by Rachel Caine
Rahel evidently did not think our combined talents were enough, as she pushed a massive piece of furniture against it. “It will not hold,” she said. “We should leave now, quickly. Is there a back door?”
“There’s company waiting for us there as well,” David said. “We’re surrounded.”
“Did you not think to warn us of that?” I snapped. “I told you we should have run last night!”
“It wasn’t an option,” David replied flatly. “We can get out of this. It’s just going to take a little creativity.”
Whatever was on the other side of the door hit with such violence that the barrier, even strengthened by three Wardens and a Djinn, bowed inward, almost ripping free of the wall in which it was anchored.
“What the hell is out there?” Luis blurted. Rahel seemed to find the question amusing.
“I don’t think it would do your sanity any good to know. We must go up, not out. Nothing waiting out there strikes me as good at climbing, but they are very good at battering holes in things.”
It was David who ripped an opening in the roof above; the hotel’s guest room tower was seven stories tall, but at this end, the building was a simple one-story affair. Only fifteen feet, straight up.
David, of course, merely flexed his legs and easily made the jump upward. I grabbed my backpack and made sure it was securely against me, then began to think about how the rest of us were to get up to safety.
“Damn,” Luis said. “Forgot my jet pack. Knew I should have packed that.” I made a cradle of fingers and leaned down. He raised his eyebrows. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Do I seem to be?”
“Hardly ever, chica,” he said. He put his booted foot in my cupped hands, and I pulled Earth power to saturate my muscles as I lifted him, straight up. It hurt, that particular enrichment of the very limited capabilities of my human body; I felt the shriek burn its way out of my mouth without my consent, but the effort worked. I threw him high enough that David could grab his arm and lift him onto the surface of the roof.
But I also knew I wouldn’t be able to do that for myself. Not effectively. Which left…
Rahel.
I hardly heard David ordering her to bring me; it was unnecessary that he do so, because after all, I held her bottle. I could have done it just as easily. Only I knew that doing so would open up a million subtle avenues of resistance to her, as irresistible to her as catnip, even now. It was a risk not worth taking, as the door protecting us continued to steadily break under the mindless, violent assault.
“Sistah,” Rahel said. I stared back at her, watching that shark’s smile on her face. There was hate in it, and I understood it very well. I’d always had nothing but contempt for the New Djinn; I’d treated them as not just second class, but other—a mongrel breed of human and Djinn, unworthy.
And she hated me for that, and for enslaving her and so many others, even if it had to be done to save them. No doubt she had other grudges; we all did, we immortals with our endlessly long memories. I had few friends even among the True Djinn, and none among her kind.
Joanne asked, perhaps jokingly, if she had to make it an order for Rahel to save me… and Rahel almost laughed, knowing as well as I did that an order from Joanne carried even less weight than one from me. “No need,” Rahel replied. “And no time. I’ll cleanse myself of her contamination later.”
Before I could respond, she had seized me, and jumped, and in almost the same motion, pushed me away. I landed on the roof, disoriented and off balance, and tumbled. I felt the crashing impact of the backpack hitting the hard surface and rolled back to my feet, rage a comforting warmth inside me, and spun to face her again as the cold desert breeze stirred my hair.
Rahel grinned, and made a little come on gesture. Her bottle had not been smashed, though others certainly had been.
No time for settling our scores now, or even for taking stock of what we’d just lost. Joanne, Weather Warden and in firm command of the winds, levitated easily up through the hole, while Rahel, at David’s terse order, began repairing the rip through which we’d come. Below, the sound of destruction was increasing. Whatever was below, it was angry.
I ventured to the edge of the roof and looked down. Luis joined me, took one look, and quickly stepped back. “Okay, I don’t really want to ask, but… what the hell is that?”
“It’s a chimera, a forced merger of several animal forms. Bear, mountain lion, scorpion.” I said it easily enough; identification was automatic, and he could have done it as well, if he’d been able to overcome his instinctive nausea and horror at what we were seeing. As a human, it was disconcerting enough, but as an Earth Warden, feeling the utter vileness of what had been done… That was what drove him back, sent him reeling and gagging.
