by Rachel Caine
“We need to get to the road,” Luis said. “Commandeer some transport—the bigger and stronger, the better. We can’t walk all the way to Portland.”
“We need a van,” Isabel put in. “Maybe a moving van, something Es can be comfortable in.”
That made the snake girl look at her oddly, as if no one had ever really considered Esmeralda’s comfort before. That might have actually been true, or at least since she’d changed into that form and been locked there by vengeful Djinn; she was dangerous, and quite possibly as sociopathic as I had been before being trapped in human form.
Yet Isabel managed to reach some hidden depth in her that wanted the emotional connection of friends. That was Ibby’s gift, perhaps… and Iz’s, now, even if this new, questionably improved girl was different in many ways.
When Isabel smiled at me, unguarded, it melted my heart and made me love her all over again, as she had been, and as she was. As she would be, in days when she was fully adult.
Should we survive so long.
“Yes,” I said aloud. “A van. I’ll see to it.”
I had no interest in wider human affairs, but as I watched the road below for a suitable vehicle, Luis sat on a rock outcropping, ankles crossed before him, and played with his cell phone. “Weather looks pretty stable here,” he announced, not that it meant anything much; human forecasters couldn’t anticipate what was coming, now more than ever. “Giant gas main explosion in San Diego, took out the convention center, lots dead. Guess Comic-Con is off for next year. Tornado storm in the Midwest, at least ten F4 events, a couple they think were F5. Grass fires on the prairies. That’s just the United States. There are tsunami warnings out in Asia, and earthquake damage on just about every fault line.”
I couldn’t imagine the chaos of Warden Headquarters, caught in the jaws of all these things.…They were already fighting a desperate war against an enemy of their own, and now the Earth was turning herself against them.…
“There,” I said aloud, as a long, silvery truck edged around the curve below and onto the straight descent. “That will do.”
Luis nodded. “You need me?”
“Not for this,” I said, and stood up. “Stay with the girls.”
“I know you didn’t just mean that the way it sounded, chica.”
I flashed him a smile, raised an eyebrow, and stepped onto the steep slope of the hill on which we had paused. It would have been risky for anyone except an Earth Warden, or a crippled Djinn channeling such power; I broke off a large piece of rock and rode it in a rushing, hissing curve down the slope. It was a bit as I imagined surfing to be, only with more dust and bumps; still, when I kicked free of the rock and landed on my feet on the road, I was smiling with the adrenaline rush of it.
The truck was just coming up on me.
Locking a vehicle’s brakes is easy, since almost all of the mechanical components of a truck fall within the control of Earth Wardens; this truck was just below the size of one needing air brakes, and I pressed abrasive pads to drums and brought it smoothly to a halt as the baffled driver pressed his gas pedal, which roared the engine and caused the truck to shake uselessly.
I opened the passenger side, climbed into the cab, and said, “Perhaps you should stop that.”
He stared at me, openmouthed, and pressed the gas harder. I sighed, put the truck in park, and turned off the engine.
“Hey!” he said, voice shaking. “What the hell is this, lady? What are you—”
I reached into the vehicle’s glove compartment—in which gloves were rarely found—and pulled out a rental agreement, maps, and, finally, a holstered handgun. I unholstered it and pointed it at him. “I’m taking the truck,” I said. “I apologize. We’ll try not to damage it, but I can’t promise much.”
“But I—you can’t—!” He was babbling now, and quite pale beneath his straggly beard. He smelled of unwashed sweat, stale clothes, and fear. “I got stuff in the back!”
Stuff that was utterly unimportant, but he hadn’t yet realized it. “We’ll be careful with it. Now get out.”
“Here?”
“There is a ranger outpost two miles in that direction.” I pointed with my free hand, then used power to unlock his door and crack it open with the latch release. “Out. Now.”
He blinked, but he must have seen in my face how very serious I’d become, because he didn’t try to argue, or take the gun from my hand. He simply slid off the seat and ran.
Satisfactory.
