Unseen

Chapter 14

IT WASN’T THAT I had forgotten Luis’s leg injury, but I’d known he wouldn’t allow it to slow him down too much. Even so, he labored very hard to keep the pace, gasping for air, and when he faltered I grabbed him and pulled him along. He dug deep for the strength to deny the pain, and I blocked it as much as I could. The patch to his torn artery was holding, and that was all I could hope for now. This pursuit might do irreparable harm to him, but he wouldn’t give it up. There was no point in asking.

Esmeralda’s snakelike form whipped around trees, threaded between boulders, slipped over shadow-protected drifts of snow that hadn’t yet melted. I expected her to slow, but if anything, she increased speed, and the starlight wasn’t enough to keep her in sight. I tracked her on the aetheric; her aura was eerie and weirdly wrong for the shape she held in the human world. It was more as she imagined herself ... but she wasn’t human at all. A feathered serpent, magnificently colored, gliding silently through the world above. The deadly sense of menace from her was even stronger in that realm of force and will, and I realized once again what a power had been leashed inside those snake’s coils.

Whoever the Djinn who’d defeated her was, he must have been astonishing. And remarkably selfless.

It took a quarter of an hour, but Esmeralda’s progress abruptly ceased, and I dragged Luis to a panting, trembling stop a few feet behind her. Her rattlesnake-patterned coils pulled themselves together in a tense pattern, bracing her for a strike, but the rattle remained silent.

Luis collapsed to one knee, and I heard a soft moan out of him, something he tried to muffle but couldn’t. The pain was intense; I felt it burning between us, and touched his damp shoulder to try to numb the screaming nerves. He shook me off. His long, dark hair was soaked with sweat and clung to his face in sharp, sticky points. “Is she here?” he whispered. I shook my head. I didn’t sense her, but there was something gathering on the aetheric around us, dark as a coming storm.

There was a flash of blue-white light to the east, and in its glow I saw Isabel standing back-to-back with Gillian. They were surrounded by what looked like half a dozen wolves—big, rangy ones, circling and charging in to nip at them. It wasn’t natural hunting behavior, although wolves could certainly hunt humans if they chose. I felt the pressure on the animals in the aetheric, heavy enough to make my head ache even at this distance. The wolves were letting out soft yips—not excitement, but pain.

They wanted to run, but couldn’t. Instead, one darted forward, lunging for Gillian, but the young Weather Warden was ready; a blast of air met it and slammed it backward, tumbling through the air to land splay-legged ten feet away. It trembled with the urge to flee, but inched forward again, dragged against its will.

“Es,” I said. Her human face turned toward me. “You handle the wolves. We’ll handle the real enemies.”

Her eyes narrowed, but she nodded, and in a flash she was heading for where we’d seen Isabel and Gillian fighting for their lives. There was another flash of light—Isabel, throwing fire—and in its glow I saw that one of the wolves had grabbed Ibby by the front of her shirt and was dragging her like a cub across the ground as she fought. The fire sent it yelping away, and Ibby scrambled back to where Gillian was batting another wolf away. There was a tornado forming above them, and I felt the whipping, ferocious winds from where I stood. Gillian planned to bring it down around them, leaving them in the protected eye, but it required control and great precision. It was a good plan, if she could make it work.

But out in the dark, someone sliced into her careful construction, and the tornado wobbled, lost cohesion, and became an uncontrolled downburst that snapped off trees and slammed Gillian and Ibby to the ground.

The wolves closed in, but before they could sink their teeth into the girls, Esmeralda was there. She hit the wolf pack like a wrecking ball, slapping her coils into them, crushing some and throwing others at bone-breaking speed into trees. I turned away as she hissed and struck at the one closest to Isabel. I didn’t need to witness it to know that she would keep the girls safe ... at least from the wolves. Whether they would be safe from Esmeralda was a larger puzzle, but it had to be risked.

Luis nodded to me, and we moved toward the place from which the Weather Warden had struck to disrupt the tornado. On the aetheric, there was a black tangle, impossible to sort out—it could have been one, or twenty.

