by Rachel Caine
It was a Harley. That was, apparently, a very popular brand. It was even larger than the last one I’d ridden, all chrome and heavy black leather saddlebags. There was aggression in the lines of it. Anger.
I liked it immediately. It suited my mood.
I opened the throttles and sent the bike roaring from the parking lot in front of Scripps Memorial Hospital, out onto Genesee, heading for Rashid’s location as it was marked on the tiny map. Rose Canyon, which was—by no coincidence, I was sure—the same location I had sensed for the Warden child in distress, Alex Carter. I pushed the motorcycle faster, faster still, until the lights around me were a blur, until I was dangerously fast even for Djinn reflexes—which I no longer possessed in full measure. But the fact remained: Rashid was trapped, and the child, Alex Carter, was in pain. In danger. And I might be in time, if I hurried.
I never made it.
I turned down a side street, focused intently on the map, on finding a less obvious way to the goal. Darkened buildings flashed by me in a smear; streetlights blurred together.
And then something hit me from behind, like a massive punch from a giant’s fist, throwing me and the motorcycle forward into an uncontrolled slide, and then I felt myself airborne, felt the world spinning sickly around me, and heard the crunch of metal and glass, and saw my own face reflected starkly in a mirror. No, not a mirror, a plate-glass window in a dark building, which I slammed into at almost a hundred miles an hour, fragmenting glass with such force it turned almost to powder where my body impacted it. At the edges, though, it turned lethally sharp, and I felt it rip at me like a shark, only for a single hot instant, and then I was hitting a wall, and falling back, seeing the splash of blood where I had impacted . . . ... and then I was down, lying still, staring up at swaying lights.
I heard the crunch of bootheels on glass.
A Djinn looked down at me. Rashid. Handsome and exotic and remotely dispassionate. “You’re badly wounded,” he said. “What will you cut off this time to save yourself, Cassiel? Your head? That would be entertaining.”
I rolled slowly to my hands and knees.
Rashid’s boot thudded heavily into my back, driving me facedown into the broken glass. I might have cried out. The sight of my blood, again, was disconnecting me from the immediacy of my injury; I felt serene, on some level, and alert.
But I couldn’t get up. “Rashid,” I said, and turned my face to the side, looking up at him through bloodied pale hair. “You don’t seem as if you need help after all.” There was something eerie in my voice, as well. Light, unconcerned, almost indifferent. The Djinn in me, rising like a monster from the dark. Rashid gazed down at me, and his eyebrows slowly rose, widening his eyes.
“From you?” he asked, and yawned, showing needle-sharp teeth. “Why ever would I? No. Never.”
“Someone called me,” I said. “Someone pretending to be you. I was provided with a map. I came to save you.”
“Amusing,” he said. “But not really important. I’m not so sensitive as all that, to take offense to something not even done to me.”
“You should,” I said. “If you’re not Pearl’s creature. She’s using you to lure me. Doesn’t that offend you?”
The weight of his boot lifted from my back, and Rashid sank into a smooth, almost feline crouch, staring at me with inhuman intensity. “I am no one’s creature.”
“So I believed,” I said. “Yet you just attacked me.” And I was hurt, although not devastatingly so. I just didn’t allow him to see it. “If you aren’t hers, why?”
Rashid shrugged. “I didn’t attack you, I just saw your crash. Why would I strike out at you? What does it get me?”
I rolled over on my side in a crunch of broken glass, staring up at him. He cocked an eyebrow.
“Then who was it?”
“You have a truly impressive number of enemies,” he said. “I, however, am not necessarily one of them. I came to see if you were dead, that’s all. I was curious.”
Curious. Of course. I felt a cold, sick wave of anger, and pushed it down; anger wouldn’t help me in dealing with Rashid, or any Djinn, unless I was truly in a position to fight. “I thank you for checking,” I said, and couldn’t keep the sarcasm from the words. “If not you—?”
“Some human.” He said it as if they were all interchangeable. From his perspective, most likely they were.