And it was what I was fighting, silently, as well.
There were at least four of the chimera in view now; one had a bear’s head clumsily balanced atop a mountain lion’s strong, sinuous body, but there were extra, armored legs erupting from the lion’s sides, and a segmented tail with a vicious stinger curving out from the back and overhead. Nauseating and fierce, and mad.
“This isn’t the Mother,” Joanne said. She was standing with me, looking over, holding her long, dark hair back as the breeze batted at us. She was pale and grim, but not as revolted as Luis was, or I felt. “It can’t be her doing this.”
And it wasn’t. I’d worried at that last night, paced, tried to shake sense out of what the avatar had been doing… and now, finally, it clicked together. This was what the avatar had been doing, under the cover of darkness, shielded from the eyes of the Djinn and even from the Mother. No, not the avatar; the avatar was only a flesh puppet, a conduit for another’s power. And I knew now, looking at these things, who had wielded that power.
“It’s Pearl,” I said. “She’s after me.”
Joanne laughed humorlessly. “Wow. It’s all about you, isn’t it?”
“This time, I believe it is—”
“Watch it,” she warned, and pulled me a step back. There were wolves circling below, too, weaving around the chimeras; they were leaping up, trying to make the jump to where we were. So far, they were unable to do so, but there was no reason to encourage them.
“Yeah, that’s not the worst. Heads up,” Luis said, and pointed up. I moved my head back, and saw a black circle of birds above us, wheeling in the warming air. The first rays of dawn gilded their wings with gold. “We need a shield, now!” He’d sensed something that I’d missed, but I saw it now… the birds shifted, no longer circling, but dropping.
Heading straight for us. I reached out and diverted some of the birds, but it was difficult; they were maddened, like the chimera below, driven beyond their own instincts by the torment that Pearl had inflicted on them. Death would be, for them, merciful.
But I couldn’t destroy them. Birds were, for me, the most beautiful of nature’s creatures… free and fierce. I felt Joanne raise a shield of hardened air above us, and flinched as the first of the birds hit. She’d tried to make it less apt to be fatal, but Pearl’s attack drove them mercilessly into the barrier, waves of them, snapping their fragile bones, painting the sky with their blood.
Tears welled in my eyes at the sight. This was for my benefit, mine alone; Pearl knew me, and she knew what would hurt me. These creatures were dying for no better purpose than to anger me.
The mesmerizing horror of the suicidal assault had distracted us from the other issues, but luckily David and Rahel had been on guard; now I heard the rip of metal and saw David throwing a large metal dish toward the edge of the roof, where one of the chimeras had clawed its way up. It knocked that one over, but the next one’s venomous stinger tail was already visible in another corner.
“Great,” Luis said, resigned. “They climb. Yeah, of course they do, because it’d be too fucking easy if they’d stay on the ground.” He readied a fireball in his hands, the burning plasma lighting up his face from below and making dark hollows of
his eyes. He wasn’t the only one turning to fire; Joanne also had pulled on that power, and as I glanced her way I saw her throw with a strong pitcher’s follow-through.
Her fireball exploded against the chimera as it landed on the roof and roared at us in an eerie mix of bear and lion… and then shrieked in a high, chittering voice as the fireball set it aflame. Joanne threw an airburst against it, blowing it in a burning arc off the corner of the roof, screaming all the way.
The screaming continued, and I knew without looking that the other creatures had attacked it. Pearl’s nature was nothing if not savage.
“More are coming,” Rahel said. “I suggest you plan an escape.” She didn’t seem her normally remote self just now; it seemed the situation was dire enough that she actually cared. That was… alarming. Escape seemed a remote possibility. We had no car now, and my motorcycle—providing it had survived the night—wouldn’t be any defense against the kind of creatures Pearl had at her disposal; she was summoning more birds for another suicidal strike, and the chimeras out there could easily rip us apart. I had no idea how fast they could run, and I wasn’t tempted to find out.
