Rachel Caine: Total Eclipse

“No, it won’t,” she said, and reached out to take my hand, and Lewis’s. “Hold on. I will take you.”

“Wait!” I said, “Imara has a barrier in place! You can’t get through it!”

“She knows we’re coming,” Venna said. “She doesn’t like it, but she knows. It’s her choice whether she destroys us to protect her own existence.”

“You’re gambling on her allowing us entrance.”

Venna smiled. “It’s not a gamble. She’s your daughter.”

She seized our hands, and I had just enough time to anticipate how bad this was going to be. . . .

And then it was much, much worse.

Venna dragged us through the aetheric planes, and my God it hurt, like being towed through coils of barbed wire. It seemed that the aetheric itself was burning, aflame with all the growing and intensifying fury and determination, pain and panic. More and more people were realizing that there was no escape, and the pressure was building to fatal levels.

Somehow, we made it through to the other end without losing our lives. Even with Venna, traveling through the aetheric was more of a crap shoot than I liked, and Lewis in particular seemed badly affected by the whole trip. He staggered and sat down, hard, on dry red dirt.

We were in canyons of sandstone, as crimson as the surface of Mars, and overhead the sky was a cool, featureless, unnatural blue.

We were inside Imara’s bubble. As it had been in the Fire Oracle’s area of influence, the world seemed to have been frozen here—I couldn’t see a single living thing moving. No birds, no insects. Not a breath of air. It was eerily silent.

Venna said, “I told you she’d let us in.”

“Don’t get cocky,” Lewis said. “She doesn’t have to let us get any closer.”

The floor of the canyon was sand covering a hard-pan surface of bedrock. Whatever river had carved this particular bend was long vanished, and rain was something rarely seen here. The canyons towered the height of four-story buildings over us, built out of layer on layer of reds, oranges, and browns. The ground was like a tree—you could read its history by the rings and layers of its life. The life of this land was long, and hard, and austerely beautiful.

Overhead, the sun was black in the center, rays blazing out in intense bursts from the edges. It was frightening and strange, and I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first, until Lewis said, hoarsely, “Eclipse.”

“It’s not an eclipse out there,” David said. “Not one scheduled in this part of the world for years to come.”

It didn’t matter. This was Imara’s domain, and she could do anything she wished here. If she wanted to blot out the sun, she could.

I looked up. At the top of the cliffs above us was a harsh glitter of glass windows built into the structure of the rocks. “She’s up there,” I said. “We’re on the wrong side. The stairs are behind it.”

The Chapel of the Holy Cross was built by man, but it had been laid on the template of something that had been there for ages, maybe since the beginning of time. Standing here, I could see through this world and into the next, with Oversight, and the chapel took on huge, shadowy dimensions, filled with power and significance, pain and endurance.

“No time for the stairs,” Venna said, and tried to take our hands. Lewis and I both stepped back. She raised her eyebrows. “What?”

“No more of that,” Lewis said. “We’ve pushed the odds too far already. You’d lose one of us this time.”

“You say you need to go up there,” she pointed out. “What would you like us to do?”

“Carry us,” I said. “Get us to the top, but not through the aetheric. Can you do that?”

She considered it for a few seconds, locking eyes with David in silent communication, and then they both nodded.

“She’s going to try to stop us,” David said. “Whatever you do, don’t let go.”

He put his arms around me, holding me tight against him. I looked over at Lewis and Venna, and burst out laughing. It was ridiculous. He towered over her on approximately the same scale as the cliffs towering over all of us. What was she going to do, hug his knees?

Venna looked vexed, then she simply changed her body, growing, filling out into the size of an adult woman. She kept the pinafore and the blond hair, but when she’d finished, she was Lewis’s height. “There,” she said. “That should do.”

“Talk about one pill makes you larger . . . ,” Lewis said, which even now, at the end of the world, made me smile.

Venna wasn’t as amused. “Turn around.”

David and I were face to face, but evidently Venna didn’t feel that close to Lewis. He turned his back to her. She stepped up and fastened her arms around his waist, and without even a pause, she launched herself, and him, into the air. David followed. The shock of being airborne, without any real means of support or propulsion, made the less rational parts of my brain scream in panic, but David and Venna kept rising, steady and controlled, as the cliff’s multicolored shadings flickered by in front of us.

“All right?” David asked me. My hair was blowing in the wind created by our passage, and I pulled it out of my face to nod. He looked grim and focused, probably anticipating the conversation we were about to have with our child. “Almost there.”

Almost being, of course, not quite good enough. I’d noticed the height of the cliffs before we’d taken to the air, and we should have already been to the top. They weren’t that tall. But now the cliffs seemed to be stretching themselves taller, and taller, and taller, and we kept rising on and on, racing to get to a point that continued to outpace us.

“Imara!” I yelled. “Imara, stop! Let us in, please !”

For a long few seconds, it seemed that she’d keep playing this game until the Djinn ran out of power and plummeted back to the canyon floor, miles below now . . . but she wasn’t cruel, our daughter. Just pissed.

The cliffs stopped rising, and in a matter of seconds we were on the rocks. I tried not to look back at where we’d been. We were far, far too high for comfort.

There were no trails on this side of the chapel, so we had to scramble over ancient ledges and boulders to get to the peak, which rose up in a defiant jut of glass and a simple, elegant cross that buried itself into the rocks.

There was a kind of a path on the downslope that intersected with the stairs, and I led the way down it to the concrete steps.

This was how I’d always come here, up these steps.

This was where I’d seen my daughter die, and the memory still burned, both here and on the aetheric. My heart pounded harder as we ascended, heading for the entrance to the chapel at the top.

Venna stopped. “I have to wait here,” she said. “I can feel it. You three have to go on.”

I cast an uncertain look at David, who was holding my hand. He nodded. “She’s right,” he said. “We have to go alone.”

As we climbed the steps, Lewis said, “There was something you were going to tell me, back at the Luxor. Something about Jonathan.”

“It’s about how he died,” David said. “I told you he died in battle, and that’s true. What I didn’t tell you is that we were losing. Our forces were being slaughtered; the plains were heaped with our dead and dying. Jonathan and his guards—I was one—were the only ones left.”

We reached the top landing. The unnaturally occluded sun seemed to cast a shadow over all of us. Below, Venna stood watching with her glimmering blue eyes, and I realized she’d stopped in exactly the place where Imara’s body had come to rest, broken, when she’d died.

“Jonathan reached out to the Mother,” David said. “In fury, and rage, and desperation. He woke her up. That’s why so many more died. He wanted to destroy everything, including himself. But instead, she . . . took him. Made him Djinn. That’s how he died. I was already wounded, probably dying. He held on to me and dragged me through with him. But she consumed him, Lewis. Body and soul. She can’t do anything else when she’s drawn to a human. If you do this—”