by Rachel Caine
The children were forming into a tightly bound cluster around us, all facing outward… so many young Wardens, so powerful, and all their power was directed inward, channeled together into a pure white shell around them as they floated in the air over the darkness. A milky, glassine skin that sealed them all inside, together.
And it began to kill them.
The power being produced was so vivid, so unnatural, that I could sense their small bodies failing under the strain. It didn’t matter to Pearl. Nothing mattered now, except her goal, almost in her reach.
The Void children remaining in the bubble imploded… their darkness exploded out of them, destroying their fragile shells, and flooded together like spilled mercury, spread in a sinuous curve along half of the dome.
It formed a liquid design, the blaze of power, and the absence of it.
Black and white.
Yin and yang.
The opposing forces of the universe.
“Stop,” I whispered. I grieved for the children who had just… disappeared, but that battle had been lost a long time ago; Pearl had chosen them, hollowed them out, made them avatars and vessels. The other children, the ones on the white side of the dome… those still had souls, minds, personalities. They could still be saved, if only I could stop this, soon.
But I was losing everything. It was bleeding, slipping, turning dark. Everything, dark.
Then I heard a whisper, and it rose up out of the remnants of the light inside me, out of the very roots of the earth. Not a word, but a feeling, an intuition. It was the breath and life and voice of the Mother, speaking to humans, brushing over us.
Life. Pure, untainted life, a power so pure and intense that it brought sharp tears to my eyes. It didn’t warm me, but it promised me warmth, life, escape from despair.…
And then I felt Pearl gather to strike. In this moment, when the Mother was finally, gently opening herself to humans, allowing just the merest suggestion of contact with them, she was vulnerable through them.
I had to act. Had to.
But all I could manage was one last, dying burst of power—just enough to shock Pearl a little, break me free of her grip, and send me tumbling forward in a heap. I hit the glittering wall of power that had formed around her and the children head on, with stunning force.
It didn’t yield.
Pearl looked down at me, remote and cold, and her eyes were the lightless empty of the Void. “You reject what I offer, Cassiel. You offend me.”
“Good,” I said. It came out raw and bloody, but satisfying. “Kill me, then. If you can.”
She walked down a set of invisible steps, as her children parted for her—some of them had already collapsed, their white light guttering out, and the rest were burning like candles in a furnace. All their power was flowing into Pearl, I realized; it was in the unearthly pale glow of her skin. She had embodied it, and the darkness.
If she completed this last, cruel act, she would be more powerful than anything else in this world.
I couldn’t break this shell, or the cycle of power that was feeding back on itself inside it. I couldn’t save myself, or the children. I couldn’t do anything except kneel there, cold and empty, as Pearl glided toward me.
But I could do one simple thing, after all.
I could duck.
The power that lanced out of her erupted in a pure white bolt, heading straight for me; if it touched me, it would burn me to cinders.
But it didn’t touch me. I let myself fall backward, anchored by my knees, and Pearl’s strike hissed and burned the air an inch above my chest.
It bored straight through her own shell of power, lanced out into the room, slammed into the back wall, and kept going.
And I rolled out through the burned opening of the shell as it began to knit itself closed, sealing Pearl and the children in.
I barely made it over the closing threshold before it irised shut.
The black-and-white sphere containing Pearl and her followers began to rotate now, slowly at first, but growing in speed and strength.
I collapsed gasping on the broken stone floor, and wondered if I had enough strength to battle Esmeralda, who was the only living thing in the room left now outside of the sphere… but as I rolled myself over on my back and looked at her, I realized that I needn’t have worried.
Esmeralda had felt it, too, that whispering touch of the Mother. Her eyes had gone wide and very dark, and they were filled with blind tears. She was still clutching Rashid’s bottle in one shaking hand, but I didn’t think she even realized she still had it.
She didn’t see me at all.
