Rachel Caine - Unseen

I was weak from the Void attack, and still suffering from the beating I’d taken from Zedala. He finally focused on that point of weakness, and I felt his power pushing at it, trying to shatter the cracked skull like an eggshell. If he drove bone into my fragile human brain, I’d be lost. I had to fight, but my strength wasn’t unlimited, and in the heat of battle I couldn’t draw on Luis, not at this distance.

I was losing.

Something flowed past me, like a shark through water, and slammed bodily into the boy. On the aetheric I saw it as a hard human-shaped light in cool gray, overlaid with the elusive watery spectrum of a Djinn. The boy was fighting it, whatever it was, but for the moment, at least, I was free.

I used the last of my strength to claw myself up at an angle, away from the building where I’d been held, and found the soft, turned earth of the field. I broke the surface and crawled toward the fence. My skull was on fire, and I felt cold and sluggish. I’d bled too much, both in plasma and in power. I had very little left. My mutilated left hand, now just a misshapen, melted blog of metal, made it difficult to claw forward.

Someone tried to grab me and pull me backward. Zedala, who’d chased me. I used the blunt, twisted club that had once been my metallic hand and slammed it into her, and she went down with a scream.

I touched the cold metal of the fence, but I didn’t have enough power left to do more than bend the links.

Trapped.

I felt that human/Djinn presence cutting through the soil beneath me, and it erupted in a spray of dirt like a geyser.

Will. It was Will.

He grabbed my shoulders even as the fence blew outward in a spray of melted metal behind me, and dragged me through to the other side. Zedala had rolled to her feet, feral and furious; the blood on her face only added to the savagery of her expression. As she lunged at Will, he drew back his hand, gathered power, and threw it in a tight, silver ball at her chest. It hit her and slammed her backward to the soft earth. She slapped at it, trying to throw it off, but it ate its relentless, merciless way through her body until she lay still and silent in the dirt.

Will’s face was smeared with dirt and mud, and now I recognized his eyes, those gray, emotionless eyes. I recognized the implacable rage with which he’d just killed the girl.

He turned it on the boy Earth Warden, who lunged up from the dirt and took a tearing grip on my hair. I didn’t see what happened to the boy, but I felt it. I saw the blood explosion on the aetheric, and saw his violent streaming colors go pale, then black.

“Stop,” I whispered. “Ashan, stop. ”

“No,” he said, and kept dragging me. “They have to be destroyed. All of these abominations must be ended !”

“No!”

He dropped the human disguise of Will, abandoning the warmth, the sweetness, the lovely and seductive illusion. What was left was the prince of the Old Djinn, a cold silver flame of fury barely contained by a human-shaped shell. My brother. My king.

He was also a cruel, conscienceless murderer, and now he turned that focus to the boy containing the Void, who was coming after the two of us with a fanatic’s disregard for personal safety.

The boy could kill a Djinn. Easily.

“Don’t touch him!” I screamed to Ashan. “He’ll destroy you!”

Ashan, who’d been reaching out to rip the boy in half, spun away at the last moment. The boy’s grasping hand brushed Ashan’s side, and I saw a black gouge appear in his body. He twisted away, and the shout of pain vibrated on the aetheric, and snapped branches from trees in the physical world. Ashan stumbled back and, with a fluid motion, caught one of the large, heavy falling branches. He let its momentum spin him, threw physical force into it, and slammed the branch home into the boy’s body.

I heard the wet snap of breaking bones, and tried to roll to my knees. I managed that much, but my balance failed as I tried to climb to my feet. I grabbed the trunk of a tree and watched as the boy—crippled now—clawed his way on, still determined to destroy Ashan no matter the cost.

“Stop!” I screamed again, as Ashan lifted the branch for a killing blow. “Ashan, no , not this way—”

He didn’t listen. I turned my head at the last moment, but that didn’t block out the sound of the impact of the branch, or the boy’s choked last gasp. “No,” I whispered, but there was no strength in it, or in me.

Ashan grabbed me and lifted me in his arms, and I saw the last of Pearl’s chosen children, the tiny Weather girl, summoning power in both hands with a dexterity that was chillingly beyond her years. Beyond her, the camp was massing—people I had known, and liked, armed with whatever they could find. They would rush us, kill us if they could. The fury was like fire in the wind.

Ashan looked down at me, and for a second I saw Will, the man I had felt such kinship to—and then Will was gone and only Ashan remained.

“Hold on,” he said, and stepped into the aetheric just as lightning exploded where we had been, burning a crater twenty feet deep in the smoking earth.

Make no mistake: I do not like Ashan. Even among the Djinn, Ashan inspired fear, not love; his arrogance—and his power—were legendary. He had, however unwillingly, bowed his head to one Djinn only, and when Jonathan had been destroyed, he owed loyalty to no one. He’d claimed by right to rule, after, and I had never contested that, though I could have. So could Venna, the oldest of my siblings, but we were both content to be what we were, and allow him his power.

That didn’t mean we liked him. It meant we respected him.

In this moment, though, weak and fragile as I felt, overwhelmed as I was, I loved him and hated him with an intensity that made me want to weep bitter human tears. I clung to him as we passed in a mist through the aetheric, speeding away from the camp. Most Djinn couldn’t bring humans through the aetheric, not intact, but Ashan could, when he wished.

Which was seldom, if ever.

We stepped out into night ... a thick, full, velvety darkness, somewhere far enough from human civilization that no hint of lights glimmered, save the stars. The wind hissed through the pines, and Ashan bent to lay me down on a bed of fallen leaves. Starlight painted him in stark contrasts—his eyes had turned full silver now, his skin almost the pale color of mine. We looked like kindred now, except that his beauty was Djinn to the core, remote and hard, and mine was soft and frail and broken.

“You pretended to be human. To be Will,” I said. “Why?”

“Like you, I wanted to see,” he said. “I wanted to know what she was doing, and why. I couldn’t depend on you, Cassiel. I had thought I could, but you began to care too much for them. You aren’t as you were when I sent you here.”

“Neither are you,” I said. “You feigned a human far too well not to have liked being in his skin. I thought we both despised them.”

“We both did,” he said. “But perhaps you’re right. We’ve both changed.”

“You knew who I was all along. You recognized me.”

“No,” he said, and turned away to stare up at the stars. “I didn’t know, not at first. I felt ... something. But you disguised yourself well, just as I had. We both fooled her, for a time—and we fooled each other as well.”

“We won’t fool her again.”

“No, not again. She’s beyond playing coy now.” He turned back to me. “What did she tell you?”

“What we knew: She plans to destroy us. All living things. Even the Mother.” I pulled in a painful breath, and tasted blood in the back of my mouth. “She plans to take her place.”