by Rachel Caine
There were three humans at risk, counting me; the two Djinn were in no danger. They could escape into the aetheric at any time. But not with us. Neither Rahel nor David had the particular, peculiar skill of keeping a human alive while moving through that realm, or they'd have already begun removing us to safety.
If they had to evacuate us another way, it would take time.
"We need to release another Djinn," I said, and took off my pack. I pulled out the padding and carefully unrolled it, layer after layer. The first six bottles had shattered, and three more were cracked and useless--a cracked bottle could not hold a Djinn. There had been ten bottles, and only the two that had been wrapped in the center were still intact.
And open. David's, and Rahel's. I felt an icy chill, because those Djinn who'd been imprisoned were now free--free to turn on us, to seek revenge against us. But at the moment, at least, it seemed the Mother had gathered back her children to her side. There was no guarantee at all that she wouldn't send them at us again soon, but for now, all that mattered was that they were no longer an asset to us. Only a potential, and deadly, liability.
I checked the last bottle, the one we'd separated out so carefully--Venna's bottle. It, at least, was intact, but she'd be of no help at all to us as an Ifrit, a twisted and blackened shadow of a Djinn. Releasing her meant only that Rahel and David would be damaged, or killed, as she blindly sought to replace her lost power with theirs. She'd cause chaos, but nothing more.
Joanne, without comment, took it from me and put it in her pocket.
I'd failed, utterly failed, in what Joanne had entrusted me to do--carry the captive Djinn safely to the Wardens. I felt a burst of hot fury at Rahel, but she'd done nothing except what came naturally to a Djinn; she'd struck out at her captor. It was an almost irresistible urge for her.
Joanne took a deep breath and said, "Rahel, take Rocha. David, take Cassiel. Get them out of here. Take them all the way to Vegas if you have to. David, you can come back for me. I can hold out here until you return."
It was a surprisingly logical choice, because Baldwin had all three powers at her disposal--Earth, Fire, and Weather--while Luis and I had only two, and Fire was his weaker gift. More than that, Joanne had been tested in battle many times, and Luis and I were relatively new at the combat aspect of fighting the forces of nature in this particular way.
But I worried. I didn't fancy even Joanne's chances against Pearl, here where she so clearly had taken the time to prepare her battlefield, build her soldiers, and was intent on not just killing, but devouring.
David was staring intensely at his lover, his wife, the mother of his future child, which I supposed he also knew. "Don't die," he said flatly. "Promise me."
It seemed a cold sort of good-bye, but only in words; what passed in looks between them was much different. They kissed, and whispered together for a few seconds, and then before I was quite ready, David turned toward me. There was a blind anger in him--not toward me in particular, but directed at the situation, at the necessity that tore him away from the woman he loved now, of all moments.
Before I could change my mind, his burning-hot arms had fastened around me, and the building, the chimera, Joanne, all of it was falling away beneath my feet in a shocking burst of acceleration that drove the blood down in my body, sending me into a weakened, gray-haze state for a few breaths until I was able to get my bearings again. David, with me as his helpless passenger, blurred through the cloud of birds, startling them out of formation, and the air grew icy around us before he steadied himself and thought to extend some heat--and breathable air--around me.
We were thousands of feet in the air, moving fast in the frozen blue. He'd gone high to avoid the creatures Pearl had sent for us, but now he began his descent in a steep, hurtling arc that whipped my clothes and hair into a frenzy around my skin.
"She'll call you back if she needs you!" I shouted.
"She'll call," he said. "But she doesn't hold my bottle. You do." David didn't need to raise his voice to be heard over the howl of the wind.
It was in my backpack. Physical location didn't matter--if I hadn't touched it, he'd have remained under Joanne's dominion, but I had put my fingers on it, and that had transferred control of him to me. I should have left the bottle with her, I realized, but in the heat of the moment I hadn't thought of it, and perhaps Joanne hadn't, either. "I won't hold you back," I promised him. "I'll send you to her."
"It might already be too late for that."
He was right, and the guilt of it gnawed at me. I forced certainty into my voice. "She'll be all right," I said. Thin white clouds appeared below us, and we punched through them with vicious speed, heading for a world that enlarged terrifyingly fast.
He didn't look at me. The lines of his jaw were tight as cables beneath his coppery skin. "No, she won't," he said. "She's never all right. But she'll survive until I can come back for her. Now don't talk to me. I don't want to know you're here."
I shut my eyes against the buffeting wind, the disorienting world through which we fell.
We hurtled toward the ground in a heart-stopping rush, and I watched the city of Las Vegas resolve beneath our feet with grim fascination. As a Djinn this would have been entertaining, but now, with flesh to tear and bone to shatter, it was simply terrifying. The city was spread out over a vast grid, but it seemed oddly lifeless at this height, buildings like tiny boxes, defiantly green lawns, blue dots of swimming pool water behind them. As we approached, the houses still had a structured sameness, but the center of the city, where we were descending, exploded into chaos--curved, asymmetrical structures with wildly extravagant grounds, pools, lawns, fountains.
