Rachel Caine - Unseen

So no matter what Luis had said, or what he (or I) had promised, Isabel would have to be taken to a place of safety and seclusion until her powers could be curbed and properly directed. Betraying her like that would damage the fragile trust she had in me, particularly, but I couldn’t help it.

Even Djinn understood that standing responsible for children meant not always being liked. Luis couldn’t make that decision.

I could.

After Isabel was asleep, I poured Luis a glass of water (he had not been drinking enough) and, when he reached for another beer, closed the refrigerator door not quite on his hand.

“She has to go,” I said. “You know she has to go, no matter what she thinks. No matter how hard it will be. You’d never forgive yourself if she injured herself, or others, because we tried to protect her too much.”

He took the water glass, turned it in his fingers, and stared into it without acknowledging what I’d said. Finally, he drank it in one long, choking gulp and handed the empty back. I refilled it for him.

“I promised her,” he said. “You think I’m going to break my word?”

“No. I am going to break my word. You’ll bear no guilt.”

Luis looked up, frowning. “It’s not about my conscience, Cass.”

“I think it is, and I understand why. But you know that Marion’s arguments are sound. Ibby needs more help than we can give her alone, and better training and protection. If she’s around children with similar experiences, it could be helpful to her.”

“She doesn’t want to go!”

“She’s six years old. Of course she doesn’t want to go. But one of us must make the choice to do what’s necessary.”

“And that’s you,” Luis said. “Always you.” He handed the water back again, and walked away, head down. “All right. You’re right—I know you are. What now?”

“We’ll have to be careful in how we go about it,” I said. “You know that she will fight us, and it can turn very dangerous. This house could easily be destroyed.”

“Hell, we could destroy the whole neighborhood if this goes bad,” he said, and sighed. “I’ve been thinking about it, too. I talked to Marion. She’s not bending—we bring Ibby within the week, or she sends an extraction team, and things get real damn messy. But even if we agree to take Ibby ourselves, things could still get messy.”

In solidarity with him, and in compensation for his lost beer, I drank the rest of the water. I had several sips before I said, “Can’t you catch her sleeping, and deepen her rest to a coma so she doesn’t wake?” It was an Earth Warden skill, but it was tricky, and required constant monitoring to ensure that a false coma didn’t become a true one.

“I could,” he said, and frowned unhappily. “No, I should be able to, but honestly, I think she’s on guard against stuff like that now. Pearl’s training was thorough. I’m afraid she’ll wake up, either as I’m doing it or when we’re traveling, and all hell will break loose. I can’t keep somebody down who’s fighting it without serious risk. She doesn’t really trust you, and we can’t afford to make her feel the same way about me. If she starts distrusting me, I don’t see how we can be sure she won’t be able to block us.” He drank some of his water, not very eagerly. “You think you can get to her quickly enough to take her down without problems?”

I was even less likely to succeed, and I shook my head. “Yet it must be done.”

“Yeah, I know.” Luis was deeply troubled, not only by the risks of keeping her here, or moving her elsewhere, but by the emotional cost to the girl. “Cass, I can’t help thinking that maybe this is what Pearl wanted. To have us rescue Ibby and bring her out here, into the human world, where she can do maximum damage. She could use Ibby to keep all of us pinned down and working twice as hard as we should. She could set these kids off like time bombs.”

I had a difficult time deciding what Pearl’s motivations might have been, at any point; she had always been hard to anticipate even when I had not been her enemy, though that was aeons ago, in a very different world. She could be cruel for cruelty’s sake, or cruel to a purpose, and it was impossible for me to know which her abduction of Isabel had been. But she had a plan; I knew that.

And it ended with the destruction of the Djinn, which was an insane goal; it meant ultimately the death of the world itself. Pearl hated everything, and hated it enough to be willing to sweep it all away in her blind rage. Humans, Djinn, animals, plants, the rich life force of the planet itself. She might expire with the rest of it, but she would survive long enough to look on a barren, dying ball of rock, and the death of all that lived. Dying last was her definition of winning.

There was a simple enough way to stop her, if I had the courage to choose it; it would mean the destruction of Isabel, of Luis, of all humans with whom I shared this strange, fragile life—a kind of firebreak, cutting Pearl off from the source of her power. But one species sacrificed for the sake of the planet ... one species out of so, so many. It had been done before.

In dooming me to mortal flesh for refusing his orders, though, Ashan had inadvertently convinced me that killing humanity was the last thing I wanted to do. I was determined to find another way, any way, to defeat my former sister.

But I still didn’t see what that way could be.

“Cass?” Luis’s hand closed over mine, drawing me back from the cold reaches of speculation to a warm, surprisingly sweet present. I felt an instant spark to him, an opening of my attention that surprised me, and I felt myself smile. “We’re going to figure it out. Don’t go there.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Where?”

“To that closed-in, dark place where you always go. Sooner or later, if you go there, you won’t come back to me, and I can’t stand that. I really can’t.”

I knew what he meant, and laid my other hand over his in a silent promise.

I would always come back.

For him.

The solution presented itself to me in an odd way. Ibby herself suggested it the next day, when she grew bored with the things that used to interest her, before her abduction. First she wanted movies, then books, then stories told to her. Toys failed to entice. By noon, she had driven Luis mad with her demands, and I had watched, bemused, as he ran out of ways to try to deal with her patiently.

“That’s enough,” he said, when she shoved the latest game—some sort of puzzle—off the table onto the kitchen floor in a petulant tantrum. “Enough, Isabel. Stop acting like you’re two.”

“Stop pretending like you care,” she shot back. She folded her chubby arms, tucked her chin down, and glared at him, and at me, as I watched from a safe distance. “It’s boring. This is all boring . You’re treating me like a little kid.”

“Then what would you like to do?” I asked her.

“Go somewhere.”

“Where?”

She sighed dramatically. “Anywhere!”

I exchanged a glance with Luis, but only a brief one. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I didn’t really need to know. The glance was only to warn him not to interfere. “Would you like to ride on the back of my motorcycle?”

He frowned at me, and silently mouthed, What are you doing? I shook my head slightly in response, and he subsided.

Ibby, regardless of her trust (or lack of it) for me, brightened immediately at the prospect of doing something implicitly dangerous. “Yes!” She wriggled down from her chair and dashed away.

“What the hell, Cass?” Luis asked, as soon as she was out of earshot. “You’re not going to take her—”