by Rachel Caine
“You’ve come for Isabel,” I said. “You won’t have her. Not again.”
“Isabel? Isabel—oh, yes, I remember her. A cute little thing, but a bit underpowered for what I needed.” Pearl shrugged. “I don’t want her. Besides, sister, she has you now to care for her. Why would I wish to intrude on that loving relationship? Why, you’re almost a mother to the poor thing.” Her smile was as swift and cruel as a hawk’s strike. She knew what it was like between the girl and me; she knew how complicated and difficult and dangerous it was for me to love a child of such power. To care, really care, in ways that Pearl herself did not.
And I hated her for knowing it.
Brennan cleared his throat. “Ladies,” he said. “Problem?”
Before Pearl could offer up the platitudes that were surely ready, I said, “Yes. If you keep her here, you’re accepting your own doom. She’ll destroy you. You need to get her out of here, now.”
Brennan thought I was joking, at least for a split second, but he must have quickly realized I was in deadly earnest. “What are you talking about? She’s—”
“Not a Warden,” I said. “Not in any way. The fact that she wields these children like weapons does not mean she is in any way sympathetic to your cause, or your challenges. She’s radioactive, Mr. Brennan. Use her, and you may win a short-term victory, but a slow, long-term death. It’s not even vaguely a possibility that she will allow any Warden on Earth to live once she has what she wants.”
He didn’t answer for a long moment. Shinju continued to smile faintly, untroubled, watching me with those unsettling, lovely eyes. Her hands remained gently on the shoulders of her two followers, who were likewise fixed on me with the intensity of hunting wolves.
“My sister is mistaken,” she said. Shinju’s voice was a weapon, too—full of music, gentle regret, false comfort. “I am heartbroken to be the cause of such strife, Mr. Brennan. You have given me shelter and safety here, and in return, I and the children have promised to protect this home you have offered us. We mean you no harm, I promise you. I am sorry for Cassiel’s bitterness, and her rage, but I do not share it. What may I do to offer you reassurance?”
He had to know, I thought. He was no fool. He had instincts. He had to know she was a danger to us all. The feeling she radiated was like razor blades on my skin, absolutely and unbelievably menacing.
“Back off,” Brennan said—not to her, but to me. “Shinju and the kids came here and contributed; that’s all I ask. How about you, Cassiel? You going to pitch in? Or you going to start a war right here, with a bunch of children?”
He didn’t see it. Couldn’t, of course; Shinju was a perfect flesh disguise for Pearl. Her frail beauty roused protective instincts, especially in male humans; her courage and quiet power raised other instincts in them that made them wish to believe her, trust her, want her. She was clever, my sister.
And insane, in ways the humans could not possibly guess.
“Our mother is ill,” she told me. “It is up to us to protect each other from her wrath until sanity comes again. That is the job of the Wardens, is it not? And anyone gifted with power and the will to use it.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t think that I’ll ever believe you, or fall for what you’ve promised these people. I know you, Pearl. I know what you want, and what you intend. And I will stop you.”
“No matter the cost?” she asked, and put her arms around the two children. They leaned against her. It was a pretty, and damning, picture. “If you attack me, you attack them, Cassiel. You make war on children. How can you do that?”
“Stop hiding behind them, then.” I was angry enough to gather power around me, and I felt it crackling inside me like a storm.
Pearl’s eyes widened, and I saw the dark joy in her.
The child on her left extended his hand, and I saw the hissing power of lightning forming around it.
I lowered my chin and readied myself for a fight that would level the building.
“Enough!” Brennan said. He came to my side, grabbed my arm, and pulled me violently off balance. “Enough, all of you. If you can’t play nice, you don’t have to share the playground. Cassiel, come with me. Shinju—just do what you were doing. As far as I’m concerned, you’re all on notice—no trouble here, or everybody goes. Clear?”
He had no power here, no power at all. Brennan’s authority was entirely mistaken. If she wished, my sister could have blown him apart with a snap of her fingers… if she was ready to make that move.
