Rachel Caine - Unbroken

“Earth Wardens, follow his example,” Luis said. “Hold up your hands. Fire, Weather, find your partners. Hurry up.” He jumped down, landing with a heavy thump of boots on carpet, and put up his own hand. Our eyes met, and he shook his head. “No, Cass. Not you. You said Pearl was on the move. It’s time to stop her. I can’t—I can’t do it with you. If they see me take off, it’s all going to come apart. I’m sorry, but… this is where our paths part. When we— When this is done, I’ll see you again.” He smiled, but there was an ending in his eyes, a quiet resignation and grief. “I love you.”

“I love you,” I said to him, and kissed him one last, sweet time. I traced the warm skin of his face, the roughness of his emerging beard, and stepped away. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“You can’t always get what you want,” he said. “The great philosopher Mick Jagger said that. Go, babe. I got this.”

I blinked away a blur of tears, turned, and ran for the half-open doorway that led to Pearl’s children.

The door slammed shut in my face. I hit it, extending Earth power ahead of me, but the door held, bouncing me back. “Rashid!” I yelled, and despite how the Djinn felt about the practice of slavery, despite all of the games and the carefully worded, treacherous game they played, he didn’t wait for my command. He hit the door in a dark blue rush, and it splintered, vaporized for three quarters of its width. Only the hinges remained, clinging to a glossy strip of wood as they flapped wildly.

Inside, Pearl stood at the center of a circle of children, all dressed in white. They were silent, eerily so, not one of them shuffling or fidgeting, and Pearl’s face was turned toward the ceiling, and her smile was broad, peaceful, triumphant.

“Now,” she whispered. “Now go and take your rightful places. She’s vulnerable, never more than now. ”

The circle of children turned in their places, facing out now instead of in, and next to me Rashid shifted uneasily. “Cassiel—” The children were advancing now, walking toward the door, toward me, and the foremost in that ring were boys and girls who radiated that special kind of darkness. Whatever inhabited them, it was akin to a demon, and it did not belong here, in this world. There were young ones, no older than five or six; there were older children, as old as twelve or thirteen. Not one of them deserved the fate that had come on them; they’d been abducted, converted, abused, deceived, tortured, and mutilated. Not one of them deserved anything from me but rescue, help, love, kindness.

But this was war.

“Cassiel,” Rashid said, and a warning was plain in his voice. “They’re coming for you. For the Wardens and the Djinn outside. You have to stop them.”

“I know,” I said.

“You have to kill them. They’ll destroy me.”

She’d sent the Void children first, because Rashid still presented a significant threat, and she wanted him gone, destroyed, unmade. The howling darkness contained inside them had grown, and I wasn’t sure there was anything of the original souls left now; I wasn’t sure they were anything but shells for a virus, burned-out avatars as Xarus had been.

Pearl had used Xarus to strike at us, out there in the desert; the artificial black corner had been her creation, a display of sheer, raw power. She’d created the chimera as well. Mother Earth wouldn’t have been so cruel, so perverse.

“Cassiel!”

“Back in the bottle,” I said to Rashid, half absently. The first Void child was only a few feet away. Rashid vanished, and I stoppered the bottle, pushing the cork in tightly and slipping it into the pocket of my pants. I looked past the children, to Pearl.

She had lowered her gaze to meet mine.

“This doesn’t have to involve them,” I told her. “It’s between us. It always has been.”

“Not anymore,” my sister said, in that silky, soft voice I had once loved, and now hated so much. “My grudge isn’t against you, Cassiel. It hasn’t been for some time. You’re a small, insignificant bug, and I don’t care about you, other than to want you removed from my path. It’s the Mother who’s my enemy. And she’s vulnerable. It’s my time now. All you need do is stand aside, and I’ll let you live a while longer. That’s all you want, isn’t it? That’s all any humans want. To delay the inevitable.”

It dawned on me, late and hard, that I couldn’t see Isabel in the approaching waves of children. She’d matured; she was stronger, faster, taller than any of the rest, but she wasn’t there. “What did you do with her?” I asked. It came out in a cold, clear tone, one that almost shimmered in the air with menace. “Where is Isabel?”

Pearl pointed, and I followed her motion, turning slightly… and saw a body embedded in the plaster of the wall. Isabel’s face was a mask, mouth frozen open in a scream.

One hand still remained free in the open air, and it trembled, finger twisting as if trying to claw at the prison.

I had a nightmare visitation of being sealed in that coffin of earth, of the crystals boring into my bones.

“She thought she could make me trust her again,” Pearl said. “She failed. I’ll keep her for later; you didn’t want to be my angel of death, Cassiel, but she… she will make a beautiful killer, I think.”

I screamed, and with no thought for anything else—not even the hands of the children reaching out for me—I drew a pure bolt of Earth power up from the ground below, blasting through concrete, steel, wood.

I blew out the wall in which Isabel was trapped.

She collapsed in a broken heap of debris, coated with pulverized drywall, but I saw her moving just a little. I saw her dust-pale hair stir as she breathed.

The first Void child touched me, and his small, cold hand closed around my wrist.

Something dark crossed over into me, a small thing, a tiny pinpoint of darkness that moved through my flesh like a burrowing insect, relentlessly seeking out the deepest, hottest flame of my power. Another chubby hand touched me, dark against my pale flesh, and I felt it again, a tiny invasion of something cold, so cold.

I remembered the needles piercing my flesh, driving inward with smooth, unflinching whispers.

“You’re going to breed the future, Cassiel,” Pearl said. “A chrysalis for a great power, a new power. You’re the first of the new angels. My dark angels. But first, you have to accept the gift that they’re giving you.”

More hands on me now. I had to fight. Had to. Rashid was right. I had no choice: I had to kill them or lose myself, horribly. Already, the tiny pinpoints of darkness were starting to draw together inside me, clumping, reproducing. Spreading.

My light was still burning, my power still strong, but I couldn’t turn it inward, against this; I couldn’t fight an enemy already inside me. Earth Wardens were the worst at self-healing, and she’d struck me at my most vulnerable point… not just in my body, but in my mind.

I couldn’t fight these children. I couldn’t hurt them.

The others were flooding around me now. They were heading out into the room with the Wardens, who’d been lulled into thinking that Pearl and her followers were helping, were safe. They’d hardly have time to realize that they’d been betrayed before these children, with their wildly enhanced powers, attacked them. Luis had inadvertently helped that along, by focusing the Wardens on the problem at hand rather than what might be coming for them on their blind side.

I was the only one watching their back now. Their last line of defense… and I had just lost the war for them, unless I acted now. Now.

But I couldn’t look into the faces of these children and destroy them, no matter what logic might say.