Unbroken

To nothing.

Ashan was dead now; whatever plan he’d foreseen for me, it had been false, or it had died along with him. My failure would cancel out all of the great victories won by my friends, my family, by humanity, because I had not been strong enough, fast enough, Djinn enough.

I was doing worse than killing humanity. I was killing the Mother herself, through my failure.

But I could do one last thing right.

I could stop my transformation into the dark angel that Pearl wanted me to become.

I pulled free of Luis and touched his face very gently. “I love you,” I said. It was a good-bye, and he knew it; I saw the shock ripple through him, and the awful resignation in the rigidity of his muscles. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t do this,” he said. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t.”

“Mom?” Isabel took a halting step toward us, then stopped. “Mom, what are you doing?”

“What I have to do.” I said it gently but firmly. “We always knew it would come to an ending, didn’t we?”

She shook her head. “No. I don’t believe in endings. I’m not going to let you—”

Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she collapsed back into Luis’s arms. He’d given her just a touch, a gentle push into the darkness, and now he held her gently in his arms and kissed her forehead. He wasn’t looking at me any longer. “She’s going to win, then,” he said. “You can’t stop her.”

The room was lurid with the cream-and-black of the sphere, now spinning fast, whipping between black and white so fast that it blurred into a smear of gray. The power in the room was like needles in my skin, a burning, stinging rush.

“No,” I said. “I can’t.” She was, I sensed, almost there, almost ready to unleash all that power into the heart of the world.

Almost ready to kill the very soul of our Mother.

And here, at the end, filled with a growing darkness, I felt an unexpected sense of… peace. Of quiet inside me, and in that silence, I heard a voice speak.

Make the choice.

Ashan’s voice, an echo of his imperious tone. He might be gone from the world, but he was still demanding things of me.

I opened my eyes and said, “Esmeralda. I need your help.”

Chapter 13

“I CAN’T DO THIS,” Es said. She was scared—very scared, in fact, uncertain in her newfound humanity. “I don’t know how anymore.”

“You can,” I told her. The darkness inside me was reaching critical stages. Only a moment had passed—a moment that had been taken up by the difficult task of getting Luis to withdraw, with Isabel, to a safe distance, because I couldn’t guarantee what would happen next. “Your venom killed a Djinn. It’ll certainly kill me. And I need to destroy this body, Esmeralda. I can’t leave it, otherwise.”

“But I just got out of being a snake,” she said. “What if I can’t shift back again?”

“You will,” I promised her, and took her hands in mine. “Or it won’t matter.”

“Wow, you are such a cheerleader.”

I smiled. “It’s been interesting knowing you, Esmeralda.”

“Likewise.” She sighed, shook her head, and reached for the Warden powers she’d been so long denied.

And she shifted back into Snake Girl.

When she opened her eyes, they were reptilian, vertically slitted, veined with red and gold… and then she opened her mouth, unhinged her jaw, and the sharp, gleaming daggers of fangs descended and locked in place as she struck in a blur.

Esmeralda’s fangs sank into my neck and shoulder, piercing skin, muscle, bone. Her venom burned like acid as she injected it.

I heard Luis shout—a wordless denial, a rejection of what I was doing, but he didn’t try to stop it. He understood that it wasn’t possible now.

I’m so sorry, I thought. The venom was fast, and fatal, and I felt my blood thicken in my veins. Two beats of my heart. Three. I have loved you all, in my own way. And you are worthy of more than I can give.

My heart tripped, faltered, and gave one last spasmodic pulse before going utterly, finally, completely still.

It hurt. Death hurt.

Ah, I heard a warm, gentle voice say. You’ve chosen. That is good. You have been missed.

It might have been the Mother, or my imagination, or the ghost of Ashan in my dying, fragile human mind.

Equally, it might have been the still, quiet voice of God echoing within me.

I exploded like a star out of my body, shed it like a burst chrysalis, and I wasn’t blackened by the Void. I wasn’t Pearl’s creature.

I was Cassiel, immortal, born of lava and stars, and the Void choked and fell in on itself inside the shell I’d cast off. I was on the aetheric plane now, looking down with the remote interest of a scientist observing laboratory mice. It was hard to believe that the flesh cooling on the floor had encased me, only a few seconds before; shedding humanity had been astonishingly easy, for all that I’d agonized over it.

The freedom, the power, the life was all around me now, coursing like blood, pulsing, intoxicating. Humanity struggled and sweated on the ground, but Djinn rode the currents of the world like eagles. So easy to forget them. To allow it all to slide away in the clean, healing stream.

You have only a moment now. The whisper came in cold, perfect clarity to me, a disturbance of light and shadow, pulse and ebb. It was not a voice, but on the aetheric, it could make itself understood.

The body slithered free of Esmeralda’s coils to fall lifelessly on the cracked concrete. Dead, my mortal flesh looked pallid, blue-white, my green eyes shallow as glass. My lips were parted, as if I had something to tell the world, but that secret would never be uttered.

Esmeralda shrank back into her human form, shivering and fragile, and wiped my blood from her mouth with trembling hands. “I didn’t want to,” she murmured, and sank down on her knees next to me. “I didn’t want to do that. Why did you make me do that?”

Luis carried Isabel back over. She was stirring now, murmuring drowsily in his arms; he put her gently on the ground and took up my failed human body instead, rocking it gently back and forth in the pulsing, inhuman light of Pearl’s sphere…

…Which flared into a sudden, glaring, blinding burst, and exploded into starlight and suns, a universe being born and instantly dying, and out of it walked…

…A goddess.

In the human world, she was a glowing, brilliant creature, gilded in darkness; Luis shielded his eyes and tried to squint between his fingers to see her as she walked toward them, my misfit human family.

He let my body slip back to the ground, and stood up to face her.

Pearl was a vortex of energy here on the aetheric, drawing in currents and creating a lazily spinning wheel on which I drifted. She was opening a portal here, one that stretched through every level of the world, all the way down to the dark, hidden heart of the Mother herself.

As she was walking toward Luis, terrifying and majestic as the storm she had created, he didn’t flinch. Didn’t hesitate.

He attacked.

I felt the violence from where I stood, such a distant and remote observer; he called fire from the liquid