by Rachel Caine
David misted out of the chill morning air, and he’d never looked more Djinn than he did in that moment, all metallic luster and burning eyes, and a rage to turn the world to cinders. “Don’t,” he said. “She needs me. She needs me now. Let me go to her!”
“I can’t,” Orwell said. There was sadness in it, and infinite regret, but there wasn’t any room for negotiation, either. “I’m sorry, David. Get back in the bottle. Now.”
David screamed, and the sound ripped through me like a saw blade, bloody and torturous, but he misted out. The scream lasted longer than his ghostly image, and then he was just… gone.
Orwell capped the bottle and put it in the pocket of his jeans. “And this one?” he asked me. “Who belongs to it?”
“What did you just do?” I blurted, appalled. “She’ll die out there without rescue!” And Lewis, of all people, would not sacrifice Joanne’s life. At least, the Lewis that I’d known before.
I didn’t really know the man who faced me now, looking so… different. It was, I thought, the losses he’d taken in battle, and something else. Something more insidious. Pearl, or Shinju as they knew her here, wormed her way into his trust, into all them. She’d convinced him of many things that I wouldn’t like, I sensed now.
Lewis didn’t answer me directly; he only held up the other bottle. “Tell me which Djinn belongs to this.”
“How did you know I even had the bottles? Did she tell you?” I jerked my chin at Shinju, who regarded me with utter, maddening gentleness. “Lewis, you cannot listen to her!”
He didn’t answer that, either. I almost didn’t know him in that moment; he looked exhausted and bruised, but the real change was in his eyes. Suffering, those eyes. And full of self-loathing.
“Please, Lewis. You must send him back to her. She needs him.”
“I can’t do that. Get inside the building. It’s not safe out here.” He looked up. Another Djinn was hurtling out of the sky, a black and lime green blur that resolved in an instant into Rahel, and in her arms… Luis, looking windblown and disoriented. She let him go, and he lurched to grab hold of a handy fake-sandstone pillar.
Rahel glanced from Orwell to me, eyebrows raised. “Am I interrupting something private?”
“Yes.” Lewis was seething now, on the wire-thin edge of control. “I assume this bottle is hers, then.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s Rahel’s.”
“Back in the bottle, Rahel. Now.”
She sent me a furious glare; I supposed she expected me to lie, but it wouldn’t have done any good. I’d added a few more years of torment on to my already lengthy sentence, once she got free of my control.
And this time, I most likely deserved it.
Luis had steadied himself, and he was watching us, frowning, standing with his weight balanced for attack or defense. “What the hell is going on?” he asked. “Why didn’t you send her back for Joanne? Is David going?”
“Ask Orwell,” I said. “Lewis, what are you doing? You can’t leave her out there alone. If Shinju’s told you that she’ll be all right, she’s lying—”
“Shinju is inside,” he said. “With us. And that’s where I need you, too, inside. I can’t risk a single one of the Djinn out there, not now; it’s the endgame. We’re losing cities, whole cities, and we can’t keep it together much longer. We’ve already lost so many. David is one of the most powerful we could ever have on our side. I absolutely can’t let him go.” No wonder his eyes were so haunted, his face so pale and lined. He was managing the end of the human race, and it was burning him alive; his very passion was destroying him.
If it was grave enough that he could abandon Joanne, whom I knew he loved more than any of us… then it was the last death throes of the Wardens.
This was Shinju, I thought again. Pearl, taking her revenge in small, cruel ways. Abandoning Joanne hurt Lewis, and it would destroy David; it would hurt all the Wardens, in great or small ways.
I shouldn’t have left her there alone. I should never have agreed to it.
Chapter 12
LAS VEGAS SEEMED shockingly normal. Inside the hotel, lights burned; slot machines rang, buzzed, and whirred. Dead-eyed humans sat and gambled away their last wealth, expecting no tomorrow. I supposed that at the end of the world, perhaps people would take their pleasures where they could, though I didn’t see what joy could come of winning a game of chance now.
