by Rachel Caine
“Just tell me that she’s all right,” I said, and closed my eyes. I felt suddenly very weary, and very alone. “Tell me that you’re all right, too.”
His voice, when it came again, was lower, softer. “I didn’t think you’d care whether I was or not.”
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “But I told you: Djinn don’t fall out of love that easily. And I do care about you, even if I wish I didn’t.”
“Ouch.” He sighed. “Cassiel, please. Yeah, I should have told you about the guys waiting outside to pick up your trail. I was going to when you stopped by my room, but ... You ever have one of those moments where you wish you’d done something, wish it with everything you’ve got? That was mine. I should have warned you. I didn’t want you hurt.”
It was an apology, but not the one I was seeking. “And Rashid?” I asked. “Have you freed him?”
“Cass—”
“Then there’s nothing more to discuss. I can’t trust you if you keep a slave against his will.”
Luis cleared his throat uncomfortably and changed the subject. “Where are you?”
“Far away,” I said. His voice sounded thin and distant now, fading as the connection fluctuated. “But never far from you if you need me. I hope you believe that.”
“I do. Cass? I’m sorry for what I said before you left. Not that it wasn’t true, but it didn’t need to be that harsh. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“I know,” I said. “And I’m sorry that my decisions have led us to this, but I couldn’t see another way. Something must be sacrificed for the greater good.”
“And that something’s us,” he said, recovering some of the cool distance to his tone. “Even if it puts Ibby at risk.”
“I’m trying to save Ibby. And all the others. But I can’t do it from there—you know that.” Now we were entering the downward spiral of arguing the finer points again, and I knew where that would end—in pain. “Please take care of her.”
“I will,” he said. If there was the slightest emphasis on the “I” part of that statement, I supposed he could be forgiven for it. “If you need power, take it. I’m out.”
And he was, ending the call without any further courtesies. He was learning bad habits, but probably from me.
I had learned so much from him, including how bitter a personal betrayal could be. It seemed only fair.
I closed my eyes, calmed my thoughts, and reached for the connection between us. It was a slender thing, but still strong, built of trust and experience; our recent discord had frayed that rope badly but not broken it. Over time, it would repair ... if we survived.
There was an oddness to doing this now, a kind of strange, tentative worry that rose in me as I began to draw power out of him. This felt less intimate and more like a clinical transaction. That should have been a good thing; it held far fewer complications, for both of us.
But as the power sank into me, heavy and golden as liquid sunlight, I found myself thinking about his face, his mouth, his body, his skin ... all the things that were now forbidden to me, by my own choice.
And it hurt, again.
I don’t know what Luis felt, or thought, but as soon as I could, I cut the flow of energy between us. The contact had left me feeling restless and wild at a very deep, almost cellular level. I craved ... something. And I didn’t dare define what it might be.
I glanced at the maps again, and at the network of black dots I was slowly forming. I’d marked all the places where the FBI had identified either locations or suspected groups of Pearl’s growing list of followers. I could visit each on the aetheric if I managed my power carefully enough. That would have been the smart, methodical way to approach it, but I believed Rashid. Right or wrong, I believed him. And if Pearl had planned to have those children brought to her in New Jersey, then it was possible that was where her training efforts were under way—and where she would be visible, flesh, and vulnerable.
I went straight to the camp location in New Jersey. As before, there was a thin, toxic shimmer to the aetheric mists over the location, but this was stronger than before—and it seemed to have a sense of me, as well. I stopped well short of the vague, twisting shapes that shrouded the area, but it seemed that I couldn’t stop drifting toward them. Troubling—and then I realized that I had stopped, after all.
The mists were reaching out for me.
I quickly propelled my aetheric body backward, but a whisper of dark shimmer brushed me as I did, and a black, cold pain shot through me. It shouldn’t have happened; nothing should have been able to affect me on the aetheric level, not in this form. But I felt it like a freezing electrical shock, and tumbled away from it, out of control, driven by a panic even I couldn’t fully understand.