“Help me stand,” I said.
“It will hurt.”
“I’m well aware of that, thank you.”
He leaned down, hooked a hand under my arm, and hauled me up to a standing position. I braced myself against the wall. Blood sheeted down my sides and pattered on the floor. I concentrated hard on slowing the flow from the wounds—hundreds of them, small and deadly slices that would drain me dry—while at the same time trying to clear my head.
“You’re standing,” Rashid said. He sounded surprised. I opened my eyes to look at him. “Well, for the moment, perhaps.”
“Listen to me,” I said. “This war isn’t against the humans, do you understand? It’s against the Djinn. It’s against you. Fight now or fight later, when she’s much stronger. Your choice.”
“You’re giving me a choice to fight at your side? Considering how well you’re doing so far? I’m flattered.” His attention strayed away from me, out to the dark, as if he was listening to something far away. “Something’s coming for you. You should leave.”
“Rashid,” I snarled, “fight with me, or get the hell out of my way. The New Djinn must be ashamed to have you among them, running coward that you are.”
He froze, face going immobile, eyes blazing, and then I felt a growl echo in the air around me, starting from low in his throat but building in the very bricks and concrete around us. What glass hadn’t already shattered did so, with a sharp, concussive pop.
Then he turned and put his back to the wall beside me. “If you die,” he said, “I will not be overly sorry. But I won’t let you survive to tell your lies of my cowardice.”
“You may assume that I won’t be sorry if you fall as well,” I said, and coughed. Blood sprayed the air in a fine mist, but I felt better, after. “Who is it coming for us?”
“Not who,” he said. “What.”
With a scream of fracturing rock, the street outside erupted, pulping metal and stone in a geyser of smoke and dust, and something . . . stood up from the wreckage.
No. Built itself from the wreckage. Piece by piece, stone by stone. A vaguely headlike piece of boulder. Twisted metal for arms, ending in sharp prongs that sparked with random electrical current from the underground power lines. A body amassed of hot asphalt studded with trash, metal, and a single screaming face embedded in the torso, an unfortunate pedestrian caught up in the insanity, frozen in his moment of death.
Another soul on my conscience.
The thing turned its head toward us. As it lumbered for the building, it struck the twisted wreck of the Harley I had been riding, and the frame and tires re-formed and warped, then were sucked into the creature, reinforcing its armored coating.
A golem, straight out of the ancient days. It was held together by a simple, massively effective self-propelling, self-powering seed that had, in its heart, a single purpose. It would rebuild itself, over and over, so long as that core of purpose existed.
Destroy the seed, destroy the golem.
But finding the seed would be like finding a needle in a hurricane of knives.
“That’s not good,” Rashid said. “You understand how to stop it?”
“In theory.”
“Theory is all you have,” he said. “It will come for one of us and ignore the other; whichever of us it is focused on, the other must take action. And no more talk of cowardice, O disgraced one, or I will slice off your other hand and feed it to you.”
It seemed to me he was quite serious on that point. “If I fall—” I said.
“Then you’re dead,” he said. “And I am free to leave without incurring any further insul
ts on my courage. So I think it would be advisable for you not to die, if you wish to keep me fighting your enemies for you.”
I bared bloody teeth at him.
Rashid, for no reason that I could understand, laughed, and then plunged away from me, meeting the oncoming monster head-on. With each step, he gained in size, expanding himself without any regard to human rules of conduct.
By the time he reached the golem, he was almost its equal.
He ducked a sweep of the creature’s wicked, jagged talons, put his shoulder against its chest, and shoved, driving it backward with a deafening screech of metal on stone. The golem was still forming itself, still learning its strength and balance, which were shifting as it sucked up new wreckage, new mass from the destroyed street. As it bumped against the slender metal stalk of a streetlight, the light flared, flickered, and the entire structure folded and twisted, wrapping around the golem like a vine. For a second I believed that it was trapped, that Rashid had leashed the thing, but then the golem simply absorbed the metal, ripping the post free of its concrete bolts.
