Rachel Caine - Unseen

That froze him. I had rarely seen Ashan surprised; I’d never seen him afraid, but this time, I saw a flash of real alarm blaze around him in the aetheric. He controlled it almost as swiftly and said, “Do you think she could?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed, and rolled on my side to cough. Something in my side hurt, and I spat up blood. “I need to rest.”

“Rest won’t help you,” Ashan said. “You’re broken.” He said it with a remote kind of recognition, nothing more, but when he knelt down and touched me, his hand felt warm and almost gentle. “Stay still.”

“I don’t need your help.”

He smiled, sharp as a knife. “Then I should have left you there to their mercies. My apologies, Cassiel. I didn’t realize you had the situation so well in hand.”

I stubbornly reached out to Luis through the frail connection between us, and felt it snap apart with a painful jolt. Terror bolted through me, and I sat up, heedless of my injuries. “No!” I rose up into the aetheric, flailing to regain that thread between us, but it was gone, melted away.

He was gone.

“You don’t need him anymore,” Ashan was saying, down in the human world. “No need to humble yourself further, my sister. You understand now the gravity of the situation, and what has to be done. I won’t have you tethered to a human, not with what you must do. I can be merciful.”

I stared at him with deadened eyes. “You cut the link.” He didn’t answer. “Give it back, Ashan. Now.”

“No.”

“Give it back . ”

“You’ve played human long enough, Cassiel. Enough of that. Take back your place, and do what you have to do.”

“Do it yourself!” I snarled. The anger in me had a sickening quality to it, a nightmare intensity. More than that, my human body was starting to fail, and he knew it. “Kill them yourself if you think it’s so vital!”

“I can’t,” Ashan said. “It will destroy me, and I’m the True Djinn’s connection to the Mother. It’ll poison all of them. You know that.”

I hadn’t thought of it in such terms, but he was right. Ashan risked bringing down the Djinn if he struck at the humans, and that was why he needed me to do it.

Because I was, at the last, expendable.

I felt the pressure that had held me in human flesh suddenly ease, like a door coming open in an airless room. The relief of that was intense and shattering. Flesh was a cage, a prison, and now I could abandon it, rise up to the aetheric and stay there, where I belonged. If I wished to visit this plane, I could descend like an angel at will. Or abandon it completely.

He was offering me my eternal life back, something that I had longed for, something I needed .

It was like being dropped in water after an eternity of thirst. I’d forgotten how it felt, to be so free, so pure, so utterly complete.

It was more seductive than anything I had ever known.

I kept staring at him, reading ages and distances in his silver eyes. He was old, Ashan. Very old. Very powerful. We had that in common, still. We had so much history that we had witnessed.

He thought he knew me.

But in this, this one simple thing, we were completely different, because I had breathed, wept, bled, lived. And he never had, not fully. Not even at the camp, when he pretended to be Will. I could see it in him now, that lack of empathy and understanding; it was possible he could learn, but he had not learned. Not yet.

I wanted to let go, to succumb to that soft, welcoming embrace of the eternal. I wanted to be what I had been, vast and powerful and perfect.

But part of me was always going to be here, in the dirt, in the blood, in the sweat and heaviness of a body. There was a strength and a power in that, too. One Ashan couldn’t really understand.

And it allowed me to close the door between us.

“No,” I said again, softly but very firmly. “I won’t abandon them. I can’t.”

Ashan stared. I had, again, surprised him. “Not even to save us. Not even to save the Mother .”

I was silent on that point. I pressed a shaking hand to my injured side. The pain turned glassy and sharp. Broken ribs, I imagined. The head injury had taken on a remote, unreal aspect; I still felt blood trickling down my neck and matting in my hair, but the pain had subsided to a dull, throbbing ache. I didn’t know if that was better or worse.

Ashan was considering what I’d said. He finally shook his head. “You’re not in your right mind,” he said. “You’re injured.”

It was kind of him to notice. “It doesn’t matter if I’m injured or healthy. I won’t kill them. If you want them dead, do it yourself.”

“One of us must lead,” he said. “We’ve always agreed that it would be me, Cassiel. Always. And a leader must order others into battle.”

I felt a cold wave of anger push back the simple human anguish of my injuries, and I looked up sharply at him. “Maybe it’s time for a change,” I said.

He laughed. “You won’t fight me. Look at you. You can’t stand on your own, and you refused my gift. You can hardly exist at all.”

I climbed slowly to my feet, moving with great deliberation. I didn’t wince, even when the pain bit deep; I didn’t allow so much as a flicker of hesitation. I never looked away from him as I stood, unaided, and faced him.

The wind bent the trees around us, and pitiless starlight rained down. The silence seemed to stretch for an eternity.

“All right, enough,” Ashan said, finally. “I never doubted your stubbornness. Only your ability.”

“I have ability,” I replied. “And will. And I don’t need more than that.”

“I’m not battling you. It isn’t the time, or the place.” Ashan’s pale lips twitched into a brief, very cool smile. “If you would be polite enough to wait, it’s more than likely I will be destroyed soon enough. We live in a dangerous world, Cassiel. And all of us will pay a price for survival, if we survive at all.”

“I’ve never heard you say such things.” Ashan was, after all, self-interested and a coward first, before all things except his protection of the Mother herself. That made him less of a pessimist than most.

“There has never been such a time,” he said. His tone was calm and dispassionate, and all the more powerful for it. “The disease the Wardens have brought to this world may destroy us yet; even Pearl has taken advantage of it, in her use of the Void. With Pearl seeking our destruction at the same time as the Wardens’ mortal enemies, do you really believe we can win without great loss?”

“I’m only surprised you even consider that you may be one of those losses.”

He bared his teeth in an almost genuine smile. “David has no reason to protect me.”

“Nor you him, though it hasn’t seemed to have worried him a great deal.”

David, the leader of the New Djinn, probably bothered far less about Ashan than Ashan did about David; I suspected that David’s intense and legendary love for the human Warden Joanne Baldwin had wakened both contempt and confusion within my brother, which manifested in—predictably, for Ashan—real hatred. David, from the few encounters I’d had with him, held little or none.

My attempt to show strength was spoiled as my knees weakened. My body gave me no real warning—a thick wave of dizziness, and then I felt myself falling. I put out my hands to brace myself—or my one human hand, and the misshapen lump of bronze that weighed down my left arm—but I never hit the ground. Instead, Ashan stepped forward, caught me, and eased me down to a kneeling position. I was having difficulty breathing—my lungs felt thick and wet—but I still managed to wheeze, “This is how you like me, on my knees to you,” before I began to cough, explosive mouthfuls of hot blood.