"What we knew: She plans to destroy us. All living things. Even the Mother." I pulled in a painful breath, and tasted blood in the back of my mouth. "She plans to take her place."
That froze him. I had rarely seen Ashan surprised; I'd never seen him afraid, but this time, I saw a flash of real alarm blaze around him in the aetheric. He controlled it almost as swiftly and said, "Do you think she could?"
"I don't know," I confessed, and rolled on my side to cough. Something in my side hurt, and I spat up blood. "I need to rest."
"Rest won't help you," Ashan said. "You're broken." He said it with a remote kind of recognition, nothing more, but when he knelt down and touched me, his hand felt warm and almost gentle. "Stay still."
"I don't need your help."
He smiled, sharp as a knife. "Then I should have left you there to their mercies. My apologies, Cassiel. I didn't realize you had the situation so well in hand."
I stubbornly reached out to Luis through the frail connection between us, and felt it snap apart with a painful jolt. Terror bolted through me, and I sat up, heedless of my injuries. "No!" I rose up into the aetheric, flailing to regain that thread between us, but it was gone, melted away.
He was gone.
"You don't need him anymore," Ashan was saying, down in the human world. "No need to humble yourself further, my sister. You understand now the gravity of the situation, and what has to be done. I won't have you tethered to a human, not with what you must do. I can be merciful."
I stared at him with deadened eyes. "You cut the link." He didn't answer. "Give it back, Ashan. Now."
"No."
"Give it back."
"You've played human long enough, Cassiel. Enough of that. Take back your place, and do what you have to do."
"Do it yourself!" I snarled. The anger in me had a sickening quality to it, a nightmare intensity. More than that, my human body was starting to fail, and he knew it. "Kill them yourself if you think it's so vital!"
"I can't," Ashan said. "It will destroy me, and I'm the True Djinn's connection to the Mother. It'll poison all of them. You know that."
I hadn't thought of it in such terms, but he was right. Ashan risked bringing down the Djinn if he struck at the humans, and that was why he needed me to do it.
Because I was, at the last, expendable.
I felt the pressure that had held me in human flesh suddenly ease, like a door coming open in an airless room. The relief of that was intense and shattering. Flesh was a cage, a prison, and now I could abandon it, rise up to the aetheric and stay there, where I belonged. If I wished to visit this plane, I could descend like an angel at will. Or abandon it completely.
He was offering me my eternal life back, something that I had longed for, something I needed.
It was like being dropped in water after an eternity of thirst. I'd forgotten how it felt, to be so free, so pure, so utterly complete.
It was more seductive than anything I had ever known.
I kept staring at him, reading ages and distances in his silver eyes. He was old, Ashan. Very old. Very powerful. We had that in common, still. We had so much history that we had witnessed.
He thought he knew me.
But in this, this one simple thing, we were completely different, because I had breathed, wept, bled, lived. And he never had, not fully. Not even at the camp, when he pretended to be Will. I could see it in him now, that lack of empathy and understanding; it was possible he could learn, but he had not learned. Not yet.
I wanted to let go, to succumb to that soft, welcoming embrace of the eternal. I wanted to be what I had been, vast and powerful and perfect.
But part of me was always going to be here, in the dirt, in the blood, in the sweat and heaviness of a body. There was a strength and a power in that, too. One Ashan couldn't really understand.
And it allowed me to close the door between us.
"No," I said again, softly but very firmly. "I won't abandon them. I can't."
Ashan stared. I had, again, surprised him. "Not even to save us. Not even to save the Mother."
I was silent on that point. I pressed a shaking hand to my injured side. The pain turned glassy and sharp. Broken ribs, I imagined. The head injury had taken on a remote, unreal aspect; I still felt blood trickling down my neck and matting in my hair, but the pain had subsided to a dull, throbbing ache. I didn't know if that was better or worse.
Ashan was considering what I'd said. He finally shook his head. "You're not in your right mind," he said. "You're injured."
It was kind of him to notice. "It doesn't matter if I'm injured or healthy. I won't kill them. If you want them dead, do it yourself."
