by Rachel Caine
We were all in danger of death, I thought, but didn’t have the breath left to speak. The air was thick and fetid, and it was an effort to even try to draw it in, as shimmering and hot as it was. Around us, the school was crumbling under the attack, and our circle of safety felt now like a slower, crueler way to die.
I looked down at the bottle in my hand and scrambled up to my knees. Luis struggled to get up, wiping blood from his mouth, but he was done. There was little strength left in him now. Certainly not enough to manage a Djinn imprisoned against his will, like Rashid.
Rashid would help us. Perhaps. But like all Djinn, he hated being compelled to do anything. Even his regard for me, even his distant appreciation for the humans around me, might not be enough.
He might find a way to allow us to die, simply out of a basic, inhuman need for revenge. It would be easy for him, so easy.
I couldn’t give him a reason.
I dropped the bottle to the floor, unopened, and grabbed a fallen slab of rock. Luis, guessing what I was about to do, flailed a weakened hand toward me, but he was too late.
I smashed the bottle with the stone, and felt a gust of something that was not quite wind, not quite power blow through us like a shock wave. It felt like a sigh.
“No,” Luis whispered. There were tears in his eyes as he collapsed with his cheek against the stone. “No, Cass, why? Why did you—”
“No other choice,” I choked, and fell beside him. Even Janice had collapsed to her knees, though Elijah and Sanjay were still moving, still a threat. “Can’t compel him.”
He was our last hope, but Rashid didn’t appear. Seconds ticked by, brutal and hopeless. Isabel went down, and Shasa; I dropped the stone and crawled to her, pulling her into my weak arms. The power inside me boiled impotently. There was nothing it could do. I tried to soften the stone beneath us, provide an escape route, but our enemies had thought of that, too.
No way out.
Elijah began to claw at the walls with his power, fighting Marion for control. He had more power, and he was winning.
“Give up,” Janice said between coughs. Her eyes were bloodshot and strained from gasping for what little air was left. She no longer radiated warmth and comfort, only desperation and fury. “Why won’t you just give up? Do you really think you can win?”
I didn’t give up because I couldn’t. That, I thought was something Janice, a mercenary at heart, could never really understand ... that there were some battles too important to retreat from, at any cost.
I’d gambled on Rashid, but that might have been my own blindness. I trusted a Djinn because I’d once been a Djinn, and yet I knew all too well that he had no obligation, no reason to help us. Luis had been ruthless, but he might have been right to keep Rashid captive.
No. I had done right.
I would die doing right.
I would die beside Luis, holding Isabel, and at least we would be together. At least that.
A blast of fresh air swept through the room, sweet and cold, and I gasped it in with helpless hunger. Luis’s lungs heaved, too, and Isabel’s. It braced all of us, and gave us a precious few more moments.
Unfortunately, it also gave Sanjay the fuel he needed to ignite an intense, tightly compacted fireball in the palm of his small hand, and fling it directly at me.
I had no chance of avoiding it, or of turning it aside. I reached for Earth power to try to form a shield of stone, but he’d acted so quickly I was drastically unprepared.
Luis lunged across me and intercepted the strike. The incandescent ball of boiling plasma hit him in the chest, and threw him like a rag doll into the cracked, smoking wall. He screamed, and convulsed, and I tried to get to him. I tried, but Sanjay threw another bolt, and this time I was able to raise the stone in time to block it, but Luis ...
He was lying motionless, limp as an animal broken at the side of the road.
The scream that came from my throat left it bloody and raw, and instead of relying on power I rushed the boy, shocking him, and grabbed him in my arms in a tackle. He felt scalding-hot, as if in the grip of a killing fever. I put my hand flat on his forehead and managed to moderate the power that I poured into him, although my instincts were to kill, to punish. ... But it wasn’t the boy I needed to kill.
It was the old woman, with her fixed and mocking smile, who watched from behind Elijah, with her other sleeping hostages around her. I lunged for her.
Elijah simply batted me aside, as if I were an insect, and sliced his hand down at my neck. I sensed the force he was wielding, blunt and brutal; he’d have crushed my flesh and bones, destroyed me without a single moment of mercy.
