Unbroken os-4

by Rachel Caine

  It was a cold assessment, one that I might have made myself once. There was an eminently logical component to it that I couldn’t really deny.

  But Luis looked as if he might throw up. “Ibby,” he said. “Jesus, how could you?” He knew, as I did, that she couldn’t reverse the process; a Djinn might be able to manipulate the structure of a body at will, but the changes a human Warden made in aging one were utterly beyond fixing. She had lost six years of her life, at least physically; the cost to her lifespan would be much, much greater, because the power it took to do this was toxic.

  “I had to.” Ibby gave him an apologetic look, but focused her reply to me. “I can’t be a little kid anymore, Cassiel. And I can’t have you guys worrying about me all the time. You need me to be strong, and I’m going to be. I have to be able to take care of myself.” She seemed calm and more certain than I felt at this moment. “Esmeralda showed me how to do it, and it didn’t hurt as much as you’d think.”

  I had nothing to say, because it was useless to debate the issue now. They had been careful to invoke such power out of my sight, out of my control; there could be no going back for Ibby now. She had lost her childhood, instantly; there would be consequences for such a flagrant use of power, things I could not yet imagine except that her life would be harsher and shorter. Aging a body so quickly ensured pain, accelerated aging, and deadly mutations. Isabel was no longer looking at a normal human lifespan; hers would be brief, like a candle lit with a blowtorch.

  Not only that, the risk—using Earth powers at such violent rates, when the Earth herself was awake and aware… that had been a hideously dangerous thing to do. It could have ended all of our lives, abruptly and very painfully.

  And yet I couldn’t find it in my heart to disagree with her choice, either. Today was the beginning of the end of mankind, unless a mighty miracle occurred. She’d lost her childhood, but perhaps all childhoods were over, everywhere, starting on this cool, silent morning.

  But I mourned the sweet child Ibby had been. The girl who stood before me now, fragile in her newfound power, was not the same at all.

  Esmeralda was still staring at me in defiance, dirty chin raised. At the end of her serpentine tail, a rattle hissed softly.

  I broke the tension by turning back to Isabel, who stood tense and defensive. “We’ll have to discuss this later; there’s no time for it now. The power you used lit up the aetheric like a flare. We must move fast.”

  “Hang on,” Luis said. His voice was soft and even, but very definitely dangerous. “I’m not even going to pretend to be okay with this. I am not okay. Ibby, what you did—you’re an Earth Warden; you can’t use power this way. It’s perverted. It’s dangerous. In different times you’d end up on an operating table getting your powers removed for gross misuse. Understand? Just because the Wardens are a little too panicked right now to enforce the rules doesn’t mean there aren’t any; it just means we have to try harder to stay on the right side of the line. And you crossed it.”

  She had gone steadily paler and more still as he talked, but she didn’t look away, and she didn’t try to defend herself, either. She just looked at him for a moment in silence, and then said, “I’m sorry. I’m doing my best. But I was going to hold you back, and I couldn’t do that. I just couldn’t.”

  He sighed, swiped a hand over his forehead in a gesture of utter frustration, and then limped over and hugged her. Hard. She came almost up to his chin now. “Okay, here’s the deal. You’re going to feel sick, and you’re going to hurt, a lot. Your bones are still forming. I’m going to see about finding you some calcium pills, vitamins, that kind of stuff; you’re going to need it, a lot of it. You start feeling bad, you say so—none of this silent heroics crap. This shit is risky.” He kissed the top of her head, and then looked up at Esmeralda, who was smirking at the two of them with an entirely inappropriate amount of satisfaction. Luis’s eyes turned dark and dangerous. “You keep an eye on her, too. And don’t think we aren’t going to talk about this again, Es.”

  “That’ll be fun,” she said. “I’ll bring cookies.”

  I cleared my throat. “You were scouting last night,” I said. “Did you find out if the Warden party and the children made it safely out?” Last night, we’d narrowly escaped a trap meant to kill or capture dozens of gifted Warden children; we’d gotten separated from them, as Ibby and her friend Gillian had gone after those who had tried to kill us. I’d taken Gillian back to the others, but Isabel had refused to turn away, and it had been late enough that neither Luis nor I could force the issue. Luis had been too badly hurt to make the run back, and I couldn’t leave him behind.

