Unseen os-3

by Rachel Caine

  I felt a hot snap inside—not something breaking, this time, but something reforging. It burned, then cooled, and I felt ... nothing for a few seconds.

  Then, distantly, I felt pain, echoing through the connection like a scream from a long distance away. Pain, anguish, fury, fear.

  I opened my eyes and stared at Ashan. “What have you done?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “You destroyed Pearl’s brightest acolytes. Did you think she would simply let that go? She’s like you. Emotional.”

  The shock of it wore off, and now the dread set in, heavy and black in the pit of my stomach.

  I’d done this. We’d done this. Luis was under attack, injured, maybe dying. I had a flash of Manny Rocha, my first Warden partner, dying in a hail of bullets while I’d stood at a distance, unable to save him—only this was more intense, worse, because what I felt for Luis—no, the love I felt for him—left me horrified, frantic, and desperate.

  I had to save him.

  Ashan was already beginning to fade away. “No!” I screamed, and lunged for him. His form was solid, then softened into mist. For an instant he stood in his True Djinn form, something human eyes weren’t meant to comprehend. I had to look away.

  “Please,” I said. “Please take me there. Please, Ashan. I will beg, if that’s what you want.”

  “It isn’t,” he said, and I felt him slip away, into the aetheric. Only his voice remained, a whisper on the wind. “I want you to remember what it means to be one of us, not one of them. If you’d chosen to join me, you could have saved him. You could have saved them all.”

  And then he was gone, and I was alone, cold and alone, in an unknown forest.

  And far away from me, my love was fighting for his life.

  I let out a scream that shook leaves from the trees, and began to run.

  I had only gone perhaps a mile before I ran into Ashan again, standing in my path, shining like the moon. He looked at me strangely, as if he’d never seen me before.

  “You run,” he said. “You have no idea where you are, and yet you run.”

  I could feel Luis’s presence, like a compass tugging me onward. I didn’t slow down, only ran around Ashan’s still form and kept going. I didn’t know how far it was; I only knew that I couldn’t risk not trying.

  If Luis died, I would die with him, one way or another. And I would wish it to be so.

  Ashan, again, standing near the trunk of a massive, shadowed tree. I was remotely thankful for his presence, as he illuminated a hidden branch that stretched across the trail and might have tripped me. I vaulted it and kept running. “You won’t make it!” he called after me. “Cassiel!”

  He was lying to me. I had to believe he was lying.

  And so I ran. I ran until I was breathless, shaking, covered in sweat. I ran until my muscles trembled with exhaustion. Ashan continued to appear like a ghost in the darkness, silently watching me.

  I didn’t stop, until with Djinn suddenness he formed right in my path, close enough that I had to slide to a flailing halt to avoid hitting him. He caught me silently when I faltered, and held me there, staring down at me. He was dressed in an immaculate gray suit now, human but with an inhuman perfection to him. His eyes, and his tie, were teal blue, with glints of silver. I had never felt so grubbily human as that moment, face-to-face with the eerie beauty of what I’d left behind.

  “Enough,” he said. “If you must destroy yourself, do it in battle, not ... like this. Not uselessly.”

  And he whirled me away into a nauseating swirl of color, sound, taste, the rancid scent of death ... and out again, into a blast of cold air, smoke, and the roar of fire.

  I tripped over a corpse and fell face forward into bloody, churned ground.

  Chapter 13

  THE CORPSE I’D TRIPPED over was someone I didn’t recognize—a man, dressed in dark clothing. He had a rifle with him, and a handgun holstered on his belt. I tugged it free, picked up the rifle, and slung it across my shoulder as I rose to my knees.

  Ashan had brought me back to the school, but the school was unrecognizable. It was a burning inferno, only vaguely defined by the shapes of walls; the fire was incredibly hot and violent, with the flames in places leaping fifty feet into the night sky. Trees burned from their leafy crowns downward all around me. At first I thought that the school had been in the path of a forest fire, but that made no sense; there were powerful Fire Wardens present who should have been able to turn the flames away, even if they hadn’t been able to extinguish them completely.

