Description: Fire is a living, malevolent thing. It eats, it breathes, it moves with fluid grace and eerie, destructive beauty. I could still appreciate the astonishing power of it, even as my hair crisped at the ends and the heat seared across my fragile human skin. Flames poured like liquid down the walls of the office, rippling and twisting out onto the floor, devouring the furniture. Everything seemed trapped in its own frozen moment of destruction, as if the fire had become amber. I couldn''t focus my stinging eyes for more than a few seconds; everything seemed too bright, too hot, and in the next instant smoke billowed black and choking around me. I fell to my knees and crawled, breathing oven-hot toxic fumes until my searching hand fell on something soft. Skin--a woman''s hand. It wasn''t moving. I grabbed hold and pulled her back toward me; her black suit had caught fire, and I batted the blaze out as coughing fits threatened to rip my lungs from my body. The woman I had found was unconscious but still breathing shallowly. Smoke had made her face a grimy mask. "Cass! Get your ass out now !" A raw, ragged shout pierced the roar of the fire, and I looked around to see a sheet of fire racing across the floor toward me. A sudden chemical blast of white foam snuffed it out. It was a temporary measure, but it gave me precious seconds to find the strength to move. Luis Rocha, still holding the sputtering, empty extinguisher, stumbled into view out of the thick smoke. My Warden partner looked as if he''d been through a fierce battle--clothes torn and burned, skin singed. He''d lost part of his shoulder-length black hair to the flames. "Cass, come on--we''re losing it! Gotta go!" I poured raw Earth power--thick, golden power that flowed like honey--over the woman I''d found, into her, and saw her breathing and heartbeat steady. I stood up and grabbed her around the waist. She was a small thing, and I was tall; even so, the weight of her draped over my shoulder caused me to stagger. The fire roared its defiance and ignited a chair only a few feet away; it burned fast, upholstery charring into black lace and revealing bones of springs and wood. I stopped, momentarily overcome. Nothing looked right now, and I couldn''t find the exit. You will die here , something told me. It sounded like the cold, dispassionate voice of Ashan, the leader of the Old Djinn--my brother, in a very real way; my king, in everything that mattered. Why do you do these things, for them? For humans, he meant. I was not born into flesh; being here in the mortal world was my choice, just as I''d chosen to run into this burning building alongside Luis. I had my reasons for doing both of those foolish, potentially fatal things. At least the part of me that was stubbornly Djinn, immortally powerful, saw it as foolishness. There were times--and this was one--when the human part was tempted to agree with it. A blessedly cool draft of air fanned my face, and I gulped it in as I staggered blindly into an area of the building not yet fully involved. A glass door had shattered at the end of the hall, and the strong breeze flowing past me was drawn by the sucking pressure of the fire behind me. We had, at best, only moments before it would lash out with explosive force in a fireball, scorching everything it touched along the way. Ahead of me Luis was shouting something as he headed for the doorway. I couldn''t answer. My lungs were choked with smoke and soot, and all I could do was cough, stagger, and brace myself against a black-smudged, too-warm wall. My eyes were watering and stinging, and I wanted to sit down against this wall, drowning in the cool, blowing air--but I knew that if I did, I''d be dead, and the woman I was trying to save along with me. I felt a sudden wavering pause in the air flooding past me, and my skin prickled in instinctual alarm. It felt like the silence before a lightning strike, but I felt no weather-working in play. No, this was physics--physics of a different kind. And then the fire exploded through the door behind me, crawling and leaping along the hallway''s ceiling and walls in thick, fiery tendrils. Hungry, and grabbing for its food. "Cassiel!" Luis shouted, and plunged back toward me. Too late, of course; he couldn''t outrun that fire, any more than I could. I felt it with a kind of fatalistic calm: I was, indeed, going to die here, now, in this moment. I was going to die a failure, trapped in human flesh, unable to prevent the disaster that was coming, or my own foolish end. And it might have been so, except that a child walked calmly out of the hellish burning heart of that fire, through the doorway, and extended her hands toward me. She was a small, lovely girl with long, silky black hair and the caramel-colored skin of her uncle Luis. When I had first met Isabel, she''d been a laughing, happy child. Now she was far too