There was something terrifying about him, and the look in his eyes. He couldn't have been more than nine years old, but that was an ancient, awful thing inside of him.
There was an adult woman with them as well, one of the teachers in a red bandanna. She was standing back, head bowed, hands clasped together. I thought for an instant that her obedience was directed toward the children, but then I realized that there was another presence in the room, standing farther away and somewhere past my aching head.
I pulled in a shaking breath as I felt the tidal force of her presence wash through the room.
I'd sought Pearl here.
I'd found her.
"No words, sister?" Pearl walked slowly into my field of vision. She was tall, graceful, beautiful as a blinding star; the dream vision I'd had of her had been an accurate representation of her human avatar, except that she wore her thick, silky black hair piled in intricate knots on top of her head to emphasize the long sweep of her neck. Unlike her followers, she was dressed in lush patterned silks that swept the floor as she walked. Her feet were bare and perfect. "No threats? No apologies? I'm disappointed. I wouldn't expect you to give up so easily."
I held my silence, since it bothered her. My head felt wrong and tender, and I was almost sure that my skull was fractured. The pillow beneath me felt sticky with blood, and I could smell the iron reek of it. Nausea twisted inside me like smoke, but I contained it. I couldn't heal myself, and cut off from Luis, I had no chance of surviving such an injury. Pearl knew that.
She was enjoying it.
Zedala and the other children looked at Pearl with expressions of utter devotion. In turn, Pearl trailed her long, lovely fingers over the hair of the smallest girl and favored her with a slow, cool smile. "Do you know what I've done, Cassiel?" she asked. "Do you understand the astonishing thing that's been accomplished here?"
"You've perverted and destroyed children," I said. My voice sounded weak and dry, no match for her elegance. "It's not so astonishing. Humans have been doing that to their own for millennia." A pulse of hot, stabbing pain bolted through me, and I tensed and cried out.
Zedala gave me a wolfish grin. "Don't be rude to the Lady," she said. "You're not good enough to look at her. I should put your eyes out."
For an awful second, I thought that Pearl would allow that; she considered it, as she wandered over to the Earth Warden boy and caressed his face with idle affection. "No," she finally said. "Show me her base human form first."
Zedala cocked her head, staring at me, and then power burst out of her like a flood from an exploding dam, such astonishing power that it overwhelmed and drowned me, ripped me apart in its turbulence, then subsided in a slow, sticky tide. I felt myself changing. Bones shattered and re-formed. Skin melted and healed. I screamed; I couldn't stop the flood of agony, or my body's primal, visceral response of horror.
The only part of me that didn't suffer was my left arm, from the forearm down. Instead, the fleshy disguise I'd adopted melted away, leaving a cold, gleaming bronze appendage in all its minutely crafted detail, down to the whorls of artificial fingerprints on metal fingers. I'd sliced away my arm to save myself, and replaced it with a Djinn-crafted duplicate; it seemed the only respite now from the pain Pearl and her children seemed intent on causing me.
I could move it, just a little.
By the time Zedala burned her way down my body, I had gained a foot in height, and my skin had been restored to its ivory color. My hair as well--it had grown out, and been bleached to its normal ice-white.
"There you are," Pearl said, and shrugged. "Or the human vessel of you, at least. Tell me, sister, how long since we've been together, even in our Djinn forms? Human time has no measure, does it? So long ago that you killed me."
I had killed her, or at least I'd believed it was so. And it had been the only possible response to her crimes, which had driven Mother Earth mad with pain. I'd destroyed her, and I'd thought I eradicated all traces of her ... but some part of her survived, tenacious as the roots of a weed. It had taken her aeons to gather her strength, but finally she was here, present, physical again.
And deadly. So very, very deadly.
"These," she said, and placed a kiss on Zedala's braided hair, "are part of me now. They believe implicitly in my cause. They understand how dangerous the Djinn and the Wardens are. They are my warriors. My avatars. My children. And when the end comes--and it will come for you, Cassiel, for all of you--these will survive with me. Out of the ashes, a new Mother will rise."
My mouth went dry. "You."