It proved to be three, and they were once again children. One Weather, one Fire, and one Earth. There was no sign of the Void represented here, which relieved me greatly. It was possible that Pearl had not been able to train enough of those kinds of soldiers yet, or that they were rare. I was glad enough not to face one.

The children were focused on Esmeralda, as I’d hoped, and Luis and I got within striking distance without being noticed. He took down the Earth child first, clapping a hand to the boy’s forehead from behind and dragging him off his feet; at the same moment I took the Fire Warden child, another boy. Mine went down more easily into an enforced, deep sleep; Luis’s fought, and I had to jump to his side and add my strength to his to overcome the boy, even taken by surprise as he was.

That left the Weather Warden, an older girl of about fourteen. She was legitimately old enough to come into her powers, but her fine control and raw strength were far from natural; she’d used the seconds of warning well, and as Luis and I tried to grab her, she pulled a massive amount of power from the air around her, drenching us with moisture and then ripping away energy to create ice. It wasn’t thick, but it was shocking, and it slowed us down long enough for her to scramble backward and launch her next attack, directly from the clouds overhead: lightning. I felt the buzzing whisper of power beneath my feet, of electrons turning and seeking alignment with those above. Even a full Djinn hesitated to take the force of a lightning bolt. I was not at all sure that I could survive a direct hit.

Flesh is an imperfect conductor. The delicate mechanisms of life are not suited to channeling that much raw energy, and I didn’t have the natural advantages of a Weather Warden to allow me to absorb the shock.

What I did have was a connection to the Earth, and the ability to alter my own body chemistry. It was risky, but the only possible defense I could muster in the second of warning I had. I increased my electrolytes, coating my skin in them in the form of sweat, and focused the energy downward, through my feet.

No one had prepared me for the pain. I’d been Tasered recently, and that had been painful, but this was like having every nerve in my body stripped raw and screaming, and then shaved with razors. It seemed to go on forever, and I felt my heart struggling not to seize up, fibrillating in the current ...

... And then it was gone, and I dropped to the forest floor, unable to move. Alive, but trembling with agony. What I could see of my hand seemed intact, though the sleeve of my jacket breathed wisps of smoke.

Luis hadn’t stopped. He had launched himself in a purely physical attack, barreling into the girl and slamming her down into the leaf litter on the ground. She screamed out raw defiance and rolled him over, pushing her palms down on his chest.

I saw his eyes go wide, and he struggled to breathe.

No! She had taken away any kind of breathable air in his body. She could suffocate him this way—it was difficult for an Earth Warden to escape this particular sort of attack ... hard to hold on to focus and power while drowning in clear air.

She thought I was down, out of the fight.

I wasn’t.

I lunged forward, grabbed the girl’s long, braided hair in my metallic left hand, and yanked her backward. She shrieked and reached instinctively for her head, and I wrapped my arms around her to still her struggles. Luis rolled over, climbed to his feet, and put his hand on her forehead. She fought, but couldn’t ride the tide of darkness. It took her under.

I let her fall, and collapsed next to her, gasping. My nerves still didn’t seem free of the random, coursing energy; I felt oddly displaced, light-headed, numb. I shouldn’t have been able to survive that, I thought, but that, too, seemed distant, almost unimportant.

Esmeralda’s coils writhed into view, and she wrapped her body around the base of a tree. Isabel and Gillian were with her. I saw no sign of the wolves, living or dead; I hoped most of them had escaped with their lives, but Snake Girl looked suspiciously well fed.

“You’ve got them,” she said. She sounded surprised. “Not bad.”

“Glad you like it,” Luis grunted, and sat down—more of a controlled fall, really. “Damn, Ibby, what were you thinking?”

She came to him and gave him a hug, a long one. “I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t really sound sorry. “Es told us they were out here. I was afraid they’d hurt somebody else. I didn’t want them to get Sanjay and Elijah.”

“What if they’d gotten you two?” Luis asked, and hugged her again. “You’ve got to be more careful, mi hija. You can’t put yourself at risk.”

Ibby looked at him with sad, sober eyes, and said, “It’s too late for that. You know it is. The Lady wants us, and she’s going to come for us. We’re going to be trouble for you until she gets us.”

“Ibby,” I said. “Your plan wasn’t just to come out here to fight them, was it?”

