by Rachel Caine
I was also hurting. A lot. I looked down at my arm, which was bleeding from deep cuts, and thought, I need to do something about that. It took me a long minute to remember the first aid kit that I’d salvaged from the office. It, and the guns, had been in a bag in my motel room.
I rolled up to my knees, then to my feet, cut off the rain and dried myself off with another burst of power—not so much eliminating the moisture from my skin and hair as moving it somewhere else. Balance. Ma’at.
The sight of the motel was appalling. It was a ruin, barely recognizable as the cheap building we’d arrived at just an hour ago. My room, at least, still had a partial wall standing, though the roof had been yanked off and tossed twenty feet away in a jumble of broken wood and shingles.
Cherise’s and Kevin’s rooms were worse.
Cherise and Kevin. The kid.
It came to me in a physical shock. In the press of adrenaline, fighting for my own life, I’d forgotten about them, but now it came dreadfully clear.
I had my powers back.
Cherise had been harboring my powers, and there was only one reason for those powers to pull away from her and go in search of someone else—if Cherise was no longer a living vessel for them. And I was the only one left standing.
Oh God, no.
I forgot all about the wound on my arm and ran to the mass of broken blocks that was where I remembered Cherise’s room to be. “Cher!” I screamed, and started throwing rubble aside, searching. “Cherise!”
I heard something soft, like a kitten, and stopped to listen. Far corner, under yet another mound of debris—but under the debris was a mattress. She’d done as I had; she’d grabbed the mattress and ducked under it for cover. Yes. Yes, it was going to be okay. . . .
I cleared the rubble off the filthy, broken mattress and pitched it away, heaving with all my strength.
Under it, Cherise lay motionless, with her body half covering the toddler she’d rescued. Tommy. He was the one making the mewling sounds, and when light hit him and he saw me, he let out a full-throated howl of panic and pain. I turned Cherise over enough to pull him out, and checked him with trembling hands. He was bruised, but I couldn’t find any broken bones. She’d protected him.
She’d protected him with her body, and her life.
“Cher,” I whispered, and smoothed her bloodied hair back from her face. “Oh, no, sweetie. No, no, no. You can’t do this to me. You can’t.”
She’d been badly battered by the falling wall, even with the mattress for protection, and I saw the unnatural shape of her legs where they’d been broken and twisted. Her face was oddly unmarked, except for a spot or two of blood. I could almost hear her laughing and saying, I always knew I’d die pretty.
“No,” I said flatly. “You’re not dying on me, bitch. Not happening.”
I saw a flicker inside of her, a golden tongue of fire that hadn’t yet gone out. She wasn’t dead . . . but she was dying. No breath, no heartbeat, and her cells were burning up the last of their energy and shutting down.
I put Tommy down, dragged Cherise flat, and began CPR. I imbued every pump of my hands on her chest, every breath I blew into her slack mouth, with Earth power, giving her body an artificial jump-start of energy for those starving cells until I could get the rest going again. It was exhausting, sweaty work, but I wasn’t going to give up. She was there. Cherise was still alive, buried under the broken rubble of her own body, and she needed me.
The Earth power saturating her body formed a link to me, reporting back on all that it found wrong inside my friend. It wasn’t good. It was going to take a lot to bring her back, and even more to restore her to anything like health.
I needed someone like Lewis, someone who had the gift, the fine and delicate touch of healing. But all I had was me, and I would have to be enough.
I started with the worst of it—ruptured spleen, damaged liver, torn internal blood vessels that were flooding her with blood and compressing her lungs. A depressed skull fracture that had driven splinters of bone into fragile tissue.
Each of those took time, and massive concentration and energy. The skull fracture was the worst and most delicate, and when I’d finally coaxed out the bone splinters and dissolved them, and repaired the damage, I had very few reserves of power left.
But I couldn’t stop. Her legs needed healing fast, or she’d lose them. I moved down her body and made sure she was kept unconscious as I moved the broken pieces, aligned them, and started binding them together in golden strips of power, spiraling up the structure and holding it together. The power sank slowly into the bone and fused it together—not strong, yet, but set.
