Caine, Rachel-Short Stories

by Rachel Caine

  She could not imagine what kind of reek she must give off.

  "I can walk," she said. She was surprised at her voice. It was a faded, cobwebbed ghost of what it had been, before the morning that Nana Sahib had promised them all safe passage from Cawnpore to Allahbad, with the promise of mercy and boats. Richard had explained it. Richard had always explained everything, until he'd been slaughtered at the river, and she'd been taken to Bibighar with the other women and children who'd survived. "Where are we going?"

  Her savior raised silver eyebrows. "To safety," he said. "You do not need to know anything more."

  "Your name," she whispered. Angels did have names, after all.

  "Yours first."

  "I apologize," she whispered. "I am Patience Jones, the wife -- the widow of Lance Corporal Richard Jones." This was foolish, this polite fiction. She was filthy, smeared with blood and other vile things, and she reeked, she stank, she was a staggering scarecrow no matter what she might want to pretend, and he was as clean and distant as a pagan god ...

  "Ashan," he said, watching her face. "My name is Ashan."

  Hardly an English name, for all his appearance and flawless command of the language. How odd.

  "I don't think I can go any further," she said. Her legs were trembling, and her head felt light and stuffed with bees, all abuzz. "Leave me. I should die here too."

  For answer, he simply stepped close, slid one arm beneath her shoulders, and bent down to slide another under her knees, and picked her up. She hissed and clutched at his tunic, but his grip on her was solid. Strong, this angel. He stood as if her not inconsiderable weight was air and shadow.

  "There's been enough dying here," he said. "Sleep."

  He bent and brushed his fingertips along her forehead, and sleep came instantly, a heavy black blanket that smothered the fears and the pain and all else, until there was only peace.

  ###

  She came awake, and wherever she was, it was quiet. Someone had taken liberties; her bloodstained dress was gone, and her skin was clean, and she'd been covered with a decent white high-necked nightdress. She lay on a soft mattress, under a soft cotton sheet, and beyond the tented rise of her toes lay a window, open to a tranquil green garden with a vast faded-silk sky.

  The room was lovely, like a dream. It was also deliciously cool, and how could that be? India was unremittingly hot and humid at this time of the year ... she had never felt this kind of delicately gentle weather beyond the best late spring of England.

  She sat up slowly, and realized in a rush that she no longer hurt. Not a single twinge of pain anywhere on her body. She skinned up the arms of her nightdress with trembling fingers, half-mad with fear, and discovered not even a faint scar where gaping hatchet and knife and sword wounds had been -- she clearly remembered feeling the cold strike of steel on her arms, then her back as she turned away, and then ... then an icy sensation across her throat, followed by searing heat, and ...

  And then she'd gone into darkness, and woken buried under dead weight, cold blood dripping slowly down her face.

  "God help me," she said aloud in a shaking rush, and pulled her knees close to her chest, cowering in the luxury of the bed, staring with tear-shattered intensity out toward the serene day beyond the window.

  She was, simply, insane. That was the only explanation.

  "You could say he already did." That same light, cool voice. Her angel -- Ashan -- stood in the doorway of the room. There was something so still about him, and yet she felt he was always on the edge of motion, or of violence. "Don't be afraid."

  "I'm not afraid," she said. His stare was bold, but she could not find it in herself to feel offended. Manners were a foolish memory, and angels surely could not violate the standards of propriety. "Are you from heaven, sir?"

  He smiled, and whatever answer he was about to give was cut short by another voice -- rude, loud, and in no way angelic. "Trust me, Ashan's never come anywhere near heaven."

  She turned her head, and saw a glorious tangle of light in the doorway that, when blinked away, resolved into a tall, lean man with a rather sharp face and a longish tangle of light brown hair, threaded with silver. His eyes were dark, and he looked altogether more ... normal ... than her savior. He was wearing a working-man's rough cotton shirt, and had his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, and he was staring at her with a bold, uncompromising expression. Patience clutched the neck of her nightgown, although it wasn't necessary; she had, at least, been provided her with decent clothing.

  "Jonathan," Ashan said. "This is Patience."

