by Rachel Caine
She did, I knew that; it was a child’s anger, a child’s acting out, but it still stung deep. As she meant it to do. I said nothing, just closed my eyes and drank in the warm, hot-metal scented breeze that was slowly beginning to ease the chill. Isabel, not getting the reaction she’d wished, busied herself with twisting the radio dial. Bursts of static flared in time with lightning as it laddered overhead, but she finally landed on a relatively clear signal.
It was not good news.
The radio announcer was shaken; that was clear even through the grainy, static-hissed connection. “—Desperate situation right now as the area has been hit with both extremely violent, wind-whipped fires and a damaging earthquake that seismologists report measured at least an eight point five. Surrounding states are sending assistance, as is the federal government, but there is news pouring in of flooding and extreme tornado activity in other areas, and frankly, there’s a limit to what rescue and volunteer efforts can accomplish at this point. The focus has turned to evacuations and saving those in the path of the destruction. In other news, in Boston, a spokesman for the CDC has confirmed the outbreak of a dangerous new virus, and the city government has called for an immediate, city-wide quarantine. While there has been speculation that this illness, which has claimed an unknown number of victims over the past twenty-four hours, was some type of bioterrorism, the spokesman stressed that they are conducting a thorough and speedy investigation to determine the point of origin of the virus.”
Isabel said nothing. She just turned the radio off as Luis opened the door and threw himself into the driver’s seat. He was soaked as well, despite his jacket and the oily trucker’s hat he’d thrown on, but he still flashed me a concerned look. “You okay?” he asked.
“She’s fine,” Isabel answered before I could speak. “There are lots of fires and earthquakes. What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Rest. You’re going to need your strength, Iz.”
“I’m not tired!”
“Yes, you are; you just don’t know it. You can’t burn through power like that and not have consequences—not even you. Just relax and let yourself heal inside.”
“But—”
“Iz. I said no.”
She slumped down in the seat, glaring at nothing, and Luis exchanged a look with me over her head as he started the truck again. He didn’t need to speak; I could understand his thoughts well enough.
It was going to be difficult with her from here on out.
Luis sighed and said, “We’re going to need beer.”
* * *
Esmeralda had been quiet—dangerously so—in the back of the truck, but as we drew nearer to Seattle, I heard her rustling and banging in the back. Finally, there was a sharp, annoyed rapping against the wall behind our seats, and Luis pulled the truck in at a closed, but covered, gas station. “Need a fill-up anyway,” he said. “Thank God for credit cards at pumps. You check on Reptile Girl back there, Iz.”
She had been steaming and glowering the entire drive, and now she gave him a frosty stare. “Say please,” she said.
“I thought you wanted to be treated like an adult, not a little kid,” he shot back. “Get your ass out and check on Esmeralda. Please.”
It clearly didn’t improve her mood, but she wiggled across the seat and darted toward the back. The rain was still pounding down, and the sound it made on the tin shield above us was a continuous, metallic din. Still, we were dry, and I couldn’t really say I was displeased with the trade. I stood outside with Luis, enjoying the smell of the rain, as he filled the gas tank. Isabel reappeared and said crankily, “She had to pee. So do I.”
“Open the store and go to the bathroom.”
Isabel rolled her eyes. “She’s a snake, Tío; she doesn’t use a toilet. She’s out there in the rain. She’s pretty angry about it, too.”
“Just go do your business and get back here,” Luis said. “Lock it back up when you’re done, okay?”
She didn’t answer. I had to smile at the thought that Luis had felt a need to lock a store during what would be, most likely, a time of chaos; Earth Wardens did tend to be more responsible with their powers than others. Most Fire Wardens would have melted the lock in their quest to get relief, and I didn’t like to think what a Weather Warden might have done.
Isabel vanished inside the store.
“How about you?” Luis asked me. “Need to go?” When I shook my head, he said, “Okay, then watch the pump. I’m hitting the head.”
