and put her in the trunk of his car.

“Then the other man came, after a really long time,” she said. “I don’t know how he got in there. He was just there. Then the trunk opened, just enough for me to get out, and he took me to a policeman before he left again. Then they brought me here.”

Rashid. The hushed tone of her voice confirmed that she’d sensed him as being somehow different.

“The first man,” I said. “Did you know him? Recognize him? Had you seen him before?”

Gloria nodded, small braids bobbing around her face. “He was at camp, the camp last summer,” she said. “His name was Mr. Holden. I didn’t like it there, so my dad brought me home. But Brianna stayed.”

“Brianna,” I said. “She’s your friend?”

“Yeah. Her parents travel a lot. She spends a lot of time with me. She liked it there.” Gloria made a sleepy face of distaste. “They
seemed
nice, but I could tell they weren’t. I told Dad I wanted to leave, and he got me. Bri-Bri wouldn’t go.”

I took a guess. “Brianna is about your age? With blond hair that she wears in braids on the sides of her head?”

Gloria could not have looked more impressed if I had suddenly waved a magic wand and produced an elephant from thin air. “Yes. That’s Bri! How did you know?”

“Magic,” I said, straight- faced, and she smiled in delight. “Gloria. I need you to understand something. You, and your parents as well.
You are not safe.
These people could come for you again. I think they will try. You must stay on your guard, all right? And—” Now, I looked at Gloria’s mother steadily. “And you must be trained, so you understand what is ahead of you.”

Gloria’s mother flinched, then nodded. She patted her daughter’s shoulder gently. “It’s because you’re special, sweetie,” she said. “Like me. Like I used to be. And you need to understand what that means.”

Gloria looked over at her and said, very calmly, “I know already, Mom. I saw the news and stuff. It’s magic, right? Like those people who can make rain.”

Gloria’s mother heaved a sigh. “Yes. Like that. And yes, your powers are probably going to be weather. Like mine were.” Another sharp look in my direction. “Will the Wardens protect her?”

“I doubt the Wardens can protect themselves just now,” I said. “Look out for your own. That is all I can say.”

I started to go, but the pleading look in Gloria Jensen’s eyes stopped me, and instead, I took her small hand and said, “You are a fighter, Gloria Jensen. And you won’t let this stop you. I know how afraid you were in the car; I could feel that. I know how much pain you were in. But you’re strong. I believe you will make a great Warden someday.”

“But not right now?”

“No,” I said. “Not right now. And you shouldn’t let anyone make you try.”

I squeezed her fingers and poured some of Luis’s healing force through her, which brightened her eyes and damped down some of her lingering pain and fear. Then I nodded to her parents, and took my leave.

Before I did, though, I thought of one more question to ask her father.

The answer, ultimately, did not surprise me.

 

Brianna was, according to the roll I carefully examined, a girl named Brianna Kirksey. Her location was shown as La Jolla, which was consistent with the hospital in which we stood. When Turner consulted the Warden HQ officials, he found that Brianna’s parents were not merely traveling . . . they were dead. Gone in a recent Warden skirmish with something in Florida, whether supernatural in nature or not was unclear. But undoubtedly, both were gone. Their bodies had only recently been recovered.

“Do you think they’re killing off the parents?” Luis asked tensely. “To keep the ones they want?” He was doubtless referring to the deaths of Manny and Angela, but I couldn’t see how Pearl could have been behind that attack. It had seemed genuinely driven by human motives, not supernatural ones.

“Maybe it’s just an accident,” Turner said. “Poor kid. She’s an orphan and doesn’t even know it yet. You think she’s been at the Ranch all this time?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “Schools would have reported her as missing, unless they had some kind of word that she’d moved. Perhaps someone covered that by telling authorities she was being—what is the term? Homeschooled.”

“If they did that, they could have had her the whole time.” Turner let out a wordless growl. “Jensen had the chance to take that kid home.”

“Not his fault.” When the two men looked at me, I shrugged. “She wanted to stay. Mr. Jensen had no legitimate reason not to allow it. It was supposed to be a camp, after all, and she had her parents’ permission at the time, I suppose.”

“How many?” Luis asked. “How many kids at this camp?”

That was the question I had asked Gloria’s father on my way out of her room. “Hundreds,” I said. “And the camp was here, in California.
Not
Colorado.” Colorado was where the Ranch had been located when first we’d discovered it, but it had vanished without a trace before the Wardens and the Ma’at could come to finish the job. Pearl had covered her tracks.

I was no longer convinced that there was only
one
location, either. Perhaps there were dozens, scattered throughout the world. Pearl wasn’t any longer a physical presence upon the Earth; she was like an Oracle. She could be anywhere. Everywhere. The spider at the center of a dark, delicate web of power.

Brianna had likely been a sort of private joke between us.
Look, I can take a child from your own hometown, corrupt her, send her after you anywhere I wish.
Pearl could have used a resource local to California, after all. She’d made a special point of bringing Brianna here and using her, knowing we would find out who she was.

I had the scroll. I had the means to track the children, but she had set traps for me, too. Each name I touched in hopes of tracing them was a potential opening through which she could attack. Not all, certainly; I thought she could only attack through the connection to the children she controlled. But I had no way of knowing which doors were safe to open, until I had already opened them and been bitten by what lay on the other side. A nice dilemma, one that must have appealed to her sense of irony. I’d outmaneuvered her in gaining the list. She had outmaneuvered me in poisoning its usefulness.

“Hundreds of kids,” Turner echoed, appalled. “All Warden kids, you think?”

“Maybe not. It seems likely she would attract other children, for protective coloring. Possibly to use as distractions for us. Even the children gifted with powers won’t be of equal strengths. She’ll only keep the ones she thinks are most valuable. The others—the others are expendable.” I looked at Brianna, and thought of Ibby, in her miniature uniform with the poisonous darkness in her eyes.
Ibby was expendable?

No.

“What are you thinking?” Luis asked me. He was touching Brianna’s forehead lightly, monitoring her sleep, but he was also reading my expression.

“I am thinking about history,” I said. “Your history, not mine. Child soldiers have been used in many eras. They’re still being used today, in some parts of your world. They’re easily trained, easily replaced. There is little doubt that Pearl would see their value in fighting against humans, but the Djinn . . . the Djinn do not, in general, share the same scruples. Some do, of course, particularly among the New Djinn. But others see all humans, of whatever age, as expendable. A child is no different than an adult, in terms of threat. You see?”