Then I let her come up from the dark, leading her slowly and gently back to the light.
Cherise opened her eyes with a choking gasp, coughed, and stared blindly up at the sky for a few seconds before her pupils contracted and focused on my face.
“Tommy?” she asked. I pulled the toddler over. He was still whimpering, but at the sight of Cherise’s smile he waved his hands and smiled back.
“He’s fine,” I said. “Cher, don’t try to get up. Stay down, let your body adjust, okay? I have to put some braces on your legs.”
“My legs?” She looked confused, then alarmed. “Oh my God, what happened to my legs?”
“They were broken,” I said. “I fixed them, but you’re going to have to watch it for a while. The braces are just to keep you from banging into things, twisting, that kind of thing.” I tried to get up, but my body wouldn’t do it. It just—refused. Okay, sitting was good. I was all right with a little rest, I supposed. I reached out and pulled over a couple of broken pieces of wood, wrapped each one in sheets from the bed, and wrapped the whole thing around her right leg, then repeated my construction project for the left.
Cherise said, in a very small voice, “I don’t feel good anymore. Not like I did.”
“I know.” That energy, humming and snapping through my body, was something that I’d never known I had, really, until it was gone. I could understand how Cherise felt, to have been given that gift, and then to lose it.
“You’ve got it.”
“Yep.”
“Because I died,” she said, which made me stop what I was doing and look at her in mute concern. “What? It’s true, right? I died, and I lost the power, and it moved on to the next person it could reach. Had to be you, or . . .” Her eyes widened, and we both said it at the same time. “Kevin.”
I hadn’t spared a thought for him, not a single second. If I had, Cherise wouldn’t have made it. But she wouldn’t see it that way, and I wouldn’t blame her a bit. It was a callous thing to do, not to at least try to find him. Problem was, now that I had the time, I didn’t have the energy. No way could I find him, or heal him if I did.
“David,” I said, and closed my eyes. The cord that bound us together was back in place now, strong and vital, but stretched very thin. Still, I knew he could hear me. I knew he would. “David, I need you to find Kevin.”
“David can’t do anything; he’s in Djinn Disneyland,” Cherise said, and batted at me weakly. “You have to go! Go find him!”
“I can’t, Cher.” I said it softly, but I thought she could feel the absolute truth of it. “I just can’t right now.”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she tried to push herself up. I held her down. She yelled at me, cursed, called me names that would have stung if I hadn’t been so tired and drained.
Then she went quiet, and I looked over my shoulder to see the Djinn who’d been driving our car walking through the rubble toward us.
Draped in his arms was Kevin’s lank, limp body.
Cherise let out a sound—not a scream, not a cry, but some awful mixture of the two. It was raw and un-thought, and scraped at me like fingernails on a burn. Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry, I thought wearily. We’d all said we understood the risks, but this was different.
We never really understood until it came down to this.
The Djinn knelt do
wn and put Kevin on the carpet next to Cherise. There wasn’t a mark on Kevin, nothing at all.
He was just . . . gone. The life had been taken right out of him. All the working pieces were still there, in a body that could have still lived on, but some great, overwhelming force had commanded it to be still.
And I knew, as I touched his hand, that there was no way I could bring him back. Kevin—all that had made up the complicated, fragile, angry, vindictive, sometimes brave boy I’d known—all that was gone, blown away like a puffball on the wind.
His eyes were open wide, pupils expanded to drink in the light. He looked very, very young. His hair still gleamed in the dim, cloudy light—wet from his shower, or from the rain I’d brought down. He’d been strong, and sometimes he’d been good, and losing him shouldn’t have hurt so very badly.
I put my hand on his forehead, one last and gentle benediction from someone who should have liked him more, helped him more, done better for him. He’d been torn apart as a child, made into a monster, and he’d tried, dammit. He’d tried so hard to be different.
