Unbroken

instinctive nausea and horror at what we were seeing. As a human, it was disconcerting enough, but as an Earth Warden, feeling the utter vileness of what had been done… That was what drove him back, sent him reeling and gagging.

And it was what I was fighting, silently, as well.

There were at least four of the chimera in view now; one had a bear’s head clumsily balanced atop a mountain lion’s strong, sinuous body, but there were extra, armored legs erupting from the lion’s sides, and a segmented tail with a vicious stinger curving out from the back and overhead. Nauseating and fierce, and mad.

“This isn’t the Mother,” Joanne said. She was standing with me, looking over, holding her long, dark hair back as the breeze batted at us. She was pale and grim, but not as revolted as Luis was, or I felt. “It can’t be her doing this.”

And it wasn’t. I’d worried at that last night, paced, tried to shake sense out of what the avatar had been doing… and now, finally, it clicked together. This was what the avatar had been doing, under the cover of darkness, shielded from the eyes of the Djinn and even from the Mother. No, not the avatar; the avatar was only a flesh puppet, a conduit for another’s power. And I knew now, looking at these things, who had wielded that power.

“It’s Pearl,” I said. “She’s after me.”

Joanne laughed humorlessly. “Wow. It’s all about you, isn’t it?”

“This time, I believe it is—”

“Watch it,” she warned, and pulled me a step back. There were wolves circling below, too, weaving around the chimeras; they were leaping up, trying to make the jump to where we were. So far, they were unable to do so, but there was no reason to encourage them.

“Yeah, that’s not the worst. Heads up,” Luis said, and pointed up. I moved my head back, and saw a black circle of birds above us, wheeling in the warming air. The first rays of dawn gilded their wings with gold. “We need a shield, now!” He’d sensed something that I’d missed, but I saw it now… the birds shifted, no longer circling, but dropping.

Heading straight for us. I reached out and diverted some of the birds, but it was difficult; they were maddened, like the chimera below, driven beyond their own instincts by the torment that Pearl had inflicted on them. Death would be, for them, merciful.

But I couldn’t destroy them. Birds were, for me, the most beautiful of nature’s creatures… free and fierce. I felt Joanne raise a shield of hardened air above us, and flinched as the first of the birds hit. She’d tried to make it less apt to be fatal, but Pearl’s attack drove them mercilessly into the barrier, waves of them, snapping their fragile bones, painting the sky with their blood.

Tears welled in my eyes at the sight. This was for my benefit, mine alone; Pearl knew me, and she knew what would hurt me. These creatures were dying for no better purpose than to anger me.

The mesmerizing horror of the suicidal assault had distracted us from the other issues, but luckily David and Rahel had been on guard; now I heard the rip of metal and saw David throwing a large metal dish toward the edge of the roof, where one of the chimeras had clawed its way up. It knocked that one over, but the next one’s venomous stinger tail was already visible in another corner.

“Great,” Luis said, resigned. “They climb. Yeah, of course they do, because it’d be too fucking easy if they’d stay on the ground.” He readied a fireball in his hands, the burning plasma lighting up his face from below and making dark hollows of his eyes. He wasn’t the only one turning to fire; Joanne also had pulled on that power, and as I glanced her way I saw her throw with a strong pitcher’s follow- through.

Her fireball exploded against the chimera as it landed on the roof and roared at us in an eerie mix of bear and lion… and then shrieked in a high, chittering voice as the fireball set it aflame. Joanne threw an airburst against it, blowing it in a burning arc off the corner of the roof, screaming all the way.

The screaming continued, and I knew without looking that the other creatures had attacked it. Pearl’s nature was nothing if not savage.

“More are coming,” Rahel said. “I suggest you plan an escape.” She didn’t seem her normally remote self just now; it seemed the situation was dire enough that she actually cared. That was… alarming. Escape seemed a remote possibility. We had no car now, and my motorcycle—providing it had survived the night—wouldn’t be any defense against the kind of creatures Pearl had at her disposal; she was summoning more birds for another suicidal strike, and the chimeras out there could easily rip us apart. I had no idea how fast they could run, and I wasn’t tempted to find out.

There were three humans at risk, counting me; the two Djinn were in no danger. They could escape into the aetheric at any time. But not with us. Neither Rahel nor David had the particular, peculiar skill of keeping a human alive while moving through that realm, or they’d have already begun removing us to safety.

If they had to evacuate us another way, it would take time.

“We need to release another Djinn,” I said, and took off my pack. I pulled out the padding and carefully unrolled it, layer after layer. The first six bottles had shattered, and three more were cracked and useless—a cracked bottle could not hold a Djinn. There had been ten bottles, and only the two that had been wrapped in the center were still intact.

And open. David’s, and Rahel’s. I felt an icy chill, because those Djinn who’d been imprisoned were now free—free to turn on us, to seek revenge against us. But at the moment, at least, it seemed the Mother had gathered back her children to her side. There was no guarantee at all that she wouldn’t send them at us again soon, but for now, all that mattered was that they were no longer an asset to us. Only a potential, and deadly, liability.

I checked the last bottle, the one we’d separated out so carefully—Venna’s bottle. It, at least, was intact, but she’d be of no help at all to us as an Ifrit, a twisted and blackened shadow of a Djinn. Releasing her meant only that Rahel and David would be damaged, or killed, as she blindly sought to replace her lost power with theirs. She’d cause chaos, but nothing more.

Joanne, without comment, took it from me and put it in her pocket.

I’d failed, utterly failed, in what Joanne had entrusted me to do—carry the captive Djinn safely to the Wardens. I felt a burst of hot fury at Rahel, but she’d done nothing except what came naturally to a Djinn; she’d struck out at her captor. It was an almost irresistible urge for her.

Joanne took a deep breath and said, “Rahel, take Rocha. David, take Cassiel. Get them out of here. Take them all the way to Vegas if you have to. David, you can come back for me. I can hold out here until you return.”

It was a surprisingly logical choice, because Baldwin had all three powers at her disposal—Earth, Fire, and Weather—while Luis and I had only two, and Fire was his weaker gift. More than that, Joanne had been tested in battle many times, and Luis and I were relatively new at the combat aspect of fighting the forces of nature in this particular way.

But I worried. I didn’t fancy even Joanne’s chances against Pearl, here where she so clearly had taken the time to prepare her battlefield, build her soldiers, and was intent on not just killing, but devouring.

David was staring intensely at his lover, his wife, the mother of his future child, which I supposed he also knew. “Don’t die,” he said flatly. “Promise me.”

It seemed a cold sort of good-bye, but only in words; what passed in looks between them was much different. They kissed, and whispered together for a few seconds, and then before I was quite ready, David turned toward me. There was a blind anger in him—not toward me in particular, but directed at the situation, at the necessity that tore him away from the woman he loved now, of all moments.

Before I could change my mind, his burning-hot arms had fastened around me, and the building, the chimera, Joanne, all of it was falling away beneath my feet in a shocking burst of acceleration that drove the blood down in my body, sending me into a weakened, gray-haze state for a few breaths until I was able to get my bearings again. David, with me as his helpless passenger, blurred through the cloud of birds, startling them out of formation, and the air grew icy around us before he steadied himself and thought to extend some heat—and breathable air—around me.

We were thousands of feet in the air, moving fast in the frozen blue. He’d gone high to avoid the creatures Pearl had sent for us, but now he began his descent in a steep, hurtling arc that whipped my clothes and hair into a frenzy around my skin.