by Rachel Caine
"Look after him," I told Esmeralda. "If anything happens to him--"
"Yeah, yeah, you'll make me into a coat, a pair of boots, and an awesome hat, I get it," she said. "Just go. I'm sick of looking at your pale, bony ass." She flicked a hand at me dismissively. I gave her a hard five-second stare before walking to my Victory. I'd laid it flat, but on the side not holding the precious bottle; I levered it upright, checked it--save for minor cosmetic damage, intact--and swung my leg over.
"Isabel," I said. "Let's go."
She hopped on without a hesitation and put her arms around my waist. For a second I was reminded of her as a smaller child, in this same position on a different bike, on a different day. A more hopeful one, perhaps.
Then I shook my head, started the engine, and we left Esmeralda and Luis behind, with the dull smoke still staining the air above them.
I was worried about Isabel still; her use of power had lit up the aetheric again, like a lightning strike on an inky night... and it would draw attention. Right now, she might be the most powerful Warden not shrouded by that black corner, far out to sea, and that meant she would be a target.
But all the vigilance seemed to be in vain. We rode fast, but smoothly. The road was empty of traffic or threats. No wrecks littered the highway. The sun had slipped beneath the line of trees now, casting cool velvet shadows across the asphalt. I drove with part of my awareness on the aetheric. If the Djinn--or Pearl's forces--decided to attack, they wouldn't give much warning. A split second might mean the difference between life and death.
Less than fifteen minutes later, we topped a steep hill, and below us in a soft, mist-shrouded valley lay a small town. The billboard-large sign proclaimed it HEMMINGTON, A NICE PLACE TO LIVE, and proved it with an utterly artificial photo of a smiling family.
It was very quiet below.
I slowed the bike and stopped, idling. Isabel rose to look over my shoulder. "Why are we waiting?" she asked. "Come on--let's go!"
"A moment," I said. There was nothing unusual, either in my field of vision or on the aetheric, yet something gave me pause.
"Look, there's a parking lot," she said, and pointed. "Right there. We can get a van or something. We don't even have to go that far."
"We need food and water," I said.
"Toilet paper," she added. "For sure. Maybe that premoistened kind. There's a store right there. C'mon, it's fine. There's nothing in there. The whole town's empty."
She was right--the place was ghostly silent. Lights burned, but I sensed no human habitation at all.
"In and out. Quickly," I said. "You see to the van. I'll drop you there and go on to the store. If there's any trouble at all, take the wheels and go. You can drive, can't you?"
She laughed. "I was a kid yesterday, but I can learn fast, Cassie. Don't worry about me."
There was no point in hesitating; the danger would be there, or not, and waiting wouldn't improve our chances. I pressed the throttle and sent the Victory gliding down the long hill. I kept the rumbling to a minimum, out of instinct as much as caution.
Too many predators out, and none of them in clear view. Staying quiet and small was as good a defense as any.
The parking lot wasn't large, but it had several choices of vehicles that would do; the largest was the work truck of some sort of contractor, and stocked with tools, from what I could make out of the interior. Not clean, but useful. I pointed to it as I rolled to a stop, and Isabel nodded as she slid off the bike. "Ibby. Be careful," I said. She waved impatiently, and I felt a spark of power as she unlocked the door to climb inside. I felt a primitive impulse to stay with her, watch over her, but that would only increase our risks. Better to divide the job.
I drove the bike onto the sidewalk in front of the store. It was called Mike's EZ Stop, and there were three cars out in front, all silent and deserted. When I killed the engine on the Victory, I could hear sounds--music, applause, talking voices, all of it softened by distance.
Televisions and radios. Not living souls.
The thick glass windows showed nothing--a brightly lit interior of shelves, groceries, coolers at the back fully stocked with cold drinks and packs of beer. I pushed open the door and heard a soft electronic tone, but no one appeared. The registers were open and bare, as if someone had methodically stripped them of cash, but there was no vandalism here.
I took two cloth bags from the environmentally friendly pile--ironic, now--and went shopping.
I checked the aisles methodically for anyone hiding as I grabbed two loaves of bread, peanut butter, jam, dried jerky, energy bars--anything that would keep without refrigeration. I avoided the canned goods, only because the water would be heavy enough; if this proved safe, we could always come back for more.
I was putting the last of the water into the bag when I rounded the corner and faced the last wall of coolers.
They did not contain beer.
The dead stared back at me, frosted and ice-eyed--employees still in aprons, a man in a tan jumpsuit who might have gone with the van Isabel was taking, a small boy crumpled into a fetal ball, a fat old woman in a flowered dress, more; they were stacked in the cooler in a horrifying mess.
Not all were intact.
It couldn't be all of the town, as overwhelming as it seemed.
I backed up into a row of shelves, and jars of spaghetti sauce clinked together. One popped free and shattered in a mess of red and broken, jagged glass.
Out. Get out. Something screamed inside me, some instinct more human than Djinn, though there was alarm within my Djinn soul as well. I tightened my grip on the bags, whirled, and ran for the doors.
The glass suddenly went opaque with cracks.
