by Rachel Caine
They kept me in the darkness, and the worst of it was that I didn’t know why. Why keep me alive? Why not kill me outright, as would have been best and safest?
But there was no doubt they wanted me alive. Suffering. Waiting.
I was aware of time passing, but there was nothing I could do except count the ticking seconds by the measured, rapid pace of my heartbeats. I was confined in a tiny space, but there was air flowing against my face. Whoever had me didn’t wish me dead.
Not yet.
I had no illusions that miracle—or nightmare—would last forever, but it seemed to stretch to the breaking point. My mind was full of questions and fears. The Wardens we’d rescued… the children we’d abandoned.
And, always, Luis. I could no longer feel his presence, or the bond between us… yet I wasn’t dying the slow, starving death of a Djinn cut off from the aetheric, either, so he must have been alive. That was all I could hold to for hope.
I was in a prison. A prison built to hold Djinn, indefinitely; it would do equally well to hold a Warden, no matter what their specialty. I could call no powers, not even a spark of light, and the tiny opening around me seemed to shrink, inch by inch, as my panic increased. I forced myself to breathe more and more slowly, focus on small sensations and details. The Djinn wouldn’t understand human instincts, human frailty; if I panicked in this tomb, I would go mad before they noticed my lapse.
And then the pain began.
It started in small ways at first, a burning sensation on the outside of my left thigh, a pinch in my right upper arm… and then it grew worse. It wasn’t burning, or pinching. It was something pressing into me, with exquisite slowness. Pushing, and pushing, and pushing, sharp points digging until they broke the skin and bored deeper.
Those were the first, and not the worst. The torture came so very, very deliberately. There was nothing human about it, nothing driven by hate or fear or anger.… No, this was a cold, empty kind of pain, inflicted in a lifeless and distant way.
I couldn’t keep calm. The pain ate away at my hard-fought reserve, sped up my breathing, brought back all the desperate panic that I’d striven to keep sealed away.
And it went on, and on, and on. The red-hot, invading pain. The whispering trickle of blood against my skin. My own ragged, too-fast breathing stirring the lank strands of my hair in the tiny spaces.
And then the screaming.
My voice wore raw soon, and my throat ached and bled from the effort. There was no more peace, no more logic, no more planning left inside me. Only the pain, the terror, the despair.
And then, from a vast distance, came the whisper of… music.
It wasn’t music as a human might hear it; this was the language of the Djinn, of tens of thousands of immortal voices raised together in a sound that held nothing but exaltation, beauty, harmony.
It was the sound of worship, and madness… a divine, thoughtless madness that had no room for individual pain or pleasure, sadness or joy. It was my brothers and sisters, but they had ceased to be the individuals I’d once known.
They sang as they killed.
Death was moving across the face of the world, and I could feel it. Worse: I could be it. Some part of me knew the insane peace of surrendering will, conscience, logic, of becoming the Great Beast, and hungered to join it.
And then I heard Pearl’s voice whispering to me. Let go, she said. Let the music fill you, Cassiel. Let the earth take you as you change. I will make you into a creature of terror and beauty, a weapon for the new Mother’s hand. I will make you my angel—not of mercy, but of death. Shining, cutting, crushing death, and you will be as beautiful as a knife. This is why I’ve spared you all this time, to serve me. Fight and die, or surrender and be reborn. Your choices, my sister.
No. No, these could not be my only choices. It didn’t matter whether I closed my eyes; I could see nothing, not even a glimmer of light, but now I deliberately squeezed them shut and brought up vibrant images in my mind: Luis, lying propped against pillows in bed, tracing his fingertips over my body, smiling. His skin gleamed like fine new bronze, and the indigo lick of flame tattoos on his arms had a sinuous grace and beauty that made me shiver. His eyes were a rich, dark cocoa, and his kisses held spice and sweetness and woke vast, unhurried needs inside me. His touch trailed heat, and his tongue woke fire.