Something caught his hand on the way down.
Rashid.
The Djinn’s perfect suit and tie were at odds with the feral twist of his lips and the fire in his eyes—silver and as hot as the blaze bursting the stones around us. He held Elijah by the arm and looked down at where I lay dazed on the floor. “Get up,” he said. “And don’t think this makes us even, Cassiel. Your human owes me debts that will take generations to repay.”
“I know,” I said, and rolled to my feet. “Is the air your gift?”
“I couldn’t have you dying before I reaped my rewards.” Rashid looked down at the boy, who was struggling to break free. “This one’s stronger than I’d expect.” And Rashid was controlling him without much apparent effort. Impressive.
“Don’t harm him,” I said.
“Really, do you think I am so cruel?” Rashid did a good job of seeming offended, but I knew he wasn’t; I knew him too well to think he would blink at any action, no matter how morally offensive to a human. “Hush, child. Enough.” He touched a fingertip to Elijah’s forehead, and the boy went limp. Rashid dropped him to the floor and extended his hand to me. I wasn’t too proud to accept the help.
“Luis,” I said, with dawning horror. “Luis was hit—”
“Yes.” Rashid didn’t move; he didn’t so much as glance at where Luis lay. I rushed past Rashid, but he caught me and dragged me to a sliding stop. “Wait.” He held up a sharp finger to silence me, more of a threat than a gesture. Then he tilted it toward Luis.
Who was sitting up, staring down at the charred hole in his shirt. It was a black-edged gap of more than ten inches across. Beneath it, his skin looked normal and undamaged.
I wasn’t imagining it this time. His flame tattoos moved, shifting like shadows in nervous flickers, and then went still again.
Luis touched the burned edges of the fabric and looked up at me, lips parted in wonder.
“What happened?” he asked. He still looked pale and ill, but he should have been dead. That plasma ball from Sanjay had hit him with full force, and as an Earth Warden he had no real defense against it.
As an Earth Warden.
Luis, whether he recognized it or not, was manifesting a critical second power. I’d seen it, from time to time; I’d felt it in those inked tattoos, but I hadn’t understood what it was. But I did know that this time it had saved his life, and mine as well.
“As you see,” Rashid said, “he’s in no immediate need of my help. Not that I would give it.”
“He’s still bleeding,” I said.
“Survivable. And also not my problem.”
I had half expected that. “Then can you help us out of here?”
Rashid’s handsome, inhumanly sharp face relaxed into an unexpectedly charming smile. “For a price, of course.”
There were too many lives at stake to play this game. “I freed you,” I said, and held his gaze. It wasn’t easy, with those hot silver eyes boring into mine. “I freed you, and that is price enough, Rashid. Don’t push your luck.”
“Don’t push yours, friend Cassiel. One day you’ll need me more than you need me today.”
I looked around at the collapsing shell of our safety. At Shasa, somehow holding back the fire, at the last edge of her strength. At Marion, doing the same with the crumbling stone barrier. At Luis, Isabel, the fallen c
hildren. “If I need you more than this,” I said, “then I don’t think even you will be enough.”
Rashid cocked his head, as if surprised by that, and nodded. “Await me,” he said, and walked out, through the barrier of flames. Fire didn’t bother Djinn. In fact, it strengthened them. Djinn were born of inferno, long ago; that was why we’d been named devils, from time to time. But we were simpler than that.
And much, much more.
The attack against us fell into confusion, and then died away. The fires, left undirected by someone with that affinity, snuffed themselves out; they’d long ago exhausted their natural fuel. A few guttered in the ashes, but most of it was smoke, and even that quickly thinned.
Rashid came back, dragging two bodies. I didn’t know either one, but he hadn’t left much to recognize, either. He dropped them at my feet, like a cat leaving kills for its owner, and turned toward Janice.
I’d almost forgotten her. She was moving quietly toward the back of the room, where the stones had broken. No doubt she’d planned to slip out while we were distracted.
She was carrying the two boys in her arms, one on each hip.
