Unbroken

Chapter 11

DAWN WAS STILL A HINT on the horizon when we began to pass signs that led not to Sedona, but Las Vegas; a course correction that mattered little to me, since there were also Wardens in that city, and people to defend from attacks. It surprised me that the Djinn had failed to discover us during the night, until Luis woke up with a raw, startled cry and surprised me into a wobble that I quickly got back under control. Losing control of a motorcycle at this speed was a very poor idea.

Rahel had stopped singing some time back, and vanished. I hadn’t thought much of it, except that her boredom had finally outweighed my torment, but now Luis leaned forward and said in a raw voice, “The Fire Oracle’s been turned loose. He’s burning cities. I saw it. I can feel it.”

He said it quickly, but with utter certainty, and I twisted to look over my shoulder. His face was set, his eyes shadowed, and I had no doubt he meant what he’d just said. “How is that possible?” I asked. “Oracles don’t leave their positions, except the Air Oracle, who isn’t confined.…”

“I’m telling you that he’s walking, and burning. The destruction—” Luis looked ill and shaken. “I saw it. I was dreaming, but it was real. I know it was real. I saw—people—Cass, it’s happening. It’s really happening. She’s going to kill us all.”

He’d known that from the beginning, but something—some instinct for self-preservation and sanity—had withheld that knowledge from him on a gut level. Now he knew, with all the certainty that I’d always carried.

There were tears in his eyes, I could see them in the reflected light of the dashboard in front of me. “We’re not going to win,” he said. “We can’t win, Cassie. We can fight all we want, but—”

I don’t know if he would have gone on, or could have, but there was a sound from the Mustang behind us—a harsh metallic grinding sound as its engine seized and suddenly died. We were topping a hill, and below us the city of Las Vegas shimmered in a sea of light. The area seemed eerily normal, oddly quiet. I wondered if people were still gambling in the casinos. It seemed likely. People sought comfort in the oddest things.

I let off the throttle to fall back to the now-coasting car… and then the same thing happened to the bike’s motor. A rattle, a cough, and then nothing.

I coasted it to a stop at the side of the road.

“Tell me we ran out of gas,” Luis said.

“No,” I replied. “It’s not a mechanical problem. Get ready. Something’s coming for us.”

We had just gotten off the motorcycle when the Mustang’s doors opened, and Joanne and David joined us; the Djinn in the driver’s seat didn’t move. He simply sat like a lifeless mannequin—as I supposed he was, unless Whitney decided it was necessary to move him. Each of them had canvas bags in the backseat of the car; Joanne dragged hers out and unzipped it. She pulled out a shotgun, loaded it with neat efficiency, and tossed it toward David, who fielded it effortlessly.

“I didn’t think you needed weapons,” I said to him. He looked up and gave me a fleeting smile.

“That depends on what’s coming,” he said. “And I never turn down an advantage. Not these days.”

Joanne was loading the semiautomatic pistol when I felt something stirring around us, a surge of Earth power that made me draw in a sharp breath of warning—but it was already too late.

Joanne must have had an instant’s warning, because she fell backward as a truly enormous eagle dropped out of the darkness overhead and extended its claws to rake her face. Light blazed out from a lantern that appeared in David’s hand, and I saw the eagle beat its wings and correct it course to strike at her again. She rolled out of the way. David tracked it with the shotgun, but didn’t fire.

I stepped in, focused all my attention, all of Luis’s tethered power, on the eagle, and called it to me. It was a wild creature, and there was no malice in it, only fear and hunger twisted by the will of another out there in the darkness. It did not deserve to be used this way; the bird was a thing of terrible beauty, and I would not have it hurt.

It glided toward me, but at the last moment the power out there in the desert ripped at its mind, forced it to see me as a dangerous enemy, and the eagle shrieked out its rage and aborted its landing to rake claws across my chest. It caught leather instead of flesh, and sliced it cleanly apart as it wheeled and fled…

… Toward a sky full of hunting birds, all coming together in an unnatural mixed-breed flock to circle overhead.

Luis turned his attention not up, but out. “We’ve got more trouble,” he said.

“More birds?” Joanne asked as she climbed to her feet and dusted herself off. “Jesus, I used to like them.”

I shook my head. “Not just birds. What’s coming is far more than that. They will catch us. We have to run now. No time for the vehicles.”

Joanne raised the pistol she’d held on to. “We’re armed.”

I felt myself grin, humorlessly. “Humans and guns. Do you have enough bullets for every living thing that survives in the desert? We have to run. We have no choice.”

“We can’t make it all the way into Vegas,” David said. “They’re coming fast, and in waves. There’s some kind of motel down the hill. We can make it there and hold them off.”

“Maybe you can, but I damn sure can’t run fast enough,” Luis said. He sounded worried. “Cass—”

“I know,” I said. “The car can coast down. I can handle the motorcycle.”

“Those birds are going to dive on you.”

“Perhaps, but I’m not leaving the motorcycle.” I shrugged. “I like it.”

He gave me a look that said I was insane—as perhaps I was—and got into the car with Joanne and David. Whatever Djinn force was animating the vehicle gave it a push, and the Mustang picked up rolling speed as the grade steepened. I had a more difficult time of it, balancing the motorcycle without the forward thrust, but I managed. We glided in a hiss of tires down the winding hill, and above us birds screamed. I heard the constant beat of wings. I kept a vigilant watch on them, waiting for an attack, but curiously, none came.

