by Rachel Caine
But complicating that pain was the knowledge that even had I done as Luis had, even had I applied all my skill and power to my two fallen friends, they would almost certainly still have died. And Luis knew that as well.
“I wanted to hate you,” he continued softly, “but I couldn’t. You’re just . . . baffling.”
“Baffling,” I repeated. I rather enjoyed that description. “How so? I try to speak my mind.”
“No shit.” He pulled in a breath as I circled my hips on his. “Holy crap, don’t do that.”
“Is it because I wish to touch you? To remove your clothes and touch you everywhere, to know you completely?” I was not certain of human protocols in these matters, but Luis didn’t seem offended. I leaned closer, slowly, and settled my arms around his neck. His skin felt hot and firm. “Because I wish to feel your body on mine? Your needs pounding through your veins?”
“Cass,” he said faintly, and then took a deep breath and said, in an entirely different tone, “Oh, what the hell, anyway.”
And he kissed me.
I didn’t know what I’d expected from this meeting of skins, but my body clearly did. In an instant, my mind blazed white, and I thought of nothing, nothing but the warm, damp glide of his lips, his hands gripping my waist and pulling me hard against him. It was challenge. It was surrender. It was an intoxicating brew of instinct and need and emotion, and I shuddered and opened my lips to the stroke of his tongue. One of his hands stroked slowly up the bumps of my spine, brushed the tender skin at the base of my neck, and cradled the back of my head in primal warmth.
I had been holding myself suspended, just a little, above his body, but now my knees seemed to spread of their own accord, lowering me the last half inch. He groaned breathlessly into my mouth, and I moved my hips back and forth against his. Pure, wild instinct, springing from the body I wore, from a hundred thousand years of human coupling hardwired into my DNA.
It took my breath away, as well.
The kiss deepened, and time stretched, measured in racing heartbeats. He was flesh and bone and muscle, all of it suddenly, insanely new to me. My hands stroked over him, sensing where he was hotter, colder, softer, firmer. I explored the long sweep of his arms, feeling the knotted cords of muscles moving beneath.
I felt an alien heat moving through me now, something coming not from my own waking human desires, but from his, bleeding over through the link that sustained my life and power. Coursing through the white-hot network of nerves, pooling and triggering pleasures that made me moan into his mouth, lost and only half-aware. The bliss was extreme, and dangerous—not because Luis’s Earth-based powers were in any sense overwhelming me, but because I felt his own precise control eroding.
“Is it always like this?” I asked him, between gasps. It took him a long time to form words for an answer.
“Sometimes,” he managed to reply. “Between—really strong Wardens—but different.”
That was nondescriptive, but interesting to me. I traced a fingertip over the strong muscles of his shoulders, and I actually saw power moving between us, strong enough to manifest in a golden afterimage where I touched.
I laughed, took hold of his shirt collar, and pulled the knitted fabric over his head to bare his chest to me. The color of his skin was like the darkest honey, the muscles strong and tensed beneath. He had more tattoos than those on his arms, I discovered, though the tribal symbols meant little to me except in sharp indigo contrast to the rest of him.
I felt his hands on me now, restlessly moving, finally coming to rest around my waist on either side.
Moving up and in, to cover my small breasts in warmth through the thin material of the shirt.
Without breaking his intense, dark gaze, I pulled the shirt from my body and dropped it on the floor to mix with his. The difference in our skin tones was startling, and beautiful to me . . . my milk to his honey, and mine was beginning to pulse with opalescent colors that I was not sure really existed in the human realm. He looked down to the place where his hands now cupped my breasts. His thumbs stroked over the hardened tips, bringing a shudder through me that started from somewhere deeper than I could explain.
Bodies. Instincts. It was all frighteningly uncontrollable.
“Cass,” he whispered. I sensed the fight in his voice, the struggle to contain the same instincts that haunted me. “Cassiel—”
I kissed him, and we melted together, one constant ecstasy of light and sound, power and bodies, and yet
I knew there was more to this; my body craved it, demanded it, screamed for it.
