by Rachel Caine
“Who’s this?”
“Cassiel, who was once a Djinn. Put me through.” I had, I thought, learned my humility lessons well; I had at least thought to give some context to my name, instead of presuming that it still held a resonance of power on its own.
“Can’t do that, lady.”
My voice went lower and colder. “Put me through.”
“Warden Rocha, please tell her that—”
“He tells me nothing,” I interrupted. “Put me through to Lewis Orwell now.”
A heavy sigh rattled through the phone, and the unfortunate in the Crisis Center said, “I’ll try. Hold.”
Luis said, “You really think you’re going to get the fucking Lord High Master of the Wardens to chat with you right now? Jesus, Cass, get a grip.”
“If Pearl wants to form an alliance with the Wardens, it will have to be stopped, and he’s the one to stop it,” I said. “He needs to know. Now.”
“Sometimes I think you just don’t get the concept of boss. He’s not going to—”
These was a click, and a different voice, scratchy with distance and a fragile connection, came on. “Orwell,” he said. “And it had better be breaking news, Cassiel.”
“It is,” I said. “You remember why I was cast down.”
“Well, I don’t know if down is very flattering to the rest of us. Cast out might be a better term. But yes, I remember. Ashan wanted you to kill the human race, and you said you wouldn’t. I hope you’re not calling to ask for a thank-you, because we’re just a little busy.” He sounded very grim, far more so than I’d expected. Orwell was one of those perpetually confident men, and yet now… “The Djinn who came with us are dying. Cut off. We’re in a black corner.”
A black corner was a Warden term for one of the burned-out areas of the world, where such an explosion of power had taken place that it destroyed the aetheric, and prevented Djinn from accessing their power. Djinn stranded in one of those areas would starve to death, slowly or quickly. Most black corners were small, isolated areas; even an injured Djinn could crawl out before permanent damage was done. But out on the ocean, when the aetheric was so ripped and bloodied… they might not survive. Any of them. They were New Djinn, most of them, but there was one.… “Venna,” I said aloud, and felt a surge of dread. “Is Venna—?”
“She’s sick,” he said. “Very sick.”
“No.” I said it softly, and almost involuntarily. Venna was a True Djinn, like me; she was ancient and incredibly powerful. I’d been puzzled by her recent affiliation with humans, but then, she’d always been intrigued by the strangest things. “Not Venna.” The loss of someone such as she would bring down the heavens, I thought.
What hurt more was the realization that I hadn’t felt her distress. Venna and I had links that went back farther than the human race, and yet… yet I felt nothing of her danger, or pain.
Lewis sighed. “Get to the point, Cassiel.”
I gulped back my pain, my shock, and focused hard to say, “Pearl. The enemy I’ve been fighting. She’s become very powerful, and now she will approach the Wardens, offer to fight by their side. You must not take her offer, Lewis.”
“Is it a trap? Is she going to not fight on our side?”
“No—she will. She must. She needs humanity to live, for now, until she achieves her ultimate goal… but then she’ll turn on the Wardens, destroy you all. When she no longer needs them, she’ll kill the rest of humanity as well.”
He was silent a long time, long enough that I feared the connection lost, but then Lewis said, “Good to know. Thanks, Cass. We should make landfall in a few days, but meanwhile, I need every Warden out there to fight, understand? Don’t give up. Shield all that you can.”
“You must promise me that you won’t accept any help from her!”
“How can I?” Lewis sounded—not himself. That was a cry of bleak despair, and the words that followed were just as dark. “I had twenty-five thousand Wardens when I started, to protect almost seven billion people. Know how many I have now? It’s tough to get a real count, but I was down to about ten thousand, and now—now it’s maybe half that. The Djinn are either dying or puppets for Mother Earth. We’ve got nothing. You expect me to throw back the only possible ally we have?”
“She’ll kill you,” I said softly. “She’ll kill you all.”
“Listen to yourself,” he replied. “Even after all this time, you can’t think of yourself as one of us.”