  Hence, our uncomfortably chilly beds of leaves in the forest for the night.

  Esmeralda seemed happy to change the subject, too. She said, “All of them from the school got picked up by a Warden convoy. They’re heading for Seattle, I think. Safe, as far as I know. We’ll need them soon, though. All of them.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Let them be children for as long as they can.” I was looking at Isabel as I said it, and she raised her chin with a jerk. It was bravado, not self-confidence, and I could see that she’d learned that, too, from Esmeralda. The idea of the two of them forming this instant and dangerous connection made me deeply uneasy, but there was nothing I could do to stop it; Esmeralda was an undoubted asset to us, and she had no reason to love those we’d be fighting. As allies went, she was more than acceptable.

  Just not for Isabel.

  “You’re living in a fantasy, you know; you guys think these kids are some kind of innocents. They’re not,” Esmeralda replied calmly, staring directly into my eyes. “They never have been. They’re Wardens, down to the core. You’re trying to pretend they’re all pure at heart. I know. I was one.”

  “You were a killer,” I said bluntly. “A psychopath. And, I observe, you still are.”

  The girl smiled, but not all her teeth were human; she had a viper’s fangs hidden inside her, and now she lazily showed them to me as her pupils contracted to shining, blind vertical slits. “Got that right, bitch. Want me to prove it?”

  “Hey!” Isabel said sharply. She put herself between the two of us and glared—I was relieved to see that Esmeralda got the same level of outrage that I did. “Enough! We’ve got real enemies, don’t we? The Lady out there, she wants to kill us, and so does Mother Earth, and probably the Djinn now. We’ve got plenty of trouble without this.”

  I, who had existed since before the human race had descended from trees, was being chastised by a child, and it rankled, because the child was right. Esmeralda was not my favorite choice of companion, or even a safe one, but she was Isabel’s friend, and any allies at all would soon be welcome.

  I bowed from the waist, spreading my hands to show I was releasing the moment. Esmeralda took an insultingly long moment to fold her fangs away, clear her eyes back to entirely human, and shrug. “Whatever,” she said, and slithered off through the hissing forest debris. “I need breakfast.”

  “Do I even want to know what that means?” Luis asked, as he limped over to me. He’d held back, I realized, because he’d hoped that Esmeralda might overlook him as a threat if she and I came to a fight. Smart, but then, that was Luis; he was a great deal more capable than I sometimes gave him credit for. And capable of more subtlety than me.

  Isabel snorted. “She doesn’t run on granola, Uncle Luis.” Already, it seems, she’d perfected the irritated teenage roll of the eyes. “Relax. She doesn’t eat people.”

  “That you know of,” Luis said. “Mija, that girl’s dangerous. She’s killed before, and she’ll kill again. I don’t think you understand what you’re getting into with her.”

  “I’m not a baby,” Isabel snapped back, and her dark eyes flashed with a hint of the power I knew she possessed. “Don’t treat me like one. I know what she is, what she’s done. She told me.”

  I doubted that what Esmeralda told her was the truth, either in its breadth or depth, but there was no po
int in arguing with the girl. She’d not be convinced now, not by the very adults to whom she wanted to prove herself.

  Luis started to speak again, but I met his eyes and shook my head. Like a sensible man, he subsided, but the frown remained grooved on his forehead.

  I kept watching him as Isabel busied herself with other things, because Luis did not look well. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, and lines of pain tight around his mouth. I moved to him, and he put his arm around me. “Hell of a night,” he said. His weight shifted just a bit, and settled more on me than his wounded leg. “You doing okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “You’re still in pain.”

  “It’s good.” It wasn’t, and I gave him a long look in reply until he said, eyebrows raising, “Okay, well, maybe good isn’t the right word. It’ll be all right until it heals on its own.”

