It was very still.
I leaped off the Victory while it was still in motion, letting it slide to a stop as I ran to the body’s side. I turned it over.
Luis.
His eyes were tightly shut, his hands fisted, but as I touched him the flames snuffed out into surly little curls of smoke, and he drew in a deep breath.
His clothes were burned, but as I frantically checked him I realized that the skin beneath was unharmed. Reddened, but not seared. He had a broken ulna and two cracked ribs, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed.
“Did my best,” he whispered. “Christ. That hurt.”
I smoothed his wet hair back. He smelled acridly of burned plastic and metal, but he was alive. Improbably, alive.
“Iz,” he said. “Over there. She jumped, with the girl.” He pointed with his unbroken arm. I kissed him quickly and rose to move in that direction.
The trees there were broken, snapped off at the base and laid out in an eerily neat circular pattern, like wheat stalks bent flat by the wind. And in the center of it was Isabel, curled up like an infant.
No sign of the girl at all.
I turned Isabel over. Her eyes were tightly shut, her skin pale, but she was breathing. Improbably, she wasn’t even scorched—not a single mark on her.
She was whispering under her breath. I pulled her into my arms and bent my head closer to make it out.
“—Couldn’t stop her, couldn’t stop her…”
“Isabel,” I said. “Ibby. Ibby!”
Her dark eyes flew open, but they were shockingly ringed by red now, as if every blood vessel in them had exploded with effort. She didn’t seem to see me at all. “Couldn’t stop her,” she whispered. “Mama, I couldn’t—”
“Shhh, Ibby, hush, it’s all right; you’re all right.” It appalled me that she was, in this extreme, calling on her mother, on a mother she’d seen gunned down. “It’s Cassiel. I’m here.”
“Mama,” she wailed, just as she had on that terrible day, and then her arms went around my neck. “Mama, I couldn’t stop her. I tried but she just—”
Me. She wasn’t calling on Angela, on the ghost of her mother who was gone. She was calling me by that name. Me.
My breath left me in a rush, and I held her tightly against me. Breathed in the smell of her hair, kissed her forehead, and felt a sunburst of feeling so large, so overwhelming that I could not even properly call it love. It was more than that. Much more.
“The girl,” Ibby said, whispering now with her head against my shoulder. “It was the girl. I thought she was sleeping, but she woke up and I couldn’t stop her. She was so strong.… It’s my fault.…”
I carried her over to her uncle. “Luis is all right, my love, you see? He’s all right.” I sat her down next to him as he struggled up, and he hugged her with his good arm. “You couldn’t have done more. You saved him, Ibby.”
“Es,” Ibby whispered, and turned her tear-streaked, eerily red-eyed face toward me. “Where’s Es?”
The truck was a blazing inferno, belching black smoke and radiating an intense, crippling heat. I couldn’t see anything within it except the stark bones of steel pillars. If Esmeralda was inside, there was little left of her.
“I’m right here,” Esmeralda said, and I confess, I jumped; she was wrapped around a pine tree, dangling her human half upside down. Her fangs flashed as she laughed. “I’m no fool, Iz. You wanted to pretend that little bitch was safe, so I bailed out on the road and got in the trees to follow. I’m just surprised it took so long for her to try to blow you up, that’s all. I’d have done it way sooner.” She slithered down the trunk of the tree and righted herself to face me. “Hey, why aren’t you dead, anyway? No way you could take down that Djinn.”
“You—you left me?” Isabel said slowly, sitting up. “You just left?”
Esmeralda shrugged and crossed her arms, leaning her upper body against a tree trunk for support while her coils stacked around her. “Yeah, so? You act like a dumbass, you get left. First rule of survival, Iz. So don’t do it again. This ain’t no rescue mission, and you can’t save anybody. Right, Albino Barbie?”
I supposed that was meant for me, but I was watching the disillusionment on Isabel’s face, and it hurt. She’d trusted Esmeralda, formed a partly imaginary bond with the older girl. She hadn’t realized what I’d always known—that Esmeralda’s capacity for devotion, and for love, was severely blunted.
“Indeed,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Not everyone can be saved. But the difference between you and Isabel is that Isabel will try. And that is a virtue, not a vice.”
Esmeralda shot me a murderous look, a rude gesture, and sank sullenly into her coils. “Fine, let her Pollyanna along all you want, but the time’s coming, Djinn bitch. Time’s coming she has to make a choice, and if you get in the way, you’ll get hurt. You know I’m right.”
“You left me,” Isabel said. “You knew it was going to go wrong, and you didn’t even try to help!”
“Girl, look at me. I’ve got no freaky powers now; your Warden friends saw to that.” Esmeralda shrugged. “You wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. Right?”
Isabel turned her face away. Her uncle hugged her closer, but she pulled free and walked toward the burning truck. She extended her hand, and I felt the stirring not just of the air as the fire slowly died, but also on the aetheric. The girl was a massive flare of power. A beacon of light in the dark.
She snuffed out the flames and left a smoking, frighteningly charred wreck in its place. “We have to move it off the road,” she said. “Somebody could crash into it.”
Luis looked at me, and I saw the exhaustion in his face. “Esmeralda,” I said. “Help her.”
“I told you, I ain’t got no—”
“You have strength in your body,” I said. “Use it.”
She glowered, but sullenly shifted her coils, wrapped around the wreck, and began dragging it with a metallic screech off to the side. “It’s still hot,” she complained. “Ow.”
“Big baby,” Isabel observed. “It’s not that hot.”
Esmeralda rattled her tail warningly, and Isabel kicked it and walked back to Luis. “Give me your arm,” she said. When he hesitated, she sighed theatrically. “Tío, you can’t run around with it broken, and it’ll take days for you to heal it yourself. Just let me do it.”
Over her shoulder, I nodded at him. He let her take his hand in hers, and even though I looked away, I felt the astonishing power as it swept through him. Ibby’s gifts were not natural, and she did not yet have the fine and delicate control that Luis possessed, but for sheer force, it rivaled the most powerful Wardens in existence… and, I thought, might even rival a Djinn.
The fact that she’d been forced into that power still woke a sickened feeling within me. Her body would never develop along a natural path, or survive as it should. Pearl was to blame for that—Pearl, and the circumstances we now faced. If you love her, stop her, a whisper inside me said. Take her out of the fight. Protect her.
But I couldn’t. There was no safety in this world, and no protection.
If you were her mother, you’d protect her.
Somehow, that whisper hurt more than anything else. I wanted to fill that aching void in Isabel’s life, but I was as crippled as Esmeralda. As untrustworthy.
I could not disappoint her so badly.
Luis’s bone knitted together cleanly, though he’d have to be careful in lifting for a few days. If only all our troubles could be so easily fixed. “We’ve got a transportation issue,” I said. “I can only carry one on the motorcycle. Esmeralda can go on her own, but—”
“Take Ibby,” Luis said. “I can hike it.”
He couldn’t. He was drained, and it took time for an Earth Warden to fully recover from such profligate efforts as he’d shown the past week. Physically, mentally, and psychically.