With the power to corrupt the flow.
I gasped aloud, and tried to pull my hand away from the scroll, but the darkness surged up through the contact, licking through nerves and veins and flesh. I saw the nail turn black, and then lines of indigo shot up my finger. Quick as a breath they spread into my left hand, a midnight tracery that brought with it an icy, fatal numbness.
Pearl's madness, her power, her furious hunger for revenge, all distilled into a black poison that had been crafted solely for this purpose, for me. Imara had known this. She'd known the risk even as she allowed me to take it. She'd tried to warn me how dangerous it could be.
I gritted my teeth and focused, trying to halt the progress of Pearl's invasion within my body. I could feel her black joy, her triumph. It was happening quickly, devastatingly quickly. I distantly heard Luis's sharp intake of breath, and felt him moving toward me as he realized something was wrong. Too late, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing he could do.
Then my hand was knocked away from the scroll, and the paper fell to the floor and rolled away, snapping into that tight, protective casing that looked like polished bone. Featureless and faintly shimmering with power. Turner hesitated, then reached down toward it. "No!" I screamed. "Don't touch it!"
He hesitated, then slowly backed away, leaving it where it had fallen.
I stared down at my limp left hand. It was blackened and numb where it lay in my lap.
Dead.
"Madre," Luis whispered, and shoved me back to kneel in front of me, taking the damaged hand in both of his. I saw power flare from him, seeking entrance, and felt a tantalizing flicker of heat within the tissues.
Something fought back. I felt the snap of attack, from within my hand to strike at him, and Luis broke off, panting. He gave me a wild look of utter horror. "I can't," he blurted. "It's not--I can't stop it. I can't even touch it. You have to do something. Fast, Cass."
"I can't." My voice sounded level and calm, unnaturally so. "It's inside me now. I can't even keep it contained in my arm much longer. My power is yours; if yours can't stop it, mine can't either. The battle's already lost."
What I meant, what he must have understood, was that I was going to be destroyed. There was nothing to be done, nothing magical that either of us could do or try.
Turner watched, confused and shocked. No help from him. No help possible.
I looked at Rashid.
He smiled, and from his crouch in the corner, said, "For a price, my razor-edged angel. It will cost you."
"What price?" I asked. My mouth was dry, my skin felt tight and clammy. I was afraid, but I also knew the dangers of showing my desperation.
"Do you really have time to bargain?" He cocked his head, just a little, and stared at me with inhuman, unfeeling eyes. "I think you don't. I can stop it. Say yes."
"To what?"
His grin turned feral. "To whatever I want, of course." His tone dripped with all manner of salacious innuendo, but his eyes . . . his eyes flicked toward the scroll, where it sat radiating power. A direct connection to the Oracles. To the Earth herself, perhaps. Power beyond measure, especially in the hands of a Djinn.
I had promised Imara never to let it out of my hands.
I sucked in a deep, trembling breath. "No," I said. I was not willing to take that particular risk. Not even at the cost of my life. Rashid was a wild, random creature. In his hands, this list could wreak incalculable damage as easily as overwhelming good.
I felt one of the barriers I had built to wall off my poisoned hand break, like a levy under a black tide. More darkness flooded into my hand, and began to spread.
"Yes," Luis said. "Dammit, do it, Rashid. Do it! Save her!"
Rashid raised an eyebrow, and didn't move his gaze away from mine. "She has to say it," Rashid said. "No one else can answer for her. What say you, Cassiel? Deal?"
I licked my lips. I felt the darkness raging beneath my skin, bubbling like some viscous acid. It didn't hurt, not yet, but that was only because it destroyed physical nerves as it went. It would no doubt be an agony beyond anything I had ever known, when it reached my centers of power. When it consumed and utterly destroyed my soul and unmade me from the world.
And deep within me, the other Cassiel stirred. The ice-cold core of me, the inhuman persona who had seen stars burn out, seen death in the billions, witnessed atrocity and miracles with the same utter lack of concern.
That Cassiel knew what to do, where the merely human one failed. I felt her chill in my heart, her clarity in my mind.
