Rachel Caine - Unknown

Luis and I hovered close together, and his wraith form took the hand of mine. I felt the indefinable click of power cementing into place, and then we rose together—up, far up, to dizzying heights. Beneath us, Albuquerque spread out into a map, but it glowed not with physical lights, but aetheric energy. History pooled and glowed in the older buildings, violet and green. Old battles and crimes stained the map in angry reds. But what we were looking for was easy to spot, even among the confusion . . . a spark of power like no other color showing. A Warden, moving among the streets. I saw the white flare of our own two presences as well. The attacking Warden was close, but not close enough to be within our physical line of sight. Weather Wardens did not need to be.

As we watched, the Warden reached out for power, gathered it in like a black vortex from the world around him, and flung it out in a focused, cohesive blow. It was not aimed for the house in which our physical forms stood.

It was aimed up, at the warm, stable weather systems covering the city. There was little for the Warden to work with, but all clouds contain stored energy, and there were enough to make a difference.

The Warden slammed together a storm, working in a crude, brute-force way that spoke of little training. This was odd, because in general the Weather Wardens were among the most precise; they had to be when working with such massive and volatile forces, which could so quickly spin out of even a gifted user’s control.

Luis silently noted the Warden’s location, and the two of us plummeted down through the shimmering layers of force and color, back in a dizzying fall to our bodies. I felt a second’s disorientation, and then grounded myself in my flesh and whirled to run with Luis to the back door of the small house. He hit it first, slamming it open and leaving it to swing on its hinges, and jumped down the three shallow concrete steps that led down to the packed earth and sparse grass of the backyard. The back fence was sagging chain link, and beyond it we saw a figure in a black coat, running.

Overhead, clouds swirled, gray and troubled. Lightning flashed within them, still randomly aggressive but building up to a level that could become dangerous. I noted the risk, but we had little choice; a Weather Warden could rip the house down around us with surgical precision, and there would be very little we could do to stop it. Luis’s powers were primarily those of stability, of life, of healing; there would be little overlap to cancel the more ephemeral, destructive powers of air and water.

There was a gate in the back, locked with a padlock. Luis reached out and snapped it off with barely an effort, turning the metal brittle and fragile with a pulse of power, and then we were out into the alley. It was piled with trash—boxes, cans, and plastic bags awaiting pickup by the city. The stench was horrifying, and after the first choking gasp I vowed to stop breathing until I was out of this miasma. A useless vow, of course, but it made me feel better.

Luis was a powerful runner, and he quickly pulled ahead of me as he dodged the trash and occasional stinking puddle in the alleyway. I gritted my teeth and forced my body to greater effort; my long legs ate up the distance between us, and I drew level with him just as we reached the end of the alleyway. My held breath exploded out, and I gasped in sweet, untainted air as we both scanned the street for the Warden we’d been pursuing.

He was standing about a block away, stock-still, staring upward. As I touched Luis’s arm to alert him, the Warden reached up a commanding hand to the heavens, and lightning leapt from the low, gray clouds in a furious pink-tinted rush, grounded in the Warden’s left palm, and exited from his right . . . straight at us.

“Down!” Luis shouted, and we both dove for the pavement as the energy sizzled toward us. One point was in our favor: The Warden seemed to have little fine control, though an overabundance of power. He was not able to redirect the strike toward us when we fell. Instead, it hit and charred a metal storage shed behind us, melting a wide, smoking hole in the side.

Luis slammed his open palm down on the sidewalk next to his head, eyes focused on the Warden, and a line of force ripped through the ground, rising and falling like an ocean swell, cracking pavement and shoving aside everything in its path. It hit the pavement on which the Warden stood, tossing him off his feet and rolling him onto the thin grass of someone’s yard. The grass was little to work with—thin, brittle, ill-watered—but I poured energy into it, forcing it to grow in long, rubbery runners that wound around the Warden’s thrashing legs. It wouldn’t hold him, but it would slow him down.

Luis softened the ground into mire, sinking the Warden’s legs but leaving his upper body supported to prevent smothering. In seconds, the Warden was mired as his feet and lower legs sank into the soft mud, and were trapped as it hardened.

Luis offered his hand to help me to my feet, and we walked across the street to where the Weather Warden lay panting and helpless, locked into the earth.

He could not have been more than twelve years old.

Luis and I exchanged looks; I do not know what mine said, but his was appalled. Just a boy, it said.

A boy who’d tried twice to kill us. I was less appalled, and more interested in why.

I sank down to a crouch beside the boy, and examined him more closely. He was typical for the age, I supposed: a defiant glare, a childish, undefined face. Black eyes, black hair, coloring much like Luis’s. “Your name,” I said. “Give it.”

He responded in Spanish. It was easy enough to guess the content of it, especially when accompanied by an aggressive hand gesture. I felt him gathering power again from the clouds overhead.

I reached out, thumped a forefinger against his forehead, and disrupted his concentration. The power fell into chaos, and the child blinked at me, startled.

“Name,” I said again.

“Candelario,” he said. “ Puta. ”

I raised my eyebrows. “Candelario,” I repeated. “I assume that other was not your last name.”

Luis said, from behind me, “Not unless his name translates to whore. ”

I thumped the child-Warden’s head again. “Stop. I can kill you if I wish, you know that?”

His concentration faded, and I felt him let the powers he’d been gathering up fade along with it. “So?” he challenged me. “You kill me, it don’t matter. You’re messing with her. ”

I knew exactly who he meant. Pearl. My sister Djinn, once. My enemy. My conquest, or so I’d thought.

Pearl, insane and predatory, who had wiped an entire race of protohumans from the face of the planet once, in her jealousy and madness. She should by all rights have been destroyed, long gone from this Earth; I had seen to that. But instead she lived on, drawing strength and power in steady, parasitic increments from these hijacked Wardens.

These children.

Candelario was like Pammy—a victim, although it was likely he didn’t know this, and would never accept it. He almost certainly believed that he was chosen, special, a trusted soldier in a war against evil. Pearl had convinced many. It was a signal weakness of the human condition, to be so easily swayed by those who wished them ill. To be rotted from within by their own belief in their virtue.

“Where is she?” I asked the boy. He spat at me. “She is using you. She is not your protector.”

“You don’t know anything!” he shot back. “Let me go or she’ll kill you all!”

“I doubt that,” I said. “Or she’d already have done so.”

Something shifted inside the boy—a change so basic that it seemed that the bones inside of him moved along with it. His face seemed to grow sharper, more adult. More like . . . someone else.