by Rachel Caine
“Luis,” I whispered. It was all I could manage. He looked shaken and anguished, but he smiled and kissed me.
When he pulled back, there was blood on his face. Fresh red blood in a pattern of dots.
I raised my fingers to touch my face, and felt the holes left by the crystals, the wetness that seeped from them. My whole body wept red.
“Stay still,” he told me. “Don’t try to move. Just stay still.”
It seemed like sound advice, and just this one time, I obeyed.
Two days in a Warden hospital in Seattle, while they pumped blood into my almost-drained body and carefully closed up every wound. The final count had been in the hundreds of punctures. Damage to my bones had been extensive, they told me, and I had several painful rehabilitation sessions with an Earth Warden to repair them.
No one explained to me what had happened until the afternoon of the second day, when Lewis Orwell dropped in and shut the door on a fluttering entourage of anxious Wardens with questions, alerts, and requests. He nodded to Luis, who was sitting at my side holding my right hand in both of his; Luis nodded back cautiously. “How’s she doing?” Orwell asked. He had a pleasant, resonant voice, and like many Earth Wardens (except me) he seemed to exude a soothing, reassuring presence that everyone liked.
“I am fine,” I answered before Luis could speak. “There’s no need to keep me confined to this bed. The bones are healing.”
“Note the present tense,” Luis said. “You’re not out of the woods, Cassiel.”
“Of course not. We are in the Pacific Northwest.”
“And… that was too literal. I meant—”
“I know what you meant,” I said, “but I am fine. The healing will continue whether I am in the bed or out of it.”
“She’s right,” Orwell said, and dragged a steel-backed chair over to the other side of my bed, which he straddled. He rested his chin on crossed arms and studied me with clinical interest. “You’re a fast healer. Comes from the Djinn part of you, most likely.” He fell silent, and I wondered what he was thinking, or wanted me to say.
I stared back, unwilling to give the first ground.
“I expected you to be full of questions,” he said.
“Did you?”
“Most people couldn’t have come out of that sane,” he told me. There was an interestingly tentative edge to his voice now, as if he couldn’t quite understand something he’d previously thought an open book. “But those who did would want to know what happened to them. They’d be demanding it. Unlike you.”
I shrugged. It hurt; healing meant that the functions were intact, but the residual pain would continue for a while, like the fading ache of deep bruises. “You’ll tell me when you think you know,” I said. “I could tell from the discussion in the halls that no one understood very much.”
He tilted his head a little to the side, as if trying to consider me from a slightly different angle. “Hasn’t he told you?” Orwell glanced at Luis, who was sitting silently at my side. There was an odd dynamic between these two men, something like a power struggle, but I didn’t understand why.
“He hasn’t been forthcoming,” I said. “He says he doesn’t remember what happened after we broke through in the mine and found the Djinn standing at the top.”
“And you?”
“Something came, something even the Djinn feared. Ashan retreated, but they took the others with them. I didn’t see what it was that threatened them, but it took me for its own. Then I remember waking up in the—confinement.” It hadn’t been a prison. It had been a coffin—no, worse. It had been a chrysalis, something that would have transformed me into something else altogether. What, I didn’t know, but I had come perilously close to finding out. “The other Wardens? Alive?”
“We found Rocha and the other five unconscious five miles from the mine entrance,” Orwell said. “Rocha tells me they were going to be killed by the Djinn, so they went at it hard; one died of her injuries, but they were all pretty bad off when we found them. The first thing he wanted to do when he was on his feet was saddle up and go off looking for you.”
“And you let him.”
“No, I went with him. Good thing I did; you were buried in there deep, and there weren’t a lot of traces to track. Between the two of us, we managed.” He gave a modest shrug. “Then it was just a matter of digging you out.”
Somehow, I doubted it was quite that simple. I thought back to the nightmare of coming into the light, of the crystals drilled into my flesh and bone. “What was it doing to me?”