Not yet.

I’d expected the refuge David mentioned to be easily visible, but I was surprised.… It was dark against the hills, and it loomed up suddenly, with an unsettlingly barren aspect to it. The building was large, multi-story, and utterly deserted, with a smoke-blackened plaster exterior; and there had been a halfhearted attempt to board up a few of the broken windows, but it was clear that no one was interested in the place any longer. I supposed that at the edge of the end of the world, securing an abandoned hotel in hopes of later renovation might not have been anyone’s largest priority.

It would have been better to continue, but ahead I saw the Mustang was slowing… and then, with a greasy gray puff of smoke, one tire blew out, and then another. It hobbled on for a few dozen more feet, loose rubber flapping loudly, and then there was a surge of power through the aetheric, and the tires reinflated. The Djinn, repairing the damage.

Then the tires blew out again—all four this time, and more decisively.

The car drifted to a stop, metal grinding noisily on asphalt as the rubber shredded away, macerated between stone and steel.

Luis got out of the car, as did the lithe form of David; I watched them move the limp form of what had been the Djinn driver out of the way, and Joanne took his place behind the wheel. Odd that it would take both a Djinn and a Warden to push a car; David ought to have been able to move it with a thought, even without tires easing the process.

Instead, they seemed to be working very hard at pushing the bumper of the car. It went only a few feet, and then Luis stumbled, and…

… And the car’s wheels sank into the road, as if into heavy mud. Luis was also trapped. David pulled him out, but not without difficulty.

I abandoned the bike, which was too heavy to maneuver without power, and ran for Joanne’s side of the car, which was already sunken too deeply for her to open the door. I reached in the window and grabbed her. Pulling her out and carrying her was no easy matter; she was tall and not excessively thin, and the road was attempting to suck me down with all its might. I focused all my earth-derived powers to try to hold it back, and managed—just barely—to stumble my way through the black muck and make it to the harder gravel on the roadway.

Something was very wrong here.

I tried automatically to shift my vision into the aetheric spectrums, and suddenly felt claustrophobic, not free… because it was as if night had fallen there on the aetheric plane, where there was not, had never been, true darkness. I saw David stumble and fall, and I understood why; no Djinn could function with that crippling shock. Even human as I was now, I felt the impact of it, the horror. It was utterly, completely wrong.

I knew something cruel and terrible was happening, something potentially fatal for us all, and the fear sharpened as I heard David whisper to Joanne, “Kill him.”

Luis was the only other male present, and he held up both hands in surrender as Joanne looked at him with dark, almost feral eyes. “He’s not talking about me! I’m not doing it!”

I realized it in the same moment that Joanne did. “The Djinn who was driving your car,” I said.

“He wasn’t a Djinn,” she said. “He was just a shell. Burned out. No will of his own… an avatar…”

“Not anymore,” I said. “Something’s filled him. Something else.”

“Who, the devil?” Rocha asked. “’Cause this doesn’t feel so great, and I can’t see a thing on the aetheric. Cass?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Careful. I hear wings.”

We had only that single second before the eagle attacked again—not me this time, but Luis. He raised his right arm instinctively to protect his eyes, and I saw the claws sink in and rip free in bloody sprays. It clawed the arm aside, and snapped for his eyes.

I lunged for it. The aetheric might have gone blind, but there was still power in the earth around us, and I poured it into the feathered, strong body of the bird as I touched it and drew it close to my chest. “Hush,” I whispered to it, and stroked its beautiful, glossy feathers as sleep took hold. “Hush, I won’t hurt you, child of the skies.” I pulled off the backpack and put it aside. My leather jacket, even shredded down the front, made an effective restraint when I stripped it off and tied the sleeves around the sleeping bird; it wouldn’t keep him trapped long once he woke, but it seemed safer for him than leaving him unprotected and limp. I put him down carefully and said, “We need shelter. There were more on the way.…” I paused, because my motorcycle, which I’d carefully parked off the road, tipped over with a sudden crash, and began sinking into the softened asphalt. I couldn’t completely abandon it, poor thing, any more than I could the eagle; I grabbed the handlebar and levered it back upright, slimed with melted road tar, and wheeled it out into the dense sand. It was likely no better, but at least it wouldn’t suffer the indignity of Joanne’s Mustang, which was now being crushed, consumed and destroyed somewhere beneath that simmering tarry surface.

I pulled the straps of the backpack on over my sleeveless pale pink tank top. The weight of the bottles was surprisingly light, but then again, they were empty of contents. Just full of power.

“Get everybody in the hotel!” Luis called to me. He was helping Joanne guide David toward the derelict building, and I ran after them, well aware that the night was full of danger, and how vulnerable we were running blind in the aetheric as well as the shadows of reality.

By the time I joined them, David had single-handedly ripped the boards from the front doors, snapped the lock, and levered open the entrance. Luis and Joanne were already inside the lobby, and David nodded for me to follow them. He sealed up the doors with a crash as he stepped in. It wasn’t merely locked; he’d woven the wood itself together into one solid structure.

The lobby reeked of smoke, mold, and the uneasily lingering ghosts of sweat, sex, and desperation. Never one of the showplaces of the town, the materials had been drab and cheap to begin with; destruction had rendered it oddly antique, though I was certain it could not be more than a few years old. Black colonies of mold swarmed the walls and spilled in clumps on the carpeting, and I was doubting sincerely that this was any place to stage our defense, save that it was the only shelter we could reach. It was too large, too porous—even with Djinn at our disposal.