I reached for him, and for an instant, just a single flash, I saw him. Not the image of him from our bed, not the smiling, lazy, sexual creature I’d imagined in that moment—no, this was a frightening vision of a hard, battered man, stained with smoke and blood, and his eyes were as dark as empty windows as he drew and shaped a fireball in his hands.
And I heard him, just a whisper. I might have imagined it, so quickly did it pass.
Luis said, I’m coming.
And then the singing madness rose inside me to a shattering pitch, and the needles piercing me drove deeper, and it was all darkness, solitude, loss. I was weightless, then falling into the darkness.
Alone.
Trapped.
Chapter 9
LIGHT.
It came in a white blaze that seared my skin, blasted my eyes even through the squeezed-closed lids, and I heard myself make a rusty, metallic sound of protest.
It was a single, thin crack in my prison, and I felt a tiny whisper of something so sweet and precious that I couldn’t identify what it might be. Fresh air? Hope? Both seemed impossible to me now.
There was a sound that echoed even through the impenetrable walls pressed against me, and I felt a shudder go through the world, my world… and then, the tiny crack of light widened into a bar. The darkness shattered and left me bare.
I couldn’t move. The weight that had trapped me in this tiny space was gone, but when I tried to lunge for the light, I couldn’t get free. Moving woke screaming agony everywhere in my flesh and bones, and all I could do was open my eyes and stare in confusion at the blur of brightness in front of me.
There was a sudden, horrifyingly loud babble of sound. Voices. I couldn’t sort them out. It was all too real, too harsh, and no matter how bad the dark had been, at least it had been constant.…
I picked one voice from the noise. “Cass? Cassiel?… Damn you, let me go. I have to—”
“No!” said another voice. “Keep him back. He doesn’t need to see this.”
The first voice—I knew it, and I felt something resonating inside me, a kind of warmth, a glow that I hadn’t even known was gone until it returned. Power, flowing into me. Making me live again.
I blinked. The haze before me resolved into the shape of a tall man, dressed in a stained flannel shirt, blue jeans, boots. His hair was long and untidy around his lean, angular face, and he was looking at me with an odd hesitancy.
“Cassiel,” he said. It was half a whisper, and in a sudden move, he crouched down. I was lying on the ground, I realized. Above me was stone, and the light that had blinded me shone from a single flashlight he’d averted at an angle. “I’m going to get you out of there. You just stay still. Struggling will only hurt more.”
I blinked and tried to speak, but the raw edges in my throat could only make an indistinct rough whisper. I tried to move my head, tilt it forward so I could look down at myself, but he was right; the effort woke sharp and screaming pain in my skull, neck, and shoulders.
“Where is Luis?” I managed to say. The man who crouched over me smiled a little, but his eyes looked tired and heartbroken.
“He’s over there,” he said. “First we have to deal with this, okay? He got us here. Now let me get you out. Stay strong.”
I couldn’t nod, but I blinked to let him know I understood.
Lewis Orwell, the most powerful Warden in the world, took a deep breath, lowered his head for a moment, and when he raised it, there was an aura of golden power that glimmered around him even here, on the human plane.
He bent forward and slid his large hands over my face, through my hair, around my head in a slow, sweeping motion
.
It hurt. I stiffened with the snaps of agony, one after another, like tiny bones breaking.
His hands met at the back of my head, then moved down, cupping my neck, spreading out over my shoulders. Every gentle touch sent waves of agony through me, snaps of white-hot pain. He paused there for a moment. He was as close as I’d ever let any human get, his body all but pressed to mine, and Orwell’s lips hovered very close to mine. His eyes were dark, very dark, and full of a power I didn’t fully comprehend.
“Look down,” he whispered.
I did.
I was encased in a coffin that had been fitted exactly to my body, one made of glittering pink crystal that shimmered in the artificial light.
And the coffin was alive, and it had grown into me. Needles of crystal, a whole forest of them, pierced and punctured my skin, some thin and just in the skin, some thicker and driving to muscle. Still others had drilled into bone.
They were flushed red with my blood.
