by Rachel Caine
I sank down beside her and put my arm around her. "We won't go back," I said.
"We should," Iz whispered. "All those people. They all needed help, and nobody was there for them. Now they're just... waiting. All alone."
It was, I realized, the neglect that bothered her; we'd left that town without burying a single body, recognizing a single lost life.
I took her hand in mine and squeezed, just a little. "I know," I said. "But, Isabel, you know we cannot go back there. We just can't. It's too dangerous, and all that we can offer them is a pyre or a grave. There are people who need our help to stay alive, and that is where we must turn our efforts."
"We could use him," she said.
I knew who she was talking about, but it was something I didn't want to bring up--not here, not in front of Esmeralda, who was tightly coiled in the corner, watching us with her bright, odd eyes. She was, I thought, jealous. Jealous of the two of us, together, sharing this small grace. Perhaps she'd even been jealous of the fact that I'd taken her with me on the trip to Hemmington. I had no way of knowing; she'd never admit it, if so.
But I didn't trust her, and couldn't help that fact. Telling her there was a Djinn captive in a bottle was something far too dangerous. The temptation would be irresistible for her--either to torment the Djinn, or to use him for her own benefit. She had a bad history of that kind of behavior, after all.
No, far better I keep Rashid as a secret, for now. I might have need of him--or Isabel might, though I couldn't trust his forbearance with her for long. He wasn't a creature of patience.
"Hey," Luis said, and I glanced up at him. Iz did not. "Let's talk outside a minute, Cass." I nodded, hugged Iz once more, and stood to follow him out of the van. He slammed the grimy back door and turned the handle to secure it, then walked away. Not far, but far enough that it was clear he didn't want to be overheard.
Then he turned on me and said, "You almost got her killed."
"I know," I said. "I'm sorry. I never intended--"
"You may not intend it, but you can't say you couldn't anticipate it. I'm not letting her out of my sight again. Or you. No more splitting up, no matter what."
"You needed time to--"
"To heal? Yeah. And you're covered in cuts and bruises and from the way you're leaning, you've got a cracked rib going on there, too. So you tell me, how are we protecting each other, exactly? How can we?" He swallowed hard and put his heavy, warm hands on my shoulders. "We have to look out for each other, because we need each other more than ever. So don't try to protect me by putting me in the rear, okay? And I won't do it for you. We look after the girls, and we watch each other's backs." He paused, and smiled a little. "God, you're beautiful."
I laughed out loud, because it was blackly comical--I was dirty, covered in bruises. My hair still had the shredded remains of leaves from the night in the woods. I'd been coated in dust in Hemmington, which at least had served to mask the nightmarish remains of blood and other less identifiable substances from the abattoir of that destroyed market. "No," I said. "Not now, and perhaps not ever. But I think you are just surprised to see me standing."
"Hell, girl, I'm surprised either of us is breathing. And you are beautiful. Always." He kissed me so tenderly that it stilled everything for a moment, all the pain and fear and worry and time ticking away. And then he made me smile by saying, "Okay, I'm not saying you couldn't get an upgrade with a shower and shampoo, maybe a change of clothes. I would personally love to see you in a towel right now."
"You're insane," I said.
"Yeah, well, some people cope with certain death by getting a little bit horny. Why, are you saying you wouldn't like that right now?"Oddly enough, even after everything--or, perhaps because of it--the idea had a certain bizarre appeal. I was overwhelmingly aware of time passing, of the situation worsening around us, but the fantasy that somehow this could stop just for an hour, perhaps two--that we could find some beautiful, quiet space for the two of us and live that fantasy out, in private--seemed breathtakingly lovely.
And impossible, of course. But I was starting to realize that today, and every day after, would be a study in the impossible. Each minute we both still lived was an improbable gift.
"If you can find a motel," I said softly, with my lips close to his ear, "and find a way to keep the girls safe and elsewhere, then I will be happy to show you how I feel about your suggestions. Though I fear now is not the time."
"I know," Luis said, and pressed his lips to the sensitive skin beneath my ear, waking shivers. "But I figured the thought might keep us both focused for a while."
It was certainly having a focusing effect upon me, but just then a sharp, shrill tune came from Luis's pocket, and he pulled back and fumbled for it with evident surprise. "Thought all the grids were down," he said as he checked the screen of his phone. "Back up, I guess. For now."
"Who is it?"
He shook his head and pressed the button to accept the call. "Rocha," he said. "Who is this?" I couldn't hear the response, but I could see his face--still and frozen halfway to a frown. "What?"
I mouthed the obvious question again, but he looked away from me, frown slowly deepening. When I started to speak aloud, he held up his hand, palm out, to stop me.
"Yeah, I hear you," he said. "You can't be serious. It's me, Cassiel, my niece--we aren't exactly the infantry. You want an extraction, you're going to have to send in reinforcements. Lots of them."
