Undone

by Rachel Caine

  I wondered if I would be expected to do that, as well.

  I did not know the protocols, so I stood, watching, as Manny put down his bag and turned on a light next to the sofa. "Living room," he said. Which I thought was a curious way to refer to it--did they not live in all the rooms? Was there a dying room? "Bedrooms through there. Kitchen. There's a sunroom on the back, which is nice."

  Manny was nervous. Perhaps it was my stare. I looked away and wandered the room, idly trailing my fingertips over the cold, still pictures in frames. Family. Human family.

  "That's my brother," he said. "Luis."

  He thought I was looking at the picture that my fingers were touching. I picked up the frame and saw that it held the image of a man, handsome, a little younger than Manny. A stronger jaw, but kind eyes.

  "He's a Warden, too," Manny said. "You'll meet him later, maybe. He's out in Florida right now."

  I put the photo down. "I would like to go now," I said, which I thought was a polite way to request an end to this. Evidently not. Manny frowned at me.

  "You want something to eat first? You do want to eat, right?"

  Did I? I supposed I did. Djinn in human form seemed to emulate all human functions equally, and my stomach was growling in frustration. I hadn't yet mastered the knack of anticipating its needs.

  I nodded.

  Angela, who'd said very little, patted her daughter on the head and sent her scampering off to play before turning to me. I was struck by her again--a quiet, controlled woman, strong. So closely guarded. "Manny tells me you're not human," she said. "Is that right?"

  I cocked my head. "I was not born human. I seem to be human enough now."

  Human enough. A frightening statement.

  "All right," Angela said. "I've seen Djinn before. I know they're dangerous. Let me make something clear to you--if you hurt my husband, if you even think about hurting my daughter, I'll kill you. Understand?"

  Manny looked taken aback. Angela's dark eyes remained steady, fixed on mine, and I sensed nothing from her but sincerity.

  "I understand," I said, and searched for something else to say. Human words seemed clumsy to me. Ridiculously inappropriate to what I wanted to communicate. "I will make mistakes. I cannot help that."

  Her fierce stare softened a bit. "Mistakes are okay," she said. "But don't make them twice. And don't you dare make them with my daughter."

  I inclined my head.

  "Now," she said. "How do you feel about enchiladas?"

  "Neutral," I said, "since I don't know what they are."

  Angela gave me her first real smile. "Then you're in for a treat."

  "Or not," Manny said, "if you don't like hot sauce."

  She hit him. It was, I realized, a playful blow, not an angry one, and I was surprised at my physical reaction, which was an impulse to reach out and stay her hand.

  I had wanted to defend him. Why? Because he was my Conduit. My life source.

  I hadn't anticipated that at all.

  I did not like hot sauce, which made Isabel laugh until tears rolled down her cheeks. She scooped up spoonfuls of the spice and ate them to show me how silly I was.

  I could not be bested by a mere child. I continued to try, choking on the burn, until at last Angela took pity on me and removed it from the table. Isabel pouted until her father tickled her into laughter again.

  It was a quiet meal--quieter than I suspected was their normal case. "When do we begin our duties?" I finally asked, after consuming several glasses of iced tea that Angela provided.

  "Tomorrow," Manny said. "Unless there's an emergency, which I hope there isn't." He stood up, picked up his plate and mine, and carried them into the kitchen. "I'll take you home now," he called back.

  Isabel ran around the table and--to my shock--crawled up into my lap. The warm, real weight of her was surprising. I looked down at her upturned face, at her smile, and frowned in puzzlement. "What do you want?" I asked her. Angela made a strangled sound of protest and rose from her chair, but I extended a hand to stop her. "Isabel?"

  "A hug," Isabel said. "You're funny, lady."

  I thought that was quite likely true, from her miniature perspective.

  I was unaccustomed to hugs, but she was an adequate instructor. She took my arms and fitted them around her small body. "Tighter!" she commanded. I dutifully squeezed, well aware of how fragile her bones were beneath the skin.

  When she began to squirm, I let go. She almost toppled from my lap, and I grabbed her to steady her.