It feinted for Rashid with a deafening crash, like a building coming down, and when he retreated, it turned and came toward me at a ground-shaking run.
I was its true target, after all.
And a golem couldn’t be killed.
Rashid had said it: As the target of the golem, my only job was to stay alive. It was Rashid’s task to use the single-minded focus of the golem to destroy it. In theory, it should have been a comfort that, even as I ran and fought for my life, there was someone working to ensure my survival.
In practice, that someone was Rashid, and I had no real guarantees that he would go at his task wholeheartedly. It did not encourage me to linger.
The typical Earth-based defenses I might have put up to repel an attack would be useless against a golem; whatever I threw at it would simply be absorbed, used to power it even more. So I ran, blowing a hole in the wall at the rear of the wrecked store—a clothing store, I realized belatedly, with the ghostly still shapes of mannequins frozen awkwardly around the edges. I had done considerable damage already, but it was nothing to what the golem was about to do, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it even if I’d wished to do so.
I was dangerously weak now, and I needed healing. The energy I pulled from Luis in a trickle was enough to sustain me under normal circumstances, but these were far from normal. I needed more.
It was going to hurt him, but I had to have it. It was now a matter of survival.
I paused, leaned against a wall, and opened the connection between us, forcing it wider. Power flowed into me, pooling golden in my veins, washing out pain and weariness. Cuts healed, though only enough to stop the blood loss. Scars would have to be dealt with later. I’d escaped any broken bones, but there were some internal injuries. I did what I could, and hoarded the last precious store of energy.
I could feel Luis’s pain from what I’d done. I’m sorry, I whispered through the link. I’d left him vulnerable, almost damaged.
He had no more to give.
I used another burst of power to blow concrete blocks and debris outward in a hole approximately the size of my body, knocking a door in the back wall, and I plunged through the cloud of choking dust, stumbled on the tumbling bricks, and came out on the other side, in a narrow back alley. The back of the building was featureless, with a scraped and dirty sign naming the business just to the left of a massive, battered metal trash container. I raced down the alley, moving as fast as I could, dodged down another side street into almost total darkness, and continued to run.
Behind me, I heard the grinding crunch of the golem chewing and absorbing its way through everything in its path. The giant metal trash container gave an almost organic shriek as it was ripped and torn, malformed and put to use to build the golem’s own body. With every single moment, it was becoming bigger, stronger, heavier, and deadlier—to me, and anything that stood in its way.
There were cars passing on the street ahead, and I ran for the motion and lights, threw myself off of the curb and in front of an oncoming vehicle, a van. It shrieked and shuddered to a halt in a thin veil of white, acrid smoke from its scorched tires, and through the windshield I saw the shocked face of a well-groomed man and a much younger girl who was almost certainly not his wife.
I yanked open the driver’s-side door. “Out,” I told the man. He gaped at me, started to sputter, and I snapped the seat belt holding him in the car, grabbed him by the collar, and hauled him out to a sitting position on the road. He scrambled up and out of the way, running; the girl in the passenger seat stared after him, then at me, black-rimmed eyes wide.
“You owe me fifty bucks, bitch,” she said. “He didn’t pay me yet.”
“I give you your life,” I said. “Consider that a tip you don’t deserve.”
She bailed out as I slammed the driver’s-side door, and before she was a step away I hit the gas, sending the van into a burst of acceleration. I rolled the windows down and watched the rearview mirror. I saw sparks as power lines fell, blue-white flares as transformers exploded behind me.
The golem was a black, lurching shadow against the stars, the more terrifying because it was so featureless.
I wheeled the van into a turn and accelerated again, heading north. Rashid clearly had not been successful yet at his assignment—finding and destroying the seed that powered the golem—so I needed to have some kind of alternate plan. Quickly.
A fresh breeze brought the scent of the ocean with it, and the sound of waves hitting the coast.
Water. Of course.