"One of us must lead," he said. "We've always agreed that it would be me, Cassiel. Always. And a leader must order others into battle."
I felt a cold wave of anger push back the simple human anguish of my injuries, and I looked up sharply at him. "Maybe it's time for a change," I said.
He laughed. "You won't fight me. Look at you. You can't stand on your own, and you refused my gift. You can hardly exist at all."
I climbed slowly to my feet, moving with great deliberation. I didn't wince, even when the pain bit deep; I didn't allow so much as a flicker of hesitation. I never looked away from him as I stood, unaided, and faced him.
The wind bent the trees around us, and pitiless starlight rained down. The silence seemed to stretch for an eternity.
"All right, enough," Ashan said, finally. "I never doubted your stubbornness. Only your ability."
"I have ability," I replied. "And will. And I don't need more than that."
"I'm not battling you. It isn't the time, or the place." Ashan's pale lips twitched into a brief, very cool smile. "If you would be polite enough to wait, it's more than likely I will be destroyed soon enough. We live in a dangerous world, Cassiel. And all of us will pay a price for survival, if we survive at all."
"I've never heard you say such things." Ashan was, after all, self-interested and a coward first, before all things except his protection of the Mother herself. That made him less of a pessimist than most.
"There has never been such a time," he said. His tone was calm and dispassionate, and all the more powerful for it. "The disease the Wardens have brought to this world may destroy us yet; even Pearl has taken advantage of it, in her use of the Void. With Pearl seeking our destruction at the same time as the Wardens' mortal enemies, do you really believe we can win without great loss?"
"I'm only surprised you even consider that you may be one of those losses."
He bared his teeth in an almost genuine smile. "David has no reason to protect me."
"Nor you him, though it hasn't seemed to have worried him a great deal."
David, the leader of the New Djinn, probably bothered far less about Ashan than Ashan did about David; I suspected that David's intense and legendary love for the human Warden Joanne Baldwin had wakened both contempt and confusion within my brother, which manifested in--predictably, for Ashan--real hatred. David, from the few encounters I'd had with him, held little or none.
My attempt to show strength was spoiled as my knees weakened. My body gave me no real warning--a thick wave of dizziness, and then I felt myself falling. I put out my hands to brace myself--or my one human hand, and the misshapen lump of bronze that weighed down my left arm--but I never hit the ground. Instead, Ashan stepped forward, caught me, and eased me down to a kneeling position. I was having difficulty breathing--my lungs felt thick and wet--but I still managed to wheeze, "This is how you like me, on my knees to you," before I began to cough, explosive mouthfuls of hot blood.
Ashan made a sound of frustration, and I felt a cold silvery power glide through me, from the crown of my head downward. I tried to resist it, but his touch was seductive and powerful, and the comfort it left behind it was so extreme that I felt an urge to weep. I didn't. My eyes were dry by the time Ashan stepped back, and I looked at myself disorientingly from the aetheric.
My head still ached, but the broken skull was fused together, and the ragged tear in my scalp had closed. The broken ribs had likewise reset, and the blood in my lungs was gone. He hadn't bothered with my collections of bruises, but overall, I was in sound condition, considering my recent injuries.
"I could have destroyed your physical body," he said. "But I wasn't sure that even at the last, you'd choose to regain your rightful place. This has to stop. I need you with me, Cassiel. We can't allow Pearl to pursue this course, and there's still only one way to stop her."
"Genocide," I said.
"Extinction," he corrected me. "As it has been before, as it will be again. It's the reason we were created, to protect the Mother. And we will, with or without you."
I got off my knees. "Then you'll do it without me," I said, brushing the dirt from my filthy, shapeless gray uniform with both hands ... and only then did I realize that he'd repaired my metallic left hand. I left it to the faint starlight, examining the finely detailed flexible metal skin, the precise movements of the metal fingers. He'd done a better job of it than I had, originally. I rubbed my fingertips together, and the sensation that came to me was absolutely realistic. Except for the warm matte color of my forearm and hand, it might have been the original appendage.
