by Rachel Caine
“Isabel’s with me,” Orwell interrupted. “Snake Girl, too. I need them, and I’m using them. All assets get deployed. Sorry, but that’s just how it is. The kid’s a soldier now, too.”
He stood up and pushed the chair out of the way; Luis came to his feet, too, and released my hand. The stare between them looked far too confrontational for comfort, so I took a deep breath, bracing for the pain, and swung my legs over the edge of the bed on Luis’s side. He grabbed for me instinctively as I pulled myself into a wavering, teeth-gritted-against-the-pain standing position, and I held on tight to his arm. It was sufficiently distracting to break the moment, and Lewis Orwell took advantage of it. He gave me a last, assessing look, nodded, and left the room, pursued by at least a dozen Wardens all pelting him with questions.
“Bastard,” Luis said. “Son of a bitch has no feelings. I’m telling you—he’s like a walking fucking iceberg, and he causes just about as much damage.”
I allowed him to guide me back to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. It shocked me how fragile I still felt. I knew intellectually how damaged I’d been, but what still haunted me was the look on my partner’s face when he’d seen me taken from that crystal prison. “Perhaps,” I said. “But perhaps he can’t afford feelings now. He’s right. If anything is to survive, we have to risk everything. Everyone. There are no safe places left.”
He knew it, and he loathed that knowledge just as much as I did. “I need to protect her, Cass. I failed my brother. I failed his wife. I even failed you. I can’t let her down, too.” He put his arms around me. The care he took told me more about him than me; I might feel fragile, but he touched me like I was made of butterfly wings. As if I might shatter, like the crystal from which I’d emerged. “She’s ours, and we can’t let her down.”
Ours. The child was, in many ways—not of our bodies, perhaps, but of Luis’s blood, and through him, and his dead brother, mine as well. We owed her love, and safety. We’d always owed her that.
I put my hands on either side of Luis’s face and held him still as I said, “We’ve already let her down. We let her down the instant that Pearl abducted her, and every day since we’ve been struggling to find meaning for her in that. But she’s not ours. She’s her own, always. And she wants to fight. She seeks it out, as I do. Step back, and let her be herself. It’s the only way we cannot disappoint her now.”
He tried to shake his head. I didn’t allow it. We stared deep into each other’s eyes. His were haunted, and I’m sure that mine held the shadows of the torture I’d endured.
My darkness won.
He pulled me into his arms, and this time, he used his strength; I lost my breath from the force of his embrace, but it was a good pain, a just and correct ache that came as much from my soul as my flesh. We stayed that way for a very long time, minutes long, before Luis pulled back and said, “You got a few things to make up to me, you know.”
I blinked, thrown by his conversational swerve. “Why?”
“Not every guy has to take seeing his lover stripped naked and lying on top of the head of the Wardens,” he said. “Even if you were covered in glitter and blood.”
He was talking about my rebirth from the crystal coffin, when Orwell had pulled me out. Had I been naked? It surprised me, but thinking back, modesty hadn’t been the largest concern I’d had. “You seem more worried by the nakedness than the blood,” I pointed out. He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug.
“Yeah, well, we all bleed a lot around here,” he said. “But the naked part, that’s supposed to be sort of private.”
“You are very odd.”
“You like that about me,” he said, and kissed me. Sweet and hot, spicy and smooth, he spiked my pulse hard, and reminded me of the delights of physical bodies. I remembered the image of him that had come to me there in the dark, in my deepest panic and pain… of his bare skin, shimmering in the peaceful light. Of his fingers trailing over mine, waking fire.
In the end, it had been him who’d kept me alive at the bottom of that dark, dark pit.
“Yes,” I agreed softly, and licked my lips to savor his taste again. “I like many things about you.”
