by Rachel Caine
He was right. I’d been caught up in my fascination with the machine, but now as I looked in that direction, I realized that I heard music playing inside, but nothing else. No laughs, shouts, conversation. I turned and saw the grim set of Luis’s face. We didn’t need to speak about it. I nodded and led the way into the building.
They were all dead. All of them. The bodies lay everywhere, fallen and limp and silent; the jukebox still banged out a loud tune from the corner, but it was playing to an unhearing audience. I crouched next to the first one nearest the door—a barmaid, dressed in shorts and a tight red top, young and fit—and looked at her face.
“It’s the same,” I said. Her eyes had the same redness, and the smell of vomit was overwhelming in this abattoir, mixed with other rancid odors that made my stomach clench hard in reaction. “Look in Oversight.”
I did it at the same time Luis did, and heard him murmur, “Dios.” The room was a rolling boil of black and red, infection and disease and agony. The bodies crawled with it. I saw the stuff trying to jump from the bodies around me to my own, and edged backward. “Spread by contact, looks like,” Luis said. “These boys must have grabbed stuff at the store back there and come straight here, just as they started dying. Anybody they touched got it, too.”
“Then someone should have lived to make it to the motorcycles, or to a vehicle,” I said. “Humans are masters of self-preservation. Someone must have tried to exercise it, and run.”
“We don’t know how long the symptoms take to set in. Could be seconds, could be minutes.” Luis shook his head. “Got to be thirty people in here, Cass. And they haven’t been dead long.”
“I’m more concerned with any that might have gotten away. If they make it to a point where they can infect larger groups that disperse…” As fast-burning as this illness was, it would be devastating in the context of a town, or a city. Priya might already have appeared there, beautiful as a burning star, to deliver that deathly touch. She could have gone anywhere, far beyond my reach, far beyond the capacity of humans to fight her unless an Earth Warden was standing right in front of her.
This was what the Earth would become: fields of the dead, cities of silence, where lonely music played unheeded. It took my breath for a moment, and for the first time, I felt fear. Real, bone-deep fear. We were butterflies in an avalanche, and what could we do, really do, to stop it?
“Steady,” Luis murmured. His hand gripped mine, strong and warm. “Bright side: This stuff isn’t airborne, or we’d already be dead. It’s contact only, which means it’s containable.…”
“Not if she spreads it in a city,” I said. “Or an airport. Or—”
I caught a flash of movement from the corner of my eye, and spun around… to find a pale, glowing hand outstretched toward me, a single finger pointing at my forehead. Behind the hand, the face of Priya, her Djinn-fired eyes burning into me with unseeing intensity.
I stumbled back, and Luis grabbed her forearm.
“No!” I screamed, but he ignored me. His whole focus was on Priya, who turned her gaze on him, as emotionless as a machine. She didn’t attempt to break free of his hold, or move at all. I reached out for him, but Luis shook his head sharply.
“Don’t,” he said. “I’m already infected.” He sounded so calm. So sure. “I can do this, Cass. Just stay back.”
He couldn’t. A human, even a Warden as powerful as Luis, couldn’t defeat a Djinn one-on-one in that kind of single combat… not when she was pouring infection into him, rotting him from within. He needed me, he needed someone to amplify and direct that power with fine control, like a laser. I could do that. I could help him hit her where she was most vulnerable.
But instinct told me to back away. Stupid, ingrained human instinct that demanded I preserve my life at all costs, even the cost of the ones I loved…
I am not a human. I am a Djinn. Djinn!
I gasped in a breath and lunged forward, adding my grip to his where it wrapped around her arm. “Together,” I said. “We’re stronger together, Luis. Let me help you!”
He let out a strange, wild little laugh, and closed his eyes. Priya wasn’t trying to pull away from us; she simply stood like a hot, burning statue, not quite flesh, not quite spirit. Exalted by her mission, and hardly noticing us at all, any more than a star might notice the ants crawling far below.
