by Rachel Caine
Venna leaned over me as I struggled to right myself. She reached out with her little-girl hand and touched my cheek in a curiously gentle way, cocked her head to one side, and then—with no warning at all—she walloped me so hard that I flew ten feet into a broken wedge of folded steel. It had once been a door, I supposed. If I could have bled more, I would have. It didn’t seem at all fair that I could hang here in this state, on the edge of death, and that my nerves hadn’t shut themselves off yet. It would be okay if I couldn’t feel this. But that was the whole point: they wanted me to feel it.
Every last bloody second of it.
I coughed and clawed my way out of the rubble. I got to my feet and stood there, trembling but erect. I lifted my chin and said, “That’s all you’ve got? You hit like a girl, Venna.”
She bared her teeth and became a feral animal, rushing at me with clawed fingers and snapping teeth, and I knew this wasn’t going to go well, not at all.
But I’d signed up for the whole ride, hadn’t I? I’d known what I was getting into, and in that split second before Venna actually reached me, I gave up all hope of living through any of it. That was a black kind of peace, perversely comforting.
Something hit Venna before she reached me—a pale blur, something big and muscular. Venna was knocked off course, into a pile of rubble. Her screams of rage pulverized a few of the concrete blocks into beach sand, and I blinked, amazed that I was still standing.
There was another Djinn standing in front of me—facing away from me, toward the others.
Oh.
It was the nameless Djinn who’d been chauffeuring us around the country. The vessel. The avatar.
And now, it said, with my own voice, “Stay away from my mother, you bastards!”
Imara. My daughter, the Earth Oracle. Like David, she couldn’t leave her own personal stronghold, where she was holding out against the madness of the Djinn . . . but she’d found a way to remote-pilot the avatar, the same way David and Whitney had done.
“Imara?” I blurted. “What are you doing?”
“Saving your life, I think. Honestly, do you ever stop doing insane things? What were you thinking?” The Djinn glanced over his shoulder, and in his expression I saw my daughter’s harassed shadow. “You shouldn’t be here. I can’t believe you walked into this with your eyes open.”
“Would you feel better if I’d blundered into it stupidly?”
“Maybe I would.” Imara snapped the Djinn’s head back around as Ashan walked forward, and I felt the energy change, grow darker. Ashan had killed my daughter, in her original Djinn form. She hadn’t forgotten that, not at all. “Back off.”
He didn’t seem to even hear her, or care that there was any kind of obstacle standing in his way. When he got within reach of the Djinn, Ashan simply reached out and pushed, and the Djinn went flying, off balance and overmatched. The only comfort I took was that Imara herself wasn’t being hurt. She was safe, somewhere else.
Ashan was looking every bit the vicious, smooth businessman he’d always appeared to me. He’d always been partial to well-tailored suits, and this one was gray, matched to an off-white shirt and sky-blue tie. His physical form had no more personality to it than a store mannequin.
He reached me, not seeming to hurry at all, and grabbed me around the throat. He did that alien head-tilt thing, just like Venna, as if trying to decide exactly what type of pond scum I might be, and—still holding my throat—turned and dragged me toward the others. Venna had gotten up and was engaged in mortal combat with the Djinn avatar, who was doing his—her?—level best to keep the kid away from my back.
But my dangers were also right in front of me, and there were a lot of them.
Ashan pulled me into the middle of the Djinn, then turned and stared right into my eyes.
“Tell us why,” he said. “Why you did this.”
“I needed to get your attention,” I wheezed, around his iron grip. “I think I have it now.”
“You do.” Ashan’s smile was as artificial and cold as the rest of him, and just as assured. “You will regret it.”
“Oh, sweetie, so ahead of you on that one. Let me go or I’ll bleed all over you.”
“Promise?” His smile widened. “Maybe soon we’ll let you die. Would you like that?”