Luis twisted and took me down to the couch in one swift, almost violent movement. My hands struggled to reach the fastenings of my pants, because I knew only one thing now, and that was how much I wanted to feel his skin everywhere, hot and damp against mine.
The air around us suddenly chilled, and I felt a crackle of energy that pierced even the fog of desire around us as heat was forcibly ripped from the air and coalesced together. I felt it before Luis, and I was able to shove him bodily out of the way of the strike, rolling him up and over the top of the couch.
He yelled in surprise. Before his body hit the floor on the other side, I was rolling the other direction, off the couch and to the floor, shoving the coffee table as I did. The bottle of whiskey tipped and spilled.
Lightning tore through the room, exploding from every electrical socket, stabbing toward a central point—the couch. It was a one-shot attack; the forces channeled through the lines overloaded the fuses almost instantly, but the convergence of the four-direction attack left deep, smoldering burns the length of the sofa.
Before the blue-white afterimages faded, I rolled to my feet, glanced at the burning couch, and reached down for my shirt. I pulled it on, then yanked on the leather jacket as Luis scrambled up on the other side, breathing hard, eyes wide with surprise.
“Someone just tried to kill us,” I said.
“No shit. Really?” He came around the couch, took up his own shirt, and tugged it over his head. “Weather Warden, right?”
“Most likely.”
“That won’t be their only shot.” He looked at the couch, charred and smoking, and then at the blackened outlets on the walls. The power was out in the house, of course. “Fuck, there goes my insurance premiums. You got any direction on this asshole?”
We had effortlessly shifted from intimacy to professional alertness, and I felt Luis burning the intoxication out of his blood, then out of mine, ensuring we were both perfectly prepared for battle. I crossed to the window, but I saw nothing amiss on the street outside; Luis launched his awareness out of his body and into the next plane of reality, which both the Wardens and the Djinn call the aetheric. Because I was linked to him, I was able to follow, and I did, rising up into a realm of existence that was less rooted in physical reality, and more in the reality of power. All things in the human world are invested, to some extent, with power; whether it is a faint spark or a flood depends strongly on its history and heritage. Humans tend to manifest strongly in the aetheric; after all, they come from long, long lines of ancestors, many wielding extraordinary energies, whether they know it or not. They also manifest themselves unconsciously, so what is seen on the aetheric tends to be more revealing than their physical forms.
Luis showed himself not too differently from his usual physical body, but the flame tattoos on his arms glowed red, and moved like real fires. It struck me that on the aetheric, he looked very much like a Djinn; there was a sense of power and purpose about him that was startling. He had gained in strength recently, though whether that was because of his association with me or his personal tragedies, I could not say.
As a Djinn, I had a less obvious presence on the aetheric, but anchored as I was now in human flesh, I had a form of some kind. I couldn’t see it for myself, and there were no mirrors in this plane, but I assumed it was fairly close to the shape I had donned in the human world. After all, this form had been—on some level—my own choice
.
Luis and I hovered close together, and his wraith form took the hand of mine. I felt the indefinable click of power cementing into place, and then we rose together—up, far up, to dizzying heights. Beneath us, Albuquerque spread out into a map, but it glowed not with physical lights, but aetheric energy. History pooled and glowed in the older buildings, violet and green. Old battles and crimes stained the map in angry reds. But what we were looking for was easy to spot, even among the confusion . . . a spark of power like no other color showing. A Warden, moving among the streets. I saw the white flare of our own two presences as well. The attacking Warden was close, but not close enough to be within our physical line of sight. Weather Wardens did not need to be.
As we watched, the Warden reached out for power, gathered it in like a black vortex from the world around him, and flung it out in a focused, cohesive blow. It was not aimed for the house in which our physical forms stood.
It was aimed up, at the warm, stable weather systems covering the city. There was little for the Warden to work with, but all clouds contain stored energy, and there were enough to make a difference.