  "Patience. Really." He was an impudent sort, lounging there with that wicked smile on his lips. "Charming. I thought you said you'd never give one of the New Djinn the time of day, Ashan."

  Ashan sent him a filthy look, turned, and left the room. Patience felt unreasonably naked without his presence, although she could not possibly say why. Jonathan didn’t watch him go. His stare remained on her; it was warmer and more human that Ashan’s, and yet there seemed to be a vast, uncomfortable distance to it as well.

  "Sir," she said. "If I may ask -- where is this? It isn't Cawnpore, nor Lucknow ..."

  "My house," the one named Jonathan said. "That makes you my guest."

  "I am very ... grateful ... " Her voice faded, burned away under his regard, because it was like nothing she had ever felt before. He looked a normal man -- more of one than the fabulous chilly silver of his friend, at least -- but there was something terrible in him. Black, black eyes that swirled with sparks of silver like stars. Her voice came back to her, thin and hollow as a reed. "What are you?"

  "I’d tell you, but you really wouldn’t understand," he said. His long, strong fingers wrapped her wrists, laid across her pulse points. "The question really is, what are you?"

  “I don’t — “

  “You do.” His eyes. “You know. You feel it.”

  There was something vast building inside her, a scream, a silent explosion of panic and light and heat and —

  And she knew. She knew.

  “I’m dead,” she whispered.

  “No. You’re a hell of a long way from dead.”

  “I’m an angel.”

  “Of a kind, maybe,” Jonathan agreed. “What we are is called Djinn. You’re a New Djinn. You were human once, and now you’re not. Now you’re like me.”

  She hadn’t seen him return, but her rescuer was standing in the doorway again, all chill and silver and an unblinking stillness. “There was a massacre at Cawnpore. A few hundred British soldiers and their dependents died at the river. The surviving women and children were held prisoner, about two hundred of them.”

  “What happened?” Jonathan directed the question to her, not to Ashan.

  Patience somehow found the words. “Nana Sahib promised we would be protected, but — yesterday, men came. We weren’t told — they just began killing us. There was panic, so much terror — there was nowhere to run. No way to fight.” She swallowed and closed her eyes. “They killed us all.”

  "Soldiers?" There was no emotion in Jonathan's voice, but his hand, touching hers, seemed extraordinarily gentle.

  "They didn’t bother to bring soldiers," Ashan said. "They used butchers. They piled the bodies against the walls."

  "Not the kind of thing you usually care about,” Jonathan said.

  “I felt her waken. I felt — “ Ashan hesitated, and his eyes seemed to take on a hard, silvery shine. “I felt her confusion. If you won’t go out to gather in your new recruits, I suppose someone has to do it.”

  He sounded harsh, and almost angry, but when he turned his attention back toward Patience, she saw something else in him.

  Jonathan didn’t seem angry. In fact, when he spoke again, he seemed amused. “Thanks for doing my dirty work, then,” he said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  And just like that, he was gone. He’d been sitting on the edge of her bed, holding her wrist in his warm, human fingers, and now — now there was no sign he had ever exis
ted.

  Ashan didn’t seem to find that alarming. After a moment of continuing to watch her, he inclined his head and said, “I will leave you now.”

  “Wait. Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for saving me.”

  Ashan blinked. “I didn’t save you. You saved yourself. Your will to live brought you through.”

  “Not — not that. I’d have gone mad if you hadn’t found me. I was — very near to it.” Strangely, that trauma already seemed to be left behind, in the distance of Jonathan’s dark eyes. “Will you tell me what I am? What I’ve become?”

  He seemed ready to refuse, ready to vanish in the still, quiet sunlight like Jonathan before him, but instead, he came to stand next to her.

  Ashan slowly extended his pale hand to her, and she took it. “You should choose a different name,” he said. “Something that leaves your human self behind.”

  Patience Verity Cadwallader Jones. It had been her touchstone in the darkness, her only whisper of sanity in a world of darkness. “May I keep Patience?”

  “If you wish,” he said, and helped her rise to her feet. Her white nightgown swirled around her, transforming into light, then into a sky-blue walking skirt and matching jacket. It felt weightless on her newborn skin. “Let me show you my world, Patience.”