Clearly, she wasn’t. Not quite. Instead, Shinju bowed toward him. “Very clear, Mr. Brennan. I apologize for this awkwardness. My sister has always been—difficult.”
I laughed wildly. “She’s a killer,” I said. “You’re a fool. You’re putting your trust in a wild animal, and she’ll turn on you. Soon.”
“You’re not acting too damn house-trained yourself,” he said, and shoved me out into the hall as he banged the conference room door closed. “What the hell was that?”
“You have no idea,” I said. “No idea what you’re doing. What you’re risking.”
“You’d be real damn wrong about that,” Brennan said grimly. “Follow me. Let me show you what we’re risking.”
The hallway opened into a large open workspace filled with desks. The smell of the place was sharp and familiar—sweat, desperation, old trash, humans who’d gone without rest or comfort for days. A few were asleep where they sat, with their heads down on their arms; a heavily pregnant woman was asleep on a black leather couch pushed against the far wall, near the bathrooms. It was a chaos of ripped paper, overflowing trash cans, and haphazardly placed shiny boards on which were scribbled all manner of things—calculations, crudely drawn maps, notes.…
And on one wall was tacked a giant, oversized map of the United States. There were pins stuck in it, a confusion of colors.
Brennan led me over to it. “Yellow pins are for reports of earthquakes and other Earth events,” he said. “You can see that they follow a lot of the natural faults and seams, but we’ve got a few brand-new ones that don’t have any historical basis we can find. Red are wildfires; the larger the pin, the bigger the problem. We ran out of sizes, so we started just drawing the boundaries in marker for the biggest. Blue is weather-related events—tornadoes, storms, lightning, and the like. Black pins are Djinn incidents.”
I took a deep breath as I looked at the map, because taking each color individually painted a clear picture of a world in crisis… deep crisis. But combining them showed something quite different, and horrifyingly obvious.
There was no way to stop it. Even had the entire ship full of Wardens stranded out at sea and helpless docked today, even had every high-powered Warden alive come racing to the rescue, it would not be enough… and this was one country. Just one, in a world full of upheaval. And likely not even the worst, in terms of loss of life and impact. It was too much, too fast, and too vast in scope.
“How many dead?” I asked.
Brennan was silent for a moment, as if he couldn’t really bring himself to speak, and then he cleared his throat and said, “In this country, right at this moment, we’re looking at about ten million in casualties. That could be low. We’ve lost touch with some major population centers, so we could be off by several million by now.”
Millions. Millions.
Weakness took me, suddenly, and I closed my eyes. Brennan’s arm went around my shoulders, a comfort that I should not have wanted, or accepted, but I leaned gratefully against him. Like the others here, he smelled of sweat, desperation, simple unwashed skin… but that no longer repelled me.
He had not given up. He’d watched this map of despair form, and he’d still kept his team focused, working, hopeful.
Somehow, hopeful.
“We need her,” he said softly. “Do you see it now? We need every goddamn one of us. I’m not saying it will be enough, but it can never be too much. Not now. Not if we expect to hold even one more day against this tide, and Orwell
told me personally that I have to hold it. Have to. Understand? This isn’t about your personal spats or future dangers or any of that crap. This is about the next half hour, and whether or not more millions of people live to see it.”
“Shinju isn’t the answer,” I said. “She’s taking advantage of your panic, your fear. If you turn to her, you’re only running to the wolf pack to escape the dogs.”
“Which one’s going to eat us slower?” he asked. “Because that’s the choice I have to make, Cassiel. And if you can’t deal with that, get the fuck out of my sight, because I not only don’t have the time, I damn sure don’t have the energy.”
Harsh as that might have seemed, it helped. I steadied myself, breathed in, out, and nodded. “I will help you,” I said. “But you need to clearly understand, Brennan, she will turn on you, and soon. You can’t trust her for even a moment.”
