Rachel Caine - Unseen

I had killed her, or at least I’d believed it was so. And it had been the only possible response to her crimes, which had driven Mother Earth mad with pain. I’d destroyed her, and I’d thought I eradicated all traces of her ... but some part of her survived, tenacious as the roots of a weed. It had taken her aeons to gather her strength, but finally she was here, present, physical again.

And deadly. So very, very deadly.

“These,” she said, and placed a kiss on Zedala’s braided hair, “are part of me now. They believe implicitly in my cause. They understand how dangerous the Djinn and the Wardens are. They are my warriors. My avatars. My children. And when the end comes—and it will come for you, Cassiel, for all of you—these will survive with me. Out of the ashes, a new Mother will rise.”

My mouth went dry. “You.”

“Yes. Of course. Who is more deserving?”

Pearl’s ambition was greater, and more insane, than I’d ever dreamed. Not annihilation, as grandiose as that might be; she still planned to destroy the Wardens, the humans, the Djinn, and indeed all life, but she planned more . She planned to kill her own Mother, the life spirit of our planet, and she planned to become that life spirit.

A corrupted, damaged, evil spirit. I couldn’t imagine what would spring forth from her, as she breathed her power over the dead land—whatever it would be, it would be nightmarish, twisted, and a perverse mockery of all the beauty and diversity of this world.

The Djinn didn’t know this. Couldn’t imagine it. If they had, if they’d been able to comprehend the danger, they would have bonded together to destroy her regardless of costs.

Even Ashan would have set aside his personal ambitions for that.

Now I had a new mission—not killing Pearl, although that was still my greatest goal. No, I had to get this knowledge out, to the Djinn, to the Wardens, to anyone who could take up arms and defend against her. I had no choice now but to survive, and run.

If I could.

“I won’t insult you, or myself, by asking you to join me,” Pearl continued. “I know you won’t. There is a core of stubbornness in you, Cassiel, that does you no particular credit. I suppose some would see it as heroism; I see it as arrogance. You have no cause for that, dear sister. You’re not nearly what you once were.”

“Who is?”

She laughed, a golden bell of sound that sounded so lovely it was easy to forget the rotten darkness in her core. Pearl was seductive; that was why this camp existed, why these children had been so badly and fatally bent to her will. That was why, even now, the Djinn hesitated to move against her—that, and their own self-interested instincts.

Even I felt her attraction, and had ever since I’d stepped into this camp. Here, she put forth her charm, her glamour ... and everyone responded. Even, I suspected, the human FBI had succumbed, outside the gates. Perhaps she’d merely made them decide to abandon their posts. I wouldn’t have put it past her abilities, not anymore.

Merle had resisted. Look what that had earned him.

I had to get free. Somehow, insane as it was, I had to find a way out of this.

“She’s plotting,” the boy Earth Warden said—Pearl’s personal executioner, as Zedala had become her personal torturer. “She’s going to try something.”

“Not yet,” Pearl said serenely. “She’s injured, and she’s alone. She’ll bide her time. Cassiel is good at that. But I, my sister, am far, far better practiced.” She bent over me, and brushed her smooth, damp, cool lips against mine. I resisted the urge to bite, only because it wouldn’t help—or even hurt her. The touch gave me the truth of her human form—it was still artificial, not genuinely human. She didn’t yet have the real power to create a body down to the cellular level. This was a shell only, lovely as it was. “If you’re counting on your Warden lover, I wouldn’t,” she continued, still bent close to me. Her eyes were black, lid to lid, and shimmering like oil. “He won’t leave the child’s side, not to rescue you. And if he does, I’ll have you all, won’t I? Foster father ... foster mother ... and child.”

“You’ll never have Isabel,” I said. “She’s free now.”

“You think so?” Pearl’s smile was nauseating, seen at close range—not in the least human. She straightened, and glanced at Zedala.

“You’d better kill me,” I said, and meant it. “If you don’t, I promise you, I’ll destroy you. At whatever cost.”

“You can’t do anything without power,” Pearl said, “but I was planning to kill you, sister. No reason to waste you, though. My children need practice.”

She nodded to the small black-haired boy, the one from whom I sensed no identifiable kind of Warden power at all ... and he reached out a single finger, and touched me just as Zedala yanked her hand away from my forehead.

Void.

His power was its absence. He lived and breathed, but what filled him was cut off from the roots of life. He existed without connection, and as his touch bridged the gulf between us, I felt the organic parts of me being shredded into rags, lost in a vortex of hungry emptiness. I couldn’t even scream. There were no human sounds for the agony of cells imploding into absolute nothingness.

It would be slow, and I would feel every second.

I was going to die, in a way more painful than I’d ever imagined, and more thorough than any other kind of death. It would devour the very Djinn nature of me. It would erase me.

And there was nothing at all I could do to stop it.

THE DJINN PART OF ME,the Cassiel part, was no more than a whisper, but it did not want to die. I felt it flow through me in a silvery thread, coiling in the power that I could now reach, since Zedala had withdrawn her block—but the power couldn’t survive against the black-hole pull of the Void.

The organics of my body were coming apart. Instead, the power flowed into my inert metal hand.

I was no longer consciously directing the power; it was driven by Djinn instinct, by the primal need to survive. My metal hand malformed, changed, and re-formed into a sharp-edged metal blade, which sliced through the bonds holding my left hand and foot to the bed where I lay.

And then my Djinn self, my cold and true self, slashed the blade through the air toward Pearl’s lovely shell. It sliced through her neck, and her body collapsed in a nauseatingly empty sack of meat—lacking organs, bones, muscles. Just a shell of flesh, and the power inside escaped.

The mocking echo of her laughter remained.

I had no choice of what to do next. I slashed across my body, and cut off the finger of the Void conduit where it pressed against my skull.

The boy screamed and fell backward. He sounded like a wounded child, not a vicious empty thing , and for a fatal second, I hesitated with my blade ready for a killing stroke.

That gave Zedala time to lunge forward and grab my arm. A burst of star-hot power blew through the metal, heating it into dripping slag. I threw her off, but it was too late; the moment was gone. The Void child still cowered in shock, but the others were on me.

The Earth Warden boy slapped his hands flat on my chest, and drove me down, down through the metal frame of the bed, down into the wooden floor of the room, down into the hard-packed dirt beneath.

Down into the rock.

I was blind here, but I had power again, and softened the rock and earth to loose, slippery sand, taking away his momentum. We struggled together, lost in the earth. He tried to use his control to shatter my bones, but here, in my element, he couldn’t find an easily exploited vulnerability.