She shook her head, looking so much older than her years. Older, perhaps, than Esmeralda. She looked at Gillian, who nodded.

“We were going to let them take us,” Ibby said. “If we do that, we can help. We can make the Lady trust us. We can stop her—I know we can.”

“Sweetheart,” Luis whispered, and put his hands on her small, sweet face. “Sweetheart, that’s very brave, but it’s also very stupid. We can’t let you do that. It’s very dangerous.”

It was also too much of a risk in another way, one he wouldn’t acknowledge ... because Ibby had been convinced by Pearl once, and although I knew she was a strong, independent child, she could be subverted again, perhaps without even realizing it.

“It’s dangerous to stay here, too,” Gillian said. Like Ibby, she no longer sounded much like a child. She’d seen and experienced too much. “They’ll keep coming for us. People will get hurt trying to protect us. Innocent people.” I saw the grief in her face, and the glitter of tears in her eyes, and knew she was thinking of the boy, Mike, who’d given his own life to save hers. “It’s better this way.”

Perhaps Esmeralda knew what they were going to do; I felt her shifting restlessly, heard the soft, tentative hiss of her rattle.

But neither Luis nor I was prepared, really.

Ibby had her arms around her uncle, and she kissed him on the cheek. “Sleep,” she said, and I sensed the sudden black wave that crushed down on him.

He fell as if she’d killed him, but I knew she hadn’t; I felt the continued, quiet beat of his heart, the steady pulse of his lungs and his life.

He slept, like the three children we’d taken down.

“Cassie,” Ibby said. She was still looking at her uncle, not at me. “Are you going to let us go?”

I was too weak to fight her, and Gillian, and I didn’t know which way Esmeralda would fall, or if she’d take a side at all. “Take me with you,” I said. “I can help you. I can make sure you’re safe.”

“Nobody’s safe,” Ibby said, and her tears fell on Luis’s burned, torn shirt. “Not me, not you, not him. Not the world. Can’t you feel it?”

Esmeralda looked up, and I heard the buzzing of her rattle burst into frantic, loud life.

The night sky was silent, full of stars, but what I felt, what I heard, wasn’t coming from the sky.

It was a scream, and it was growing louder and louder, and it was coming from the aetheric, and the ground beneath us, and the trees, and the world.

It was the scream of awakening, of pain, of the sudden and irrevocable changing of our lives.

Isabel stood up. So did I. Esmeralda slithered closer, her rattle shaking out a steady, adrenaline-fueled alarm. Gillian pressed closer against my side, and I put my arm around her for comfort.

The screaming grew so loud it burned in my head and drove me to my knees. The aetheric was burning red, burning like the end of the world.

And I heard Her voice. The Mother. Only the vast, rolling sound of it, the voice of thunder and hurricane, rock and boiling volcano. The scream of life in all its violent, striving agony. There was no meaning to it, no way to interpret it, but I knew what it meant.

It meant that my time was up, and so was Pearl’s. Whatever her plan, she had no time left to prepare. The Mother was awake, and the fury of her pain would drive the Djinn to her defense, like white blood cells racing to contain infection ... and that infection most certainly was humanity.

Ashan hadn’t triggered this. I didn’t know what wound had been made in the world that had brought it on, but it no longer mattered. The Mother was awake, and the Djinn would be under her command now, no longer individuals choosing their paths. Even Ashan would be one of that army, mindless and effectively quite insane.

If I’d taken his offer, if I’d returned to my Djinn strength, I would be just as helpless as the others now.

In a perverse sense, this worked for Ashan, not against him. He wanted humanity gone, and the defenses of the Earth would begin to do that bloody work for him. Millions would die. Chaos would descend.

Pearl would have no one to oppose her now; all their energies would be devoted to survival. She could amass her forces and wait for the end, and no one would oppose her.

No one but us.

“We have to go,” Ibby said. “You have to make Uncle Luis understand, Cassie. We need him, too.”

“I know,” I whispered. I swallowed and tasted blood, and ash, and the oncoming deaths that this would bring. “I’ll make him understand.”

There was no place for protecting Ibby now, or Gillian, or any of them.

There was only total war.