I had a choice. It wasn't one my human self could make.
Only a Djinn could make it.
"No," I said again, very precisely. "I do not accept your deal, Rashid. Not for that."
I walked forward and took hold of a bronze sculpture on a side table, a metal representation of two clasped, weathered praying hands. Angela's possession, one dear to her during her life. I felt the whisper of her devotion and passion soaked into the metal. Her history.
Help me be strong, the human side of me whispered. Help me do the right thing. Help me not be afraid.
The Djinn part of me had no fear at all, only frozen, emotionless purpose.
I raised power and re-formed the metal. It melted in my right hand into a shimmering pool, then lengthened. Hardened.
Formed itself into a sharp, long-bladed hatchet.
Before either Luis or Ben Turner could stop me, I put my hand and wrist flat on the wooden surface of the dining table, raised the hatchet, and put all my strength into the downward blow. I had to do it in one strike.
To my Djinn mind, it was all angles, force, calculation. An entirely academic exercise.
The human part of me had gone away. That was for the best.
I heard Luis screaming, but it was too late.
Now.
The blade slammed squarely into untainted flesh an inch above where the poison stopped, sliced through flesh, muscle, and through the tough bone. All the way through, burying its edge in the wood below.
Its work done, the Djinn in me faded back into watchful silence, satisfied with the precision and power of its work.
The human part of me woke to the horror. I screamed. The pain was tremendous, a hot red storm that threatened to drive me unconscious to the ground; it took all my focus and strength to hold on. Immediately after, shock set in fast, and the flood of bleeding slowed to a sudden, dizzying trickle from the stump. The severed hand took on a strange, disassociated look, as if it had never been a part of me, as if I had only dreamed of ever having such a thing attached to my body.
Rashid had idly noted how many terrible things could happen in a matter of mere seconds.
He was so correct.
"No!" Luis was shouting. He grabbed at me, struck the hatchet from my hands and sent it skittering across the floor, scattering blood drops. "Dios, no!" He hissed something else, something I couldn't understand through the hazy fog that descended over my eyes, and took the stump of my arm in a firm grip. Maybe he meant to try to reattach the hand. Earth Wardens had been known to work such miracles, after all.
The hand had other ideas.
My severed hand spasmed, and then it began to move, like a separate and living creature. Tentatively at first--stiff little jabs of the blackened fingers--and then it dug its nails into the wood and curled, looking suddenly like nothing so much as a spider preparing to leap.
Rashid, who had not reacted even as I chopped my hand off, suddenly rose to his feet in a smooth, startled motion as my blackened hand began walking across the table toward me.
Rashid reached out, and a broad-bladed knife from the kitchen counter flew through the air to smack into his palm. He advanced with three fast steps, and with a blindingly quick motion, stabbed the knife into the back of my severed, crawling hand, pinning it to the table. It struggled for a few seconds, scrabbling with its black fingernails, and then went still.
Not limp.
Just . . . still. Waiting.
"Holy fucking God," Turner whispered, and then shook himself. "We need to get a tourniquet on her. Fast."
Luis tore his wide gaze from the hand on the table, and I saw him thrust all of it away with an almost physical effort of will. "I've got it," he said. "Cass? You hear me?"
"I hear you," I said distantly.
Luis's face was set and hard, but his eyes were so worried. So vulnerable. "Not going to lie to you, this is going to hurt like hell, so I'm going to turn off your nerves for a second. Hang on, okay?"
I nodded placidly.
Then I was sitting on the floor. I don't know how; it seemed like life had jumped its tracks for a moment, as if a few vital seconds of my life had been erased, crudely and utterly destroyed.
Whatever trauma I had felt, those seconds were gone, utterly vanished. Sometimes the human brain protects itself, creates a fail-safe circuit. That was what Luis had done--triggered that final protection, a kind of static during which the brain resets itself.
I had no memory, because no memory of those moments existed for me. Nor ever would.
There was a towel tied tightly around the end of my arm, which ended abruptly in an empty space. I raised it and stared at it, wondering where my hand had gone. I could still feel it, still feel the phantom muscles flexing. What happened . . . ? I knew, but I didn't know. Not really.