There were three humans at risk, counting me; the two Djinn were in no danger. They could escape into the aetheric at any time. But not with us. Neither Rahel nor David had the particular, peculiar skill of keeping a human alive while moving through that realm, or they’d have already begun removing us to safety.
If they had to evacuate us another way, it would take time.
“We need to release another Djinn,” I said, and took off my pack. I pulled out the padding and carefully unrolled it, layer after layer. The first six bottles had shattered, and three more were cracked and useless—a cracked bottle could not hold a Djinn. There had been ten bottles, and only the two that had been wrapped in the center were still intact.
And open. David’s, and Rahel’s. I felt an icy chill, because those Djinn who’d been imprisoned were now free—free to turn on us, to seek revenge against us. But at the moment, at least, it seemed the Mother had gathered back her children to her side. There was no guarantee at all that she wouldn’t send them at us again soon, but for now, all that mattered was that they were no longer an asset to us. Only a potential, and deadly, liability.
I checked the last bottle, the one we’d separated out so carefully—Venna’s bottle. It, at least, was intact, but she’d be of no help at all to us as an Ifrit, a twisted and blackened shadow of a Djinn. Releasing her meant only that Rahel and David would be damaged, or killed, as she blindly sought to replace her lost power with theirs. She’d cause chaos, but nothing more.
Joanne, without comment, took it from me and put it in her pocket.
I’d failed, utterly failed, in what Joanne had entrusted me to do—carry the captive Djinn safely to the Wardens. I felt a burst of hot fury at Rahel, but she’d done nothing except what came naturally to a Djinn; she’d struck out at her captor. It was an almost irresistible urge for her.
Joanne took a deep breath and said, “Rahel, take Rocha. David, take Cassiel. Get them out of here. Take them all the way to Vegas if you have to. David, you can come back for me. I can hold out here until you return.”
It was a surprisingly logical choice, because Baldwin had all three powers at her disposal—Earth, Fire, and Weather—while Luis and I had only two, and Fire was his weaker gift. More than that, Joanne had been tested in battle many times, and Luis and I were relatively new at the combat aspect of fighting the forces of nature in this particular way.
But I worried. I didn’t fancy even Joanne’s chances against Pearl, here where she so clearly had taken the time to prepare her battlefield, build her soldiers, and was intent on not just killing, but devouring.
David was staring intensely at his lover, his wife, the mother of his future child, which I supposed he also knew. “Don’t die,” he said flatly. “Promise me.”
It seemed a cold sort of good-bye, but only in words; what passed in looks between them was much different. They kissed, and whispered together for a few seconds, and then before I was quite ready, David turned toward me. There was a blind anger in him—not toward me in particular, but directed at the situation, at the necessity that tore him away from the woman he loved now, of all moments.
Before I could change my mind, his burning-hot arms had fastened around me, and the building, the chimera, Joanne, all of it was falling away beneath my feet in a shocking burst of acceleration that drove the blood down in my body, sending me into a weakened, gray-haze state for a few breaths until I was able to get my bearings again. David, with me as his helpless passenger, blurred through the cloud of birds, startling them out of formation, and the air grew icy around us before he steadied himself and thought to extend some heat—and breathable air—around me.
We were thousands of feet in the air, moving fast in the frozen blue. He’d gone high to avoid the creatures Pearl had sent for us, but now he began his descent in a steep, hurtling arc that whipped my clothes and hair into a frenzy around my skin.
“She’ll call you back if she needs you!” I shouted.
“She’ll call,” he said. “But she doesn’t hold my bottle. You do.” David didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard over the howl of the wind.
It was in my backpack. Physical location didn’t matter—if I hadn’t touched it, he’d have remained under Joanne’s dominion, but I had put my fingers on it, and that had transferred control of him to me. I should have left the bottle with her, I realized, but in the heat of the moment I hadn’t thought of it, and perhaps Joanne hadn’t, either. “I won’t hold you back,” I promised him. “I’ll send you to her.”
