by Rachel Caine
For answer, he pulled a pistol from under his leather vest and pointed it at me. “Don’t threaten me, bitch.”
I hadn’t been. I’d been warning him.
It happened before either of us had a chance to make our next moves in this pointless chess game. I felt heat, unnatural heat, emanating from the gas tank of the Victory, and realized my time was up. I couldn’t stop combustion, but the gasoline was a product of the Earth, and subject to Luis’s Warden powers. It took only a minor adjustment to render it inert within the tank of my motorcycle, a second of concentration, and I felt the Victory lurch as the inert fuel fouled the engine. It coughed, sputtered, and died.
The biker riding close on my right wasn’t as lucky. His motorcycle simply exploded. Fragments blew out in a terrifyingly beautiful ball, like a flower with a heart of fire blooming lethal, twisted petals. The man riding it simply . . . ceased, as a coherent presence. I felt the psychic blow as the impact rippled the air, but I couldn’t note it in any significant way. I didn’t have the time. I dived off the wobbling Victory just as the other motorcycle exploded and flattened myself; heat rippled over me, and an expanding wave of concussion pressed me into the pavement for an instant, then passed. I had two pieces of luck—first, the Victory took the brunt of the shrapnel. Flying metal shredded the beautiful form of my bike, mutilating it, but it protected me from the worst of it for a critical instant as it was blown out, over me, and spun end over end to crash into the ditch on the side of the road. I curled into a ball, well aware of the danger as the bikers lost control all around me; one thick wheel came within a half inch of my face, but somehow missed doing worse than laying greasy road marks on the edge of my sleeve. Metal shrieked and crashed, men yelled, and I smelled burning rubber even over the stench of burning human flesh.
Another gas tank exploded. Screaming erupted.
I rolled clear, moving fast, and dropped into the ditch where my Victory had landed in a sad and twisted heap. It was good that I did, as more explosions sounded, flinging lethal shrapnel—including human bones—through the air above me.
Someone else landed in the ditch with me . . . the leader of the bikers, his leather vest shredded and torn, skin shimmering with blood, eyes wide and dazed. Not dead, surprisingly. Not even badly wounded, beneath the splatter of blood. Unlike some of his fellows, he still had all his limbs.
“Jesus,” he panted, and crawled to put his back to the raw earth of the ditch. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! What the fuck?”
“They’re not after you,” I told him, and got a blank, uncomprehending look from him. “I told you to leave me alone.”
“Fucking hell, lady, who’d you piss off, the fucking Marines?”
“I wish,” I said. I’d learned the expression from Luis, but from the man’s look, I wasn’t sure I had delivered it properly. “Stay down.”
“Like hell I will. Those are my brothers up there!”
I didn’t know if he meant literally, as in blood relations, or figuratively; it was difficult to determine human relationships at the best of times for me. “Stay down!” I almost snarled it this time, and grabbed him bodily by the shredded leather vest as he tried to put his head up above the road level. “This isn’t your fight!”
It was, however, mine. I looked down at the mournful remains of my beautiful Victory, sighed, and bent my knees to jump up and out of the ditch.
The biker hit me in a flying tackle from the side, taking me completely by surprise. He slammed me down into the packed dirt and scratchy weeds an instant before another motorcycle skidded drunkenly off the road and crashed down right where I had been standing. It had been blown over by another explosion, which hit my ears with a dull crump of sound that told me my hearing had already begun to shut itself off in trauma.
The Harley was undamaged, except for some superficial dents and splatters. I stared at it, then shoved the biker off of me without much regard for his shouted concerns. I turned back to reach into the waistband of his blue jeans and pull out a semiautomatic pistol from a holster he’d concealed there. I checked the magazine— full, and stocked with hollow points—and slammed it home before removing the safety catch.
“Stay. Down,” I said, soft and precise, and straddled the Harley, which was still somehow running. The vibration of the engine sent waves of heat through my body, almost sexual in its intensity, and I took a deep breath before backing the Harley out of the ditch, up the other side, and back another few feet.