There was something there. Something alive. Something hungry.
It wasn’t Pearl, but it was an aspect of her. An avatar, waiting for the unwary Djinn or Warden. The chill I’d felt had been her leech battening on me to drain away all of my aetheric energy ... all that I’d borrowed from Luis, and all that powered the cells of my human body as well. This was new, and deadly indeed, if it could attack Wardens, and not only the Djinn.
Pearl was growing stronger, and I’d allowed that to happen. It was as Ashan had told me in the beginning: She was drawing power from humans, and from Wardens, and if she wasn’t stopped, she’d soon have enough to destroy all of the Djinn as well—a ravening black hole consuming all that it touched.
I experimented a bit with the trembling black fog, seeing what triggered it to move closer and what it would ignore. That was a dangerous game, and it brought me into contact with the mist more than once. By the time I’d done my investigation, and gathered enough information, I was once again running dangerously thin on reserves—but it was worth it.
I knew enough to get a warning through.
My next call was to Luis, again, to give him the information, location, and findings; he would tell Marion, who would coordinate the Wardens and warn the Djinn, such as remained on speaking terms with us. Luis brought up the issue of power, for which I was thankful; I hadn’t wanted to ask a second time. This time, the flowing energy was stronger, and the images and desires it woke in me more pronounced.
Not something I could share with Luis, but I was relieved when he said, a little hesitantly, “Do you want me to stay on the phone? I’m on some downtime. I could go up with you to take a look, see what you’re up against.”
The idea of seeing him, even in aetheric form, was irresistible, and the tone of his voice seemed to indicate that he wanted at least some kind of reconciliation. I forced myself to hesitate before saying yes, hoping I didn’t sound as desperate as I felt; if he sensed it, he had the kindness not to say anything. Our good-byes were nonexistent again, but I left the phone on and the channel open, and rose into the aetheric. The cell phone would be a great help, since humans could not easily speak on the aetheric, and even Djinn sometimes found that their conversations took on confusing, unintended overtones in the realm of energy and intentions.
Finding each other was easy. The connection between us could be used as a guideline, and I flew toward him at dizzying speeds through the aetheric—native, to the Djinn, but confusing and wildly unreal to human senses. I felt the vibrations between us grow in intensity until I saw him hurtling toward me with equal urgency. I slowed, and so did he, until we were hovering just apart. His form glowed a soft gold now, with flickers of copper in the form of flames on his arms. Most Wardens chose other forms on the aetheric, but not Luis; he was himself, in all important aspects. I still wondered how he saw me here, in this place. It wasn’t a thing I could witness for myself.
Speaking was all but impossible between us, but the feelings that cascaded back and forth were not. His hand reached for mine, and as he touched me I saw that my fingers glowed moon-silver on the right, dull copper on the left, because half of my left arm had been replaced and reworked with Djinn power in metal on the physical plane. It made li
ttle difference to me; sensations still came through, even touch, though perhaps a bit muted. I actually forgot about it much of the time.
On the aetheric, though, the contrast was striking.
Intoxicating as being in his presence again was, I knew we couldn’t linger here; Luis’s time was limited, and he needed rest. There was an underlying flicker of gray around him that spoke of exhaustion.
But he’d come to me, despite everything. And I knew, because I could feel it, that his instinctive pleasure in my presence was as intense as mine in his.
I held his hand as we shot up in a parabolic arc through the mists and lights, dodging dimly seen figures of other Wardens on their own affairs and Djinn who registered in ghostly flickers. We came crashing down toward the flat representation of the world at the black spot on my map, near Trenton, New Jersey.
More of that black shimmering curtain, but this one rose higher and twisted with more power than before. It seemed to move like a silently blazing fire, reaching up to brush the roof of the aetheric world and stretching down into the physical world below—a burning black tree of power.