“She forgives me for what I did,” Es said. “I feel it. I feel it. I can—I can change—”
And she did, drawing in a deep breath; the thick, muscular coils began to shift, contract, drawing together in a smooth, tapering glide… and Esmeralda was standing. She looked down at her long, smooth legs, slender feet, and cried out—grief, joy, shock all boiling together. The white shirt she was wearing reached almost to her knees now, and it left her looking younger than before, a child playing at dress-up. I wondered how many years it had been since she’d been herself, been truly and completely human.
Just in time to lose everything again.
She blinked and looked down at me. “You don’t look so good, lady,” she said. “I’ve seen dead things on beaches with better color.”
“Esmeralda,” I whispered. “Get out. Go. Find Isabel.”
“She doesn’t need to find me,” Isabel said from the doorway. “I’m right here, Mom.” She was still covered in plaster dust, smeared and dirty, but she was alive. And behind her was Luis, bloody but still upright. He ignored Esmeralda, ignored the spinning sphere hovering in the middle of the room, and limped to me.
“We’re okay out there now,” he said. “Lots of sleeping kids. Djinn are holding the power bubble over us.” He collapsed down on the floor next to me, and pulled me into his arms. “God, you’re cold, Cass.”
I couldn’t tell him I was dying, but it was true; the darkness that I’d been infected with was eating away, steadily and quietly killing me. It was a kind of virus, I decided; as it fed on me, it reproduced. Soon, I’d be a vessel for it, like Pearl’s Void children.
And then I’d be unacceptably dangerous.
I’d failed on every level. Luis, Isabel, even Esmer-
alda… they had succeeded. But I hadn’t stopped Pearl. I hadn’t even slowed her. All my power, all my history, and it had come to this.
To nothing.
Ashan was dead now; whatever plan he’d foreseen for me, it had been false, or it had died along with him. My failure would cancel out all of the great victories won by my friends, my family, by humanity, because I had not been strong enough, fast enough, Djinn enough.
I was doing worse than killing humanity. I was killing the Mother herself, through my failure.
But I could do one last thing right.
I could stop my transformation into the dark angel that Pearl wanted me to become.
I pulled free of Luis and touched his face very gently. “I love you,” I said. It was a good-bye, and he knew it; I saw the shock ripple through him, and the awful resignation in the rigidity of his muscles. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t do this,” he said. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t.”
“Mom?” Isabel took a halting step toward us, then stopped. “Mom, what are you doing?”
“What I have to do.” I said it gently but firmly. “We always knew it would come to an ending, didn’t we?”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t believe in endings. I’m not going to let you—”
Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she collapsed back into Luis’s arms. He’d given her just a touch, a gentle push into the darkness, and now he held her gently in his arms and kissed her forehead. He wasn’t looking at me any longer. “She’s going to win, then,” he said. “You can’t stop her.”
The room was lurid with the c
ream-and-black of the sphere, now spinning fast, whipping between black and white so fast that it blurred into a smear of gray. The power in the room was like needles in my skin, a burning, stinging rush.
“No,” I said. “I can’t.” She was, I sensed, almost there, almost ready to unleash all that power into the heart of the world.
Almost ready to kill the very soul of our Mother.
And here, at the end, filled with a growing darkness, I felt an unexpected sense of… peace. Of quiet inside me, and in that silence, I heard a voice speak.
Make the choice.
Ashan’s voice, an echo of his imperious tone. He might be gone from the world, but he was still demanding things of me.
I opened my eyes and said, “Esmeralda. I need your help.”
Chapter 13
“I CAN’T DO THIS,” Es said. She was scared—very scared, in fact, uncertain in her newfound humanity. “I don’t know how anymore.”
“You can,” I told her. The darkness inside me was reaching critical stages. Only a moment had passed—a moment that had been taken up by the difficult task of getting Luis to withdraw, with Isabel, to a safe distance, because I couldn’t guarantee what would happen next. “Your venom killed a Djinn. It’ll certainly kill me. And I need to destroy this body, Esmeralda. I can’t leave it, otherwise.”