  Isabel giggled, and it was as warm as sunlight.

  This is a child. A young soul. A blank slate. I had never met one before, and it was oddly . . . freeing.

  "That's enough," Angela said, and grabbed Isabel from my lap. "You need to learn some manners, mija."

  "She's sad," Isabel protested. "I wanted to make her smile!"

  Manny came back from the kitchen. His eyes darted from Angela holding his daughter in a protective embrace, to me sitting quietly in my chair. I was not smiling. In truth, I could have, but I knew it would ring false to the child.

  "Not yet, Isabel," I told her. "Maybe later. But--thank you for the hug."

  I meant it. She had reached out to me, and although it should not have mattered to me . . . it did.

  Manny broke the silence by picking up his car keys from the table and saying, in a carefully bland tone, "Let's get you home."

  Home.

  It was another box. It was filled with odors, of course--choking detergent where the carpets had been recently cleaned, paint reeking from the newly retouched walls. Aside from the odors, the room was empty save for a single small cot, made up with sheets, blanket, and pillow. A single small folding table. A single small lamp.

  I liked the simplicity of it.

  "Yeah," Manny said, and juggled keys in his hand for a second before tossing them to me. I snatched them out of the air without looking. "Cozy, I know. Sorry, we didn't have time to get things for you, and I figured you'd want to pick furniture and stuff yourself."

  He was apologizing. How odd.

  "It's fine," I said. I threw open the nearest window and took in a breath of the air that rolled over the sill, redolent of sage and high mountain spaces.

  "I guess--I'll bring over some catalogs tomorrow. You can pick what you want. Clothes, too. You want Angela to go with you to find things?"

  I looked down at myself. "What's wrong with what I have?"

  He blinked. "Nothing. Uh, you can't wear the same thing all the time."

  I knew that. "I bought several copies of the same clothing. I know clothes must be changed and laundered."

  "But--everything you bought is the same?"

  "Yes."

  He shook his head. "You are not a normal girl."

  I was not a girl. But I assumed he meant it in a figurative sense, and allowed it to pass.

  Manny laid out the contents of a folder on the table. "Checkbook. Remember what I said about the ATM, and how you can only pull out what you have in the account? Same thing here. Just because you have checks left, that doesn't mean you can keep on writing them. Here's your phone number. Rings to this cell phone, so you should memorize it." He pulled a small pink device from his pocket. "Sorry about the color; pink was all I could get. Last-minute."

  I liked pink. "It's fine." I took the machine in my hands and felt the energy coursing through it. My Djinn senses were blunted, but in close proximity, I could still feel the broad strokes of its engineering. "How does it work?"

  He showed me. I called his home, explained to Angela that we were testing my cell phone, and hung up.

  "We usually say good-bye," Manny said dryly.

  "Why?"

  "Same reason we do most things. Because it's polite."

  I was starting to see that. I slid the small pink phone into my pocket. "Manny."

  I had not said his name before, and it drew his attention, with a hint of anxiety. "Yes?"

  "I--" My throat threatened to close around
the words, but how could I survive if I could not acknowledge this? "I need--"

  He understood without more being said, and extended his hand to me. I took it, cool fingers closing on warmer ones, and reached out for power.

  It flowed through him in a thick golden stream, slow and sweet as honey. Not nearly as powerful as what Lewis had given me, and I sensed that it would not sustain me as long, but good nevertheless. I took in a deep breath as the warmth infused me, as the world flared into auras and a brief, tantalizing glimpse of the worlds beyond, and then steadied back into human terms.

  It wasn't easy to do it, but I let go.

  Manny staggered. I grabbed his arm and guided him to the cot, where he sat and leaned forward, breathing hard. "I am sorry," I said. "Did I--"

  "No." His voice sounded rough, and he didn't look at me directly. "No, I'm fine. You did fine. It's just--it feels--"

  "Bad," I supplied soberly. He raised his head, and I was surprised by the glitter in his eyes.

  "No. It feels good."

  Oh.