Rashid looked at me. “Yours?” he asked.
“Mine,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Oh, there will be a charge. We’ll discuss that later. Privately.” He grinned again, and then turned his attention to Luis. “And later for you, too, Warden.”
Luis didn’t try to speak. He just shook his head. I glanced at him, tormented; he needed healing, and quickly. Rashid wasn’t about to do it; in fact, as I turned toward him, the Djinn evaporated into flickers of darkness and was gone.
Marion waved me on. “I’ll take care of him,” she said. “Go. Get her.”
I rolled the tension out of my shoulders and walked toward Janice. She tried to move toward the exit, but I easily outmaneuvered her. Anger made me quick, and feral.
“I can still kill them,” she warned me. “Doesn’t take much. You know that.”
“It wouldn’t take much to kill you, either,” I said. “And I’d do it before I let you go. I don’t want the boys harmed, but if you do it, it’s your choice. Mine is to stop you.”
“At any cost,” she said. “Really.”
“Yes.” I felt more like a Djinn in that moment than at any point I could remember since falling into flesh. “I promise you, you won’t leave here alive unless you put those boys down, safely.”
Janice flinched. What she saw in me woke fear, and obedience. She bent and carefully laid Sanjay down, then Elijah. As she straightened, she held up her hands in surrender. “All right,” she said. “They’re down. Deal?”
“Deal,” I agreed. And on the aetheric level, I wrapped power around her rapidly beating heart. She tried to stop me, but in the end, without her glamour, she was far weaker than I’d expected. “I didn’t tell you I would let you leave alive. Only that you wouldn’t if you failed to do what I said. You bargain badly.”
And then I killed her.
It was a great deal more merciful than she deserved.
Marion was dangerously weak, but her power and mine sufficed to heal the ragged tear in Luis’s artery, at least well enough that he could move safely. The volume of blood he’d lost was another matter. We accelerated the production of it, but it would be days before he was himself again. Still, he was conscious, steady, and able to walk, if stiffly; that was a great deal better than either of us had expected.
There was a bruise forming on his chin. He rubbed it as I helped him to his feet. “Damn, girl, you didn’t have to make your point quite that hard.”
“There wasn’t time for polite argument,” I said. “And you deserved it.”
He sighed. “Yeah, I kinda did. But you’re not going to hear it again. I’m blaming it on the blood loss.”
His sense of humor was back, for which I was heartily grateful. I braced him until he could stand on his own, and tried to step away.
He didn’t let me. His hands went around my upper arms, and held me in place, close to him. “You bet our lives,” he said. “On a Djinn’s goodwill.”
“It was better than betting it on his obedience,” I said. “You tricked him into the bottle. It wasn’t his choice. This was. You have to trust Djinn, Luis. You can’t force them to be what you want them to be.”
I was speaking of Rashid, most certainly, but I was also speaking of myself. And he knew that.
“You still hate me?” he asked. “Don’t go saying you didn’t. I felt it. I know how much it hurt you, what I did. What I said, sure, but mostly what I did. I never wanted that, Cass. Never.”
“And I never wanted to leave you,” I said. “Please believe that.”
He nodded, eyes gone dark. “Did you find her?”
“Yes.”
“Did you hurt her?”
“Some,” I said, and shook my head. “Not enough. Not nearly enough.”
“You will.”
“We will.”
“Yes.” He kissed my forehead, with so much tenderness it melted the last of the icy pain within me. “We will.”
We left the ruins behind.
The other Wardens had met us on the way to the fire road, to the east ... a ragtag, injured bunch, but they hadn’t lost anyone else. A few asked about Janice. None of us commented on her loss with more than a brief acknowledgment of it. I wondered what Marion would say, in the end. She, more than anyone else, had made a catastrophic mistake in allowing Janice such unfettered, trusted access to her most vulnerable charges. The pain of that weighed heavily on her—visibly, in fact, in the slump of her shoulders and the new lines on her face. I’d managed to retrieve her wheelchair from the ruins, but the electrical power had been destroyed, and no one had the energy left to repair it. She pushed herself along the rocky path, face welded into an emotionless mask. Alone with her thoughts, and her failures.
