Rachel Caine - Firestorm

The Oracle smiled, and dropped her hand back to her side, and I slowly drifted back into my body.

When it was over, there was something left behind. A slow, rich, deep pulse of power. Connection. Rhythms that I'd never felt before, or had any idea existed within my own body.

The Oracle turned away and took her seat again, contemplating the bright red rocks outside, the washed blue sky, the molten sun.

She looked peaceful. So peaceful.

I turned to go back out into the world.

Ashan was standing in the chapel. Staring at me with murderous, bloody fury. I backed up a step and shot a look at the Oracle, but she was sealed in that silent contemplation again. Might as well have been a thousand miles away from the confrontation going on three feet from her.

"It's over," I said. "Back off, Ashan."

"No," he growled. He was far from the polished, self-contained Djinn I'd come to know and fear—this one was primal, reduced to his most basic instincts to inflict pain and terror. "Not you. I won't be your slave!"

I'm not asking you to…

I would have said it, but he didn't give me the chance. He lunged forward, exactly as he'd lunged at Imara, and I was glad to see him come for me, glad, because I wanted this monster dead more than I'd ever wanted anyone dead in my life.

I reached for power, intending to finish this once and for all, but I wasn't fast enough. He grabbed my head and held it between his hands, and I knew I was one millisecond from a broken neck, dead like my child, oh God, Imara…

Instead, he held me still and stared into my eyes, and I felt something happening. I fought to get free, but he was too strong, and whatever it was, he was doing it up on the aetheric levels, too—

Something in me ripped away, something vital and irreplaceable, and I felt a liquid heat race through my head, burning, erasing, taking me away from the world…

No.

The Oracle moved . Impossible, that something so composed of stillness could move so fast, but Ashan was in her hands and being pulled back and down, still snarling and fighting.

Whatever he'd done to me, it was still happening. I swayed, gasping, and grabbed for a bench. Missed. Thumped hard to my hands and knees.

Ashan was on the floor, too, and something was happening to him, something bad… the woman, the thing, she was bending over him and there was a pure white light and screaming, so much screaming…

… and when it was over, she was sitting on a bench, staring straight ahead as if she'd never moved. Never would.

The gray-haired man with the pale, young face rolled over on his side, still screaming. Something different about him now. He was weeping, gagging on every breath.

Not a Djinn at all now. Just a man. Human.

Cast out from the angels.

… what was a Djinn?

I'd known his name once, hadn't I? And this place, I knew it, too… there was a haunting feeling of déjà vu, but I couldn't remember…

Couldn't remember.

There was a popping sound, like thin glass dropped on stone, and without any more warning than that a naked man was lying on the floor near the altar. Golden skin, auburn hair. When his eyes opened, they were the color of melting brass, fierce and hot and inhuman.

I flinched and scrambled out of his way. Toward the other man, who was at least human.

"No—" The metallic one reached out, trying to grab hold of me, and I pulled away. "Jo, what's happened to—?"

I had no idea who he was, but he frightened me. Scenes flickered in front of my eyes, people I didn't know, a life I'd never lived. Terrifyingly vivid, but they had nothing to do with me, did they? I didn't know these people, these places. I didn't know… it was all so confusing…

The gray-haired man screamed and charged up from the floor, hands outstretched for my throat.

The woman on the bench turned her head toward me and made the tiniest gesture, the smallest little lift of a finger, and I was spinning into the darkness.

My last sight was of the auburn-haired man lunging for me, trying to hold on. There was torment on his face, and for a second… for a second I thought I knew him.

Then I was gone.

I was lying on something cold and wet, and I was naked and shivering. Afraid. Something was very, very wrong with me.

I reflexively curled in on myself, protecting as much of myself as I could, as awareness of the world washed over me in hot, pulsing waves.

Biting, frigid wind. Ice-cold sleet trailing languid fingers over my bare skin. I forced my eyes open and saw my arm lying on the ground in front of my eyes, hand outstretched, and my skin was a pallid, blue-tinged white, red at the fingertips. Frostbite.

I ached all over, so fiercely that I felt tears well up in my eyes. And I felt empty , cored out and thrown out like an old orange peel.

I forced myself to look beyond my own hand, and saw that I was lying in a mound of cold, slimy leaf-litter. Overhead, fall-colored trees swayed and scratched the sky, and what little could be seen between the skeletal branches was gray, flocked with low clouds. The air tasted thin in my mouth.

I tried to think where I was, how I'd gotten here, but it was a blank. Worse, it terrified me to even try to think of it. I shuddered with more than the cold, gasping, and squeezed my eyes shut again.

Get up , I told myself. Up . I'd die if I stayed here, naked and freezing. But when I tried to uncurl myself from the embryonic position I'd assumed, I couldn't get anything to work right. My muscles jittered and spasmed and protested wildly, and the best I managed was to roll myself up to my hands and knees and not quite fall flat on my face again.

I heard a voice yelling somewhere off in the woods. Sticks cracking, as something large moved through the underbrush. Run ! something told me, and I was immediately drenched in cold terror. I lunged up to my feet, biting back a shriek of agony as muscles trembled and threatened to tear. I fell against the rough bark of a tree and clung to it as cramps rippled through my back and legs, like giant hands giving me the worst massage in the world. I saw sparks and stars, bit my lip until I tasted blood. My hair was blowing wildly in the wind where it wasn't stuck to my damp, cold skin or matted with mud and leaves.

I let go of the tree and lurched away. My legs didn't want to move, but I forced them, one step at a time. My arms were wrapped around my breasts to preserve a warmth that I couldn't find, either within me or without.

My feet were too cold to feel pain, but when I looked back I saw I was leaving smears of blood behind on the fallen leaves. Cuts had already opened on the soles.

I kept moving. It was more of a lurching not-quite-falling than running, but I was too frightened to wait for any kind of improvement. Had to keep moving .

More shouting behind me. Voices, more than one. The hammer of blood in my ears kept me from focusing on the words. Someone did this to me , I thought. Put me out here to die . I didn't want them to find that they'd failed.

Not that they really had failed, yet.

Up ahead was a tangle of underbrush. My body was already covered with whip-scratches and a lacework of blood against cold white skin. Even numb as I was at the moment, I couldn't throw myself into a thorn thicket. I needed a way around… I turned right, holding to a massive tree trunk for support, and clambered up a short rise.

Just as I reached the summit, a shadow appeared at the top of it. I gasped and started to fall backward, but the shadow reached down and grabbed my forearm, pulling me up the rest of the way and then wrapping me in sudden warmth as his arms closed around me.