goddamn bottle before you pull that shit.” He sounded tired, but oddly calm. “Good call, though. We weren’t going to make it. If ever there was a time for a panic button, that was it. How’d you get him?”
I shrugged. Every muscle in my body ached now, as if it had been stretched on a rack. “Luck,” I said. “And I think he let me, in a way. Rashid isn’t one who’s been longing for the end of the human race. In a strange sort of way, I think he likes you humans.”
“You’re one of us,” Luis pointed out. “Which you keep forgetting, by the way. Doesn’t make me feel better about our future.”
“We don’t have one,” I said. “Any of us.”
“Ouch.” He rolled over on his side, then up to his feet, with an assist from me. “Damn, that feels about as good as I expected it would. What the hell did he do?”
“I think it’s best we don’t ask in detail. The Wardens are on the way—”
I was wrong, I realized, as the door on the other side of the roof banged open, and a stream of people poured out. Some were regular humans dressed in military uniforms and carrying weapons; some were unarmed, but far from regular. Power glimmered around them, even to the human eye. There were five Wardens, by the time they’d all arranged themselves around us, and an equal number of armed military personnel.
One of the Wardens stepped forward: male, older than Luis, with short black hair graying at the temples and a whippet-thin build. He had an unusual face, I thought—handsome, but with a strangely ironic twist, and very dark eyes. There was something very strong about him, and very dangerous. “Luis Rocha,” he said, and turned that stare on me for a second. “Cassiel.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Luis said. He was leaning on me, but now he straightened and centered himself. “That’s my niece Isabel in the van. And her friend Esmeralda.”
The Warden inclined his head just a touch, not so much agreement as acknowledgment. “I’m Brennan,” he said. “Nice parking job. Want to tell me exactly how you managed that? Because I’m pretty sure that only a Djinn could have blasted through our defenses and landed you so neat and pretty on our roof. Twenty-two floors up.”
“I’m a Djinn,” I said.
“Was,” he corrected, and extended his hand. “Hand it over.”
“What?”
“The bottle you used to get here,” he said. “Hand it over, or you’re going to get to street level without the benefit of the elevator.” Brennan was, I realized, a Weather Warden, and a powerful one. I felt a sudden, damp gust of air slam against me—a bully’s warning shove.
“I’m disappointed,” Luis said. “Considering you’ve got all those shiny guns.”
Brennan snorted. “Yes, Bre’r Rabbit, I’m going to walk you into the briar patch,” he said. “Threatening Earth Wardens with guns. That’s a winning strategy.” He sounded genuinely amused, but in the next snap of a second, that was utterly gone. “Hand it over, or I’ll hand you over to gravity, and I assure you, she isn’t as kind as I am.”
I smiled thinly. “No.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Excuse me, I think I heard you say no. I must have been wrong about that because—” Suddenly, the wind’s shove turned into a persistent, strong push that, despite my efforts to stabilize, moved both Luis and me back over the roof toward the edge; not quite over, but the distance was halved before he finished his sentence. “Because that would really be very sad. I’d have a moment.”
“So would I,” Isabel said. I hadn’t seen her get out of the van, but she was now standing on the other side and facing Brennan from that angle. “And you wouldn’t like that, Mr. Brennan.”
“Oh, it’s just Brennan,” he said. “You’re a cutie, aren’t you? Don’t.” Once again, his voice went from warm and oddly gentle to utterly cold in the whiplash space of an instant. “If you think you’re going to whip up a little fiery surprise for me, I wouldn’t. See Miss Walinsky, there?” He nodded to a slight young woman in a violently purple hoodie, with blue streaks in her hair and a ring through her nose. “Miss Walinsky makes your normal firestarters look like wet rags. I don’t think either one of you wants to be getting into it. Portland already burned. We’re trying to keep that kind of behavior to a minimum here, so put a cork in it. So to speak.”
He returned his attention to me and held out his hand again. He didn’t need to speak.
And neither did I. I was an arm’s length from the edge, and now I took a giant step toward it, and held the bottle out, dangling it carelessly from two fingers over the drop. “I think we have room for negotiation,” I said. “Don’t we, Brennan? And the next time you threaten that child, I’ll take it out of you in flesh.”
His face went still and his eyes went empty, and for a second I couldn’t tell what he was doing or thinking. Then it was as if he flipped a switch, and he was all smiles. The hand lowered back to his side. “That would be interesting,” he said. “But let’s put a pin in that for now, shall we? Why don’t we get in out of the cold and have a nice, comfortable discussion? Always nice to see more Wardens. We damn well need the help. Okay, everybody stand down. Down. We’re all friends here.”
I sincerely doubted that, but he made gestures, and the armed military were the first to head back through the roof door. Then one by one the other Wardens followed. Miss Walinsky, I noticed, went next to last, and Brennan slowly backed up toward the exit while still carefully watching us. The pressure of wind against my body faltered, and stopped; I hadn’t even realized how much there had been until he released it. For a Weather Warden, he had an impressive amount of power and control.
“Come on down,” he said. “We’ve got coffee. And I promise, no more strong-arm tactics.”
This wasn’t because he had a moral aversion to them, I thought; it was because he was smart, and flexible, and he knew they wouldn’t work. Not with me.
I exchanged a look with my partner, and Luis shrugged, then winced from the twinges in his strained muscles. “Unless we want to live up here, no point in hanging around,” he said. “You realize he’s going to try to commandeer that bottle for the cause, right?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’d do the same in his place. But it’s not going to happen. The Wardens don’t do well with Djinn. They never have. And I’m not betraying Rashid to their tender mercies.”
“Well, there’s one good thing,” Luis said, and put his arm around Isabel as she came to join us. The van shifted on its flat tires, groaning, as Esmeralda slithered her way out as well. “We’re not on our own anymore. And there’s coffee. I don’t know about you, but I could use some of that.”
I agreed about the coffee, at least.
In fact, the coffee was excellent, but as Luis murmured to me, it was Seattle; hardly extraordinary, given their obsession with caffeinated drinks, that they knew how to properly make it. I sipped a cup and let the warmth soak into my abused body; I was Warden enough to ensure that there were no subtle chemicals included to, say, put me to sleep in order to liberate Rashid’s bottle. And Brennan, at least, wasn’t stupid enough to try that.
Instead, he was trying persuasion. And logic.
“Look, we’re happy you’re here,” he said as we took seats in what had once been some sort of corporate conference room; the chairs were opulent leather, the table large enough to seat thirty in comfort, and the lights were controlled from a remote that he operated with apparent expertise. On the far wall, a flat-screen television was tuned to a twenty-four-hour news channel. Both the chaotic footage and the scrawling text below reported mounting death tolls from the ongoing disasters around the country and the world. “As you can see, we need all the Warden power we can get.”
I remembered the still, breathless morning, and my conviction that it was the last peace the human race would know.
It was a pity I’d been right.
Esmeralda had declined to come with us; she’d ignored the shocked looks of the Wardens, and the outright white-knuckled fear of the military, and slithered into an office. She ordered food, a lot of it, and water, and slammed the door. I wasn’t expecting her to join the conversation anytime soon.
Isabel was with us, and the look she gave Brennan was unsettling. She didn’t like him much, and I supposed that was Brennan’s own fault, really—nevertheless, it was a pity. We needed to work together, and his actions had made that more difficult.
“Yeah, we were heading to join up with you,” Luis said. “I got a call from Warden HQ. They wanted to divert us to the mine problem.”
“Ah,” Brennan said. He sounded more subdued than he had before. “They got split off from us heading out of Portland. Going into the tunnels was the only way they could get away, but once they were in, there was no getting
