“Obstacles,” I finished softly. “But what value can a five-year-old child hold? Is she even displaying any talents as a Warden?”

“Not yet. Most kids don’t until they hit puberty. But it does run in our family.” He shrugged. “I started using mine pretty early. Around nine, I think.”

I thought back and wondered. It seemed impossible that the attacks would have been designed solely to eliminate potential guardians for the child, but he was right: Taking Isabel seemed to be a primary goal, not a secondary one.

“Then they won’t let her go easily,” I said. “If they did all this to ensure they could get her.”

Luis was watching me, and his expression was tense and grave. “You think they’ll kill her?”

“I don’t know,” I said softly. “I don’t know what they want from her.”

I turned in the key to the desk clerk ten minutes later, which led to his anxious worry that we had found something wrong with the accommodations, and Luis and I mounted the Victory and resumed the journey.

The trace, on the aetheric, was still there, and still definite. Isabel was ahead of us, but only by an hour. Whatever method of travel they were using to transport her, it was slower than our motorcycle, even double loaded. I opened the throttle, and we began to close the distance.

We rode for almost an hour, and my hunting instincts—inherited from the Djinn I had been as well as the flesh I wore—bayed for blood. We were maddeningly close, so close that a single fold of the horizon hid her from us.

Careful, the cautious part of me warned. They’ll fight to keep her.

“Colorado!” Luis shouted as we flashed past a large sign. I didn’t care about the boundaries. Isabel’s track was only a few miles ahead of us, and I intended to catch them. “Dammit! Cassiel, slow down—cops!”

I saw the cruiser as we flew past it, sitting nose out in a dirt road at the side of the highway. I glanced in my rearview mirror to see if he’d take up the pursuit.

He did.

“Pull over!” Luis was shouting to me now. “You can’t outrun them on a straight road; just pull over!”

I slowed. It was hard. My instincts howled to keep on chasing, and although I knew he was right, it seemed wrong to give up so easily.

The cruiser pulled up behind us, and two men got out. One approached us while the other hung back.

“Off the bike, please,” the policeman said. He was a large man, solid, with an expression that seemed blankly polite. His eyes were covered by dark sunglasses and shaded by a brimmed hat. My impression of him was one of starch and angles.

I swung my leg over the seat, as did Luis, and once we were off the motorcycle, the policeman drew his weapon and shoved it hard against my chest, right over my fragile human heart.

“Don’t move,” he said. Luis had frozen, not daring to protest, and that cost us, as well; the other policeman came around the car, grabbed Luis by the collar, and threw him facedown on the hot metal hood of the car.

He put the muzzle of his gun on the back of Luis’s neck.

“On the ground,” the man who had me said. “Face-down. Do it!”

The asphalt was hot and sticky, but I had little choice. I could resist, but I doubted I could save Luis as well as myself. Too many variables, and I didn’t understand this reaction. It seemed out of proportion for a speeding violation.

“Hands!” he demanded. I felt a hard knee in the center of my back, and moved my arms within his reach behind me. He snapped cold metal over my wrists and jerked me up to my knees with a hard pull on the restraints. Pain lanced up my strained shoulders, and I bit down on a wince. “All right, bitch, you’ve got about one minute to tell me what I want to know. Understand?” He jammed the gun hard at the back of my head. “Understand?”

“Yes,” I said. A Fire Warden might have been able to disable the guns. Perhaps it might be possible for an Earth Warden, as well, to warp the metal, but undoing the chemical reaction that fired the bullet was a skill that Luis did not have, and remained elusive to me.

I don’t know what question I expected the policeman to ask, but it surprised me when he said, with cold intensity, “Tell me what happened to my son.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and my gaze touched Luis’s, where he’d been thrown facedown against the car. His dark hair was damp and clinging to his face. He looked desperate and angry.

Dangerously so.

“What are you talking about?” Luis snapped. “Let her go, man!”

The policeman holding him down pushed harder. “Shut up.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so! Colorado State Police have cameras in the cars, right? Smile, you jackass, you’re busted for brutality!”

“Luis! Enough!” I said, and twisted enough that I could see the edge of the policeman’s face, the one holding the gun to my head. “I don’t know what you are talking about. Who is your son?”

It was a very dangerous question. I sensed the sick fury building in him, and he was mere seconds from pulling the trigger that would kill me.

“Who’s my son?” he repeated. He grabbed a fistful of my pink hair and yanked my head painfully back. “Who’s my son? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Randy,” the other cop said. “This guy’s got a point. We’re exposed out here. You want to get straight answers, we can’t do it right here on the side of the road, man.”

“Cameras can be smashed,” Randy said.

“Maybe so, but passing cars can’t.”

Randy hesitated, then grabbed the handcuffs and hauled me up to my feet. He shoved me in the direction of the police car as his partner opened the back door and put Luis inside. Luis didn’t fight, but as we approached the vehicle the stench of it rolled over me—hot metal, vomit, despair, sweat, blood, stale air, and the reek of plastic—and it was hard not to dig in my feet and resist.

No. I had to learn to deal with this strange problem of mine sometime, and now, with a gun aimed at my head, it seemed a good time to begin.

I told myself it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought, once I was inside the police car, but that was a fragile sort of lie that crumbled as soon as the door slammed shut beside me. The air was stifling, and it reeked. I coughed, barely controlling an urge to void my stomach, and tried not to struggle like an animal in a trap.

I am Djinn. This is nothing, nothing, nothing.

No. It was confinement. And confinement was something the Djinn hated.

Officer Randy and his partner got in the vehicle, which rocked to accommodate their weight, and we pulled out onto the road.

“You okay?” Luis asked me in a low voice. I nodded, throat working, unable to speak. I had never liked enclosed vehicles, but this one seemed ever more sinister and confining. “Don’t do anything crazy.”

“Yeah, listen to your friend,” Randy said. We had gone about five miles from where we’d left the Victory, and now he slowed the cruiser and made a right turn on to a barely visible dirt road. The car bounced and rocked along the trail, throwing up showers of dust and rocks.

When we could no longer see the road behind us, he brought the car to a stop and turned off the engine. The tick-tick-tick of cooling metal and the constant low chatter from the radio speakers were the only sounds.

“Out,” Randy said. His partner gave him a worried look, but complied. He and Randy opened our doors and removed us from the backseat, out into open air again. The hot air fanned the sweat that had trickled down my back, and I shivered.

Randy drew his gun again, staring at me with cool, dust brown eyes. He was a hard man, but I didn’t sense real cruelty in him. Desperation, perhaps.

“Now,” he said. “Let’s start the movie over. Where’s my son?”

Luis shook his head. “We don’t know what you’re talking about, Officer. We really don’t.”

He stuck the barrel of his gun under Luis’s chin, and Luis’s eyes squeezed shut to conceal what must have been either rage or fear. He didn’t move, but I saw muscles flexing in his tattooed arms.