by Rachel Caine
That gave Zedala time to lunge forward and grab my arm. A burst of star-hot power blew through the metal, heating it into dripping slag. I threw her off, but it was too late; the moment was gone. The Void child still cowered in shock, but the others were on me.
The Earth Warden boy slapped his hands flat on my chest, and drove me down, down through the metal frame of the bed, down into the wooden floor of the room, down into the hard-packed dirt beneath.
Down into the rock.
I was blind here, but I had power again, and softened the rock and earth to loose, slippery sand, taking away his momentum. We struggled together, lost in the earth. He tried to use his control to shatter my bones, but here, in my element, he couldn’t find an easily exploited vulnerability.
I was weak from the Void attack, and still suffering from the beating I’d taken from Zedala. He finally focused on that point of weakness, and I felt his power pushing at it, trying to shatter the cracked skull like an eggshell. If he drove bone into my fragile human brain, I’d be lost. I had to fight, but my strength wasn’t unlimited, and in the heat of battle I couldn’t draw on Luis, not at this distance.
I was losing.
Something flowed past me, like a shark through water, and slammed bodily into the boy. On the aetheric I saw it as a hard human-shaped light in cool gray, overlaid with the elusive watery spectrum of a Djinn. The boy was fighting it, whatever it was, but for the moment, at least, I was free.
I used the last of my strength to claw myself up at an angle, away from the building where I’d been held, and found the soft, turned earth of the field. I broke the surface and crawled toward the fence. My skull was on fire, and I felt cold and sluggish. I’d bled too much, both in plasma and in power. I had very little left. My mutilated left hand, now just a misshapen, melted blog of metal, made it difficult to claw forward.
Someone tried to grab me and pull me backward. Zedala, who’d chased me. I used the blunt, twisted club that had once been my metallic hand and slammed it into her, and she went down with a scream.
I touched the cold metal of the fence, but I didn’t have enough power left to do more than bend the links.
Trapped.
I felt that human/Djinn presence cutting through the soil beneath me, and it erupted in a spray of dirt like a geyser.
Will. It was Will.
He grabbed my shoulders even as the fence blew outward in a spray of melted metal behind me, and dragged me through to the other side. Zedala had rolled to her feet, feral and furious; the blood on her face only added to the savagery of her expression. As she lunged at Will, he drew back his hand, gathered power, and threw it in a tight, silver ball at her chest. It hit her and slammed her backward to the soft earth. She slapped at it, trying to throw it off, but it ate its relentless, merciless way through her body until she lay still and silent in the dirt.
Will’s face was smeared with dirt and mud, and now I recognized his eyes, those gray, emotionless eyes. I recognized the implacable rage with which he’d just killed the girl.
He turned it on the boy Earth Warden, who lunged up from the dirt and took a tearing grip on my hair. I didn’t see what happened to the boy, but I felt it. I saw the blood explosion on the aetheric, and saw his violent streaming colors go pale, then black.
“Stop,” I whispered. “Ashan, stop.”
“No,” he said, and kept dragging me. “They have to be destroyed. All of these abominations must be ended!”
“No!”
He dropped the human disguise of Will, abandoning the warmth, the sweetness, the lovely and seductive illusion. What was left was the prince of the Old Djinn, a cold silver flame of fury barely contained by a human-shaped shell. My brother. My king.
He was also a cruel, conscienceless murderer, and now he turned that focus to the boy containing the Void, who was coming after the two of us with a fanatic’s disregard for personal safety.
The boy could kill a Djinn. Easily.
“Don’t touch him!” I screamed to Ashan. “He’ll destroy you!”
Ashan, who’d been reaching out to rip the boy in half, spun away at the last moment. The boy’s grasping hand brushed Ashan’s side, and I saw a black gouge appear in his body. He twisted away, and the shout of pain vibrated on the aetheric, and snapped branches from trees in the physical world. Ashan stumbled back and, with a fluid motion, caught one of the large, heavy falling branches. He let its momentum spin him, threw physical force into it, and slammed the branch home into the boy’s body.
