by Rachel Caine
She nodded silently. I saw a glimmer of tears in her eyes, and fear, but she blinked and forced a smile for her son. “We’ll do that, won’t we, sweetie? We’ll go to the store right now.”
“Can I get Pop Rocks?”
“If you want to, of course you can.” She looked up at us, oddly embarrassed. “I don’t usually let him, but—”
“Let him have what he wants,” Luis said. “Today. Stay safe, ma’am.”
She gave him another smile, fainter this time, and hurried her son along. We watched them go down the block, to the same grocery store Luis had already visited.
“Do you think they’ll live?” I asked him softly. He didn’t look at me.
“Do you think any of us will?”
Without another word, or waiting for my answer, he walked back to the van.
Chapter 5
OUR GIRLS WERE QUIET for the most part, although Esmeralda was grumpy and restless; this was not, I found, shocking. Iz seemed too quiet, too withdrawn, and I tried to engage her in conversation for a while before abandoning the attempt and letting her ride in silence, staring out the window.
“Couple of hours more,” Luis said. “It’s going to get more dangerous the closer we get to Seattle, so stay alert. Cass, I need you up on the aetheric if you can manage it. Keep a lookout for any trouble.”
I nodded and took his hand; physical contact between the two of us made access to the aetheric realm easier for me. A small burst of power sent me soaring up, out of my body, and the world took on the nacreous shimmer of mother of pearl, then dissolved into lines, light, whispers, fog. My native environment, as a Djinn, but I was no longer at home in it, and I felt the steady, though small, drain of power required to sustain me here. It was a risk, doing this; Luis was still weak, and his reserves of power were less than either of us might have wished. Mine were still shallow, too, but I was more concerned about him; I could only channel power through him, and draining him past safety put us both at risk.
For now, though, it was only a minimal exposure.
The forest around us was very much the same on the aetheric as it was in the human world; more impressionistic, perhaps, suggestions of trees and shadows of animals moving through them in streaks of subtle color. Life was bright, even plant life; the trees pulsed with slow whispers of golden energy. Beautiful, and calming.
But there was trouble everywhere around us.
The road on which the van traveled was a thick dead slice through all that life, a thing of man’s making, too recent to have any real history and place on the aetheric, where time was as much a visible dimension as the others. Not everything mankind created looked so awkward here, but new construction did. The town we’d left behind had more weight and natural ease to it, because its history gave it reality as much as the wood and glass and metal of which it was built. Time had given it life of its own, and the memories and events that had taken place there, good or bad, had created its own aura. It was, I thought, a good place to live, full of small joys and long peaces. No human place was free of sadness, madness, death, but in their town, at least, that was outweighed by something I could only call… happiness.
I didn’t wish to, but I found my aethereal body turning slowly, facing another direction… toward Hemmington.
The town was a blackened scar. For all its apparent peace and silence in the human plane, here it was a shriek, a vibrating well of agony, an open wound in the world. Something had happened there, something great and terrible, and the death that had followed hadn’t left only human corpses; it had rendered that entire town, and everything in it, poisonous.
It was a trap, but instead of something that would blow up intruders, it would lure them in, lull them, and then destroy. My own trauma there had added to the scarring, I realized; so had Isabel’s.
I looked at the girl, sitting silently in the van below me, and saw the taint of that place inside her. It had infected her in subtle, awful ways. She’d heal, I thought, but for now, the germs of it continued to fester. I mourned that, and the blackening of the roots of her power that she’d done to herself. Isabel was still beautiful, a shining star on the aetheric, but she glittered more darkly than she ought.
I turned away from Hemmington, extending my vision farther out. Not far away, Portland burned. The Wardens had withdrawn their forces, fallen back to Seattle. By the standards of human cities, Portland was a young place—only a little over a hundred years of buildings and settlements, and little that had lasted for any length of time. It had held a significant population, though most had scattered now, in bright groups that fled in all directions. The forces pummeling Portland were full of bright, bloodred fury… flames that seared away what humans had built and returned it to ashes.