"That's a gift," he said, nodding toward it. "And I think you'll find that in the end you'll know I was right about the humans. They were a mistake, and they need correcting."
I sensed he was about step into the aetheric and leave me behind. "Wait! My connection to Luis. Restore it."
He met my eyes, and in his silver ones I read a trace of the man I'd liked, back in the camp. A trace of regret, and kindness. Then Ashan blinked, and it vanished. "Very well," he said. "But you won't like what you find. I was trying to spare you the pain."
I felt a hot snap inside--not something breaking, this time, but something reforging. It burned, then cooled, and I felt ... nothing for a few seconds.
Then, distantly, I felt pain, echoing through the connection like a scream from a long distance away. Pain, anguish, fury, fear.
I opened my eyes and stared at Ashan. "What have you done?"
"Nothing," he said. "You destroyed Pearl's brightest acolytes. Did you think she would simply let that go? She's like you. Emotional."
The shock of it wore off, and now the dread set in, heavy and black in the pit of my stomach.
I'd done this. We'd done this. Luis was under attack, injured, maybe dying. I had a flash of Manny Rocha, my first Warden partner, dying in a hail of bullets while I'd stood at a distance, unable to save him--only this was more intense, worse, because what I felt for Luis--no, the love I felt for him--left me horrified, frantic, and desperate.
I had to save him.
Ashan was already beginning to fade away. "No!" I screamed, and lunged for him. His form was solid, then softened into mist. For an instant he stood in his True Djinn form, something human eyes weren't meant to comprehend. I had to look away.
"Please," I said. "Please take me there. Please, Ashan. I will beg, if that's what you want."
"It isn't," he said, and I felt him slip away, into the aetheric. Only his voice remained, a whisper on the wind. "I want you to remember what it means to be one of us, not one of them. If you'd chosen to join me, you could have saved him. You could have saved them all."
And then he was gone, and I was alone, cold and alone, in an unknown forest.
And far away from me, my love was fighting for his life.
I let out a scream that shook leaves from the trees, and began to run.
I had only gone perhaps a mile before I ran into Ashan again, standing in my path, shining like the moon. He looked at me strangely, as if he'd never seen me before.
"You run," he said. "You have no idea where you are, and yet you run."
I could feel Luis's presence, like a compass tugging me onward. I didn't slow down, only ran around Ashan's still form and kept going. I didn't know how far it was; I only knew that I couldn't risk not trying.
If Luis died, I would die with him, one way or another. And I would wish it to be so.
Ashan, again, standing near the trunk of a massive, shadowed tree. I was remotely thankful for his presence, as he illuminated a hidden branch that stretched across the trail and might have tripped me. I vaulted it and kept running. "You won't make it!" he called after me. "Cassiel!"
He was lying to me. I had to believe he was lying.
And so I ran. I ran until I was breathless, shaking, covered in sweat. I ran until my muscles trembled with exhaustion. Ashan continued to appear like a ghost in the darkness, silently watching me.
I didn't stop, until with Djinn suddenness he formed right in my path, close enough that I had to slide to a flailing halt to avoid hitting him. He caught me silently when I faltered, and held me there, staring down at me. He was dressed in an immaculate gray suit now, human but with an inhuman perfection to him. His eyes, and his tie, were teal blue, with glints of silver. I had never felt so grubbily human as that moment, face-to-face with the eerie beauty of what I'd left behind.
"Enough," he said. "If you must destroy yourself, do it in battle, not ... like this. Not uselessly."
And he whirled me away into a nauseating swirl of color, sound, taste, the rancid scent of death ... and out again, into a blast of cold air, smoke, and the roar of fire.
I tripped over a corpse and fell face forward into bloody, churned ground.
Chapter 13
THE CORPSE I'D TRIPPED over was someone I didn't recognize--a man, dressed in dark clothing. He had a rifle with him, and a handgun holstered on his belt. I tugged it free, picked up the rifle, and slung it across my shoulder as I rose to my knees.