I heard the wet snap of breaking bones, and tried to roll to my knees. I managed that much, but my balance failed as I tried to climb to my feet. I grabbed the trunk of a tree and watched as the boy—crippled now—clawed his way on, still determined to destroy Ashan no matter the cost.
“Stop!” I screamed again, as Ashan lifted the branch for a killing blow. “Ashan, no, not this way—”
He didn’t listen. I turned my head at the last moment, but that didn’t block out the sound of the impact of the branch, or the boy’s choked last gasp. “No,” I whispered, but there was no strength in it, or in me.
Ashan grabbed me and lifted me in his arms, and I saw the last of Pearl’s chosen children, the tiny Weather girl, summoning power in both hands with a dexterity that was chillingly beyond her years. Beyond her, the camp was massing—people I had known, and liked, armed with whatever they could find. They would rush us, kill us if they could. The fury was like fire in the wind.
Ashan looked down at me, and for a second I saw Will, the man I had felt such kinship to—and then Will was gone and only Ashan remained.
“Hold on,” he said, and stepped into the aetheric just as lightning exploded where we had been, burning a crater twenty feet deep in the smoking earth.
Make no mistake: I do not like Ashan. Even among the Djinn, Ashan inspired fear, not love; his arrogance—and his power—were legendary. He had, however unwillingly, bowed his head to one Djinn only, and when Jonathan had been destroyed, he owed loyalty to no one. He’d claimed by right to rule, after, and I had never contested that, though I could have. So could Venna, the oldest of my siblings, but we were both content to be what we were, and allow him his power.
That didn’t mean we liked him. It meant we respected him.
In this moment, though, weak and fragile as I felt, overwhelmed as I was, I loved him and hated him with an intensity that made me want to weep bitter human tears. I clung to him as we passed in a mist through the aetheric, speeding away from the camp. Most Djinn couldn’t bring humans through the aetheric, not intact, but Ashan could, when he wished.
Which was seldom, if ever.
We stepped out into night ... a thick, full, velvety darkness, somewhere far enough from human civilization that no hint of lights glimmered, save the stars. The wind hissed through the pines, and Ashan bent to lay me down on a bed of fallen leaves. Starlight painted him in stark contrasts—his eyes had turned full silver now, his skin almost the pale color of mine. We looked like kindred now, except that his beauty was Djinn to the core, remote and hard, and mine was soft and frail and broken.
“You pretended to be human. To be Will,” I said. “Why?”
“Like you, I wanted to see,” he said. “I wanted to know what she was doing, and why. I couldn’t depend on you, Cassiel. I had thought I could, but you began to care too much for them. You aren’t as you were when I sent you here.”
“Neither are you,” I said. “You feigned a human far too well not to have liked being in his skin. I thought we both despised them.”
“We both did,” he said. “But perhaps you’re right. We’ve both changed.”
“You knew who I was all along. You recognized me.”
“No,” he said, and turned away to stare up at the stars. “I didn’t know, not at first. I felt ... something. But you disguised yourself well, just as I had. We both fooled her, for a time—and we fooled each other as well.”
“We won’t fool her again.”
&
nbsp; “No, not again. She’s beyond playing coy now.” He turned back to me. “What did she tell you?”
“What we knew: She plans to destroy us. All living things. Even the Mother.” I pulled in a painful breath, and tasted blood in the back of my mouth. “She plans to take her place.”
That froze him. I had rarely seen Ashan surprised; I’d never seen him afraid, but this time, I saw a flash of real alarm blaze around him in the aetheric. He controlled it almost as swiftly and said, “Do you think she could?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed, and rolled on my side to cough. Something in my side hurt, and I spat up blood. “I need to rest.”
“Rest won’t help you,” Ashan said. “You’re broken.” He said it with a remote kind of recognition, nothing more, but when he knelt down and touched me, his hand felt warm and almost gentle. “Stay still.”
“I don’t need your help.”