The sickness was already eating its way inside Luis, and the most difficult thing for Earth Wardens to do was to heal themselves; I channeled his energy out, and back in, burning the infection away, and then helping him drive back against the source. Priya was a teeming, seething incubator of the plague; she had been hollowed out, filled with this blackness, and set in motion. The Priya I had known was gone, as surely as those who’d inhabited the dead around us were no more. And that struck me hard, the grief of it; Priya had been an immortal, and she had been thrown away to become a vessel for destruction.
She had been my sister once.
I closed my eyes and threw myself into the fight, rising into the aetheric to more clearly see the struggle. Priya’s body was no longer the beautiful, harmonious form it had been; it was distorted, rotted, cancerous with the poison she carried inside. Luis glowed bright as a star, tinted with a fire’s edge of glittering orange from his rage and fear, and as I watched, his fire burned clean the portion of Priya’s arm he held. I poured my own strength into him, careless of the cost, and guided his Earth Warden instincts into the pathways inside her body, carrying his purifying fire deeper. Each second was a bloody, costly struggle for supremacy between the infection trying to kill, and Luis—with my focus magnifying his power—trying to heal. Priya’s body went a milky pale white where his healing touched it; the flesh was only a shell now, and as he destroyed what filled it, all that was left of her was the diamond-hard casing that was not quite living tissue.
And even so, even with spending so much power, so much strength, so much courage… we began to lose.
Priya did not fight us, because she didn’t need to; the infection roared back, boiled up within Luis and began to choke off his strong, steady pulse of life—and through him, mine as well. Death was stronger than our temporary passions, and it was patient as the tide.
Just when I felt him struggling, though, and knew we were going to fail, another power joined us—strong, burning-hot, and wild and uncontrolled. It fell to me to channel and focus that power as well, and it was like trying to direct a raging river down a narrow pipe, when the power threatened to rip the pipe itself to shreds. Isabel, I realized, in the single second of awareness I had to spare. It was Isabel’s power, raw and new and stunningly powerful, and added to Luis’s, lensed through mine, it was more than Priya—or the infection that had overtaken the Djinn—could fight.
Even so, it took a long time. Longer than I thought any of us could endure. Luis chased the infection, burned it, boiled it down to a pure hard core in the very center of her… and then focused a beam of power on it so bright that even in the aetheric it seared my vision. It resonated across the aetheric in a rippling wave… and then Priya was empty. A glittering glass shell that began to crack and collapse under its own pressure into sharp, fragile edges.
I felt a strange burning in my eyes, and for a moment I thought it came from the violence of Luis’s final assault that had broken the spine of the disease… but then I realized that the ache was in my flesh, a heat that had nothing to do with the fight we’d been waging.
I was infected.
I was dying.
And as I watched, Priya’s human-shaped form collapsed into fine, gray dust, and Luis staggered and went down in utter exhaustion.
I collapsed, too, sprawled in the open doorway. Weak winter sun hurt my eyes, and I couldn’t seem to get my breath.
I can’t die this way, I thought. Others will sicken. Others will be infected from me. Ibby…
Even as I thought her name, I saw her face. She looked older, taller, a confusing and alien version that didn’t match to the sweet,
chubby girl I still held in my heart. The eyes were the same, though, a child’s wide eyes, full of concern.
Her lips shaped my name, and she started to lean down toward me.
“No,” I whispered. I felt hot now, feverish, burning up with it. Something twisted violently inside me. It would not be an easy death. “Don’t.”
But Isabel reached down and took my hand, and I couldn’t stop her.
I felt the infection’s surge through my body toward hers. “No,” I said again, more strongly. “No!”
But it met an impenetrable wall where Isabel’s flesh touched mine, and I felt the infection recoil, as if it were intelligent, alive, afraid.
And then Isabel reached into me and crushed it.
This was not the smooth, clean destruction that Luis had managed on Priya; this was, instead, a brutal display of absolute power, uncontrolled by anyone, even Isabel herself. She mashed the infection, ripped it apart, destroyed it in a child’s vicious rage.