He would have been a good man eventually. I knew it.
I wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. They choked me deep inside but refused to rise. Maybe I needed them. Maybe it wasn’t time to mourn.
“Jo.” It was David’s voice, coming from the Djinn’s mouth. “There’s nothing—”
“I know!” I snarled at him, suddenly and irrationally furious with David, of all people. “Just leave me the hell alone, okay? I know there’s nothing I could have done!”
He rose to his feet, staring down at me, and then nodded. “I’ll get the car,” he said. “Let me know if you want to bury him before we go.”
Now Cherise was screaming at him. I didn’t think David minded. He was staying quietly neutral, aware that we had to deal with this in our own ways. He moved the Djinn back, out of our view.
Cherise finally stopped spitting out accusations, and gathered up the wailing, frightened toddler in her arms, hugging him close. I’d never pegged her as the motherly type, but watching her, I could see it. She put on a smile for the boy, soothed him, and when that was done, I could see that she’d reached some fragile acceptance inside.
“We’re not just leaving him here like this, like road-kill,” she told me. “Promise me.”
“I promise,” I said. “I’ll make sure he’s taken care of.”
I meant it, of course, and she could tell that. She didn’t make any objection as I gestured for the Djinn to come back and scoop Kevin up in his arms. I knew it was David on the inside of the avatar, but somehow I couldn’t make myself reach out for him. It wasn’t really David. Just a flicker of will. A phantom. A shadow.
I pulled myself up to my feet without any help from him, looked down at myself, and said, “I need to find my clothes.” It was a measure of how insane things were that nobody else seemed to have noticed I was naked. Cherise, in fact, looked surprised. “I left them in the bathroom.”
For answer, the Djinn nodded toward a spot on the carpet—a relatively clean one. A pile of clothing materialized there—white shirt, sturdy pants that looked suspiciously like I remembered the drapes to be. My own shoes, recovered and cleaned. Plain white bra and panties and socks.
Djinn couldn’t create out of thin air, but they could recycle. He’d used the raw material of extra sheets, the curtains, towels, whatever textile was around, and he’d managed to produce a decent attempt at a wardrobe. Clean and dry, if not stylish.
I struggled into it fast. It fit, of course. Djinn tailoring always fit. I tied my hair back with a stray scrap of fabric blowing in the dirt and started to follow the Djinn out of the rubble.
“Jo?” Cherise called. I looked back. She was sitting up, cradling the fretful boy in her lap. She looked huge-eyed and emotionally shattered, but at least she was physically okay. For now. “I want to go with you.”
“No. If you put any weight on those legs right now, they could break again. They need at least an hour to finish building the seal in the break. That’s as fast as I can do it.”
“Okay.” She swallowed, but didn’t look away. “I want to see him buried. Please. Take me with you.”
I hesitated, then nodded. “I’ll send the Djinn back for you,” I said. “Wait here, okay? I promise, it’ll only be a few minutes.”
She didn’t like it, but I think she saw that there was no way I could carry her myself, physically or with any kind of magical power. If I pulled power from the world around me again, it’d be a case of diminishing returns and a harder crash once it was over. I couldn’t afford it.
Not knowing that this was far from the end.
I found the Djinn easily enough; he’d left a lighted trail of orange light through the trees. He hadn’t gone too far in, but far enough that I lost sight of the road and the wrecked motel. In here, among the pines, things were hushed. The air smelled sweet and heavy, crisp with the smell of the needles.
Untouched.
The Djinn had dug a grave—six feet deep, wider than needed—beneath a particularly impressive branching tree. Kevin’s body lay wrapped in a simple white sheet from the motel, and he no longer looked like the boy I’d known, or the man I’d wished he’d had a chance to become. He looked . . . empty, rendered pale and sexless by the shroud. I wasn’t sure I wanted Cherise to see him like this, but I’d promised.
“I’ll get him in,” I said. “Go get Cherise and the kid. Don’t let her walk yet.”