The death toll must have been significant, but the suffering was done now; what was left in that city belonged to the Djinn and to the Mother. Humans had no place there now.
Not so far away—and too close for comfort—the Wardens had regrouped and gathered their forces near Seattle. They’d kept the destruction confined to Portland so far; I could see that their efforts were focused on evacuating the people and finding them safety, not on trying to douse the unnaturally bright flames that continued to devour what had once been one of America’s great cities. It was, I knew, far from the only disaster they were facing; there was a great, dark energy rising from the midwest of the continent, where floods raced out of control and Weather Wardens struggled to divert storms and tame rivers. It would not end well, from the raw, bleeding colors of the aetheric. There was more—the harsh stabbing oranges and stark ripping greens of earthquakes were flashing along long-dormant rifts, toppling houses and rocking the tall towers of distant cities. The ocean’s tides were rising under the whipping winds of forming hurricanes far out to sea.
There was death coming, and it would not stop.
I already knew it, but staring at it here, in this way, it shook me how fragile the Wardens were, how utterly useless their defenses. I’d heard the grim despair in Lewis Orwell’s voice, and now I felt it, as well; this was a fight to the death, but the winner was a foregone conclusion. All we could do was bind up wounds and defend for as long as we could. Without more Wardens, without the supporting power of Djinn, humanity had very little time left as masters of the world.
If they’d ever truly held that title, other than in their own minds.
We had avoided truly being attacked thus far, mainly because nature was directing its hatred toward the largest concentrations of what it perceived as threats… toward cities, and the Wardens who clumped to defend them. As we came closer to Seattle, we’d start drawing unwelcome attention; Isabel’s bright power would ensure that we couldn’t pass completely unnoticed. Even Luis had an impressive presence on the aetheric, though Iz’s light effectively hid his, and I presumed mine as well.
I was watching the ongoing battle of the Wardens when I felt the first stirring of… awareness. It was not so much something seen as felt… the power that was consuming Portland, that mindless beast seemed to pause and look. I felt the impact of its stare, like clouds over the face of the sun. All of the aetheric seemed to dim and go quiet.
It was looking at us.
I did not dare to move, not even to drift down into my body. There was a sense of a vast, predatory interest focused on us, and any tiny mistake could bring disaster.
The flames in Portland faltered and began to fall silent, but the energy behind them did not fall away; no, it gathered itself, a beast tensing to spring.
We were too close.
Freezing like prey wouldn’t save us, I realized. I dropped back into my body with a breathless, icy rush, lunged forward to brace myself against the dashboard of the van, and gasped out, “Turn! Get off this road!”
“What?” Luis asked. “Jesus, Cass, what is it?”
“Get off the road. Do it now!”
“Chica, there’s nowhere to go!”
“Turn around!” My shout must have conveyed
the true depths of my alarm, because he didn’t hesitate anymore. Luis hit the brakes, brought the van into a shuddering, tire-burning slide. Momentum threatened to tip us, but he controlled it somehow and accelerated into the drift. The tires caught traction, and suddenly we jerked forward, heading back the way we’d come.
“Faster!” I yelled. “Get us off this road!”
Luis didn’t ask any more questions, just pressed the accelerator to the floor. When the van responded sluggishly, I felt him working the engine with Earth power, opening up clogged valves to pull more power out of the churning metal parts.
It wasn’t going to be enough.
I could see it now, through the back window—a blazing arrow of power coming behind us, like liquid sunlight flowing down the road. The trees on either side were igniting into brilliant orange. Everything it touched died.
And it was going to catch us.
“Stop,” Isabel said.
“Can’t do that,” Luis said. “Cass is right. We can’t fight this.”
“You can’t run fast enough,” she said. She sounded scared, but certain. “Cassie, we need him.”
She was talking about Rashid, but Rashid would be of no real help to us; he might possibly be able to preserve our lives, but this power would simply drown us, consume us, and even a Djinn’s power was limited by his master’s endurance. Sooner or later, he would lose that battle, and we would be dissolved, digested, gone.
