by Rachel Caine
“Cash only,” Luis read on the sign, and sighed. He dug out his wallet and handed it over. “Make it fast. Get us some food and water for the road, too. Extra blankets and pillows if they have them.”
I nodded and slipped out into the rain. The shock of it was breathtaking, and I quickly uncapped the gas tank and inserted the pumping nozzle before dashing into the small store.
There was a dead man behind the counter, sitting on a stool like some ghoulish prop for a cheap horror movie. He had fallen back against the wall, but was delicately balanced so that he hadn’t quite tipped off his seat and to the floor. The details of him surfaced in my mind slowly, from the shock: older, with graying hair; no obvious wounds, but there was a thick, dried crust of vomit streaking the front of his shirt and chin. His eyes had filmed over, but I could see the broken blood vessels underneath the glaze.
Dried blood had gathered at the corners of his eyelids, and cherry-black threads of it ran from his nose to his mouth.
I stopped where I was, and slowly, carefully extended my senses toward him on the aetheric. What I saw there, on that plane, was far worse than this—a rotted, horribly ripe thing throbbing with living sickness.
He was dead, but the infection inside him was alive, and violently hungry.
I slowly backed up, touching nothing. Little details began to surface, now that the initial shock had passed. Disordered shelves. An open cash register a few feet away, its drawers lolling empty.
I look at the scene through Oversight and found a confusion of colors, shapes, hints, and images. Others had been in the store before us, and at least some of them had taken items. But glowing brightly, very brightly, was the ghostly image of a Djinn, stretching out a hand and touching the proprietor’s head with a fingertip.
I knew her, or the her she’d been before Mother Earth had awakened. Priya—like me, one of the original Djinn, formed out of fire and primal instincts. But Priya had always been kindly disposed toward humans, and this… this was none of her doing. Not of her own choice.
In that image burned upon the aetheric plane, Priya’s face was cold and set, her eyes blazing with power. She had simply walked into this place, touched the man on the forehead, and left.
And he’d sickened and died, within minutes.
Luis saw me, wiped fog from the window of the truck cab, and frowned in concern. He rolled the window down and said, “What’s wrong?”
“Look at me in Oversight,” I said. “Check me for infection. Do it quickly.”
He didn’t waste time asking; I saw his eyes lose focus as he used another kind of vision to inspect me. It didn’t take long.
He shook his head. “Nothing. What the hell?”
“The man inside is dead,” I said. “Infected with… something. Something very nasty. We can’t take the risk of touching anything in there. It must be burned, all of it.” I felt shaken, I realized. No, more than that: I was actually shaking. My muscles were loose and trembling. “Others have been here. We have to find them. This will spread quickly.”
Luis froze for a few seconds, then nodded. “We need the gas for the truck,” he pointed out, ever practical. “There’s a button inside, behind the counter. Somebody has to press it.”
“No,” I said. “No one goes inside.”
I heard the door slide up at the back, and the sound of someone jumping down… then the whispering slither of Esmeralda’s descent. Isabel looked around at me, then at the store. “What are you doing standing in the rain?”
I didn’t feel like explaining again. “Can you trip the switch to get gas from here?”
“Yeah, but there should be someone in there who—”
“Just do it, Isabel!” My voice sounded unlike my usual self—to raw, too sharp, too shrill.
She gave me a dark look. “Tell me why.”
Esmeralda slithered toward the door, and before I could tell her not to proceed, she recoiled—literally, pulling her snakelike body into tight, defensive coils. I heard a faint rattle. “Dead guy,” she said. “Damn. He looks sick.”
“He was,” I said. “And is. Going in is not an option.”
“Then what?”
“There is a switch under his hand. It must be flipped from out here.”
Isabel looked toward Esmeralda, who nodded decisively. “I wouldn’t be eating no Ho Hos out of this place—that’s for sure. Flip the switch and let’s get the hell out before we’re puking all over ourselves and bleeding from the eyeballs. Vámanos.”
