Rachel Caine - Unbroken

“You were a killer,” I said bluntly. “A psychopath. And, I observe, you still are.”

The girl smiled, but not all her teeth were human; she had a viper’s fangs hidden inside her, and now she lazily showed them to me as her pupils contracted to shining, blind vertical slits. “Got that right, bitch. Want me to prove it?”

“Hey!” Isabel said sharply. She put herself between the two of us and glared—I was relieved to see that Esmeralda got the same level of outrage that I did. “Enough! We’ve got real enemies, don’t we? The Lady out there, she wants to kill us, and so does Mother Earth, and probably the Djinn now. We’ve got plenty of trouble without this.”

I, who had existed since before the human race had descended from trees, was being chastised by a child, and it rankled, because the child was right. Esmeralda was not my favorite choice of companion, or even a safe one, but she was Isabel’s friend, and any allies at all would soon be welcome.

I bowed from the waist, spreading my hands to show I was releasing the moment. Esmeralda took an insultingly long moment to fold her fangs away, clear her eyes back to entirely human, and shrug. “Whatever,” she said, and slithered off through the hissing forest debris. “I need breakfast.”

“Do I even want to know what that means?” Luis asked, as he limped over to me. He’d held back, I realized, because he’d hoped that Esmeralda might overlook him as a threat if she and I came to a fight. Smart, but then, that was Luis; he was a great deal more capable than I sometimes gave him credit for. And capable of more subtlety than me.

Isabel snorted. “She doesn’t run on granola, Uncle Luis.” Already, it seems, she’d perfected the irritated teenage roll of the eyes. “Relax. She doesn’t eat people. ”

“That you know of,” Luis said. “ Mija , that girl’s dangerous. She’s killed before, and she’ll kill again. I don’t think you understand what you’re getting into with her.”

“I’m not a baby,” Isabel snapped back, and her dark eyes flashed with a hint of the power I knew she possessed. “Don’t treat me like one. I know what she is, what she’s done. She told me.”

I doubted that what Esmeralda told her was the truth, either in its breadth or depth, but there was no point in arguing with the girl. She’d not be convinced now, not by the very adults to whom she wanted to prove herself.

Luis started to speak again, but I met his eyes and shook my head. Like a sensible man, he subsided, but the frown remained grooved on his forehead.

I kept watching him as Isabel busied herself with other things, because Luis did not look well. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, and lines of pain tight around his mouth. I moved to him, and he put his arm around me. “Hell of a night,” he said. His weight shifted just a bit, and settled more on me than his wounded leg. “You doing okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “You’re still in pain.”

“It’s good.” It wasn’t, and I gave him a long look in reply until he said, eyebrows raising, “Okay, well, maybe good isn’t the right word. It’ll be all right until it heals on its own.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” I said, and before he could protest, I crouched down and put my hand on his thigh, just at the level where the injury had occurred. He’d been very lucky not to have bled out; the tear in the artery had been grave indeed. I closed my eyes and invoked Oversight, an overlay to the real world that imbued it with the rich, shifting colors and images from the other layers of reality, the real worlds that were the natural home to the Djinn.

Luis, painted with those colors, seemed pallid and gray, and his leg pulsed with red and black energy. I could sense the sickness taking hold inside, the rot and ruin waiting to consume his feverish, dimming light.

No. I would not lose him now. Not after all this. I could not. It was no longer a selfish need, that of a Djinn depending on the skill and power of a human to provide her with energy for survival.… No, this was something else altogether, a burning and desperate need to have him alive. To preserve the beauty of what I knew was within him.

Our eyes locked, and Luis’s lips curved a little in a tired smile. “You’d better get up before someone takes a picture and we’re both porn stars,” he said, but the smile faded after a second, and a look of alarm came into his face. “You’re not going to—”

I didn’t look away from his face as I opened the connection between us, and a golden wave of Earth power flowed from him into me, drowning me in deep, soft, rich energy. I couldn’t stop the sigh that escaped; feeling that incredible sensation, so close to pain and pleasure, made me remember what it had been like to exist in that flow, that state of being. It was not so much that I missed it as when I touched it, I was a starving woman remembering the taste of food.

It was addictive, that power. And dangerous.

Especially now.

Luis tried to cut the connection as his eyes widened in surprise. “No, you can’t.…” He knew how dangerous it was to use power now, and he also knew I had not done it lightly. “Cassiel, stop—”

I poured the power out again, through my fingertips, bathing his wound in a flood of healing energy.

It hurt. And it was glorious.

Luis collapsed against the tree trunk behind him and slid down, eyes closing as a moan escaped his suddenly pallid lips. I helped cushion some of the shock, but I couldn’t stop the pain; the infection had crept deep into him overnight, unusually fast and deadly, and it took concentration to seek it and burn it out of him. That didn’t stop the sensations that continued to squeeze him in their grip, though—complex waves of heat, cold, orgasm, agony. The tissues of his damaged artery knitted together in strong, rubbery layers over the thin patch that had held him through the night, and then the muscles and outer layers of skin bonded over it.

I didn’t stop until he was healed.

As the last cells absorbed the healing energy, I let the connection whisper closed between us; I’d consumed much of Luis’s reserves, and my own as well, but it had to be done. I couldn’t bear to think of him suffering any longer.

Odd, how that had taken over from concern for myself—the only concern I’d had for so many millennia.

Now, in the wake of that urgency, I found myself swaying on my knees, falling, and caught in Luis’s strong hands. It felt good. Safe. The pleasure I’d felt in channeling all that effusion of power was gone now, and in its place was an aching emptiness, a weariness that descended like nightfall and make me feel weak, lost, alone.

Luis gathered me against his chest, and I let my head fall against his chest. “Shhh,” he whispered to me, and smoothed my leaf-littered hair. “Thank you, Cass. But you shouldn’t have done that. You know you shouldn’t have.”

“No choice,” I whispered back. I felt as bloodless and ill as he’d been before. “Infection. It would have killed you.”

“I know.” The calm with which he said it surprised me, and he smiled a little. “Death ain’t no new thing for me, chica. It’s kind of what we were born for, humans. Never expected to live long, as a Warden. Not expecting to survive these next few days, for damn sure. None of us should.”

The words were sober, the tone kind. I felt a chill, listening to him; he had a calm conviction that was difficult to comprehend. We were not so given to the inevitable, we Djinn. We liked to be the inevitable, not its victims. Humans had a kind of courage I’d never truly understood: the courage to face their own doom.

I didn’t know if Djinn had that same bravery; we’d never been called on to use it, if so. Suffering, we understood, but obliteration was something else again. We could neither fully comprehend it, nor accept it.