Unseen (36 page)

Who was sitting up, staring down at the charred hole in his shirt. It was a black-edged gap of more than ten inches across. Beneath it, his skin looked normal and undamaged.

I wasn’t imagining it this time. His flame tattoos
moved
, shifting like shadows in nervous flickers, and then went still again.

Luis touched the burned edges of the fabric and looked up at me, lips parted in wonder.

“What happened?” he asked. He still looked pale and ill, but he should have been
dead.
That plasma ball from Sanjay had hit him with full force, and as an Earth Warden he had no real defense against it.

As an
Earth
Warden.

Luis, whether he recognized it or not, was manifesting a critical second power. I’d seen it, from time to time; I’d felt it in those inked tattoos, but I hadn’t understood what it was. But I did know that this time it had saved his life, and mine as well.

“As you see,” Rashid said, “he’s in no immediate need of my help. Not that I would give it.”

“He’s still bleeding,” I said.

“Survivable. And also not my problem.”

I had half expected that. “Then can you help us out of here?”

Rashid’s handsome, inhumanly sharp face relaxed into an unexpectedly charming smile. “For a price, of course.”

There were too many lives at stake to play this game. “I freed you,” I said, and held his gaze. It wasn’t easy, with those hot silver eyes boring into mine. “I freed you, and that is price enough, Rashid. Don’t push your luck.”

“Don’t push yours, friend Cassiel. One day you’ll need me more than you need me today.”

I looked around at the collapsing shell of our safety. At Shasa, somehow holding back the fire, at the last edge of her strength. At Marion, doing the same with the crumbling stone barrier. At Luis, Isabel, the fallen children. “If I need you more than this,” I said, “then I don’t think even you will be enough.”

Rashid cocked his head, as if surprised by that, and nodded. “Await me,” he said, and walked out, through the barrier of flames. Fire didn’t bother Djinn. In fact, it strengthened them. Djinn were born of inferno, long ago; that was why we’d been named devils, from time to time. But we were simpler than that.

And much, much more.

The attack against us fell into confusion, and then died away. The fires, left undirected by someone with that affinity, snuffed themselves out; they’d long ago exhausted their natural fuel. A few guttered in the ashes, but most of it was smoke, and even that quickly thinned.

Rashid came back, dragging two bodies. I didn’t know either one, but he hadn’t left much to recognize, either. He dropped them at my feet, like a cat leaving kills for its owner, and turned toward Janice.

I’d almost forgotten her. She was moving quietly toward the back of the room, where the stones had broken. No doubt she’d planned to slip out while we were distracted.

She was carrying the two boys in her arms, one on each hip.

Rashid looked at me. “Yours?” he asked.

“Mine,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Oh, there will be a charge. We’ll discuss that later. Privately.” He grinned again, and then turned his attention to Luis. “And later for you, too,
Warden.
”

Luis didn’t try to speak. He just shook his head. I glanced at him, tormented; he needed healing, and quickly. Rashid wasn’t about to do it; in fact, as I turned toward him, the Djinn evaporated into flickers of darkness and was gone.

Marion waved me on. “I’ll take care of him,” she said. “Go. Get her.”

I rolled the tension out of my shoulders and walked toward Janice. She tried to move toward the exit, but I easily outmaneuvered her. Anger made me quick, and feral.

“I can still kill them,” she warned me. “Doesn’t take much. You know that.”

“It wouldn’t take much to kill you, either,” I said. “And I’d do it before I let you go. I don’t want the boys harmed, but if you do it, it’s your choice. Mine is to stop you.”

“At any cost,” she said. “Really.”

“Yes.” I felt more like a Djinn in that moment than at any point I could remember since falling into flesh. “I promise you, you won’t leave here alive unless you put those boys down, safely.”

Janice flinched. What she saw in me woke fear, and obedience. She bent and carefully laid Sanjay down, then Elijah. As she straightened, she held up her hands in surrender. “All right,” she said. “They’re down. Deal?”

“Deal,” I agreed. And on the aetheric level, I wrapped power around her rapidly beating heart. She tried to stop me, but in the end, without her glamour, she was far weaker than I’d expected. “I didn’t tell you I
would
let you leave alive. Only that you wouldn’t if you failed to do what I said. You bargain badly.”