He hung up the call, and I sank back in the seat, feeling weary and utterly defeated. Luis silently put the phone away and concentrated on driving for a while.
“Well,” he finally said, “at least you warned him. But I’ve got to be honest: He’s right. He’s got to pick the lesser of two evils right now.”
“Pearl isn’t the lesser. She only appears to be, from the Wardens’ perspective right now.”
“Yeah, well, you can argue it when we see him.” He yawned, shook himself out of it, and said, “We can’t keep this up. We’re burning power every time we turn around, and it’s going to wear us down, Cass. We haven’t even made it to an actual fight yet, and already I’m drained. So are you.” He checked his watch and the fuel gauge. “We’ve got at least another eight to ten hours before we get to Seattle, and that’s if the roads hold out and we don’t run into trouble, which we damn sure will.”
“And your point…?”
“We need rest. We need to figure out what to do with Pearl Junior there, because you can’t keep her unconscious from now until this all shakes out, and having her at our backs is the definition of a bad idea.”
“What are you saying?” I half turned in the seat now, staring at him.
“I’m saying that we’ve got the hell beat out of us more than we can handle already, and we’re going to have to handle a lot more. We need to refuel, recharge, get ready. Going in drained means we ain’t helping anybody.”
“They’ll bring the fight to us!”
“Maybe,” Luis said. “But out here, away from the cities, it’s still quiet. And we’re stopping to rest before we do something stupid, because we’re too tired to think straight.”
He took his foot off the gas.
I flooded power through the metal, and the engine growled deep. The truck lunged forward, inciting a chorus of yelped protests from the others. I held Luis’s stare with mine, and then said quietly, “Watch the road. We’re not stopping. We cannot stop. There’s no more rest, no more time. Do you understand?”
“You’re crazy. We’re human, not Djinn. We can’t just— Let go of the pedal, Cass.”
I said nothing. There was something in my stare that made him go quiet in the end, and he faced forward.
We kept driving.
Thirty minutes later, we slowed for the first signs of trouble—a tangle of wreckage in the middle of the road. Luis stopped the truck, and we both went to examine the damage. It had been a car once, but there was nothing left of it now to identify it as such, save one mangled tire still visible. From the fluids leaking from the crushed object, there had been occupants. They were beyond saving.
“Any idea what did that?” Luis asked me. I shook my head, but that was a lie. There was no damage to the close-crowding trees on either side of the road, which argued against an attack by weather; I could visualize a Djinn easily compacting the vehicle with careless blows, driving the metal in on the occupants. But why this car? Why…
I found a severed hand by the side of the road, a perfectly undamaged specimen sheared cleanly by some incredible force. It was a woman’s hand, with manicured fingernails that had seen better days, and a great deal of recent abuse.
In the palm, when I checked it in Oversight, there shimmered the ghost of a stylized sun—the identification of a Warden. I looked at the crushed car, startled, and the agony and violence that bloomed on the aetheric made me shudder. A Djinn had done this. A powerful, furious, mad Djinn.
Because they were Wardens, headed—as we were—to battle.
“Luis,” I said softly.
“I know,” he said.
“Wardens.”
“I know. Get in the damn truck, now.”
We ran for it, but I slowed as I felt the aetheric bending around us. Something had just arrived. The hot, intangible rush of power blasted through me, and left me scorched and trembling inside.
I stopped and turned to face it. Luis made it to the door of the truck, but turned as well. I heard him whisper, softly, “Madre de Dios.”
A Djinn was standing in the road, blocking our path. He was the size of a man, but he was not anything like one, really; the form was correct, but his skin was a deep violet-indigo, his eyes blazed silver, and there was an aura around him that was visible even in the human world—power, madness, rage.
Rashid. He’d recovered far faster from Esmeralda’s bite than any of us really had expected, and he was still under the control of the Mother. At least I believed he was.
Like Priya, he had no choice in what he’d been sent to do.