The Warden slammed together a storm, working in a crude, brute-force way that spoke of little training. This was odd, because in general the Weather Wardens were among the most precise; they had to be when working with such massive and volatile forces, which could so quickly spin out of even a gifted user’s control.
Luis silently noted the Warden’s location, and the two of us plummeted down through the shimmering layers of force and color, back in a dizzying fall to our bodies. I felt a second’s disorientation, and then grounded myself in my flesh and whirled to run with Luis to the back door of the small house. He hit it first, slamming it open and leaving it to swing on its hinges, and jumped down the three shallow concrete steps that led down to the packed earth and sparse grass of the backyard. The back fence was sagging chain link, and beyond it we saw a figure in a black coat, running.
Overhead, clouds swirled, gray and troubled. Lightning flashed within them, still randomly aggressive but building up to a level that could become dangerous. I noted the risk, but we had little choice; a Weather Warden could rip the house down around us with surgical precision, and there would be very little we could do to stop it. Luis’s powers were primarily those of stability, of life, of healing; there would be little overlap to cancel the more ephemeral, destructive powers of air and water.
There was a gate in the back, locked with a padlock. Luis reached out and snapped it off with barely an effort, turning the metal brittle and fragile with a pulse of power, and then we were out into the alley. It was piled with trash—boxes, cans, and plastic bags awaiting pickup by the city. The stench was horrifying, and after the first choking gasp I vowed to stop breathing until I was out of this miasma. A useless vow, of course, but it made me feel better.
Luis was a powerful runner, and he quickly pulled ahead of me as he dodged the trash and occasional stinking puddle in the alleyway. I gritted my teeth and forced my body to greater effort; my long legs ate up the distance between us, and I drew level with him just as we reached the end of the alleyway. My held breath exploded out, and I gasped in sweet, untainted air as we both scanned the street for the Warden we’d been pursuing.
He was standing about a block away, stock-still, staring upward. As I touched Luis’s arm to alert him, the Warden reached up a commanding hand to the heavens, and lightning leapt from the low, gray clouds in a furious pink-tinted rush, grounded in the Warden’s left palm, and exited from his right . . . straight at us.
“Down!” Luis shouted, and we both dove for the pavement as the energy sizzled toward us. One point was in our favor: The Warden seemed to have little fine control, though an overabundance of power. He was not able to redirect the strike toward us when we fell. Instead, it hit and charred a metal storage shed behind us, melting a wide, smoking hole in the side.
Luis slammed his open palm down on the sidewalk next to his head, eyes focused on the Warden, and a line of force ripped through the ground, rising and falling like an ocean swell, cracking pavement and shoving aside everything in its path. It hit the pavement on which the Warden stood, tossing him off his feet and rolling him onto the thin grass of someone’s yard. The grass was little to work with—thin, brittle, ill-watered—but I poured energy into it, forcing it to grow in long, rubbery runners that wound around the Warden’s thrashing legs. It wouldn’t hold him, but it would slow him down.
Luis softened the ground into mire, sinking the Warden’s legs but leaving his upper body supported to prevent smothering. In seconds, the Warden was mired as his feet and lower legs sank into the soft mud, and were trapped as it hardened.
Luis offered his hand to help me to my feet, and we walked across the street to where the Weather Warden lay panting and helpless, locked into the earth.
He could not have been more than twelve years old.
Luis and I exchanged looks; I do not know what mine said, but his was appalled. Just a boy, it said.
A boy who’d tried twice to kill us. I was less appalled, and more interested in why.
I sank down to a crouch beside the boy, and examined him more closely. He was typical for the age, I supposed: a defiant glare, a childish, undefined face. Black eyes, black hair, coloring much like Luis’s. “Your name,” I said. “Give it.”
He responded in Spanish. It was easy enough to guess the content of it, especially when accompanied by an aggressive hand gesture. I felt him gathering power again from the clouds overhead.