And then I killed her.

It was a great deal more merciful than she deserved.

 

Marion was dangerously weak, but her power and mine sufficed to heal the ragged tear in Luis’s artery, at least well enough that he could move safely. The volume of blood he’d lost was another matter. We accelerated the production of it, but it would be days before he was himself again. Still, he was conscious, steady, and able to walk, if stiffly; that was a great deal better than either of us had expected.

There was a bruise forming on his chin. He rubbed it as I helped him to his feet. “Damn, girl, you didn’t have to make your point quite that hard.”

“There wasn’t time for polite argument,” I said. “And you deserved it.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I kinda did. But you’re not going to hear it again. I’m blaming it on the blood loss.”

His sense of humor was back, for which I was heartily grateful. I braced him until he could stand on his own, and tried to step away.

He didn’t let me. His hands went around my upper arms, and held me in place, close to him. “You bet our lives,” he said. “On a Djinn’s goodwill.”

“It was better than betting it on his obedience,” I said. “You tricked him into the bottle. It wasn’t his choice. This was. You have to trust Djinn, Luis. You can’t force them to be what you want them to be.”

I was speaking of Rashid, most certainly, but I was also speaking of myself. And he knew that.

“You still hate me?” he asked. “Don’t go saying you didn’t. I felt it. I know how much it hurt you, what I did. What I said, sure, but mostly what I did. I never wanted that, Cass. Never.”

“And I never wanted to leave you,” I said. “Please believe that.”

He nodded, eyes gone dark. “Did you find her?”

“Yes.”

“Did you hurt her?”

“Some,” I said, and shook my head. “Not enough. Not nearly enough.”

“You will.”

“
We
will.”

“Yes.” He kissed my forehead, with so much tenderness it melted the last of the icy pain within me. “We will.”

We left the ruins behind.

The other Wardens had met us on the way to the fire road, to the east ... a ragtag, injured bunch, but they hadn’t lost anyone else. A few asked about Janice. None of us commented on her loss with more than a brief acknowledgment of it. I wondered what Marion would say, in the end. She, more than anyone else, had made a catastrophic mistake in allowing Janice such unfettered, trusted access to her most vulnerable charges. The pain of that weighed heavily on her—visibly, in fact, in the slump of her shoulders and the new lines on her face. I’d managed to retrieve her wheelchair from the ruins, but the electrical power had been destroyed, and no one had the energy left to repair it. She pushed herself along the rocky path, face welded into an emotionless mask. Alone with her thoughts, and her failures.

Miraculously, only one of the children had died: Mike, whom I’d found outside of the building. Gillian seemed inconsolable; she’d sought out Isabel, and the two girls walked together, hands clasped. I wondered how that friendship had developed. They didn’t seem at all similar, really.

Humans often confused me, though.

The Wardens traveled in unexpected silence, communicating in careful whispers and gestures as we moved down the twisting path. At regular intervals, we paused to take a head count.

Just before we reached the fire road, we stopped for the last one. Luis and I stood together, not touching but closer than we’d felt since the decision to bring Isabel here. I still didn’t know if that had been a mistake, or a necessary evil; she seemed better, despite the desperate last stand in the school. Maybe Marion’s treatments had helped, though the seizures she’d suffered still frightened me, as did the pessimistic estimate of her chance of long-term survival.

I looked around for her, but there were two other Warden children behind us. “Ibby?”

Someone shushed me. Gayle passed me, rapidly conducting her head count. Then she came back, frowning, counting again.

Dread gathered in my stomach. I stopped her. “What is it?”

“Two short,” she said. “I didn’t see anyone leave.”

Neither had I, and it alarmed me. I’d been vigilant. Whoever had left the party had done so under cover of a veil, and a very good one.

Luis and I exchanged a look of perfect understanding, and spun away in separate directions, checking faces. When I reached the end of the line, I turned and ran back to meet him halfway. We instinctively grabbed hold of each other.

“She’s not here,” Luis panted. “Ibby’s gone. The other girl, too. Gillian.”

Gillian, who had been so distraught. But had they gone on their own, or had they been taken?