  “Let me be the judge of that,” I said, and before he could protest, I crouched down and put my hand on his thigh, just at the level where the injury had occurred. He’d been very lucky not to have bled out; the tear in the artery had been grave indeed. I closed my eyes and invoked Oversight, an overlay to the real world that imbued it with the rich, shifting colors and images from the other layers of reality, the real worlds that were the natural home to the Djinn.

  Luis, painted with those colors, seemed pallid and gray, and his leg pulsed with red and black energy. I could sense the sickness taking hold inside, the rot and ruin waiting to consume his feverish, dimming light.

  No. I would not lose him now. Not after all this. I could not. It was no longer a selfish need, that of a Djinn depending on the skill and power of a human to provide her with energy for survival.… No, this was something else altogether, a burning and desperate need to have him alive. To preserve the beauty of what I knew was within him.

  Our eyes locked, and Luis’s lips curved a little in a tired smile. “You’d better get up before someone takes a picture and we’re both porn stars,” he said, but the smile faded after a second, and a look of alarm came into his face. “You’re not going to—”

  I didn’t look away from his face as I opened the connection between us, and a golden wave of Earth power flowed from him into me, drowning me in deep, soft, rich energy. I couldn’t stop the sigh that escaped; feeling that incredible sensation, so close to pain and pleasure, made me remember what it had been like to exist in that flow, that state of being. It was not so much that I missed it as when I touched it, I was a starving woman remembering the taste of food.

  It was addictive, that power. And dangerous.

  Especially now.

  Luis tried to cut the connection as his eyes widened in surprise. “No, you can’t.…” He knew how dangerous it was to use power now, and he also knew I had not done it lightly. “Cassiel, stop—”

  I poured the power out again, through my fingertips, bathing his wound in a flood of healing energy.

  It hurt. And it was glorious.

  Luis collapsed against the tree trunk behind him and slid down, eyes closing as a moan escaped his suddenly pallid lips. I helped cushion some of the shock, but I couldn’t stop the pain; the infection had crept deep into him overnight, unusually fast and deadly, and it took concentration to seek it and burn it out of him. That didn’t stop the sensations that continued to squeeze him in their grip, though—complex waves of heat, cold, orgasm, agony. The tissues of his damaged artery knitted together in strong, rubbery layers over the thin patch that had held him through the night, and then the muscles and outer layers of skin bonded over it.

  I didn’t stop until he was healed.

  As the last cells absorbed the healing energy, I let the connection whisper closed between us; I’d consumed much of Luis’s reserves, and my own as well, but it had to be done. I couldn’t bear to think of him suffering any longer.

  Odd, how that had taken over from concern for myself—the only concern I’d had for so many millennia.

  Now, in the wake of that urgency, I found myself swaying on my knees, falling, and caught in Luis’s strong hands. It felt good. Safe. The pleasure I’d felt in channeling all that effusion of power was gone now, and in its place was an aching emptiness, a weariness that descended like nightfall and make me feel weak, lost, alone.

  Luis gathered me against his chest, and I let my head fall against his chest. “Shhh,” he whispered to me, and smoothed my leaf-littered hair. “Thank you, Cass. But you shouldn’t have done that. You know you shouldn’t have.”

  “No choice,” I whispered back. I felt as bloodless and ill as he’d been before. “Infection. It would have killed you.”

  “I know.” The calm with which he said it surprised me, and he smiled a little. “Death ain’t no new thing for me, chica. It’s kind of what we were born for, humans. Never expected to live long, as a Warden. Not expecting to survive these next few days, for damn sure. None of us should.”

  The words were sober, the tone kind. I felt a chill, listening to him; he had a calm conviction that was difficult to comprehend. We were not so given to the inevitable, we Djinn. We liked to be the inevitable, not its victims. Humans had a kind of courage I’d never truly understood: the courage to face their own doom.

  I didn’t know if Djinn had that same bravery; we’d never been called on to use it, if so. Suffering, we understood, but obliteration was something else again. We could neither fully comprehend it, nor accept it.

  “We’ve had some differences lately,” Luis continued. “Said things, done things… but, Cassiel, I want you to know that it doesn’t matter now. None of that. All that matters is that I love you. Understand?”