  No, this was an attack.

  And a successful one.

  I didn’t hear the sound of the shot fired at me, but I felt the bullet slice across the meat of my upper arm, drawing a bloody slash; it felt like a hot poker applied to my skin, and for a second I didn’t register what had occurred. My instincts saved me; I threw myself flat and crawled to take the only shelter available—behind the corpse that I’d fallen over earlier. I rolled him on his side and curled up, unshipped the rifle, and carefully looked around for my assailant. It was impossible to hear the shots, but I saw a spark of misplaced flame from the trees—a muzzle flash in the darkness—and aimed and fired, using the power of the Earth to guide my shot to its target.

  I sensed the shock of the bullet’s impact through bone, brain, and out the other side as my shot found its home, and then I took another moment to study the scene more carefully. He seemed to have been the only remaining gunman, or the one assigned to prevent reinforcements from arriving; no one else fired on me.

  But I felt a harsh ripple on the aetheric, and turned toward it just as I saw the trees bending, whipping, and cracking. Something was coming for me, coming fast, and it was big. Very big.

  I glimpsed something dark, but it wasn’t an animal; the power driving it felt alien at its core, cold and lifeless. Void. Someone was driving a moving sphere of void through the forest, devouring all it touched, and it was heading straight for me.

  I couldn’t fight that, and it was too late to run. I got up to my feet, took three long steps, and prepared myself. There was a dead tree trunk lying at an angle nearby, and I ran for it, up its incline, and on the last step channeled power into my legs and jumped.

  The black sphere charged through the space where I’d been while I hung at the apogee of my jump, fifty feet overhead, and then landed crouched on the branch of a tree above. It hesitated, circling, and then zipped off in a different direction. It had found another target, and I heard someone scream.

  It was quickly cut off.

  From this vantage, with the treetop aflame above me, I could see the devastation wrought on the Wardens’ stronghold. The attack had shredded the metal fencing around the building, but it was the building itself that had sustained the most damage—concrete walls shattered, wood burned away, and now almost every part of the interior seemed to be burning with a white-hot intensity that was at odds with a normal blaze. It was being fed by a Fire Warden of abnormal power and concentration ... one of Pearl’s, I imagined. I could feel the dark shimmer of her power in the air, though I couldn’t locate her presence.

  Evidently her adept that was managing the Void was less well equipped, because after several moments the black sphere faltered, smashed through a few more unlucky trees, then abruptly shrank to a pinpoint and vanished with an implosive pop louder even than the roar of the fire. I jumped down from the tree and began hunting for the rest of Pearl’s attacking force.

  Instead, I saw a Warden—one I recognized, though I didn’t know her name—waving at me frantically as she rose from behind the cover of some bushes and dropped what must have been a very, very good veil. I raced to her, keeping low, and as I ducked behind the brush I saw that she wasn’t alone—she had dozens with her, including most of the other Wardens. Almost all of them were injured or exhausted from the fight. “Thank God,” she said. She was holding a bloody bandage to her side, and offered me a real, though tense, smile of welcome. “I’m Gayle.”

  I nodded
, scanning the weary faces. “Where are the rest?” There were too few children, and no sign of Luis and Ibby. Gayle’s smile faded, and she looked back at the burning inferno of the school.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “We couldn’t reach them. Marion, Janice, Luis, Shasa, Ben—at least five of the kids. We tried, but we were under attack. We had to save those we could reach. I’m so sorry.”

  I shouldn’t have blamed them for that, but in that moment I felt a surge of pure hatred nevertheless. You left them to die. Gayle must have known that, must have seen it burning in my eyes, but to her credit, she didn’t back away. Maybe she was simply too tired, and too badly wounded.

  I turned away and stared at the burning ruins. Adrenaline and fear made it difficult to sort out my emotions, but I calmed myself and listened, listened for that tiny whisper that always existed—that fragile yet steely-strong connection with Luis.