He smiled, sharp as a knife. “Then I should have left you there to their mercies. My apologies, Cassiel. I didn’t realize you had the situation so well in hand.”
I stubbornly reached out to Luis through the frail connection between us, and felt it snap apart with a painful jolt. Terror bolted through me, and I sat up, heedless of my injuries. “No!” I rose up into the aetheric, flailing to regain that thread between us, but it was gone, melted away.
He was gone.
“You don’t need him anymore,” Ashan was saying, down in the human world. “No need to humble yourself further, my sister. You understand now the gravity of the situation, and what has to be done. I won’t have you tethered to a human, not with what you must do. I can be merciful.”
I stared at him with deadened eyes. “You cut the link.” He didn’t answer. “Give it back, Ashan. Now.”
“No.”
“Give it back.”
“You’ve played human long enough, Cassiel. Enough of that. Take back your place, and do what you have to do.”
“Do it yourself!” I snarled. The anger in me had a sickening quality to it, a nightmare intensity. More than that, my human body was starting to fail, and he knew it. “Kill them yourself if you think it’s so vital!”
“I can’t,” Ashan said. “It will destroy me, and I’m the True Djinn’s connection to the Mother. It’ll poison all of them. You know that.”
I hadn’t thought of it in such terms, but he was right. Ashan risked bringing down the Djinn if he struck at the humans, and that was why he needed me to do it.
Because I was, at the last, expendable.
I felt the pressure that had held me in human flesh suddenly ease, like a door coming open in an airless room. The relief of that was intense and shattering. Flesh was a cage, a prison, and now I could abandon it, rise up to the aetheric and stay there, where I belonged. If I wished to visit this plane, I could descend like an angel at will. Or abandon it completely.
He was offering me my eternal life back, something that I had longed for, something I needed.
It was like being dropped in water after an eternity of thirst. I’d forgotten how it felt, to be so free, so pure, so utterly complete.
It was more seductive than anything I had ever known.
I kept staring at him, reading ages and distances in his silver eyes. He was old, Ashan. Very old. Very powerful. We had that in common, still. We had so much history that we had witnessed.
He thought he knew me.
But in this, this one simple thing, we were completely different, because I had breathed, wept, bled, lived. And he never had, not fully. Not even at the camp, when he pretended to be Will. I could see it in him now, that lack of empathy and understanding; it was possible he could learn, but he had not learned. Not yet.
I wanted to let go, to succumb to that soft, welcoming embrace of the eternal. I wanted to be what I had been, vast and powerful and perfect.
But part of me was always going to be here, in the dirt, in the blood, in the sweat and heaviness of a body. There was a strength and a power in that, too. One Ashan couldn’t really understand.
And it allowed me to close the door between us.
“No,” I said again, softly but very firmly. “I won’t abandon them. I can’t.”
Ashan stared. I had, again, surprised him. “Not even to save us. Not even to save the Mother.”
I was silent on that point. I pressed a shaking hand to my injured side. The pain turned glassy and sharp. Broken ribs, I imagined. The head injury had taken on a remote, unreal aspect; I still felt blood trickling down my neck and matting in my hair, but the pain had subsided to a dull, throbbing ache. I didn’t know if that was better or worse.
Ashan was considering what I’d said. He finally shook his head. “You’re not in your right mind,” he said. “You’re injured.”
It was kind of him to notice. “It doesn’t matter if I’m injured or healthy. I won’t kill them. If you want them dead, do it yourself.”
“One of us must lead,” he said. “We’ve always agreed that it would be me, Cassiel. Always. And a leader must order others into battle.”
I felt a cold wave of anger push back the simple human anguish of my injuries, and I looked up sharply at him. “Maybe it’s time for a change,” I said.
He laughed. “You won’t fight me. Look at you. You can’t stand on your own, and you refused my gift. You can hardly exist at all.”
I climbed slowly to my feet, moving with great deliberation. I didn’t wince, even when the pain bit deep; I didn’t allow so much as a flicker of hesitation. I never looked away from him as I stood, unaided, and faced him.
