Rachel Caine - Unseen

I turned my back on it and went to Isabel. I didn’t hold out my hand to her; I knew she wouldn’t take it. Her gaze was wide, and fixed past me to the glass, and what was happening behind it.

I crouched down to put myself even with her, and said, “Ibby. Look at me.”

She didn’t at first, but finally, with a great effort, she transferred her attention to me. I expected anger, but I didn’t see any. What I saw, very clearly, was fear.

“You wanted me to see,” she whispered. “You wanted me to see what happens if I do the wrong things. If I become like her.”

I nodded slowly. “One possibility of it,” I said. “People are not Djinn; Djinn are born to power, bred for it, shaped for it. People are ... fragile, even the best. And power is a heavy thing; it warps even the strongest. I know this is much for you to learn, but you have too much ability not to understand what you could risk.”

We both looked at Snake Girl, who was swallowing the kicking feet of the unfortunate rabbit. She smiled at us with bloodied teeth.

I expected Isabel to flee, but she didn’t. She walked around me, right up to the glass, and stared Snake Girl full in the face. Snake Girl, for her part, bent her body in a sinuous curve to put herself on a level with Ibby. “What?” she demanded. “You not get your five bucks’ worth, bitch?”

Isabel gulped, but her voice was steady when she said, “I just wanted to know your name.”

For the first time, I saw Snake Girl surprised. In that moment, she didn’t look much older than Isabel. Then her face hardened, and she said, “Snake Girl. That’s who I am now.”

“Who were you then? Before?”

“Why you want to know?”

“I just do,” Ibby said. “Please.”

It might have been the first time Snake Girl had been asked for anything since sealing herself in this cage—or being sealed in, perhaps. She was silent a moment, except for the restless writhing of her coils and the dry scrape of scales, and then she said, “Esmeralda. My brother called me Es.”

“I don’t have a brother,” Ibby said. “But my mami called me Ibby. Thank you, Es.”

“For what?”

Ibby shrugged. “Just thanks.” In an act of courage so vivid that I could not quite believe I was seeing it, Ibby put her small hand flat against the glass. “I hope you feel better someday, Es.”

Snake Girl—Esmeralda—stared at her with odd, troubled eyes for a long moment, then slowly reached out and put her hand against Ibby’s, with four inches of glass and steel wire between them.

“ Adios , Ibby,” she said. “Don’t trust the Djinn. She’s a cold one, like me.”

“I don’t trust anybody,” Ibby said. “Not really.”

Esmeralda nodded, and Ibby did as well, and then she walked back to me. I rose to my full height, and Isabel held out her hand to me. I took it.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“To leave?”

“To go to the school.” She looked at me very seriously. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

DARWIN THE IGUANAwas indeed waiting when we came out from the back of the room, which brightened Isabel’s darkened spirits a great deal. Mabel watched us with a frown. After consultation with Isabel, we decided that an iguana was too large, but that a bearded dragon was an acceptable substitute.

Ibby wasn’t interested in snakes as companions.

I called Luis, who answered on the first ring, sounding worried. “Could you bring the truck?” I asked. “We have things to carry.”

“Everybody all right?”

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “I bought Isabel a pet.”

There was an interestingly long silence, and finally he said, “Is it poisonous?”

“Not that I am aware of.”

“That’s ... surprising, somehow, from you. All right. You can explain it all to me later.”

I gave him the address, and Isabel and I spent the hour until he arrived quite happily encountering wildlife, in the gentle glow of Mabel’s benign residual Earth powers. Esmeralda was, I thought, in the best possible place; Mabel was protective of all her charges, including a girl who might be tempted all too easily to dangerous aggression. If Mabel was uncomfortable with the exhibition aspect of Esmeralda’s situation, it was clear that Es reveled in it; she enjoyed seeing the discomfort and horror on people’s faces.

Although I believed that perhaps Esmeralda had gotten a bit more for her five-dollar charge than she’d bargained for, with Isabel.

Mabel gave us all of the care instructions and a supply of food for the bearded dragon, whose name Isabel immediately decided was Spike. Spike was tame enough to ride home sitting on Isabel’s lap in the sun, dozing happily with his head resting on her palm.

Luis, however, kept casting it, and me, nervous looks. “This wasn’t just a shopping trip,” he said. Ibby had also succumbed to the warmth of the sun, and was asleep with her head tipped against my arm. She showed no sign of hearing.

“I had to show her something,” I said. “I had to convince her. It seemed the only way.”

“Scared straight?”

I considered the phrase. “Perhaps,” I said. “And perhaps I just introduced her to a future ally, in which case we will have much more to think about later on. But for now I think Ibby will go to the school without a fight.”

“Good,” he said. “I just got another call from Bearheart, and she’s not kidding about the deadline. How you want to do this? I’m not too keen on putting her in an airplane, and Marion says it’s too late to meet at the rendezvous at Area 51.”

“Driving is better,” I agreed. “Besides, I doubt they would allow Spike on the plane.”

The school that Warden Bearheart had established was in Normandie, Wyoming. That was as close to effectively the middle of nowhere as it seemed possible to be in modern-day terms. The drive was long and tiring, not the least because I could not possibly take my attention off the world around us for long; our enemies were still shadows in the night, but they stalked us, and there would be only split seconds between life and death for all of us if our vigilance failed.

Despite all that, I found that there was little I loved more than being on the Victory, with the road disappearing beneath the wheels. Wind battered me, sun broiled me, we were visited by torrential rains that drove us to shelter for almost a full day, and yet something inside of me found this vagabond life fiercely beautiful. The snow came next, falling in steady white curtains and veiling everything in thick drifts.

I suspect Luis and Isabel, in the truck, found the long trip merely very tiring.

When we finally arrived in Wyoming, I thought it a beautiful place, stark and lovely as only the most deadly things can be. Thick with snow, it seemed especially ancient, and implied that humanity was a recent, not very welcome visitor. I liked its character. It suited me well.

Outside of Cheyenne, Luis received a phone call; I saw him drop back and flash his lights, which was the signal to pull over to the side of the road. That wasn’t difficult, despite the banked snow; we saw very little in the way of traffic on this road. I braced the motorcycle on its kickstand and walked back toward Luis’s truck, watching the shadows around us for any hint of hostile action. Nothing more menacing than a rabbit was nearby—not that I would underestimate the rabbit.

Luis rolled down the truck’s window as I approached; he covered the speaker of the phone and said, “FBI.” I nodded, because that spoke volumes in the three simple letters. The FBI had been working with the Wardens to try to take down several of Pearl’s compounds across the country, but we’d heard little in the past few days about any success—or failure. Luis mostly listened, but from time to time he would look to me, or Ibby (who was again sleeping, with Spike’s plastic case on her lap to get full benefit of the heater), and I was not feeling overly confident based on what I saw in his eyes. He finally said, “Yeah, sorry about that, but we’re traveling. Nowhere near Albuquerque right now. Won’t be back for at least a few more days.” He paused to listen, and smiled grimly. “Well, you can try to trace us if you want, but you’re tracking Earth Wardens. Whatever that GPS chip shows you, we ain’t there, man. And I’m not telling you where we’re going. I’ll call you when we’re headed back. Best I can do. Okay. I’ll hit you back.”