The very definition of a Pyrrhic victory. You win only to burn.
I thought about that scream that David had uttered; I didn’t seem to be able to unhear that kind of pain and anguish, fury and horror. It echoed unpleasantly inside my head, driving out everything else, and I thought, I have to get him back. Open the bottle and let him find her.
I thought that up to the moment when Lewis opened a door and walked me inside the last refuge of the Wardens.
The smell of sweat, desperation, and despair was thick in the room. There was little noise; it was as hushed and quiet as a church, or a funeral. At one time, this would have been an expensive retreat for the ridiculously wealthy, a playpen for the spoiled, but now all of the elegance had been stripped and shoved away, and the room was a morgue, hospital, surgery, and battleground all at once. There was a space in one corner for Wardens to work, and currently there were six standing together, hands linked. As I watched, one collapsed. A black-coated staff member of the hotel silently picked her up and carried her to a cot, woke another Warden, and led him groggily to take the empty place in the circle.
In Oversight, this room was awash in reds and blacks, bloody with it.
And around us, hemming us in, was a descending white fury.
There was another room, the door left partially open; I glanced at it as we walked past, and saw…
Isabel.
“Ibby!” I cried, and ran toward her. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, but scrambled up to hug me when I hurtled toward her. Luis was right with me, hugging the child, kissing her.
She’d grown still more—no longer the slender early teen, she’d now matured to an age that had to be ringing the bell of adulthood. Seventeen, eighteen years of growth, perhaps, but the smile was still the unfettered joy of a child, and the relief of one.
“Mama,” she blurted, and then took in a sharp, steadying breath. She shook her long, dark hair back and composed herself with an obvious effort. “I mean, hello, Cassiel. Uncle Luis.”
“Shut up, mija,” he said, and hugged her again. He kissed her on the forehead. “How did you get here?”
“I came with everybody out of Seattle,” she said. “We were evac-ed out by helicopter, except for the Weather Wardens; they had to go in a truck. Es went with them. She said it was exciting.” The color was high in her cheeks, but she was trying very hard to seem composed. “You two look tired. But you’re okay, right?”
“Yeah, we’re okay,” Luis said, and smiled.
“I’m so glad,” said a new voice, and I turned. So did Luis, and his smile vanished. So did his good mood, and mine, because Pearl’s human form stood there, cool and composed, smiling at us. I hadn’t noticed in the stress of the moments before, but she’d affected a Japanese kimono, and put her dark hair up in a complicated style; of all those I’d seen in this place, she was the first to look rested and content. “Please, be welcome here with us.” The us was significant, because she was talking about Isabel. And, I saw, Esmeralda, who was asleep in a piled tangle of coils nearby.
And beyond her was a room full of Pearl’s children. Eerily quiet children, mostly awake and focused on things that weren’t there—working on the aetheric, I assumed. Performing their altruistic duty to help mankind… until Pearl decided that was no longer necessary, of course. As soon it wouldn’t be.
There were almost a hundred of them here, dressed in plain white shirts and pants, like a uniform. Isabel, I realized, was also in white. Even Esmeralda wore a soft white T-shirt on her human half instead of her usual flashy choices.
Pearl’s kimono was a
softly patterned white, with embossed flowers and dragons.
“Interesting,” I said, holding her dark gaze. “White’s the color for funerals in Japan.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m in mourning for all those we’ve lost. I’m surprised that you are not… but then, Cassiel, you were never what one would term the sentimental sort. You finally came to join the battle.”
“Oh, I’ve been fighting,” I said. “And I don’t forget who I’m really fighting, either. That was your doing, out there in the desert.”
She cocked her head slightly, but her utterly polite and blank expression never shifted. “It’s good to be aware of one’s purpose,” she said blandly. “Though I thought the Djinn had a different path for you than this. You could have become something so… different. So powerful.”
I had a suffocating flashback to being sealed in that airless tight crystal coffin, pierced by slow, pitiless needles. Changing, as she intended, to something different. Something powerful.