The road was carnage. Broken bodies, some weakly moving still. Shattered vehicles. Blood and bone.
And nothing else. No enemy. No face to put to my would-be killer.
Without the anchor of Luis’s presence, it was very hard for me to view things on the aetheric plane, where the reality of mere physics took on different aspects; it was like trying to fly while holding a concrete block. I managed it for only a few long seconds, overlaying the burning wreckage and bodies and serene moonlit desert with the floods and flows of intention, power, and truth.
Most of those lying on the road did not benefit from the illumination of their souls; their crimes had warped them into hideous shapes, disfigured their faces beyond recognition. I didn’t linger on their self- mutilations. Energy rose up from the destroyed motorcycles in shimmers of gauzy color, but there was something more.
The hot, glowing presence of two Wardens, drawing power.
I saw something lance at me across the aetheric, straight and intense as it cut through everything in its path. It was narrow, and it looked exactly like a laser beam, save that its lurid red color didn’t exist at all in the real, physical world.
I pulled broken metal up from the road in a rush, building a steel shield between me and the beam rushing toward me. It hit my improvised defense and blasted it to even smaller component pieces, but the shield had taken the energy and dissipated it into a splash that only melted and seared the remains into a ball of slag.
I snarled and throttled the borrowed Harley into a full scream of power. Tires dug sand, then gravel, and then I was airborne as momentum carried me forward over the ditch and onto the surface of the road. I avoided the worst of the wreckage and aimed the motorcycle for the spot where the beam of power had originated.
This time, the Warden was an adult—young, but fully a man, probably only a few years younger than Luis. He looked scared, but determined, and as I came for him, he readied his defenses.
I didn’t hold back. I slammed him backward, off his feet, and the ground opened beneath him. He dropped dozens of feet, and as he fell, the sides of the pit caved in over him. Burying him alive. Pinning him down with tons of crushing weight.
Destroying him.
It took fully a minute for him to die, smothered beneath the sand, but I didn’t wait to watch. This was war, and the Djinn in me had come forth, the part that cared little for the disposable lives of humans.
I went after the second glowing spot of power.
A figure dressed in dull brown started out of concealment behind a low jut of rock, illuminated by the fires glowing behind me. For a frozen moment, as I closed the distance, I felt recognition strike me. It was too far to see her face, but I felt the familiar aetheric sense of her, a warm connection I hadn’t known I’d missed until it returned, overwhelming in its relief.
That was Isabel. Ibby. Manny and Angela’s child.
My child, something in me whispered.
Ibby was no longer the sweet, smiling girl I remembered, or even the traumatized one who’d seen her parents die as she shivered and wept in my arms. She looked older than five now, although physically her body hadn’t matured unnaturally; there was something within her that had warped, bringing an adult, cold distance in her expression. A precision to her movements. Confidence, and calculation, although she was afraid.
But she still looked like Isabel.
Pearl. Pearl had done this to her. Rage swept through me, turning fear to ash, and in that moment I really would have destroyed the human world for wh
at Pearl had done—except that it would have meant destroying Isabel, as well.
I let off the throttle of the motorcycle. Ibby was standing by the side of the road, watching me, body tensed. Ready to attack. Ready to run.
Why? Why was she here?
Pearl, again. Pearl was training Ibby as a weapon. How better to use her, than to use her against me?
Oh, Ibby. But she had not led the attack. She’d been here either as hostage, or apprentice, but she was not ready to fight someone like me. She was so young. Too young.
It reduced me to fury and grief.
“Ibby,” I said. I had no doubt she could hear me, even over the throbbing growl of the Harley. “Ibby, it’s me. It’s Cassiel.”
It was a ridiculous thing to say. She knew who I was. I could see that in her face, in the caution and tension, the fear. It shattered my heart to see her fear me; she had always been so accepting of me, so . . . loving.