Miraculously, only one of the children had died: Mike, whom I’d found outside of the building. Gillian seemed inconsolable; she’d sought out Isabel, and the two girls walked together, hands clasped. I wondered how that friendship had developed. They didn’t seem at all similar, really.
Humans often confused me, though.
The Wardens traveled in unexpected silence, communicating in careful whispers and gestures as we moved down the twisting path. At regular intervals, we paused to take a head count.
Just before we reached the fire road, we stopped for the last one. Luis and I stood together, not touching but closer than we’d felt since the decision to bring Isabel here. I still didn’t know if that had been a mistake, or a necessary evil; she seemed better, despite the desperate last stand in the school. Maybe Marion’s treatments had helped, though the seizures she’d suffered still frightened me, as did the pessimistic estimate of her chance of long-term survival.
I looked around for her, but there were two other Warden children behind us. “Ibby?”
Someone shushed me. Gayle passed me, rapidly conducting her head count. Then she came back, frowning, counting again.
Dread gathered in my stomach. I stopped her. “What is it?”
“Two short,” she said. “I didn’t see anyone leave.”
Neither had I, and it alarmed me. I’d been vigilant. Whoever had left the party had done so under cover of a veil, and a very good one.
Luis and I exchanged a look of perfect understanding, and spun away in separate directions, checking faces. When I reached the end of the line, I turned and ran back to meet him halfway. We instinctively grabbed hold of each other.
“She’s not here,” Luis panted. “Ibby’s gone. The other girl, too. Gillian.”
Gillian, who had been so distraught. But had they gone on their own, or had they been taken?
“We have to look for them,” Luis said. “They’ve only been gone fifteen minutes, since the last check. Can’t have gone far.”
Gayle grabbed him and pulled him to a halt. “Hey!” she hissed. “We’ve got refugees and wounded, and we don’t know t
hat they’re safe yet! We can’t go tearing through the woods shouting!”
He shoved her back, but he must have known, as I did, that she was right. “Then what?” he spat back, but quietly enough. “Someone took her! I’m not just giving up on her!”
“We may be able to track her on the aetheric,” I said quietly. “And we don’t know that she was taken, Luis. We don’t know that at all.”
I was trying to prepare him, because I didn’t believe, not for a moment, that Ibby had been spirited away against her will. The child was, if nothing else, a fighter; she’d been taken once, and she would never go quietly again. Added to that, she was in the midst of a group, and no one had noticed her, or Gillian’s, disappearance.
She’d gone willingly, wherever she had gone. And she’d taken Gillian with her.
“Well?” Gayle whispered. “We can’t wait. I have to keep them moving. We’re vulnerable out here.”
“Go,” Luis said. “We’re staying.” I nodded. We stepped out of the group, and Gayle, after a troubled frown, led the others on into the dark. It took surprisingly little time before we were lost in the dark again, just the two of us.
Luis limped over to me as I stood surveying the dark, cold woods. The school’s fires had gone out, or at least sunk to sullen ashes; it was once again full, true night, and a moonless one. “Let’s go,” he said, and limped on, back toward the trail. “We might be able to pick up their tracks where they left the group.” I didn’t move. After several steps, he stopped and looked back. “Cass?”
“Stay where you are,” I said softly. “Don’t move.”
I heard a soft, whispering laugh through the trees. “You’re good; I’ll give you that,” said a woman’s voice. I recognized it all too easily. “Mira, he’s a tasty one. Yours?”
Luis started to turn, but Esmeralda—Snake Girl—whipped out of the shadows with blinding, reptilian speed, wrapping coils around him with crushing force. Her human half rose up, beautiful and terrifying as she hissed and bared her venomous fangs. Luis struggled, but Esmeralda was too physically strong to budge ... and when I tried to break her hold, my Earth-based powers bounced off of her without effect. In a very real sense, Esmeralda was part of that power. It had taken a Djinn’s death to seal her in the form she was in and take away much of her strength; that only served notice of how incredibly powerful and dangerous she’d once been.
