Rachel Caine - Firestorm

"Where's—?"

"Father? He was with us for a while, but he had to go. Djinn business. I think it was about the Demon Marks." Like her father, she had the trick of driving without paying the slightest attention to the road, and kept staring right at me. "Are you better?"

I didn't feel better. No, I felt like I'd been boiled, steamed, deboned, and thrown out of a plane at thirty thousand feet. With a collapsing parachute. David had healed my broken bones, but the remainder of it was my problem. "Peachy," I lied. "How long have I been out?"

It took her a second, juggling the human concept of time in her head. "Four hours, I think. You hit the ground hard. Father did what he could to help you. He wasn't sure it would be enough." Her hands kept steering the car accurately, even while we took a curve. "Are you sure you're all right?"

Something came to me, a little late. "And how exactly do you know how to drive a car?"

Imara blinked a little and shrugged to show she didn't understand the question.

"Kid, you've been alive for, what, a couple of days? Did you just wake up knowing everything that you need to know? How does that work?"

Another helpless lift of her shoulders. "I don't know. If I had to guess, I'd say I know everything my parents knew. So I benefit from your life, and Father's. It saves time."

I remembered Jonathan sending me to Patrick, the only other Djinn who'd really had to learn how to become one from scratch—who'd been brought over from human by another Djinn, rather than created the old-fashioned way, out of apocalypse and death. I'd had to take baby steps, learning how to use what I'd been given, because David hadn't been able to transfer that life experience to me the way he had done with Imara.

But the idea that your daughter knows everything you knew? Not very comforting. There were plenty of moments in my life that I'd just as soon not share with my offspring…

I pulled myself away from that, pressed my hand to my aching head, and asked, "Where are you heading?"

"Maine?…"

David had set her on the road to Seacasket, at least. And apparently global positioning was one of the things that she'd inherited from him.

I nodded and tried stretching. It didn't feel great. "What about the accident? Was everybody all right?"

"Accident?" She was either playing dumb, or all that carnage and twisted metal had meant little to her.

"There was a wreck—there was a—" A little girl. Wandering, bloodied, scared. I'd been trying to save her, hadn't I? My memory was fuzzy, tied up with images that didn't make any sense of opalescent swirls and burning and falling…

"I don't know," she confessed, and chewed her lip. I knew that gesture. It had taken me dedication to get over the same one. She was my kid, all right. "I didn't know it was important or I would have paid more attention."

"Not important ?" I let that out, accusation-flavored, before I could stop myself. Imara turned her attention back to the road. Not to focus on her driving, just to avoid my censure.

And then she deliberately turned back, eyes level and completely alien. "I should have paid more attention, but you should leave that behind you now. What Father's asking you to do is more important, and you can't be distracted by individual lives now." She shook her head. "It's also very, very dangerous, what he's asking of you. I don't like it."

"I just got my synapses fried in a lightning strike, and then I fell out of the sky. Dangerous is sort of a sliding scale with me."

"Mom!" She sounded distressed. Angry. "Please understand: Whatever you've faced before, this is different , and you need to stay focused on the goal. I know that's hard for you, but if you worry about saving every individual, you'll lose them all. Let other people do their part. This is Djinn work, and it isn't the kind of thing humans are built to do."

By my very nature, I wasn't good at taking in the big picture; for me, the whole world was that lost, scared little girl wandering in a field. Those college boys trapped in their wrecked truck. The world revealed itself to me one person at a time.

But I took in a deep breath and nodded. "Right. I'm focused. How much longer—?"

"About seven more hours," Imara said. "I'll stay with you. There are things you can't do on your own. You'll need help. Father said—" She shut up, fast. Father . I wondered if David was as frightened by that as I was by the Mom thing. Or as delighted. Or both. "Is this still strange for you?"

"What?"

"Me," she said softly, and turned her attention back to the road. "Human mothers carry their children inside them. They hold them as infants; they teach and guide them. I was born as I am. That's strange, isn't it?"

She sounded wistful, even sad. I'd been so busy thinking of myself and my reactions to her that I hadn't considered how odd this might be for her, too. That maybe she felt lost in a maze of human feelings she didn't understand. Wasn't even supposed to have, perhaps.

"Imara," I said. "Pull over."

"What?"

"Please."

She coasted the car to a stop on the gravel shoulder, not far from a sign that warned of curves up ahead, and twisted around to face me. It was like looking in a faerie mirror—so similar that it made me shiver somewhere deep inside. There was an indefinable connection between us that I loved and feared in equal parts.

"You look so much like me," I murmured, and took her hands in mine. They felt warm, real, and solidly familiar.

"I am you," she said. "Most of me. I'm not so much your child as your clone—Djinn DNA doesn't mix well with human. So my flesh is mostly the same as yours, and my—my spirit is Father's."

I shivered a little. How was I supposed to feel about that? And what was I supposed to say? "I—"

"I'm not really Djinn," she said. "You know that, don't you? I can't do the things Father can do. I can't protect you."

"Mothers protect children. Not the other way around."

She tilted her head a little to the side, regarding me with a tiny little frown. "How can you protect me?"

Great question. "I won't know until I get there," I said, and impulsively reached up to touch her cheek. "Sweetheart, I'm not going to pretend that you're not stronger than I am, or faster, or smarter, or—anything else that the Djinn part of you can give. But the point is that I'll protect you when I can, and I do not want you to put yourself at risk for me. All right?"

The frown grooved deeper. "That's not what Father said to do."

"Then your dad and I need to have a talk." What she'd said was making me curious. "When you say you're not fully Djinn—"

"What are my limits, do you mean?" she asked. I nodded. "Where you're strong—in weather and fire, particularly—I'm strong. I can move the way the Djinn do. But I'm bound to my body in ways they aren't. I can't change my form. I can't use other elements that you can't control, as well." She continued to watch me carefully. Her voice was matter-of-fact, but I couldn't help but think that David and Jonathan and I had done something terrible, bringing Imara into the world. I couldn't tell if she resented the restrictions her half-blood birth had given her. If she did, that would be one hell of a case of adolescent angst.

"But," she continued when I didn't jump in, "even so, I am one of the Djinn. They all felt it when I was born. I'm still a part of them, if a small one."

I stayed quiet, thinking. She might not have been able to read my mind, but she could easily read my expressions—something I couldn't do to her.

"You're worried that if you keep me with you, they could trace you through me. A weak link."

"A little. With the Djinn so unreliable…" I'd seen the Djinn turn on a dime, when the Earth called; even though Imara might seem immune to that, she was clearly a lot more vulnerable than I'd like. And I couldn't hold my own against a full-on Djinn assault, not for more than a few seconds. No human could, if the Djinn unleashed their full potential.