He moved in that direction. I concentrated on the boring task of watching the numbers spin meaninglessly on the pump; Luis had—probably uselessly—given his credit card for the payment, but economies across the world would stumble today, shatter tomorrow. Soon, it wouldn’t be how many imaginary dollars, or pounds, or yen, were in an imaginary account.… It would be about survival, and survival required tools. Things to barter, things to use. I began making a list of what would be good to acquire.
The pump stopped with a thud and click, and I replaced the nozzle where it was meant to go… and then realized how alone I was. Esmeralda was still missing, somewhere out in the rain; Luis and Isabel were in the store itself. It was just me, and the constant, punishing rain.
But there was someone watching me.
I stayed very still, facing out toward the downpour-obscured road. I saw nothing, but I sensed… something. A presence. The damp hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I felt the need to back up, but I stood my ground.
There was a sigh of wind, and the curtain of rain parted in a clear, square corridor. Water sluiced off the invisible top and down the sides. It was a precise, dangerously controlled use of power, and at the other end of the opening stood a child. Small, delicate; girl or boy, I couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter greatly at that age.
“Sister,” the child said, and that voice echoed out, too large and powerful for that frail form. “I need to speak with you.”
I didn’t know the child herself, but she was only a vessel. The power that loomed larger around her was familiar, and dangerous indeed. Pearl had come to see me—not in the flesh, but occupying it, piloting it from afar.
The open, rain-free corridor was an invitation, an obvious one that lured me toward the child. It was stupid of me to consider going toward the danger, but I was in a blackly strange place, and danger was all around me now.
So I went.
The sound of the rain drumming against the child’s shield was punishingly loud, until I stopped a few feet away. Then, the roar cut off cleanly, leaving a silence so charged with tension that I could feel the hair on my arms stir and shiver.
The child had dark eyes, short-cropped silky hair, and a secretive little smile too old for her years. I thought of Ibby, of the destruction of her childhood, and forced the anger away. “Sister,” I said. “Too weak to form your own flesh now?”
“Too careful,” she said, in that lazily amused tone. “What a judgmental thing you’ve become, Cassiel. Humanity has corrupted you quite to the core. Did you like your taste of the Mother’s love? She’d have killed you, you know. Supped on your blood and gnawed the power from your broken bones. She’s a cannibal. And all your human friends will be food for her feast.”
“Hers or yours,” I said, and shrugged. “Death is death, Pearl. You offer nothing better.”
“I offer a stay of execution. A partnership to keep humanity alive. You need me, sister. You know that you do.”
“For what? You’re only seeking to save your own existence. If the Mother destroys the human race, you go with it; you’ve hidden yourself very well, I have to admit, and you did what all the Djinn thought impossible—you hid yourself away and drew power from humans, growing in power as they did. I’d applaud, but I doubt you can successfully root yourself so well in the power of the cockroaches who survive after them, although that would certainly be apt.”
The child’s eyes sparked with a sudden red glow, and power crackled around me in blue-whi
te zaps along the edges of the corridor. “Softly,” she said. “I may not love you so much as all that, Cassiel.”
We fought like humans, I realized then… like siblings. Bitter and acrimonious, too sensitive to each other’s moods and vulnerabilities. The most violent hatreds came from families.
I took a step back and forced myself to stay silent. The glow faded slowly, and the crackling power hissed and fell silent, although a burnt-ozone smell filled the space around me.
“I came in peace,” Pearl said. “I came to save you.”
“We don’t need you,” I told her. I said it firmly, but without anger, and I even gave her a small nod of respect. “If you wish to fight, do so. But the Wardens fight alone, as they always have.”
“You speak for them.”
“They’d say the same.”
The child’s smile was, this time, truly unsettling. “You think so? Really? We’ll see, my sister. But the truth is, I don’t need you. You are an annoyance with which I no longer wish to contend. I gave you a chance. Now I hope you enjoy the consequences. Good-bye, my sister. Say hello to our mother.”