I threw myself forward into a facedown slide on the linoleum floor just as all the windows shattered inward, shredding the interior of the store like a bomb. Wind. Not just any wind. No, this was traveling at insane force, blowing over shelves, ripping up counters, and flinging them into the air. I saw a register fly by overhead before it hit a sliding metal shelf and blew apart into sharp fragments of metal and plastic. The electrical power cord hissed wildly in the air like a living thing and slapped the floor only a few inches from my hand.
I had no defense against weather. Not in here.
The initial burst of air had destroyed things, but now it sucked out again, then turned, and turned, warm and cool colliding in an insane battle for supremacy. The debris swirled and sped up into a blur, and the roof of the little store ripped away with a shriek of cracking steel and timber.
Gone.
The walls went next, unraveling into bricks and beams. I curled up tight on the floor and felt the wind sucking at me, ripping me with teeth made of steel and glass, wood and sharp plastic. It would flay me alive, or pull me into the storm of deadly, grinding debris. The linoleum floor, which was being ripped away around me, was at least under my control; made of largely organic materials, it was something within reach of my Earth powers, and I first rolled and wrapped the thick, flexible coating around my body. It protected me to some extent--enough that I began grabbing and dissolving the other organic debris in the air, especially the cutting and stabbing surfaces, into dust. The wind could still throw me at fatal speed, but at least it couldn't rip me to pieces quite so easily.
But it had other tricks, this tornado formed--I felt it now--of sheer, volcanic hatred... and as it shredded the coolers at the sides of the store, bodies joined the debris. The wind scoured them apart in seconds, into wet flesh and sharp, flaying bone. It was all organic, all under the domain of my Earth power, but it was too much, too fast, especially now that the storm was mixing so many different kinds of weapons together.
The dead attacked me in the second wave, and I'd already spent what power I had to stop the first assault. The bones stabbed at me like flying knives, and skulls pummeled me with the force of thrown bowling balls. The thick flooring couldn't protect me completely, or forever, and the tornado seemed to be growing in fury now, focused solely o
n ripping me to pieces....
And then something entered the fight, on my side. A brilliant rush of power that threw up walls around me, solid earth and concrete, rigid metal, a berm of safety that gave me relief from the pummeling.
And then, quite suddenly, I felt the back of the tornado snap as the power fueling it withdrew. The wind faltered, scattered in all directions, and bones and ripped flesh and debris rained down on the shelter that covered me.
I couldn't breathe. The linoleum had wrapped tightly to my body, and the air within the shelter had been exhausted in only a few gasps.
I'd suffocate here, in my safe haven....
But then the top peeled away with the ease of a can opening, and a face looked down on me. Two faces, actually. One, veiled with a fall of dark hair, was Isabel's, looking pale and frightened.
The other was indigo blue, silver-eyed, and I felt a surge of frantic panic as I realized that it was Rashid. Rashid, whom I'd imprisoned in a bottle...
... That was now held tightly in Isabel's hand.
"Get her out," Isabel ordered. Rashid ripped the shelter further open, took hold of the linoleum, and unrolled me from its stifling embrace. I gagged in dusty breaths and stared at his extended hand for a few seconds before grabbing it.
He lifted me effortlessly out and into a wasteland. A very limited and specific one, covering only the building that had once been Mike's EZ Stop; there was nothing left but scattered bricks, rubble, and the pulped remains of the dead. Not something I wanted Isabel to witness, but not something I could easily shield her from, either.
Isabel grabbed on to me and hugged me, wordless and shaking. I hugged her back and looked over at Rashid, who inclined his head just a tiny bit.
"You're sane," I said.
"Well," he replied, with a sharp-toothed smile, "that is not a common opinion. But I am no longer a puppet of the Mother's will. Only of hers." He cast a dark look at Isabel, and my arms tightened around her in reaction. "You are well aware how I feel about such things."
"Don't," I warned him. "She's a child."
"Old enough to hold my bottle," he said. "Though that was your doing, my sweet dear cousin, sticking me in one. For the second time. There will come a reckoning. Soon."
"Then reckon with me. Not her. She took possession only to save my life." I hesitated a moment, then said, "What happened here, in this place?"
He didn't have to answer me; a captive Djinn could easily use the rules of his confinement to throw endless obstacles in the ways of humans with whom he had issues. I counted it a fairly good sign that he said, "Djinn. Of course. There is an anima here. They waked it and moved on, and it did the rest. And will continue to do so."
An anima was the spirit of a place, a kind of tiny splinter of the Mother's consciousness, though it was difficult to tell how linked it was to her, or whether it was its own creature, like the Djinn. Anima were generally benign, though some darker ones gave rise to legends of hauntings.
This one, though, was mad and angry, left to stalk through a dead town and rip apart anything that intruded on its fury. There would be many of these, I realized now... pockets of seeming calm that would lure in the unsuspecting, only to trigger a boundless rage. The Djinn had set traps, knowing that humans would seek safety in places that looked safe, comfortable, normal.
I couldn't help a shudder. The anima wasn't dead here, only hurt and waiting. It wouldn't wish to fight a Djinn, so Rashid's presence alone saved us... but the next to stop here wouldn't be as lucky.