My head felt light and vague. I pulled in deep, trembling breaths and felt an arm bracing me across my shoulders. "Easy," Luis said. His voice was wrong, shaking and too high. "Breathe. Come on, breathe."
I was breathing, I thought, with a hot flash of annoyance. Even Rashid was watching me with a frown of concentration. Turner and Luis seemed shocked and horrified.
Ah, yes, of course. I had chopped off my hand.
Their reactions made perfect sense, then.
"I'm all right," I said. Indeed, I was. My pain had receded, and the light-headed feeling was going away. The absence of the invading darkness left me feeling unreasonably strong. "Were you able to stop the bleeding?" As if I was inquiring politely about the health of a distant relative, or the weather. Something that had no bearing on my own ability to survive the night.
Luis swallowed. His skin looked cream-pale beneath its burnish of bronze. "It's stopped," he said. "I deadened the nerves and sealed the blood vessels. But it's not good, Cass. Christ, why?"
"Pearl," I said. "If I hadn't acted, she'd have destroyed me. It had to be done."
"I could have stopped it," Rashid said. I gave him a long look. "Perhaps."
"It wouldn't matter," I said. "You wanted the list. I can't give it to you. I couldn't depend on your goodwill, Rashid. Or would you say that you would have acted to save me, regardless?"
He didn't answer. He didn't have to. I'd felt it from him, felt that avarice and pure, selfish desire. I knew him.
I had once been Rashid, or very like him.
"It was the only way," I said, and for some reason it came out almost kind. I deliberately hardened my tone. "If you want to make amends, Rashid, you may. The girl, Gloria. Go and get her. There will be no bargain. You will do it because I tell you to do it."
Rashid's eyes widened. He looked at the table, where my blackened, severed hand still lay pinned by the knife. Not dead. Quiescent.
"If I save her now," he said, "you will lose your way to the one you seek. I can follow instead, and retrieve the girl before more harm is done."
"She's alone," I said. "She's in pain. She's a child.
More harm is done every second. Do this, Rashid. You owe this to me."
He thought about that, and unwillingly inclined his head.
Then he vanished.
In the silent aftermath of his departure, Ben Turner said, "You cut your hand off. Jesus Christ, you cut. Your hand. Off."
"It wasn't my hand," I said. "Not anymore. And it couldn't be saved."
Turner looked a little queasy, and stared hard at the unmoving black thing that sat crouched and nailed to the tabletop. It still didn't look dead. It looked like it was simply waiting for an opening, for a careless moment. I was not entirely certain the knife could hold it, if it truly exerted itself, although Rashid had certainly buried the metal deeply into the wood.
"Yeah," Turner said softly. "I see your point. So . . . what the hell do we do with that now?"
"You are a Fire Warden, aren't you?" I asked. "Burn it. Please."
He sent me a narrow, disbelieving look, then silently asked Luis if he agreed. Luis did, with a bare, silent nod. Turner took in a deep breath, focused his energy, and the wood on the table, for a respectable distance around the severed hand, burst completely into flame.
The hand began to struggle against the knife, jerking, slicing itself blindly as it tried to escape. Luis and I opened the floodgates of power to pour it into the wood the hand was touching. What wasn't yet burning warped, folding over the fingers, trapping it. Fire, metal, earth--it was bound by all the powers, save air, which in this case fed the fire. The hand flopped wildly, trying to pull itself free, and finally, with a crackle of baking bones and sizzling flesh, went completely, utterly limp.
Dead.
A black, viscous liquid flowed from the severed stump of the wrist, turning wood to powdery, rotted ash where it touched, and smothering the flames. But it didn't live long beyond its flesh host, and vanished into black, greasy smoke that faded into nothing on the air.
Turner kept the fire burning hot until my hand was a lacework of bones, bright white and crumbling, and then he let the flames die.
He promptly stumbled to the bathroom and slammed the door. I watched him go without comment. Luis, moving like a man who'd taken a gut wound, let go of me and walked to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out a beer. He popped the cap from it, still staring into a distance full of horror, then upended the bottle and drank until all that was left was foam. Then he leaned forward and rested the cold empty glass against his forehead.