Las Vegas was schizophrenic and beautiful, glowing even at the end of the world with its own false luster and very real power.
We came down in front of a vast glass pyramid, guarded by a sphinx that had never seen the sands of Egypt. David slowed at the very last moment and cushioned our landing, but even so, I felt the impact rattle all the way up my spine.
We hadn't been expected, but we were definitely awaited, and before I could draw breath, I felt the muzzle of a gun pressing against the back of my head. "Freeze," said a shaking voice. "In the name of the Wardens."
I turned around, took hold of the barrel of his gun, and fused it into a crushed ball. He was a boy, hardly much older than Isabel in her new teenaged body, and although I raised my hand to hit, I lowered it again, slowly.
"Stand down," said a firm voice behind the two of us, and I turned to see Lewis Orwell coming toward us. He looked--battered. Infinitely tired, unshaven, limping, but on his feet and leading a contingent of at least four powerful Wardens behind him.
And Shinju. Pearl. She looked perfectly composed, with that lovely smile fully in place.
"I'm going back for Jo," David said.
"You're not going anywhere," Lewis snapped, "until I get an update."
"She's in trouble."
"Always is. So talk fast."
David's eyes flared dark red, a color so violent that it made me take a precautionary step back. "I have to go. Now."
Lewis, for answer, took a bottle from his pocket. An open bottle. And incanted, quickly, the threefold charm of binding. Be thou bound to my service.
David laughed, a metallic sound with a bitter, biting edge of despair. "Too late," he said, and slapped the bottle out of Lewis's hand to shatter fifty feet away on the pavement. He grabbed Lewis's neck in one hand, and for a moment there was naked fury between the two of them, something so fierce that it was almost blinding. "I'm going."
"Wait," I said involuntarily, and David froze. "David, don't hurt him. Let him go." He did, releasing his grip almost instantly, and now it was Lewis whose eyes brightened, and focused on me.
"He's bottled," Lewis said. "And you have it."
I'd made a deadly mistake in trying to save Lewis's life; I'd betrayed a secret I didn't know would be an issue. David gave a wordless shout of fury, and I screamed back, "Go!"
Before the word was fully off my lips, he exploded into shadows and was gone.
But it didn't matter.
"It's in her bag," Shinju said sweetly. "She'd keep it from you if she could."
I backed up as Lewis came toward me, but three Wardens were behind me now, and Shinju, and the straps holding my backpack simply... disintegrated. Shinju caught the falling bag and held it out with a formal bow to Lewis.
"What are you doing?" I demanded, as he unzipped the bag and took out bottles--the ones for David and Rahel. "Lewis, you can't."
He glanced up at me, and I saw all the humanity had been crushed out of him. There was only weariness and the weight of the world. "I can't do anything else," he said. "We need them." He held up one of the bottles and said, with an eerie calm, "David, come back here. Now."
David misted out of the chill morning air, and he'd never looked more Djinn than he did in that moment, all metallic luster and burning eyes, and a rage to turn the world to cinders. "Don't," he said. "She needs me. She needs me now. Let me go to her!"
"I can't," Orwell said. There was sadness in it, and infinite regret, but there wasn't any room for negotiation, either. "I'm sorry, David. Get back in the bottle. Now."
David screamed, and the sound ripped through me like a saw blade, bloody and torturous, but he misted out. The scream lasted longer than his ghostly image, and then he was just... gone.
Orwell capped the bottle and put it in the pocket of his jeans. "And this one?" he asked me. "Who belongs to it?"
"What did you just do?" I blurted, appalled. "She'll die out there without rescue!" And Lewis, of all people, would not sacrifice Joanne's life. At least, the Lewis that I'd known before.
I didn't really know the man who faced me now, looking so... different. It was, I thought, the losses he'd taken in battle, and something else. Something more insidious. Pearl, or Shinju as they knew her here, wormed her way into his trust, into all them. She'd convinced him of many things that I wouldn't like, I sensed now.
Lewis didn't answer me directly; he only held up the other bottle. "Tell me which Djinn belongs to this."
"How did you know I even had the bottles? Did she tell you?" I jerked my chin at Shinju, who regarded me with utter, maddening gentleness. "Lewis, you cannot listen to her!"
He didn't answer that, either. I almost didn't know him in that moment; he looked exhausted and bruised, but the real change was in his eyes. Suffering, those eyes. And full of self-loathing.
"Please, Lewis. You must send him back to her. She needs him."
"I can't do that. Get inside the building. It's not safe out here." He looked up. Another Djinn was hurtling out of the sky, a black and lime green blur that resolved in an instant into Rahel, and in her arms... Luis, looking windblown and disoriented. She let him go, and he lurched to grab hold of a handy fake-sandstone pillar.
Rahel glanced from Orwell to me, eyebrows raised. "Am I interrupting something private?"
"Yes." Lewis was seething now, on the wire-thin edge of control. "I assume this bottle is hers, then."
"Yes," I said. "It's Rahel's."
"Back in the bottle, Rahel. Now."