“But I just got out of being a snake,” she said. “What if I can’t shift back again?”
“You will,” I promised her, and took her hands in mine. “Or it won’t matter.”
“Wow, you are such a cheerleader.”
I smiled. “It’s been interesting knowing you, Esmeralda.”
“Likewise.” She sighed, shook her head, and reached for the Warden powers she’d been so long denied.
And she shifted back into Snake Girl.
When she opened her eyes, they were reptilian, vertically slitted, veined with red and gold… and then she opened her mouth, unhinged her jaw, and the sharp, gleaming daggers of fangs descended and locked in place as she struck in a blur.
Esmeralda’s fangs sank into my neck and shoulder, piercing skin, muscle, bone. Her venom burned like acid as she injected it.
I heard Luis shout—a wordless denial, a rejection of what I was doing, but he didn’t try to stop it. He understood that it wasn’t possible now.
I’m so sorry, I thought. The venom was fast, and fatal, and I felt my blood thicken in my veins. Two beats of my heart. Three. I have loved you all, in my own way. And you are worthy of more than I can give.
My heart tripped, faltered, and gave one last spasmodic pulse before going utterly, finally, completely still.
It hurt. Death hurt.
Ah, I heard a warm, gentle voice say. You’ve chosen. That is good. You have been missed.
It might have been the Mother, or my imagination, or the ghost of Ashan in my dying, fragile human mind.
Equally, it might have been the still, quiet voice of God echoing within me.
I exploded like a star out of my body, shed it like a burst chrysalis, and I wasn’t blackened by the Void. I wasn’t Pearl’s creature.
I was Cassiel, immortal, born of lava and stars, and the Void choked and fell in on itself inside the shell I’d cast off. I was on the aetheric plane now, looking down with the remote interest of a scientist observing laboratory mice. It was hard to believe that the flesh cooling on the floor had encased me, only a few seconds before; shedding humanity had been astonishingly easy, for all that I’d agonized over it.
The freedom, the power, the life was all around me now, coursing like blood, pulsing, intoxicating. Humanity struggled and sweated on the ground, but Djinn rode the currents of the world like eagles. So easy to forget them. To allow it all to slide away in the clean, healing stream.
You have only a moment now. The whisper came in cold, perfect clarity to me, a disturbance of light and shadow, pulse and ebb. It was not a voice, but on the aetheric, it could make itself understood.
The body slithered free of Esmeralda’s coils to fall lifelessly on the cracked concrete. Dead, my mortal flesh looked pallid, blue-white, my green eyes shallow as glass. My lips were parted, as if I had something to tell the world, but that secret would never be uttered.
Esmeralda shrank back into her human form, shivering and fragile, and wiped my blood from her mouth with trembling hands. “I didn’t want to,” she murmured, and sank down on her knees next to me. “I didn’t want to do that. Why did you make me do that?”
Luis carried Isabel back over. She was stirring now, murmuring drowsily in his arms; he put her gently on the ground and took up my failed human body instead, rocking it gently back and forth in the pulsing, inhuman light of Pearl’s sphere…
…Which flared into a sudden, glaring, blinding burst, and exploded into starlight and suns, a universe being born and instantly dying, and out of it walked…
…A goddess.
In the human world, she was a glowing, brilliant creature, gilded in darkness; Luis shielded his eyes and tried to squint between his fingers to see her as she walked toward them, my misfit human family.
He let my body slip back to the ground, and stood up to face her.
Pearl was a vortex of energy here on the aetheric, drawing in currents and creating a lazily spinning wheel on which I drifted. She was opening a portal here, one that stretched through every level of the world, all the way down to the dark, hidden heart of the Mother herself.
As she was walking toward Luis, terrifying and majestic as the storm she had created, he didn’t flinch. Didn’t hesitate.
He attacked.
