What I meant, what he must have understood, was that I was going to be destroyed. There was nothing to be done, nothing magical that either of us could do or try.
Turner watched, confused and shocked. No help from him. No help possible.
I looked at Rashid.
He smiled, and from his crouch in the corner, said, “For a price, my razor-edged angel. It will cost you.”
“What price?” I asked. My mouth was dry, my skin felt tight and clammy. I was afraid, but I also knew the dangers of showing my desperation.
“Do you really have time to bargain?” He cocked his head, just a little, and stared at me with inhuman, unfeeling eyes. “I think you don’t. I can stop it. Say yes.”
“To what?”
His grin turned feral. “To whatever I want, of course.” His tone dripped with all manner of salacious innuendo, but his eyes . . . his eyes flicked toward the scroll, where it sat radiating power. A direct connection to the Oracles. To the Earth herself, perhaps. Power beyond measure, especially in the hands of a Djinn.
I had promised Imara never to let it out of my hands.
I sucked in a deep, trembling breath. “No,” I said. I was not willing to take that particular risk. Not even at the cost of my life. Rashid was a wild, random creature. In his hands, this list could wreak incalculable damage as easily as overwhelming good.
I felt one of the barriers I had built to wall off my poisoned hand break, like a levy under a black tide. More darkness flooded into my hand, and began to spread.
“Yes,” Luis said. “Dammit, do it, Rashid. Do it! Save her!”
Rashid raised an eyebrow, and didn’t move his gaze away from mine. “She has to say it,” Rashid said. “No one else can answer for her. What say you, Cassiel? Deal?”
I licked my lips. I felt the darkness raging beneath my skin, bubbling like some viscous acid. It didn’t hurt, not yet, but that was only because it destroyed physical nerves as it went. It would no doubt be an agony beyond anything I had ever known, when it reached my centers of power. When it consumed and utterly destroyed my soul and unmade me from the world.
And deep within me, the other Cassiel stirred. The ice-cold core of me, the inhuman persona who had seen stars burn out, seen death in the billions, witnessed atrocity and miracles with the same utter lack of concern.
That Cassiel knew what to do, where the merely human one failed. I felt her chill in my heart, her clarity in my mind.
I had a choice. It wasn’t one my human self could make.
Only a Djinn could make it.
“No,” I said again, very precisely. “I do not accept your deal, Rashid. Not for that.”
I walked forward and took hold of a bronze sculpture on a side table, a metal representation of two clasped, weathered praying hands. Angela’s possession, one dear to her during her life. I felt the whisper of her devotion and passion soaked into the metal. Her history.
Help me be strong, the human side of me whispered. Help me do the right thing. Help me not be afraid.
The Djinn part of me had no fear at all, only frozen, emotionless purpose.
I raised power and re-formed the metal. It melted in my right hand into a shimmering pool, then lengthened. Hardened.
Formed itself into a sharp, long-bladed hatchet.
Before either Luis or Ben Turner could stop me, I put my hand and wrist flat on the wooden surface of the dining table, raised the hatchet, and put all my strength into the downward blow. I had to do it in one strike.
To my Djinn mind, it was all angles, force, calculation. An entirely academic exercise.
The human part of me had gone away. That was for the best.
I heard Luis screaming, but it was too late.
Now.
The blade slammed squarely into untainted flesh an inch above where the poison stopped, sliced through flesh, muscle, and through the tough bone. All the way through, burying its edge in the wood below.
Its work done, the Djinn in me faded back into watchful silence, satisfied with the precision and power of its work.
The human part of me woke to the horror. I screamed. The pain was tremendous, a hot red storm that threatened to drive me unconscious to the ground; it took all my focus and strength to hold on. Immediately after, shock set in fast, and the flood of bleeding slowed to a sudden, dizzying trickle from the stump. The severed hand took on a strange, disassociated look, as if it had never been a part of me, as if I had only dreamed of ever having such a thing attached to my body.
Rashid had idly noted how many terrible things could happen in a matter of mere seconds.
He was so correct.
“No!” Luis was shouting. He grabbed at me, struck the hatchet from my hands and sent it skittering across the floor, scattering blood drops. “Dios, no!” He hissed something else, something I couldn’t understand through the hazy fog that descended over my eyes, and took the stump of my arm in a firm grip. Maybe he meant to try to reattach the hand. Earth Wardens had been known to work such miracles, after all.
The hand had other ideas.
My severed hand spasmed, and then it began to move, like a separate and living creature. Tentatively at first—stiff little jabs of the blackened fingers—and then it dug its nails into the wood and curled, looking suddenly like nothing so much as a spider preparing to leap.
Rashid, who had not reacted even as I chopped my hand off, suddenly rose to his feet in a smooth, startled motion as my blackened hand began walking across the table toward me.
Rashid reached out, and a broad-bladed knife from the kitchen counter flew through the air to smack into his palm. He advanced with three fast steps, and with a blindingly quick motion, stabbed the knife into the back of my severed, crawling hand, pinning it to the table. It struggled for a few seconds, scrabbling with its black fingernails, and then went still.
Not limp.
Just . . . still. Waiting.
“Holy fucking God,” Turner whispered, and then shook himself. “We need to get a tourniquet on her. Fast.”
Luis tore his wide gaze from the hand on the table, and I saw him thrust all of it away with an almost physical effort of will. “I’ve got it,” he said. “Cass? You hear me?”
“I hear you,” I said distantly.
Luis’s face was set and hard, but his eyes were so worried. So vulnerable. “Not going to lie to you, this is going to hurt like hell, so I’m going to turn off your nerves for a second. Hang on, okay?”
I nodded placidly.
Then I was sitting on the floor. I don’t know how; it seemed like life had jumped its tracks for a moment, as if a few vital seconds of my life had been erased, crudely and utterly destroyed.
Whatever trauma I had felt, those seconds were gone, utterly vanished. Sometimes the human brain protects itself, creates a fail-safe circuit. That was what Luis had done—triggered that final protection, a kind of static during which the brain resets itself.
I had no memory, because no memory of those moments existed for me. Nor ever would.
There was a towel tied tightly around the end of my arm, which ended abruptly in an empty space. I raised it and stared at it, wondering where my hand had gone. I could still feel it, still feel the phantom muscles flexing. What happened . . . ? I knew, but I didn’t know. Not really.
My head felt light and vague. I pulled in deep, trembling breaths and felt an arm bracing me across my shoulders. “Easy,” Luis said. His voice was wrong, shaking and too high. “Breathe. Come on, breathe.”
I was breathing, I thought, with a hot flash of annoyance. Even Rashid was watching me with a frown of concentration. Turner and Luis seemed shocked and horrified.