Rachel Caine - Unseen

“What?” she snapped at us, finally giving us her attention. Her voice came through clearly, but off to the side from a speaker installed in the wall. “You never seen a Snake Girl before? Vámanos , losers. You’ve got your five bucks’ worth.”

The girl was perfectly human down to her waist, and wearing an old, faded T-shirt that featured the same cartoon character decorating Isabel’s crash helmet. From the waist down, however, her body turned into the muscular coils of a serpent—massive, and patterned like a rattlesnake in tan, brown, and black. The scales glistened in the light, and as the coils began to move, undraping from the sofa, I saw the gleam of white bone at the end of her body.

She had a long rattle, and it began to set up a relentless buzzing, like a thousand hives of agitated bees.

Isabel, wide-eyed, had said nothing at all. Finally, she looked up at me and said, “What happened to her?”

Snake Girl laughed. It was a harsh, unpleasant sound like knives stabbing a chalkboard. “ Mira , it talks. What you think happened to me, little bitch? I got cursed by an evil witch. What else? Only I was the evil witch.” She stopped laughing and moved with frightening speed to the glass, her top half swaying above the massive, muscular snake’s body as she stared down at us, but especially at Isabel. She finally looked directly at me. “You. You look Djinn.”

I shrugged. “I was.”

“Explains how you knew I was here,” she said. “I don’t take out ads in the Yellow Pages. Didn’t think the Djinn paid that much attention to the Wardens’ failures.”

I didn’t blink as I watched her; there was something very predatory and primally frightening about her. “The Djinn never forget a failure like you,” I said.

That seemed to please her, in some bizarre, obscure way. She focused again on Ibby. “And you. You’re just like I was when I was your age. Maybe a little skinnier. But I was shorter.”

Ibby took a big step back, but I wouldn’t let her run away. Not yet. She tried to pull free, but I exerted a little Earth power to freeze her feet where they stood. Snake Girl pressed both her very human hands to the glass, then squashed her face against it, too, turning the beautiful features into something alien and monstrous. Then she pulled back and laughed, clearly delighted by the discomfort she was causing.

Ibby was shaking with it.

“I was so smart ,” Snake Girl said. “I knew better than anybody. See, I was good, and I learned really fast. Eight years old and I was setting bones and curing diseases. Ten, and I was making crops grow out of dead ground. I was a fucking miracle , that’s what I was. They all said so, all the curanderas .” She smiled, but it was deeply unpleasant, and her body twisted sinuously to one side, then the other. It was mesmerizing and terrifying, and I could feel Isabel trembling. “I could do anything. To anybody. For anybody. You understand how that feels?”

Isabel didn’t nod, but I did. I understood all too well how that felt.

“Well, I thought I could do anything, anyway,” Snake Girl said. “But how do you know if you don’t try? So I wanted to see if I could.” She hesitated, studying me, then Isabel. “You sure you want me to go into it?”

“Yes,” I said. Isabel said nothing.

“Your nickel,” Snake Girl said with a shrug. “I started small, with animals, making them into other things. Some died. Some went all crazy. But I kept going, because why not, okay? I turned dogs and cats into bears and lions, only it didn’t go so well most of the time. Big messes to clean up and hide. I figured I’d messed around with animals long enough, so I finally changed a couple of kids, made them grow six feet tall in a day.” Her fierce, malicious smile faded. “They said they wanted to grow up. Well, I made them grown-up. Only they didn’t do any better in the end than the dogs and cats, and there was an even bigger mess to clean up. And I got caught.”

I knew the next part of the story, the part that involved the Djinn—it was something all Djinn knew—but Snake Girl seemed reluctant to continue, or else she enjoyed dragging out the suspense. The silence stretched until I said, “And then?”

“And then the curanderas got a Djinn to come and stop me. I almost won, you know. I turned myself into a giant rattlesnake and I bit him, but not before he turned it all against me. I killed him. I killed a Djinn. Can you believe that?” She laughed, and this time the huge white fangs in her mouth came down with terrifying ease, glinting and wet with venom. “But he got his revenge. He trapped me like this. Not human enough to live, not snake enough to die. A freak show. And while I’m a freak show, I’m damned sure going to make money from it!”

There was silence after she’d finished, except for the dry rustle of her coils.

And then, unexpectedly, Ibby spoke. “Aren’t you sorry?” she asked. “For what you did?”

“Sorry?” Snake Girl tossed her hair back over her shoulders and gave the other girl a look of smoldering arrogance. “Why should I be s orry ? I didn’t ask for all this power in the first place. What, did you? You get yours at the Internet store, idiota ?”

“I’d be sorry about it,” Ibby said very softly. “If I did what you did. I’d feel sick. I’d hate myself.”

Snake Girl’s face distorted with something like fury, and her warning rattled sharply again through the speakers. The writhing coils of her body slammed against the glass with such force that a crack appeared in its surface. Just a small one, but it was significant.

I let Isabel go. She ran to the far corner of the room, still facing the Snake Girl, as if she couldn’t stand to turn her back to what she was seeing. I couldn’t, either, but I let none of that show on my face, and I did not retreat. I refused to retreat from the murderer of a Djinn.

“You can’t hurt anyone now,” I said, not so much for the Snake Girl’s benefit as for Isabel’s. “You’re frozen—no power to shift yourself to either side. And so you will live, and die, between things. Between worlds.” Just as I will , I thought, but at least my predicament was not so dramatic. “Didn’t the Wardens try to help you?”

Snake Girl laughed. “Oh, yes. They tranquilized me, and they had their best Earth Wardens try to fix me. I guess that Djinn was just a little too good. Too bad, really. If they’d restored me, I’d have destroyed all of them.”

“Why?” I asked only because I wondered if maybe, just maybe, this peculiar creature could give me a glimpse inside the mind of Pearl, my enemy. I didn’t particularly care about Snake Girl, just as she didn’t particularly care about the victims she had destroyed. It was a fitting, Djinn-style punishment, what had been done to her. Better she should suffer.

“Why not?” Snake Girl asked, and laughed again. She looked very pretty in that moment, and very insane. “Because they’d stop me from doing what I wanted, of course. They say I used too much power. I say I didn’t use nearly enough. But the truth is, they could have killed me and they didn’t. So I kind of owe them for that, I guess.”

She stopped talking and stayed there, swaying back and forth, then whipped around suddenly as a steel door opened in the back of the room, and a rabbit hopped through, hesitant and worried. It sat up to survey the situation, not quite sure what to make of Snake Girl.

She moved in a blur of scales and fangs, all prettiness vanished into a deadly fury, and I caught a glimpse of the nightmare of her face distended, jaw unhinged to take in her prey, just before the rabbit discovered its last, fatal mistake.