I had my hands free, so I shot him a finger. “Not as much as I’d like to watch you try it.” It was getting harder to talk around his kung- fu grip, and I wasn’t sure that last smart-ass remark came out as anything but garbled chokes. Ashan liked to play with his food. I thought that as long as I was giving back, he wouldn’t move on to the next phase of agony.
Maybe.
The avatar had lost his battle with Venna. That didn’t surprise me much, but it did alarm me. It meant that Imara was playing hurt, or handicapped. Normally, she could have wiped the floor with any Djinn who got in her way, but now the avatar was down, battered and hurt, and Venna was stepping calmly over the body to get to me.
The beaten Djinn avatar rolled over and up to its feet, but it wasn’t in any shape to come at Venna again on my behalf.
The Djinn looked past Venna, at me, and I saw my daughter’s torment in those strange eyes. “Mom,” she said softly. “Get ready. He’s coming.”
Ashan’s hand gripped tighter, bending cartilage in my throat, and what little air I was gasping in cut off. I flailed at him, and it made no difference. None at all.
It never occurred to me to wonder who he was, until a shadow formed in the corner of my eye, and David walked out of it, carrying a . . . box?
I was clearly hallucinating. Oxygen deprivation.
David put the box down, lunged forward, and grabbed Ashan’s arm.
And broke it.
Ashan yelled in surprise and let go of me as he stared down at the dangling odd angle of his forearm, then caught hold of it with his left and snapped it back into a straight line, reconstructing the damage—but it gave David time to grab me and pull me away from Ashan.
David’s eyes were molten bronze, blazing so hot I could feel the feverish intensity behind them. He glanced at me once, a frantic, horrified look, and then put his attention on Venna, who was shrieking toward us like something out of a first-rate horror movie.
He slammed her back, into the Djinn avatar, who in turn slung her hard into a wall and pinned her there.
“No time,” David gasped. He was trembling now, and I could feel the fear in him. “Jo, in the box. You know what to do. I—”
He cried out, fell to his knees, and I watched the David I knew disappear. He fought it, oh God he fought it with everything in him, but he was a Djinn, and a Conduit, and he couldn’t hold back.
I watched his eyes turn pale, then white.
Panic drove me to follow his orders. I could lose myself; I could stand that. I couldn’t see him reduced to a puppet, something used to hurt me. He wouldn’t survive that. God, why had he done this? He’d been safe!
I ripped back the top of the box and found . . . bottles. Lots of bottles, all with corks in the tops.
It came to me in a blinding rush what he wanted me to do.
I grabbed the first one I could reach, popped the cork with my thumb, and focused on David as the Mother took possession of him.
“Be thou bound to my service!” I yelled, and didn’t dare stop for a breath. “Be thou bound to my service! Be thou bound to my service!” As incantations go, it wasn’t much—I spit the words out so fast that they were almost incomprehensible, and for a terrible second I thought I’d rushed too much . . . that it wouldn’t work at all.
It felt like the entire Djinn world took in a collective breath, and I knew I had only a few seconds to live. They wouldn’t be playing with me anymore now. Not anymore.
David screamed—an inhuman scream, torment and fury—and dissolved into mist.
Venna, behind me, broke free of the avatar and lunged for me. If she could force me to break the bottle before I corked it, he’d go free.
I hung o
n to the slippery glass like grim death, and corked it. I hadn’t waited for the mist to flow inside, but I hadn’t really needed to; it was the corking that mattered, and suddenly I felt a complex network of power snap into place between me and David, overlaying the bonds we already had.
Now all I had to do was release him.
Venna hit me like a freight train just as I thumbed out the cork, and I was smashed against the floor. Somehow, I managed to cradle the bottle against breakage, and I curled in on myself, holding it, keeping it safe.
The Djinn piled on me, and I knew, as I felt unnaturally hot, strong hands take hold of parts of my body, that I’d be ripped to pieces.
