Unknown

Time slowed to an icy crawl, and I felt every slow beat of my heart as my focus narrowed in on him. On this Dji

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 Dji

“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 Dji

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

Whatever Rashid assumed about the Dji

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 stu

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 co

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, u

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 ma

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.