Something that she would control. Her angel of death, stalking the world.
“That’s not going to happen,” I said, and she bowed her head, just a tiny inclination.
“As you say.” It was amusement, not agreement. “You are welcome to stay here with us.”
“No. Isabel,” I said, “get Esmeralda. We’re joining the Wardens.”
“I can’t,” Isabel said. It wasn’t a rebellion, it was a statement. “I’m sorry, Cassie, but I can’t do that. The Wardens aren’t where I need to be. Es, either. They don’t understand us, and they don’t know what we can do. We’re better here, where we can really use our powers to help.”
There was the faintest shadow of a smile on Pearl’s lips. Delicate, like the shadows of flowers and dragons on her robe. “The children know that I’ll care for them,” she said. “As I always have.”
“Care for them,” I repeated. The rage that I kept banked inside, that had driven me to survive despite all the challenges arrayed against me, against Ashan’s edict and the Wardens’ distrust, against the Mother herself—that rage warmed me now. Sustained me. I did not let it drive me, however. I knew that was what she wanted. “Oh, you care for them. I’ve seen the wreckage of the children you no longer wanted, could no longer use. You keep those you can put to work, and once they’re dry, you’ll discard them. And none of them will outlive your rebirth, will they?”
But that, I knew, was a lie. Of all the children that Pearl had abducted, or coerced, or whose parents she’d persuaded to entrust them to her—of all these elite children gathered here with her in this room—she’d keep Isabel to the last breath, purely because I loved her.
Isabel was my punishment. Solely, completely, mine.
“It’s my choice,” Iz insisted. “Cassie, please understand—this is how I want to help. By being here. With her. I want you to respect what I choose to do.”
Luis hadn’t spoken, but he was staring at his niece with an expression that told me how heartbroken he was. “You can’t want this, Iz,” he said softly. “If you do, you’re forgetting everything you learned. She took you, baby. She did things to you that hurt you. She made you—she made you believe that Cass was your enemy, that I was dead. Don’t you see that? She’s not your friend. She’s our enemy.”
“She’s your enemy,” Iz said. She looked just as grave, just as sad. “I’m sorry, Tío. I wish I could make you understand, but she made me what I need to be right now, and I need to be here. Please believe me. Please.”
“They’ll never understand, Isabel,” Pearl said. She sounded so soft, so compassionate, and no one could see what she really was inside: a murderer, bent on extinction, bloody and complete. Someone who could only lust after death on an ever-grander scale. “They’ll always try to stand in your way. But it’s up to you. If you want to go with them, I wish you well.”
She didn’t mean it, of course; she’d never allow Isabel out of her control now, but Iz didn’t know that, couldn’t know it. To her, it sounded like pure generosity of spirit.
There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t reinforce that impression and drive Isabel further into the arms of my enemy.
I felt a presence behind me, and looked back to see that Lewis Orwell was standing there. He nodded politely to Pearl, equal to equal. “Thank you for maintaining the perimeter,” he said. “It’s much-needed relief.”
“I am happy to assist,” she said. “Cassiel seems to think that these children are here against their wishes. Would you please reassure her, Warden?”
He glanced at me, at Luis, and said, “I’ve spoken to as many of them as I can. They all say they’re fine. None of them have parents here with us.” Meaning, I supposed, that this was a room full of orphans, with no one to come for them. No one to battle Pearl for their hearts and minds. And what else would they say? They’d all been twisted into her creatures. They had no voices of their own.
“If that’s so, not all of their parents died out there fighting the good fight,” I said. “Some were killed by—what do you call it?—friendly fire.”
“Maybe,” Orwell said. “But that’s a moot point now. If we survive, we can sort it all out then.” He didn’t seem to hold out any real hope for that, and he was most likely right. “I need the two of you on duty, right now. Come with me.”
“Not without Isabel,” Luis said.
