Rachel Caine - Unseen

“He’s still bleeding,” I said.

“Survivable. And also not my problem.”

I had half expected that. “Then can you help us out of here?”

Rashid’s handsome, inhumanly sharp face relaxed into an unexpectedly charming smile. “For a price, of course.”

There were too many lives at stake to play this game. “I freed you,” I said, and held his gaze. It wasn’t easy, with those hot silver eyes boring into mine. “I freed you, and that is price enough, Rashid. Don’t push your luck.”

“Don’t push yours, friend Cassiel. One day you’ll need me more than you need me today.”

I looked around at the collapsing shell of our safety. At Shasa, somehow holding back the fire, at the last edge of her strength. At Marion, doing the same with the crumbling stone barrier. At Luis, Isabel, the fallen children. “If I need you more than this,” I said, “then I don’t think even you will be enough.”

Rashid cocked his head, as if surprised by that, and nodded. “Await me,” he said, and walked out, through the barrier of flames. Fire didn’t bother Djinn. In fact, it strengthened them. Djinn were born of inferno, long ago; that was why we’d been named devils, from time to time. But we were simpler than that.

And much, much more.

The attack against us fell into confusion, and then died away. The fires, left undirected by someone with that affinity, snuffed themselves out; they’d long ago exhausted their natural fuel. A few guttered in the ashes, but most of it was smoke, and even that quickly thinned.

Rashid came back, dragging two bodies. I didn’t know either one, but he hadn’t left much to recognize, either. He dropped them at my feet, like a cat leaving kills for its owner, and turned toward Janice.

I’d almost forgotten her. She was moving quietly toward the back of the room, where the stones had broken. No doubt she’d planned to slip out while we were distracted.

She was carrying the two boys in her arms, one on each hip.

Rashid looked at me. “Yours?” he asked.

“Mine,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Oh, there will be a charge. We’ll discuss that later. Privately.” He grinned again, and then turned his attention to Luis. “And later for you, too, Warden. ”

Luis didn’t try to speak. He just shook his head. I glanced at him, tormented; he needed healing, and quickly. Rashid wasn’t about to do it; in fact, as I turned toward him, the Djinn evaporated into flickers of darkness and was gone.

Marion waved me on. “I’ll take care of him,” she said. “Go. Get her.”

I rolled the tension out of my shoulders and walked toward Janice. She tried to move toward the exit, but I easily outmaneuvered her. Anger made me quick, and feral.

“I can still kill them,” she warned me. “Doesn’t take much. You know that.”

“It wouldn’t take much to kill you, either,” I said. “And I’d do it before I let you go. I don’t want the boys harmed, but if you do it, it’s your choice. Mine is to stop you.”

“At any cost,” she said. “Really.”

“Yes.” I felt more like a Djinn in that moment than at any point I could remember since falling into flesh. “I promise you, you won’t leave here alive unless you put those boys down, safely.”

Janice flinched. What she saw in me woke fear, and obedience. She bent and carefully laid Sanjay down, then Elijah. As she straightened, she held up her hands in surrender. “All right,” she said. “They’re down. Deal?”

“Deal,” I agreed. And on the aetheric level, I wrapped power around her rapidly beating heart. She tried to stop me, but in the end, without her glamour, she was far weaker than I’d expected. “I didn’t tell you I would let you leave alive. Only that you wouldn’t if you failed to do what I said. You bargain badly.”

And then I killed her.

It was a great deal more merciful than she deserved.

Marion was dangerously weak, but her power and mine sufficed to heal the ragged tear in Luis’s artery, at least well enough that he could move safely. The volume of blood he’d lost was another matter. We accelerated the production of it, but it would be days before he was himself again. Still, he was conscious, steady, and able to walk, if stiffly; that was a great deal better than either of us had expected.

There was a bruise forming on his chin. He rubbed it as I helped him to his feet. “Damn, girl, you didn’t have to make your point quite that hard.”

“There wasn’t time for polite argument,” I said. “And you deserved it.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I kinda did. But you’re not going to hear it again. I’m blaming it on the blood loss.”

His sense of humor was back, for which I was heartily grateful. I braced him until he could stand on his own, and tried to step away.

He didn’t let me. His hands went around my upper arms, and held me in place, close to him. “You bet our lives,” he said. “On a Djinn’s goodwill.”

“It was better than betting it on his obedience,” I said. “You tricked him into the bottle. It wasn’t his choice. This was. You have to trust Djinn, Luis. You can’t force them to be what you want them to be.”

I was speaking of Rashid, most certainly, but I was also speaking of myself. And he knew that.

“You still hate me?” he asked. “Don’t go saying you didn’t. I felt it. I know how much it hurt you, what I did. What I said, sure, but mostly what I did. I never wanted that, Cass. Never.”

“And I never wanted to leave you,” I said. “Please believe that.”

He nodded, eyes gone dark. “Did you find her?”

“Yes.”

“Did you hurt her?”

“Some,” I said, and shook my head. “Not enough. Not nearly enough.”

“You will.”

“ We will.”

“Yes.” He kissed my forehead, with so much tenderness it melted the last of the icy pain within me. “We will.”

We left the ruins behind.

The other Wardens had met us on the way to the fire road, to the east ... a ragtag, injured bunch, but they hadn’t lost anyone else. A few asked about Janice. None of us commented on her loss with more than a brief acknowledgment of it. I wondered what Marion would say, in the end. She, more than anyone else, had made a catastrophic mistake in allowing Janice such unfettered, trusted access to her most vulnerable charges. The pain of that weighed heavily on her—visibly, in fact, in the slump of her shoulders and the new lines on her face. I’d managed to retrieve her wheelchair from the ruins, but the electrical power had been destroyed, and no one had the energy left to repair it. She pushed herself along the rocky path, face welded into an emotionless mask. Alone with her thoughts, and her failures.

Miraculously, only one of the children had died: Mike, whom I’d found outside of the building. Gillian seemed inconsolable; she’d sought out Isabel, and the two girls walked together, hands clasped. I wondered how that friendship had developed. They didn’t seem at all similar, really.

Humans often confused me, though.

The Wardens traveled in unexpected silence, communicating in careful whispers and gestures as we moved down the twisting path. At regular intervals, we paused to take a head count.

Just before we reached the fire road, we stopped for the last one. Luis and I stood together, not touching but closer than we’d felt since the decision to bring Isabel here. I still didn’t know if that had been a mistake, or a necessary evil; she seemed better, despite the desperate last stand in the school. Maybe Marion’s treatments had helped, though the seizures she’d suffered still frightened me, as did the pessimistic estimate of her chance of long-term survival.

I looked around for her, but there were two other Warden children behind us. “Ibby?”