Ashan had brought me back to the school, but the school was unrecognizable. It was a burning inferno, only vaguely defined by the shapes of walls; the fire was incredibly hot and violent, with the flames in places leaping fifty feet into the night sky. Trees burned from their leafy crowns downward all around me. At first I thought that the school had been in the path of a forest fire, but that made no sense; there were powerful Fire Wardens present who should have been able to turn the flames away, even if they hadn't been able to extinguish them completely.
No, this was an attack.
And a successful one.
I didn't hear the sound of the shot fired at me, but I felt the bullet slice across the meat of my upper arm, drawing a bloody slash; it felt like a hot poker applied to my skin, and for a second I didn't register what had occurred. My instincts saved me; I threw myself flat and crawled to take the only shelter available--behind the corpse that I'd fallen over earlier. I rolled him on his side and curled up, unshipped the rifle, and carefully looked around for my assailant. It was impossible to hear the shots, but I saw a spark of misplaced flame from the trees--a muzzle flash in the darkness--and aimed and fired, using the power of the Earth to guide my shot to its target.
I sensed the shock of the bullet's impact through bone, brain, and out the other side as my shot found its home, and then I took another moment to study the scene more carefully. He seemed to have been the only remaining gunman, or the one assigned to prevent reinforcements from arriving; no one else fired on me.
But I felt a harsh ripple on the aetheric, and turned toward it just as I saw the trees bending, whipping, and cracking. Something was coming for me, coming fast, and it was big. Very big.
I glimpsed something dark, but it wasn't an animal; the power driving it felt alien at its core, cold and lifeless. Void. Someone was driving a moving sphere of void through the forest, devouring all it touched, and it was heading straight for me.
I couldn't fight that, and it was too late to run. I got up to my feet, took three long steps, and prepared myself. There was a dead tree trunk lying at an angle nearby, and I ran for it, up its incline, and on the last step channeled power into my legs and jumped.
The black sphere charged through the space where I'd been while I hung at the apogee of my
jump, fifty feet overhead, and then landed crouched on the branch of a tree above. It hesitated, circling, and then zipped off in a different direction. It had found another target, and I heard someone scream.
It was quickly cut off.
From this vantage, with the treetop aflame above me, I could see the devastation wrought on the Wardens' stronghold. The attack had shredded the metal fencing around the building, but it was the building itself that had sustained the most damage--concrete walls shattered, wood burned away, and now almost every part of the interior seemed to be burning with a white-hot intensity that was at odds with a normal blaze. It was being fed by a Fire Warden of abnormal power and concentration ... one of Pearl's, I imagined. I could feel the dark shimmer of her power in the air, though I couldn't locate her presence.
Evidently her adept that was managing the Void was less well equipped, because after several moments the black sphere faltered, smashed through a few more unlucky trees, then abruptly shrank to a pinpoint and vanished with an implosive pop louder even than the roar of the fire. I jumped down from the tree and began hunting for the rest of Pearl's attacking force.
Instead, I saw a Warden--one I recognized, though I didn't know her name--waving at me frantically as she rose from behind the cover of some bushes and dropped what must have been a very, very good veil. I raced to her, keeping low, and as I ducked behind the brush I saw that she wasn't alone--she had dozens with her, including most of the other Wardens. Almost all of them were injured or exhausted from the fight. "Thank God," she said. She was holding a bloody bandage to her side, and offered me a real, though tense, smile of welcome. "I'm Gayle."
I nodded, scanning the weary faces. "Where are the rest?" There were too few children, and no sign of Luis and Ibby. Gayle's smile faded, and she looked back at the burning inferno of the school.
"I'm sorry," she said. "We couldn't reach them. Marion, Janice, Luis, Shasa, Ben--at least five of the kids. We tried, but we were under attack. We had to save those we could reach. I'm so sorry."
I shouldn't have blamed them for that, but in that moment I felt a surge of pure hatred nevertheless. You left them to die. Gayle must have known that, must have seen it burning in my eyes, but to her credit, she didn't back away. Maybe she was simply too tired, and too badly wounded.