I closed the door, strapped in, and started the truck as I heard the back door sliding up. The truck shifted a little with the addition of more weight in the cargo area. Esmeralda was on board, and I heard the flexible metal rattle down again.
Luis slipped into the passenger seat beside me, strapped in, and nodded. “Good to go,” he said.
“Isabel?”
“In the back with Es.” He shrugged. “Couldn’t see any reason to insist.”
He was right, of course, but it did sting a little that she preferred the musty interior of the cargo area to sitting in the front with us. I rolled down the windows to clear the stench of the former driver out as the truck started its roll down the long decline. I’d never driven something this large, but it wasn’t difficult, other than adjusting to the increased mass and wind surface. I still missed my motorcycle, abandoned somewhere behind on the trail; there was so much freedom in that kind of travel, in being one with the machine, the free and open air.
I disliked enclosed cabins.
The icy blast of the winter air was bracing, or so I told myself; my breath steamed in the chill, and Luis was shivering. “Seriously?” he asked, staring at me steadily until I sighed and grudgingly rolled up the window to a compromise halfway position. Luis shook his head and looked behind the seats, which search yielded an ancient, untrustworthy-looking blanket that he settled around his shoulders with a sigh of satisfaction.
“You could make yourself warmer,” I pointed out. “You are an Earth Warden.”
“Try it sometime,” he said. “Takes a lot of energy conversion, and we’re supposed to be keeping it on the down-low right now, so I’ll take the blanket. Besides, first rule of having Warden powers: Don’t default to them without checking for a nonmagic solution first. Blankets work.”
“I was a Djinn,” I said. “Mundane solutions don’t come naturally to me.” Like many things, the simplest possible things humans adjusted to from birth. The overwhelming power of their senses, for one. Someone in this truck had eaten far too much cabbage, and quite recently. I inched the window down just a touch more. Luis had a blanket, after all. “Luis… you understand that what we’re doing will likely end in disaster. We’re fighting the Djinn and the Mother herself. This can’t end well for the Wardens, or for humanity.”
“Well, if it goes bad, your Pearl problem is solved,” Luis said. “Since we’ll all be dead, she’ll lose her power supply. End of game for her. She’ll want to keep us alive.”
“For now, but only until she finds the right moment to strike at the Mother. If she’s able to do what she intends, she won’t need us. She’ll be able to tap directly into the lifeblood of the planet. Her consciousness would replace the Mother’s.”
“And that would be bad,” Luis said in a bland tone that reeked of understatement. In essence, a mad, violently selfish Djinn would become the consciousness of the Earth—a vast, sentient creature carrying us all on her skin. One thing I knew about Pearl: She enjoyed the suffering of others.
Humanity wouldn’t be cleanly destroyed, as the Mother so clearly intended; under Pearl’s control, there would be horrible plagues, slow destruction, deaths that might make the worst sadists flinch.
I shifted gears as we reached a long, straight curve; dark green pines brushed the dull sky, and far overhead, a thin silver shard of a plane scratched the sky. That, too, would stop soon; airplanes were far too vulnerable to the Mother’s anger. But then, so were all manmade things: Trains would be twisted off the tracks. Cars w
ould be swallowed up by roads. Houses would be crushed. Cities would burn.
All starting… today.
“Cass,” Luis said. “What are you thinking?”
I reached over and took his hand in mine. Warm, strong, human. Fragile and temporary as a breath, yet strong and resilient as a river.
There was hope. Always hope. And it was those like Luis who would be the bearers of that hope, and the victims of it; heroes they were, and heroes died so that others might live.
I took a deep breath and said, “I wish we had more time, Luis.”
He misunderstood me. “Yeah, things are happening fast. Can’t travel much faster, though. Not unless you intend on hijacking a plane, which I’m pretty sure would not be a good idea, either.”
I’d meant something far different. Far more personal. When he touched me, my mind flashed to sensations… the stroke of his fingers along my eager flesh, the indrawn breaths, the taste of sweat on his skin. The quiet, hushed, beautiful moment at the top of the pleasure curve, when the universe expanded before me with the beauty of a Djinn’s dreams.