“I think I lost money here once,” Luis said. “Didn’t really look all that much better then. I’ll bet the drinks were stronger, though.”

“Oh, you know they took the liquor with them when they left.” Joanne sighed. “Liquor and cash. And frankly, a big-screen plasma isn’t going to be much good to us in the current circumstances. Not even with free HBO.”

She sounded cheerful, but with a bright edge of mania; Joanne, like the rest of us, had been pushed too close to the edge, and was all too aware of the drop looming below. Still, she was smiling. I was far from sure that I had the same grace within me. I worried that we’d not get out of here alive. I worried what Isabel was doing, and who had charge of her—and I prayed it wasn’t Shinju or Esmeralda. I worried about… everyone.

Including Luis. He was holding together, but there were only so many shocks any of us could take before coming apart, however temporarily. He seemed stolid, but I remembered the ashen certainty I’d seen in him of the fate of humanity. How long before he, too, would lose faith?

Joanne led the way across the destruction and into a back room, which was less affected by smoke, mold, and general neglect; it had a small kitchenette, tables, couches, and bathroom areas beyond. A room for the staff, not guests; the furnishings here were even cheaper and more utilitarian than outside.

Luxurious, under the current circumstances, though I could imagine staff members grumbling about its Spartan pleasures.

As Luis and I helped David—still shaken and blinded by the disruption of the aetheric, as a human would be by a sudden loss of gravity—into a chair, Joanne turned to additional defenses. She called up power and began to melt the metal edges of the door and frame into a sturdy, permanent seal; it took a while and some fine concentration to create a solid barrier. Joanne finally let out a heavy sigh, rubbed her forehead, and must have realized that she was still holding a pistol in a tight, white-knuckled grip. “Probably not going to do much good anyway,” she said, when she saw me watching.

“Maybe not,” I agreed. “But we can ill afford to reject any line of defense.”

She nodded and stuck it in the waistband of her pants, and I made way for her as she came to David’s side. She took his hand, and his fixed stare slowly focused on her face. I turned away to give them privacy, and saw someone standing in the shadows.

Gold eyes gleaming.

Rahel, who must have been listening to Joanne and David’s exchange, because she said softly, “David was right about the aetheric.” Joanne responded instantly, summoning a handful of fire as she spun to face the potential threat, then held it at the sight of the Djinn. “I was following. I hit… something. I had to take physical form to get this far, and I don’t think I can reach much of my power. It’s as if we’re in…”

“In a black corner,” David finished, when she hesitated. “But only at half the strength of a natural-developing one. It feels artificial. Imposed.”

I had never experienced one in physical form, and on the aetheric black corners—which occurred naturally, but with utmost rarity—were easy to see and easier to avoid, unless they formed around you. If this was how it felt at half strength, I never wanted to be trapped in one at full power; when I reached for the aetheric, I felt as if I was suffocating on darkness, and although I could reach my power, it felt muffled, tenuous, vulnerable. It would be worse for the full Djinn, of course. Much worse.

Rahel was eating candy as she contemplated our situation, and it made me feel unexpectedly quite hungry. As if she sensed it, Rahel scooped more snacks from the guts of the machine she’d cracked open, and tossed them to us in turn. I received some sort of chocolate-covered cookie. It was unexpectedly crispy beneath the sweet coating, and there was a lingering kiss of caramel. It was a taste, I decided, that I could have come to love.

A pity that what I was eating would likely be the last candy the human race would ever produce.

Rahel and Joanne were talking, but it was more banter than substantive conversation, I thought—unimportant. Rahel would not be so casual if there was any chance of our enemies striking at us immediately, which meant we could delay our inevitable deaths by at least a bit more. Then again, the Djinn were badly handicapped just now; they depended on the aetheric as their primary reality, with this world as unreal to them as that realm was to humans. It was possible she was… overconfident.

“Perhaps you should keep watch,” I said, raising my voice over their repartee; both stopped and gave me a look, but then Joanne nodded.

“Rahel, that’s your job,” she said. “You see anything, anything, that looks suspicious, you tell Cassiel or Luis. Let David rest. And don’t give me any of that wily Djinn crap, either. You know how serious this is.”

Rahel said, “It doesn’t get more serious, I believe. So yes, I will indulge you, sistah. But where are you going?”

“We’ve got bathrooms,” Joanne said. “Hell, we might even have running water, if there’s a miracle the size of China. I’m going to take advantage.”

As Joanne walked away, heading for the back area, Rahel moved the blinds on a small strip of window that looked out on the lobby and froze in that position, as if she could stand forever.

No doubt she could.

“Let me see your arm,” I said, turning to Luis. He seemed surprised, and looked down at it with a frown. His right was a bloody mess; the wounds still bled, but the eagle’s claws hadn’t reached any significant blood vessels, at least. The shredded tissues looked bad.

“Damn.” He sank down on the tan couch, and his laugh rang hollow. “Kinda forgot about that. Thanks for reminding me.” I sat next to him and examined the wound, then put my hands on either side of it. “Hey, if you’re going to seal it, try to keep the tat intact. Took days to get that inked.”

I gave him a flash of a look, then turned my attention to the problem at hand. There was muscle, nerve, and tissue damage—a surprising lot of it, given the fast and glancing nature of the attack. Birds had real power in them, and this one more than most. I began weaving together the muscles; nerves were trickier, requiring fine control that was difficult with the heavy, dark pressure on the aetheric. Closing the skin was, by contrast, a simple matter.