  I felt a discordant jangle of emotions not my own.

  Alive. He was alive, somewhere in there.

  I opened my eyes, turned to Gayle, and said, “They’re inside. We must get them out.”

  She looked at her exhausted, wounded band, and the huddled, frightened children they protected. “I can’t. I’m sorry, but we have to concentrate on protecting these kids. We can’t go back in there. I have only one living Fire Warden, and she’s badly injured.”

  I couldn’t fault her logic, or her judgment, but I wasn’t willing to accept defeat that easily. Not when it meant the lives of those I loved. “Then watch my back,” I said. I handed her the rifle, and she checked the clip with a competence that gave me confidence.

  “Good luck.” She nodded. “If you can get them out, head for the fire road to the east. If everything works right, we should have rescue transportation coming in the next twenty minutes, but we can’t wait for you for long if it means risking the lives of those we already have.”

  I rolled to my feet and ran, keeping low, around the side of the school. The flames weren’t as intense here—in fact, part of the wall seemed intact, though heavy iron gray smoke poured through shattered windows. The door was open, and two small bodies lay huddled together on the bare ground outside.

  I ran for the fence, still largely intact on this side, ripped it apart with Earth power, and left it dangling open behind me as I scooped up the two children and dragged them away from danger. Both were almost unrecognizable under the thick layers of soot on their faces, but I knew the bright red blaze of her hair—the girl was Gillian. It took me longer to work out the boy’s identity, but of course it was Mike, her constant companion and protector.

  Mike was dead. I checked him to be sure, and tried all the techniques I knew to revive the boy, but his spirit was gone, and his body unresponsive. He’d been badly burned, his lungs scorched beyond any survival. Mike, the Fire Warden, had been overwhelmed by the blaze he’d tried to manage.

  But he’d saved Gillian—no doubt at his own expense. She was unconscious, and suffering from smoke inhalation, but alive. I poured power into her to stabilize her condition, and then plunged back through the fence and handed her off to Gayle, who put her with the other injured children.

  The door into the building was firmly closed and blazing hot, but so far there were no flames at the window where the two children must have escaped—only a thick black river of smoke pouring out.

  I climbed in.

  The smoke closed around me like hot, smothering cloth, and I immediately dropped to the floor to try to find anything like breathable air. It was there, but very thin and tasting of toxins. I couldn’t see well—between the billows of gray and the dazzling leap of fire on the far wall, it took me a moment to realize that I’d dropped into some kind of library. Books were aflame at the far end of the room. A plastic chair and table were in place, but melting into surrealistic shapes as the flames approached. I crawled, feeling the synthetic carpet clinging and sticky beneath me. It, too, was melting from the heat. Breathing turned more difficult as I approached the far doorway; there were flames pouring through it, but moving along the ceiling, and only gradually descending toward the walls.

  Still possible, if not safe.

  In the hallway, I came across another body—a Warden. It was young Ben. He’d been shot in the back three times—center chest twice and once in the head. Dead. I left him and crawled on, not knowing if it was even possible to find the others. All I knew was that Luis, at least, was still alive, somewhere in this inferno.

  And I had to find him. I couldn’t leave him to face this alone.

  At the end of the hallway, a curtain of intensely hot flames burned—intensely hot, and oddly directed. Focused. Pearl’s attackers were focusing their efforts here, which meant that there was some reason for it.

  Someone was conducting a spirited and lasting defense.

  It was counterintuitive to head for the worst of the blaze—not to mention insane—but I sensed the roil of power that overlaid the conflagration. That wasn’t merely fire ahead of me; it was a weapon, wielded by a master.

  And there was an equally expert defense, mounted from the other side.

  I had no protection I could summon up for the risk of burning, but there was no question in my mind of turning back. Luis was beyond that thick wall of destruction. Isabel would be there with him.

  And I would not abandon them.

  I should have taken Ashan’s offer. As a Djinn, I could have entered this fight with significant advantages ... but at the risk of losing what made me want to fight so hard. It was the losses I’d suffered that made me part of this world; Djinn had no such connection. Not the Djinn I had known, or been.