"Yes. Of course. Who is more deserving?"
Pearl's ambition was greater, and more insane, than I'd ever dreamed. Not annihilation, as grandiose as that might be; she still planned to destroy the Wardens, the humans, the Djinn, and indeed all life, but she planned more. She planned to kill her own Mother, the life spirit of our planet, and she planned to become that life spirit.
A corrupted, damaged, evil spirit. I couldn't imagine what would spring forth from her, as she breathed her power over the dead land--whatever it would be, it would be nightmarish, twisted, and a perverse mockery of all the beauty and diversity of this world.
The Djinn didn't know this. Couldn't imagine it. If they had, if they'd been able to comprehend the danger, they would have bonded together to destroy her regardless of costs.
Even Ashan would have set aside his personal ambitions for that.
Now I had a new mission--not killing Pearl, although that was still my greatest goal. No, I had to get this knowledge out, to the Djinn, to the Wardens, to anyone who could take up arms and defend against her. I had no choice now but to survive, and run.
If I could.
"I won't insult you, or myself, by asking you to join me," Pearl continued. "I know you won't. There is a core of stubbornness in you, Cassiel, that does you no particular credit. I suppose some would see it as heroism; I see it as arrogance. You have no cause for that, dear sister. You're not nearly what you once were."
"Who is?"
She laughed, a golden bell of sound that sounded so lovely it was easy to forget the rotten darkness in her core. Pearl was seductive; that was why this camp existed, why these children had been so badly and fatally bent to her will. That was why, even now, the Djinn hesitated to move against her--that, and their own self-interested instincts.
Even I felt her attraction, and had ever since I'd stepped into this camp. Here, she put forth her charm, her glamour ... and everyone responded. Even, I suspected, the human FBI had succumbed, outside the gates. Perhaps she'd merely made them decide to abandon their posts. I wouldn't have put it past her abilities, not anymore.
Merle had resisted. Look what that had earned him.
I had to get free. Somehow, insane as it was, I had to find a way out of this.
"She's plotting," the boy Earth Warden said--Pearl's personal executioner, as Zedala had become her personal torturer. "She's going to try something."
"Not yet," Pearl said serenely. "She's injured, and she's alone. She'll bide her time. Cassiel is good at that. But I, my sister, am far, far better practiced." She bent over me, and brushed her smooth, damp, cool lips against mine. I resisted the urge to bite, only because it wouldn't help--or even hurt her. The touch gave me the truth of her human form--it was still artificial, not genuinely human. She didn't yet have the real power to create a body down to the cellular level. This was a shell only, lovely as it was. "If you're counting on your Warden lover, I wouldn't," she continued, still bent close to me. Her eyes were black, lid to lid, and shimmering like oil. "He won't leave the child's side, not to rescue you. And if he does, I'll have you all, won't I? Foster father ... foster mother ... and child."
"You'll never have Isabel," I said. "She's free now."
"You think so?" Pearl's smile was nauseating, seen at close range--not in the least human. She straightened, and glanced at Zedala.
"You'd better kill me," I said, and meant it. "If you don't, I promise you, I'll destroy you. At wh
atever cost."
"You can't do anything without power," Pearl said, "but I was planning to kill you, sister. No reason to waste you, though. My children need practice."
She nodded to the small black-haired boy, the one from whom I sensed no identifiable kind of Warden power at all ... and he reached out a single finger, and touched me just as Zedala yanked her hand away from my forehead.
Void.
His power was its absence. He lived and breathed, but what filled him was cut off from the roots of life. He existed without connection, and as his touch bridged the gulf between us, I felt the organic parts of me being shredded into rags, lost in a vortex of hungry emptiness. I couldn't even scream. There were no human sounds for the agony of cells imploding into absolute nothingness.
It would be slow, and I would feel every second.
I was going to die, in a way more painful than I'd ever imagined, and more thorough than any other kind of death. It would devour the very Djinn nature of me. It would erase me.
And there was nothing at all I could do to stop it.