  That, I realized, could be extraordinarily dangerous for us both.

  Manny left quickly after, reminding me to lock the door. I did, flimsy as the barrier was, and wandered through my apartment. It was indeed small--a "living" area, a kitchen, a second empty room, and a bath. I opened all the windows. Humans enjoyed living in boxes. I did not.

  For the first time since falling into human flesh, I was alone. Truly alone.

  I sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes shut, and tried to remember what it had felt like to be a Djinn. The memories faded so quickly, anchored in skin. The power from Manny resonated inside, a slow and constant rush, and for some time, nothing intruded.

  Until I felt the world shift.

  Something had happened, subtle and vile, on the edges of my awareness. It was not in the air--there were Wardens at work, molding the forces there, but all was well. Fire, then? No, I sensed nothing but silence from that quarter.

  The vile thing was happening to a living creature, and so it whispered through the power Manny had granted me.

  And it was happening here.

  I shot to my feet, eyes opening, and cast about for any sense of direction. Yes, there, there, to my right and not far away . . .

  I unlocked and opened the door and stepped out on the landing my apartment shared with two others. The pulse was weak now, the life fading.

  I descended the two flights of stairs at a run, arrived at ground level, and turned the corner.

  A child lay on the ground, with a knot of other children around him. No one was touching him, and I got no sense of malice. Only confusion, and a dawning awareness of something wrong.

  There was a machine next to him--a bicycle.

  He had fallen.

  "Move," I ordered the children, and they scattered like bright birds. I knelt next to the boy, my hands moving slowly above him, sensing the rightness of his body, and then the wrongness in his skull.

  The bone was broken. The brain--

  "Get his people," I said, intent on the task before me.

  "What?"

  "His father! His mother!" My brain struggled to parse words. "Parents."

  Two of the children ran, shouting at the top of their lungs. I slid my hand carefully behind the boy's head, and under the feather-soft hair I felt the depression where he'd struck the curb. Blood flooded warm across my fingers.

  I needed Manny, but he was away, and I was alone.

  The Djinn part of me said, It is an accident. It is the way of living things. And the Djinn part of me was content to let it be so.

  But the human part, the human part screamed in frustration, too urgent to ignore.

  I pulled from the reserve of power inside and poured it through my fingertips. Of all that the Djinn knew, we knew this--the template of things. We could build, we could destroy . . . and we could, on occasion, heal, if we held enough power inside, and the injury was fresh and contained.

  I felt the bone shift, and the boy screamed. The sound pierced me like cold metal, but I gritted my teeth and kept focusing on my work, sealing the bone together. I concentrated then on reducing the swelling of his injured brain tissues. The cut in the scalp was stubborn, and continued to leak red despite my commands.

  Human hands closed around my shoulders and yanked me away from the shrieking child. I fell backward, surprised.

  A human man was looming above me, face dark red with rage, a fist clenched. "What are you doing to my kid?" he shouted.

  The boy squirmed away from me, got to his short legs and hurried to his father's protection, wrapping his arms around the man's waist. I remembered Isabel grabbing on to Manny's knees, and the fierce love and protective instinct I'd sensed between them.

  "I did not hurt him," I said. I didn't move. Violence hung like a black cloud around the man, and any provocation could unleash the storm. "He fell from his bicycle. He struck his head."

  The words had the desired effect, as did my calm tone and direct gaze. The man's posture shifted, his fist relaxed, and he looked down at his child. He lifted the boy in his arms and touched the back of the small head.

  His fingers came away bloody. "My God--"

  "You should see a doctor," I said. Not that the child needed one, but I thought it sounded like a human thing to say. "I don't think he's hurt badly, but--"

  The boy began to cry, wails of pain and fright, and buried his face in his father's chest. The man stared at me for a moment, then nodded once, a dry sort of thanks, before carrying his child away.

  One of the other children grabbed the bicycle and wheeled it after them. One wheel wobbled badly.

