Rachel Caine - Unseen

“Are you in love with my uncle Luis?” she asked.

I looked at Luis, who stared back, on the verge of laughing. He spread his hands helplessly. “Hey, she didn’t ask me ,” he said. “Good luck.”

In this, at least, I was determined to be truthful. I sank down to one knee in front of Isabel, which put us almost on eye level, and said, “Yes. I love your uncle very much. Is that all right?”

She cocked her head a little to one side, thinking; clearly, she hadn’t expected such a direct response. From the choked sound Luis was making, neither had he. “I suppose,” she said, a little severely. “But don’t make him sad. I won’t like it if you make him sad.”

She continued to watch me with a serious expression, until I nodded with equal gravity. What Luis might not have picked up from her words was the underlying threat. She still doubted me, at some very deep level; my once-Djinn-sister Pearl had gone to great lengths to try to create me as the villain in Ibby’s life, to paint me as a monster and a cruel murderer, to twist the child in the direction that Pearl wished her to go, for whatever obscure and dangerous reason. It would take time for Ibby to get over that completely, even if on a rational level she was trying to believe in me again.

I didn’t yet know what Pearl was trying to achieve by abducting and altering these children, but I knew one thing: They were powerful, and dangerous when angered.

The subtext of what Ibby had said was quite clear: If you hurt him, I’ll hurt you back . And she meant every unsaid word of it. She might not want to hurt bad people, but she would, for Luis, make a definite exception to her rule ... even if the bad person was me.

I nodded, holding her gaze. There was no doubt between us what she meant, or what I had agreed. Ibby, satisfied, grabbed her pale pink nightgown, the one with bright cartoon characters woven in the fabric, and shut the door to change.

Luis had watched the entire exchange, and now, as I glanced toward him, I saw that he hadn’t missed any of the subtexts, either. “ Dios ,” he breathed. “She really would take you on if she had to, wouldn’t she?”

I nodded. “For you, she’d take on anyone. You’re all she has, Luis.”

“No,” he said. “She has you, too. Even if she doesn’t really know that yet.”

I wanted to believe that, but I had choices to make—small ones now, and larger ones looming like storms in the distance. The wrong decision at any time would have catastrophic consequences, not just for me but for everyone I had come to love in the human world. I had, in a very real sense, been sent here by the Djinn to halt a disastrous, still-unknowable chain of events that Pearl had put in motion, by breaking a weak link in the chain itself.

The link of human life, from which Pearl was drawing her power.

Perhaps even the right decision this time would still mean that I would become the villain Ibby so feared, destroy my fragile relationship with her uncle, and set me adrift and alone.

Choices.

I hated them.

I felt a burst of power from the bathroom, and reacted without thinking to what could have been an attack upon Isabel; I banged the door open and charged in, and caused Ibby to yelp and back up fast against the wall. She was wearing the nightgown, and her hair was dry and crackling with energy. Too much energy. There wasn’t a trace of water drops in the tub or on the floor, but there was a faint smell of singed fabric in the air.

I stopped, but not before Ibby had formed a ball of white-hot fire in the palm of her hand. She was staring at me with huge, terrified eyes, and I knew she was seeing something that Pearl had shown her—me, killing her uncle. It was a lie, but it was so hard for her to forget the images, and I had just triggered a flashback with my overreaction and violence.

I held up both hands to her, palms out. “Peace, Isabel,” I said, in my most soothing voice. “I am sorry I frightened you. I was only worried for you. I thought something bad had happened.”

She didn’t quench the flame immediately; she kept watching me, wary and unhappy, until Luis appeared behind me in the doorway. “Ibby,” he said. “Stop.”

She closed her fist, and the flames died, leaving a brilliant aura I could still see when I blinked. “I didn’t do anything,” she blurted, and her pouting lips quivered, as if she might burst into wails at any moment. “She scared me! I didn’t do anything wrong!”

“You used power,” I said. “You promised you wouldn’t, except in self-defense and with our guidance.”

Now the pout was more pronounced, and her small features took on a stubborn, set look. “I was wet. I just wanted to get dry.”

“Ibby, you can’t do that,” Luis said, and eased around me to put himself between the two of us. “You promised me, sweetheart. You promised you wouldn’t use power just because it was easy.”

“But I was wet . You dry yourself off. I’ve seen it.”

“That’s true, but we’re older. There are a lot of things you can do when you’re older that you shouldn’t be doing now.”

“Like what?”

“Like drinking beer. Or kissing. Or using power just because it’s there. It’s dangerous, Ibby. It can hurt you, and maybe hurt other people, too.” For a man who had never expected to have these sorts of conversations with a child, he was doing well, I thought.

Ibby, however, still had her doubts. “But you wanted me to save those people in the fire. You said I should.”

“And you were very brave,” I said, when I saw the indecision on Luis’s face. “But that was when we were with you, to help and make sure you didn’t get hurt. You shouldn’t do things on your own.”

“You think I’m bad,” Ibby said, and her face became a hostile mask. “Like the Lady said. The Wardens think we’re all bad. They want to punish us and take away what makes us special. And now you want to do it, too, to me. You want to take it all away.”

“No,” Luis said. “We want to make you safe. That’s all. You have to trust me, Ibby. You do, don’t you?”

He sounded so sincere, so warm, that I couldn’t imagine how anyone could have distrusted him even for an instant. Ibby wavered, and finally nodded. “I trust you .” She still wasn’t forgiving me, I noticed. “You’re not going to make me go to that school place, are you?”

“No, I’m not going to make you go,” he said. “We’re not going to let them take you away, either. So don’t be afraid, okay?”

“Okay.” She fidgeted for a moment, then walked to Luis and hugged him. “Can I go watch a movie now?”

“One, and then bed,” he said. “How about that movie with the fish? You like that one.”

She brightened immediately, and nodded. She even turned a sweetly dimpled smile on me, and I smiled in turn, feeling a little of my unease abate. She moved away down the hall, excited by the prospect of fun, her fright forgotten.

But she’d not forgotten the rest of it. I knew that. She didn’t trust me.

And the truth was she was right not to.

EMOTIONS ASIDE,there was really no question of whether Ibby would go to the Wardens’ retreat, or hospital, or school—whatever they wished to call it. At her tender age, with the kind of trauma and training (if one could call it that) that had been visited upon her, I did not believe that she could be counted on to learn right from wrong when it came to her powers, even with our guidance. In the worst case, Luis and I would be hard-pressed to contain her without damage, should it come to that, and keeping her in a situation in which others would be put at risk was a very bad idea. Isabel’s gift was explosive ... literally. She had a second gift of Earth powers that would be much slower to develop, but I’d seen that element misused just as badly as fire, in the wrong hands. But fire—fire was disastrously easy for her, and it was one of the most visible, terrifying gifts. Humans—and I now counted myself among them—had a distinctively sharp fear of burning. I knew she would eventually learn to use that to get her way. What child her age wouldn’t, in the end?