Chapter 12
THE DJINN PART OF ME, the Cassiel part, was no more than a whisper, but it did not want to die. I felt it flow through me in a silvery thread, coiling in the power that I could now reach, since Zedala had withdrawn her block--but the power couldn't survive against the black-hole pull of the Void.
The organics of my body were coming apart. Instead, the power flowed into my inert metal hand.
I was no longer consciously directing the power; it was driven by Djinn instinct, by the primal need to survive. My metal hand malformed, changed, and re-formed into a sharp-edged metal blade, which sliced through the bonds holding my left hand and foot to the bed where I lay.
And then my Djinn self, my cold and true self, slashed the blade through the air toward Pearl's lovely shell. It sliced through her neck, and her body collapsed in a nauseatingly empty sack of meat--lacking organs, bones, muscles. Just a shell of flesh, and the power inside escaped.
The mocking echo of her laughter remained.
I had no choice of what to do next. I slashed across my body, and cut off the finger of the Void conduit where it pressed against my skull.
The boy screamed and fell backward. He sounded like a wounded child, not a vicious empty thing, and for a fatal second, I hesitated with my blade ready for a killing stroke.
That gave Zedala time to lunge forward and grab my arm. A burst of star-hot power blew through the metal, heating it into dripping slag. I threw her off, but it was too late; the moment was gone. The Void child still cowered in shock, but the others were on me.
The Earth Warden boy slapped his hands flat on my chest, and drove me down, down through the metal frame of the bed, down into the wooden floor of the room, down into the hard-packed dirt beneath.
Down into the rock.
I was blind here, but I had power again, and softened the rock and earth to loose, slippery sand, taking away his momentum. We struggled together, lost in the earth. He tried to use his control to shatter my bones, but here, in my element, he couldn't find an easily exploited vulnerability.
I was weak from the Void attack, and still suffering from the beating I'd taken from Zedala. He finally focused on that point of weakness, and I felt his power pushing at it, trying to shatter the cracked skull like an eggshell. If he drove bone into my fragile human brain, I'd be lost. I had to fight, but my strength wasn't unlimited, and in the heat of battle I couldn't draw on Luis, not at this distance.
I was losing.
Something flowed past me, like a shark through water, and slammed bodily into the boy. On the aetheric I saw it as a hard human-shaped light in cool gray, overlaid with the elusive watery spectrum of a Djinn. The boy was fighting it, whatever it was, but for the moment, at least, I was free.
I used the last of my strength to claw myself up at an angle, away from the building where I'd been held, and found the soft, turned earth of the field. I broke the surface and crawled toward the fence. My skull was on fire, and I felt cold and sluggish. I'd bled too much, both in plasma and in power. I had very little left. My mutilated left hand, now just a misshapen, melted blog of metal, made it difficult to claw forward.
Someone tried to grab me and pull me backward. Zedala, who'd chased me. I used the blunt, twisted club that had once been my metallic hand and slammed it into her, and she went down with a scream.
I touched the cold metal of the fence, but I didn't have enough power left to do more than bend the links.
Trapped.
I felt that human/Djinn presence cutting through the soil beneath me, and it erupted in a spray of dirt like a geyser.
Will. It was Will.
He grabbed my shoulders even as the fence blew outward in a spray of melted metal behind me, and dragged me through to the other side. Zedala had rolled to her feet, feral and furious; the blood on her face only added to the savagery of her expression. As she lunged at Will, he drew back his hand, gathered power, and threw it in a tight, silver ball at her chest. It hit her and slammed her backward to the soft earth. She slapped at it, trying to throw it off, but it ate its relentless, merciless way through her body until she lay still and silent in the dirt.
Will's face was smeared with dirt and mud, and now I recognized his eyes, those gray, emotionless eyes. I recognized the implacable rage with which he'd just killed the girl.
He turned it on the boy Earth Warden, who lunged up from the dirt and took a tearing grip on my hair. I didn't see what happened to the boy, but I felt it. I saw the blood explosion on the aetheric, and saw his violent streaming colors go pale, then black.
"Stop," I whispered. "Ashan, stop."
"No," he said, and kept dragging me. "They have to be destroyed. All of these abominations must be ended!"