Ibby was stronger by far in Fire Warden powers than her uncle; for her it was a mere shrug to trigger the connection that powered the pump. As I set it in action, the counters rolled on a price that would never be paid now. I filled the truck to the brim, then replaced the nozzle and climbed back inside to drive the vehicle off away from the building, slowly.
Esmeralda and Ibby stayed behind, and Luis watched them in the rearview mirror. It took only a moment for the fire to begin, consuming the little store. The two girls made it to the truck and slammed the door down just as the gas pumps blew in a spectacular orange-and-red mushroom of power. What was left of the station store collapsed in on itself, burning even more fiercely.
Ibby thumped on the wall behind my seat. “Go!” she yelled.
“First of many,” Luis said quietly. “Don’t know his name, but I’ve got to think he wouldn’t want to infect anyone else. Best we can do for him now is purify him.”
Purify. That was, I thought, a good word, a hopeful word. The dead man was purified.
I, on the other hand, felt sick and filthy within. There would be no honor today, no purification for those of us charged with defending life. I could feel that, as surely as I felt the cold wind pouring through the open window of the truck. “We need to find the others,” I said. “And stop Priya.”
“Priya?”
“Djinn.” I rubbed my face with both hands, wishing I could rub all of this misery away as easily. “She was here, carrying a plague. It kills fast and lingers long. He won’t be her only victim. We need to find those who came to this store before we did and try to heal them.”
Luis looked as grim as I felt. “Even if you were a full Djinn, that’d be a hat trick,” he said. “You said it kills fast. They wouldn’t get far. What we need to do is find their bodies and burn them—but you need to go after Priya while we do that. Only way this works is if we split up. Me and the girls, you after the Djinn.”
It made sense, and I took a deep breath and nodded. “I need transportation.”
He gave me an unexpected grin, but there was little humor in it. “Yeah, well, I checked the nav system. Turns out there’s a biker bar about two miles ahead. I’m pretty sure someone will be happy to give up their chopper for the cause.”
A motorcycle. Freedom, and the wind in my face, and the exultance of the chase.
I smiled back, with just as much of the predator in my smile as I’d seen in his. “I’m sure,” I agreed, and pressed the accelerator hard.
As I parked the truck at Busty’s Roadhouse, I admired the selection of two-wheeled vehicles neatly lined up outside. Gleaming, well-maintained machines, with the addition of a few muddied, hard-ridden trail bikes. I immediately focused on a Victory; the sleek shape drew me to it like a magnet. This particular model was different from my cherished Vision; it was more aggressive, muscular, heavily chromed, and a steel-hard blue.
I loved it.
“Cass.” Luis had gotten out of the truck, and was now quietly standing beside me. When I looked up at him, he jerked his chin toward the roadhouse. “Too quiet in there for this many guys.”
He was right. I’d been caught up in my fascination with the machine, but now as I looked in that direction, I realized that I heard music playing inside, but nothing else. No laughs, shouts, conversation. I turned and saw the grim set of Luis’s face. We didn’t need to speak about it. I nodded and led the way into the building.
They were all dead. All of them. The bodies lay everywhere, falle
n and limp and silent; the jukebox still banged out a loud tune from the corner, but it was playing to an unhearing audience. I crouched next to the first one nearest the door—a barmaid, dressed in shorts and a tight red top, young and fit—and looked at her face.
“It’s the same,” I said. Her eyes had the same redness, and the smell of vomit was overwhelming in this abattoir, mixed with other rancid odors that made my stomach clench hard in reaction. “Look in Oversight.”
I did it at the same time Luis did, and heard him murmur, “Dios.” The room was a rolling boil of black and red, infection and disease and agony. The bodies crawled with it. I saw the stuff trying to jump from the bodies around me to my own, and edged backward. “Spread by contact, looks like,” Luis said. “These boys must have grabbed stuff at the store back there and come straight here, just as they started dying. Anybody they touched got it, too.”
