by Rachel Caine
It was a long drive to the next major town.
We never quite reached it.
The sun was just coming up, and we still had six hours or so to go to the next town big enough to merit the name, when I finally put my foot down and said that we needed beds, showers, food, and restrooms. That wasn’t as tough as it sounded to achieve; two curves of the road later, we spotted a roadside motel, the no- name-brand kind made of bravely painted cinder blocks that doesn’t have to go into double digits on room numbers. Technically, it was a motor court. I wasn’t sure what the difference was, except that “motor court” sounded slightly more upscale than “no-tell motel.”
It wasn’t.
The office was locked, but somebody had already done yeoman work breaking in the door, which swung wide open. The cash register was on the floor, cracked and empty. There was a TV missing from a stand in the corner, cable connections left dangling. Looters always take the TVs. And it always seems insane, but never more than now.
There were keys hanging on hooks behind the counters. I grabbed three and tossed one each to Kevin and Cherise. “Be careful,” I said. “Could be anybody out there. Make sure you lock the doors once you’re inside.”
Kevin cast a significant look at the busted office door. “Yeah,” he said. “That’ll help. What do they make these things out of, cardboard? An arthritic eighty-year-old on a walker could kick these things down.”
“Your body odor could knock it down faster,” Cherise said crisply. “I cannot wait for a shower. They want to go all Psycho on me, fine. At least I’ll die clean.”
She held out her arms, and Kevin passed her the toddler, who was awake, alert, and watching me with shining black eyes. He was drooling on himself. I didn’t take it as a compliment. “Come on, Herbert.”
“You are not calling him Herbert,” Kevin said, as Cherise got the boy situated on her hip.
“Okay, how about Ronald? I’m trying to go with a dead president theme, here.”
“He’s too good looking. Go with Thomas.”
“Tommy,” Cherise said immediately. “Jefferson. Yeah, okay. How’s that, Tommy? You like that, big man?” She made nonsense sounds to him, and Tommy laughed and clapped his hands. “Tommy it is. Awesome. Tommy and I are going to get clean.”
“Enjoy,” I said. I was going to be in hot pursuit of that shower, but first I wanted to go through the office. The looters had probably taken everything of value, but I wasn’t looking for things to pawn or spend.
Kevin hesitated at the door. “You going to be okay?”
I flipped a hand at him without looking up from the contents of a drawer. He shrugged and went away.
The drawer seemed heavy, although there wasn’t much in it. I frowned playing with it, and realized that it had a false bottom. I pressed on the back, and the front popped up.
Underneath that lay a big, black semiautomatic pistol, with two full clips and a box of bullets . . . and a sawed-off shotgun, and shells.
“Sweet,” I said, and stuffed it all into a recyclable shopping bag that was lying on the floor. Small-business owners. Like Boy Scouts, always prepared.
I also found a private stash of alcohol, which I left, except for one bottle I planned to use for first aid. Or morale emergencies, whichever came first. There was also a pretty significant first aid kit, well stocked, and some shelf-stable cookies, power bars, and chips that I put into another bag.
I was feeling pretty good by the time I locked the flimsy door on my motel room. The room was clean and empty, and as far as I could tell, nobody had bothered to loot it. The bathroom still had soap and shampoo. With the power off, it was dark as a cave, but I’d brought a flashlight from the office, and set it up to shine on the shower area. I dumped my filthy clothes in the sink to soak. The water was lukewarm, but that was better than nothing.
The shower started out lukewarm, then turned cold, but I didn’t care; feeling clean again was an intense relief. I could have hope again. Hope that if I had to die, at least I would do it with shiny, bouncy hair.
Something flashed across the glow from the flashlight. I gasped, got soap in my eyes, and rinsed as fast as I could. It’s a moth, I told myself. A moth flying around in front of the light. You’d have heard somebody come in.
I listened. The falling water drowned out any sound of an intruder.
“It’s a moth,” I breathed, willing myself to believe it. Okay, I was in a creepy deserted motel with no lights. Okay, I was in a horror movie cliché, naked in a shower in a creepy deserted motel with no lights.
