I was too exhausted, too weak to think.
The door closed. The guards stayed outside. After a moment, the pinch-faced Earth Warden who’d tormented me stepped out of a curtained alcove at the far end of the room.
“This way,” she said. She had a silver gun in her hand. “If you try anything, I’ll kill you.”
Dying seemed almost inevitable, at this point. I hesitated.
“You want to see the girl, don’t you? Isabel?”
Something terrible was waiting for me in the direction she wished me to go. I knew it. I felt it in every screaming nerve. I could not go through that door.If I did, I would not just die. I would die screaming. I would suffer agonies that I could not begin to imagine, but could feel heavy in the air like poisonous smoke.
She.
The thought brushed across me like a ghost, and I knew it came from my Djinn side, the side that was almost dead now, starved into submission. A mere flutter of resistance.
She waits.
I stared at the Warden without moving. She frowned. “Did you hear me? Move it!”
My eyes rolled back in my head and I collapsed. I didn’t try to cushion my fall, didn’t try to turn my body, and when my head struck the ground, it struck hard enough to crack bone and split skin. Blood began to trickle past my nose across the pristine pearl floor.
“Goddammit,” the Warden sighed. “Just what I needed today—another goddamn epileptic fit.”
She came toward me.
I didn’t move.
She knelt next to me and put her hand on my hot pink hair, feeling for the fracture.
I opened my eyes, bared my teeth, and dislocated my arm to wrap fingers over her wrist. It was a tenuous hold, but she was startled, and in those vital seconds I ripped power from her in great, bloody swatches, stripping her clean of all aetheric energy. She wasn’t as powerful as Luis, but she would serve.
I melted away my chains.
She didn’t even have the ability to scream. I held her silent for it, and stared into her wide, agonized eyes, drinking in her pain.
I let her form a word. Just one. “Please . . .”
“I am Djinn,” I told her softly. “Do you understand? Djinn.And I give you the mercy of the Djinn.”
I sealed her mouth with contemptuous ease by stilling her vocal cords; all she was able to produce was a torturous, hoarse buzzing. I put a knee in her back to hold her down and rifled through her pockets. I took the gun, extra clips of bullets, her identification, and a curious medallion holding a silver key.
Then I put the gun to her head, released her vocal cords enough that she could whisper, and said, “Where is the child Isabel Rocha?”
“You Djinn bitch,” the Warden wept. “You hurt me.”
“And I am not finished,” I promised. “Tell me where to find the child.”
“Fuck you!”
“I’m not attracted to you,” I said. “But if by that you mean you won’t help me, then I have no use for you.”
I sealed her mouth forever by exploding a blood vessel in her brain. Relatively painless, and instantly fatal.
It was better than she deserved.
I dragged her body behind a sofa and covered it in silky furs. The bloodstains came up easily, and then I methodically searched the room for a way out.
There was only one.
The way the Warden wanted me to go.
I transformed the neon yellow jumpsuit and prisoner shoes into soft leather trousers and jacket in light pale pink, with war slashes of black. Heavy riding boots.
I moved the curtain aside, expecting another room . . . but it was a hallway, like a long, curving throat. Slick and featureless. There was no sound.
She knows I’m here,I thought. She’s waiting.My Djinn side refused to say anything, or to give me the name of my fear.
I sensed nothing but cold and ice ahead of me.
I moved on, and as I did, doorways appeared—closed, with no markings. Each felt slightly different beneath my fingers. One was hot enough to blister, even at a brush. One felt damp, and I sensed a vast pressure of water behind it. One was a living grave, rich with the smell of rotting things and the work of scavengers.
What are you looking for, Cassiel? Come. Come ahead.
The voice vibrated in my ears the way Luis’s had done, but it was not Luis. It was not any voice I knew. No, it was everyvoice I knew, Djinn or human, a massive and strange chorus of sound.
I stopped where I was, my hand on a closed door, and felt every nerve shrink with fear.
You killed my servant, killer of Djinn.
“She deserved it,” I said.
The laughter was the laughter of every murderer. Mocking, cold, and free of any trace of a soul. So do you,the voice said. For your crimes, murderer of the eternal.
The nacreous hallway began to close in on me. The pearly layers grew and thickened before my eyes, pushing inward. It would grind me apart. I looked behind and found the way back already closed to me. This structure was the mouth of a hungry predator, and I had no escape but down its throat, the way it wanted me to go. There was something dark and terrible at its heart, waiting to devour.
I took a deep breath and opened the door that stank of earth and rot, and plunged into darkness instead.
If I died here, I would choose my death.
Grave dirt filled my mouth, my nose, my ears. It was heavy and wet on my skin. I knew death intimately, and it tried to push inside me, insistent as a blind worm.
Interesting,the alien voice whispered to me. But you cannot leave me. I know you now. I will have you.
I spat it out and pushed through the dirt, swimming in muck, until I fetched up against a hard surface in the darkness. Nacre. The slick, pearly surface had a living structure to it, like bone. Why? Why have this room of grave dirt?
I had no time for riddles.
I blew the wall apart in an explosion of shards, and the house—if one could call it a house— shrieked.My strike, even as powerful as it was, had only opened a hole the size of a fist. I battered at it, widening it, and the house fought to close its wound even as I struggled to widen it. The instant I paused, it shrank the gash again.
I rained down destruction until the hole was barely wide enough to pass my shoulders, and then wriggled in. This was the most dangerous moment of all; if my concentration faltered, the house would close the gap and chop me in half or amputate a limb. I could sense the Voice screaming, though I had stilled my eardrums and rendered myself effectively deaf. I’d shut off all other senses, too, save sight. I wanted no sensory attacks to distract me at a critical moment.
The nacre had jagged, knife-sharp edges, and it sliced my skin as I crawled and wiggled through the narrow opening. I felt it shift as I hauled myself through, and for a heart-skipping moment I felt the sharp edges press on my thighs enough to draw blood. It wanted to snap shut. I didn’t let it, but it was a very near thing. I hauled my feet free seconds before the nacre mouth snapped closed, gnashing only air.
I was on the white gravel outside of the white house, on the smooth, curving side facing away from the park and the children. I rolled to my feet and began to run, releasing my hold on my senses. I would need every advantage now.
You cannot leave me, Cassiel, killer, destroyer. I have been waiting for you.
This time, the human inhabitants of the compound did not ignore me. I drew shouts, screams, and shots. One bullet grazed my leg, but I dodged the rest, using cover and even the bodies of others. I had little empathy for anyone caught in the cross fire just now. They were only faces, and the terrible thing behind me, the terrible knowledge pressing in on me . . .