David reformed in the middle of the Djinn and fought them off. That sounds simple. It wasn’t. His eyes blazed bronze again, and I could see the focus and fear on his face as he stood over me and wreaked damage on his fellow Djinn. It allowed me the space to crawl away, inching along over broken concrete and steel to where he’d left the box.
The avatar was there, holding bottles with the corks already out. He passed me one, and I focused on Venna, who was ripping at David like a wild animal. She’d kill him, and me, if she wasn’t stopped. “Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound to my service.”
I got all three iterations out before Venna reached me, and she shrieked and disappeared. I hadn’t been at all sure that it would work on the Old Djinn; I’d suspected it wouldn’t. But maybe, somewhere out there, somebody liked me after all, despite the evidence to the contrary.
I corked the bottle and slotted it back into the box. The avatar, in turn, threw me the next empty. This time, I targeted Ashan.
Ashan snarled and misted away before I could complete the incantation. Coward.
Rahel didn’t run. She leaped like a spider out of the shadows as I turned my concentration on her, and sent me, and the bottle, flying before I could stammer out more than half the incantation. The avatar dropped what he was doing and grabbed her, wrestling her to a halt before she could rip my head off, and I finished gasping the last iteration out: “—bound to my service.”
Screams. Mist. A cork in the bottle, which went back in the box.
But the rest of the Djinn weren’t going to let me continue this; most of them had been corked before, and even if they hadn’t been under the Earth’s control they’d have come after me in earnest. They’d killed Wardens for far, far less.
David broke free of a knot of them and backed up to stand over me. He dragged me to my feet and said, “Get us help.”
He meant Rahel and Venna, locked in the bottles. According to the rules that governed bottled Djinn, neither he nor any Djinn could touch the containers once they’d been filled. I had to open them myself.
One of the other Djinn thought faster than I could move. She couldn’t touch the bottles, but she could touch the box they were stored in, and she overturned it, sending dozens of bottles—all corked, all identical—skittering over the debris. Two of them were full. I just had to find those two.
It wasn’t quite a needle in a haystack, but hanging as I was on the edge of death, it was close enough.
“Keep them off me!” I shouted to David and the avatar—whether Imara or Whitney was piloting it now, I couldn’t tell—and lunged for the first bottle. I uncorked it. Nothing. I dropped it where it lay and went to the next. Nothing, again.
One of the bottles was smashed. I hoped that wasn’t one of the two I was looking for, but I didn’t see either Rahel and Venna coming to wreak unholy vengeance on me, so probably not.
A Djinn grabbed my ankle as I reached for the next bottle, and yanked me toward him. I managed to close my fingers around it as I was dragged backward, and as I felt him take hold of the other leg, I knew he was going to wishbone me—just rip me in half with one pull.
I uncorked the bottle, and felt that rush of power and control settle in.
Venna formed, blue eyes calm and utterly in control. She looked down at me, nodded, and grabbed hold of the Djinn who was about to subdivide me. Venna didn’t mess around. She couldn’t kill him, but she could—and did—rip enough out of his physical form that he had to mist away and recover.
Then she turned to me and helped me up. I was now holding two open bottles, hers and David’s, and it occurred to me that balancing another one was going to be problematic—but I needed to throw Rahel in on their side. There were far too many possessed Djinn, not enough defenders, and already David had bloody cuts on him that weren’t healing. It was a sign of how much power he was expending.
Plus, I needed healing, and I needed it fast, so that I could funnel power to my Djinn before it was too late.
Under normal circumstances, David could have healed me, and I could have replenished his power after I was feeling better—but these circumstances were far from normal. We were in a smoking, radioactive hole in the ground, fighting for our lives against an enemy that could, at any time, destroy us all.
I went up into the aetheric, looking desperately for something, anything to help . . . and found it, heading our way at a very fast clip. Two bright, shimmering spots that radiated power.
Wardens.
They were still minutes away, but they were coming, and they were powerful. It would help. With two more Wardens to anchor the bottled Djinn, and capture others . . .