I reached out, thumped a forefinger against his forehead, and disrupted his concentration. The power fell into chaos, and the child blinked at me, startled.
“Name,” I said again.
“Candelario,” he said. “Puta.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Candelario,” I repeated. “I assume that other was not your last name.”
Luis said, from behind me, “Not unless his name translates to whore.”
I thumped the child-Warden’s head again. “Stop. I can kill you if I wish, you know that?”
His concentration faded, and I felt him let the powers he’d been gathering up fade along with it. “So?” he challenged me. “You kill me, it don’t matter. You’re messing with her.”
I knew exactly who he meant. Pearl. My sister Djinn, once. My enemy. My conquest, or so I’d thought.
Pearl, insane and predatory, who had wiped an entire race of protohumans from the face of the planet once, in her jealousy and madness. She should by all rights have been destroyed, long gone from this Earth; I had seen to that. But instead she lived on, drawing strength and power in steady, parasitic increments from these hijacked Wardens.
These children.
Candelario was like Pammy—a victim, although it was likely he didn’t know this, and would never accept it. He almost certainly believed that he was chosen, special, a trusted soldier in a war against evil. Pearl had convinced many. It was a signal weakness of the human condition, to be so easily swayed by those who wished them ill. To be rotted from within by their own belief in their virtue.
“Where is she?” I asked the boy. He spat at me. “She is using you. She is not your protector.”
“You don’t know anything!” he shot back. “Let me go or she’ll kill you all!”
“I doubt that,” I said. “Or she’d already have done so.”
Something shifted inside the boy—a change so basic that it seemed that the bones inside of him moved along with it. His face seemed to grow sharper, more adult. More like . . . someone else.
“Do you?” An entirely different voice than the boy’s, although using his vocal cords. “Really, do you doubt it, my sister? I thought you knew me better.”
Pearl. Pearl was speaking through this boy. I caught my breath. I felt Luis’s warm hand grip my shoulder, and I put a palm down flat on the warm ground, taking in power and feeding it through the cycle between us. Preparing for the strike, if it would come.
The boy’s eyes were still black, but now it wasn’t adolescent anger in them, it was something worse. Focused malice. Real evil.
“You send out your troops ill-prepared,” I told her. “His attack was crude, you know.”
“I’m not interested in subtlety,” Pearl said. “You should know that about me, Cassiel.”
Oh, I did. All too well. “Then why not come to me directly? I’m your enemy. Not this one.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, and there was such deep, ancient anger in it that even I shuddered. “I have nothing but enemies. Doubt me not, sister mine. I will destroy this world and everything living on it. You’re a fool if you believe otherwise.”
With that, she was gone. Just . . . gone, leaving no clues, no comfort. She did not explain herself. She never had, and never would; I would have to guess at the dark motives behind her plans. But it would have to do with hatred and jealousy, just as it had before.
We had all felt it, when she had struck in those long-ago mists of time. Almost a million thinking beings killed in an instant, a mass murder on the scale of a god, a million souls screaming in pain and confusion. It had destroyed Pearl’s mind, or what remained of it; in response, she had begun to rip at the universe around us, damaging things that should never have suffered injury. Things that lacked the capacity to heal.
I had destroyed Pearl, or I thought I had. I was the original murderer, among the Djinn. The first of us to kill one of our own.
Ironic, that some seed of her had survived, had somehow cast down roots among the new species that filled the emptiness she’d left on the planet with her crimes. Humanity was where Pearl hid. Humanity was where her power lay.
And so Ashan, the leader of the True Djinn, had ordered me to repeat not my crime, but Pearl’s. By ending humanity, I would also, once and for all, end Pearl. So he believed, and it was likely true.
If I acted, I would become a monster. If I failed to act, Pearl would use the power she sucked from these humans to destroy my people.
Choices.
Candelario resurfaced, still glaring. I could see that he had no idea of what he had said—or what she said, using him as her remote tool. She hid within him, within all of them, like a virus.