  I sat there breathing hard, blood on my hands, blood cooling in the gutter, and wondered what I had just done. I'd reacted virtually without thinking. I'd spent my precious hoard of energy almost down to the last trickle, and I knew that I would have continued to give until the well ran dry, once I had engaged in the battle for the child's life.

  That frightened me. Djinn were not so careless, nor so caring of others. He was human. Humans die. That was the Djinn philosophy, and it was true.

  Yet I had not even once thought of withholding my help.

  I got up, sore and tired, and went back to my apartment to wash and sleep, and worry about what was happening to me.

  "You what?" I had not expected Manny to be angry, but he clearly was; his face was darkening in much the same way as the boy's father's had when he'd been contemplating violence. "How could you be so damn careless? You don't know what you're doing. You're not a healer--you can't just--" He got his temper under control by taking several slow, deep breaths. "How's the kid?"

  "I don't know."

  "Great. Just great. Do you have any idea how much trouble you could have been in? What if the kid had died on you? Hell, what if he died later?"

  "I didn't cause his injury," I said, affronted. We were standing in the living area of my apartment, and Manny had brought two cups of coffee--a morning ritual, he'd assured me. It was a kind gesture, but he'd done it before I had told him of the child and my actions.

  The coffee sat forgotten on the table now.

  "Maybe not, but you could have gotten tied up with all kinds of questions, and the police--" Manny pressed a hand to his forehead. "Damn. What am I saying? It might not have been smart, but I'd have done the same thing. I couldn't have ignored it, either. But I have training. You don't, Cassiel. You can't just--jump in. Especially not without me, okay?"

  I accepted that without argument. By human standards, it was true enough. "I should not have acted so quickly," I agreed. "I need more power."

  I put it bluntly, to see both how it felt on the tongue and how he would react. The taste of it was fine. His reaction was instructive, in that his eyes widened, and I saw a spark of something that might have been excitement, quickly buried.

  "All right," he said, and his tone seemed deliberately casual. He held out his hand. I took it, and almost immediately, the beast inside of me
, the hungry, desperate part, began to greedily devour what was offered. My sensible mind faded, pushed aside by need.

  I felt Manny try to pull away. It sparked instincts in me--not Djinn instincts; the primitive impulses of a ruthless, successful predator.

  The human impulse to hunt was complicating my needs.

  No!

  My distaste of those human instincts was all that saved him. I let go, wrenching the flow of power shut between us, and backed physically away, arms wrapped around my aching stomach.

  Manny collapsed. It was slow, almost graceful, and he was never unconscious; he simply lacked the strength, or the will, to keep on his feet. Or his knees. He fell full length on the carpet and rolled onto his back, eyes dark and wide, gasping for breath.

  "I'm sorry," I said. I was. I was also well aware that I should not touch him again, not now. "Did I hurt you?"

  "Not--exactly," he said. He groaned and rolled painfully onto his side, then up to a sitting position. I could see the trembling in his muscles, as if he'd received a violent electric shock. "Let's not do that again, okay? You're kind of hard on your friends."

  "I said I was sorry."

  "You can say it again. It won't offend me." Manny rested his back against the bare wall, pulled up his knees, and rested his forearms on them. "Christ. We've got to work on that. You can't take it out of me like that. If we're in real trouble, you could kill us both, not to mention anybody we're trying to help." He rested his head against the wall and sighed. "And at the risk of sounding like a woman, that hurts when you do it wrong."

  I stayed silent. I felt a strange burn of shame, deep down, that wouldn't be smothered. I hurt him. I hadn't meant to do so, but that hardly mattered. If I'd killed him, he leaves behind others. The interconnectedness of human life had never truly made itself real to me until I had sat at the table, eating food prepared by his wife, watching his daughter laugh and smile.

  Manny didn't speak again. I crouched down across from him, eye level, and stared deep into his eyes.

  "I can't promise," I said. "I will do my best, but I may not always be able to control this. You must be prepared to defend against me."

  His gaze didn't waver. "That's not real comforting."

  "It wasn't meant to be." I smiled slightly, but I didn't imagine that was comforting, either. "I assume the Wardens are keeping track of what I do."