I kicked the stand of the motorcycle and eased off the bike, walking toward her. I must have looked frightening—stained with smoke and blood, a memory of that terrible day when she’d lost her parents.
She didn’t react, other than to narrow her eyes.
“Ibby,” I murmured. I came closer, moving slowly. “Oh, my girl.”
Her dull brown clothing was a kind of camouflage, a soldier’s gear cut down to fit a child. It should have looked ridiculous, like some sort of costume; instead, she filled it with deadly confidence.
She is only five years old. I felt that strike me hard as a fist, and I ached to stop time, reverse the hurts that had been done to her, take her in my arms and rock away the anguish.
Even if the anguish was only my own.
“I can help you,” I told her softly. I took another step on the gravel, and I saw her tense, readying herself. I stopped and made sure my hands were loose and un-threatening at my sides. I attempted a smile. “I want to help you, Ibby. Don’t you believe that?”
I felt a slight whisper in the aetheric, a brush of power. She was reading me. That was . . . impossible. Isabel was a mere child, nowhere near old enough—even should she have the inborn ability—to wield those kinds of powers, never mind with such utter precision. Reading the truth was an Earth power, like healing.
I also sensed another power in her, jittering and familiar. Fire.
Five years old, and already burdened with two kinds of Warden powers. It would shatter her like glass, or worse, warp her into an unrecognizable, twisted mockery with no hope of returning to the person she was meant to become.
In that instant, I hated Pearl, with such a pure and burning passion, such an utterly impotent passion that it made me tremble and close my eyes to hold it inside. Please, I thought. Please let me find a way to destroy her, to wipe her from the Earth. She destroys everything she touches.
Ibby chose that moment to respond. “My mommy wants me to do this,” she said. She sounded utterly certain.
My eyes flew open, and I felt the breath congeal in my lungs. “What?” I whispered.
“Mommy says I have to be stronger now,” Isabel said. “Or the bad people will win. The bad people who hurt her, like you.” Something flashed in her dark, wide eyes, something awful. “I won’t let you hurt my mommy again, Cassie. I won’t.”
The realization almost drove me to my knees. Pearl, what have you done? Whether it was the strain of such unnatural power already pulling Isabel apart, or Pearl’s vile manipulations, I couldn’t tell, but I realized with a wrench that Isabel thought she was protecting her dead mother. A mother that, impossibly, she thought was still alive. And no child would flinch from that. Certainly not the child of warriors like Manny and Angela.
I spread my arms wide to my sides and lowered myself to my knees on the filthy road. A warm burst of wind blew out of the desert, stinging my eyes with dirt, but I kept my gaze on hers.
“You can kill me,” I told her. “Ibby, if you really think I would ever hurt you, hurt your mother, hurt your father—then you should kill me. But I wouldn’t. I won’t ever do that.” Nor could I. Manny and Angela were both well beyond any pain I could bring to them.
She was still reading me. I felt the subtle, golden touch around me, and knew she could feel the truth of my words. The anguish behind them, and the righteous rage I couldn’t altogether control.
“Someone is lying to you,” I told her. “It isn’t me. Please think about that.”
She considered me in silence for a long few seconds, then tilted her head to one side and extended a chubby little hand.
“Sleep,” she said, and darkness hit me like a falling anvil. I fought it, reaching for my own power, but as I did, I realized that she was trying to show me mercy. If I fought it, she’d use other means, and then I’d have to kill or be killed.
Better to lose. Much better.
As I was driven beneath the surface of the darkness, I thought about Luis, about what he might think when I failed to keep my promise and come back.
And I mourned not for myself, but for him.
When I woke up, I was on the gravel at the side of the road, and Isabel was gone. There was no sign of her anywhere. I tore myself out of anchoring flesh to look for her on the aetheric, but I found no trace at all, not even a lingering shadow of her presence.
I wrapped my arms around my aching chest, where emptiness and confusion burned like a heavy weight. So close, I’d been so close. I’d seen her. I might have saved her.
Or killed her. The odds had been far too uncertain.