I wished we had more time together. Not like this, not tired and dirty and exhausted, speeding to another confrontation. Together.
I started to speak, but then I caught the sad, gentle look in his eyes, and realized that he hadn’t misunderstood me at all. The echo came through the link between us, soft and subtle, a sense of loss. Of letting go.
“Survival tactics,” Luis said aloud. “It’s what humans do. We either cling to things so desperately we can’t let go, or we let go before we get hurt. It’s not that I don’t want… us. It’s that we can’t afford to put us ahead of them, Cass. We can’t.”
He was right, but it was because he was, in his deepest heart and soul, a hero. I was not. I wanted to cling to him with all my strength and not allow anything to come between us, not even the fate of the world and humanity.
But instead, I smiled. “I know,” I lied. I’d become very good at the lies, I realized. “We should focus on the mission at hand.”
“No distractions,” he said.
I nodded as if I truly believed it, and focused on driving. The less I thought about him, about me, about us, the better it was.
But God above, it hurt.
The weather worsened as we drove toward Seattle; rain at first, a slow mist that turned to drops, and then to curtains of near-freezing downpour. The tank had run low, and I pulled the truck in at last at a small roadside gas vendor. His lights cast a welcome red-and-white glow into the chilly sameness of the rain-washed road, and I pulled in and stopped at the fuel pump.
“Cash only,” Luis read on the sign, and sighed. He dug out his wallet and handed it over. “Make it fast. Get us some food and water for the road, too. Extra blankets and pillows if they have them.”
I nodded and slipped out into the rain. The shock of it was breathtaking, and I quickly uncapped the gas tank and inserted the pumping nozzle before dashing into the small store.
There was a dead man behind the counter, sitting on a stool like some ghoulish prop for a cheap horror movie. He had fallen back against the wall, but was delicately balanced so that he hadn’t quite tipped off his seat and to the floor. The details of him surfaced in my mind slowly, from the shock: older, with graying hair; no obvious wounds, but there was a thick, dried crust of vomit streaking the front of his shirt and chin. His eyes had filmed over, but I could see the broken blood vessels underneath the glaze.
Dried blood had gathered at the corners of his eyelids, and cherry-black threads of it ran from his nose to his mouth.
I stopped where I was, and slowly, carefully extended my senses toward him on the aetheric. What I saw there, on that plane, was far worse than this—a rotted, horribly ripe thing throbbing with living sickness.
He was dead, but the infection inside him was alive, and violently hungry.
I slowly backed up, touching nothing. Little details began to surface, now that the initial shock had passed. Disordered shelves. An open cash register a few feet away, its drawers lolling empty.
I look at the scene through Oversight and found a confusion of colors, shapes, hints, and images. Others had been in the store before us, and at least some of them had taken items. But glowing brightly, very brightly, was the ghostly image of a Djinn, stretching out a hand and touching the proprietor’s head with a fingertip.
I knew her, or the her she’d been before Mother Earth had awakened. Priya—like me, one of the original Djinn, formed out of fire and primal instincts. But Priya had always been kindly disposed toward humans, and this… this was none of her doing. Not of her own choice.
In that image burned upon the aetheric plane, Priya’s face was cold and set, her eyes blazing with power. She had simply walked into this place, touched the man on the forehead, and left.
And he’d sickened and died, within minutes.
Luis saw me, wiped fog from the window of the truck cab, and frowned in concern. He rolled the window down and said, “What’s wrong?”
“Look at me in Oversight,” I said. “Check me for infection. Do it quickly.”
He didn’t waste time asking; I saw his eyes lose focus as he used another kind of vision to inspect me. It didn’t take long.
He shook his head. “Nothing. What the hell?”
“The man inside is dead,” I said. “Infected with… something. Something very nasty. We can’t take the risk of touching anything in there. It must be burned, all of it.” I felt shaken, I realized. No, more than that: I was actually shaking. My muscles were loose and trembling. “Others have been here. We have to find them. This will spread quickly.”