“Huh,” he said, looking down at what I’d done after I wiped the blood away. “Not bad. Gives the tat some character with the scars. Here. Rest.” He raised the arm—carefully, as it was likely still aching from the accelerated healing—and settled it on the back of the couch, and I removed my backpack and leaned in and against him. We both needed showers, but I could hear water running from the back; evidently, the owners of this place hadn’t shut off all of the utilities before the fog of chaos had descended. That would be Joanne, I would bet; she had been the worst off, in terms of needing a wash. I didn’t mind the way Luis smelled, though; his body smelled sharply male, vibrantly alive in ways that I would not have thought I could appreciate. I breathed him in deeply, and pressed closer. Now that the adrenaline of the ride was passing, even though I knew we were still under threat, I felt the drag of exhaustion pulling at me, trying to close my eyes. Here, in his arms, I felt safe. Illusion though it was, it was powerful.

And it lasted until Rahel suddenly swiveled her head sharply, at an utterly inhuman angle, to stare toward the showers. David came to his feet in a fluid and boneless motion, and I felt it, too, a power moving through the air around us, something hot and feral and living.

And aware of us.

David turned to Luis and me, and pointed. His eyes were blazing gold. “Stay here!” he ordered us, and he vanished in a blur, heading toward the showers.

“I don’t take your orders,” I said, and stood up; it was entirely possible that Joanne needed more help than David, in his currently weakened state, could offer.

Rahel flashed across the distance between us, and before I could blink, was standing in my way with one taloned hand extended to me.

The pointed, razor-sharp ends of her nails were embedded, ever so shallowly, in my skin, just over my heart. “You should take his orders,” she said, and narrowed her eyes as she smiled. “David’s remarkably good at what he does when it comes to her safety, and he’s far better suited to deal with this. So you just stay still like a good little human, Cassiel.”

I drew in breath to order her away, and she casually reached out her other hand to lay a slender finger across my lips.

My voice locked in my throat. She took the finger away to waggle it mockingly in my face. “Ah, ah, ah,” she said. “No cheating and ordering me to let you pass, mistress. I’ve been at this game a lot longer than you. If I don’t want to do something, you can’t make me. You’re not human enough to surprise me. You’re Djinn at heart, and I know how you think.”

Luis stood up. I expected him to come to my defense, but instead he walked over to the chair where David had been sitting. Rahel glanced at him, then back to me. As long as I had her bottle, what he did was of little consequence to her…

… Until he picked up the shotgun David had dropped beside the chair, racked the slide, and pointed it directly at Rahel’s head. “How about me?” he asked her. “Do I surprise you? Let her go. Now.”

Before Rahel could respond—either to attack him, or release me, and I knew they were equal weight in her at that moment—there was the explosive crack of a gunshot from the other room, and it was as if that single shot had cracked a black glass jar that had been pressing down over all of us. The thick pressure shattered, though the release carried with it a stinging whip crack of power that woke a red pain behind my eyes. Rahel staggered, and then her eyes widened. She released me instantly, pulled her claws back, and turned toward the bathroom as if my interference no longer mattered at all.

Joanne came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, hair wet and pressed in dripping strings around her face. Her expression was blank, but there was a terrible distance in her eyes as David led her along with a hand on her arm. He eased her down in the chair.

She was still holding a pistol in her hand. He took it from her and placed it aside, then brushed his fingertips over her forehead, trailing them down across her face, her parted lips.

She slipped into a deep, gentle sleep. David sat back on his heels with a sigh and looked at the three of us. He focused on the shotgun, then Luis’s face, and Luis cleared his throat and raised the shotgun to rest against his shoulder in a safe carry position.

“What happened?” Luis asked.

“The avatar, the empty one,” David said. “Whoever is after us, they were using it to source the aetheric block around us. It—came after Jo. We had to be sure it wouldn’t happen again.”

“So you killed it,” Rahel said. I couldn’t tell, from the way she said it, whether that was praise or blame.

Perhaps David didn’t know, either. He shook his head and settled against the wall, tense and fluid, eyes penny-bright. “Not me,” he said. “Watch the lobby. They’ll be coming soon enough, now that they know they can’t cut us off from the aetheric any longer. You two should rest while you can.” That last was directed at Luis and me.

“The avatar,” I said. “It was an empty shell?”

“It was a Djinn once,” he said. “You know him. Go and look.”

I stared at him for a moment, frowning, and then nodded. I walked past Luis, who was now sitting again on the couch; he started to rise to go with me, but I gestured for him to stay.

This I needed to do for myself.

The body of the avatar lay limp on the wet floor tiles. Its eyes were open, but entirely dead black now. It was just flesh, real down to the circulatory system, and blood ran sluggishly down the tile crevices toward the drain, but it was leakage, not true bleeding. One had to be alive to bleed.

I crouched down, staring at his face. It seemed familiar, and I took each of the features individually, trying to place him. Djinn could, and did, change appearance, but for some reason once we settled on a human form, we didn’t often shift out of it and into another. It became part of our self-image, I supposed. My memory was long, but human faces had never formed much of a meaning for me.…

And then I knew.

He was one of my brothers, a True Djinn.

The memory came back to me, shockingly painful. His name was Xarus, and unlike me, he’d always been fascinated by humans. He’d walked in human flesh often, formed friendships, attachments. I’d always thought him peculiar, and weak.