“It might already be too late for that.”
He was right, and the guilt of it gnawed at me. I forced certainty into my voice. “She’ll be all right,” I said. Thin white clouds appeared below us, and we punched through them with vicious speed, heading for a world that enlarged terrifyingly fast.
He didn’t look at me. The lines of his jaw were tight as cables beneath his coppery skin. “No, she won’t,” he said. “She’s never all right. But she’ll survive until I can come back for her. Now don’t talk to me. I don’t want to know you’re here.”
I shut my eyes against the buffeting wind, the disorienting world through which we fell.
We hurtled toward the ground in a heart-stopping rush, and I watched the city of Las Vegas resolve beneath our feet with grim fascination. As a Djinn this would have been entertaining, but now, with flesh to tear and bone to shatter, it was simply terrifying. The city was spread out over a vast grid, but it seemed oddly lifeless at this height, buildings like tiny boxes, defiantly green lawns, blue dots of swimming pool water behind them. As we approached, the houses still had a structured sameness, but the center of the city, where we were descending, exploded into chaos—curved, asymmetrical structures with wildly extravagant grounds, pools, lawns, fountains.
Las Vegas was schizophrenic and beautiful, glowing even at the end of the world with its own false luster and very real power.
We came down in front of a vast glass pyramid, guarded by a sphinx that had never seen the sands of Egypt. David slowed at the very last moment and cushioned our landing, but even so, I felt the impact rattle all the way up my spine.
We hadn’t been expected, but we were definitely awaited, and before I could draw breath, I felt the muzzle of a gun pressing against the back of my head. “Freeze,” said a shaking voice. “In the name of the Wardens.”
I turned around, took hold of the barrel of his gun, and fused it into a crushed ball. He was a boy, hardly much older than Isabel in her new teenaged body, and although I raised my hand to hit, I lowered it again, slowly.
“Stand down,” said a firm voice behind the two of us, and I turned to see Lewis Orwell coming toward us. He looked—battered. Infinitely tired, unshaven, limping, but on his feet and leading a contingent of at least four powerful Wardens behind him.
And Shinju. Pearl. She looked p
erfectly composed, with that lovely smile fully in place.
“I’m going back for Jo,” David said.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Lewis snapped, “until I get an update.”
“She’s in trouble.”
“Always is. So talk fast.”
David’s eyes flared dark red, a color so violent that it made me take a precautionary step back. “I have to go. Now.”
Lewis, for answer, took a bottle from his pocket. An open bottle. And incanted, quickly, the threefold charm of binding. Be thou bound to my service.
David laughed, a metallic sound with a bitter, biting edge of despair. “Too late,” he said, and slapped the bottle out of Lewis’s hand to shatter fifty feet away on the pavement. He grabbed Lewis’s neck in one hand, and for a moment there was naked fury between the two of them, something so fierce that it was almost blinding. “I’m going.”
“Wait,” I said involuntarily, and David froze. “David, don’t hurt him. Let him go.” He did, releasing his grip almost instantly, and now it was Lewis whose eyes brightened, and focused on me.
“He’s bottled,” Lewis said. “And you have it.”
I’d made a deadly mistake in trying to save Lewis’s life; I’d betrayed a secret I didn’t know would be an issue. David gave a wordless shout of fury, and I screamed back, “Go!” Before the word was fully off my lips, he exploded into shadows and was gone.
But it didn’t matter.
“It’s in her bag,” Shinju said sweetly. “She’d keep it from you if she could.”
I backed up as Lewis came toward me, but three Wardens were behind me now, and Shinju, and the straps holding my backpack simply… disintegrated. Shinju caught the falling bag and held it out with a formal bow to Lewis.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, as he unzipped the bag and took out bottles—the ones for David and Rahel. “Lewis, you can’t.”
He glanced up at me, and I saw all the humanity had been crushed out of him. There was only weariness and the weight of the world. “I can’t do anything else,” he said. “We need them.” He held up one of the bottles and said, with an eerie calm, “David, come back here. Now.”