The benefit for Rashid would be that the glass of his bottle wouldn’t last, either; he’d be free again, free to join the crusade against the hunted remains of humanity. Though I wondered whether he would take quite so much joy in it as others.
“Cassie!” she shouted. We had seconds, if that. She was right. There was nothing else we could do, not against this vast force of nature that rolled toward us.
I lunged over the seat, into the back of the van, thumping down next to Esmeralda, who was staring out the window with a grim, silent concentration that was not quite fear and not quite delight. An uneasy mix of the two. “Beautiful,” she said. “Death’s really beautiful, you know.”
“Shut up,” I said, and ripped open the saddlebag of the Victory, parked beside her coils. Her rattle stirred with a dry hiss, but I kicked it out of the way and grabbed Rashid’s bottle. I ripped the foam stopper out. “Rashid! You’re called!”
He could have dawdled; any enterprising Djinn could have used delay to his advantage, especially one with a grudge, but instead he was instantaneously crouched in front of me, silver eyes gleaming, naked indigo body coiled almost as sinuously as Esmeralda’s reptilian form. His teeth glittered as his lips cut in a smile. “What will you?” he asked me.
“Take us safely to the Wardens in Seattle,” I said. “Now.”
“You forgot to say painlessly,” he said.
Too late.
Rashid wasn’t one of the Djinn capable of transporting humans cleanly through the aetheric.… That was a skill only a very few possessed, and those who did hardly ever bothered to use it. What he could do, however, was pick up the entire van and move it at speed the mechanical beast was never meant to achieve—speed that flattened me back against the van’s wall, drove the scream back into my chest. Bones creaked under the strain, and my cuts reopened, sending red trickles rippling not down, but up and back, driven by the incredible force of our passage.
It took seconds, but it felt like an eternity, trapped and terrified. When it passed, it did so suddenly, a deceleration that sent me slamming with stunning force against the metal van doors at the end, with a hail of unsecured metal tools around me. Rashid was kind enough to ensure that I wasn’t killed by them, but he didn’t bother with minor injuries—more cuts and bruises to add to my collection.
Esmeralda fared better, but only because she’d coiled herself tightly and wedged herself between the van’s driver’s seat and the bolted racks of tools. Even then, as my vision cleared, I saw that her nose was bleeding, and so were her ears. Even her eyes had turned ruddy in the whites.
I fumbled for the van’s door and tumbled out onto a cold, hard surface—and almost off the edge of a roof twenty stories high. I caught myself in time, just barely, and slowly edged backward.
The van was precariously on the edge, well off the center of a yellow painted circle that was, I suddenly realized, meant for helicopters. The paint on the van had blistered and peeled away in places, and as I watched, it settled slowly down as all four tires deflated.
The driver’s side door opened, and Luis fell out. Luckily, he was not so close to the edge of the roof as I’d been. He flopped over on his back, staring up at the sky, gasping hoarsely. Like Esmeralda, his face was gory with blood from ruptured blood vessels, and he coughed and spat up more red, then groaned.
“Ibby,” I whispered. I managed to scramble upright, clinging a moment to the van’s open back door, and then felt my way around to the passenger side.
Isabel lay across the seat, eyes tightly shut. Her face was paper white, and her nose was still bleeding. I fumbled in the glove compartment and found a box of tissues; I grabbed a handful and used them to mop the blood from her face. Her eyes fluttered open, and she took the tissues and pressed them to her nose herself.
We didn’t speak. I smoothed her hair with one trembling hand and realized that I was still holding Rashid’s bottle in the other, uncorked.
Rashid was standing just at the edge of the roof, balanced on his bare toes, staring down. He still hadn’t bothered with clothing, and now he turned and faced me, hands on his hips. “No gratitude?” he asked. “I suppose I deserve that. But you’re safe, and the Wardens are on the floors below. On their way to you now.” In a sudden rush, he was standing at the van’s door, leaning in on me. His eyes had gone from silver to an even more unsettling steel color. “A word of advice, Cassiel: You’ve woken a devil, and it will come for you. The Wardens won’t welcome you.”