“I have to break them,” Lewis said, still very softly. “This thing is alive. It’s fighting to keep you. It’s feeding off you. I won’t lie, this is going to hurt.”
I could nod now. After a second’s horror, edged with fear, I did.
“Hold on,” he said, and jerked me violently forward. At the same time, I sensed a hammer blow of power coursing through him, through me, and all the crystals shattered at once in a mind-destroying white-hot wave of agony and fury and hunger and disappointment…
… And then I was lying limp on Lewis’s chest, cradled in his arms. Screaming voicelessly, because the pain was worse, somehow, as if the crystals were still inside me, still drilling…
And they were.
The broken ends of the crystals were moving. Driving in.
Lewis wrapped his arms around me, and I felt another surge of power blast through me in a cresting wave that hit and shattered every one of the deadly fragments, until I was lying limp against him, covered in a coating of shining dust.
“Get Rocha, somebody,” Orwell said. He let his arms fall free to hit the ground at his sides, and didn’t move. I couldn’t. My muscles felt loose and slack, unnaturally dead within my body. My bones felt as if they had been broken into dust as well… and then a strong pair of hands was pulling me up and into another embrace.
Luis.
The smell of him washed over me, familiar and strong—male sweat, damp earth, the spicy sweetness of peppers and chocolate. I saw the tattoos on his arms first, winding sinuously up his bronze skin, and finally I focused on his face.
“Luis,” I whispered. It was all I could manage. He looked shaken and anguished, but he smiled and kissed me.
When he pulled back, there was blood on his face. Fresh red blood in a pattern of dots.
I raised my fingers to touch my face, and felt the holes left by the crystals, the wetness that seeped from them. My whole body wept red.
“Stay still,” he told me. “Don’t try to move. Just stay still.”
It seemed like sound advice, and just this one time, I obeyed.
Two days in a Warden hospital in Seattle, while they pumped blood into my almost-drained body and carefully closed up every wound. The final count had been in the hundreds of punctures. Damage to my bones had been extensive, they told me, and I had several painful rehabilitation sessions with an Earth Warden to repair them.
No one explained to me what had happened until the afternoon of the second day, when Lewis Orwell dropped in and shut the door on a fluttering entourage of anxious Wardens with questions, alerts, and requests. He nodded to Luis, who was sitting at my side holding my right hand in both of his; Luis nodded back cautiously. “How’s she doing?” Orwell asked. He had a pleasant, resonant voice, and like many Earth Wardens (except me) he seemed to exude a soothing, reassuring presence that everyone liked.
“I am fine,” I answered before Luis could speak. “There’s no need to keep me confined to this bed. The bones are healing.”
“Note the present tense,” Luis said. “You’re not out of the woods, Cassiel.”
“Of course not. We are in the Pacific Northwest.”
“And… that was too literal. I meant—”
“I know what you meant,” I said, “but I am fine. The healing will continue whether I am in the bed or out of it.”
“She’s right,” Orwell said, and dragged a steel-backed chair over to the other side of my bed, which he straddled. He rested his chin on crossed arms and studied me with clinical interest. “You’re a fast healer. Comes from the Djinn part of you, most likely.” He fell silent, and I wondered what he was thinking, or wanted me to say.
I stared back, unwilling to give the first ground.
“I expected you to be full of questions,” he said.
“Did you?”
“Most people couldn’t have come out of that sane,” he told me. There was an interestingly tentative edge to his voice now, as if he couldn’t quite understand something he’d previously thought an open book. “But those who did would want to know what happened to them. They’d be demanding it. Unlike you.”
I shrugged. It hurt; healing meant that the functions were intact, but the residual pain would continue for a while, like the fading ache of deep bruises. “You’ll tell me when you think you know,” I said. “I could tell from the discussion in the halls that no one understood very much.”
He tilted his head a little to the side, as if trying to consider me from a slightly different angle. “Hasn’t he told you?” Orwell glanced at Luis, who was sitting silently at my side. There was an odd dynamic between these two men, something like a power struggle, but I didn’t understand why.
