Unbroken

And it lasted until Rahel suddenly swiveled her head sharply, at an utterly inhuman angle, to stare toward the showers. David came to his feet in a fluid and boneless motion, and I felt it, too, a power moving through the air around us, something hot and feral and living.

And aware of us.

David turned to Luis and me, and pointed. His eyes were blazing gold. “Stay here!” he ordered us, and he vanished in a blur, heading toward the showers.

“I don’t take your orders,” I said, and stood up; it was entirely possible that Joanne needed more help than David, in his currently weakened state, could offer.

Rahel flashed across the distance between us, and before I could blink, was standing in my way with one taloned hand extended to me.

The pointed, razor-sharp ends of her nails were embedded, ever so shallowly, in my skin, just over my heart. “You should take his orders,” she said, and narrowed her eyes as she smiled. “David’s remarkably good at what he does when it comes to her safety, and he’s far better suited to deal with this. So you just stay still like a good little human, Cassiel.”

I drew in breath to order her away, and she casually reached out her other hand to lay a slender finger across my lips.

My voice locked in my throat. She took the finger away to waggle it mockingly in my face. “Ah, ah, ah,” she said. “No cheating and ordering me to let you pass, mistress. I’ve been at this game a lot longer than you. If I don’t want to do something, you can’t make me. You’re not human enough to surprise me. You’re Djinn at heart, and I know how you think.”

Luis stood up. I expected him to come to my defense, but instead he walked over to the chair where David had been sitting. Rahel glanced at him, then back to me. As long as I had her bottle, what he did was of little consequence to her…

… Until he picked up the shotgun David had dropped beside the chair, racked the slide, and pointed it directly at Rahel’s head. “How about me?” he asked her. “Do I surprise you? Let her go. Now.”

Before Rahel could respond—either to attack him, or release me, and I knew they were equal weight in her at that moment—there was the explosive crack of a gunshot from the other room, and it was as if that single shot had cracked a black glass jar that had been pressing down over all of us. The thick pressure shattered, though the release carried with it a stinging whip crack of power that woke a red pain behind my eyes. Rahel staggered, and then her eyes widened. She released me instantly, pulled her claws back, and turned toward the bathroom as if my interference no longer mattered at all.

Joanne came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, hair wet and pressed in dripping strings around her face. Her expression was blank, but there was a terrible distance in her eyes as David led her along with a hand on her arm. He eased her down in the chair.

She was still holding a pistol in her hand. He took it from her and placed it aside, then brushed his fingertips over her forehead, trailing them down across her face, her parted lips.

She slipped into a deep, gentle sleep. David sat back on his heels with a sigh and looked at the three of us. He focused on the shotgun, then Luis’s face, and Luis cleared his throat and raised the shotgun to rest against his shoulder in a safe carry position.

“What happened?” Luis asked.

“The avatar, the empty one,” David said. “Whoever is after us, they were using it to source the aetheric block around us. It—came after Jo. We had to be sure it wouldn’t happen again.”

“So you killed it,” Rahel said. I couldn’t tell, from the way she said it, whether that was praise or blame.

Perhaps David didn’t know, either. He shook his head and settled against the wall, tense and fluid, eyes penny-bright. “Not me,” he said. “Watch the lobby. They’ll be coming soon enough, now that they know they can’t cut us off from the aetheric any longer. You two should rest while you can.” That last was directed at Luis and me.

“The avatar,” I said. “It was an empty shell?”

“It was a Djinn once,” he said. “You know him. Go and look.”

I stared at him for a moment, frowning, and then nodded. I walked past Luis, who was now sitting again on the couch; he started to rise to go with me, but I gestured for him to stay.

This I needed to do for myself.

The body of the avatar lay limp on the wet floor tiles. Its eyes were open, but entirely dead black now. It was just flesh, real down to the circulatory system, and blood ran sluggishly down the tile crevices toward the drain, but it was leakage, not true bleeding. One had to be alive to bleed.

I crouched down, staring at his face. It seemed familiar, and I took each of the features individually, trying to place him. Djinn could, and did, change appearance, but for some reason once we settled on a human form, we didn’t often shift out of it and into another. It became part of our self-image, I supposed. My memory was long, but human faces had never formed much of a meaning for me.…

And then I knew.

He was one of my brothers, a True Djinn.

The memory came back to me, shockingly painful. His name was Xarus, and unlike me, he’d always been fascinated by humans. He’d walked in human flesh often, formed friendships, attachments. I’d always thought him peculiar, and weak.

Years ago, he’d been pulled apart on the aetheric—a natural accident, one of the few that could claim the life and soul of a Djinn. Had he not been trying to save others, humans, he could have saved himself, but he made the choice to destroy his immortal existence for the sake of a handful of fragile, temporary creatures.

And I had hated him for that. I’d hated the memory of him still more when I’d discovered that his flesh shell still lived and breathed. Jonathan, then the leader of the Djinn, had decreed that the flesh of Xarus, the avatar, be spared. I hadn’t known why, but perhaps Jonathan had known something. He often did, annoyingly. He’d had a gift for foresight that had bettered anyone’s, even Ashan’s.

Why, now, did I feel Xarus’s loss at last, seeing his lifeless body reduced to meat? Why did it matter?

I put my hand on his cheek. It felt like human flesh. It was human flesh, Xarus’s flesh, crafted like mine from the deepest instincts, the desires none of us ever acknowledged to be mortal, to know what their brief and bright lives were like…

It was the last of something that had been born immortal, and now it was gone.

I sat in the dark silence, with his blood crawling slowly toward the drain, and I grieved in ways that I never had, for one of my own lost. I’d felt anger before; I’d felt betrayal, and sometimes, loss.

But never emptiness. Never the raw knowledge of caring in the way that humans cared for each other, and missed each other.

And the ironic thing was that he’d been gone for almost a thousand years, and I’d never really liked him in the first place.

When I returned to the outer room, Luis was asleep. So was Joanne. David and I said nothing to each other, but he knew, and in a way, that eased my pain a little; I had more in common with him than I’d ever fully realized. More in common with all of them.

David was right. I needed to rest.

I couldn’t sleep.

Instead of resting, although I was tired, I found myself pacing in the narrow confines of the common room as Luis and Joanne sprawled and dreamed on the couches. There was something nagging at me, something beyond my grief and worry, or even the anticipation of a fight to come. There was something we had missed. Were missing. It ticked in the back of my mind like a bomb, and as the humans slept, as David and Rahel kept a silent and vigilant watch, I struggled to understand what it was that bothered me so much.…

Joanne woke, and David moved to speak with her in a low voice. She was upset; bad dreams, perhaps. I paid no attention. I admired her survival skills, but not her emotional instability.

“We should go,” I said to Rahel, who was still silent and vigilant at her post. Unlike a human, she didn’t feel