“In the bottle,” I said. “Now.”
He grinned at me in a way that made me think of the amusement of cannibals, and vanished in a puff of soft blue smoke. Theatrical now. But not a liar, I thought.
I’d lost the foam sponge, but Esmeralda held it up as she leaned over the seat to look at Isabel. I nodded thanks and squeezed it into the neck of the bottle as Esmeralda asked, “How is she?”
I didn’t need to answer. Isabel gave us a thumbs-up gesture, took the tissues from her nose, and sniffled cautiously.
“I think it’s stopped,” she said, and sat up. “Yeah, it’s stopped. Es? Are you okay?”
“Five by five,” Esmeralda said. “Your uncle don’t look so good.”
Luis was still lying on his back, staring at the cloudy sky. I took more tissues from the box and went to sit next to him. As he wiped the blood from his face, he said, “Next time, tell me about the goddamn Djinn in the goddamn bottle before you pull that shit.” He sounded tired, but oddly calm. “Good call, though. We weren’t going to make it. If ever there was a time for a panic button, that was it. How’d you get him?”
I shrugged. Every muscle in my body ached now, as if it had been stretched on a rack. “Luck,” I said. “And I think he let me, in a way. Rashid isn’t one who’s been longing for the end of the human race. In a strange sort of way, I think he likes you humans.”
“You’re one of us,” Luis pointed out. “Which you keep forgetting, by the way. Doesn’t make me feel better about our future.”
“We don’t have one,” I said. “Any of us.”
“Ouch.” He rolled over on his side, then up to his feet, with an assist from me. “Damn, that feels about as good as I expected it would. What the hell did he do?”
“I think it’s best we don’t ask in detail. The Wardens are on the way—”
I was wrong, I realized, as the door on the other side of the roof banged open, and a stream of people poured out. Some were regular humans dressed in military uniforms and carrying weapons; some were unarmed, but far from regular. Power glimmered around them
, even to the human eye. There were five Wardens, by the time they’d all arranged themselves around us, and an equal number of armed military personnel.
One of the Wardens stepped forward: male, older than Luis, with short black hair graying at the temples and a whippet-thin build. He had an unusual face, I thought—handsome, but with a strangely ironic twist, and very dark eyes. There was something very strong about him, and very dangerous. “Luis Rocha,” he said, and turned that stare on me for a second. “Cassiel.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Luis said. He was leaning on me, but now he straightened and centered himself. “That’s my niece Isabel in the van. And her friend Esmeralda.”
The Warden inclined his head just a touch, not so much agreement as acknowledgment. “I’m Brennan,” he said. “Nice parking job. Want to tell me exactly how you managed that? Because I’m pretty sure that only a Djinn could have blasted through our defenses and landed you so neat and pretty on our roof. Twenty-two floors up.”
“I’m a Djinn,” I said.
“Was,” he corrected, and extended his hand. “Hand it over.”
“What?”
“The bottle you used to get here,” he said. “Hand it over, or you’re going to get to street level without the benefit of the elevator.” Brennan was, I realized, a Weather Warden, and a powerful one. I felt a sudden, damp gust of air slam against me—a bully’s warning shove.
“I’m disappointed,” Luis said. “Considering you’ve got all those shiny guns.”
Brennan snorted. “Yes, Bre’r Rabbit, I’m going to walk you into the briar patch,” he said. “Threatening Earth Wardens with guns. That’s a winning strategy.” He sounded genuinely amused, but in the next snap of a second, that was utterly gone. “Hand it over, or I’ll hand you over to gravity, and I assure you, she isn’t as kind as I am.”
I smiled thinly. “No.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Excuse me, I think I heard you say no. I must have been wrong about that because—” Suddenly, the wind’s shove turned into a persistent, strong push that, despite my efforts to stabilize, moved both Luis and me back over the roof toward the edge; not quite over, but the distance was halved before he finished his sentence. “Because that would really be very sad. I’d have a moment.”