Unknown

I glowered at him. “Go away.”

“And you don’t need my help.”

“No.”

“Liar.” His eyes were luminous and gleeful. “Where’s your human pet? The Warden?”

“Where he’s needed. Why do you care?”

“I deeply do not. I was merely curious. You seem . . . attached to him.” The distaste in his voice made me bristle, again. “It seemed strange to see you here, alone.”

“I am not attached,” I snapped. “I am . . .” I smiled, sharp edged. “Merely curious.”

That wiped the smugness from his face, and Rashid stepped away from me. His expression smoothed out into a blank mask, but his eyes continued to burn. “I have not seen a golem walk the Earth in a few thousand years,” he said. “Interesting that your enemies have such . . . long memories, don’t you think?”

Memories, and powers, I thought, but didn’t say. Creation of a golem was nothing that a mere child could come up with, certainly not alone; the Warden children sent against me so far had been powerful, but it was unfocused brute force, not precision. Not the kind of delicate and focused control necessary to create something like a golem. That was a manifestation of Earth powers, but so very specific, so very exacting in its nature that few had ever been able to learn the trick of it. A mere handful of humans, throughout history.

And all of those, so far as I knew, were long dead and gone. There was no one alive today, not even Lewis Orwell, who had the ability to do this sort of thing unaided.

“It’s Pearl,” I said. “She knows these things. Forgotten talents, forgotten uses, collected for tens of thousands of years. The Wardens of today use powers rooted in science, in their understanding of the world around them. The Wardens of yesterday had no science; their powers had sources in legend, folklore, religion. It is a different thing altogether.” The golem was a little of all three. There were others, too. Things that had not been seen on the Earth for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Giants and monsters. Things the Wardens would be ill-equipped to battle on their own, if Pearl brought them out as weapons. “She’s teaching them. These children. Guiding them.”

Rashid said nothing to that, but I could see he looked troubled. Like my Dji

Like Gallan, that would be a fatal error. And I could not stop him from making it.

“You’ve done enough,” I told him, more softly, and stood up. “I will call—” My voice died as I pulled the cell phone from my pocket, flipped it open, and saw a dead screen. Water dripped from the casing in a steady stream.

I hate water.

Rashid sighed, reached over, and flicked the phone with a single finger. The flow of water stopped, the phone gave a smug musical chime, and the screen began to glow as it restarted itself.

“I will call Luis,” I said, as if I hadn’t paused at all, “and we will handle this among the Wardens. Go away, Rashid.”

“Say pretty please,” he purred. There was a maniacal gleam in his eyes, a Dji

I simply glared back, unspeaking, until he shrugged, bared pointed teeth, and misted away, leaving me alone on the rocks.

“Hello?” Luis’s voice on the phone, small and distant. “Cass? Where the fuck are you?” He sounded anxious. Almost frightened.

“I’m all right,” I said, and pulled in a deep breath. The sound of his voice filled some small, dark space inside me that I hadn’t realized had gone empty. Need. That was a human thing, need. It seemed every moment I lived, I discovered more human feelings inside me.

Curious, how like Dji

“That was really not my question,” Luis snapped. “Where?”

“At the shore,” I said. “I need you here.”

“And I need you here. Dios, woman, you don’t go racing off by yourself like that, not when we have kids here in trouble! What were you thinking?” I recognized the tension in his voice; it had a deadly significance to me, because it was the same tense, furious tone he had used after his brother and sister-in-law had been shot. After I had elected to chase the killers, instead of working to save their lives. “We are Wardens. We save lives first! Why is that so damn hard for you to understand?”

“It isn’t,” I protested. A curl of damp wind blew my hair away from my face, and I looked up at the moon and sighed. “My presence was not a help to you with Bria

He let out a scorching, fluid string of Spanish curses that was as evocative for its fury as its precision. I waited, holding the phone away from my ear, until I heard him pause. “Finished?” I asked him coldly. “Because I will not be talked to in this ma

“God, sometimes you’re exactly like my second-grade teacher!” He almost laughed, but there was no humor in it. “I hated that bitch.”

He sounded . . . different. I frowned. “Luis,” I said slowly. “You know not to talk to me this way.”

“Why do I care what you want? You’re a leech! You’re only hanging around me so you can suck on me anytime you need a fix. You don’t care that you just about knocked me down, pulling that much power out of me. You didn’t care about Ma

It gave rise to a startling, cold question: Was I? I had deliberately held myself apart. Deliberately thought of myself as different, better, more.

Had that made me less, in the end?

I forced my brain—my very human brain, subject to all these treacherous tides of emotion and pain—to focus. Luis was not a cruel man. I had done nothing to anger him so much; yes, I’d left him, I’d done it without warning, but the reaction was all out of proportion.

I’d left him with Bria