She sent me a furious glare; I supposed she expected me to lie, but it wouldn't have done any good. I'd added a few more years of torment on to my already lengthy sentence, once she got free of my control.
And this time, I most likely deserved it.
Luis had steadied himself, and he was watching us, frowning, standing with his weight balanced for attack or defense. "What the hell is going on?" he asked. "Why didn't you send her back for Joanne? Is David going?"
"Ask Orwell," I said. "Lewis, what are you doing? You can't leave her out there alone. If Shinju's told you that she'll be all right, she's lying--"
"Shinju is inside," he said. "With us. And that's where I need you, too, inside. I can't risk a single one of the Djinn out there, not now; it's the endgame. We're losing cities, whole cities, and we can't keep it together much longer. We've already lost so many. David is one of the most powerful we could ever have on our side. I absolutely can't let him go." No wonder his eyes were so haunted, his face so pale and lined. He was managing the end of the human race, and it was burning him alive; his very passion was destroying him.
If it was grave enough that he could abandon Joanne, whom I knew he loved more than any of us... then it was the last death throes of the Wardens.
This was Shinju, I thought again. Pearl, taking her revenge in small, cruel ways. Abandoning Joanne hurt Lewis, and it would destroy David; it would hurt all the Wardens, in great or small ways.
I shouldn't have left her there alone. I should never have agreed to it.
Chapter 12
LAS VEGAS SEEMED shockingly normal. Inside the hotel, lights burned; slot machines rang, buzzed, and whirred. Dead-eyed humans sat and gambled away their last wealth, expecting no tomorrow. I supposed that at the end of the world, perhaps people would take their pleasures where they could, though I didn't see what joy could come of winning a game of chance now.
The very definition of a Pyrrhic victory. You win only to burn.
I thought about that scream that David had uttered; I didn't seem to be able to unhear that kind of pain and anguish, fury and horror. It echoed unpleasantly inside my head, driving out everything else, and I thought, I have to get him back. Open the bottle and let him find her.
I thought that up to the moment when Lewis opened a door and walked me inside the last refuge of the Wardens.
The smell of sweat, desperation, and despair was thick in the room. There was little noise; it was as hushed and quiet as a church, or a funeral. At one time, this would have been an expensive retreat for the ridiculously wealthy, a playpen for the spoiled, but now all of the elegance had been stripped and shoved away, and the room was a morgue, hospital, surgery, and battleground all at once. There was a space in one corner for Wardens to work, and currently there were six standing together, hands linked. As I watched, one collapsed. A black-coated staff member of the hotel silently picked her up and carried her to a cot, woke another Warden, and led him groggily to take the empty place in the circle.
In Oversight, this room was awash in reds and blacks, bloody with it.
And around us, hemming us in, was a descending white fury.
There was another room, the door left partially open; I glanced at it as we walked past, and saw...
Isabel.
"Ibby!" I cried, and ran toward her. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, but scrambled up to hug me when I hurtled toward her. Luis was right with me, hugging the child, kissing her.
She'd grown still more--no longer the slender early teen, she'd now matured to an age that had to be ringing the bell of adulthood. Seventeen, eighteen years of growth, perhaps, but the smile was still the unfettered joy of a child, and the relief of one.
"Mama," she blurted, and then took in a sharp, steadying breath. She shook her long, dark hair back and composed herself with an obvious effort. "I mean, hello, Cassiel. Uncle Luis."
"Shut up, mija," he said, and hugged her again. He kissed her on the forehead. "How did you get here?"
"I came with everybody out of Seattle," she said. "We were evac-ed out by helicopter, except for the Weather Wardens; they had to go in a truck. Es went with them. She said it was exciting." The color was high in her cheeks, but she was trying very hard to seem composed. "You two look tired. But you're okay, right?"
"Yeah, we're okay," Luis said, and smiled.
"I'm so glad," said a new voice, and I turned. So did Luis, and his smile vanished. So did his good mood, and mine, because Pearl's human form stood there, cool and composed, smiling at us. I hadn't noticed in the stress of the moments before, but she'd affected a Japanese kimono, and put her dark hair up in a complicated style; of all those I'd seen in this place, she was the first to look rested and content. "Please, be welcome here with us." The us was significant, because she was talking about Isabel. And, I saw, Esmeralda, who was asl
eep in a piled tangle of coils nearby.
And beyond her was a room full of Pearl's children. Eerily quiet children, mostly awake and focused on things that weren't there--working on the aetheric, I assumed. Performing their altruistic duty to help mankind... until Pearl decided that was no longer necessary, of course. As soon it wouldn't be.
There were almost a hundred of them here, dressed in plain white shirts and pants, like a uniform. Isabel, I realized, was also in white. Even Esmeralda wore a soft white T-shirt on her human half instead of her usual flashy choices.
Pearl's kimono was a softly patterned white, with embossed flowers and dragons.
"Interesting," I said, holding her dark gaze. "White's the color for funerals in Japan."
"I know," she said. "I'm in mourning for all those we've lost. I'm surprised that you are not... but then, Cassiel, you were never what one would term the sentimental sort. You finally came to join the battle."