“Cass?” Luis lunged out of the rain. He looked frantic as he dropped to his knees beside the two of us. “What happened?”
“One of Pearl’s,” I said wearily, and almost pitched forward as I lost my balance. Luis’s warm hands grabbed my shoulders, and he pulled me back against him, arms wrapping me in safety. “She’s going to the Wardens to offer her help to them against the Mother. And they’ll accept; they’re bound to. They don’t understand what she is. What she wants.”
“Then we have to tell them,” he said. “She tried to shut you up, right?” He looked down at the small form of the girl. “Cass, did you—”
“She’s alive,” I said, and coughed up a mouthful of dirty water, retching mud up from my stomach in a sudden rush. I didn’t feel better for the purge.
“Well, we can’t just leave her here. She’ll freeze.”
“We can’t take her, either. She’s dangerous.”
But now Isabel was there, too, and she reached out with a cry for the little girl. “What did you do?” she shouted at me, glaring, and I didn’t have the energy or the heart to explain. “You’re always hurting people! Always!”
“Iz, stop, hang on a minute—”
But she avoided Luis’s outstretched hand, picked up the little girl, and carried her off toward shelter. The look she shot me was full of dark fury and distrust.
“Iz!” Luis yelled, but if Isabel could hear him, she didn’t care. He turned his anger on me, instead. “Cassiel, do you have some kind of death wish? You can’t just walk off and have a chat with that evil bitch without backup—you know that! What were you thinking?”
It was as if his frightened, protective anger was contagious, because suddenly irritation inside me sparked into rage, and I shoved free of him and stumbled up to my feet. The rain no longer felt cold; it seemed soothing as it slapped down on my face and hair, soaked into my clothes. I was still shaking, but the chemicals in my body driving it were from a far different source.
“I was thinking that there’s no point!” I shouted back at him, and shook my head so forcefully that spray flew in a mist. “It’s the end, Luis! And there’s no point in being careful now. It’s all risk, and loss, and I can’t—” I ran out of breath, and the anger wasn’t enough to cushion me against the sudden, horrible reality of the losses, and the ones that were to come. “I can’t live through this. There’s no point.”
He felt sorry for me; I could see it. Fool. He didn’t understand, didn’t see what I saw, didn’t understand the gulf that yawned black and hungry beneath our feet. We were rolling down a steep hill into a chasm, and there was no stopping it now. The Mother would destroy us, or we could cling to the false comfort held out by Pearl, and die later, and more horribly.
Ashan had exiled me from the Djinn because I’d refused to kill humanity—a clean masterstroke of strategy that would have destroyed Pearl along with them. His response had been to cast me down into human form, but I had grown to realize, over this time with them, that it hadn’t been punishment so much as another, long-game strategy. I was the miserable hope that Ashan had placed in the center of this, placed to bring about the end of the game if I had the courage… a useless, fragile, broken human. I couldn’t save anyone. I couldn’t even save myself.
Ashan had thought far too much of me. It was all useless, and shattered, and wrong, and the hope and love in Luis’s eyes were tragic now.
I pushed past him and slogged through the clinging mud toward the truck.
Esmeralda was coiled up in a loose tangle of scales and limbs near the back door, looking as drowned and annoyed as I felt. Her tail rattled as I passed her. “Saw you out there,” she said. “Have fun with your hermana?”
“Shut up,” I snapped.
“You can’t let Isabel keep doing that, you know,” she said. “Picking up strays.”
“Like you?”
Esmeralda smiled, but there was a hint of the snake in that smile. “Some strays bite. This one will. You can’t save them all. Got to make sure Iz understands that.”
Esmeralda wasn’t saying anything that I didn’t feel myself, gut-deep, but it offended me that she was echoing my own thoughts. I didn’t want this Djinn-killing sociopath on my side, or in my head.
“Saving children may not be your priority,” I said coolly, “but perhaps it should be ours. Keep away from the girl. She may yet be salvageable.”
“Keep telling yourself that!” she yelled back, as I climbed into the truck’s cab. “She’s going to melt your faces off, and don’t say I didn’t warn you!”
Isabel was already inside, sitting stiffly in the center of the bench seat with the little girl in her arms. She’d wrapped her in the blanket I’d used before, and asleep, the child seemed innocent and heartbreakingly vulnerable. I slammed the door. Isabel edged away from me, putting clear space between us, as Luis got in the driver’s side. I heard the back door slam as Esmeralda took her place.
Nobody spoke at all as we drove away, into the storm.
Luis still had a working cell phone, and charged it using the plug-in port in the truck. His first call, once we were safely out of the heart of the storm and into something more like normal rain, was to the Wardens.
“Crisis Center,” said a sharp male voice on the other end of the line. “Name?”
“Luis Rocha, Earth. Checking in,” he said.
“You mobile and able to take work?”
“Yes,” he said, and gave me a quelling look when I started to speak. “Are they back?”
“They who?”
“The ones who went off on the cruise,” he said. The cruise in question had not actually been a vacation; a large number of the most powerful Wardens had boarded an ocean liner and sailed away from the coast of Florida, trying to prevent a major disaster. So far, there had been no word of their return… but then, we’d been preoccupied.
“Not yet,” the voice said. “They should be docking in a few days, though. We’ve made contact and told them how dire the situation is here. They’re making best possible speed, but it’s up to us to hold until they get here.”
From the stress in the man’s voice, he didn’t think that was very likely. I didn’t hold out much hope, either. Mother Earth, conscious and angry, could destroy much of human civilization in a day, never mind a week. The Wardens remaining wouldn’t be able to stop it, especially with the Djinn co-opted against them.
“I need to speak with Lewis Orwell,” I said. “Now.”
“Who’s this?”
“Cassiel, who was once a Djinn. Put me through.” I had, I thought, learned my humility lessons well; I had at least thought to give some context to my name, instead of presuming that it still held a resonance of power on its own.
“Can’t do that, lady.”
My voice went lower and colder. “Put me through.”
“Warden Rocha, please tell her that—”
“He tells me nothing,” I interrupted. “Put me through to Lewis Orwell now.”
A heavy sigh rattled through the phone, and the unfortunate in the Crisis Center said, “I’ll try. Hold.”
Luis said, “You really think you’re going to get the fucking Lord High Master of the Wardens to chat with you right now? Jesus, Cass, get a grip.”
“If Pearl wants to form an alliance with the Wardens, it will have to be stopped, and he’s the one to stop it,” I said. “He needs to know. Now.”
“Sometimes I think you just don’t get the concept of boss. He’s not going to—”
These was a click, and a different voice, scratchy with distance and a fragile connection, came on. “Orwell,” he said. “And it had better be breaking news, Cassiel.”
“It is,” I said. “You remember why I was cast down.”
“Well, I don’t know if down is very flattering to the rest of us. Cast out might be a better term. But yes, I remember. Ashan wanted you to kill the human race, and you said you wouldn’t. I hope you’re not calling to ask for a thank-you, because we’re just a little busy.” He sounded very grim, far more so than I’d expected. Orwell was one of those perpetually confident men, and yet now… “The Djinn who came with us are dying. Cut off. We’re in a black corner.”