Rachel Caine - Unseen

Someone shushed me. Gayle passed me, rapidly conducting her head count. Then she came back, frowning, counting again.

Dread gathered in my stomach. I stopped her. “What is it?”

“Two short,” she said. “I didn’t see anyone leave.”

Neither had I, and it alarmed me. I’d been vigilant. Whoever had left the party had done so under cover of a veil, and a very good one.

Luis and I exchanged a look of perfect understanding, and spun away in separate directions, checking faces. When I reached the end of the line, I turned and ran back to meet him halfway. We instinctively grabbed hold of each other.

“She’s not here,” Luis panted. “Ibby’s gone. The other girl, too. Gillian.”

Gillian, who had been so distraught. But had they gone on their own, or had they been taken?

“We have to look for them,” Luis said. “They’ve only been gone fifteen minutes, since the last check. Can’t have gone far.”

Gayle grabbed him and pulled him to a halt. “Hey!” she hissed. “We’ve got refugees and wounded, and we don’t know that they’re safe yet! We can’t go tearing through the woods shouting!”

He shoved her back, but he must have known, as I did, that she was right. “Then what?” he spat back, but quietly enough. “Someone took her ! I’m not just giving up on her!”

“We may be able to track her on the aetheric,” I said quietly. “And we don’t know that she was taken, Luis. We don’t know that at all.”

I was trying to prepare him, because I didn’t believe, not for a moment, that Ibby had been spirited away against her will. The child was, if nothing else, a fighter; she’d been taken once, and she would never go quietly again. Added to that, she was in the midst of a group, and no one had noticed her, or Gillian’s, disappearance.

She’d gone willingly, wherever she had gone. And she’d taken Gillian with her.

“Well?” Gayle whispered. “We can’t wait. I have to keep them moving. We’re vulnerable out here.”

“Go,” Luis said. “We’re staying.” I nodded. We stepped out of the group, and Gayle, after a troubled frown, led the others on into the dark. It took surprisingly little time before we were lost in the dark again, just the two of us.

Luis limped over to me as I stood surveying the dark, cold woods. The school’s fires had gone out, or at least sunk to sullen ashes; it was once again full, true night, and a moonless one. “Let’s go,” he said, and limped on, back toward the trail. “We might be able to pick up their tracks where they left the group.” I didn’t move. After several steps, he stopped and looked back. “Cass?”

“Stay where you are,” I said softly. “Don’t move.”

I heard a soft, whispering laugh through the trees. “You’re good; I’ll give you that,” said a woman’s voice. I recognized it all too easily. “ Mira , he’s a tasty one. Yours?”

Luis started to turn, but Esmeralda—Snake Girl—whipped out of the shadows with blinding, reptilian speed, wrapping coils around him with crushing force. Her human half rose up, beautiful and terrifying as she hissed and bared her venomous fangs. Luis struggled, but Esmeralda was too physically strong to budge ... and when I tried to break her hold, my Earth-based powers bounced off of her without effect. In a very real sense, Esmeralda was part of that power. It had taken a Djinn’s death to seal her in the form she was in and take away much of her strength; that only served notice of how incredibly powerful and dangerous she’d once been.

I thought I could defeat her, but not with Luis held hostage in those muscular, tensing coils. She could crush him before I could save him.

“ Very tasty,” Esmeralda said, and lowered herself to look into Luis’s eyes. “You have good instincts, Djinn. This one’s no rabbit. He’s more of a tiger.”

Luis tried something—I couldn’t tell what, but it didn’t matter; at the first sign of his drawing power, Esmeralda tightened her coils, and I heard bones and muscles creaking under the stress. He gasped, and then couldn’t pull in another breath to replace the one he’d lost. The panic in his face made her smile. “Definitely a tiger,” she said. “But tigers die just like rabbits, hombre . So play nice.”

“Let him breathe,” I said. “Please.”

She glanced at me, raised her eyebrows, and tossed her dark hair back over her shoulders. “Since you ask so nice, sure.” Her smile was real, and vicious. “You want to ask me why I’m here?”

“I know why you’re here,” I said. “You’re here because Ibby told you to come here. When?”

That startled Snake Girl, and once again I saw that flash that betrayed her genuine youth. She might exude self-confidence, but beneath it she was still a girl, one who’d made tremendous mistakes. “Who says I come running when some little brat calls?”

“Because you liked her. Because you saw in her what you once were. And because she asked your name.”

“You think I’m that simple?”

“No,” I said. “I think you’re that lonely, Esmeralda. How did she send for you?”

Es slowly unwound herself from around Luis’s body, and he staggered and backed away toward me. The two of us against the monster ... but I wasn’t seeing a monster anymore.

Es settled her coils comfortably, a glistening mound of sinuous flesh, and propped her chin on one hand. Her elbow rested on the top of a coil. “She called the shop and left a message to tell me where she was. She said she liked it here, but she figured things would go wrong. She thought I could help. She said it was the least I could do.”

“Can you help?”

“Yeah, probably.” Es shrugged. She studied her fingernails, and frowned at the dirt she found beneath them. She’d been traveling a long way, I realized; her shirt—the only clothing she wore—was dirty and torn, and her previously shiny, perfect hair was rough and tangled. No doubt she could manage to hide herself effectively with what remained of her Earth powers, because otherwise her travels would have been brief, and full of general panic. But even then, she hadn’t had an easy time of it.

I was willing to bet it was the first time she’d risked the outside world in quite some while.

“The girls,” I said. “Do you know where they are?”

“Ibby and the redhead? Yeah. I know where they were going.”

“And you just let them go?” Luis said. His fists balled up, and I saw the black tattoos on his arms glitter in the starlight and start to smolder. His use of fire was purely instinctual now, not directed with anything like precision. I laid a hand on his shoulder, and felt him deliberately reach for calm. “Where are they?”

“Doing something brave,” Esmeralda said. “They knew somebody would be coming for the convoy you have on the road. They split off. They’re going to intercept them.”

Luis spat out a curse. “We already had perimeter security,” he said. “The last thing we need is two of these kids out there handling power they shouldn’t be touching!”

“Listen, man-cake, I already slithered past your so-called perimeter security, like, fifteen times.” Es sighed. “You Wardens. Es stupido. You’d do better with third-rate rent-a-cops; at least they’d have guns. Ibby was right. If you want to keep your convoy from getting trashed, you’d better get your best on it. And the kids, they’re good. Better than you.”

“Es,” I said, “the more those girls use their powers, the more broken they become. They started too young. You understand that better than anyone.”

The Snake Girl looked away, and didn’t comment. Her coils shifted restlessly, and there was a slight, instinctive buzz from her tail rattle. “They’ll be okay,” she said. “Look, you can’t protect them. They’re going to do what they’re going to do.”