I had a second’s warning this time, purely because Pearl couldn’t help but gloat; it was just enough time to drop to one knee on the muddy ground and punch power down into the water-drenched soil. I had no dominion over the water, but the soil responded to me, sluggish but powerful. It rose up in a thick, slippery wave under the child’s feet, throwing her—him?—off balance with a high, surprised cry. The attack that was blasting toward me missed, but only just; I felt the incredible heat of it blister my skin and sizzle my hair, and completed my forward motion to fall flat on the mud. My shirt was blazing, and I rolled over to kill the flames. As I did so, I kept moving the ground under the child’s feet, and riding the thick, shifting sludge kept the Fire Warden from launching another effective assault.
The rain shield overhead collapsed, and ice-cold water hit my burned skin in a punishing, breathtaking slap. I felt power shifting on the aetheric, and desperately kept pushing the earth around, trying to buy time. This child’s power was enormous, and extremely well controlled; if I gave a second’s pause, she would respond with a blistering assault that would burn the skin right off my body and leave me dying in the mud, or worse. I was fortunate that the child was strong in fire; earth was a good defense against that, if I could stay ahead of her and anticipate her moves.
It was hard to do, but while rocking her off balance yet again, I simultaneously pulled the mud up in a counterwave that buried me but left a tiny hole through which I could catch a breath. I sucked in a deep one, and rolled even as I sank deeper into the muck, reaching, reaching.…
I felt the mud suddenly harden around me, and the heat against my back was sudden and stunning, as if I’d been shoved beneath a giant broiler. She was trying to bake me, if not burn me. I sank deeper to avoid it, then twisted up, hands outstretched.
My fingers closed on the stick-thin legs of the child, and I sent a massive burst of power up through her nerves to force an overload and shutdown.
The child toppled over in a sudden, helpless heap.
I clawed up from the mud and flopped next to her, gasping and letting the rain pound me as it sluiced the grit from my face and eyes. Then I checked the child for signs of life. She was breathing, but unmoving. Her heart was speeding too fast, trying to fight me as I held her in that state. I put my palm flat on her forehead, closed my eyes, and eased her into a deeper state of calm and then, finally, unconsciousness.
“Cass?” Luis lunged out of the rain. He looked frantic as he dropped to his knees beside the two of us. “What happened?”
“One of Pearl’s,” I said wearily, and almost pitched forward as I lost my balance. Luis’s warm hands grabbed my shoulders, and he pulled me back against him, arms wrapping me in safety. “She’s going to the Wardens to offer her help to them against the Mother. And they’ll accept; they’re bound to. They don’t understand what she is. What she wants.”
“Then we have to tell them,” he said. “She tried to shut you up, right?” He looked down at the small form of the girl. “Cass, did you—”
“She’s alive,” I said, and coughed up a mouthful of dirty water, retching mud up from my stomach in a sudden rush. I didn’t feel better for the purge.
“Well, we can’t just leave her here. She’ll freeze.”
“We can’t take her, either. She’s dangerous.”
But now Isabel was there, too, and she reached out with a cry for the little girl. “What did you do?” she shouted at me, glaring, and I didn’t have the energy or the heart to explain. “You’re always hurting people! Always!”
“Iz, stop, hang on a minute—”
But she avoided Luis’s outstretched hand, picked up the little girl, and carried her off toward shelter. The look she shot me was full of dark fury and distrust.
“Iz!” Luis yelled, but if Isabel could hear him, she didn’t care. He turned his anger on me, instead. “Cassiel, do you have some kind of death wish? You can’t just walk off and have a chat with that evil bitch without backup—you know that! What were you thinking?”
It was as if his frightened, protective anger was contagious, because suddenly irritation inside me sparked into rage, and I shoved free of him and stumbled up to my feet. The rain no longer felt cold; it seemed soothing as it slapped down on my face and hair, soaked into my clothes. I was still shaking, but the chemicals in my body driving it were from a far different source.
