He stood and walked to Angela, and I saw his hands grip the wooden side. His shoulders began to shake. I couldn’t imagine that he had shed tears for the dead in a very long time.

It must have hurt.

I was glad.

Chapter 11

WHAT LUIS HAD just done was a grave breach of the rules of the Wardens, and I understood why; Earth Wardens—the truly powerful ones—could manipulate memory. If it was done subtly enough, the victim might never suspect anything had happened at all.

It was a power that was fearfully easy to abuse, and difficult to detect. Under normal circumstances, I thought that Luis would never have done such a thing, but now, with the Wardens either withdrawn to their own affairs or potential threats . . . he couldn’t afford to rely on them for help.

Or me.

“Why didn’t you kill them?” I asked Luis. We were out of earshot of Sylvia and the funeral director, who were near the door. Luis shook his head. He was moving slowly, concentrating on the steady motion of his feet, as if it was the most difficult thing in the world at the moment.

“It’s a pride thing. You kill a Norteño, you get killed, or everybody near you does. There’s no end once you start that. It can roll on for years. Wipe out whole families.”

Blood feuds. One of the common threads of human culture, this inability to forget or forgive. It was something they had in common with the Djinn. When I had heard the boy speak of hurting Isabel, I had almost killed him. I wouldn’t have hesitated if Luis hadn’t been there. I’d have simply ended the threat, with no regard for the consequences. I would have walked away from the resulting war with no thought of guilt.

I had to admit to myself that Luis’s way was likely better.

The funeral director stepped into our path and said, in his low, gentle voice, “Is everything all right, Mr. Rocha?”

“Everything’s fine,” Luis said hoarsely. “My friends got a little carried away by their grief. I’ll pay for the damages.”

The funeral director’s eyes widened, and he moved off down the hall with what might have been unseemly haste. Luis watched him go.

“Another reason not to kill anybody,” he said. “Considering the room’s booked in my name.”

Sylvia stood by the exit, looking sad and angry. She was restlessly crumpling a tissue in her hands, over and over, and she sent Luis a filthy look as we approached.

I tried to remember that she had lost a child, but in that moment, it was difficult.

“You and your friends,” she said in a low, vicious tone, “had better not show your faces at my daughter’s funeral. God help you if you do.”

“Sylvia—”

Her eyes glittered, but the tears in them seemed more like armor than grief. “You brought the Norteños here? And then you let them walk away? What kind of a man are you, you don’t defend your own?”

She slammed open the door and stalked away. Luis hurried after her—as much as he was capable at the moment—and opened the passenger’s door of the pickup truck. He had to lift her up on the step.

She did not appear grateful.

It was a stiff, silent drive home, with Sylvia sitting rigid between us. In the passing flare of headlights, her expression remained remote and furious. She put away the handkerchief and took out a set of black, polished beads. She kissed the silver crucifix that dangled from it, and then began to work the beds through her fingers, lips moving silently. Rosary beads. I was surprised the custom had not changed from so long ago.

Luis seemed to have no trouble navigating, but I could sense his weariness. He yawned hugely as he parked the big, black truck in front of Sylvia’s house, which blazed with warm light, and opened his driver’s-side door to descend.

I hopped out and extended my hands to Sylvia. She frowned at me, and then evidently decided that I was less objectionable to her at the moment than Luis.

I lifted her effortlessly and set her feet on the concrete sidewalk. She stepped back, momentarily too amazed to frown, and Luis rounded the hood of the truck. He looked from Sylvia to me and sighed.

“Thanks,” he told me. Not as if he meant it. “Sylvia, I’d like to say good night to Isabel. If you don’t mind.” He hated asking, but seemed to recognize that insisting would only cause the woman to stand more firmly in his way.

Sylvia sent us another distrustful look, and grudgingly nodded. “Don’t wake her up if she’s asleep,” she said. “It’s hard enough for her, with the bad dreams.”

Sylvia’s sister Veronica was in the living room, knitting in the glow of the softly playing television set. She stood up to give Sylvia a hug, and then a slightly more restrained one to Luis. None for me, but Veronica—a large, grandmotherly woman with a kinder face than her sister—nodded and smiled instead.

“She’s been very quiet,” Veronica said. “I don’t think she woke up at all.”

Luis moved down the hall, leaving Sylvia to whisper with her sister, and as he reached Isabel’s door, I hesitated.

“Stop,” I whispered. Luis paused, hand in the air an inch from the knob.

“What?”

I didn’t know. There was a feeling—a wrongness. Nothing I could identify, either in the human world or on the aetheric. It was almost as if something had been here and gone, leaving only its acrid, bitter aetheric scent.

“You had a Warden watching the house?”

“Ma’at, like I told you. Yeah, of course.”

I shoved Luis out of the way and opened the door myself.

There was no immediate terror leaping to confront me; the room was as we’d left it, only darker. A sparkling night-light glimmered softly against the far wall, casting pink radiance into the corner and across the bed.

The aura was stronger here. Don’t scare the child, I told myself, and forced myself to move slowly and softly to the bed.

She was a featureless lump beneath the covers. The pink light played out its endless soothing loop, catching the shadows and creases of the blankets.

I slowly pulled them down, and heard Luis’s gasp.

The bed held only a stuffed pillow and a rag doll, whose black yarn hair spilled out over the pillow. I put my hand in the hollow where Isabel had been. “Cold,” I said. “She’s been gone a long time.” Perhaps since the first time Veronica had checked on her. I sat back on my heels, studying the bed carefully. There was no sign of a struggle, nothing overturned. No hint on the aetheric of trauma.

Isabel had not been harmed.

Not here.

That maddening ghost of a trace eluded me. I had sensed it before, but I couldn’t force the memory to appear. It hovered like a fog at the edges of my awareness, but never came close enough to drag into the light.

My hand remained in the hollow of Isabel’s bed, where her body had slept. I could feel each individual fiber of the cool cotton sheet. I could smell the sweet perfume of her hair on the pillow.

Gone.

Luis had moved to the closet and now was conducting a methodical search of the room, calling Isabel’s name in a calm, loud tone that grew gradually louder, gradually less calm as each hiding place was eliminated.

His hands were shaking. Not just trembling, but shaking, like a man gripped by extreme cold.

After he’d looked beneath the bed, he looked across it at me, and I said, “She’s not here, Luis.”

His face flushed red, then pale. “She’s here. She’s hiding, that’s all. ISABEL!” He bellowed it this time, got to his feet, and charged out of the room. I heard the sound of his footsteps, his calls, the sounds of doors being opened and shut. Sylvia’s strident demands to know what he was doing. Veronica’s softer protests.

The screams when Luis finally told them the child was gone.

I stayed there motionless and silent, staring at the dirty rag doll. It was the one the child had been holding the first time I’d seen her in her front yard. One black button eye was missing, and a seam beneath the right arm had given way. Discolored, soft stuffing poked through.