“I will help,” he said. “I must help you.”
I felt a cold hand grip my spine and shake it. “What did you see?”
He shook his head, a violent spasm as if he tried to throw the image of it away and could not. “I can show you,” he said, and extended his hand.
I looked at Luis Rocha, who shrugged. “It’s your call. I don’t trust the guy, but that’s probably just me.”
I transformed the material of the blanket wrapped around me into cloth—enough to make trousers and a shirt—and took Gallan’s hand.
We rose into the aetheric.
Gallan, on this plane, was a shadow, quick and quiet, and I felt heavy and obvious in my human aura. He pulled me with him, heading through a maze of living trees and rocks that gave way to darkness and whispers.
There was no darkness on the aetheric, but it was here, bitter and void of any hint of energy.
We were above the compound called The Ranch.
There were no signs of people, no sources of even electrical power. It was as if every ounce of life had been drained, not just inside the compound, but out. The devastation went on in all directions, stretching almost a mile—death incarnate.
Only the pearl-and-bone yin and the parklike yang remained, glowing in the darkness in white and green.
Pulsing.
Alive.
Hungry.
I felt it pull at us. Gallan backed away, drawing me with him, and rose far up into the aetheric sky until the pulsing, living entity was far below us.
I still felt the drag. So did Gallan. I realized that I was feeling it through him—this thing called to Djinn, lured them.
It ate them.
Gallan was weakening. I took the lead to pull him onward, back toward my mortal body; this time, at least, the anchor of flesh seemed to be an advantage. A salvation.
I crashed back into flesh and opened my eyes to see Gallan still kneeling where he had been, swaying.
He was unraveling.
“I got too close,” he said. “Help me, Cassiel.”
“Luis!” I grabbed Gallan’s arm, but it felt more like mist than flesh, and my fingers sank sickeningly into moistness.
Luis tried, but when he reached out, his hands passed entirely through the Djinn, leaving trails of smoke behind. Gallan’s eyes were desperate, his mouth open, but he made no sound now.
He was trapped on the aetheric, and this manifestation was failing.
Fading into smoke.
Gone.
I grabbed Luis’s hand and launched us both into the aetheric, trying to follow Gallan’s essence, but the darkness disoriented me, whispered to me, taunted and pushed in strange currents.
I heard screams, and the screams of the Djinn are not meant for human ears. I fell back into flesh, and so did Luis.
He was holding me in his arms. I was trembling.
“It eats Djinn,” I said numbly. “It ate Gallan. It destroyed Gallan.”
It was the Voice, the pearl-and-bone yin, the parklike yang. It was the children within it, being used to fuel and enhance a creature that had limitless hunger, an appetite for power and destruction that knew no boundaries.
She,my Djinn side whispered. Not it. She. You know who she is.
She had been familiar to me because once, a very long time ago, I had been asked to kill her.
I’d thought I had.
“Pearl,” I whispered. “It’s Pearl.”
I collapsed in Luis’s arms as the darkness closed in.
When I woke, I was in a bed, sheets and blankets over me. Despite the warm coverings, I felt cold and empty. The room seemed very silent, though I heard voices coming muffled through the wall. The other room, I thought. Luis had put me in my own bed, and he was talking to others next door.
I got up, dressed in my stained leathers, and walked in without knocking. My appearance interrupted Luis as he talked with three others, two men and a woman. The woman, I was surprised to see was Greta, the Fire Warden from Albuquerque. The others I didn’t know, but from their weak auras, they were Ma’at, not Warden.
“Cassiel.” Luis’s eyes were warm but wary. “How are you?”
I sat down on the bed without an answer. I didn’t know how I was. I wasn’t sure I would ever know. After an awkward silence, Greta said, “We conducted several flyovers of the compound. The thing is, there’s no installation. Nothing like what you described, anyway.”
She had printed photographs, which she spread out on the table. They showed the weathered wreckage of an old farmstead, no modern buildings, no fences, no walls, no houses.
There was no pearl-and-bone building, no living embodiment of yin-yang.
No sign of the compound at all.
“We’re still working to get a team in there to do a ground reconnaissance. Luis—is it possible that somehow you were, I don’t know, delusional? That the two of you—”
“No,” I said. “It is not possible.”
Luis wasn’t so sure, and he seemed shaken by the suggestion. “Cassiel, they altered my blood chemistry. They could have altered yours, too. Maybe what we saw—”
“What we saw,” I said, “was real. The compound was real. The bullets were real. We saved a real child, Luis. That was not illusion.”
“Then where is it?” one of the Ma’at asked, and tapped the photos. “Where did it all go?”
I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Luis. I need to talk to you. Only you, alone.”
Greta and the Ma’at exchanged looks, then shrugged. Luis moved them to the open door, into my room, and shut it behind them before he turned to look directly at me.
I took a moment before I spoke, because I knew that once I began, he would never look at me so kindly again.
“I need to explain how I came here,” I said. “I need to explain why Ashan cast me out. You won’t like it.”
Luis nodded and settled himself in a chair.
“A long time ago, I became the first Djinn to do murder,” I said. The words felt numbing on my lips, like ice. “Another Djinn. Her name was Pearl. You think us cold, I know, but we are the guardians of the Mother, and we have limits. Pearl . . . had none.”
Luis leaned forward, intent on my words. “What happened?”
“We had been the first children of the Earth for so long, you know. So many countless, numberless millennia that you cannot even begin to imagine it. Life changed, evolved; we paid little attention to it. Species came and went—and then one arose. One that had awareness, and intelligence, and understood.” I held his gaze captured in mine. “Not mankind as you know it now. An earlier version, a more peaceful one.”
Luis wet his lips. “What did you do?”
“I did nothing,” I said. “Pearl found them offensive. She destroyed them. She erased them from the face of the Earth and ripped away everything they were. There are crimes among the Djinn, but that one had no name until that moment—not even as much because of the slaughter, but because of what happened to Pearl in response.”
He waited while I gathered my thoughts.
“She . . . went mad,” I said. “She tore holes in the fabric of the universe around us that should never be opened, and she could not close them again. She became—other. Alien to us. Ashan sent me to destroy her. It was the first time in our history that one Djinn killed another, you see.” I looked away. “She did not defend herself, because she never expected me to strike against her. It had never happened.”
Luis was frowning. “But I’m talking about now.Not then.”
“It is the same,” I said. “I destroyed her. I thought I removed her from the world, but there must have been something left. Some seed, some thought, some memory . . . and it grew in secret, in shadow, passed down within the new mankind that arose after her. Now it’s here. Pearl is here. She’s drawing her source power from humans, but her hunger for the Djinn is unlimited. She’ll destroy them. Destroy us.What happened to Gallan will happen to all the Djinn, one at a time. They’ll be drawn in and destroyed.”