Luis froze for a few seconds, then nodded. “We need the gas for the truck,” he pointed out, ever practical. “There’s a button inside, behind the counter. Somebody has to press it.”
“No,” I said. “No one goes inside.”
I heard the door slide up at the back, and the sound of someone jumping down… then the whispering slither of Esmeralda’s descent. Isabel looked around at me, then at the store. “What are you doing standing in the rain?”
I didn’t feel like explaining again. “Can you trip the switch to get gas from here?”
“Yeah, but there should be someone in there who—”
“Just do it, Isabel!” My voice sounded unlike my usual self—to raw, too sharp, too shrill.
She gave me a dark look. “Tell me why.”
Esmeralda slithered toward the door, and before I could tell her not to proceed, she recoiled—literally, pulling her snakelike body into tight, defensive coils. I heard a faint rattle. “Dead guy,” she said. “Damn. He looks sick.”
“He was,” I said. “And is. Going in is not an option.”
“Then what?”
“There is a switch under his hand. It must be flipped from out here.”
Isabel looked toward Esmeralda, who nodded decisively. “I wouldn’t be eating no Ho Hos out of this place—that’s for sure. Flip the switch and let’s get the hell out before we’re puking all over ourselves and bleeding from the eyeballs. Vámanos.”
Ibby was stronger by far in Fire Warden powers than her uncle; for her it was a mere shrug to trigger the connection that powered the pump. As I set it in action, the counters rolled on a price that would never be paid now. I filled the truck to the brim, then replaced the nozzle and climbed back inside to drive the vehicle off away from the building, slowly.
Esmeralda and Ibby stayed behind, and Luis watched them in the rearview mirror. It took only a moment for the fire to begin, consuming the little store. The two girls made it to the truck and slammed the door down just as the gas pumps blew in a spectacular orange-and-red mushroom of power. What was left of the station store collapsed in on itself, burning even more fiercely.
Ibby thumped on the wall behind my seat. “Go!” she yelled.
“First of many,” Luis said quietly. “Don’t know his name, but I’ve got to think he wouldn’t want to infect anyone e
lse. Best we can do for him now is purify him.”
Purify. That was, I thought, a good word, a hopeful word. The dead man was purified.
I, on the other hand, felt sick and filthy within. There would be no honor today, no purification for those of us charged with defending life. I could feel that, as surely as I felt the cold wind pouring through the open window of the truck. “We need to find the others,” I said. “And stop Priya.”
“Priya?”
“Djinn.” I rubbed my face with both hands, wishing I could rub all of this misery away as easily. “She was here, carrying a plague. It kills fast and lingers long. He won’t be her only victim. We need to find those who came to this store before we did and try to heal them.”
Luis looked as grim as I felt. “Even if you were a full Djinn, that’d be a hat trick,” he said. “You said it kills fast. They wouldn’t get far. What we need to do is find their bodies and burn them—but you need to go after Priya while we do that. Only way this works is if we split up. Me and the girls, you after the Djinn.”
It made sense, and I took a deep breath and nodded. “I need transportation.”
He gave me an unexpected grin, but there was little humor in it. “Yeah, well, I checked the nav system. Turns out there’s a biker bar about two miles ahead. I’m pretty sure someone will be happy to give up their chopper for the cause.”
A motorcycle. Freedom, and the wind in my face, and the exultance of the chase.
I smiled back, with just as much of the predator in my smile as I’d seen in his. “I’m sure,” I agreed, and pressed the accelerator hard.
As I parked the truck at Busty’s Roadhouse, I admired the selection of two-wheeled vehicles neatly lined up outside. Gleaming, well-maintained machines, with the addition of a few muddied, hard-ridden trail bikes. I immediately focused on a Victory; the sleek shape drew me to it like a magnet. This particular model was different from my cherished Vision; it was more aggressive, muscular, heavily chromed, and a steel-hard blue.
I loved it.
“Cass.” Luis had gotten out of the truck, and was now quietly standing beside me. When I looked up at him, he jerked his chin toward the roadhouse. “Too quiet in there for this many guys.”