“We have to look for them,” Luis said. “They’ve only been gone fifteen minutes, since the last check. Can’t have gone far.”

Gayle grabbed him and pulled him to a halt. “Hey!” she hissed. “We’ve got refugees and wounded, and we don’t know that they’re safe yet! We can’t go tearing through the woods shouting!”

He shoved her back, but he must have known, as I did, that she was right. “Then what?” he spat back, but quietly enough. “Someone
took her
! I’m not just giving up on her!”

“We may be able to track her on the aetheric,” I said quietly. “And we don’t know that she was taken, Luis. We don’t know that at all.”

I was trying to prepare him, because I didn’t believe, not for a moment, that Ibby had been spirited away against her will. The child was, if nothing else, a fighter; she’d been taken once, and she would never go quietly again. Added to that, she was in the midst of a group, and no one had noticed her, or Gillian’s, disappearance.

She’d gone willingly, wherever she had gone. And she’d taken Gillian with her.

“Well?” Gayle whispered. “We can’t wait. I have to keep them moving. We’re vulnerable out here.”

“Go,” Luis said. “We’re staying.” I nodded. We stepped out of the group, and Gayle, after a troubled frown, led the others on into the dark. It took surprisingly little time before we were lost in the dark again, just the two of us.

Luis limped over to me as I stood surveying the dark, cold woods. The school’s fires had gone out, or at least sunk to sullen ashes; it was once again full, true night, and a moonless one. “Let’s go,” he said, and limped on, back toward the trail. “We might be able to pick up their tracks where they left the group.” I didn’t move. After several steps, he stopped and looked back. “Cass?”

“Stay where you are,” I said softly. “Don’t move.”

I heard a soft, whispering laugh through the trees. “You’re good; I’ll give you that,” said a woman’s voice. I recognized it all too easily. “
Mira
, he’s a tasty one. Yours?”

Luis started to turn, but Esmeralda—Snake Girl—whipped out of the shadows with blinding, reptilian speed, wrapping coils around him with crushing force. Her human half rose up, beautiful and terrifying as she hissed and bared her venomous fangs. Luis struggled, but Esmeralda was too physically strong to budge ... and when I tried to break her hold, my Earth-based powers bounced off of her without effect. In a very real sense, Esmeralda
was
part of that power. It had taken a Djinn’s death to seal her in the form she was in and take away much of her strength; that only served notice of how incredibly powerful and dangerous she’d once been.

I thought I could defeat her, but not with Luis held hostage in those muscular, tensing coils. She could crush him before I could save him.

“
Very
tasty,” Esmeralda said, and lowered herself to look into Luis’s eyes. “You have good instincts, Djinn. This one’s no rabbit. He’s more of a tiger.”

Luis tried something—I couldn’t tell what, but it didn’t matter; at the first sign of his drawing power, Esmeralda tightened her coils, and I heard bones and muscles creaking under the stress. He gasped, and then couldn’t pull in another breath to replace the one he’d lost. The panic in his face made her smile. “Definitely a tiger,” she said. “But tigers die just like rabbits,
hombre
. So play nice.”

“Let him breathe,” I said. “Please.”

She glanced at me, raised her eyebrows, and tossed her dark hair back over her shoulders. “Since you ask so nice, sure.” Her smile was real, and vicious. “You want to ask me why I’m here?”

“I know why you’re here,” I said. “You’re here because Ibby told you to come here. When?”

That startled Snake Girl, and once again I saw that flash that betrayed her genuine youth. She might exude self-confidence, but beneath it she was still a girl, one who’d made tremendous mistakes. “Who says I come running when some little brat calls?”

“Because you liked her. Because you saw in her what you once were. And because she asked your name.”

“You think I’m that simple?”

“No,” I said. “I think you’re that lonely, Esmeralda. How did she send for you?”

Es slowly unwound herself from around Luis’s body, and he staggered and backed away toward me. The two of us against the monster ... but I wasn’t seeing a monster anymore.

Es settled her coils comfortably, a glistening mound of sinuous flesh, and propped her chin on one hand. Her elbow rested on the top of a coil. “She called the shop and left a message to tell me where she was. She said she liked it here, but she figured things would go wrong. She thought I could help. She said it was the least I could do.”