Not much time had passed—moments, perhaps. Stars still glimmered overhead. Fires still burned. Men still moaned and cried out for help.
A low wail of a police siren was sounding in the distance, no doubt drawn by the death, smoke, and flames still raging on the road behind me. How was I ever going to explain this? I felt a surge of frustrated helplessness, and dragged myself to my feet by main strength.
A motorcycle roared up out of the ditch. The leader of the bikers, leaving behind his fallen comrades, opened the throttles and blazed past me in a blur of metal and leather, not even pausing to kill me, although he no doubt dearly wished to. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d made the attempt.
He had found another undamaged bike. The one I had salvaged still stood leaning on its kickstand in the middle of the road a hundred feet away, idling. I walked to it, mounted, and raised the stand to balance the heavy weight at its equilibrium point, then gunned the engine. It wasn’t like the Victory; the Harley growled in a completely different tune, throbbed at a lower range as its engine cycled. I’d lost my helmet, but that didn’t matter now. What mattered was not spending the rest of my day—or all my days—in an interrogation room answering the questions of the police.
I had to get to Sedona.
I aimed the Harley where it needed to go, and let it loose to fly, chasing the taillights of the biker ahead of me as we both, for different reasons, fled the law.
* * *
Riding the Harley was a very different sort of experience for me. It was rougher, less forgiving of the sins of the pavement against it—less precise in its handling, although still a very fine machine. It made up for these things in sheer, raw power, and although the traffic began to thicken as I approached Sedona, I had no problem guiding the bike in a fluid, shifting rush around slower-moving cars, trucks, and vans. Sedona’s night desert glowed in starlight, a severe and subtle beauty that woke something in me. A hunger for peace. Serenity. Solitude. There was a faint, pink glow on the eastern horizon; the sun was coming. A new day. A fresh day.
A day in which, perhaps, I could find my own brand of redemption.
Not while this abomination goes on, I told myself. The haunting image of Isabel, forced to accept powers beyond her reach, warped by loyalty to a dead mother, made me too sick with rage to consider satisfying that impulse toward retreat.
I will save you, Ibby. I will.
If there was anything of her left to save.
As a Djinn I never cons
idered failure; things either were, or were not, and I had rarely been unable to accomplish what I set out to do. The human condition, though, is a different matter entirely. The potential for failure existed in every heartbeat, every second, every decision I risked.
No. I will not fail. Not in this.
There was nothing but my will to drive me, but I had to believe that would be enough.
I had to believe in myself, as paradoxical as it seemed.
I dodged around a slow- moving RV with Virginia license plates, avoided a head-on collision with a tractor trailer, and after another quarter hour saw the turnoff toward the church. The motor of the Harley left smoke and blatting roars in my wake, somehow indecent in this polite, sleepy town in the predawn dimness, and for a moment I considered spending a few precious drops of power to muffle the noise.
Instead, I spent them on repairing my clothing and cleaning my skin and hair, making myself presentable for a meeting I was already dreading.
The Chapel of the Holy Cross was a popular visitor destination, particularly at dawn. As I parked the Harley in the broad, flat lot, I saw more than a dozen trucks, cars, and, yes, the ever-popular recreational vehicles, all disgorging yawning occupants. Tourists snapping photographs, or pilgrims come to pray and meditate. Their presence would be a bother, but not a deterrent to me.
I left the Harley, stood for a moment to gather my thoughts, and then started up the long path to the chapel. The walk gave me time to think what I might say. I wasn’t certain why I was so nervous this time about approaching the Oracle; I had done it before, and she had been, if not warm, at least accepting. What had changed? Rashid’s warnings, of course, but it was more than that.
I felt a greater weight on me now.
I knew why, on some level. I was becoming more human, and there was a kind of dread building in me, a kind of instinctual awe that I could not control. I was not even certain if the Oracle would hear me now, and if she would, if she could grant me even the smallest of favors.
But I had no other choice but to try. Lives had already been lost to get me this far.