“I—” She was frowning now, and lost, so she quickly went on the attack. “It’s not my problem! I was doing what you wanted. I was getting the stuff out of our way! That’s what Fire Wardens are for, to fix these things!”
“That’s not what Fire Wardens are for, to clean up your messes,” Luis said. “It’s not what Djinn are for, either. And if you wanted to get their attention, you’ve done it. That little display lit up the aetheric like the Fourth of July.”
“So?” Edie challenged. “Let them come get me. I can take them.”
“Who? The Djinn? How many, Edie? One, two, yeah, maybe, because you’ve got a hell of a lot of power. But you can’t take five of them. Or ten. Or twenty. And the rest of us, we won’t be so lucky.”
“So?” she said again, and shrugged. “Not my fault you’re lame. Why should I worry about you?”
“Don’t,” I said to Luis as he opened his mouth again. “You can’t convince her. The best we can do is get on with things, quickly.”
He didn’t like it, and he definitely didn’t like Edie’s attitude, but he nodded. I could see the tensed muscles in his neck and shoulders, but all he did was pull open the door of the van. “Inside,” he said. “Let’s move.”
Edie got in and took her seat next to the very silent boy. He hadn’t done or said a thing the entire time, and that made me feel oddly more afraid of him than of Edie, with all her profligate waste of power.
Luis started the van, and I mounted my motorcycle. Without a word between us, I eased into the lead.
Driving through the burning piles of what had once been a vivid, living forest made for a sobering experience. The death of plants and animals left marks on the aetheric, just as those of humans did; the ghostly image of what this place had once been was worrying, and sad. I couldn’t dwell on it for long; the road rapidly became more hazardous, as I dodged the occasional debris that hadn’t been swept completely out of the way. This was made more difficult by the thick, drifting smoke. My eyes burned from the constant irritation, and my lungs seemed thick and congested as well. I began to cough, but I couldn’t spare much attention from the trail ahead. The road had suffered damage from lightning strikes, and I weaved around the potholes, still smoking from their trauma, as well as the other things the tornado had left in its wake.
I slowed suddenly and stopped. Behind me, Luis hit the brakes fast, leaned out the window, and called, “What is it?”
There was a man lying in the road. He had on a thick blue jacket, blue jeans, hiking boots—typical covering for a day’s trek out in the forest. There was a corona of thick blood on the road around him.
I put the bike on its kickstand and walked to him, then crouched to check his pulse.
He rolled over and smiled at me with shark-sharp teeth, Djinn eyes blazing a milky cold blue, and I knew in that instant that he was going to kill me. I’d fallen for an obvious trap. I hadn’t checked the man in the aetheric, or I’d have seen this was only a shell, not a human with a true aura.
My own fault. It was a bitter thing to carry with me into the dark.
He snapped at me with that razor-edged grin, and without thinking, I lifted up my left forearm and slammed it into his jaws, forcing his head back. He gagged on it, chewing, but that arm wasn’t flesh. It was metal, powered by Djinn engineering and my own Earth power.
It still felt pain, and I couldn’t help the scream that forced its way out—but I didn’t let him pull my arm free of his jaws. Better the metal suffer than my flesh.
“Cass!” Luis was shouting, and I heard him running to me. I’d get him killed, too, for nothing, for a simple lack of foresight.…
And then the boy, Alvin, opened the passenger door and stepped out, and the Djinn who was on the verge of ripping my arm away stopped. All his attention was away from me and on the boy. I pulled my mangled forearm free and scrambled back, and the Djinn didn’t bother to follow. He came to his feet in an unnaturally smooth, boneless motion.
Luis grabbed me and pulled me backward by the collar of my jacket, then yanked me up to my feet. “Get to the van!” he yelled. “I’ve got this!”
He didn’t. Couldn’t. And he must have been aware of that, but Luis was ever the hero. I would never be able to break him of that habit.
It didn’t matter. The boy took a few calm, measured steps toward the Djinn, who was staring at him as if he couldn’t quite comprehend what was facing him. “You should both get back in the van,” Alvin said. “I don’t know what this will do to you.”
Luis seemed undecided, but I was not; I’d seen what Pearl’s Void children could do, and the boy seemed genuinely concerned. Unlike Edie, he wasn’t glorying in his power, or enjoying the confrontation; he seemed very grave, and very focused.
I pushed Luis back to the van, and climbed in with him. My motorcycle gleamed in the road between us and the confrontation that was slowly unfolding, but I had no desire to get out to move it. I loved the bike, but there was no use in dying for it. “We can’t leave him out there alone,” Luis said. “He’s just a kid.”
“No,” I said softly. “Look.” I grabbed Luis’s hand, and took him just a little into the aetheric, where the ghost-forest still loomed around us. The Djinn was a blazing white fire there—unusual because Djinn normally weren’t easily visible to humans on this plane, but he was channeling power directly from the Mother.
Facing him, the boy wasn’t even there. What was there was a kind of howling emptiness, the exact opposite of a human aura; the boy didn’t belong here, in this world. In this plane. There was something inside him that was very far from human.
I fell back into my body, and felt Luis jerk as he fell into his. He turned toward me, lips parted, eyes wider than I’d ever seen them. “What is that?”
“Him,” I said, staring at Alvin. “Or what Pearl made out of him. He’s still there, the boy, but there’s something else in him. Something that isn’t from any plane of existence I know.”
“Demon,” he said. The Wardens were familiar with demons, who could—and did—inhabit Djinn… or Wardens, if the conditions were right. But this wasn’t a demon, either, not in any sense I could explain.
“More,” I said. That was inadequate, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t imagine what had happened to this child, but it must have been truly horrific. She’d taken him specifically to hollow out what made him human, and then fill that hole with something alien and totally, coldly uncaring about our world. I’d never understood that before, what she’d done to the Void children; it was even worse than the violation of the other children, like Isabel, who’d had their powers forced into early and violent bloom.
The boy was a walking bomb.
The Djinn had, perhaps wisely, decided not to attempt a physical assault; instead, he abandoned his human shell and rushed at the boy in a wave of power. A mundane human would have been killed instantly; a Warden would have lasted a little longer, but in the end, the Djinn was too powerful to fight effectively.
The power simply passed into the boy, and… vanished. Gone.
The Djinn shrieked and tried to pull himself back; he managed, at least partially, but as he tried to re-form into a visible body it was plain that what was left was mutilated and badly wounded.
And the boy hadn’t so much as raised a hand.
“You should go,” Alvin said to him. “I really don’t want to hurt you. We just want to get by and save those people. Could you go?” He was astonishingly polite, but also completely unmoved by the torture he’d just inflicted. In his own way, he was dead, I realized. Merely better mannered than an average living person.
The Djinn snarled and attacked—not the boy, but me. I felt the hot, burning premonition of the assault an instant before the power erupted out of the ground below my feet and connected with a snap in the air above.
I was the conduit for the energy of the lightning bolt. And as I had no Weather Warden abilities, there was no chance I would have survived such an experience… except that Edie simply stopped it in midstrike, leaving only a
Alvin shook his head and said, “Okay, then.” He sounded sad, but resigned, and in the next instant a complex net of something that I couldn’t quite see, couldn’t quite understand, emerged from the boy’s slender body. It was like a living thing, something boneless and alien, but still anchored in his power and flesh… and it engulfed the wounded Djinn and simply ate him. No sound, no drama, no flashes or explosions. It was… easy.
I felt utterly, filthily sick, and grabbed for Luis. He seemed just as unsteady as I felt, but the two of us balanced each other. “God,” he breathed, staring at the boy. “My God.”