He groaned and stepped in closer, and my knees parted until he was pressed against me in a hot, solid line from chest to crotch. Beneath the thin cotton gown, I was bare, and he knew it; I could feel the tension gathering inside him, coiling down deep, and his erection was an obvious pressure against me. “Shit,” he whispered, and brushed my lips with his. “I wasn’t exactly planning on this. There’s no privacy here, you know. And you’re not healed enough to—”
“I decide whether I’m healed enough,” I said. The minor aches and pains had fallen away, driven back by the adrenaline and sweet, anxious need that was forming inside me. “As for privacy, the door does lock. And we take our pleasures now, or risk never having them again. What would you want?”
He groaned and kissed me again, and I distinctly heard the metallic sound of the lock engaging on the door. Then the steel-framed chair that Orwell had used slid across the floor and slammed at an angle under the handle. “Just in case,” he murmured, and I felt his fingers pulling at the ties on my hospital gown. “Mmmm, easy open. Very nice.”
For answer, I used a tiny burst of Earth power to part the zipper of his jeans as I slid the leather of his belt out of the buckle. I paused then, suddenly struck by a new, odd thing: my left hand.
It was working.
I opened and closed my fist, watching the fingers bend, the hand itself curl; apart from the metallic shine to it, it felt and looked just as my right hand did. There was no sign of the damage that I’d suffered on the road from the Djinn attack.
“Did you…?” I asked.
Luis shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “I’m not that good. Orwell fixed you up. Said he needed you fully functional.”
“Well,” I said, and smiled as I eased his pants down, taking my time with the job. “I assure you, I am fully functional. And that’s of benefit to you.”
He gasped aloud as that metallic hand touched, stroked, played, and then he buried his head in the hollow of my neck to kiss, nibble, bite gently at areas that made me shiver and arch against him. “Hope the brakes are good on this bed,” he said, and made me laugh. I hadn’t thought I’d ever laugh again, but the vision of the two of us madly entwined on this bed as it rolled through the hallway, Wardens stopping to gawk… “Stop laughing,” he scolded me, but I heard the tremble of it in his voice, too. “You’re screwing up my concentration.”
I made him gasp aloud, again, from what I was doing with both hands now. “Am I? Because it seems your concentration is quite… firm.”
“Oh, now you’re teasing?” His voice had turned ragged, dark around the edges, and I let him lift me up and back onto the bed. My gown drifted to the floor, and somehow the sheet joined it as he kicked off his jeans, stripped away his sleeveless shirt, and knelt in the open space between my legs. “I can tease, too. Payback.”
He could, it seemed. The teasing involved hands, mouths, sweetly torturous control that made me bite my lips and beg him for release. When he finally gave in, when he was inside me, instinct and a desperate need took hold of me, and no matter how he tried to slow it down, I wasn’t in the mood for leisurely lovemaking. Not this time. There was too much darkness to dispel, too much desperation, too little time left. He surrendered to me as much as I did to him, both of us lost in the fury and fire and urgency of it, and when he came he shuddered deep, holding me upright and close, and seeing the ecstasy take him triggered something wild in me as well, something that burst up from our joined bodies and spun us both crazily out of control, up into the highest reaches I’d ever climbed on the aetheric, and then drifted us down again like falling leaves to settle once again in our human, mortal, beautiful forms.
Luis collapsed against me, only just managing to hold his weight off at the last minute by resting it on his elbows. We were both covered in sweat, tasting it on each ot
her’s lips, and the glow between us lingered. Neither of us wanted to move, and it wasn’t until the door rattled that he finally stopped kissing me in drowsy, gentle presses of lips, and sighed. The frustrated groan that followed came from the very depths of him, and I felt it resonating in my own body.
“Welcome back,” he said, and laughed a little despairingly. “Now it’s time to go. God, Cass. If I’d lost you…”
I touched my lips to his in wordless reassurance. “You didn’t,” I said. “And you won’t.”
There was another impatient rattle at the door, and then a knock—tentative at first, then growing louder.
“We should probably—”
“Yes,” I agreed, and kissed him again. “We should.” Neither of us was in a hurry to answer the summons—and then, unexpectedly, the lock snapped back.
“Crap,” Luis said.
There was an Earth Warden on the other side of that door; Luis’s forethought in adding the bracing chair had paid off, because that stopped them from barging in—for a moment.