But dammit, I wasn’t going to be some horror movie damsel who got killed naked in a shower in a creepy deserted motel. With no lights.
I shut off the water with a firm twist of the knobs, grabbed the thin shower curtain, and rattled it back. Water trickled ice-cold down my back from my wet hair and brought up chill bumps all over my skin.
Nobody there.
I grabbed a towel, dried off, and wrapped it spa- style around my body, then used the second one to do the turban thing. This wasn’t the kind of place that provided free plush robes, or even paper-thin ones. I stood on the cold tile, picked up the flashlight, and angled it around in every corner of the small room.
Nothing.
“Moth,” I said, triumphantly, and propped up the light to help me see what I was doing as I scrubbed my clothes with bath soap. I refilled the sink several times, finished by wringing it all out, and hanging it up on the side of the tub and the shower rod.
Then I walked out into the main room, which was flooded with light from the opened curtains, and saw the Djinn sitting on my bed waiting for me.
And not just any Djinn.
Rahel.
Rahel was back to her old self—beautiful, sharp-edged, dressed in a neon yellow tailored pantsuit with a plunging neckline white shirt. Cornrowed hair, with amber and gold beads woven throughout. Her long pointed fingernails matched her outfit, and her eyes were a pure, luminous white.
I stopped in the doorway and braced myself with one hand. Rahel didn’t move. She didn’t speak. She didn’t seem to even know I was there.
I licked my lips and said, “Rahel?”
For a moment, nothing happened, and then her head tilted, very slowly, to one side. Beads clicked together with a dry-bones rattle like the warning of a rattlesnake in slow motion.
I stood there waiting for it, but she didn’t move again. I took a tentative step forward, then another one. No reaction. I made it to the rickety side chair that came with the “office table” and its cheap lamp, and sat down because I wasn’t sure if my legs would hold me for too long. She didn’t feel like Rahel. She looked the part, but Rahel would already have fired off some snarky, lazy insult or threat, clicked her fingernails, tried to kill me, laughed . . . something.
What was wearing Rahel right now was very far from the Djinn I knew.
“Who are you?” I whispered. Those white eyes stared at me, unblinking, but blind. I just happened to be the direction in which they stared; it didn’t feel like focus. “Is this—are you—”
I couldn’t exactly come out with it, but I understood, on a very primal level, who was looking out through that blank gaze. An intelligence so vast that it couldn’t possibly understand me. So huge that it was trying to make sense of something impossibly tiny to it. . . . As if by staring unaided at the surface of the table, I could see the molecules that made it up. She was trying to understand. But I didn’t think she did. Or could. And that was . . . alarming.
“Can you let me talk to Rahel?” I asked, in the softest, most respectful voice I could manage. “I just—she can translate for you. Help you understand.” Although how that was going to get across I couldn’t imagine. It was like an ant trying to communicate with me by the pheromones and scents that made up its language. I couldn’t detect it, much less understand it.
So much easier to squash the bug, especially when the hive was so, so large.
I was screwed.
Rah
el stared through me for what seemed like an hour, but couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes, and then suddenly her head snapped back upright, and she surged up to her feet, took two steps forward, and her hand went around my throat. I yelped, trying to press backward; the chair tipped against the wall, pinning me in place. I kicked at her, for all the good it did. It was like kicking bare toes into solid rock. I felt the sharp, biting sting as her fingernails pressed in, and I had a grim, graphic vision of how it would look when she flexed her hand and drove those nails into soft flesh and ripped my throat out in a spray of blood. . . .
But that didn’t happen. Rahel froze, our faces inches away. This close, the white glow in her eyes broke up into a coruscating brilliance—every color, all colors, flickering by at such speed that only the constant white glow was left. I was looking into something that humans should never see, and I felt parts of my mind giving up, shutting down, refusing to hold the information flooding into them. I could hear that awful shrieking again, just as I had on board the ship, and I couldn’t shut it out.