Years ago, he’d been pulled apart on the aetheric—a natural accident, one of the few that could claim the life and soul of a Djinn. Had he not been trying to save others, humans, he could have saved himself, but he made the choice to destroy his immortal existence for the sake of a handful of fragile, temporary creatures.

And I had hated him for that. I’d hated the memory of him still more when I’d discovered that his flesh shell still lived and breathed. Jonathan, then the leader of the Djinn, had decreed that the flesh of Xarus, the avatar, be spared. I hadn’t known why, but perhaps Jonathan had known something. He often did, annoyingly. He’d had a gift for foresight that had bettered anyone’s, even Ashan’s.

Why, now, did I feel Xarus’s loss at last, seeing his lifeless body reduced to meat? Why did it matter?

I put my hand on his cheek. It felt like human flesh. It was human flesh, Xarus’s flesh, crafted like mine from the deepest instincts, the desires none of us ever acknowledged to be mortal, to know what their brief and bright lives were like…

It was the last of something that had been born immortal, and now it was gone.

I sat in the dark silence, with his blood crawling slowly toward the drain, and I grieved in ways that I never had, for one of my own lost. I’d felt anger before; I’d felt betrayal, and sometimes, loss.

But never emptiness. Never the raw knowledge of caring in the way that humans cared for each other, and missed each other.

And the ironic thing was that he’d been gone for almost a thousand years, and I’d never really liked him in the first place.

When I returned to the outer room, Luis was asleep. So was Joanne. David and I said nothing to each other, but he knew, and in a way, that eased my pain a little; I had more in common with him than I’d ever fully realized. More in common with all of them.

David was right. I needed to rest.

I couldn’t sleep.

Instead of resting, although I was tired, I found myself pacing in the narrow confines of the common room as Luis and Joanne sprawled and dreamed on the couches. There was something nagging at me, something beyond my grief and worry, or even the anticipation of a fight to come. There was something we had missed. Were missing. It ticked in the back of my mind like a bomb, and as the humans slept, as David and Rahel kept a silent and vigilant watch, I struggled to understand what it was that bothered me so much.…

Joanne woke, and David moved to speak with her in a low voice. She was upset; bad dreams, perhaps. I paid no attention. I admired her survival skills, but not her emotional instability.

“We should go,” I said to Rahel, who was still silent and vigilant at her post. Unlike a human, she didn’t feel the need to fidget, shift, relax, or even look away—the Djinn version of a motion sensor. “There’s no need to linger here now. We can defend ourselves adequately, if pressed, now that we can reach the aetheric.”

“Can we?” She smiled a cynical little smile, and lifted her shoulders in a tiny shrug. “Look at her in Oversight and tell me what you think then.”

By her she meant, presumably, Joanne. I leaned against the wall next to Rahel and shifted my eyes into the aetheric spectrum, and saw what she had seen… what David must have seen as well. Joanne was not an especially powerful Earth Warden, able to fight the effects of radiation as part of her natural gifts; Weather Wardens had no such protections, and she’d taken the very worst of the beating down in that pit.

She was saturated with it, cells cooking and dying from the inside out, as if she’d been trapped in an invisible microwave.

“If she and her child are to live,” Rahel said, “then David needs time to heal her. It won’t be easy, and it’s beyond the capacity of Earth Wardens. So we stay. She has to rest.” This time, just for a split second, her eyes veered from their focus to rest on me, a flash of gold and warmth. “And you, mistress, ought to rest as well. You’re not as strong as you believe.”

I settled into a chair then, unwillingly. I don’t need rest, I thought, but as soon as I released my iron hold on my body, it begged to disagree with aches blooming in every muscle. David’s whispering in the Djinn language was a soothing litany meant for Joanne, but it lulled me as well, into an exhausted tumble into the dark.

At the last second, what Rahel had said struck me, rather forcefully. If she and her child are to live…

Joanne Baldwin was pregnant, and it must have been David’s child—the child of a Djinn. And somehow, I hadn’t seen it.

I turned my gaze on her in Oversight, and yes, there it was, the clear though subtle signs of life stirring inside her—curiously, not Djinn life, but something more tethered to the human world. David’s child, but human in form and power.

Joanne and David had something more to fight for, it seemed, than just the world in general. The way that Luis—and yes, me—found strength in our love for Isabel.

David saw me watching them, and looked up. I smiled, just a little, and he returned it. “You think I’m mad, don’t you?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Perhaps,” I said. “And perhaps I’m not mad enough. But I believe that I’m learning.”

Waking up came with a surge of adrenaline and terror, and I didn’t know why. It was utterly silent. Nothing had changed in the room, except that David had fallen silent. I opened my eyes and saw Rahel at the window, looking out, and in the next second I saw her take a step back and allow the blinds to fall closed.

She turned to David, who looked up. They both nodded.

“Wake him,” Rahel said to me, and pointed to Luis, who was blissfully snoring on the couch. “We need everyone now.”

I shook Luis awake and endured his muttering about the lack of coffee, and we were joining hands to assess the situation on the aetheric when the first attack came.

Something wild and very angry slammed headlong into the sealed door. I was surprised that the cheap barrier held; it flexed against the impact, and a thin crack formed down the middle. “Brace it,” I said, and Luis nodded, throwing our combined Earth power into the wood to stiffen it to a packed-steel density. Another, stronger power overlaid ours.