Rashid stared with those unsettling eyes and an expression I couldn't read, then said, "If you're done with using me, child, you can put your toys away."
"Oh," Isabel said softly. "Oh, uh, I don't know how--"
"I'm hardly likely to tell you." For all his menacing talk, Rashid was, I thought, showing remarkable restraint. Djinn were naturally inclined to take every advantage to trick their masters, but he was deliberately refraining.
Isabel looked frankly panicked. This was well outside the narrow bounds of her experience, and her hand was shaking. Any Djinn with half an impulse toward freedom could have startled her enough to drop the bottle, shattering it on the rubble and setting its captive free.
But Rashid did not move.
"Find something to put in the opening," I told Isabel softly. "A cork would be best. Something that fits tightly." She looked around frantically, while Rashid crossed his arms, rocked back and forth on his heels, and shook his head. She finally held up a triangular cosmetic sponge to me, and I nodded. "Now tell him to go back in the bottle."
"Go back in the bottle," she said in a rush, and then her cheeks turned red. "Please?"
"For the Mother's sake, school her if you want to keep her alive," Rashid told me, but he disappeared, and I gave the girl another nod.
"Push the sponge in tightly," I said. She did, and let out a sudden gust of breath. She held the bottle out to me, and I took it. "Good job, Iz. Never forget, a captive Djinn is not your friend, only your tool, and tools can turn in your hand. Don't use him unless you have no choice." I gave her an odd look then, and voiced the question that had suddenly come to my mind. "How did you know about the bottle?"
The hot red blush in her cheeks grew stronger, and she looked down. "I thought I'd better get your bike," she said. "I was putting it in the truck when all this started. I was kind of--looking around."
"And how did you know what it was?"
She frowned and stared at the bottle in my hand--an ordinary empty beer bottle, somewhat ridiculously sealed with a flare of cosmetic sponge. "Can't you see it?"
I saw nothing beyond the obvious. "What do you see?"
"Him," she said. "It's like a sun inside there. It burns."
That was... impossible. I stared from the bottle to her, thoughtfully, and then became aware of a sharp ache in my right side. The first of many complaints from a body that had sustained much abuse; it was the first voice of a mob's roar, all clamoring for attention. I had many cuts, some deep, and more than a few cracked bones and torn muscles.
And no time for any of it. "My bike is in the van?" I asked. "And where is the van?"
"In the parking lot," she said. "I'm sorry, Cassie, I was going to go, but--"
"But then you saw what was happening," I finished for her. "And you decided to stay and help. Iz, you can't do that. You must follow orders. Do you understand? I told you to take the van and go. You might have gotten yourself killed along with me."
"I didn't," she said. "And you needed me. You did."
It was difficult to argue the truth of that, especially when I had to use her stabilizing arm to limp my way out of the wreckage of the store.
The contrasts were eerie. The store was a pile of wreckage and shredded human remains, but just beyond it the street lay quiet and calm, only a few scattered bricks to show any disorder. The parking lot where Iz had left the van still sat unmolested, all the cars shrouded now with a faint coating of dust that still hung in the twilight air.
"What was that?" Iz asked me, as we got into the van. I took the driver's side.
"I don't know," I said, and looked out on the still, picturesque little town. "But I don't think we'll find anything else we can use here."
Or, I added silently, any survivors. A few lights burned in the windows, but there was an emptiness to this place that went deep, all the way to the unsettled core of the earth.
We would, I thought as I jump-started the van and got it rolling toward the exit, go around this place. Well and far around. For all its peaceful appearance, there was a curse hanging on this place, and a powerful one. I wondered what Rashid would tell me if I removed him from the bottle and asked what had happened here to madden the anima so horribly.
I wondered whether he would lie to me.
Probably.
Transportation acquired, we chose a different route at a crossroads rather than visiting the silent town of Hemmington; this one led to an even smaller hamlet, but thankfully there were people o
n the streets and cars passing through. The people were scared and nervous, and the cars seemed to be loaded with possessions, but it was better than our last stop.
Luis, always cautious, gassed the van up and did the grocery shopping himself (as if it had been my fault!).... He returned with much the same choices I would have made, but had thrown in some candy bars and soft drinks. "Comfort food," he said. "Ain't like we're going to have a whole lot of comfort, overall. Here, I also picked up camping gear. We're going to need it, one way or another. Not likely to be a lot of four-star accommodations in our future."
He'd also, without pointing it out, added some interesting survival tools to our supplies, including a rifle, ammunition, some wickedly lovely knives, and other things whose purposes weren't quite as clear to me. Esmeralda understood their purpose, however. "Water disinfection tabs, portable chemical heating pads... You're getting serious about this survivalist stuff. Good for you. This shit's going to get real, fast."
"You didn't see that town," Isabel said from where she sat on the dirty floor of the van, knees pulled up to her chest. She wasn't looking up as we inventoried the contents of the bags that Luis had brought, and I worried about the stillness of her posture. It seemed more traumatized than I had expected--but then, I had dragged a child, only six years old in real years, if not in body, into a place full of danger and very real horror. What had I expected, that she would easily adapt? Simply accept what she'd seen?