  It was her world now, too.

  Weather Warden ss

  Black Corner

  Rachel Caine

  Flying is not my favorite thing. It’s not the favorite thing of any Weather Warden, but the stronger you are in talent, the more likely you are to end up in the middle of some very unpleasant turbulence along the way, especially on a cross-country flight. When you’re up in the air, you’re out of your element as a human, and the forces that exist up there know.

  They react.

  On the plus side, I was flying with my own personal Djinn bodyguard, which meant that the plane wouldn’t crash, the storms wouldn’t become so bad innocent bystanders would be slaughtered, and I had a strong hand to crush in a death-grip for the duration of the endless, bumpy, slippery trip. David didn’t complain. In fact, he found it a wee bit funny. I hated him a little for that.

  We landed in Lubbock amid wind gusts and blowing red sand — in other words, normal West Texas weather. The plane bumped, jerked, slipped, and threw me forward into the too-close seat in front of me as the pilot hit the brakes and flaps. David helpfully pushed me back upright and patted my shoulder. “You did fine,” he said.

  “You mean, I didn’t shriek in terror or get tasered by a flight attendant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Missed it by that much.” I concentrated on slowing my pulse rate and centering myself — easier to do, now that I was ground-adjacent. “Explain to me again why I’m here?”

  David’s smile turned just a touch bitter. “Because Lewis snapped his fingers and summoned you?”

  That was not exactly fair, although it was more or less accurate.

  He hadn't said much on the phone call, other than a simple "Need you here, now, hop a plane." David hadn't provided much in the way of information either, which was odd -- Djinn were usually better than a gossip column if you wanted the skinny on hidden motivations.

  "So," I said as we made our way out of the cattle chute and into the gate area. "Is he here? Or are we on our own?"

  "You tell me." David nodded at the window directly facing us. It had frost forming on the inside of the glass -- and the outside temperature was hot enough to melt pavement. The frost formed letters: @ BAGGAGE CLAIM.

  "Great," I said. "Remind me to teach Lewis the proper use of a courtesy phone. Or text messaging, Jesus."

  "He's rattled," David said. "He wouldn't usually make that kind of gesture."

  We exchanged glances, and I lifted my shoulders in a mini-shrug. I didn't know what was up; if David did, he was keeping it strictly to himself.

  We headed for Baggage Claim.

  Lewis was leaning against a much-leaned-against concrete pillar just beyond the rotating metal suitcase carousels — arms crossed, slouching, looking like he’d just walked in out of the desert after two weeks of roughing it. His brown hair had grown out to brush his shoulders and fall across his eyes, and he was rocking a solid week’s worth of manly stubble, which was starting to look more hobo than metrosexual.

  It meant he was no longer bothering with appearances.

  "Let's go," he said, pushing off of the pillar as we approached. I had to skip a little to catch up as his long strides ate up carpet; David didn't seem to move any faster, but he fell in next to me.

  "Yeah, our trip was great," I said. "What's that? You're grateful we dropped everything to come running at your beck and call? Why, you're welcome. I'm sure it's very important - "

  "I don't have time for your crap," Lewis said. Not in a funny way. I stopped walking, and David -- attuned with my mood in a way only a Djinn (and/or a lover) could be -- stopped with me. It took Lewis two more steps to realize he'd lost us, and he turned to look at us. There was a jittery energy in him that seemed completely at odds with the usual laid-back man I knew.

  "Lewis," I said, very quietly. "Do not snap at me. We came as a favor, and it was a bitch of a flight, and I have no fricking idea what you want from us. We can just get right back on a plane if you're going to give attitude."

  His eyes cleared. Nothing like a brisk, cold slap to knock some sense into someone. Lewis took a step toward us, then stopped and pulled in a deep, deliberate breath. "Sorry," he said. "I need your help, and we don't have a lot of time. I'll tell you everything in the car."

  David was watching me. I stared hard at Lewis, and finally said, "This had better be good. Seriously. I flew. You know how much I hate that."

  "I know," Lewis said. "Please."