Joanne was awake and on her feet now, and despite the sudden emergency, she looked almost herself again—tall, strong, confident, with a smile curving her full lips and a light in her eyes. She loved battle almost as much as I did, I thought. That was… unique, in a Warden. “Time to get down to business,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

Rahel evidently did not think our combined talents were enough, as she pushed a massive piece of furniture against it. “It will not hold,” she said. “We should leave now, quickly. Is there a back door?”

“There’s company waiting for us there as well,” David said. “We’re surrounded.”

“Did you not think to warn us of that?” I snapped. “I told you we should have run last night!”

“It wasn’t an option,” David replied flatly. “We can get out of this. It’s just going to take a little creativity.”

Whatever was on the other side of the door hit with such violence that the barrier, even strengthened by three Wardens and a Djinn, bowed inward, almost ripping free of the wall in which it was anchored.

“What the hell is out there?” Luis blurted. Rahel seemed to find the question amusing.

“I don’t think it would do your sanity any good to know. We must go up, not out. Nothing waiting out there strikes me as good at climbing, but they are very good at battering holes in things.”

It was David who ripped an opening in the roof above; the hotel’s guest room tower was seven stories tall, but at this end, the building was a simple one-story affair. Only fifteen feet, straight up.

David, of course, merely flexed his legs and easily made the jump upward. I grabbed my backpack and made sure it was securely against me, then began to think about how the rest of us were to get up to safety.

“Damn,” Luis said. “Forgot my jet pack. Knew I should have packed that.” I made a cradle of fingers and leaned down. He raised his eyebrows. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Do I seem to be?”

“Hardly ever, chica,” he said. He put his booted foot in my cupped hands, and I pulled Earth power to saturate my muscles as I lifted him, straight up. It hurt, that particular enrichment of the very limited capabilities of my human body; I felt the shriek burn its way out of my mouth without my consent, but the effort worked. I threw him high enough that David could grab his arm and lift him onto the surface of the roof.

But I also knew I wouldn’t be able to do that for myself. Not effectively. Which left…

Rahel.

I hardly heard David ordering her to bring me; it was unnecessary that he do so, because after all, I held her bottle. I could have done it just as easily. Only I knew that doing so would open up a million subtle avenues of resistance to her, as irresistible to her as catnip, even now. It was a risk not worth taking, as the door protecting us continued to steadily break under the mindless, violent assault.

“Sistah,” Rahel said. I stared back at her, watching that shark’s smile on her face. There was hate in it, and I understood it very well. I’d always had nothing but contempt for the New Djinn; I’d treated them as not just second class, but other—a mongrel breed of human and Djinn, unworthy.

And she hated me for that, and for enslaving her and so many others, even if it had to be done to save them. No doubt she had other grudges; we all did, we immortals with our endlessly long memories. I had few friends even among the True Djinn, and none among her kind.

Joanne asked, perhaps jokingly, if she had to make it an order for Rahel to save me… and Rahel almost laughed, knowing as well as I did that an order from Joanne carried even less weight than one from me. “No need,” Rahel replied. “And no time. I’ll cleanse myself of her contamination later.”

Before I could respond, she had seized me, and jumped, and in almost the same motion, pushed me away. I landed on the roof, disoriented and off balance, and tumbled. I felt the crashing impact of the backpack hitting the hard surface and rolled back to my feet, rage a comforting warmth inside me, and spun to face her again as the cold desert breeze stirred my hair.

Rahel grinned, and made a little come on gesture. Her bottle had not been smashed, though others certainly had been.

No time for settling our scores now, or even for taking stock of what we’d just lost. Joanne, Weather Warden and in firm command of the winds, levitated easily up through the hole, while Rahel, at David’s terse order, began repairing the rip through which we’d come. Below, the sound of destruction was increasing. Whatever was below, it was angry.

I ventured to the edge of the roof and looked down. Luis joined me, took one look, and quickly stepped back. “Okay, I don’t really want to ask, but… what the hell is that?”

“It’s a chimera, a forced merger of several animal forms. Bear, mountain lion, scorpion.” I said it easily enough; identification was automatic, and he could have done it as well, if he’d been able to overcome his instinctive nausea and horror at what we were seeing. As a human, it was disconcerting enough, but as an Earth Warden, feeling the utter vileness of what had been done… That was what drove him back, sent him reeling and gagging.

And it was what I was fighting, silently, as well.

There were at least four of the chimera in view now; one had a bear’s head clumsily balanced atop a mountain lion’s strong, sinuous body, but there were extra, armored legs erupting from the lion’s sides, and a segmented tail with a vicious stinger curving out from the back and overhead. Nauseating and fierce, and mad.

“This isn’t the Mother,” Joanne said. She was standing with me, looking over, holding her long, dark hair back as the breeze batted at us. She was pale and grim, but not as revolted as Luis was, or I felt. “It can’t be her doing this.”

And it wasn’t. I’d worried at that last night, paced, tried to shake sense out of what the avatar had been doing… and now, finally, it clicked together. This was what the avatar had been doing, under the cover of darkness, shielded from the eyes of the Djinn and even from the Mother. No, not the avatar; the avatar was only a flesh puppet, a conduit for another’s power. And I knew now, looking at these things, who had wielded that power.

“It’s Pearl,” I said. “She’s after me.”

Joanne laughed humorlessly. “Wow. It’s all about you, isn’t it?”