It hurt. I think I screamed, though I struggled to hold the agony inside; the infection died hard, but it died, and Isabel sank down on her knees next to me and smiled. It was a pure smile of triumph, but it was not sweet. Not the expression of a child, any child. “There,” she said. “It’s better now, right?”
I couldn’t speak, but I nodded, or tried; my head jerked unevenly as the muscles seized in protest.
Together, the three of us had just killed a Djinn. And not any Djinn… one fueled with the direct, angry power of the Mother. I could understand what Luis had done, but Isabel… At her age, with her experience, she should never have been able to try it, much less succeed in saving me. Not from a disease that had never been seen before on this world, something clever and aware on its own.
Isabel was still smiling as she said quietly, “It was a weak one.”
“What?” I concentrated on breathing in slow, steady rhythm as the waves of pain began to recede.
“The disease the Djinn was carrying. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. There’ll be more. Worse. You know that.”
I did, but I’d tried to avoid thinking of it. Priya had appeared out here in the woods, not in the center of a populated city. Why? My only answer was that some last vestige of the old Priya still fought, however inadequately. She’d managed to avoid catastrophic loss of life.
But others might not have fought so hard. Even now, it could be happening.
As if she’d read my mind, Isabel said, “It’s happening all over. There’s one like her in Boston right now. Four more that I can see on the aetheric around the world—two in Europe, two in China. I don’t think Crazy Bad Mommy Earth can make too many at once, though. She can’t afford to; it destroys the Djinn, and she needs them for other things.” Isabel sounded utterly certain of this, unnaturally so, as if she were a Djinn herself. She blinked, and some of that eerie gleam left her eyes as she extended her hand to me. “Come on. We need to get Uncle Luis and get out of here. They need us in Seattle.”
I was hardly capable of helping anyone at the moment, and to my humiliation I did need her assistance in finding my feet. When we found Luis, he was groggily scrambling up, avoiding the area of dust that had once been a Djinn’s physical manifestation. When he saw me, he lunged for me and wrapped his arms around me. “Damn,” he whispered, and his warm breath caressed my neck and ear like an intimate touch. “What were you thinking, chica? Could have gotten yourself killed!”
“As could you,” I said. “If I hadn’t stepped in.”
Isabel snorted. “Yeah, and I had to save both of your butts,” she said, and then, oddly, giggled. “I don’t think you ever let me get away with saying that. Butts!”
She broke into gales of laughter, in a room full of the dead, in the ashes of a destroyed Djinn, and a chill came over me. The sound was so like the old Ibby, the innocent child, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that there was nothing innocent about this now. She was a child, still, in the body of a teen, and a power almost equivalent to a Djinn—some of that had been her inheritance, a genetic code that would have made her an extremely powerful Warden in the fullness of time, but it had been wildly enhanced by Djinn intervention—by Pearl’s treatments that Ibby had endured while her prisoner. It was such a dangerously volatile combination that I could not see, could not imagine, how it would not blow up in all our faces.
Luis still had his arm around me, and I felt his shudder through my skin.
Yes.
We had a lot to fear today.
Chapter 3
THE DEAD DID NOT need their vehicles, at least. Isabel took an unsettling amount of satisfaction in burning the roadhouse, and as the flames billowed high into the air, waving flags of black, acrid smoke, I checked out the Victory I’d coveted before. Over the past few weeks Luis had developed his latent power as a Fire Warden; as we were partners, linked at the aetheric level, it was simple enough to tap into his power, and a stroke of my fingers on the ignition fired it to rumbling life under me. The familiar throbbing purr of the engine made something tense in me relax, made me remember that mankind had survived on this powerful and dangerous earth for a long time… and not only survived, but thrived. They had taken steps no other species had done—they had refined nature, rivaled it, harnessed it, and conquered it in small ways. The motorcycle I had mounted was an incredibly strong yet precise piece of engineering—as much of a miracle as the workings of a cell, or the vast and ceaseless wandering of the wind.
Humans simply couldn’t see it.