  I couldn’t give up my hard-won humanity for power. I had to find a way. I rose to a crouch, readied myself, and closed my eyes.

  And then I raced forward, into the fire.

  Humans have an atavistic terror of burning, and I hadn’t counted on it being so strongly encoded in the cells of my body, but the instant I felt the flames hiss through my hair and clothes, my body went into terrified overdrive, releasing massive amounts of adrenaline, blocking out pain. The world shrank to a single, unalterable imperative: run.

  And I ran, straight and fast, through a roaring fury of heat. Even with the deadening influence of the adrenaline, I distantly felt the lash of pain as my clothing caught fire and burned around me. Every step forward seemed to take a nightmare hour, though it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before I hit the barrier at the end of the fire.

  It was an impenetrable barrier of stone, flung up out of the Earth’s bones.

  I couldn’t stop. I reached out to Luis and pulled an enormous, crippling flood of power that melted the stone in front of me in a rippling wave. It was extraordinarily dangerous, and I felt the pressure being exerted from the other side to block me out. The stone hardened, and I faced a nightmare possibility of being trapped, sealed in the rock, crushed ... but then the pressure fell away, and I tumbled through into hot, smoky air that felt as cold as ice against my scorched body. I hit the smoldering wooden floor and rolled. Someone threw thick cloth over me, and I felt hands slapping at me, trying to douse the flames. At the same time, someone sent an enormous burst of power toward the stone wall through which I’d come, to seal it shut again.

  The first face I saw as the blanket was withdrawn was Luis’s. His eyes widened, and his lips parted in either horror or astonishment—it could have been either, given my current state—but then he pulled me up to a sitting position and hugged me fiercely. The adrenaline was fading as quickly as it had dumped into my bloodstream, and the pain that flashed through me was agonizing ... and then muted, as his healing power began to do its work.

  No, not just his power ... Isabel’s, as well. She was beside me, too, and her hand was resting on my shoulder. The two complex signatures of power, as distinctive as types of wine, mixed inside me and exploded in a powerful new way, driving my cells to heal at a dizzying rate.

  I hugged them both close, shuddering in shock a
nd gratitude, and felt Isabel’s arms wind around my neck. Oh, child. Beautiful child. I kissed Luis quickly, put my hand on his unshaven cheek, and said, “Ben’s dead. So is the boy, Mike. Gillian is alive—I got her outside the fence. Gayle has most of the others hidden outside, waiting for transportation.”

  “We’ve got almost everyone else,” Luis said. “It happened fast. I don’t know how; Ben must have been taken out first just as the fireworks got started. They meant to burn us all.”

  I didn’t think so. I looked up at the others, who were sitting or lying in the small defensive space left to them. Marion still had her wheelchair, and she took time to spare me a quick look from her maintenance of the barrier that held back the ravening fire. “Thanks for joining us,” she said. “But it might not have been a good idea. We’re not doing so well.”

  She was right about that; the situation looked bad. Earth could defend against Fire, but not for long. Ben’s Weather skills had been their best possible option; he could have kept the air fresh and clear, and starved the fire, given enough time and power.

  The elderly Earth Warden, Janice, was in charge of the children, who were huddled close against her for comfort. She’d put two of them under, and they seemed to be sleeping with unnatural peacefulness. When I met Janice’s eyes, she said, “We can’t have them panicking.” And she was right about that; having these extraordinary children losing control of their talents here, now, would be deadly to us all.

  Isabel tugged on my sleeve. I looked down at her in distracted affection and kissed her forehead, but she only tugged harder. She leaned in and whispered in my ear, “We’re in trouble.”

  “I know that, Ibby.”

  “No, we’re in trouble. Really.”

  “Can you get through the fire and get out?”

  “Sure,” she said, and shrugged. “But I can’t get anybody else out. They’ll let me go; they already told me so. And Sanjay and Elijah, too. But nobody else. And I can’t leave Uncle Luis.”