“This time, I believe it is—”

“Watch it,” she warned, and pulled me a step back. There were wolves circling below, too, weaving around the chimeras; they were leaping up, trying to make the jump to where we were. So far, they were unable to do so, but there was no reason to encourage them.

“Yeah, that’s not the worst. Heads up,” Luis said, and pointed up. I moved my head back, and saw a black circle of birds above us, wheeling in the warming air. The first rays of dawn gilded their wings with gold. “We need a shield, now!” He’d sensed something that I’d missed, but I saw it now… the birds shifted, no longer circling, but dropping.

Heading straight for us. I reached out and diverted some of the birds, but it was difficult; they were maddened, like the chimera below, driven beyond their own instincts by the torment that Pearl had inflicted on them. Death would be, for them, merciful.

But I couldn’t destroy them. Birds were, for me, the most beautiful of nature’s creatures… free and fierce. I felt Joanne raise a shield of hardened air above us, and flinched as the first of the birds hit. She’d tried to make it less apt to be fatal, but Pearl’s attack drove them mercilessly into the barrier, waves of them, snapping their fragile bones, painting the sky with their blood.

Tears welled in my eyes at the sight. This was for my benefit, mine alone; Pearl knew me, and she knew what would hurt me. These creatures were dying for no better purpose than to anger me.

The mesmerizing horror of the suicidal assault had distracted us from the other issues, but luckily David and Rahel had been on guard; now I heard the rip of metal and saw David throwing a large metal dish toward the edge of the roof, where one of the chimeras had clawed its way up. It knocked that one over, but the next one’s venomous stinger tail was already visible in another corner.

“Great,” Luis said, resigned. “They climb. Yeah, of course they do, because it’d be too fucking easy if they’d stay on the ground.” He readied a fireball in his hands, the burning plasma lighting up his face from below and making dark hollows of his eyes. He wasn’t the only one turning to fire; Joanne also had pulled on that power, and as I glanced her way I saw her throw with a strong pitcher’s follow-through.

Her fireball exploded against the chimera as it landed on the roof and roared at us in an eerie mix of bear and lion… and then shrieked in a high, chittering voice as the fireball set it aflame. Joanne threw an airburst against it, blowing it in a burning arc off the corner of the roof, screaming all the way.

The screaming continued, and I knew without looking that the other creatures had attacked it. Pearl’s nature was nothing if not savage.

“More are coming,” Rahel said. “I suggest you plan an escape.” She didn’t seem her normally remote self just now; it seemed the situation was dire enough that she actually cared. That was… alarming. Escape seemed a remote possibility. We had no car now, and my motorcycle—providing it had survived the night—wouldn’t be any defense against the kind of creatures Pearl had at her disposal; she was summoning more birds for another suicidal strike, and the chimeras out there could easily rip us apart. I had no idea how fast they could run, and I wasn’t tempted to find out.

There were three humans at risk, counting me; the two Djinn were in no danger. They could escape into the aetheric at any time. But not with us. Neither Rahel nor David had the particular, peculiar skill of keeping a human alive while moving through that realm, or they’d have already begun removing us to safety.

If they had to evacuate us another way, it would take time.

“We need to release another Djinn,” I said, and took off my pack. I pulled out the padding and carefully unrolled it, layer after layer. The first six bottles had shattered, and three more were cracked and useless—a cracked bottle could not hold a Djinn. There had been ten bottles, and only the two that had been wrapped in the center were still intact.

And open. David’s, and Rahel’s. I felt an icy chill, because those Djinn who’d been imprisoned were now free—free to turn on us, to seek revenge against us. But at the moment, at least, it seemed the Mother had gathered back her children to her side. There was no guarantee at all that she wouldn’t send them at us again soon, but for now, all that mattered was that they were no longer an asset to us. Only a potential, and deadly, liability.

I checked the last bottle, the one we’d separated out so carefully—Venna’s bottle. It, at least, was intact, but she’d be of no help at all to us as an Ifrit, a twisted and blackened shadow of a Djinn. Releasing her meant only that Rahel and David would be damaged, or killed, as she blindly sought to replace her lost power with theirs. She’d cause chaos, but nothing more.

Joanne, without comment, took it from me and put it in her pocket.

I’d failed, utterly failed, in what Joanne had entrusted me to do—carry the captive Djinn safely to the Wardens. I felt a burst of hot fury at Rahel, but she’d done nothing except what came naturally to a Djinn; she’d struck out at her captor. It was an almost irresistible urge for her.

Joanne took a deep breath and said, “Rahel, take Rocha. David, take Cassiel. Get them out of here. Take them all the way to Vegas if you have to. David, you can come back for me. I can hold out here until you return.”

It was a surprisingly logical choice, because Baldwin had all three powers at her disposal—Earth, Fire, and Weather—while Luis and I had only two, and Fire was his weaker gift. More than that, Joanne had been tested in battle many times, and Luis and I were relatively new at the combat aspect of fighting the forces of nature in this particular way.

But I worried. I didn’t fancy even Joanne’s chances against Pearl, here where she so clearly had taken the time to prepare her battlefield, build her soldiers, and was intent on not just killing, but devouring.

David was staring intensely at his lover, his wife, the mother of his future child, which I supposed he also knew. “Don’t die,” he said flatly. “Promise me.”

