Rachel Caine: Heat Stroke

Get back , David said, and gently tried to push me away. I clung harder. Jo, you have to get back now. I need to do this alone .

“No.” I didn’t even know if I could do it, or how stupid an idea it was, but I formed flesh. I was surprised it was even possible here, in this place, but I took on weight and dimension and artificial life. No air to breathe, but that didn’t matter, not for a short while; I could manufacture an atmosphere good enough to sustain me for a while, out of the same primal material I’d just formed my body from.

A hot sirocco of wind whipped through the nothingness, blowing back my straight black hair, whispering close over my skin.

Hands closed around my shoulders from behind. They slid up my neck and combed hair away from my skin, and I shivered at the kiss that burned right at the juncture of my neck and collarbone.

“ Jo .” His whisper was as rough and unsteady as his fingers. “I thought I’d never see you again. Not in any way that mattered.”

I turned. David was back to my David, hair slightly too long for neatness, warm copper eyes, kissable lips. I wrapped my arms around him and held him. There was too much tension in his body, but it felt right . At last. The coldlight was a continuous white-noise hiss of blue against the bubble I’d formed around us, but it didn’t matter just now. I wanted to stay in his embrace forever.

And I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. Too high a price for that.

He kissed me, gentle and slow and warm, and the taste of him nearly made me weep. He cupped my face in both hands, and as he pulled back his eyes were luminous with peace.

“It’s okay,” he said, and drew his thumbs over my lips in a caress that was as intimate as anything I’d ever felt. “Jonathan knew. One of us has to go. I’ve had my time.”

“Wrong,” I corrected him, and put all my strength into a shove that sent him stumbling backwards. “I’m giving you mine.”

I dove straight at the whirlpool.

David’s scream followed me in, but it was too late, too late to even wonder what the hell I was thinking, because I felt the darkness on the other side of the rift and with it, a visceral surge of panic, and knew this was going to hurt, badly .

And then I hit the paper-thin cut between the worlds, and stuck there with an impact that shredded me back into mist. Pieces of me began to be sucked away, through that rift, and I had to fight to hold on against the intense black pressure.

Where the pieces of me went through, the rift sealed.

Oh God.

I understood now. I understood why Jonathan had been so reluctant to send David to do this, because he’d known what had to be done. The only thing that could seal this thing was my blood, or David’s, because we’d birthed this thing, like some distorted child.

I let go. Let go of everything—all the fear, the pain, the anguish, the guilt. I felt the cord back to David break with a high, thin singing sound like a snapped wire, and his presence vanished from my mind.

I was alone.

I let go and let the Void have me, as much of me as it needed to seal the hole between our two worlds. It was like bleeding to death—a slow, cold unraveling, a sense of being lost one drop at a time. There was pain, but the pain didn’t matter.

What mattered was that I sensed the rift drawing together, healing.

The flow of coldlight at the rift slowed, stopped. It drifted in a sparkling blue weightless dance around me.

What was left of me.

I felt the rift seal shut with a kind of vacuum seal thump, and instantly the coldlight glowed white-hot around me, bright and brilliant as a million stars exploding, and faded off into darkness. It couldn’t exist here without the rift, just as I couldn’t exist without the umbilical to David.

There was not much left of me. Just enough to remember who I was, what I’d been. Faces in my memory, but I didn’t know them anymore. It was all falling away.

Falling like snow into the dark.

The snow turned to light. Sunlight. I was standing in a meadow full of grass that was too green to be real, and there was a woman walking toward me through flame red flowers. Her white gown shifted in a wind that didn’t stir the fields.

White hair like a cloud. Eyes the color of deepest amethyst. Beautiful and cool and peaceful.

“Sara.” I didn’t know where the name came from. “I’m dead, you know.”

She reached out toward me. “No,” she said, and caressed the satin of my hair. “No, my sweet. Not yet. There is a part of you that remains. Humans are like that.”

I remembered a coal black hunger, ice-edged shadows. “Ifrit?” I whispered.

“You would be,” she said. “But there is another way. And perhaps we owe that to you.”

“We?”

When she pulled back, I saw she wasn’t alone. There was a man with her, big and muscular, running a little to fat, with a Scandinavian-blond unruly shock of hair and eyes as blue as a Caribbean sea. I knew him, and didn’t know him. He smiled at me, very slightly, and I saw pain in it. And courage.

“I’ve lived too long,” Sara said. “I’ve stolen life from others. Patrick betrayed you to buy it for me. There is no honor in what I’ve become.”

I didn’t understand. The wind that rippled Sara’s dress touched my face, combed cool fingers through my hair. It was gentle and beautiful and peaceful, and I knew it wanted to take me with it, into the dark.

“I did this for Patrick. I started the rift. What David did for you only accelerated it. Do you understand?”

I didn’t. It was all falling away, sliding into the shadows.

“We do the worst things for love,” she whispered. “So Jonathan was created. So David created you. So I created Patrick. And none of us should exist. The balance is gone.”

If balance was required, I was restoring it. Going away…

“Stay,” she said, and touched my face with those cool silver lips. “There is a gift only Patrick and I can give. One last gift, in return for what you have given us.”

Words drifted up from the darkness inside of me. “What have I given you?”

Her smile was beautiful, and sad, and perfect. “A way to be together. And now I offer you the same, my love. Take it.”

She opened her arms. I looked at Patrick. There were tears shining in his eyes, and he backed away. Afraid, after all.

I stepped into Sara’s embrace.

“No,” Patrick gulped, and turned back. He flung his arms around us both and hid his face in the pale lace of Sara’s hair. “Both of us or nothing. As it always was.”

Something wrapped hot around me, like clinging tar, and I thought, I should have said no , but then the pain dug deep and I screamed.

And screamed and screamed and screamed, until the universe exploded in a silent dark pop like a shattering of glass.

It didn’t feel like a gift.

It felt like a betrayal.

When I woke up, someone was holding me in strong, warm arms. I tried to burrow closer and felt the embrace tighten. “Jo?”

I lifted my head and saw that it was David. We were sitting against a wall in a hallway, next to a giant brushed-steel vault door. I felt… empty. Clean, but empty. Exhausted and powerless.

I felt wrong .

He was stroking my hair gently, letting it curl around his fingers. Crap . Curly hair again. Something hadn’t gone right…

“Easy,” he murmured when I tried to get up. He rose to his feet, still holding me, and set me down on shaky legs. “Oh God, Jo. My God. You’re alive.”

Sara. Patrick . It had seemed so real, hurt so much… I drew breath. It felt… wrong. Clumsy. Mechanical. “Maybe.” Memory slammed back with a vengeance and flooded me with alarm. I turned to look inside the vault.