Rachel Caine - Thin Air

As if she were reading my thoughts-scary idea-Cherise suddenly blurted, “Do you think we were taken?”

“Taken?” I paused in the act of loading the water bottle back in the pack. Cherise looked nearly human again. Amazing what a little color in the cheeks can do for a girl.

“You know. By them ,” she said. She pointed upward with a trembling finger.

“They…?” And then I remembered the gray alien tattoo. “Oh. Them. Right.” Not that I wanted to sound judgmental, and hey, I’d hooked up with a former boyfriend who was apparently made out of liquid metal and could disappear at will, so who was I to scoff? “Uh, I don’t think so, honey.”

She was staring at me as if she were waiting for my reply, and then, two seconds later, she looked agitated. “But it makes sense! What if they…what if they did something to us!” Cherise suddenly threw off the thermal blankets in a crinkle of foil and began frantically groping at the back of her neck. She twisted the hair up and anxiously turned toward me. “Is there a scar? Did they put the chip in my neck?”

“There’s no chip.” I waited for her to grasp the fact that I was replying to her, and this time it seemed to take even longer. “Cherise, get a grip. There’s no scar, there’s no chip, and I don’t think you were abducted by little gray aliens. I don’t think you were probed, experimented on, or beamed up. I don’t think you went to the planet Bozbarr, either. Whatever happened, I think there’s a different explanation.” Not necessarily one any less crazy.

Cherise frowned, then looked disappointed. “But…it fits all the stories. We were away from people, and I don’t remember what happened. There’s missing time, and suddenly I’m back out here in the middle of nowhere…”

“This is something else.”

She was already talking over me by the time I got the words out. “Unless it’s something to do with the Wardens,” she said.

“You’re sure you don’t remember anything? Anything at all?” Cherise, after several seconds of silence, shook her head. I changed the subject. “Do you remember anything about what happened to Kevin? Where he could be?”

The conversational train clickety-clacked along tracks for the required two heartbeats before she caught up. “No. But…” A faint wave of color bloomed in her cheeks. “But if he could, he’d be here with me.”

So the beach bunny had a thing for skinny slacker boy? I’d thought they were just unrelated strangers, but clearly it wasn’t even just a Mutt-and-Jeff partnership; it was a choice. Her choice, at least, and his, if he wasn’t a total idiot.

I kept my voice low and quiet. “How long have you been with him?”

That got me an odd look. “You know. You were with me when I met him.”

Great. More big black hole to fill in. “Pretend I don’t know,” I said. “When-”

There was a scratching at the tent, and I shot up to my feet, grabbing the nearest blunt object-which turned out to be a bottle of water-but my doubtful turf-defending skills weren’t necessary. It was Lewis. He snaked through the narrow entrance, reached for his pack, and then he saw Cherise.

His stare fixed on her, and there was this sensation of something happening, something I couldn’t see or control. Needles all over my skin. My hair blew back in a sudden gust of breathlessly cold wind, and I felt gravity give a funny little lurch, as if it were thinking of canceling its regular appearance.

I blinked, and however I did it, I saw things. First of all: Lewis. He looked taller, stronger-not substantially different, just…more. He radiated some kind of aura for several feet around him, shifting like oil on water. And outside of that aura was a storm. Not literally, not with clouds and things, but still: a storm. There was no other way to think of it. It was sheer bloody power, sparking and gathering and flaring, coming from everywhere, out of the air, up from the ground, flowing into and out of him. And it was focused directly at Cherise.

I looked at her, and she almost vanished. Not totally, but she’d faded like some sepia-toned photograph, and her aura was weak and pale by comparison. There were broad, ugly, jagged streaks of pure black running through it, like claw marks. The tent around us glimmered with heat and power, and the light was getting stronger, so strong I could hardly stand to look at him.

“Lewis!” I turned back to him. “Don’t. She’s okay.”

“No,” he said. “She’s not.”

Lewis wasn’t letting down his guard. When Cherise looked at me, terrified, he held out a hand toward her, palm out, as if he were warning her to stay away.

“How’d she get in here?”

“I brought her. I know, that was probably stupid, but I couldn’t just leave her!” Lewis transferred that X-ray stare to me. I got the impression that he was mortally worried about what he was going to see, but then it must have been better than he expected, because he blinked and seemed to back off from spiritual Defcon One.

“What’s happening to her?” I asked.

“What we thought. The Demon used her, and now it’s let her go. She’s been badly hurt.”

“I didn’t see any wounds…” There’d been blood on her sweater, but nothing wrong with her skin. As if the bullet holes Lewis had put in her had fully healed.

“This isn’t the kind of damage you see outside,” he said. “And it’s not the kind that heals.”

I wasn’t sure how much of this Cherise was following; she seemed confused, her eyes flickering back and forth between the two of us. Lewis kept staring at Cherise, frowning, tilting his head first one way, then the other.

“This makes no sense,” he muttered, and took a step closer to her. Then another one. “No sense. Why would it go after her? She’s not a Warden. No power, nothing like what they’re usually drawn toward. She barely shows up on the aetheric even when she’s not…” He didn’t seem to find a word for it. “Does she remember?”

“Ask her yourself. She’s not deaf.”

He blinked, as if he’d forgotten she was something more than just a collection of interesting problems, and then hunkered down and started asking Cherise questions. It was a short conversation, since it didn’t take too many repetitions of time-delayed “I don’t know” before Lewis began seeing the light. The light being, of course, more of a murky, indistinct confusion.

When he was finished, he cast a dark look in my direction and said, “Outside. Now.”

I wasn’t particularly fond of being ordered around, but I was willing to go along, for now. Seeing as he’d probably saved my life a couple of times already. We squirmed through the narrow tent aperture, I made a joke about birth canals that probably wasn’t particularly appropriate, and then we were outside in the cutting, frosty wind. Little miniature tornadoes of blown snow whipped by, ruffling my hair and fanning it in a cold sheet across my face. I folded my arms, put my hands in my armpits, and said, “What? What’s wrong?”

Lewis was facing kind of toward me, but mostly away. Like he knew he had to have this conversation but didn’t particularly want to. “It’s bad,” he said. “She may seem okay now, but she’s not.”

“Then do your voodoo and fix her up,” I said. “Make her all-”

“She’s dying,” he said.

I felt like he’d punched me in the stomach, and for a second or two I was at a loss for words before I rallied. “No, she’s not. She’s getting better. Look, she nearly froze to death, but she’s recovering, and-”

He met my eyes, and the bitter fury rolling in him cut me off cold. “She’s dying, Jo,” he said. “The stuff that keeps her alive, the…I don’t know, the soul, is gutted. Cored out. I can’t save her. Once a Demon rips at someone like that, so completely, what’s left after it leaves can’t sustain itself. She’ll just…slow down and die. You saw how hard it is for her to focus. That’s only going to get worse. Fast.”