It seemed a cold sort of good-bye, but only in words; what passed in looks between them was much different. They kissed, and whispered together for a few seconds, and then before I was quite ready, David turned toward me. There was a blind anger in him—not toward me in particular, but directed at the situation, at the necessity that tore him away from the woman he loved now, of all moments.

Before I could change my mind, his burning-hot arms had fastened around me, and the building, the chimera, Joanne, all of it was falling away beneath my feet in a shocking burst of acceleration that drove the blood down in my body, sending me into a weakened, gray-haze state for a few breaths until I was able to get my bearings again. David, with me as his helpless passenger, blurred through the cloud of birds, startling them out of formation, and the air grew icy around us before he steadied himself and thought to extend some heat—and breathable air—around me.

We were thousands of feet in the air, moving fast in the frozen blue. He’d gone high to avoid the creatures Pearl had sent for us, but now he began his descent in a steep, hurtling arc that whipped my clothes and hair into a frenzy around my skin.

“She’ll call you back if she needs you!” I shouted.

“She’ll call,” he said. “But she doesn’t hold my bottle. You do.” David didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard over the howl of the wind.

It was in my backpack. Physical location didn’t matter—if I hadn’t touched it, he’d have remained under Joanne’s dominion, but I had put my fingers on it, and that had transferred control of him to me. I should have left the bottle with her, I realized, but in the heat of the moment I hadn’t thought of it, and perhaps Joanne hadn’t, either. “I won’t hold you back,” I promised him. “I’ll send you to her.”

“It might already be too late for that.”

He was right, and the guilt of it gnawed at me. I forced certainty into my voice. “She’ll be all right,” I said. Thin white clouds appeared below us, and we punched through them with vicious speed, heading for a world that enlarged terrifyingly fast.

He didn’t look at me. The lines of his jaw were tight as cables beneath his coppery skin. “No, she won’t,” he said. “She’s never all right. But she’ll survive until I can come back for her. Now don’t talk to me. I don’t want to know you’re here.”

I shut my eyes against the buffeting wind, the disorienting world through which we fell.

We hurtled toward the ground in a heart-stopping rush, and I watched the city of Las Vegas resolve beneath our feet with grim fascination. As a Djinn this would have been entertaining, but now, with flesh to tear and bone to shatter, it was simply terrifying. The city was spread out over a vast grid, but it seemed oddly lifeless at this height, buildings like tiny boxes, defiantly green lawns, blue dots of swimming pool water behind them. As we approached, the houses still had a structured sameness, but the center of the city, where we were descending, exploded into chaos—curved, asymmetrical structures with wildly extravagant grounds, pools, lawns, fountains.

Las Vegas was schizophrenic and beautiful, glowing even at the end of the world with its own false luster and very real power.

We came down in front of a vast glass pyramid, guarded by a sphinx that had never seen the sands of Egypt. David slowed at the very last moment and cushioned our landing, but even so, I felt the impact rattle all the way up my spine.

We hadn’t been expected, but we were definitely awaited, and before I could draw breath, I felt the muzzle of a gun pressing against the back of my head. “Freeze,” said a shaking voice. “In the name of the Wardens.”

I turned around, took hold of the barrel of his gun, and fused it into a crushed ball. He was a boy, hardly much older than Isabel in her new teenaged body, and although I raised my hand to hit, I lowered it again, slowly.

“Stand down,” said a firm voice behind the two of us, and I turned to see Lewis Orwell coming toward us. He looked—battered. Infinitely tired, unshaven, limping, but on his feet and leading a contingent of at least four powerful Wardens behind him.

And Shinju. Pearl. She looked perfectly composed, with that lovely smile fully in place.

“I’m going back for Jo,” David said.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Lewis snapped, “until I get an update.”

“She’s in trouble.”

“Always is. So talk fast.”

David’s eyes flared dark red, a color so violent that it made me take a precautionary step back. “I have to go. Now.”

Lewis, for answer, took a bottle from his pocket. An open bottle. And incanted, quickly, the threefold charm of binding. Be thou bound to my service.

David laughed, a metallic sound with a bitter, biting edge of despair. “Too late,” he said, and slapped the bottle out of Lewis’s hand to shatter fifty feet away on the pavement. He grabbed Lewis’s neck in one hand, and for a moment there was naked fury between the two of them, something so fierce that it was almost blinding. “I’m going.”

“Wait,” I said involuntarily, and David froze. “David, don’t hurt him. Let him go.” He did, releasing his grip almost instantly, and now it was Lewis whose eyes brightened, and focused on me.

“He’s bottled,” Lewis said. “And you have it.”

I’d made a deadly mistake in trying to save Lewis’s life; I’d betrayed a secret I didn’t know would be an issue. David gave a wordless shout of fury, and I screamed back, “Go!” Before the word was fully off my lips, he exploded into shadows and was gone.

But it didn’t matter.

“It’s in her bag,” Shinju said sweetly. “She’d keep it from you if she could.”

I backed up as Lewis came toward me, but three Wardens were behind me now, and Shinju, and the straps holding my backpack simply… disintegrated. Shinju caught the falling bag and held it out with a formal bow to Lewis.

“What are you doing?” I demanded, as he unzipped the bag and took out bottles—the ones for David and Rahel. “Lewis, you can’t.”

He glanced up at me, and I saw all the humanity had been crushed out of him. There was only weariness and the weight of the world. “I can’t do anything else,” he said. “We need them.” He held up one of the bottles and said, with an eerie calm, “David, come back here. Now.”

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.