Rachel Caine: Undone

To Jean Stuntz, my dear and patient friend,

who sat with me in a humid bar

in Oklahoma City and helped me figure out

what made Outcast Season a halfway good idea.

You, my dear, rock.

To Cynthia Clarke, for services above and beyond!

My friends P. N. Elrod, Sharon Sams-Adams, and the Time Turners for extraordinary support.

To beta readers Brooke Carleton, Sonya Volkhardt, and Jesse L. Cairns for masterful commentary and guidance.

To the Victory dealership in Arlington, Texas, and the Smart Car dealership in Dallas.

IT ONLY TOOKone word to destroy me, after millennia of living in peace and security, and the word was No.

I knew as I made my answer that it would not come without consequences. Had I known just how vast those would be, and how far they would ripple, I doubt I would have had the courage.

Humans say that ignorance is bliss, and perhaps that’s true, even for Djinn.

For a moment, it seemed that my act of outright defiance brought with it no reaction. Ashan, the Djinn facing me—one of the oldest of the Old Ones—was a swirl of brilliance without form, a being without the trap of flesh, just as I was.

I thought that perhaps, this time, my defiance might go unpunished, and then I felt a ripple in the aetheric currents surrounding me. The aetheric was the world in which I lived, a plane of light and energy, heat and fire. It had little in common with the lower planes, the ones tied to dirt and death. I lived in heaven, and a ripple in heaven was ominous indeed.

I watched as Ashan—brother, father, god of my existence, newly made Conduit from Mother Earth to the Djinn—took on form and substance. It required power to do such a thing here, in this place; I had not bothered with form in so many turnings of the world I didn’t think I could even remember the shapes, and even if I did, I had not the raw force necessary to manipulate things here.

Ashan’s aetheric form became ominously solid and dark, and I felt the ripples grow stronger, rocking the reality around us. The bands and currents of colors, pastel and perfect, took on sharp edges. Rainbows bled and wept.

“No?” He repeated it from a mouth that was almost human form, giving me the chance to change my answer. To save myself.

“I cannot. No.”

This time, the rainbow burned. Another ripple hit me in a wave, hot and thick with menace, and I felt a strange pulling sensation that quickly became . . . pain, as much as one could feel pain without physical form. I was in danger; every instinct screamed it.

“Last chance,” Ashan said. “Cassiel, don’t test me. I can’t allow your rebellion. Not now. Do as you are ordered.”

What I was doing wasn’t rebellion, but he couldn’t see this so clearly, and I could not explain. I had never been known for my reasonable nature, and I never explained myself.

I stayed silent.

“Then you chose this. Remember that.”

I felt the tugging inside of me turn white-hot, searing in its intensity. I felt the exact moment when Ashan ripped away my connection to the aetheric, to him, to the mother of us all, the Earth.

Beyond that, the vast and unknowable God.

I felt the exact moment when I died as a Djinn, and fell, screaming. I crashed through all the planes of heaven, shattering each in turn, a bright white star burning as it fell. I took on form.

Solidity.

Pain.

I landed facedown in the mud and dirt.

Destroyed.

“Cassiel.”

The voice was a whisper, but it burned in my ears like acid. The slightest sound—even my own name—was agonizing. I had never been hurt before, and I was drowning in the sensations, the agony of it. The humiliating fury of helplessness, of being trapped in flesh . Of being mutilated and emptied and cut off.

The worst of it was that it was my own fault.

I rolled away from the sound of my name being called again, and from the gentle brushing touch of a hand. My fresh-born nerves screamed, outraged by every hint of pressure. I couldn’t separate my thoughts from the overwhelming, crushing burden of senses I had never bothered to master before, because I had never bothered to be human.

“Cassiel, it’s David. Can you hear me?”

David. Yes. David was Djinn, a Conduit like Ashan. He would understand. He could help. He could sense the echoing emptiness inside me where my power had once been; he could tell how badly damaged I was. He could make it stop .

“Help,” I whispered, or tried to. I don’t know if he understood me. The sounds that came from my mouth sounded less like words than the raw whimpering of a wounded animal. There was no elegance to my plea, no eloquence. I had no grace. I was trapped in a prison of heavy, uncooperative flesh, and everything hurt. I tried to get away from the pain, but no matter how I writhed, changing my skin, changing inside it, the burn was constant. The agony of being alone never went away.

His voice grew louder, more urgent. “Cassiel. Listen to me. You’re shifting too fast. You have to choose a shape and hold on to it, do you understand? You’re killing yourself. Stop shifting!”

I didn’t understand. It was all flesh, and nothing felt right, nothing felt true. I kept blindly changing my form—the shape of my face, the length of my legs and arms, my height, my weight. I abandoned human templates altogether for something smaller, something catlike, but that felt wrong, too, worse than wrong, and I clawed back into human flesh and fell on my side again, panting and exhausted. I blinked my eyes—oh, so limited, these eyes, seeing such a narrow spectrum of light—and saw that my exhausted body had settled into a female form, long-limbed, pale. The hair that straggled across my field of vision was very pale, as well—white, with a touch of ice blue. It matched the devastating cold inside of me.

I was shivering. Frozen. I had never known what it was really like, nerves rasping on each other in such a way. It felt horrific and humiliating, being so exposed, so raw and badly formed.

Something warm fell across my naked body, and I rolled into it, groaning uncontrollably. I felt myself lifted up and embraced in David’s arms, weak as a newborn child.

I fixed my gaze on his face. So different. He was not the bright, burning flame I had known from the aetheric; here, he was in the form of a human man. Still, there was a touch of the Djinn in the hot coppery color of his eyes, and in the gleam of his skin.

David had always loved abiding among mortals, while I’d avoided them, shunned the idea of taking flesh at all. We had never been friends, even so much as Djinn might be; allies from time to time, when the occasion suited. Never more. Ironic we should find ourselves at the same destination, by such different roads.

“Cassiel,” he said again, and brushed hair back from my face as he braced my head against his chest. “What happened to you?” He sounded genuinely concerned, although I was none of his responsibility—but David had always had a touch of the human about him, because of his origins. False-born, a Djinn only in power and not in lineage, bred from humans and brought up to the Djinn only through the catastrophic deaths of thousands. They called themselves the New Djinn. Not like Ashan. Not like me. We were the True Djinn, born of the power of the Earth. These others were merely late-coming pretenders.

“Can you hear me? What happened ?”

Even had I been in command of my new lips, lungs, and tongue, I couldn’t confess what had brought me down to this terrible state, not without revealing more than even David should know.