“You don’t know?” Orwell stared at me steadily for a long moment, then shrugged. “I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen anything like it. Your flesh was turning crystalline, hard as diamonds. Your eyes—it had only just started, I can tell you that much. What you would have been at the end of it is anybody’s guess, but it would have been…”
“Irresistible,” Luis put in softly, and drew both our gazes. “Like the irresistible force. And beautiful, too. Scary beautiful.”
It reminded me far too much of what Pearl had promised. I ached still in every cell; I was, I sensed, lucky that the process hadn’t gone much further or I’d have never survived the reversal.
I forced myself to think beyond my own fears. “How long have you been here, Orwell? Where are the Wardens who went out to sea with you? The Djinn?”
“We docked in Miami four days ago,” he said. “The Wardens are where they’re needed. The Djinn…” He hesitated, and looked away. “They were taken as soon as we got out of the black corner. We lost them, one way or another.”
“But they held,” I said, and felt a burst of amazement that was almost pride. “The Wardens held. Against the Djinn.”
“We’re maintaining,” Orwell agreed. He looked exhausted, I thought; leadership sat well on him, but it was a crushing load. “We’re not winning. Look, I know from Brennan that you think dealing with Shinju is dealing with the devil, but trust me: Right now, I’ll take the devil and all his pointy-headed minions as long as they do what I tell them. I have to, because our only other choice is obliteration.” He let that sink in before he continued. “As best we can tell, the reason Rocha and the other Wardens who survived that mine are still alive is that Shinju brought her kids and fought on their side. They’d have been ground into hamburger, otherwise. As it was, the odds were way too close.”
“Pearl—Shinju—is the one who sealed me in that prison,” I told him. “I know it. I heard her voice.”
“Maybe so, but I’ve got no energy right now for personal grudges,” he said. “Revenge can wait until we’ve got bandwidth. For now, I need every soldier fighting our enemies, not each other.”
I raised my eyebrows, and did not answer. Luis, on the other hand, did. “If she makes another move at Cassie, I’ll find a way to kill that bitch. I mean it. I don’t care what it costs.” His grip on my hand was tight, too tight, but I understood, for the first time, his emotion. The hate and fear was a tight little ball inside him, bound with razor-edged guilt. “You saw her. You saw what it was doing to her.”
Lewis Orwell inclined his head just a little, a silent acknowledgment, but he said, “Revenge can wait. And it will. Get me?”
“I get you,” Luis said, though his tone and his expression were set hard. “What next?”
“I need her up and on her feet, and you both back in the field,” Orwell said. “Things are moving fast now. Joanne’s on her own, and she needs backup. I can’t go. I’m sending you two.”
“I can’t leave Isabel—”
“Isabel’s with me,” Orwell interrupted. “Snake Girl, too. I need them, and I’m using them. All assets get deployed. Sorry, but that’s just how it is. The kid’s a soldier now, too.”
He stood up and pushed the chair out of the way; Luis came to his feet, too, and released my hand. The stare between them looked far too confrontational for comfort, so I took a deep breath, bracing for the pain, and swung my legs over the edge of the bed on Luis’s
side. He grabbed for me instinctively as I pulled myself into a wavering, teeth-gritted-against-the-pain standing position, and I held on tight to his arm. It was sufficiently distracting to break the moment, and Lewis Orwell took advantage of it. He gave me a last, assessing look, nodded, and left the room, pursued by at least a dozen Wardens all pelting him with questions.
“Bastard,” Luis said. “Son of a bitch has no feelings. I’m telling you—he’s like a walking fucking iceberg, and he causes just about as much damage.”
I allowed him to guide me back to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. It shocked me how fragile I still felt. I knew intellectually how damaged I’d been, but what still haunted me was the look on my partner’s face when he’d seen me taken from that crystal prison. “Perhaps,” I said. “But perhaps he can’t afford feelings now. He’s right. If anything is to survive, we have to risk everything. Everyone. There are no safe places left.”