“Hand me my gown,” I said.
He kissed me again, fast, and slid off to grab my gown, drape it over me, and then step into his underwear and jeans in a fast, expert motion. He was just zipping up when the chair clattered away from its locking position at the door, and it banged open.
Luis didn’t pause. He picked up the sheet from the floor and put it back over me, winked, and turned to face the person standing in the doorway.
It was Isabel. Next to her, Esmeralda’s human torso swayed on top of her snaky, muscular body. She crossed her arms over the tight, pink shirt she wore (embellished with the glittering words BITCH QUEEN) and looked down at Isabel, who had frozen, looking taken aback.
“See?” Esmeralda said. “Told you there was nothing wrong. They were just totally doing it.”
Luis got his shirt from where it dangled at the end of the bed and pulled it over his head. “Girls,” he said in a bland voice. “What’s the emergency?”“Um…” Isabel’s cheeks were beet red, and she couldn’t seem to look directly at either of us. “Nothing. It can wait. I just—I just wanted to see how she was doing. When the door was locked, I thought—”
“I told you,” Esmeralda said in a bored voice, and checked the finish on her fingernails. “Doing it.”
“Shut up!” Isabel whispered fiercely. “God!”
“Thank you for coming to see me,” I said, and was very careful about where and how the sheet draped over me. “I’m sorry the timing was… awkward. I’m much better.”
Esmeralda coughed and muttered something under her breath; that earned a solid backhanded smack from Iz, whose blush worsened, if that was possible. “Uh—okay then, I—” Esmeralda was grinning at her now. “I just—shut up!—I’ll come back later.” She turned and left, head high, struggling to hold to her damaged dignity, and Esmeralda broke into outright guffaws of laughter.
“Oh my God, did you see her face? The two of you are so busted,” she said. “Get a room. Somewhere else.”
“Es,” Luis said. “Beat it. I mean it. And lay off the kid. She’s six-going-on-fifteen.”
Esmeralda stuck her tongue out at him—and showed fangs at the same time—but she slithered off down the hallway, petulantly knocking over a cart along the way. Luis shook his head.
“I think we just scarred that kid for life,” he said. “She’ll never look at us the same again.”
“She knew we were lovers.”
“There’s a big difference between knowing and walking in on it,” he said.
“So you regret it?”
He turned toward me, and his slow, intimate smile warmed me from within. “Not for a damn second,” he said. “I wish we had a thousand hours just like it.”
But we didn’t, and hearing it aloud brought it home to both of us. The smiles and warmth faded. Luis cleared his throat, took a step toward the door, and said, “I’m going to go find out where he’s sending us. You okay on your own to get cleaned up?”
“Yes,” I said. As he shut the door, I threw back the sheet and gown and got out of bed. With the recession of all the complicated hormonal cocktails that had given me such a burst of… enthusiasm, I was left feeling weak, shaky, and even more bruised, though still oddly elated. The elation faded as I stood in the shower and scrubbed myself with the crisp-scented soap, and I was left feeling thoughtful instead. Lewis Orwell had seemed almost… resigned, I thought. Resigned to defeat, and willing to compromise at every step to postpone that defeat by another hour, another day. Rejecting Pearl was the right thing to do, but it meant hastening an inevitable death struggle.
And he, as all humans before him, would bargain to remain in play for as long as possible, in search of a miracle.
Pearl counted on that. Feasted on it.
But why hadn’t she killed me? What could she want more than that? I will make you a weapon, she’d said. Always, she’d wanted me to join her—not as an equal, as a tool to be used.
I looked down at myself and saw the fading spots of countless injuries she’d inflicted on me with the cool, emotionless precision of a machine.
Ashan had been right all along. One day soon, it would come down to the two of us, facing each other over the heads of innocents… and I would have to make a choice that I, like Lewis Orwell, had been delaying in the face of the inevitable.