Isabel disagreed. She crossed her arms and sat down on the floor, unmistakably daring us to drag her off against her will. Luis looked down at her, shaken and angry. When he grabbed for her, I intercepted his hand and shook my head. “Leave her,” I said. “You must. This isn’t over.”
“Damn straight it isn’t over,” he said, and glared at Pearl. “I’m coming for you, bitch. You are not getting that girl. Believe it.”
Her gaze brushed mine, and I heard Pearl’s mocking voice in my mind. And you, Cassiel? No empty threats from you, even as I hold your child in my hands? While I hold her very soul?
I smiled slowly, and said aloud, “No empty ones.”
I pushed Luis out ahead of me, following the most powerful Warden on earth to our assigned battle stations.
I should have known that Joanne wasn’t that easy to kill—even for Pearl.
Luis and I were remotely laying thick blocks of power at the base of a newly emerging volcano in Los Angeles. It was brute-force work, no delicacy to it; we were well beyond that kind of control now, after many exhausting hours.
We’d just finished the last layers of protection for the embattled city, and dropped out of the aetheric back into our bodies, when the shout rang out through the hushed, startled room.
“Cassiel! Luis!”
Joanne Baldwin—bloodied, sweaty, dirty, furious—was standing in the doorway. A stillness fell over the room, a sense of dull surprise; there might have been happiness, if anyone had still had the energy for it.
She ignored everyone except us.
Joanne scrambled over cots, prone bodies, and thumped down to land flat-footed facing us, weight distributed for a fight. She looked wild and almost Djinn-bright in her fury. “Where is he?” she demanded, and I saw glimmers of fire around her hands, evidence she was just barely clinging to her controls. “David was with you! Where is he, damn you? What did you do to him? You had his bottle!”
I think she would have burned me out of sheer terror and frustration, but Lewis Orwell—who’d been lying down on a bunk not far away—rose and came toward her. She had no chance to even speak his name before he put his arms around her, not so much to comfort her as hold her back. She pushed him away, but I saw her freeze, taking in what I’d seen hours ago—the state of the man, the sadness, the exhaustion.
“Where is he?” she asked, but in a much shakier, more vulnerable voice. “God, please—”
He took her arm and led her away. Breaking the news to her, I thought, in private—that he’d taken David, that he’d imprisoned him, that he’d made the decision to leave her to die while he’d used David ruthlessly here instead,
to shore up defenses, defend the helpless masses dying out there in the greater world.
I’d felt ill even witnessing the trapped fury in Joanne’s lover; he’d done as commanded, mostly because even he couldn’t deny the necessity of it, but he had never stopped hating Lewis for it.
Together they had trapped and imprisoned almost a hundred Djinn, and those bottles sat locked in a case on the far wall of the Wardens’ room. The only bottle that wasn’t there was Venna’s, the one that Lewis himself still kept.
And now Lewis was going to have to explain all of that to Joanne. That ought to be an interesting conversation… and one likely to lead to violence.
The door closed after them. The small meeting space inside didn’t seem like a place to be having the kind of confrontation that was likely between two Wardens of that level of power, but then again, I supposed that having it here in the middle of innocent potential victims might have been worse.
“Hey,” Luis said. He shook his loose black hair away from his face, grabbed a bottle of water from a cooler sitting nearby, and pitched it underhand to me. I cracked the top and drained several gulps, closing my eyes at the simple ecstasy of fulfilling a basic need. “While they’re occupied, we need to talk.”
“About…?”
“You know what.” He jerked his chin at the second, still larger room, where Pearl kept her children segregated from the Wardens. Where Isabel was. “This is coming to a head, and she’s going to strike. We need to be ready when that happens, and I don’t know what your plan is.”
I’d been working on one, but it was depressingly likely that it, too, would fail. Still, he was right; we had to try. “Make your way over toward the door,” I said. “We’ll need a diversion.”
“What kind?”
“Any kind, so long as it pulls the Wardens away from that wall.” I glanced where I meant, and he saw the locked case with its mismatched bottles neatly lined up there. “I need only about fifteen seconds.”