He knew it, and he loathed that knowledge just as much as I did. “I need to protect her, Cass. I failed my brother. I failed his wife. I even failed you. I can’t let her down, too.” He put his arms around me. The care he took told me more about him than me; I might feel fragile, but he touched me like I was made of butterfly wings. As if I might shatter, like the crystal from which I’d emerged. “She’s ours, and we can’t let her down.”
Ours. The child was, in many ways—not of our bodies, perhaps, but of Luis’s blood, and through him, and his dead brother, mine as well. We owed her love, and safety. We’d always owed her that.
I put my hands on either side of Luis’s face and held him still as I said, “We’ve already let her down. We let her down the instant that Pearl abducted her, and every day since we’ve been struggling to find meaning for her in that. But she’s not ours. She’s her own, always. And she wants to fight. She seeks it out, as I do. Step back, and let her be herself. It’s the only way we cannot disappoint her now.”
He tried to shake his head. I didn’t allow it. We stared deep into each other’s eyes. His were haunted, and I’m sure that mine held the shadows of the torture I’d endured.
My darkness won.
He pulled me into his arms, and this time, he used his strength; I lost my breath from the force of his embrace, but it was a good pain, a just and correct ache that came as much from my soul as my flesh. We stayed that way for a very long time, minutes long, before Luis pulled back and said, “You got a few things to make up to me, you know.”
I blinked, thrown by his conversational swerve. “Why?”
“Not every guy has to take seeing his lover stripped naked and lying on top of the head of the Wardens,” he said. “Even if you were covered in glitter and blood.”
He was talking about my rebirth from the crystal coffin, when Orwell had pulled me out. Had I been naked? It surprised me, but thinking back, modesty hadn’t been the largest concern I’d had. “You seem more worried by the nakedness than the blood,” I pointed out. He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug.
“Yeah, well, we all bleed a lot around here,” he said. “But the naked part, that’s supposed to be sort of private.”
“You are very odd.”
“You like that about me,” he said, and kissed me. Sweet and hot, spicy and smooth, he spiked my pulse hard, and reminded me of the delights of physical bodies. I remembered the image of him that had come to me there in the dark, in my deepest panic and pain… of his bare skin, shimmering in the peaceful light. Of his fingers trailing over mine, waking fire.
In the end, it had been him who’d kept me alive at the bottom of that dark, dark pit.
“Yes,” I agreed softly, and licked my lips to savor his taste again. “I like many things about you.”
He groaned and stepped in closer, and my knees parted until he was pressed against me in a hot, solid line from chest to crotch. Beneath the thin cotton gown, I was bare, and he knew it; I could feel the tension gathering inside him, coiling down deep, and his erection was an obvious pressure against me. “Shit,” he whispered, and brushed my lips with his. “I wasn’t exactly planning on this. There’s no privacy here, you know. And you’re not healed enough to—”
“I decide whether I’m healed enough,” I said. The minor aches and pains had fallen away, driven back by the adrenaline and sweet, anxious need that was forming inside me. “As for privacy, the door does lock. And we take our pleasures now, or risk never having them again. What would you want?”
He groaned and kissed me again, and I distinctly heard the metallic sound of the lock engaging on the door. Then the steel-framed chair that Orwell had used slid across the floor and slammed at an angle under the handle. “Just in case,” he murmured, and I felt his fingers pulling at the ties on my hospital gown. “Mmmm, easy open. Very nice.”
For answer, I used a tiny burst of Earth power to part the zipper of his jeans as I slid the leather of his belt out of the buckle. I paused then, suddenly struck by a new, odd thing: my left hand.
It was working.
I opened and closed my fist, watching the fingers bend, the hand itself curl; apart from the metallic shine to it, it felt and looked just as my right hand did. There was no sign of the damage that I’d suffered on the road from the Djinn attack.
“Did you…?” I asked.
Luis shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “I’m not that good. Orwell fixed you up. Said he needed you fully functional.”
“Well,” I said, and smiled as I eased his pants down, taking my time with the job. “I assure you, I am fully functional. And that’s of benefit to you.”