I finished in the bathroom, limped to the closet, and found fresh clothing—all new, still with the tags hanging on them. Either the Wardens had made arrangements, or Luis had gone shopping; either thought made me smile, because they had—whether through luck or skill—chosen soft, pastel colors, the kind that I most preferred. The pale pink leather jacket was buttery to the touch, as were the pants. Dressed, I felt much less fragile and helpless, though I was well aware how long it would take to recover fully.
Luis arrived a few moments later, as I was zipping up the calf-high boots. “Damn,” he said, cocking his head. “You look scarily sexy. Look, are you sure you shouldn’t be—”
“I was healthy enough to go to bed with you,” I pointed out. “I should be well enough to get out of bed; it surely follows.” He started to say something, then thought better of it and just shook his head. “Did you find where we are to meet Warden Baldwin?”
“That’s a little problem. She’s moving fast, and it’s tough to guess where, and why; communication’s been spotty at best. It looks as if she’s heading toward our home base—into the Southwest. If we start in that direction, we’ll be able to course-correct when she does.”
“She must have fared well enough if she’s still alive,” I said. Luis shrugged.
“Well, she’s got her powers back after whatever happened to them out at sea, but she lost one of the Wardens who was with her. Kevin, the kid. He’s dead, killed by Djinn. All she’s got now is one friend traveling with her, not even one with any powers, so she’s totally on her own.”
“David isn’t with her?” I couldn’t imagine a circumstance that would part him from her, in time of trouble. Not of his own accord.
“Yeah, well, that got complicated. As long as they both had no power, he could stick with her, but once she managed to get them both recharged and ready… Well, he’s a Djinn, and not just any Djinn. A conduit to the Mother. He had to get the hell away from her, for obvious reasons.”
David, once granted back his power, had been pulled into the mindless fury of the Mother. Of course. I didn’t know why I’d thought that he, of all the Djinn, would be different—none of us could resist her.
That was part of why Ashan had exacted his complicated, painful, wonderful toll on me, to make me human. In a sense, he’d protected me, left me free to act on my own when he could not. I hated to give him the credit, but it seemed likely now that he’d foreseen much of what had passed, and might still come.
I used a hospital-provided hairbrush to tame my fly-away hair, just a little, and looked at myself in the mirror. I seemed ready. There was a slight rose-colored flush in
my cheeks, a lingering glow, and my green eyes were clear and steady. The punctures were healed and fading.
We will do this, I told myself. We must do this. Joanne Baldwin held almost as much strength as Lewis Orwell; the Wardens needed her, desperately. Orwell himself had told me that indirectly; what they were fighting was not a war. Wars could be won.
We stood an excellent chance of not living another day.
And yet I looked… peaceful. Ready. Alive.
“Humans,” I said aloud to the mirror, shook my head, and went to join Luis.
Chapter 10
WE DROVE THROUGH THE DAY, into the night, and saw the morning while still on the road. One benefit of being Earth Wardens: We had the ability to channel power to keep ourselves awake and alert, and although we’d need sleep eventually, it was simple enough to keep ourselves going on this journey. I rode my motorcycle, and Luis had appropriated a truck from a car lot; he’d found one that looked a great deal like his own, which made me raise an eyebrow and ask him how long it had taken to find that. He’d responded that if he was going to stand a damn good chance of dying in it, he wanted a truck that didn’t embarrass him.
I couldn’t argue with that. I was quite attached to the Victory.
We gave Portland a wide berth; the smoke of the dead city was a smear on the horizon, still burning. I kept my attention on the aetheric, watching for any signs of trouble ahead. The Djinn continued their relentless and unpredictable assaults; today, it seemed, they were focused on eradicating cities in Alaska and returning the entire state to wilderness.
There were few Wardens in Alaska. By midday, there were none. A night passed, and we kept moving.
We stopped, finally, as noon blazed in a cloudless sky; winter had lost its grip by the time we coasted to a halt in the small community of Farmington, New Mexico. Luis leaned out of the truck’s window and said, “Time to stop for food. Once we get hooked up with Baldwin, there’s no telling when we’ll have time to eat again. That girl is even more of a trouble magnet than you are.”