“Then someone should have lived to make it to the motorcycles, or to a vehicle,” I said. “Humans are masters of self-preservation. Someone must have tried to exercise it, and run.”
“We don’t know how long the symptoms take to set in. Could be seconds, could be minutes.” Luis shook his head. “Got to be thirty people in here, Cass. And they haven’t been dead long.”
“I’m more concerned with any that might have gotten away. If they make it to a point where they can infect larger groups that disperse…” As fast-burning as this illness was, it would be devastating in the context of a town, or a city. Priya might already have appeared there, beautiful as a burning star, to deliver that deathly touch. She could have gone anywhere, far beyond my reach, far beyond the capacity of humans to fight her unless an Earth Warden was standing right in front of her.
This was what the Earth would become: fields of the dead, cities of silence, where lonely music played unheeded. It took my breath for a moment, and for the first time, I felt fear. Real, bone-deep fear. We were butterflies in an avalanche, and what could we do, really do, to stop it?
“Steady,” Luis murmured. His hand gripped mine, strong and warm. “Bright side: This stuff isn’t airborne, or we’d already be dead. It’s contact only, which means it’s containable.…”
“Not if she spreads it in a city,” I said. “Or an airport. Or—”
I caught a flash of movement from the corner of my eye, and spun around… to find a pale, glowing hand outstretched toward me, a single finger pointing at my forehead. Behind the hand, the face of Priya, her Djinn-fired eyes burning into me with unseeing intensity.
I stumbled back, and Luis grabbed her forearm.
“No!” I screamed, but he ignored me. His whole focus was on Priya, who turned her gaze on him, as emotionless as a machine. She didn’t attempt to break free of his hold, or move at all. I reached out for him, but Luis shook his head sharply.
“Don’t,” he said. “I’m already infected.” He sounded so calm. So sure. “I can do this, Cass. Just stay back.”
He couldn’t. A human, even a Warden as powerful as Luis, couldn’t defeat a Djinn one-on-one in that kind of single combat… not when she was pouring infection into him, rotting him from within. He needed me, he needed someone to amplify and direct that power with fine control, like a laser. I could do that. I could help him hit her where she was most vulnerable.
But instinct told me to back away. Stupid, ingrained human instinct that demanded I preserve my life at all costs, even the cost of the ones I loved…
I am not a human. I am a Djinn. Djinn!
I gasped in a breath and lunged forward, adding my grip to his where it wrapped around her arm. “Together,” I said. “We’re stronger together, Luis. Let me help you!”
He let out a strange, wild little laugh, and closed his eyes. Priya wasn’t trying to pull away from us; she simply stood like a hot, burning statue, not quite flesh, not quite spirit. Exalted by her mission, and hardly noticing us at all, any more than a star might notice the ants crawling far below.
The sickness was already eating its way inside Luis, and the most difficult thing for Earth Wardens to do was to heal themselves; I channeled his energy out, and back in, burning the infection away, and then helping him drive back against the source. Priya was a teeming, seething incubator of the plague; she had been hollowed out, filled with this blackness, and set in motion. The Priya I had known was gone, as surely as those who’d inhabited the dead around us were no more. And that struck me hard, the grief of it; Priya had been an immortal, and she had been thrown away to become a vessel for destruction.
She had been my sister once.
I closed my eyes and threw myself into the fight, rising into the aetheric to more clearly see the struggle. Priya’s body was no longer the beautiful, harmonious form it had been; it was distorted, rotted, cancerous with the poison she carried inside. Luis glowed bright as a star, tinted with a fire’s edge of glittering orange from his rage and fear, and as I watched, his fire burned clean the portion of Priya’s arm he held. I poured my own strength into him, careless of the cost, and guided his Earth Warden instincts into the pathways inside her body, carrying his purifying fire deeper. Each second was a bloody, costly struggle for supremacy between the infection trying to kill, and Luis—with my focus magnifying his power—trying to heal. Priya’s body went a milky pale white where his healing touched it; the flesh was only a shell now, and as he destroyed what filled it, all that was left of her was the diamond-hard casing that was not quite living tissue.