“Cass?” Luis said. “What do you want to do?”
“Get in,” I said. “I’ll keep him busy.”
“Cassiel—”
“Do it!”
Luis yanked open the door and slid in, and I saw Rashid lower his chin. The glow in his eyes brightened, sparked with fury that was beyond even my experience.
I reached deep into Luis, into the deepest reserves of his power, and pulled all I could without damaging him beyond repair. I heard him cry out, but there was no time, no time at all, not if any of us were to survive the moment, the second.
I hit Rashid with a blast of pure white fire.
It was hardly enough to sting him, but it pushed him off the road and into the dirt, where he hit, rolled, and came to his feet with his skin dripping fire.
“Go!” I screamed, and heard Luis hit the gas. The truck rocketed past me, tires screaming; I felt the bumper brush me out of the way, but I had no time for pain because Rashid was rushing at me, and I knew, without even a hesitation, that I was about to die.
And that was, oddly, all right.
The world went quiet, still, pure, calm. Rashid was an indigo smear against it. I searched for the fear and rage that I needed to sustain me in this fight, but it was gone. Nothing left but a vast acceptance and readiness.
I’d felt this before, the detachment, the lack of fear, the power. Only once, since I’d been cast out from the Djinn, but the single bright spark of that Cassiel had never died, never surrendered.
Some part of me, some normally unreachable core, was yet a Djinn—trapped, limited, maybe even mutilated by what Ashan had done to me, but he couldn’t destroy it, not utterly. And in this moment, when I shed all my human faults, fears, hopes…
The Djinn emerged, and flowed into me again, unnatural, inhuman, perfect. My body glowed with a pure white light, and I caught Rashid’s arms and forced them wide as he rushed upon me. We were locked together, bodies pressed, eyes focused on each other.
And I was not afraid, any more than I’d been afraid when I’d seen an infection crawling up my arm and taken a weapon and brought it down to sever the flesh and bone. I’d known what had to be done, and I’d done it without hesitation. It had been a glorious madness, just like this.
I could hold Rashid here, trapped with me. I would hold him, for as long as necessary to ensure that Luis and the girls got safely away. For eternity, if I must.
No. No. I could do more. Must do more.
I tightened my hold on him. He was brutally strong, powered by the Mother’s rage, but there was something in me, too, something that I’d carried with me. A core that wouldn’t break, wouldn’t yield.
His rage flowed over me, through me, out of me, and back into the Earth from which it sprang.
Rashid, I whispered, my lips kissing close to his. Rashid.
He was there. Unlike Priya, he was not yet gone, not yet burned away. He’d hidden himself deep within, and I could feel him there, his terror and pain, his anguish and rebellion.
He needed help.
He needed…
It came to me with a stunning shock what he needed, and without thinking I released him and stepped back. I couldn’t save him like this, or stop him from going after those I was sworn to protect.
But I could stop him. And save him.
The instant I released him, Rashid flashed away, chasing the truck. I dove into the underbrush and found the thing I’d glimpsed, a single flare of brightness in the dark.
A glass bottle.
It was a beer bottle, still smelling of hops and malt.
Seconds left.
Rashid was in front of the truck now.
Summoning his power.
“Be thou bound to my service,” I said, and concentrated every ounce of the power inside me on his distant spark. “Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound to my service, Rashid!”
There was a scream on the aetheric, a ripping of the fabric, and power flowed like blood toward me, through me, into the bottle.
I slapped my hand down on the top, trapping him within, and collapsed to my knees on the fallen leaves. A chilly blast of wind made me shake, but it wasn’t only that—the fear came back, and the emptiness, and the fragility of flesh. The Djinn Cassiel had visited me and gone, and left me a human shell full of weakness.
But I had Rashid. I had him.
There was mud caked at the bottom of the leaves, and I slammed the bottle down into it, sealing it tightly. It looked empty, but on the aetheric the glass container swirled and glowed with trapped energy.