Of all the things that I had seen so far of Pearl’s influence, that was the most alarming. The power involved was staggering.
More than that—it felt aware.
She’s here. She might not have taken physical form yet, but it was a certainty that her energy was stored here, readying itself.
Something in me reacted to her presence with a kind of longing, and panic, and I dragged Luis to a halt, hovering well beyond any approach to the column of force. Shafts of multicolored light crackled within it, lightning without a storm’s logic, and on the real world I dimly heard Luis’s voice on the phone say, “We can’t handle this alone, Cass. This is way above our pay grade.”
He wasn’t wrong, but the fact was that there were no others to call on. Marion couldn’t leave the children; most of the other powerful Wardens had been called out to the emergency at sea. Pearl had timed her move to active strikes just perfectly; Ashan wouldn’t commit the Old Djinn to fighting her, and David couldn’t. He’d already tasked them to the Wardens and to combat existing threats.
We were very much on our own, and very vulnerable indeed.
“Go,” I said aloud, in the real world. “Break loose. I can’t risk you.”
“You can’t do this alone. If she’s that powerful, she’ll destroy you in ten seconds and you know it.”
“And your help will only add another ten seconds to our lives! I’d rather do this alone. Ibby needs you more than I do.”
“You think I’m just going to back off and leave you? That’s you who leaves, Cass. Not me.”
On the aetheric, his glowing form turned toward me, and both our hands joined. We turned in slow, dreamlike circles, eddied by the currents of power. Beyond us, the fire of Pearl’s black hatred danced, and the smoke it gave off in the aetheric was the ash of a thousand burning Djinn.
“I’m not going. Ibby needs us both,” Luis said, down in the real world. “You can’t fight her. Not alone, Cass. Not now. Please don’t do this.”
“It’s the best chance we have to stop her,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I hung up the phone.
In that instant, the bonfire ceased to shimmer its toxic colors upward, toward the roof of the Djinn world; instead, the tendrils suddenly whipped outward, flowing with wicked speed toward the two of us. We’d been at a safe boundary distance, I’d thought, but no longer.
Now it was coming for us.
Coming very, very fast.
I tried to push Luis away, toward safety, but he hung on with a tenacity I hadn’t expected. Instead of pulling apart, he dragged me closer, closer ... and instead of a physical embrace, our aetheric bodies slid together.
They merged, sinking into each other, forming one heart, one spirit, one mind.
The resulting explosion of power was soundless, and bright as a star, and as Pearl’s poisonous tendrils of shadow whipped around us, I realized that she couldn’t touch us. Not as long as that brilliant light burned between us, within us.
I clung to Luis on the aetheric, and the power amplifying between us roared on, louder and louder, setting up resonances and waves that rippled in all directions. It disrupted the attack coming against us, and then broke in a soundless shatter against Pearl’s central column of force.
But Pearl’s column wavered under the attack, and came near to dispersing completely.
The blaze—Pearl herself?—pulled itself rapidly into a hard black shaft of swirling shadows, then into a ball, which contracted to a tiny pinpoint of darkness ...
And sped away through the aetheric, leaving behind the ghostly shimmer of power that I’d seen at other locations.
That was how Pearl moved from one of her camps to another. We’d just forced her to stage a hasty retreat.
On the physical plane, my cell phone rang, and I fumbled it open, still splitting my attention between the two realms of existence. “Madre,” Luis’s voice said shakily. “Can you feel this? What the hell is this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. We were still merged on the aetheric, and it felt ... incredible. I wanted to weep with the beauty of it, and scream, and run away from its intimacy. There was nothing in my experience like it, not even among the Djinn. This was ... wrong, and yet it felt so addictively right. “Let go.”
“I can’t,” Luis whispered, from a great distance away. “I can’t let you go. I can never let you go. Don’t you feel that? God, Cass, no matter what happens, no matter how we feel ... this is right.”