“You don’t need that,” Luis said. He was leaning against the truck, watching me with his head cocked to the side. “You can ride with us.”
I shook my head and revved the engine, just a little. “I prefer to be more… mobile. You can use a scout driving ahead, spotting for trouble.” That, and I wanted my freedom. Being walled up in the cabin of a truck, especially if I was not driving—it was not how I cared to spend what would likely be my last day alive.
Luis smiled. “You never look as happy as when you’re on one of those,” he said, and then gave it another second’s thought. “Okay, I can think of one other time you’re happy, but the position is kind of similar.”
That woke memories that merged pleasantly with the steady, low vibration of the motor between my legs, and I raised my eyebrows and challenged him with a stare. He gave me a small nod and climbed up into the cab. Isabel was sitting beside him now, with Esmeralda still coiled up in the cargo area.
I eased the Victory out behind the truck, then thought better of it and leaned into a wide arc as I accelerated, whipping smoothly past and out in front before the first broad, sloping turn of the road came about. The day was still bright, the wind cool and fresh, the air scented pleasantly with winter pine… but I could smell the smoke of the pyre left burning behind us, and I knew that the death we’d just witnessed was happening now, on a devastating scale, in places far distant from this.
The end of the world would not happen all at once, and that made it all the more appalling.
The weather turned on us within an hour; the clear, cold skies were covered fast by a rising curtain of bruise black, punched with brilliant stabs of lightning. I did not like the look of that, and even without a true Weather Warden sense to guide me, I could tell that it was full of anger, violence, and power. The first drops began falling in an ice-cold rush. I was without much to protect me, and was almost instantly chilled, first to shivering muscles and then to aching bones. My flyaway pale hair was plastered flat to my face, and I could not feel the fingers of my real, flesh hand where they gripped the throttles. Curiously, I could feel my other hand, the false one I’d fashioned with the last of my Djinn power to replace one corrupted by my sister’s black powers. If thy hand offend thee, cut it off. Most humans treated that as a metaphoric saying from the Bible. I had taken it quite literally, and it should have crippled me.
Sometimes the odd metallic gleam of that arm and hand startled me, but just now, I was grateful for it; in a hostil
e world of cold, it felt… warm. Soothing, somehow, powered by a tiny spark of what I’d once been.
But the rest of me was suffering badly, and over the next hour I was so concentrated on staying on the bike that my vision had tunneled to an intense focus on the blurred road ahead. I failed to hear the horn honking behind me over the roar of the engine and the rain until Luis flashed his lights, illuminating the black, shadowed rain in glowing strobes. I forced my clenched fingers to respond, and slowed the bike as I pulled it over to the side. The truck eased in behind me, and Luis got out and ran to my side. He’d found a jacket in the truck, a thin blue windbreaker, which he tossed over my shoulders. “Let’s get your bike in the truck!” he yelled. “You can’t stay out in this!”
I felt immense, stupid relief at this; it hadn’t occurred to me, in my focus, to give up and seek shelter. I almost fell in getting off the bike, and Luis had to catch and stabilize me. “You’re ice cold,” he said. “Go on, get in the cab. I’ll get the bike loaded.”
I stumbled to the truck and opened the door as he jogged by with the rolling Victory to the back of the truck. I supposed that there was a ramp of some sort, but the mechanics of it fled my mind as soon as I crawled into the warm, dry cab and slammed the door. I was shuddering with cold, and the blast of warm air from the vents felt like a lost, tropical paradise. Only gradually did I become aware that Isabel was sitting next to me, her hand tucked in my metallic one.
“Do you want me to help?” she asked. “I can.”
“No,” I said through chattering teeth. “You’ve used enough power today. Rest. It isn’t necessary.”
She immediately pulled her hand free and crossed her arms. I recognized the line that formed between her brows, and the harder jut of her chin. She’d inherited that from her father, Manny, and for just a flash, I felt the loss of him all over again. He’d been my first partner, my first human friend. My ally. And I’d let him down. “Fine,” Isabel said coldly. “Then freeze. I don’t care.”