"No!"
He dropped the human disguise of Will, abandoning the warmth, the sweetness, the lovely and seductive illusion. What was left was the prince of the Old Djinn, a cold silver flame of fury barely contained by a human-shaped shell. My brother. My king.
He was also a cruel, conscienceless murderer, and now he turned that focus to the boy containing the Void, who was coming after the two of us with a fanatic's disregard for personal safety.
The boy could kill a Djinn. Easily.
"Don't touch him!" I screamed to Ashan. "He'll destroy you!"
Ashan, who'd been reaching out to rip the boy in half, spun away at the last moment. The boy's grasping hand brushed Ashan's side, and I saw a black gouge appear in his body. He twisted away, and the shout of pain vibrated on the aetheric, and snapped branches from trees in the physical world. Ashan stumbled back and, with a fluid motion, caught one of the large, heavy falling branches. He let its momentum spin him, threw physical force into it, and slammed the branch home into the boy's body.
I heard the wet snap of breaking bones, and tried to roll to my knees. I managed that much, but my balance failed as I tried to climb to my feet. I grabbed the trunk of a tree and watched as the boy--crippled now--clawed his way on, still determined to destroy Ashan no matter the cost.
"Stop!" I screamed again, as Ashan lifted the branch for a killing blow. "Ashan, no, not this way--"
He didn't listen. I turned my head at the last moment, but that didn't block out the sound of the impact of the branch, or the boy's choked last gasp. "No," I whispered, but there was no strength in it, or in me.
Ashan grabbed me and lifted me in his arms, and I saw the last of Pearl's chosen children, the tiny Weather girl, summoning power in both hands with a dexterity that was chillingly beyond her years. Beyond her, the camp was massing--people I had known, and liked, armed with whatever they could find. They would rush us, kill us if they could. The fury was like fire in the wind.
Ashan looked down at me, and for a second I saw Will, the man I had felt such kinship to--and then Will was gone and only Ashan remained.
"Hold on," he said, and stepped into the aetheric just as lightning exploded where we ha
d been, burning a crater twenty feet deep in the smoking earth.
Make no mistake: I do not like Ashan. Even among the Djinn, Ashan inspired fear, not love; his arrogance--and his power--were legendary. He had, however unwillingly, bowed his head to one Djinn only, and when Jonathan had been destroyed, he owed loyalty to no one. He'd claimed by right to rule, after, and I had never contested that, though I could have. So could Venna, the oldest of my siblings, but we were both content to be what we were, and allow him his power.
That didn't mean we liked him. It meant we respected him.
In this moment, though, weak and fragile as I felt, overwhelmed as I was, I loved him and hated him with an intensity that made me want to weep bitter human tears. I clung to him as we passed in a mist through the aetheric, speeding away from the camp. Most Djinn couldn't bring humans through the aetheric, not intact, but Ashan could, when he wished.
Which was seldom, if ever.
We stepped out into night ... a thick, full, velvety darkness, somewhere far enough from human civilization that no hint of lights glimmered, save the stars. The wind hissed through the pines, and Ashan bent to lay me down on a bed of fallen leaves. Starlight painted him in stark contrasts--his eyes had turned full silver now, his skin almost the pale color of mine. We looked like kindred now, except that his beauty was Djinn to the core, remote and hard, and mine was soft and frail and broken.
"You pretended to be human. To be Will," I said. "Why?"
"Like you, I wanted to see," he said. "I wanted to know what she was doing, and why. I couldn't depend on you, Cassiel. I had thought I could, but you began to care too much for them. You aren't as you were when I sent you here."
"Neither are you," I said. "You feigned a human far too well not to have liked being in his skin. I thought we both despised them."
"We both did," he said. "But perhaps you're right. We've both changed."
"You knew who I was all along. You recognized me."
"No," he said, and turned away to stare up at the stars. "I didn't know, not at first. I felt ... something. But you disguised yourself well, just as I had. We both fooled her, for a time--and we fooled each other as well."
"We won't fool her again."
"No, not again. She's beyond playing coy now." He turned back to me. "What did she tell you?"