The truth of it echoed between us in breathtaking clarity. That was the painful part, as well as the beauty; we were not meant to feel this kind of connection, not at this level. It was reserved for Djinn, and too powerful for humans to channel.
I tried again to pull away, but I couldn’t. I wanted ... I wanted to stay connected to him, in just this incredibly powerful, intimate way, forever.
The light between us flickered, and I realized with a jolt that he was the one fueling all this power, and it was draining him dry. He would allow it, in this state. He wouldn’t feel self-preservation, or fear. Not when we were too closely joined to differentiate ourselves.
I had to end it. Quickly.
It took the effort of my life, but I ripped us apart—and the pain was unbelievable, cell- and soul-destroying. On the physical plane, I heard Luis scream through the cell phone, and heard my own agonized cry. On the aetheric, we bled black waves of anguish as our conjoined bodies came apart, and wisps of our aetheric essence broke loose to swirl in bright, then fading colors around us. The wisps quickly cooled to ash gray, and fell away.
On the phone, Luis went ominously silent, and in the aetheric his form went still, drifting aimlessly in the visible and invisible currents of force. The colors of his body, normally so bright, were fading to pastel.
He was injured.
He might be dying.
I was hurt, but not so badly; I could see places on my aetheric body where I continued to bleed off energy in brightly colored streams. I concentrated on stopping the flows, and slowly, painfully, the bleeding became trickles.
I let go of my hold on the aetheric, and the gravitational pull of my physical body snapped me back through a dizzyingly long distance, a rush of starlight and waves of color, a fall from heaven. ...
I came upright in the chair in the motel with a gasp. I was still holding the cell phone, but there was only static and distant noise on the line. “Luis?” I said. “Luis, answer me if you can hear me!”
Nothing. I heard more noise now, other voices, and then a rustle as someone else picked up the cell phone. “Cassiel?” Marion’s voice. She sounded guarded.
“Is he all right?”
“Don’t know yet; he’s out cold. No obvious physical damage, but I’ve had a good look at Luis Rocha these past few days, and if he’s hurting, it’s a real problem. What happened?”
I didn’t want to tell her. The
re was something frightening and intimate about what we’d done; it felt forbidden, though as far as I knew there were no customs or laws against it.
But then, there never were until someone invented the newest perversion.
“We joined on the aetheric,” I finally said, choosing my words carefully. “Not touched. Joined. Became one. I had to pull us apart; it was killing him.” When she didn’t immediately reply, I asked, “Do you know of this? Have you seen it done?”
“Not by humans,” she said. “A very few times by a human and a Djinn, but it takes a strong bond to even attempt it. Maybe the Djinn have something like it among themselves ...?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think there’s anything like that in Djinn experience. Did I kill him, Marion? Did I—”
“No, he’s not dead,” she said. “Hurt, yes, but not dead. No worries, we’ll take care of him here.” She cleared her throat. “Perhaps you shouldn’t—”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Perhaps we shouldn’t. Ever.”
I hung up, staring thoughtfully at the blank wall in front of me. Djinn couldn’t—or didn’t, in any case—merge in the way that Luis and I had on the aetheric; that seemed to be reserved exclusively for Wardens and Djinn ... but technically speaking, I wasn’t even a Djinn, only the remnants of one.
Odd, that I was the first to discover this intimate, cruelly beautiful connection that could occur between two people on the aetheric—unless it couldn’t occur to anyone but me. Perhaps that was one of the strange outlying pieces of my once-Djinn self; perhaps Ashan had deliberately left that capability to me, to help me protect myself here on the aetheric from Pearl.
I wouldn’t rule it out. Ashan played very long, very obscure games, and he had manipulated me from the beginning. If this was some kind of weapon left to me to discover, then it was a dangerously seductive one.
It appeared that I could protect myself from the worst that Pearl could do, on the aetheric. All I needed to do was kill the Warden who stood with me.