Rachel Caine - Unbroken

She knew I was lying, she must have, but in this last, desperate moment, she also knew that we had no real choices left. She hesitated one more second, staring into my eyes, and blurted, “I love you, Mom.”

Then she was gone, and I pulled in a deep, trembling breath. There were tears in my eyes. Tears.

“You really love this human child?” Rashid asked me, as if it were a normal day and we were in casual conversation. As if the world weren’t coming apart around us.

“Yes,” I said softly. “Yes, I do. She’s my daughter, in every way that matters.”

Rashid shrugged. “And you used to be so… fierce.”

“I still am.” I swallowed hard, and tasted darkness. “Rashid, the Void children touched me.”

He looked sharply at me, eyes flaring bright silver. “You’re infected?” He took a step back. “Give someone else the bottle. You can’t keep me now. You know that. Your sickness will spread to me.”

“Don’t worry, I have other plans for you,” I said. And I did; a plan had formulated itself somewhere deep inside me, and it was suddenly and brilliantly illuminated like a landing strip in the dark. “I’ll set you free at the proper moment.”

“Do it now!”

“I can’t,” I said… and then a pale pair of arms locked around me from behind, and pulled me backward with irresistible, bone-breaking force.

Pearl.

I tried to summon power and break free, but where she touched me numbness spread—a creeping cold that mirrored the darkness from the Void children that had infected me. My skin, already pale, turned a dead blue-white as infection spread like frost. I couldn’t feel the bottle in my fingers, and as much as I tried to hang on to it, I couldn’t.

Rashid cried out, but he couldn’t help, couldn’t come close to Pearl. And like all trapped Djinn, he couldn’t directly touch the bottle.

It hit the floor, rolled toward the edge of the abyss, and was just tipping over the edge when he summoned a gust of wind that blew it the opposite direction, in a skitter over broken stone to relative safety…

… Until there was a flash of green coils untangling and dropping from overhead on an exposed beam, and Esmeralda reached down and scooped up the bottle.

I had been looking for her. Counting on her, in fact.

“Isabel,” I whispered. I could only just draw the breath to speak, and when I did, my breath misted on the air. “Give it to Isabel. Hurry.”

She laughed, dangling her human half upside down, fangs extended and glistening with venom. “Hell with you,” she said. “I am done with all of you people. I used to be good, really good. But you treat me like everybody else does, like a freak. Not anymore, chica. ” She waggled the bottle in front of me as she righted her body in a sinuous twist of coils. “He’s mine now. Mine. Don’t think just because I don’t have Warden powers anymore that I’ve forgotten how to order around a Djinn. Rashid’s my gorgeous personal insurance policy to get the hell out of this in one piece.”

Pearl laughed, and that laughter crept inside me, too, heavy as fog. I couldn’t hold my head up now. I felt like a flesh-doll, limp in her grip. “Poor Cassiel,” she said, and I felt her cool lips graze my ear. “Can you feel it? The Mother is listening. She is listening to humans now. Unguarded, open, vulnerable. It’s time for you to choose. Die with the Djinn and the Wardens, or live with me. Esmeralda’s already made her choice.”

Esmeralda dropped down out of the rafters with a heavy, meaty thump, and slithered closer, head tilted to one side, watching Pearl curiously.

“I’m not on anybody’s side,” she said. “Damn sure not on yours. I’ve seen what you do to kids. I never had many limits, but whatever mine were, you blew right past them.”

“So you want to be my enemy,” Pearl said. “That’s an unfortunate choice.”

Esmeralda shrugged. “I don’t want to be anybody’s enemy. I just want to be on the side that wins, that’s all. There never was a place in the old world for me. Maybe there’ll be one in yours.”

I couldn’t speak. I could just barely find the strength to draw in one raw, aching, freezing breath after another. Outside, the battle between the Wardens and Pearl’s children had gone almost quiet; I wondered, with a growing dread, if Isabel was all right. And Luis.

“Es,” I whispered. The dark inside me was starting to hurt as it grew stronger; it was pulling things from me, important things. Memories. Identity. Strength. “Don’t. She will not win.”

Esmeralda nodded past me, toward the abyss Rashid had punched into the center of the room—the hole through which had fallen so many children. “Oh, it looks like she will,” she said. “Sorry, Cass, but I never was much of a martyr.”

I slowly, painfully turned my head, and saw that the children, alive, intact, aware, were floating in midair. Rising up out of the dark, completely unharmed.

“Did you really think I’d let the Djinn do something so cruel as to slaughter all these innocent lives?” Pearl asked. “I saved you from yourself, Cassiel. The Wardens are finished, and humanity with them. I’m what comes next. And now, so are you, my sweet, cold sister.”

Cold , so cold. The pain inside was excruciating now, a black fire I couldn’t control or fight. The power I pulled from Luis was spinning away from me into that void, eaten by something… something that was reaching through .

Something that was trying to clamber its sharp-edged way inside me, as her power froze and shattered every bit of strength and power left in me.

The children were forming into a tightly bound cluster around us, all facing outward… so many young Wardens, so powerful, and all their power was directed inward, channeled together into a pure white shell around them as they floated in the air over the darkness. A milky, glassine skin that sealed them all inside, together.

And it began to kill them.

The power being produced was so vivid, so unnatural, that I could sense their small bodies failing under the strain. It didn’t matter to Pearl. Nothing mattered now, except her goal, almost in her reach.

The Void children remaining in the bubble imploded … their darkness exploded out of them, destroying their fragile shells, and flooded together like spilled mercury, spread in a sinuous curve along half of the dome.

It formed a liquid design, the blaze of power, and the absence of it.

Black and white.

Yin and yang.

The opposing forces of the universe.

“Stop,” I whispered. I grieved for the children who had just… disappeared, but that battle had been lost a long time ago; Pearl had chosen them, hollowed them out, made them avatars and vessels. The other children, the ones on the white side of the dome… those still had souls, minds, personalities. They could still be saved, if only I could stop this, soon.

But I was losing everything. It was bleeding, slipping, turning dark. Everything, dark.

Then I heard a whisper, and it rose up out of the remnants of the light inside me, out of the very roots of the earth. Not a word, but a feeling, an intuition. It was the breath and life and voice of the Mother, speaking to humans, brushing over us.

Life. Pure, untainted life, a power so pure and intense that it brought sharp tears to my eyes. It didn’t warm me, but it promised me warmth, life, escape from despair.…

And then I felt Pearl gather to strike. In this moment, when the Mother was finally, gently opening herself to humans, allowing just the merest suggestion of contact with them, she was vulnerable through them.

I had to act. Had to.

But all I could manage was one last, dying burst of power—just enough to shock Pearl a little, break me free of her grip, and send me tumbling forward in a heap. I hit the glittering wall of power that had formed around her and the children head on, with stunning force.