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“Okay,” Scott said. He stared at me for a few seconds. “Well. If it arrives, just let me know.”
Greta rose. Scott seemed reluctant to leave, but he had little choice; she was clearly the senior in the team, and once her course was set, she did not seem the type to be balked. She shook Ma
Perhaps she’d been told the truth. In that case, no wonder she had hesitated. I was careful to keep the brief contact impersonal, merely surface, and saw a flash of relief in her eyes.
I wasn’t so careful with Scott. He pulled free quickly, wiping his hand against his trousers. I had not made a friend.
I hadn’t intended to.
“Ma
I kept my stare on Scott until the door closed between us with a final, soft click.
“You shouldn’t antagonize him,” Ma
“You shouldn’t placate him.” I turned back to reach for the folders on the desk.
“What was all that about? Why’d you lie to him? We’ve got a folder of stuff for Colorado, right?”
“I don’t know,” I said softly. I transferred my gaze back to the closed door and frowned. “I don’t know.”
Ma
It made me tired, too, and I allowed him to draw me out of the office and deliver me home.
Dji
I had never dreamed before, but that night, alone in darkness, I dreamed of Luis Rocha. In my dream he was both the same and different; more and less. A Dji
I had not dreamed of Ma
This seemed oddly significant to me.
I said nothing of the dream to Ma
I was not sure I liked it.
Seeing Luis waiting in the office hallway was a not unpleasant shock, a throwback to the dream that sent hot waves of sensation from the soles of my feet through the top of my head. I averted my eyes from him, eager to keep any hint of what was in my mind from him.
“Something wrong?” Ma
There was a brief pause, and I saw Luis shift his weight from a casual posture to something more—cautious. “You didn’t leave a message?”
“Leave what message?”
“To meet you here at the office.”
Ma
I felt it first, a fraction of a second before either of the Wardens. I shoved Ma
Fire exploded out of the open office in a white-hot jet, rolling like lava to boil against the opposite wall, which immediately blistered, cooked, and began to burn. On the other side of the wall of flame, I saw Ma
I was not. By turning the other direction I had saved my flesh, but now I was trapped in an alcove at the end of the hallway, a shallow box with no way out. The air rippled with heat, and smoke began pouring from the flaming walls and ceiling—black and thick in my mouth and nose. My eyes stung and watered, and I found myself pressed back against the farthest wall, gasping in shallow, choking breaths.
I needed to get control of it, but the fire—fire terrified me in ways I had never imagined. It was an instinct erupting from the roots of my body, an atavistic need to retreat from the flames.
I am Dji
But it could now, and my flesh knew that all too well. I struggled to control my reactions. I had power; all I needed to do was apply it.
But the power was rooted in Earth, and fire responded little to my feeble attempts.
A shape emerged from the flames—human-formed but made of fire, and that cooled into the dull red of molten metal.
A Dji
It looked at me for a long moment, then reached out to me. When I hesitated, it cocked its head to one side, plainly impatient.
I reached out, and my fragile human hand grasped his.
There was no sense of burning.
He pulled me into the fire, and I was surrounded by the flames, enveloped and caressed by them. It was like being a Dji
Then I felt a shove and I stumbled on, into air that felt ice-cold after the heat of the blaze. The air was thick with toxic smoke. I reached out and felt the solid surface of a wall. I followed it, coughing and choking, until I ran into a warm body and human hands gripped my shoulders.
“I’ve got her!” I recognized the voice, even smoke roughened. Luis Rocha. “Cassiel. Come on!”
A shadow charged toward us—Ma
The office building was a chaos of people ru
“Fire Wardens are responding,” Ma
“There they go,” Luis said, and sank down against a wall to a crouch as we felt the power of the Wardens sweep past us in a cool wave. The smoke lessened, and I heard the roar of the fire subside to a dull mutter. “Fuck. What the hell was that? Who the fuck did you piss off, Ma
“Me? Somebody told you to be here, remember? Maybe they’re not after me!”
They glared at each other, red-eyed and belligerent. I had never seen the blood relationship between them so clearly.
I cleared my throat and tasted ash. “You’re angry because you’re afraid,” I said. “So you should be. Someone wanted to kill us, or at least cared nothing of killing all of us so long as they achieved their goal. Someone capable of igniting fire on a massive scale, which means a Warden—”
“Or a Dji
I hadn’t told them that there had been a Dji
Ashan, on the other hand . . . Ashan was one to hold a grudge for generations, and human damage was nothing to him.