And even so, even with spending so much power, so much strength, so much courage… we began to lose.
Priya did not fight us, because she didn’t need to; the infection roared back, boiled up within Luis and began to choke off his strong, steady pulse of life—and through him, mine as well. Death was stronger than our temporary passions, and it was patient as the tide.
Just when I felt him struggling, though, and knew we were going to fail, another power joined us—strong, burning-hot, and wild and uncontrolled. It fell to me to channel and focus that power as well, and it was like trying to direct a raging river down a narrow pipe, when the power threatened to rip the pipe itself to shreds. Isabel, I realized, in the single second of awareness I had to spare. It was Isabel’s power, raw and new and stunningly powerful, and added to Luis’s, lensed through mine, it was more than Priya—or the infection that had overtaken the Djinn—could fight.
Even so, it took a long time. Longer than I thought any of us could endure. Luis chased the infection, burned it, boiled it down to a pure hard core in the very center of her… and then focused a beam of power on it so bright that even in the aetheric it seared my vision. It resonated across the aetheric in a rippling wave… and then Priya was empty. A glittering glass shell that began to crack and collapse under its own pressure into sharp, fragile edges.
I felt a strange burning in my eyes, and for a moment I thought it came from the violence of Luis’s final assault that had broken the spine of the disease… but then I realized that the ache was in my flesh, a heat that had nothing to do with the fight we’d been waging.
I was infected.
I was dying.
And as I watched, Priya’s human-shaped form collapsed into fine, gray dust, and Luis staggered and went down in utter exhaustion.
I collapsed, too, sprawled in the open doorway. Weak winter sun hurt my eyes, and I couldn’t seem to get my breath.
I can’t die this way, I thought. Others will sicken. Others will be infected from me. Ibby…
Even as I thought her name, I saw her face. She looked older, taller, a confusing and alien version that didn’t match to the sweet, chubby girl I still held in my heart. The eyes were the same, though, a child’s wide eyes, full of concern.
Her lips shaped my name, and she started to lean down toward me.
“No,” I whispered. I felt hot now, feverish, burning up with it. Something twisted violently inside me. It would not be an easy death. “Don’t.”
But Isabel reached down and took my hand, and I could
n’t stop her.
I felt the infection’s surge through my body toward hers. “No,” I said again, more strongly. “No!”
But it met an impenetrable wall where Isabel’s flesh touched mine, and I felt the infection recoil, as if it were intelligent, alive, afraid.
And then Isabel reached into me and crushed it.
This was not the smooth, clean destruction that Luis had managed on Priya; this was, instead, a brutal display of absolute power, uncontrolled by anyone, even Isabel herself. She mashed the infection, ripped it apart, destroyed it in a child’s vicious rage.
It hurt. I think I screamed, though I struggled to hold the agony inside; the infection died hard, but it died, and Isabel sank down on her knees next to me and smiled. It was a pure smile of triumph, but it was not sweet. Not the expression of a child, any child. “There,” she said. “It’s better now, right?”
I couldn’t speak, but I nodded, or tried; my head jerked unevenly as the muscles seized in protest.
Together, the three of us had just killed a Djinn. And not any Djinn… one fueled with the direct, angry power of the Mother. I could understand what Luis had done, but Isabel… At her age, with her experience, she should never have been able to try it, much less succeed in saving me. Not from a disease that had never been seen before on this world, something clever and aware on its own.
Isabel was still smiling as she said quietly, “It was a weak one.”
“What?” I concentrated on breathing in slow, steady rhythm as the waves of pain began to recede.
“The disease the Djinn was carrying. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. There’ll be more. Worse. You know that.”
I did, but I’d tried to avoid thinking of it. Priya had appeared out here in the woods, not in the center of a populated city. Why? My only answer was that some last vestige of the old Priya still fought, however inadequately. She’d managed to avoid catastrophic loss of life.
But others might not have fought so hard. Even now, it could be happening.
