A black corner was a Warden term for one of the burned-out areas of the world, where such an explosion of power had taken place that it destroyed the aetheric, and prevented Djinn from accessing their power. Djinn stranded in one of those areas would starve to death, slowly or quickly. Most black corners were small, isolated areas; even an injured Djinn could crawl out before permanent damage was done. But out on the ocean, when the aetheric was so ripped and bloodied… they might not survive. Any of them. They were New Djinn, most of them, but there was one.… “Venna,” I said aloud, and felt a surge of dread. “Is Venna—?”
“She’s sick,” he said. “Very sick.”
“No.” I said it softly, and almost involuntarily. Venna was a True Djinn, like me; she was ancient and incredibly powerful. I’d been puzzled by her recent affiliation with humans, but then, she’d always been intrigued by the strangest things. “Not Venna.” The loss of someone such as she would bring down the heavens, I thought.
What hurt more was the realization that I hadn’t felt her distress. Venna and I had links that went back farther than the human race, and yet… yet I felt nothing of her danger, or pain.
Lewis sighed. “Get to the point, Cassiel.”
I gulped back my pain, my shock, and focused hard to say, “Pearl. The enemy I’ve been fighting. She’s become very powerful, and now she will approach the Wardens, offer to fight by their side. You must not take her offer, Lewis.”
“Is it a trap? Is she going to not fight on our side?”
“No—she will. She must. She needs humanity to live, for now, until she achieves her ultimate goal… but then she’ll turn on the Wardens, destroy you all. When she no longer needs them, she’ll kill the rest of humanity as well.”
He was silent a long time, long enough that I feared the connection lost, but then Lewis said, “Good to know. Thanks, Cass. We should make landfall in a few days, but meanwhile, I need every Warden out there to fight, understand? Don’t give up. Shield all that you can.”
“You must promise me that you won’t accept any help from her!”
“How can I?” Lewis sounded—not himself. That was a cry of bleak despair, and the words that followed were just as dark. “I had twenty-five thousand Wardens when I started, to protect almost seven billion people. Know how many I have now? It’s tough to get a real count, but I was down to about ten thousand, and now—now it’s maybe half that. The Djinn are either dying or puppets for Mother Earth. We’ve got nothing. You expect me to throw back the only possible ally we have?”
“She’ll kill you,” I said softly. “She’ll kill you all.”
“Listen to yourself,” he replied. “Even after all this time, you can’t think of yourself as one of us.”
He hung up the call, and I sank back in the seat, feeling weary and utterly defeated. Luis silently put the phone away and concentrated on driving for a while.
“Well,” he finally said, “at least you warned him. But I’ve got to be honest: He’s right. He’s got to pick the lesser of two evils right now.”
“Pearl isn’t the lesser. She only appears to be, from the Wardens’ perspective right now.”
“Yeah, well, you can argue it when we see him.” He yawned, shook himself out of it, and said, “We can’t keep this up. We’re burning power every time we turn around, and it’s going to wear us down, Cass. We haven’t even made it to an actual fight yet, and already I’m drained. So are you.” He checked his watch and the fuel gauge. “We’ve got at least another eight to ten hours before we get to Seattle, and that’s if the roads hold out and we don’t run into trouble, which we damn sure will.”
“And your point…?”
“We need rest. We need to figure out what to do with Pearl Junior there, because you can’t keep her unconscious from now until this all shakes out, and having her at our backs is the definition of a bad idea.”
“What are you saying?” I half turned in the seat now, staring at him.
“I’m saying that we’ve got the hell beat out of us more than we can handle already, and we’re going to have to handle a lot more. We need to refuel, recharge, get ready. Going in drained means we ain’t helping anybody.”
“They’ll bring the fight to us!”
“Maybe,” Luis said. “But out here, away from the cities, it’s still quiet. And we’re stopping to rest before we do something stupid, because we’re too tired to think straight.”
He took his foot off the gas.
I flooded power through the metal, and the engine growled deep. The truck lunged forward, inciting a chorus of yelped protests from the others. I held Luis’s stare with mine, and then said quietly, “Watch the road. We’re not stopping. We cannot stop. There’s no more rest, no more time. Do you understand?”
“You’re crazy. We’re human, not Djinn. We can’t just— Let go of the pedal, Cass.”
I said nothing. There was something in my stare that made him go quiet in the end, and he faced forward.
We kept driving.
Thirty minutes later, we slowed for the first signs of trouble—a tangle of wreckage in the middle of the road. Luis stopped the truck, and we both went to examine the damage. It had been a car once, but there was nothing left of it now to identify it as such, save one mangled tire still visible. From the fluids leaking from the crushed object, there had been occupants. They were beyond saving.
“Any idea what did that?” Luis asked me. I shook my head, but that was a lie. There was no damage to the close-crowding trees on either side of the road, which argued against an attack by weather; I could visualize a Djinn easily compacting the vehicle with careless blows, driving the metal in on the occupants. But why this car? Why…
I found a severed hand by the side of the road, a perfectly undamaged specimen sheared cleanly by some incredible force. It was a woman’s hand, with manicured fingernails that had seen better days, and a great deal of recent abuse.
In the palm, when I checked it in Oversight, there shimmered the ghost of a stylized sun—the identification of a Warden. I looked at the crushed car, startled, and the agony and violence that bloomed on the aetheric made me shudder. A Djinn had done this. A powerful, furious, mad Djinn.
Because they were Wardens, headed—as we were—to battle.
“Luis,” I said softly.
“I know,” he said.
“Wardens.”
“I know. Get in the damn truck, now.”
We ran for it, but I slowed as I felt the aetheric bending around us. Something had just arrived. The hot, intangible rush of power blasted through me, and left me scorched and trembling inside.
I stopped and turned to face it. Luis made it to the door of the truck, but turned as well. I heard him whisper, softly, “Madre de Dios.”
A Djinn was standing in the road, blocking our path. He was the size of a man, but he was not anything like one, really; the form was correct, but his skin was a deep violet-indigo, his eyes blazed silver, and there was an aura around him that was visible even in the human world—power, madness, rage.
Rashid. He’d recovered far faster from Esmeralda’s bite than any of us really had expected, and he was still under the control of the Mother. At least I believed he was.
Like Priya, he had no choice in what he’d been sent to do.
“Cass?” Luis said. “What do you want to do?”
“Get in,” I said. “I’ll keep him busy.”