The void inside me was growing fast now, shooting out dark tendrils. There were fewer children fanning out past me to attack the Wardens than there might have been, because of Isabel’s actions, but still enough to kill what was left of the people—and Djinn—on the other side of that door. It was up to me to stop it.
I sent a fierce pulse of energy back through the hands of the children touching me, and one by one they slumped, unconscious. One slid over the ragged, broken edge of the floor into the abyss below, but I didn’t have time to save him, didn’t have any time at all.
“Isabel!” I shouted. “Stop the children out there!”
She headed past me for the door, lithe and quick, and as Pearl stretched out a hand toward her, I got in the way. What hit me felt deceptively light at first, like a shower of water, but almost immediately it began to burn through my clothing, and open raw bloody holes in my skin. Acid. I coughed and gagged on the burning smell of it. A Weather Warden might have been able to wash it away, but as an Earth Warden all I could do was slowly change the composition of the acid into an inert form, and that took time.
The wounds it left me with were impossible to heal, and I had no time left, because lightning sizzled now from Pearl’s fingers. I twisted in midair to avoid the strike; it blew apart an antique sofa pushed against the wall, and part of the wall behind it. A burning masterpiece of art slipped off its hook and toppled to the carpet, and I rolled forward and for the first time, touched Pearl’s body, in the flesh.
It was cold. Ice cold. And where my fingers gripped, I saw white creeping into my skin, turning it the pallid consistency of rubber.
I pulled, but my hand had gone numb, and slid harmlessly off her skin. It felt… dead. Wholly and completely dead.
My metallic left hand was still functioning. I grabbed the bottle out of my pocket and flipped the cork free with my thumb. “Rashid!” I shouted. “Take the children away from here! All of them you can! Now!”
“I can’t touch the blackened ones,” he said, but it was in passing; he was already moving, and he grabbed a boy who was lunging for me with a knife in his hand. The child was only seven or eight years old, and burning hot from the unnatural forces of powers inside him; as Rashid pulled him back, the boy simply made the blade of the knife lengthen. The steel leaped across the open space between us, and the needle-thin tip stabbed an inch into my chest before Rashid could snap it and yank it free. He gave me a wordless look of alarm before he grabbed the fighting boy, then an armload of others, and with a single word of power left them limp and sleeping.
It would take time for him to get them all.
I heard Isabel out in the other room yelling at the Wardens. “Don’t let them touch you! Kill them if you have to!”
“But they’re just kids!” someone protested, and then the chaos intensified out there. The Void children could kill with a touch, pull away energy in a roaring flood. Where that energy went was a mystery; it seemed to tumble through them and off into the dark. They were no more than child-sized holes punched in the world.
Isabel was right. They had to be stopped by any means necessary.
And so did I, now.
I could feel that heavy pull inside me, like a black hole forming in the pit of my stomach. The drain was small at first, but it was growing, throwing its spiral arms wider and wider with each increasingly fast spin. I had moments left, if that, before I became as empty and as dangerous as these children.
Or worse. Chrysalis, Pearl had called me. A vessel for something else. Something greater.
Her dark angel.
No. That was not my fate. I was not going to watch this world burn, and everything fail, and see Pearl rise as the new Mother. I was not going to stand at her side, her creature, to pollute and torture and destroy what remained in the ashes.
I would not preside over the death of the human race.
Rashid had taken away many of Pearl’s children, but he couldn’t approach the ones armed with Void powers; they were the most dangerous, by far. He misted into view beside me, and dropped a small canvas bag at my feet. It was unzipped, and in it, I could see what looked like a rifle. He grabbed the weapon and tossed it to me; I caught it, surprised, and said, “I can’t shoot them!”
“Darts,” he said. “From the zoo. An entire bag.” He gave me a scary, wild smile, and winked, and I felt the same surge of hope and exhilaration as I put the stock of the gun to my shoulder, sighted, and pulled the trigger on the nearest Void child.
The dart took her in the shoulder, and she gasped in surprise and whirled around, face blank with shock… and then just blank, as the drug raced through her system. She stumbled, lost her balance, and fell.
Isabel ducked back in the door and saw me. “I can’t stop them!” she shouted.
I tossed the rifle, and the bag, to her. “Now you can,” I said. “Go! Stay with Luis! I can handle this here!”
She knew I was lying, she must have, but in this last, desperate moment, she also knew that we had no real choices left. She hesitated one more second, staring into my eyes, and blurted, “I love you, Mom.”
Then she was gone, and I pulled in a deep, trembling breath. There were tears in my eyes. Tears.
“You really love this human child?” Rashid asked me, as if it were a normal day and we were in casual conversation. As if the world weren’t coming apart around us.
“Yes,” I said softly. “Yes, I do. She’s my daughter, in every way that matters.”
Rashid shrugged. “And you used to be so… fierce.”
“I still am.” I swallowed hard, and tasted darkness. “Rashid, the Void children touched me.”
He looked sharply at me, eyes flaring bright silver. “You’re infected?” He took a step back. “Give someone else the bottle. You can’t keep me now. You know that. Your sickness will spread to me.”
“Don’t worry, I have other plans for you,” I said. And I did; a plan had formulated itself somewhere deep inside me, and it was suddenly and brilliantly illuminated like a landing strip in the dark. “I’ll set you free at the proper moment.”
“Do it now!”
“I can’t,” I said… and then a pale pair of arms locked around me from behind, and pulled me backward with irresistible, bone-breaking force.
Pearl.
I tried to summon power and break free, but where she touched me numbness spread—a creeping cold that mirrored the darkness from the Void children that had infected me. My skin, already pale, turned a dead blue-white as infection spread like frost. I couldn’t feel the bottle in my fingers, and as much as I tried to hang on to it, I couldn’t.
Rashid cried out, but he couldn’t help, couldn’t come close to Pearl. And like all trapped Djinn, he couldn’t directly touch the bottle.
It hit the floor, rolled toward the edge of the abyss, and was just tipping over the edge when he summoned a gust of wind that blew it the opposite direction, in a skitter over broken stone to relative safety…
… Until there was a flash of green coils untangling and dropping from overhead on an exposed beam, and Esmeralda reached down and scooped up the bottle.
I had been looking for her. Counting on her, in fact.
“Isabel,” I whispered. I could only just draw the breath to speak, and when I did, my breath misted on the air. “Give it to Isabel. Hurry.”
She laughed, dangling her human half upside down, fangs extended and glistening with venom. “Hell with you,” she said. “I am done with all of you people. I used to be good, really good. But you treat me like everybody else does, like a freak. Not anymore, chica.” She waggled the bottle in front of me as she righted her body in a sinuous twist of coils. “He’s mine now. Mine. Don’t think just because I don’t have Warden powers anymore that I’ve forgotten how to order around a Djinn. Rashid’s my gorgeous personal insurance policy to get the hell out of this in one piece.”