“Hell, I already knew that,” he said. “I don’t trust her. I don’t trust you, either, lady. You just got here, and frankly, you scare the shit out of me. If I didn’t need every damn spark of talent on the planet, I’d kick both of you out the door. But the fact is that I don’t have that luxury anymore. If the devil himself shows up trailing ashes and holding a pitchfork, I’m putting him to work on fire duty.”
I put my hand on his and gripped it, hard. “It would be better to trust the devil,” I said. “He at least needs souls. Pearl doesn’t.”
Then I pulled free, walked back to the conference room, and opened the door.
Shinju was sitting calmly, hands folded. The two children had their eyes closed, but they were not asleep. They were working.
“Well?” she asked me. There was no real doubt in her as to what my answer would be, and I didn’t trouble to hesitate.
“I won’t work with you,” I said. “Not now, and not ever. But I will not fight you here. If you choose to help them, then help, but if I see you even think of turning on them, I’ll fight you to the ashes of the world.”
Pearl smiled, very slowly, with terrible beauty and emptiness in those eyes. “Oh, I will save them,” she said. “All those people. And you will help me, my sister, because that is who you are. You were never a murderer. Not as I was. Not as I am. Ashan was a fool to believe it, even for a moment.”
The leader of the True Djinn, Ashan, had asked me to kill the human race, and I had said no, and now—just as he’d foreseen, somehow—this was the reward I had reaped. The end of humanity being forced upon us, and Pearl the savior of it.
For now. Until she had all she wanted.
The enemy of my enemy… would never be my friend. Never.
“I’ll still destroy you,” I told her. “This is just a small breathing space. Enjoy it while it lasts, Pearl.”
Her smile widened, lost its formal grace and became a thing of true, horrific amusement. “Charming,” she said. “And now you can go explain to Isabel why you’re allowing me to help these people. You made her promises, didn’t you, that you’d fight me at every turn? And now you must break them.”
She was right.
I said nothing, and I left the conference room door open as I walked away to the stairs. Five flights went too quickly, but I was glad of the slight distraction of the activity. I wanted to run now. Run until my body was full and my mind was empty.
Run from everything.
Upstairs, Luis rose from his chair and said, “Cass? Are you okay?” Isabel came slowly around the table, tentative and worried. I don’t know what they saw in me, but whatever it might have been, it must have mirrored the blackness inside me.
“Pearl’s here,” I said. “And we need her. We can’t fight her now. I’m sorry.”
Isabel’s eyes widened. “The Lady’s here?”
“Yes.” It hurt me that there was only a little fear in Iz’s eyes, mixed with a larger portion of excitement. It wasn’t her fault. Pearl had taken her from us, and she’d twisted Isabel in so many ways—not just waking her powers prematurely, but convincing the girl that it was for her own good. She’d convinced Iz that her uncle hadn’t loved her, that I had betrayed her, that Isabel could only trust herself, in the end.
Pearl had destroyed Iz’s childhood, but she’d made her strong, and the Isabel that existed now valued that more than anything else. More: Pearl had made the child love her, in a way that I never could.
I tried not to feel a rush of hatred for that, and despair, but I was honest enough now to admit that I deeply wanted that love from Isabel, that unconditional devotion; I wanted to give it in return. But Pearl had precedence, and Iz couldn’t trust me, not completely.
I was not born to be a mother, it seemed.
“Where is she?” Iz breathed.
“Doesn’t matter,” Luis said. “We’re not going anywhere near her. Cass, have you lost your fucking mind? You can’t let her near Isabel!”
He hadn’t seen the map, hadn’t felt the gut-wrenching power of the true scope of what we faced. I knew that, but still, the disbelieving betrayal in his face made me hurt. “Talk to Brennan,” I said. “I promise you, this is what must happen. Not what I want, but what we need. Just talk to him, and decide for yourself. I won’t interfere.”
“You let him mess with your head,” Luis said. He was tense and angry now, fists clenched. “You were the one who called Orwell and laid down the law, damn you. You said—”
“I know what I said,” I interrupted him, just as tightly furious. “But we won’t live to see the dawn unless we work with her. We won’t, Luis. There are no angels to rescue us. Only devils, and we must take whatever hand is offered now.”