He gasped aloud as that metallic hand touched, stroked, played, and then he buried his head in the hollow of my neck to kiss, nibble, bite gently at areas that made me shiver and arch against him. “Hope the brakes are good on this bed,” he said, and made me laugh. I hadn’t thought I’d ever laugh again, but the vision of the two of us madly entwined on this bed as it rolled through the hallway, Wardens stopping to gawk… “Stop laughing,” he scolded me, but I heard the tremble of it in his voice, too. “You’re screwing up my concentration.”
I made him gasp aloud, again, from what I was doing with both hands now. “Am I? Because it seems your concentration is quite… firm.”
“Oh, now you’re teasing?” His voice had turned ragged, dark around the edges, and I let him lift me up and back onto the bed. My gown drifted to the floor, and somehow the sheet joined it as he kicked off his jeans, stripped away his sleeveless shirt, and knelt in the open space between my legs. “I can tease, too. Payback.”
He could, it seemed. The teasing involved hands, mouths, sweetly torturous control that made me bite my lips and beg him for release. When he finally gave in, when he was inside me, instinct and a desperate need took hold of me, and no matter how he tried to slow it down, I wasn’t in the mood for leisurely lovemaking. Not this time. There was too much darkness to dispel, too much desperation, too little time left. He surrendered to me as much as I did to him, both of us lost in the fury and fire and urgency of it, and when he came he shuddered deep, holding me upright and close, and seeing the ecstasy take him triggered something wild in me as well, something that burst up from our joined bodies and spun us both crazily out of control, up into the highest reaches I’d ever climbed on the aetheric, and then drifted us down again like falling leaves to settle once again in our human, mortal, beautiful forms.
Luis collapsed against me, only just managing to hold his weight off at the last minute by resting it on his elbows. We were both covered in sweat, tasting it on each other’s lips, and the glow between us lingered. Neither of us wanted to move, and it wasn’t until the door rattled that he finally stopped kissing me in drowsy, gentle presses of lips, and sighed. The frustrated groan that followed came from the very depths of him, and I felt it resonating in my own body.
“Welcome back,” he said, and laughed a little despairingly. “Now it’s time to go. God, Cass. If I’d lost you…”
I touched my lips to his in word
less reassurance. “You didn’t,” I said. “And you won’t.”
There was another impatient rattle at the door, and then a knock—tentative at first, then growing louder.
“We should probably—”
“Yes,” I agreed, and kissed him again. “We should.” Neither of us was in a hurry to answer the summons—and then, unexpectedly, the lock snapped back.
“Crap,” Luis said.
There was an Earth Warden on the other side of that door; Luis’s forethought in adding the bracing chair had paid off, because that stopped them from barging in—for a moment.
“Hand me my gown,” I said.
He kissed me again, fast, and slid off to grab my gown, drape it over me, and then step into his underwear and jeans in a fast, expert motion. He was just zipping up when the chair clattered away from its locking position at the door, and it banged open.
Luis didn’t pause. He picked up the sheet from the floor and put it back over me, winked, and turned to face the person standing in the doorway.
It was Isabel. Next to her, Esmeralda’s human torso swayed on top of her snaky, muscular body. She crossed her arms over the tight, pink shirt she wore (embellished with the glittering words BITCH QUEEN) and looked down at Isabel, who had frozen, looking taken aback.
“See?” Esmeralda said. “Told you there was nothing wrong. They were just totally doing it.”
Luis got his shirt from where it dangled at the end of the bed and pulled it over his head. “Girls,” he said in a bland voice. “What’s the emergency?”“Um…” Isabel’s cheeks were beet red, and she couldn’t seem to look directly at either of us. “Nothing. It can wait. I just—I just wanted to see how she was doing. When the door was locked, I thought—”
“I told you,” Esmeralda said in a bored voice, and checked the finish on her fingernails. “Doing it.”
“Shut up!” Isabel whispered fiercely. “God!”
“Thank you for coming to see me,” I said, and was very careful about where and how the sheet draped over me. “I’m sorry the timing was… awkward. I’m much better.”