I stood up, swaying a little from the loss of blood and lingering shock, and retrieved the bronze hatchet from where it lay in a pool of crimson on the floor. I cleaned it carefully against the towel wrapped around my left wrist, then sat down on the sofa and worked the tight knots of cotton twine that bound the towel in place.
"What the hell are you doing?" Luis asked wearily, and tried to stop me. I shoved him away with my good hand and held him there, pulling at the frayed cord with my teeth until it loosened enough for me to slip the towel away.
I had enough control of my body to keep the blood vessels clamped, and the nerves deadened. I wrapped the twine tight again, then contemplated the bronze weapon in my right hand.
"Cass." His voice broke a little. "Cass, what the hell are you doing?" He was afraid, I realized, that I had gone entirely mad. That I was about to start mutilating myself again, to no real purpose.
"Shhhhh," I said, and reached out with power. The metal of the weapon softened, melted, formed itself into a complex and delicate structure. I built it with a Djinn's instinctive understanding of the world, of my own lovely, finely engineered body, the interconnectedness of all things. I think in a way Luis was right--I was quietly, oddly mad. It had seemed completely rational to me to do these things, from the moment I had recognized that I had a choice none of the others--not even Pearl--had foreseen. Sever my hand. Burn the remains.
Now the same ruthless, cold Djinn instinct was telling me to make myself a new hand, out of the weapon that had been my salvation.
I began by building hard metal bones, then overlaying them with fine, strong cables in patterns that mirrored the muscles and tendons of my right hand. Then, over all of that, a light, flexible bronze skin. Fingers. Even delicately etched fingernails, each slightly and sharply pointed, like finely manicured claws.
Then I slipped the complex mechanism over the open stump of my arm and joined up the parts, with little regard to what was metal and what was flesh. It fused together with a hiss and a smell of burning flesh, and I began to move my fingers s
lowly, one after another, before Luis's wide, disbelieving eyes.
Then I made a fist, with my new bronze hand, and uncurled it to lay it flat in my lap. It was an exact mirror of my right hand, perfect in every visible detail. Even the shine of the metal mimicked living flesh. It was as if I'd dipped my living hand into metal.
I heard the water running in the bathroom, and then the door opened and Turner came out, wiping his mouth with a towel. "We need to get you an ambulance and--what the hell is that?" He sounded like a man who'd gone beyond surprise, into weary resignation.
I held up my metal hand and said, "No ambulance. No hospital." I wiggled the fingers to show him that it worked, then lowered it and closed my eyes. "I will sleep now."
I don't know, but I imagined that Turner and Luis exchanged long looks. I simply drifted off into a half-drugged distance of shock, artificial calm, and true, genuine exhaustion.
It felt like I slept only a few minutes before coming awake again, shaking. The calm and shock had left me, the cold Djinn certainty had left me, and there was only the knowledge of what I had done to my fragile human flesh.
Luis was sitting beside me on the couch. I looked mutely at him, my eyes blurring with cold, lost tears, and he put his arm around me, pressed his lips to my temple, and whispered, "Thank God. Thank God you're back."
I was. The person who had been inhabiting my body, from the moment I had realized what my only choice had been, was gone. That Cassiel had once again been banished to the hidden recesses where she lurked.
"That was her, wasn't it?" he asked. "The Cassiel you used to be. The Djinn. The badass you keep telling me about." The one who would make the choice to destroy humanity, if it was necessary.
I nodded, burying my face against his shirt. I couldn't stop shaking. Couldn't stem the tears. His hand stroked my hair over and over, an animal comfort and connection, and I wanted . . . oblivion. Just for a while.
"You were right," he told me. "She's terrifying."
To me, as well.
The next few minutes were long ones, silent ones, filled with the sound of Turner drinking down a glass of water, refilling it, then emptying it again, as if he hoped to wash himself clean from the inside out. I wondered if I should ask for something, but I didn't need to do so; Luis, unasked, brought me a glass and very gently encouraged me to drink.