Rachel Caine - Unseen

Suddenly, Elijah was a shield.

“Let go,” I said to Ibby. She shook her head. “Ibby, let go and go to your uncle. I don’t want you to get hurt.” This was, in many ways, more dangerous than anything else that might have happened ... that the traitor was locked in here with us, in this desperate last stand, ready to strike at will. I wondered why she hadn’t done it already, but I thought I knew. She didn’t dare strike until she could ensure that she would take out all of the remaining Wardens in one blow—Marion, Luis, Shasa, and now me, to complicate her problem. Janice’s mission must have been to gather the most powerful children and bring them out alive to Pearl.

She’d gathered them. Now she simply had to kill the rest of us to ensure her victory.

I peeled Isabel’s arms away from my neck and pointed her at Luis. “Stay with him,” I said, and she backed toward him, never taking her wide dark eyes from Janice.

Janice cocked her head slightly to one side, and I saw the recognition in her eyes. She knew that I knew, and that Ibby did as well. Her charade was ending.

“Well,” she said, “it was nice while it lasted.” She extended one hand toward Luis, and the bullet wound in his thigh suddenly broke open, pumping bright red blood in a fountain. Ibby stopped, shocked, and backed away from the spatter in instinctive horror. Luis let out a choked cry and grabbed for his thigh, squeezing with both hands; Marion spun her chair toward him and slapped her hand atop his. She was splitting her concentration dangerously, and as I’d noted when I’d left the school, she’d already been tired. She had to pull away as a fresh attack pounded against the stone walls she’d thrown up, and the bleeding increased again as Luis sank down to a sitting position on the floor. Ibby ran to him and put her hand on his shoulder.

“No, no, Isabel, you’re in no shape to do that kind of work,” Janice said, and I felt a subtle, wrong shift in the energy coming from her. The edges of it brushed me, and I felt sick, wrong, twisted ... but it wasn’t directed at me.

It was directed at Isabel, who screamed and dropped to the floor beside her uncle, writhing in the grip of one of those seizures I’d witnessed before.

Janice had induced it. Deliberately.

I snarled and turned on her, every instinct—Djinn and human—screaming inside me to destroy the woman ... but I couldn’t. She had Elijah’s neck in her hands, and the boy was asleep. He couldn’t fight back.

“I’ll flay you,” I said, with an eerie control that I didn’t feel. “I’ll flay you and feed your skin to the pigs while you watch. Stop hurting them. ”

“Back off, and I will,” Janice snapped. “Ah, ah, Marion, stay where you are. Don’t make me start thinning the herd.”

Marion’s face was frightening to behold, but she stopped her slow advance toward Janice. I could feel her gathering up her power, getting ready to strike, but like me, she was at a severe disadvantage.

As long as Janice had the children gathered around her, we were limited in what we could do.

Shasa’s concentration broke as the situation in the room finally dawned on her. She opened her eyes, startled, and glanced at Janice with a frown. “What the hell is going on?” It was only at that moment that I realized how much Shasa’s power had kept the ravening inferno at bay around us; smoke poured through tiny cracks in the stone, and the rock itself snapped and hissed under the pressure of the heat. Marion’s barrier couldn’t exist for long without Fire Warden assistance. “Janice? What’s she talking about?”

“Nothing,” Janice said in that warm, soothing voice that had lulled so many into trust. “She’s a traitor, Shas. She’s one of them. She left us to give them intel, and now she’s back to finish the job. She brought this on us, and we let her inside.”

That held just enough truth to distract Shasa for another critical moment ... and then Janice extended her hand and tapped the Fire Warden on the shoulder. Just a light tap, but I felt the cold breath of power settle around the girl.

Shasa collapsed as her eyes rolled back in her skull. She looked fragile, suddenly, like a broken doll. Without her power supporting it, the defenses around us began to snap and shift under the pressure of the forces outside.

Pearl’s forces.

My lips peeled back from my teeth. I glanced over at Luis, who looked pale and shaking, but he’d stripped off his belt and was twisting it around his thigh, attempting to slow the loss of blood. Isabel had collapsed against his side, trembling and writhing in the grip of the seizures, and the sight of that fueled my rage to dangerous levels.

I turned to Janice. “Put Elijah down,” I said. “Now. Or I destroy you. You’re no match for me.”

“Oh, you’re right about that,” she replied, and gave me her sweet little grandmotherly smile. I almost preferred Zedala’s fanaticism, in that moment; Janice’s violence and cruelty were coldly calculated, and in a sense that made it all the more horrible. “But then again, I’ve got some advantages, don’t I? If you want the bleeding to stop, and Ibby to survive this latest attack ... you’ll stand aside. I can call off the attack. We can arrange a peaceful exchange—these children for your lives.”

“And yours.”

“Well”—she shrugged—“naturally someone has to go with them to take care of them. And I’m one of the best.” The smile turned hard around the edges. “Even Marion said so.”

Marion remained silent, but her expression could have shattered stone. I’d never seen a human look so implacably angry. That was the kind of rage that Wardens tried to avoid—the kind that drove them to extremes even a Djinn couldn’t comprehend. This offended her in every way possible, from her compassion for the children to the massive and unthinkable betrayal of trust Janice had perpetrated.

“I think Cassiel is wrong,” she finally said, very softly. “Flaying is too good for you, Janice. I’ll have to think of something ... better.”

Janice lost her smile altogether. “The New Mother is going to kill you all, in ways worse than you’d ever think of trying on me,” she said. I realized, with a grim, bleak amusement, that Pearl had given herself a title. How very like her. “Don’t be stupid. Let me have the kids. Let me walk away. I can guarantee you’ll live to lick your wounds.”

“She’s lying,” Marion said. “She doesn’t intend to let any of us out of here alive.”

“And I don’t intend to allow her to live, either,” I said. “Stalemate.”

Janice laughed. “Is it getting hotter in here, or is that just me?”

It was. The stone around us was cracking, friable under the unrelenting pressure of the fire. Smoke poured thinly through the cracks, adding to the oppressive heaviness of the air. I realized I was breathing more and more deeply. The fire outside was turning the air toxic, and without a Weather Warden to cleanse it, we had very little time left, even if the fire didn’t reach us first.

Janice was no match for me, not in strength; that was why she had Elijah, and the other children. Human shields. Any of us would hesitate to use full power with them in the way; it would be hideously easy for her, as an Earth Warden, to kill them before we could act.

“If I’d been able to keep Gillian, I could have solved this little problem,” Janice said. “You can blame that one on Ben. He lost his backbone.”

Ben. Weather Warden. I suddenly understood who it was who’d ambushed me with the mudslide on my way back to the school, before ... It was Ben; it had to be. Janice had recruited him, or he’d been placed, like her, in the heart of the school ... but he’d had a change of heart. Probably, I thought, because of the children. I’d seen him with them, and he’d seemed genuinely moved by their plight. I’d been an easy, justifiable enemy for him.