And then, just like that, it was over. She let go, I overbalanced and fell to the floor on my hands and knees, and Rahel turned and stalked toward the door.
It blew outward in a spray of splinters—wood mist, really—and the untouched lock and knob fell with a clatter to the concrete outside. She didn’t pause on her way out. I heard one of the other doors slam open, and heard Kevin yell.
“Kevin, no!” I screamed, and scrambled to get to my feet. “Leave her alone!” I wasn’t at all afraid he could hurt Rahel, only that he was going to actually get her attention.
I made it to the door too late. Kevin had a fireball in his hand, and before I could shout again, he was throwing it at Rahel’s back.
Sometimes, the ant stings.
And there’s really only one response to that, isn’t there?
I threw myself backward and to the side as Rahel spun, braids flying, and backhanded the ball of fire out of the air, sending it rocketing at blurry speed for the proverbial bleachers. Before that had even happened, she was launching a counterattack at Kevin, a wave of force that hit the building and blew it apart in a cascade of shattered concrete, rebar, and splintered wood.
I was on the floor, hugging cheap carpet. I’d lost my towel, but that was completely meaningless at the moment. As things came apart around me I grabbed the mattress on the bed and yanked it off the frame. It slid across, tilted down, and formed a small sheltered space as I curled up into a protective ball.
I heard screaming. Could have been Cherise, or the toddler. Tommy. Could even have been Kevin. I hated myself for hiding, but my body wouldn’t move, wouldn’t obey my orders to get up and help.
Nothing you can do, part of my mind said. You’re not a Warden. Rahel can’t even see you. You’re just collateral damage. Keep your head down.
What had I told Cherise, once upon a time? Mere humans were part of this, too. They were the reason the Wardens kept fighting.
And I had to fight for myself, too. No matter the odds.
Another stunning blow hit the building, and the roof overhead ripped off and went flying. The front window shattered, and a piece of glass plunged all the way through the mattress to emerge two inches from my face in a lethally sharp exclamation point. I choked on concrete dust as the cinder-block front wall collapsed in. Some of the blocks—not all, thankfully—slammed down on top of the mattress, pressing it down on me, and I burrowed in toward the bed frame to gasp in more air.
And then it got quiet.
I went very still, listening, and over the faint groan of debris that was still succumbing to gravity, I heard slow, deliberate footsteps. They weren’t heading away.
Rahel was going to finish the job.
I huddled there, heart pounding. All the will to get up and fight had bled right out of me at the sound of those footsteps; there was something terrifying about them.
The sound of death.
I closed my eyes as the crunch of shoes on debris stopped nearby.
The mattress covering me suddenly flipped up and off, flying into the air like some startled bird. I gasped as its comforting weight disappeared. I’d never felt so exposed, naked, and helpless in my life.
I forced myself to open my eyes, and saw Rahel standing over me, staring down with those eerie white eyes. I remembered the first time I’d met her—how she’d just appeared in my car, nearly sending me off the road in surprise. How she’d casually tormented me, but helped me, too. I’d seen Rahel do amazing things, and terrible things, but it had always been her.
This wasn’t her. And suddenly, that made me angry.
“All right, Mom,” I said, and climbed up to my bare feet. I’d lost my towels, not sure where or how; my cold, damp hair straggled down my back and over my shoulders, and I was unevenly coated in concrete dust like I had a serious case of mange. “You want me? Here I am!” I had a black rage boiling inside me, fueled by sheer terror, and I wasn’t the type to go down without a fight. I bent and scooped up a bent piece of iron rebar. It felt gritty and cold in my hands as I took up a batting stance.
Rahel reached for me. I swung, connected with her shoulder, and the rebar snapped in half, sending a piece flying away to clatter against the rubble of the far side of the destroyed room. I wasn’t done. I jabbed at her with the broken end, hoping to bury it in her guts, but she just batted it easily away. When I tried it again, she took hold of the rebar and ripped it out of my hand.
She flung it contemptuously after the other half.