The Djinn nodded and misted away. I stood there looking at Kevin for a moment, then hopped down into the damp hole in the earth, reached up, and rippled the ground to move him toward me and onto a hardened cushion of air. I floated him down into my arms, and lowered him the last bit on my own. He still felt heavy. Somehow, I’d expected him to be lighter now.
I leaned over and kissed his lips gently. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Find peace, Kevin. I’ve never known anybody who needed it more, and deserved it more.”
That didn’t seem to be enough, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
I levitated myself up on a heated column of rising air and stepped off at ground level, just in time to see the Djinn arrive back at a run with Cherise and the boy in his arms. They looked like toys, the casual way he balanced them, but I knew he wouldn’t drop them. No chance.
He looked around, then formed a plain wooden chair that was the same color and texture as the trees around us. Fallen wood, probably, reshaped for the purpose. He lowered her into it and came to stand next to me.
“He did a lot of things he probably regretted,” David said. “But he tried to do good. That counts.”
“He died trying to save us,” I said. “That counts for everything.”
We linked hands. It didn’t feel like David, but that didn’t matter right now. I just wanted to feel a touch, anyone’s touch, to remind me I wasn’t all alone in this. I felt a breath of relief pass over me that made me feel a little weak. I wish you were with me, I whispered, deep inside.
And I heard his whisper back, along that golden cord that bound us on the aetheric plane. I am with you, he said. Always.
Together, we filled in the hole. Apart from the singing of birds in the trees, the busy rustle of animals carrying on their lives, there wasn’t any sound. When I looked at Cherise, she was silently crying. The boy was staring at us in confusion, about to break into wails of disapproval for all this craziness, but not sure if he should.
We smoothed the dirt on top of Kevin’s grave, and I sent a pulse through the Earth, bidding the seeds to grow. Grass and flowers, pushing up green and fresh.
“You deserved better, Kevin,” I said. “You always deserved better than what you got, and I’m sorry.”
The Djinn said something, after that—something in warm, liquid syllables, lyrical and lovely that rose and fell in emotional arcs of poetry. When he was done, he bowed his head.
“That was beautiful,” Cherise said, even though I knew she hadn’t un
derstood it any more than I had.
“It’s our prayer for the dead,” said David’s voice. “Given to those who fall in battle.”
When he said our, I sensed that he didn’t mean the Djinn. He meant the human he’d once been, living in that long-ago time.
I squeezed his hand. “It is beautiful,” I said. “Promise me you’ll use it for me if it comes to that.”
“No,” he said. “I won’t. Because I won’t be here to do it if you’re gone.”
We stayed a while longer, but the air was getting cool, and we had miles to go.
The Djinn carried Cherise back to the waiting Mustang, which had only suffered a few scratches and dings out in the parking lot during the general destruction. Good. I’d destroyed way too many automotive works of art in my time. I didn’t want to leave the Boss behind, too.
I looked back at the place where Kevin Prentiss had died until it fell away in the rear window, just another wide spot in the road. Nothing special.
It was special now. It always would be, for me.
I waited for the tears, but they stayed where they were, simmering, angry, hungry.
“Floor it,” I said to the Djinn, and to David through him. “I want to see our daughter.”
He didn’t respond, but the Mustang leaped up to a whole new level of fast.
Chapter Eight
Weirdly enough, nothing else was happening in Missouri, or in Oklahoma as we dropped down toward our Arizona destination. Open roads, lots of traffic. Some towns still had power and some sense of normalcy, including—improbably—Oklahoma City.
People were actually going to work.
I supposed that was a good sign; life had to go on, until it became impossible. It was just . . . strange.
I rose up into the aetheric and found a powerful bunch of Wardens at work—Earth, Fire, and Weather all locked in a tight- knit unit, constantly repelling attacks on any number of levels. They were stretched thin, but coping. I soared up higher into the spirit world, looking at the patterns of lights and color, shadows and twisted representations of the physical world.