Another pause. He turned completely away from me and lowered his voice. I picked out words that were disturbing, in or out of context--suicide, dangerous, impossible--but then he ended the conversation as suddenly as he'd started it, and shoved the phone back into his pocket. He stayed turned away from me for a few more seconds, hands fisted, and then slowly faced me.
"So," he said. "I guess you heard something about that."
"A suicide mission," I said calmly. "Impossible. You used the word dangerous, but clearly that was superfluous, given the rest of it."
He grinned, but it was a small, tightly controlled expression, and above it his eyes remained serious. "They've got a small group of Wardens trapped, and they need an Earth Warden to go get them. They're Fire and Weather, can't do it on their own. So I guess we're drafted."
"Where are they?"
He pointed down. "They're trapped in a collapsed mine shaft," he said. "And it's deep. But since there are six of them, and we're losing manpower all the time, I guess HQ doesn't feel like writing them off quite yet. They want our--and I'm quoting here--best efforts at rescue."
I raised my eyebrows. "How far down?"
"Honestly? Nobody's sure. You know those miners in Chile they rescued a couple of years ago? Not quite that far, but farther than any sane person should have ended up. I'm guessing a Djinn shoved them in there and slammed the door."
"And could still be guarding it," I said. "Perhaps."
"Yeah, maybe so. Which is why I don't want Iz and Esmeralda along for the ride on this one. We take them all the way to Seattle, get them settled and safe, and then we go on to the rescue."
"We just agreed we wouldn't split up."
"You want to drag two kids down hundreds of feet into gas-filled tunnels where any little spark could blow us all up? I'm pretty sure Esmeralda wouldn't go anyway, which would split us up to begin with. And I don't want Iz down there. Call me crazy, but I think we've done enough to her for one day." By we he meant, of course, me. I'd done enough to her for the day. And he was entirely right. "We're going to need help, especially if there's a Djinn involved."
I cocked an eyebrow. "Will you trust me in this?"
"Don't I always?" he asked. "What am I trusting you about, specifically?"
"I'd rather not say right now."
His head tilted a little to the side as he regarded me, and although the trust I'd requested was there, so was a healthy dose of doubt. I didn't blame him. I'd have felt the same, really. "But you're going to say before we're half a mile underground and getting ham
mered by a pissed-off insane Djinn, right? And it'd be real handy if you had, say, a Weather Warden in your back pocket who could manufacture breathable air, because I'm thinking the lack of that will be a little challenging."
"Trust me," I said again.
He dragged a gentle finger down the side of my face. "Oh," he said. "Cassiel, if I trust anybody today, it's you. I got no choice, do I?"
In truth, I wasn't sure that made me feel very much better.
"Excuse me," said a new, and very tentative, voice. I turned, and there was a woman standing a few feet away, with her hand clasping that of a small boy of about six years old. She was pretty, and the uncertain voice seemed to match her hesitant body language. "Did you come from out of town?" That was a polite way, I thought, of saying that we weren't from around here. The boy ogled Luis with fascination, especially the flame tattoos that licked the skin around the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt.
"Yes, ma'am," Luis replied. He sounded extremely polite suddenly. "We're just getting a few supplies, then we're heading out."
"Oh, I wasn't-- No, of course you're welcome here. I'm sorry if it sounded like you weren't, sir. That wasn't what I meant, not at all...." She was flustered now, and solved it by extending her free hand to him. "I'm Lucy. Lucy McKee."
"Hello, Mrs. McKee."
"I only asked because the phones are down, and there's a lot of rumors--the TV reports look just awful. Is it terrorists? Do you know? A lot of people are saying it's terrorists." She had large blue eyes that her son had inherited, and they both looked at us with grave, hopeful intensity.
"No, ma'am, I don't think it's terrorists," Luis said. He said it gently, but firmly. "Right now, there are a lot of things going on, but none of them are man-made as far as I'm aware. You should tell your family to stay together. You have a disaster plan, don't you? How to contact each other? You've got food and water supplies?"
"Well, a few, but--"
"Get more," he said. "Mrs. McKee, I don't want to scare anybody, but I'm not telling you anything that they won't be saying on the radio and TV soon. Keep in contact with your people, and get yourself supplied with food and water. Don't try to go to a bigger city right now. That's where the trouble will be worse. Understand?"
She nodded silently. I saw a glimmer of tears in her eyes, and fear, but she blinked and forced a smile for her son. "We'll do that, won't we, sweetie? We'll go to the store right now."
"Can I get Pop Rocks?"
"If you want to, of course you can." She looked up at us, oddly embarrassed. "I don't usually let him, but--"
"Let him have what he wants," Luis said. "Today. Stay safe, ma'am."
She gave him another smile, fainter this time, and hurried her son along. We watched them go down the block, to the same grocery store Luis had already visited.
"Do you think they'll live?" I asked him softly. He didn't look at me.
"Do you think any of us will?"
Without another word, or waiting for my answer, he walked back to the van.