  That did it. I started walking again.

  Outside, the afternoon sun was harsh and unfiltered. A gust of wind spit sand in my face, then rattled away to torment someone else. The parking lot beyond the terminal glittered with windshields and sun-faded paint jobs. We crossed the street to the parking lot, dodging around a few passing cars. He’d parked his vehicle — a battered, dusty SUV — near the back of the lot.

  When we got to the truck, Lewis jumped in the driver's seat. David and I looked at each other; David quirked an eyebrow and said, deadpan, “Shotgun.” I stuck my tongue out at him and hauled my self up into the back seat. I stayed behind the passenger seat; the driver’s seat was jammed all the way back to accommodate Lewis’s freakishly long legs. David jumped up with that unearthly grace of the Djinn, and we were in motion almost before his door closed.

  “So,” I said, leaning over between the seats. "We're in the car. Now can we hear why?"

  Now that there was no good reason for him to keep quiet, he still seemed reluctant to share. It was a good thirty seconds of road noise-filled silence before he finally said, "There's a missing boy."

  I'm not hard-hearted, but that seemed to be a relatively small matter to fly two of the most powerful Wardens in the country out here, plus the leader of the New Djinn. There had to be more to the story. I struggled to figure out how to phrase my questions without sounding accusatory, and then gave up. "Any reason why this isn't just a straight-up police matter?"

  "Yes. The boy's one of us. Or will be. He's already demonstrating some significant power, and he's only eleven years old." Lewis had another of those curious moments of silence, and then continued. "He's also a friend of the family, I guess you could say."

  "Whose family?"

  "He's Jane Falworth-Davis's son. Francis's grandson."

  Oh. That changed things, no doubt about it. Francis Falworth-Davis was one of the grand old ladies of the Wardens organization; she'd been an amazing talent in her day, and the leader of North America for almost thirty years.

  Everybody had expected that Jane, her daughter, would be just as impressive -- and she was, in some ways, but she was also fragile as glass. I'd known her at Princeton. Lewis had, too. She'd had some kind of serious psychot
ic breakdown at school and been whisked off for emergency psychic surgery -- removal of her powers, because she'd been uncontrollably lashing out. The surgery was always risky at the best of times, and these hadn't been. Jane hadn't come out of it well. As far as I knew, she was still clinically insane.

  It was only after the surgery that they'd discovered she was pregnant. Jane never admitted who the father was, and Francis had taken the baby to raise herself.

  The Wardens owed Francis, who could have blamed us for Jane's troubles, and hadn't. Not only that, Francis had saved the world dozens of times over. She was within her rights to call in favors, even in the form of Lewis, David, and me.

  "I'd think you would be more useful coordinating from a distance," David said.

  Lewis slid sunglasses on. I saw a muscle tighten in his jaw. “Tried it," he said. "Time could be running out for the boy. I want the best on this, right now."

  On the one hand, it was flattering that we were considered the best.

  On the other ... if Lewis couldn't handle it alone, that didn't exactly fill me with confidence. And I couldn't understand what David was thinking at all.

  ###

  Francis Falworth-Davis met us on the porch of one of an old-time ranch house, a sprawling two-story thing of sun-weathered wood with a wraparound porch. I couldn’t decide how old she was at first glance — over sixty, but younger than the house. She had snow-white hair close-cropped around a tanned, strong face mapped with smile lines, but she wasn’t smiling. Not now. As we got out of the SUV she nodded to Lewis, gave David a long, knowing look, then focused on me. It was like being hit unexpectedly with a laser pointer, full in the eyes; the force of her personality was so impressive I felt it from a dozen feet away.

  “Welcome,” she finally said. “Come on in.”

  Inside, the house had that lived-in feel, floors worn smooth by generations of footsteps. Walls smothered by photographs, from stiff-postured pioneer families to smiling informal snapshots of a smiling, lovely girl I recognized — Jane, the girl from college. In some of the later photos, Jane was missing, and there was only Francis and a smiling little boy. Ethan. Up until that moment, I’d been able to think of him in the abstract, but the sight of that smile made him real to me, a real person in genuine peril.