“I was thinking that there’s no point!” I shouted back at him, and shook my head so forcefully that spray flew in a mist. “It’s the end, Luis! And there’s no point in being careful now. It’s all risk, and loss, and I can’t—” I ran out of breath, and the anger wasn’t enough to cushion me against the sudden, horrible reality of the losses, and the ones that were to come. “I can’t live through this. There’s no point.”
He felt sorry for me; I could see it. Fool. He didn’t understand, didn’t see what I saw, didn’t understand the gulf that yawned black and hungry beneath our feet. We were rolling down a steep hill into a chasm, and there was no stopping it now. The Mother would destroy us, or we could cling to the false comfort held out by Pearl, and die later, and more horribly.
Ashan had exiled me from the Djinn because I’d refused to kill humanity—a clean masterstroke of strategy that would have destroyed Pearl along with them. His response had been to cast me down into human form, but I had grown to realize, over this time with them, that it hadn’t been punishment so much as another, long-game strategy. I was the miserable hope that Ashan had placed in the center of this, placed to bring about the end of the game if I had the courage… a useless, fragile, broken human. I couldn’t save anyone. I couldn’t even save myself.
Ashan had thought far too much of me. It was all useless, and shattered, and wrong, and the hope and love in Luis’s eyes were tragic now.
I pushed past him and slogged through the clinging mud toward the truck.
Esmeralda was coiled up in a loose tangle of scales and limbs near the back door, looking as drowned and annoyed as I felt. Her tail rattled as I passed her. “Saw you out there,” she said. “Have fun with your hermana?”
“Shut up,” I snapped.
“You can’t let Isabel keep doing that, you know,” she said. “Picking up strays.”
“Like you?”
Esmeralda smiled, but there was a hint of the snake in that smile. “Some strays bite. This one will. You can’t save them all. Got to make sure Iz understands that.”
Esmeralda wasn’t saying anything that I didn’t feel myself, gut-deep, but it offended me that she was echoing my own thoughts. I didn’t want this Djinn-killing sociopath on my side, or in my head.
“Saving children may not be your priority,” I said coolly, “but perhaps it should be ours. Keep away from the girl. She may yet be salvageable.”
“Keep telling yourself that!” she yelled back, as I climbed into the truck’s cab
. “She’s going to melt your faces off, and don’t say I didn’t warn you!”
Isabel was already inside, sitting stiffly in the center of the bench seat with the little girl in her arms. She’d wrapped her in the blanket I’d used before, and asleep, the child seemed innocent and heartbreakingly vulnerable. I slammed the door. Isabel edged away from me, putting clear space between us, as Luis got in the driver’s side. I heard the back door slam as Esmeralda took her place.
Nobody spoke at all as we drove away, into the storm.
Luis still had a working cell phone, and charged it using the plug-in port in the truck. His first call, once we were safely out of the heart of the storm and into something more like normal rain, was to the Wardens.
“Crisis Center,” said a sharp male voice on the other end of the line. “Name?”
“Luis Rocha, Earth. Checking in,” he said.
“You mobile and able to take work?”
“Yes,” he said, and gave me a quelling look when I started to speak. “Are they back?”
“They who?”
“The ones who went off on the cruise,” he said. The cruise in question had not actually been a vacation; a large number of the most powerful Wardens had boarded an ocean liner and sailed away from the coast of Florida, trying to prevent a major disaster. So far, there had been no word of their return… but then, we’d been preoccupied.
“Not yet,” the voice said. “They should be docking in a few days, though. We’ve made contact and told them how dire the situation is here. They’re making best possible speed, but it’s up to us to hold until they get here.”
From the stress in the man’s voice, he didn’t think that was very likely. I didn’t hold out much hope, either. Mother Earth, conscious and angry, could destroy much of human civilization in a day, never mind a week. The Wardens remaining wouldn’t be able to stop it, especially with the Djinn co-opted against them.
“I need to speak with Lewis Orwell,” I said. “Now.”