grown up for her very young age--almost six. Her eyes had a depth and sadness that spoke of trauma, and as she extended her chubby little hands toward me she closed them into fists, and the fire that was racing toward me...; died. It was as if there was some barrier over the doorway she had stepped through. The fire boiled and roared there, but couldn''t pass to reach the cooler air beyond. Even the breeze had ceased. There was not a mark on Isabel. Not a singed hair, nor a single smudge of ash. Her pale blue T-shirt had a cheerful rainbow on it, vibrant as ever, and even her white sneakers were clean. She said, very soberly, "We should go now, Cassie." Isabel was the only person in the world I permitted to call me that. It was a reminder of happier days, and a happier Ibby. I continued to cough as she walked past me toward her uncle Luis. He shook his head and met my eyes briefly, and I read in his gaze how disturbed and worried he was by seeing her this way. There was nothing to be said, though. He took Ibby in his arms and carried her toward the broken glass door. I followed, with my own unconscious burden. Outside, the scene was a confusion of flashing lights, the harsh glow and roar of the fire, the squawk of radios and shouts of men. Fire trucks unrolled great white snakes of hoses, and men and women in heavy protective gear rushed toward the building. One took the woman from my shoulder and hurried her toward a waiting ambulance and team of paramedics. I sank down to the grass, still coughing, and spat out black, vile-tasting mucus. I don''t know how much time passed--a minute, maybe two--before a paramedic knelt next to me and held up an oxygen mask. I sucked gratefully on the cool, sweet breath of life, feeling my head clear and my lungs ease. He handed me a packet of premoistened towelettes and gave me a thumbs-up motion, with eyebrows raised. I nodded. He moved on. I scrubbed the damp fabric over my grimy face, and realized that my hands were trembling. I could have used Earth power, drawn from Luis, to clean myself off and start to heal the damage done to my lungs, but I chose not to do so; Luis, at the moment, needed his strength, and I was not seriously injured. My vanity could be satisfied with mere human cleaning methods for now. A well-dressed man with a badge hung on a cord around his neck took a knee beside me. He wasn''t looking at me so much as at the burning building, and his expression was remote and focused. His credentials said his name was Guilder, and he was wearing a crisp black suit, white shirt, and businesslike blue tie. "You''re Cassiel," he said. "The Djinn." He didn''t say it the way a Warden who''d grown up with the idea of supernatural genies locked in bottles would have; he pronounced the word carefully, awkwardly, like an entry in a foreign dictionary. "I''m Guilder. FBI." I nodded. I had expected the agents to descend on us quickly; I was simply surprised that he wasn''t one of many. I removed the mask (a little regretfully) and said, "You want to know how it happened." My voice hardly sounded like my own; my vocal cords were strained, and had the husky growl of a longtime smoker. "We warned you." "I''ve been briefed already about your warnings," he said, still watching the blaze as the firefighters began to train their hoses on it. "You really think a child caused all this?" "Not just any child," I said. "A child who can control fire and bend it to his will. We warned you not to keep any of them here. You''re not equipped to handle them." The children had been rescued--or abducted, depending on which side you might be on--from camps across the United States run by the Church of the New World, a fringe organization that had recently twisted itself in dangerous new directions: either one that abducted children with blossoming Warden powers over Earth, Fire, and Weather, or subverted the parents to believe that the Church was the only possible way to protect their young ones. Part of the Church''s teaching was that the Warden organization, the official gathering of those gifted with these powers, intended harm to the children. I was the first to admit that the Wardens were not perfect, but I knew they meant the best, especially for the talented innocent. The Church, on the other hand, taught that the Wardens were ruthless, cruel mutilators who would rip the talent away from the children, leaving them psychic cripples at best, or dead at worst. That could happen, of course, if a child manifested a talent that was dangerous to everyone else, and had to be stopped. It was rare, but possible. The Wardens didn''t always err on the side of mercy. The Church preached it as an everyday occurrence, as a plan. And many people had believed, and given the Church children to train --or the Church had, in some cases, abducted those it thoug

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