The wind bent the trees around us, and pitiless starlight rained down. The silence seemed to stretch for an eternity.
“All right, enough,” Ashan said, finally. “I never doubted your stubbornness. Only your ability.”
“I have ability,” I replied. “And will. And I don’t need more than that.”
“I’m not battling you. It isn’t the time, or the place.” Ashan’s pale lips twitched into a brief, very cool smile. “If you would be polite enough to wait, it’s more than likely I will be destroyed soon enough. We live in a dangerous world, Cassiel. And all of us will pay a price for survival, if we survive at all.”
“I’ve never heard you say such things.” Ashan was, after all, self-interested and a coward first, before all things except his protection of the Mother herself. That made him less of a pessimist than most.
“There has never been such a time,” he said. His tone was calm and dispassionate, and all the more powerful for it. “The disease the Wardens have brought to this world may destroy us yet; even Pearl has taken advantage of it, in her use of the Void. With Pearl seeking our destruction at the same time as the Wardens’ mortal enemies, do you really believe we can win without great loss?”
“I’m only surprised you even consider that you may be one of those losses.”
He bared his teeth in an almost genuine smile. “David has no reason to protect me.”
“Nor you him, though it hasn’t seemed to have worried him a great deal.”
David, the leader of the New Djinn, probably bothered far less about Ashan than Ashan did about David; I suspected that David’s intense and legendary love for the human Warden Joanne Baldwin had wakened both contempt and confusion within my brother, which manifested in—predictably, for Ashan—real hatred. David, from the few encounters I’d had with him, held little or none.
My attempt to show strength was spoiled as my knees weakened. My body gave me no real warning—a thick wave of dizziness, and then I felt myself falling. I put out my hands to brace myself—or my one human hand, and the misshapen lump of bronze that weighed down my left arm—but I never hit the ground. Instead, Ashan stepped forward, caught me, and eased me down to a kneeling position. I was having difficulty breathing—my lungs felt thick and wet—but I still managed to wheeze, “This is how you like me, on my knees to you,” before I began to cough, explosive mouthfuls of hot blood.
Ashan made a s
ound of frustration, and I felt a cold silvery power glide through me, from the crown of my head downward. I tried to resist it, but his touch was seductive and powerful, and the comfort it left behind it was so extreme that I felt an urge to weep. I didn’t. My eyes were dry by the time Ashan stepped back, and I looked at myself disorientingly from the aetheric.
My head still ached, but the broken skull was fused together, and the ragged tear in my scalp had closed. The broken ribs had likewise reset, and the blood in my lungs was gone. He hadn’t bothered with my collections of bruises, but overall, I was in sound condition, considering my recent injuries.
“I could have destroyed your physical body,” he said. “But I wasn’t sure that even at the last, you’d choose to regain your rightful place. This has to stop. I need you with me, Cassiel. We can’t allow Pearl to pursue this course, and there’s still only one way to stop her.”
“Genocide,” I said.
“Extinction,” he corrected me. “As it has been before, as it will be again. It’s the reason we were created, to protect the Mother. And we will, with or without you.”
I got off my knees. “Then you’ll do it without me,” I said, brushing the dirt from my filthy, shapeless gray uniform with both hands ... and only then did I realize that he’d repaired my metallic left hand. I left it to the faint starlight, examining the finely detailed flexible metal skin, the precise movements of the metal fingers. He’d done a better job of it than I had, originally. I rubbed my fingertips together, and the sensation that came to me was absolutely realistic. Except for the warm matte color of my forearm and hand, it might have been the original appendage.
“That’s a gift,” he said, nodding toward it. “And I think you’ll find that in the end you’ll know I was right about the humans. They were a mistake, and they need correcting.”
I sensed he was about step into the aetheric and leave me behind. “Wait! My connection to Luis. Restore it.”
He met my eyes, and in his silver ones I read a trace of the man I’d liked, back in the camp. A trace of regret, and kindness. Then Ashan blinked, and it vanished. “Very well,” he said. “But you won’t like what you find. I was trying to spare you the pain.”
