Unbroken

“Tell me we ran out of gas,” Luis said.

“No,” I replied. “It’s not a mechanical problem. Get ready. Something’s coming for us.”

We had just gotten off the motorcycle when the Mustang’s doors opened, and Joanne and David joined us; the Djinn in the driver’s seat didn’t move. He simply sat like a lifeless mannequin—as I supposed he was, unless Whitney decided it was necessary to move him. Each of them had canvas bags in the backseat of the car; Joanne dragged hers out and unzipped it. She pulled out a shotgun, loaded it with neat efficiency, and tossed it toward David, who fielded it effortlessly.

“I didn’t think you needed weapons,” I said to him. He looked up and gave me a fleeting smile.

“That depends on what’s coming,” he said. “And I never turn down an advantage. Not these days.”

Joanne was loading the semiautomatic pistol when I felt something stirring around us, a surge of Earth power that made me draw in a sharp breath of warning—but it was already too late.

Joanne must have had an instant’s warning, because she fell backward as a truly enormous eagle dropped out of the darkness overhead and extended its claws to rake her face. Light blazed out from a lantern that appeared in David’s hand, and I saw the eagle beat its wings and correct it course to strike at her again. She rolled out of the way. David tracked it with the shotgun, but didn’t fire.

I stepped in, focused all my attention, all of Luis’s tethered power, on the eagle, and called it to me. It was a wild creature, and there was no malice in it, only fear and hunger twisted by the will of another out there in the darkness. It did not deserve to be used this way; the bird was a thing of terrible beauty, and I would not have it hurt.

It glided toward me, but at the last moment the power out there in the desert ripped at its mind, forced it to see me as a dangerous enemy, and the eagle shrieked out its rage and aborted its landing to rake claws across my chest. It caught leather instead of flesh, and sliced it cleanly apart as it wheeled and fled…

… Toward a sky full of hunting birds, all coming together in an unnatural mixed-breed flock to circle overhead.

Luis turned his attention not up, but out. “We’ve got more trouble,” he said.

“More birds?” Joanne asked as she climbed to her feet and dusted herself off. “Jesus, I used to like them.”

I shook my head. “Not just birds. What’s coming is far more than that. They will catch us. We have to run now. No time for the vehicles.”

Joanne raised the pistol she’d held on to. “We’re armed.”

I felt myself grin, humorlessly. “Humans and guns. Do you have enough bullets for every living thing that survives in the desert? We have to run. We have no choice.”

“We can’t make it all the way into Vegas,” David said. “They’re coming fast, and in waves. There’s some kind of motel down the hill. We can make it there and hold them off.”

“Maybe you can, but I damn sure can’t run fast enough,” Luis said. He sounded worried. “Cass—”

“I know,” I said. “The car can coast down. I can handle the motorcycle.”

“Those birds are going to dive on you.”

“Perhaps, but I’m not leaving the motorcycle.” I shrugged. “I like it.”

He gave me a look that said I was insane—as perhaps I was—and got into the car with Joanne and David. Whatever Djinn force was animating the vehicle gave it a push, and the Mustang picked up rolling speed as the grade steepened. I had a more difficult time of it, balancing the motorcycle without the forward thrust, but I managed. We glided in a hiss of tires down the winding hill, and above us birds screamed. I heard the constant beat of wings. I kept a vigilant watch on them, waiting for an attack, but curiously, none came.

Not yet.

I’d expected the refuge David mentioned to be easily visible, but I was surprised.… It was dark against the hills, and it loomed up suddenly, with an unsettlingly barren aspect to it. The building was large, multi-story, and utterly deserted, with a smoke-blackened plaster exterior; and there had been a halfhearted attempt to board up a few of the broken windows, but it was clear that no one was interested in the place any longer. I supposed that at the edge of the end of the world, securing an abandoned hotel in hopes of later renovation might not have been anyone’s largest priority.

It would have been better to continue, but ahead I saw the Mustang was slowing… and then, with a greasy gray puff of smoke, one tire blew out, and then another. It hobbled on for a few dozen more feet, loose rubber flapping loudly, and then there was a surge of power through the aetheric, and the tires reinflated. The Djinn, repairing the damage.

Then the tires blew out again—all four this time, and more decisively.

The car drifted to a stop, metal grinding noisily on asphalt as the rubber shredded away, macerated between stone and steel.

Luis got out of the car, as did the lithe form of David; I watched them move the limp form of what had been the Djinn driver out of the way, and Joanne took his place behind the wheel. Odd that it would take both a Djinn and a Warden to push a car; David ought to have been able to move it with a thought, even without tires easing the process.

Instead, they seemed to be working very hard at pushing the bumper of the car. It went only a few feet, and then Luis stumbled, and…

… And the car’s wheels sank into the road, as if into heavy mud. Luis was also trapped. David pulled him out, but not without difficulty.

I abandoned the bike, which was too heavy to maneuver without power, and ran for Joanne’s side of the car, which was already sunken too deeply for her to open the door. I reached in the window and grabbed her. Pulling her out and carrying her was no easy matter; she was tall and not excessively thin, and the road was attempting to suck me down with all its might. I focused all my earth-derived powers to try to hold it back, and managed—just barely—to stumble my way through the black muck and make it to the harder gravel on the roadway.

Something was very wrong here.

I tried automatically to shift my vision into the aetheric spectrums, and suddenly felt claustrophobic, not free… because it was as if night had fallen there on the aetheric plane, where there was not, had never been, true darkness. I saw David stumble and fall, and I understood why; no Djinn could function with that crippling shock. Even human as I was now, I felt the impact of it, the horror. It was utterly, completely wrong.

I knew something cruel and terrible was happening, something potentially fatal for us all, and the fear sharpened as I heard David whisper to Joanne, “Kill him.”

Luis was the only other male present, and he held up both hands in surrender as Joanne looked at him with dark, almost feral eyes. “He’s not talking about me! I’m not doing it!”

I realized it in the same moment that Joanne did. “The Djinn who was driving your car,” I said.

“He wasn’t a Djinn,” she said. “He was just a shell. Burned out. No will of his own… an avatar…”

“Not anymore,” I said. “Something’s filled him. Something else.”

“Who, the devil?” Rocha asked. “’Cause this doesn’t feel so great, and I can’t see a thing on the aetheric. Cass?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Careful. I hear wings.”

We had only that single second before the eagle attacked again—not me this time, but Luis. He raised his right arm instinctively to protect his eyes, and I saw the claws sink in and rip free in bloody sprays. It clawed the arm aside, and snapped for his eyes.

I lunged for it. The aetheric might have gone blind, but there was still power in the earth around us, and I poured it into the feathered, strong body of the bird as I touched it and drew it close to my chest. “Hush,” I whispered to it, and stroked its beautiful, glossy feathers as sleep took hold. “Hush, I won’t hurt you, child of the skies.” I pulled off the backpack and put it aside. My leather jacket, even shredded down the front, made an effective restraint when I stripped it off and tied the sleeves around the sleeping bird; it wouldn’t keep him trapped long once he woke, but it seemed safer for him than leaving him unprotected and limp. I put him down carefully and said, “We need shelter. There were more on the way.…” I paused, because my motorcycle, which I’d carefully parked off the road, tipped over with a sudden crash, and began sinking into the softened asphalt. I couldn’t completely abandon it, poor thing, any more than I could the eagle; I grabbed the handlebar and levered it back upright, slimed with melted road tar, and wheeled it out into the dense sand. It was likely no better, but at least it