I thought desperately of David—not as a savior, not as someone to come running in and sweep me off my feet. I thought how desperately I was going to miss him, and how much this would hurt him, and how sorry I was not to be able to tell him—tell him . . .
As Rahel swiped a hand full of razor-sharp talons toward my neck, I knew I was going to die. I’d heard other people talk about coming to some kind of peace, acceptance, whatever. Not me. I wanted to howl out my defiance and fury.
Instead, I ducked.
The claws missed my throat, my face, and tangled in my hair. She instantly grabbed a fistful, yanking me off balance toward her. I fought, scratched, punched, did everything I could—a wild animal, fighting for my life.
I heard a distant, wild screaming somewhere at the very limits of hearing, a banshee kind of sound that dopplered closer in seconds. A freight train full of demented shriekers, all of it hurtling straight for me.
Maybe that was death. Rahel’s claws flashed, and I managed to get my arm up to defend my throat. I didn’t feel the cuts, but I saw the skin part like tearing silk, weirdly beautiful. Even the spray of blood looked beautiful—brilliantly colored, every misty drop frozen in crystal clarity.
Then the screaming freight train hit me, full force, and my world went dark. Agony rolled through my body, as if every cell was being ripped apart, rolled in acid, and set aflame . . . but somehow, impossibly, I was still alive.
I heard myself shrieking, just like that sound I’d heard, and then fire exploded out of the ground to engulf me.
No, not fire.
Power.
Thick golden streams of power, flooding up my body, wreathing me in glorious streamers, whipping around and around and then plunging in to waken an explosion that should have ripped me apart.
It should have ripped the world apart.
But instead, I opened my eyes and saw the haze of the aetheric, overlaying the drab, gray destruction. I saw the swirling, unsettled energies, the anger, the stain of all the past in this place.
And I saw the Mother, looking out of a Djinn’s eyes in blind, unthinking fury.
I knocked Rahel’s arm aside and slammed my palm down flat against her chest, directly between her breasts. Force rippled out and down my arm, and blew explosively in a tight-focused blast from me to her.
I knocked the Djinn into the air, over a pile of fallen concrete blocks, and out into the relatively clear area of the parking lot.
I looked down at myself. I was covered in cuts, concrete dust, and blood—so much so that I might as well have been wearing a really skin- tight outfit. But everything was still working, at least while the adrenaline was pumping.
Good enough.
I walked over the broken concrete and glass, heedless of more cuts, and followed Rahel out to where she’d fallen. Not surprisingly, she was already back on her feet, and her sharp teeth glittered as she snarled.
I kept walking toward her, but as I did, I reached for power, and it came, welling up out of the ground, descending from the skies, crackling and bleeding out of every electrical impulse around me. I formed it into a ball of luminescent poison green and threw it like a fast-ball, straight for her face.
She tried to bat it aside, but it dodged, even quicker than a Djinn, and detonated against her torso in a hot flare that knocked her completely down. I reached up into the troubled skies and rubbed water and air molecules together, gathering static into a massive potential energy that turned the clouds black and green.
Then I flipped the polarization of the molecules in the ground, then the air above her, clicking over the changes faster and faster until the circuit was open . . .
. . . And lightning struck in a thick, burning column, pinning her down. Rahel’s body convulsed and dissolved into mist. Not dead—you can’t kill a Djinn like that—but seriously inconvenienced. Even a Djinn has a safety overload, and I’d just burned it right out with those three consecutive strikes.
She’d be back, but not for a while.
I looked around and remembered the power I’d gathered overhead as the sky snarled and rumbled. I reached up and bled the energy back out, slowly, distributing it in a soft, gentle rain that sluiced the blood and dust from my skin. I was still full of power—stuffed with it—but I knew how to let it slowly sink back down into the waiting, silent ground.
A final sigh, and I opened my eyes.
And collapsed.
Ow.
The concrete wasn’t a soft landing, and I realized that my body had simply failed after conducting that much power, energy, and adrenaline. I was shaking now as the tide of hormones receded in my bloodstream and left me feeling human, and vulnerable, again.