I felt the violence from where I stood, such a distant and remote observer; he called fire from the liquid center of the earth, focused its power through the lens of his own soul, and threw it on her like a burning blanket.
It simply slid away and left her untouched. She didn’t so much as falter in her steady progress toward him.
Well? said a calm, quiet voice, echoing through the aetheric. Are you just going to let him die for nothing? Or are you going to do what Ashan asked of you in the beginning?
Venna? I whispered. I felt the echo through the world, here and not here. Her presence spread everywhere… but it was tainted, twisted, not entirely as it should have been. It was turning fragile and thin with every pulse of power.
I can’t stay with you long, she responded. I’m too damaged, but until there is a new conduit I will have to serve; Ashan chose me, even though I didn’t want the responsibility. He knew what must be done, long ago. You must finish it, now, before it’s too late. The Mother’s heart is opened. She is listening. She is vulnerable. It’s up to you to protect her now.
I felt the aetheric… stop. The entire world, all of its levels and planes and complicated, clockwork parts, stopped. All the Djinn, all the Wardens, all the humans. Animals. Plants. Insects.
Everything living stopped, caught in a moment of utter, shining awareness as the Mother opened her eyes and looked on it with full, conscious intent. It was beautiful, and terrifying. Angels would hide their faces under that merciless, merciful gaze; humans went silent and still. I was aware that even Pearl, with her merciless progress toward my family, had halted, just for a moment.
I could see the Mother’s consciousness flowing into the brilliant vessel of her Earth Oracle, not so far away from where my old physical body lay broken. She was distilling herself into one form, so that she could hear and speak to the representative of the human race. To Lewis Orwell.
While in that form, she was as vulnerable as she would ever be.
Pearl’s shining, slick form appeared now on the aetheric, and was echoed on all the levels above and below. She was ripping through reality, heading for the Mother, and when she reached her…
… She would kill her.
Now, Venna whispered. It must be now. I can’t… She, too, was losing power. The Djinn were failing, as the aetheric ripped apart in a disrupted chaos around Pearl; she was damaging the link between the Moth
er and her children, obscuring the flow of power.
They would die soon. So would I—I was now Djinn, one of them, and I could feel my own connection to the lifeblood of the planet beginning to choke off, dry up. A Djinn couldn’t last for long without it. Humans could last longer, but they’d go mad, and they wouldn’t even understand why they were ripping each other to pieces. Storms would rage, before an unnatural silence fell. Everything, everything, would fail.
Ashan had known it would come to this, and he’d known that I could make the choice. By teaching me about them, about humans, by making me become one, he’d connected me in ways that I’d never have been able to know in my original, uncorrupted form.
The seeds of humanity remained within me, even now. I’d never be rid of them… and I didn’t want to be rid of them. Luis was within me, and Isabel. Manny and Angela. The brave Wardens dying; the courage of humans who had no reason to risk themselves for others.
Infinite beauty and tragedy. Humanity was flawed, and angry, and cruel; it was beautiful, and creative, and kind. It had spread over every corner of the world, and where it tread, things were never the same. The aetheric was scarred by them, and yet it was also made richer and deeper by what they felt, loved, made.
No other species had ever done these things, created these things.
And they were worth saving. All of it, worth saving.
You have to do it. Venna’s last, faint whisper, a prayer from the soul of the dying Djinn as Pearl used the cutting, burning power of the human race, all their fear and hatred, lensed through the children she’d made so diamond-hard, to strike at the beating, living heart of the world.
And she was right. Ashan was right. I had been wrong, always.
I was Djinn. I was ancient, and ruthless, and powerful, and even now, with the world darkening around me, with the aetheric beginning to shatter and crumble into dust, I had one great and singular talent. I could kill better than any other being who had ever existed, throughout creation.
And now, I had to use that skill. Pearl’s power came from humanity, from the souls of all of those packed into this busy world—six billion and more, each holding a spark, a connection, that when connected was a source of astonishing power. Only Pearl had ever tapped into it.