I didn’t know if the binding would keep him controlled by my will, or if it had only bound him into a prison; the only way to test it would be to release him, and that was a dangerous risk. Too dangerous, for now. Later, perhaps, it would be worth taking the chance.
The truck was still moving, already out of sight. Safe, for now.
And I was once again on foot.
Chapter 4
TWO MILES DOWN THE ROAD, I found the Victory motorcycle sitting neatly parked on the edge. The tire marks told me that the truck had stopped, unloaded it, and driven on. Good. I leaned against the bike for a few moments, head down. The rain continued, but it was fitful now, and light; no other traffic had passed in either direction.
I mounted the bike and started it with a spark of power, then patted the sleek side with absent fondness. “Let’s find them,” I said. I opened the saddlebag strapped to the side and found men’s clothing, rolled up tightly; the beer bottle with Rashid’s spirit fit nicely inside the curl of a pair of soft blue jeans, and I cushioned it further with a fleece shirt.
Then I eased the Victory out onto the black ribbon of road, and started the ride.
The punishing vibration of the engine felt magically soothing to me, pounding the kinks from knotted muscles and clearing my mind. The wind and rain in my face woke something primal in me, something that thought clearly and coldly about our chances. They were, of course, poor at best. Lewis Orwell himself had admitted that; until the bulk of the Wardens docked from their mission at sea, those of us stranded here were the thinnest possible line of defense. There was no chance we wouldn’t be shattered.
But we had an unexpected, even shocking advantage, if we could actually trap and bottle the Djinn. I’d always loathed that loophole in the freedom and power of my kind, but now I felt grateful for it; without it, the humans wouldn’t stand a chance, and ultimately neither would the Djinn themselves or the Mother. We had to maintain a fragile balance to fight for reason, for peace, and for the defeat of our real enemy: Pearl.
The Mother was experiencing agony and the temporary madness that came of it. If we could soothe her, it would pass. But Pearl… Pearl was a cancer at the very heart of the world, and she had to be burned away.
The bottle in my saddlebags represented a step toward all of that. Perhaps. At the very least, it symbolized a chance we hadn’t had an hour ago.
I saw the white flash of pa
int ahead on the road, and accelerated around a curve. The truck was just ahead now, climbing a rise. I could catch it in only a moment.
I was still half a mile back when the vehicle made the top of the hill…
… And exploded in a fireball, raining metal and debris into the trees.
“No!” I screamed. It burst out of me in a fury, ripping a blood path down my nerves and flesh, and I pushed the throttle hard over, heedless of the slick road, the dangers, everything except the burning wreck that was overturned there at the top of the hill.
No one could have survived that.
No one.
* * *
I found the first body lying in a burning heap on the side of the road. The pine trees were aflame, and the sound of trees snapping as the sap boiled was like war.
It was very still.
I leaped off the Victory while it was still in motion, letting it slide to a stop as I ran to the body’s side. I turned it over.
Luis.
His eyes were tightly shut, his hands fisted, but as I touched him the flames snuffed out into surly little curls of smoke, and he drew in a deep breath.
His clothes were burned, but as I frantically checked him I realized that the skin beneath was unharmed. Reddened, but not seared. He had a broken ulna and two cracked ribs, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed.
“Did my best,” he whispered. “Christ. That hurt.”
I smoothed his wet hair back. He smelled acridly of burned plastic and metal, but he was alive. Improbably, alive.
“Iz,” he said. “Over there. She jumped, with the girl.” He pointed with his unbroken arm. I kissed him quickly and rose to move in that direction.
The trees there were broken, snapped off at the base and laid out in an eerily neat circular pattern, like wheat stalks bent flat by the wind. And in the center of it was Isabel, curled up like an infant.
No sign of the girl at all.
I turned Isabel over. Her eyes were tightly shut, her skin pale, but she was breathing. Improbably, she wasn’t even scorched—not a single mark on her.
She was whispering under her breath. I pulled her into my arms and bent my head closer to make it out.