I, too, was remembering his brother, dead of a bullet.

“I’m going to kill this guy,” Randy said, “and then you’ll remember what I’m talking about. How’s that?”

“If you do, you’re a fool,” I said, and got the full cold glare. He didn’t move the gun away from Luis. “Explain what’s happening. Maybe we can help you. We’re also looking for a child. A little girl, Isabel Rocha. She’s five years old. She’s been abducted from her bed.”

That surprised him enough to take his finger away from the trigger and lower the weapon to his side. “What?”

“She’s my niece,” Luis said raggedly. “My brother and sister died in a drive-by a couple of days ago. Ibby’s all I have left.” For just that moment, he couldn’t conceal the horror and despair of that, and I knew it rang true with the policeman, who took another sharp look at Luis, then at me. Frowning. “God-dammit, you have to believe us!”

It was convincing enough to cause uncertainty in our captor. And the frustration. “A kid,” he repeated. “What the hell is going on?”

“Who is your son?” I asked softly. Randy didn’t take his gaze from Luis.

“His name is C.T. Calvin Theodore Styles,” Randy said. “He’s five years old, and he was taken out of his bed three nights ago. Just—gone. No sign of an intruder, no clues.”

Randy’s partner, who seemed visibly relieved that violence wasn’t about to erupt, contributed the rest. “Randy got a call a couple of hours ago,” he said. “Came to his personal cell phone, said the one who’d abducted C.T. had left him somewhere to die, and was heading this way.”

Randy finally shifted his attention back to me. “The caller said I’d know her by the motorcycle and the pink hair.”

“That caller,” I replied, “is the one who has your son, and more than likely Isabel. I have nothing to do with it, but they are using you, and me, to slow down pursuit.”

Randy kept staring at me. “I get why he’s in this,” he said. “Family. Why are you?”

It seemed a fair question, and all I could do was shrug, as hard as that was to do with my hands manacled behind my back. “Family,” I said. “They’re all I have, as well.”

That, too, rang true to his lie-sensitive ears, and he exchanged a glance with his partner, who nodded. Without a word between them, they unlocked our handcuffs. Handcuffs, I realized, that either of us could have melted away at any moment . . . and had not. Luis had likely been biding his time, waiting for a strategic moment. I had been—what? Distracted? Djinn are not distracted.

“You got a picture of the girl?” the policeman was asking.

“Yeah,” Luis said. He dug in his back pocket and flipped photos, stopping on one that showed Manny, Angela, and Isabel in some sort of holiday setting. They were frozen in that moment, happy and glowing. Alive.

It hurt me to look at it. This is how things are for them. Time is a long road, with tragedy around every turn. They can’t go back; they can only bring the past forward with them in fragments and photographs and memories.

No, not them. I was human now, to all intents and purposes. Like them, I was traveling that road now, and time was an enemy: a thief, stealing moments and memories and lives.

Randy—Officer Styles—flipped to Luis’s identification card, then examined his other photographs before handing it all back. He was cautious, which reflected well on him. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “They look like nice people.”

“They were,” Luis said. I could tell it was still hard for him to use the past tense of the verb. He put his wallet back in his pocket and sent me a glance. “So where are we? We good now?”

“Yeah,” the policeman nodded. “We’re good, until I find out you’re shining me on, and then both of you are food for crows if I find out you had anything, anything to do with my son’s abduction. Clear?”

Luis nodded. “Clear.”

Officer Styles’s attention turned to me. “Pink, what’s your name?”

I almost answered Cassiel, but stopped myself. He had been thorough in checking Luis’s identity. He’d hardly take my word for it. In answer, I took my own wallet from my jacket pocket and handed it over. He flipped it open to the driver’s license. “Leslie Raine,” he said, and glanced up at me. “Picture doesn’t look much like you.”

“Do they ever?” Luis muttered. It was good he answered for me, because I felt stung. I had used a minor amount of power to adjust the photograph to resemble me. Was he implying that I was not skillful at such forgery?

“Huh,” Randy said. He studied the photo closely, then me, then the card again.

“I’m albino.” Several people had referred to me so; I thought it only fair to adopt the idea. “Perhaps we don’t photograph well.”

“Don’t albinos have pink eyes?”

“Not all of them,” I said.

He flipped through the rest of the wallet. Apart from the credit cards that Lewis had provided, there was nothing else. No mementos. No photographs of any kind, saving up memories for empty days.

I wished I had taken some now, not so much to placate the policeman, but to keep Manny’s smile vivid in my mind.

He handed everything back. “Kind of a light wallet.”

“I’m neat.”

“That’s not neat, that’s OCD,” he said. “Okay, I’ll buy you guys might be legitimate; we already looked you up on the computer in the car. Manny and Angela Rocha, shot dead in their front yard, just like you said. Isabel Rocha, abducted. Got a nice mug shot of you, sir, from bad old days.”

Luis shrugged. “Reformed,” he said.

“Used to be in the Norteños, right? I didn’t know that was an option, getting reformed.”

“I got a good job.”

“Yeah? Doing what?”

“How is this helping to find your son?” I cut in. “Or Isabel?”

Officer Styles took in a breath, held it, and let it out. “It isn’t, I guess,” he said. “You tell me what you know about this.”

It was my turn to exchange a look with my partner. Luis, correctly guessing that I did not have enough experience in half-truths to be credible, took the lead. “We got a lead,” he said. “Isabel was spotted along this road, heading from New Mexico into Colorado. We were getting close when you stopped us. Look, if you want to come with us . . .”

“Who gave you the lead?”

Luis shook his head. “I can’t tell you that. But I promise you, if you let us follow it, we’ll do everything we can to get your son back while we look for Ibby.”

He meant it, and I knew that Officer Styles sensed it, too. He was on the verge of saying something when his phone rang. He checked the number on the display and said, “My wife.” Tension ran dark through his voice. He turned away to speak in low tones, and I did not try to hear what was said. The pain and fear coming from him was palpable, like a sickening fog.

Children, I thought. What can our enemies want with children?

So many terrible things.

Randy closed the phone and took a moment staring toward the horizon. When he came back to us, his manner and expression were composed, but that didn’t matter. He was far from calm. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Randy,” his partner said. “Everything okay with Leona?”

“She’s just anxious. I don’t want to tell her—” He shook his head. “I don’t want her to know this was a bad lead. She needs a little hope.”

It was astonishing, how little it took to change him from a man I needed to battle to a man I wanted to help. Djinn rarely changed their minds, but then, they had scopes of knowledge that humans did not. Human perception, I realized now, was like a prism, reflecting first one facet of a new thing and then another.

It made the matter of trusting someone even more risky. I wondered how they had ever learned to do it at all.

“Can you take us back to the motorcycle?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Because I like my motorcycle.”

That seemed to amuse him, but he nodded. “Sure. Why not?”