Chapter 5
OUR GIRLS WERE QUIET for the most part, although Esmeralda was grumpy and restless; this was not, I found, shocking. Iz seemed too quiet, too withdrawn, and I tried to engage her in conversation for a while before abandoning the attempt and letting her ride in silence, staring out the window.
"Couple of hours more," Luis said. "It's going to get more dangerous the closer we get to Seattle, so stay alert. Cass, I need you up on the aetheric if you can manage it. Keep a lookout for any trouble."
I nodded and took his hand; physical contact between the two of us made access to the aetheric realm easier for me. A small burst of power sent me soaring up, out of my body, and the world took on the nacreous shimmer of mother of pearl, then dissolved into lines, light, whispers, fog. My native environment, as a Djinn, but I was no longer at home in it, and I felt the steady, though small, drain of power required to sustain me here. It was a risk, doing this; Luis was still weak, and his reserves of power were less than either of us might have wished. Mine were still shallow, too, but I was more concerned about him; I could only channel power through him, and draining him past safety put us both at risk.
For now, though, it was only a minimal exposure.
The forest around us was very much the same on the aetheric as it was in the human world; more impressionistic, perhaps, suggestions of trees and shadows of animals moving through them in streaks of subtle color. Life was bright, even plant life; the trees pulsed with slow whispers of golden energy. Beautiful, and calming.
But there was trouble everywhere around us.
The road on which the van traveled was a thick dead slice through all that life, a thing of man's making, too recent to have any real history and place on the aetheric, where time was as much a visible dimension as the others. Not everything mankind created looked so awkward here, but new construction did. The town we'd left behind had more weight and natural ease to it, because its history gave it reality as much as the wood and glass and metal of which it was built. Time had given it life of its own, and the memories and events that had taken place there, good or bad, had created its own aura. It was, I thought, a good place to live, full of small joys and long peaces. No human place was free of sadness, madness, death, but in their town, at least, that was outweighed by something I could only call... happiness.
I didn't wish to, but I found my aethereal body turning slowly, facing another direction... toward Hemmington.
The town was a blackened scar. For all its apparent peace and silence in the human plane, here it was a shriek, a vibrating well of agony, an open wound in the world. Something had happened there, something great and terrible, and the death that had followed hadn't left only human corpses; it had rendered that entire town, and everything in it, poisonous.
It was a trap, but instead of something that would blow up intruders, it would lure them in, lull them, and then destroy. My own trauma there had added to the scarring, I realized; so had Isabel's.
I looked at the girl, sitting silently in the van below me, and saw the taint of that place inside her. It had infected her in subtle, awful ways. She'd heal, I thought, but for now, the germs of it continued to fester. I mourned that, and the blackening of the roots of her power that she'd done to herself. Isabel was still beautiful, a shining star on the aetheric, but she glittered more darkly than she ought.
I turned away from Hemmington, extending my vision farther out. Not far away, Portland burned. The Wardens had withdrawn their forces, fallen back to Seattle. By the standards of human cities, Portland was a young place--only a little over a hundred years of buildings and settlements, and little that had lasted for any length of time. It had held a significant population, though most had scattered now, in bright groups that fled in all directions. The forces pummeling Portland were full of bright, bloodred fury... flames that seared away what humans had built and returned it to ashes.
The death toll must have been significant, but the suffering was done now; what was left in that city belonged to the Djinn and to the Mother. Humans had no place there now.
Not so far away--and too close for comfort--the Wardens had regrouped and gathered their forces near Seattle. They'd kept the destruction confined to Portland so far; I could see that their efforts were focused on evacuating the people and finding them safety, not on trying to douse the unnaturally bright flames that continued to devour what had once been one of America's great cities. It was, I knew, far from the only disaster they were facing; there was a great, dark energy rising from the midwest of the continent, where floods raced out of control and Weather Wardens struggled to divert storms and tame rivers. It would not end well, from the raw, bleeding colors of the aetheric. There was more--the harsh stabbing oranges and stark ripping greens of earthquakes were flashing along long-dormant rifts, toppling houses and rocking the tall towers of distant cities. The ocean's tides were rising under the whipping winds of forming hurricanes far out to sea.
There was death
coming, and it would not stop.
I already knew it, but staring at it here, in this way, it shook me how fragile the Wardens were, how utterly useless their defenses. I'd heard the grim despair in Lewis Orwell's voice, and now I felt it, as well; this was a fight to the death, but the winner was a foregone conclusion. All we could do was bind up wounds and defend for as long as we could. Without more Wardens, without the supporting power of Djinn, humanity had very little time left as masters of the world.
If they'd ever truly held that title, other than in their own minds.
We had avoided truly being attacked thus far, mainly because nature was directing its hatred toward the largest concentrations of what it perceived as threats... toward cities, and the Wardens who clumped to defend them. As we came closer to Seattle, we'd start drawing unwelcome attention; Isabel's bright power would ensure that we couldn't pass completely unnoticed. Even Luis had an impressive presence on the aetheric, though Iz's light effectively hid his, and I presumed mine as well.