  He meant it. I could feel the warm, steady pressure of his stare, and the surge of emotion inside him. He did love me, with all the fragile power of his human soul.

  I smiled slowly and said, “I understand.” I did not tell him I loved him, but I did not need to do so; he could feel it, flowing between us like the golden-hot energy of the Earth. The Djinn love intensely, and rarely, and I was still shy of admitting what I felt aloud… but he knew.

  He leaned forward and kissed me, a warm, damp brush of his lips that turned serious and deep as I leaned forward into it. It was not the time, or the place, for such things, but I felt frantic with the need to tell him, without words, how valuable his life was to me.

  “Easy,” Luis whispered, and put his warm hands on either side of my head. “Peace, Cass. This isn’t the time for any good-byes.”

  I took in a deep breath and nodded. Here, in the calm before the storm that was to come, was the only time to say our good-byes, but I understood that once we did, once we let go of each other on some fundamental level, it would rob us of energy we might need to survive. As long as we fought for each other, for Isabel, we had a chance.

  “Then we should be moving,” I said, and got to my feet. I offered him a hand, but he rose easily, testing his leg and nodding approval. “No pain?”

  “Eh, a little. Not enough to matter. Good job. So… where are we going, exactly?”

  It was a dangerous tactic, but I decided to forego Oversight and rise up directly into the aetheric; it took a frightening lot of effort to do so. I’d spent most of my reserves of power in healing Luis, and detaching myself from physical form and drifting into the next realm seemed a huge accomplishment. I drifted there, recovering, and then propelled myself up, higher, deeper into the aetheric plane.

  The forest in which we were physically located was unchanged… a deep well of living green, shot through with vertical splashes of brown and gold, an impressionist’s view of trees and grass. Living things glittered and shimmered as they moved through the protection of the branches. I saw Luis’s aetheric form there below, glowing in blues and whites. Next to him was my own physical form, but gone gray without my inhabiting spirit. Isabel was an opal-brilliant swirl of colors a few feet away, and there, streaking smoothly through the trees, was a poisonously green figure that could only be Esmeralda.

  We were alone here.

&
nbsp; I turned my gaze outward, over a confusing jumble of colors and shapes, ever changing, driven by human events as much as nature. Change is the fundamental principle of all living things, but humanity makes it an obsession, a religion. Today, however… Today it was dwarfed by the explosion of bloodred, bruise black energy cascading up from all sides. Mother Earth’s rage and pain glittered in the heavens like cutting-hard rain. It turned in angles in the air, held high and ready to fall.

  I felt cold and small, seeing that. When that storm fell, the world would end for mankind, in blood and slaughter.

  I saw the roil of colors on the horizon that marked a Warden battling back the powers of the Mother—a useless victory in an entirely foregone war, but the Wardens, like all humans, simply never gave up. They couldn’t. Djinn could, and did, withdraw to other realms. Humans had only this one. They were committed, until death.

  And some were dying, right now, as I watched. I could see the vicious snaps of Djinn responses to the Wardens’ attempts to control the fire that was blazing its way relentless toward a helpless population center. With the fuel of Mother Earth’s anger behind it, the flames couldn’t be contained by normal human firefighting methods; it would burn things that ought not to burn, and spread like oil on water.

  The Wardens were few, and brave. And they were dying.

  As I watched, more Fire Wardens joined in, though their powers were limited by distance. It would not be enough, and surely they all knew it. Any effective defense would be smashed by the shock troops of the Djinn, now fighting not for themselves and their own agenda, but in defense of, and at the command of, Mother Earth.

  I had felt it before, that ecstatic possession, the loss of self and identity. It was, for the Djinn, euphoric and beautiful—for most of them, at any rate. Those with a fondness for the human race, of specific individuals… those would be trapped in a miserable horror, forced to feel pleasure at their own actions against humanity, yet still retaining some core of self deep inside that fought. I thought of David, reluctant leader of the Djinn descended from humans, and shuddered. His ties to the human world were deep and constant. He loved a Warden, a woman whom he would inevitably face in a battle to the death now.