But first I had to make it until they arrived.
Venna and David suddenly left their individual fights, heading for the same spot at the same time, which looked like a recipe for disaster. I should have known better. One of the Djinn had picked up a massive section of concrete, and was pitching it out of the shadows and smoke at me. It would have flattened me like a cartoon if it had landed.
David and Venna caught it and threw it back into the Djinn, bowling a few of them over. But David staggered, and I saw his wounds start to bleed more heavily. Venna also was looking less than steady.
Because I was losing ground, too. Adrenaline had sustained me for a while, but now I could feel my body starting to lose its way. Having the additional drain of the Djinn didn’t help, either.
I didn’t think I was going to make it until help arrived. That might have been a character flaw, but I could feel the resignation growing inside of me, the willingness to finally, ultimately just . . . let go.
David looked at me, and I saw the emotion in his face, the knowledge. He understood what I was feeling, and thinking, and he couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t.
He exchanged a look with Venna and backed up next to me, took me in his arms, and poured energy into me, healing me in a hot, burning rush that made my body arch against him in a parody of love. I heard myself screaming, I heard him whispering to me, frantic and desperate.
“No!” Venna said sharply, and grabbed David and pulled him off me. She shoved him away, at the oncoming group of three Djinn who were coming at us. “Stop them!” He let out an anguished yell and hit them head-on.
Venna grabbed my hands and took up what David had started. She poured power into me in a burning wave, forcing my body together and sealing it with more power than I’d ever felt. It hurt, oh God, it felt like being boiled alive, and I knew I was screaming but I couldn’t stop.
She wasn’t just healing me, she was undoing what she’d done to me before—and that was some serious magic. Whatever she’d done to suspend me at the edge of death, it had been significantly more powerful than I’d thought.
Venna drained herself dry. I saw the blaze in her blue eyes die down, go dim, and then go out. She released my hands and started to disappear—but not into mist. Into sharp-edged shadows, angles, an alien and terrifying geometry that I recognized instantly.
She had just given up so much of herself, so fast, that she was becoming a creature made up of hunger. She was losing herself, but not to the Mother; she was losing herself to desperation.
Her eyes turned black, all black.
Ifrit.
I think that some part of Venna was still aware, because inste
ad of battening on the closest possible Djinn—David—she bypassed him, grabbed hold of one of the three he was fighting, and hooked her oddly angled, blackened limbs around the other Djinn. Ifrits fed by ripping away aetheric energy, draining their victims as they voraciously and endlessly fed, to sate a hunger that couldn’t really be stopped, not by any power short of an Oracle’s.
Venna had brought all her primitive fury and power to it, and within a matter of seconds, she’d reduced the screaming Djinn she was holding to ashes. Ashes.
She’d destroyed him utterly.
The stronger the Djinn, the more viciously predatory the Ifrit could become—and Venna was, without question, the most fearsome Ifrit I could dare to imagine. She went after another victim, who prudently misted away and left the fight.
I was still shaking and sweating, on my hands and knees. I felt better, and much worse, at the same time; light-speed healing will do that to a human body. I’d be dealing with the aftereffects for days. For now, though, I needed to overrule my body’s shock, and just get on with it.
David helped me stand. He was watching Venna’s rampage, lips parted as if he literally couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t sure I could, either.
Venna shifted and made for a Djinn I knew slightly—she was exotically beautiful, with white hair and eyes that normally glowed a brilliant yellow. She tried to mist away, but Venna was quicker, and sank her claws into the Djinn, who howled in rage and pain.
“We have to stop her,” David said. “She’ll kill everyone. Everyone.”
I scrambled for Venna’s bottle and said, firmly, “Venna. Back in the bottle. Back in the bottle. Back in the bottle! ” I almost added, Dammit, because she wasn’t listening to me. . . . But then, inevitably, the compulsion set in to obey, and she was dragged away from her victim in a mist of shifting black that oozed slowly back into the glass container.