He shook his head and stalked out—no doubt, in search of Brennan. Isabel gave me a last, silent look and followed, and I sank down in a chair and put my aching head in my hands. I had never felt so trapped, or so human.
I had sworn I would never accept a peace with Pearl, but now… now I’d not only done it, I’d promised cooperation.
The enemy of my enemy…
“Mother,” I whispered, close to tears. “How could you desert us? How could you bring us to this?”
But the Mother had never spoken to me, not directly, and she did not do so now. There was only darkness, and silence.
I wasn’t sure how much time passed, but it seemed like only moments before someone was shaking me by the shoulder. I hadn’t meant to sleep, and wasn’t sure that I had, really, but the momentary shame and confusion was burned away by the sight of Luis’s face, and the urgency of his voice.
“Come on,” he said. “We need you. Now.”
I followed him at a run down the hall. We slammed through the fire door and onto the concrete steps, which he took two at a time, running at a careless speed that held no concern for his own safety. Five floors down, we came on the locked door. He had no card, but before I could find the one I’d been given, he extended a hand and simply melted the lock of the door. “Stupid anyway,” he muttered. “What the fuck is there to steal now? Money? No damn use at all.”
The hallway was busy with people coming and going, but they parted for Luis as he shoved through; we passed the small room that Pearl had been in, but both she and the four children were gone, leaving sleeping bags, plates, and glasses scattered carelessly around.
They were all in the main room, all the Wardens. Pearl and her four followers were there, too, standing slightly apart. She looked calm and detached, but unsmiling—at least until she caught sight of me.
“What is it?” I asked Luis. He ignored the question as he pushed through the standing crowd of Wardens. Isabel was at the front, standing with Brennan. Even Esmeralda had come out, I saw; she was coiled up in the back corner of the room, and had lifted her human torso up to see over those in the way. Her eyes had gone slitted and reptilian.
I didn’t need an answer, because my eyes fell on the board, and the Warden who was pulling out pins from an area of the map in the middle of the country. It had been filled with yellow and red, blue and black… but all the pins were being removed and
dumped in boxes.
There were tears on the Warden’s pale face, and she paused to wipe them with the back of a hand before she continued.
Then she took a black marker and drew a thick diagonal line through the open space. Then another, crossing it.
“We’ve lost control of most of the Midwest,” Luis said. “St. Louis is gone; it’s a goddamn heap of junk after the last earthquake. Kansas City is badly damaged, too many dead to count; everything’s in chaos now, people fighting for food, cars, gas.… It’s all coming apart. Still some communities holding together, mostly smaller towns, but tornadoes are targeting them specifically, ripping them up one by one. Too much, too fast. Brennan had to pull the surviving Wardens out when the Djinn began coming after them directly.”
I looked around at the others. There were more tears, and silence so deep and aching that it made me tremble.
Brennan finally said, “We don’t have time to grieve. I’m sorry. I know everyone knows someone who’s been affected by this—the losses are enormous, and shocking, and I’m sorry we can’t give it the attention it deserves. I’m sorry that the dead can’t be honored now. But there are living people we need to save, and we still can save them, if we stay focused. You’re doing it, people. You’re making a difference. We knew this would happen, so don’t let it stop you.”
There were a few nods, and some gulped back their tears and wiped their faces. The Warden who’d drawn the X through a tri-state area of the nation put down the marker and stepped back, head bowed. I saw her lips moving in silent prayer.
I wondered how many bodies lay dead and unburied there. How many millions of lives had just been lost, or were being lost, right now. We were abandoning them to their fates.
It seemed heartless, but I could see that it was a choice the Wardens had to make. We couldn’t grieve. We couldn’t count costs. We couldn’t worry about enemies, and the future, and what might happen tomorrow.
Surviving this eternal, exhausting day would be achievement enough.