“He hasn’t been forthcoming,” I said. “He says he doesn’t remember what happened after we broke through in the mine and found the Djinn standing at the top.”
“And you?”
“Something came, something even the Djinn feared. Ashan retreated, but they took the others with them. I didn’t see what it was that threatened them, but it took me for its own. Then I remember waking up in the—confinement.” It hadn’t been a prison. It had been a coffin—no, worse. It had been a chrysalis, something that would have transformed me into something else altogether. What, I didn’t know, but I had come perilously close to finding out. “The other Wardens? Alive?”
“We found Rocha and the other five unconscious five miles from the mine entrance,” Orwell said. “Rocha tells me they were going to be killed by the Djinn, so they went at it hard; one died of her injuries, but they were all pretty bad off when we found them. The first thing he wanted to do when he was on his feet was saddle up and go off looking for you.”
“And you let him.”
“No, I went with him. Good thing I did; you were buried in there deep, and there weren’t a lot of traces to track. Between the two of us, we managed.” He gave a modest shrug. “Then it was just a matter of digging you out.”
Somehow, I doubted it was quite that simple. I thought back to the nightmare of coming into the light, of the crystals drilled into my flesh and bone. “What was it doing to me?”
“You don’t know?” Orwell stared at me steadily for a long moment, then shrugged. “I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen anything like it. Your flesh was turning crystalline, hard as diamonds. Your eyes—it had only just started, I can tell you that much. What you would have been at the end of it is anybody’s guess, but it would have been…”
“Irresistible,” Luis put in softly, and drew both our gazes. “Like the irresistible force. And beautiful, too. Scary beautiful.”
It reminded me far too much of what Pearl had promised. I ached still in every cell; I was, I sensed, lucky that the process hadn’t gone much further or I’d have never survived the reversal.
I forced myself to think beyond my own fears. “How long have you been here, Orwell? Where are the Wardens who went out to sea with you? The Djinn?”
“We docked in Miami four days ago,” he said. “The Wardens are where t
hey’re needed. The Djinn…” He hesitated, and looked away. “They were taken as soon as we got out of the black corner. We lost them, one way or another.”
“But they held,” I said, and felt a burst of amazement that was almost pride. “The Wardens held. Against the Djinn.”
“We’re maintaining,” Orwell agreed. He looked exhausted, I thought; leadership sat well on him, but it was a crushing load. “We’re not winning. Look, I know from Brennan that you think dealing with Shinju is dealing with the devil, but trust me: Right now, I’ll take the devil and all his pointy-headed minions as long as they do what I tell them. I have to, because our only other choice is obliteration.” He let that sink in before he continued. “As best we can tell, the reason Rocha and the other Wardens who survived that mine are still alive is that Shinju brought her kids and fought on their side. They’d have been ground into hamburger, otherwise. As it was, the odds were way too close.”
“Pearl—Shinju—is the one who sealed me in that prison,” I told him. “I know it. I heard her voice.”
“Maybe so, but I’ve got no energy right now for personal grudges,” he said. “Revenge can wait until we’ve got bandwidth. For now, I need every soldier fighting our enemies, not each other.”
I raised my eyebrows, and did not answer. Luis, on the other hand, did. “If she makes another move at Cassie, I’ll find a way to kill that bitch. I mean it. I don’t care what it costs.” His grip on my hand was tight, too tight, but I understood, for the first time, his emotion. The hate and fear was a tight little ball inside him, bound with razor-edged guilt. “You saw her. You saw what it was doing to her.”
Lewis Orwell inclined his head just a little, a silent acknowledgment, but he said, “Revenge can wait. And it will. Get me?”
“I get you,” Luis said, though his tone and his expression were set hard. “What next?”
“I need her up and on her feet, and you both back in the field,” Orwell said. “Things are moving fast now. Joanne’s on her own, and she needs backup. I can’t go. I’m sending you two.”
“I can’t leave Isabel—”