I wrenched the wheel again, taking the first possible turn west, toward the shoreline. I was close, which was fortunate; glances in the rearview mirror showed me that although the area behind me was hidden in darkness, inky and deep, there was movement there. Glints of metal. And a constant, grinding roar, as if a powerful engine behind me was systematically ripping apart the world.
Rashid suddenly appeared in the passenger seat of the van. I knew he wasn’t bound to a physical body, but Djinn sometimes sustained hurts too deep to heal on the aetheric, and those were reflected in any physical form they took.
Rashid looked . . . beaten. There was a long slash across his bare, indigo chest, and blood splashed over his face, hands, arms . . . none of it the golem’s. The golem wouldn’t bleed.
He sat, limp and gasping for breath, and then leaned his sweat- matted head back against the seat and said, “I can’t get to it. It’s too strong.”
“You’re giving up,” I said. “You. Rashid the mighty. Rashid the arrogant.”
“Save your contempt,” he said, and swiped irritably at the blood on his face, then made a disgusted expression and wiped the spilled crimson on the seat of the van. “You have mighty enemies, for one who’s already fallen far. Why do they need to kill you so badly?”
“My charm.”
“Ah, that would explain it.” Rashid shuddered a little, and I saw the cut across his chest draw together into an ugly scar. He was healing, but not nearly as quickly as a Djinn should. The damage he’d sustained must have been massive, on the aetheric plane. “You must leave this place. The golem will have a limited range. If you leave—”
“It will just follow, grow larger, and destroy anything it comes against,” I said. “I’m not a Djinn. I can’t jump from one spot to another to break the trail. It will find me, sooner or later, and the longer it takes to catch up, the larger and stronger it will be.”
Rashid closed his eyes for a moment. “Then you can’t win.”
“I’m not giving up.”
“Then how do you plan to—” Rashid fell silent as I wrenched the wheel, tires screaming, and almost crashed the vehicle into the side of a building as I sped down another side road. It was the last of the industrial district. Beyond it was a long stretch of straight asphalt running parallel to the sea. Beyond that there were parking lots, metal barriers, and the rocky coast with the heaving dark ocean
beyond, glinting with moonlight. “You’re not serious.”
“Hold on,” I told Rashid, and jumped the curb with a hard bang and scraping metal to get into one of the deserted parking areas. There was a sturdy metal barrier between the parking and the walkways, where in sunny weather humans would promenade, enjoying the beautiful views.
I pushed the van’s accelerator flat to the floor, picking up speed as the engine roared. The van hit, bounced up, and its mass and momentum overcame the metal barrier at the end and threw it down. Tires grabbed and propelled us forward, over the mangled steel; I felt one of them shred and blow, but the others held firm.
Behind us, the golem lurched out of the night, huge and inconceivably only a step behind us. It was as tall as a downtown building now, a teetering mass of ripped road surface studded with absorbed wreckage, cars, and unlucky humans who’d wandered in its way. A nightmare, reaching out for the van and slamming down an appendage that was only vaguely hand-shaped.
Metal spikes the size of girders slammed into the roof of the van and drove all the way through, biting into the ground and rock beneath. The van came to a sudden, lurching stop, engine screaming, tires burning, and I realized that it was over.
We weren’t going to make it.
“Out!” I screamed at Rashid, and bailed from the door next to me. I didn’t wait to see if he’d obeyed; I knew I didn’t have time. The golem was a heartbeat away from achieving its goal, and it wouldn’t give up. Not now.
A fist made of metal and stone slammed down on the van, drove it all the way to the pavement, and destroyed any sign that it was ever a vehicle at all.
I was five feet from the rocky edge of the cliff. Waves pounded on stone below.
I ran.
The golem crouched, an ever-shifting mass of destruction, and absorbed the wreckage of the van. I didn’t see Rashid as the metal, plastic and glass shattered and deformed, as the golem devoured it, but I knew I had no time to gawk. He’d live, or not. I couldn’t help him in any way.
