Unbroken: Outcast Season: Book Four (25 page)

There was a sound around us then, a kind of crystalline creaking, like frozen wind chimes, and everything seemed to grow darker. Even the Djinn seemed surprised. Ashan lifted his head, and whatever he saw on the aetheric made him gesture to the other Djinn in a blur.

But it was too late. I don’t know what descended on them, and on us. I saw the Djinn grabbing for the Wardens, for Luis, and Ashan came for me, but something got between us. Something worse than Ashan.

Something that had me.

I tried to rise. Tried to fight.

Darkness took me down, fast and merciless, and the last thing I saw was Ashan and the Djinn retreating, and abandoning me to my fate.

They kept me in the darkness, and the worst of it was that I didn’t know
why
. Why keep me alive? Why not kill me outright, as would have been best and safest?

But there was no doubt they wanted me alive. Suffering. Waiting.

I was aware of time passing, but there was nothing I could do except count the ticking seconds by the measured, rapid pace of my heartbeats. I was confined in a tiny space, but there was air flowing against my face. Whoever had me didn’t wish me dead.

Not yet.

I had no illusions that miracle—or nightmare—would last forever, but it seemed to stretch to the breaking point. My mind was full of questions and fears. The Wardens we’d rescued… the children we’d abandoned.

And, always, Luis. I could no longer feel his presence, or the bond between us… yet I wasn’t dying the slow, starving death of a Djinn cut off from the aetheric, either, so he
must
have been alive. That was all I could hold to for hope.

I was in a prison. A prison built to hold Djinn, indefinitely; it would do equally well to hold a Warden, no matter what their specialty. I could call no powers, not even a spark of light, and the tiny opening around me seemed to shrink, inch by inch, as my panic increased. I forced myself to breathe more and more slowly, focus on small sensations and details. The Djinn wouldn’t understand human instincts, human frailty; if I panicked in this tomb, I would go mad before they noticed my lapse.

And then the pain began.

It started in small ways at first, a burning sensation on the outside of my left thigh, a pinch in my right upper arm… and then it grew worse. It wasn’t burning, or pinching. It was something pressing into me, with exquisite slowness. Pushing, and pushing, and pushing, sharp points digging until they broke the skin and bored deeper.

Those were the first, and not the worst. The torture
came so very, very deliberately. There was nothing human about it, nothing driven by hate or fear or anger.… No, this was a cold, empty kind of pain, inflicted in a lifeless and distant way.

I couldn’t keep calm. The pain ate away at my hard-fought reserve, sped up my breathing, brought back all the desperate panic that I’d striven to keep sealed away.

And it went on, and on, and on. The red-hot, invading pain. The whispering trickle of blood against my skin. My own ragged, too-fast breathing stirring the lank strands of my hair in the tiny spaces.

And then the screaming.

My voice wore raw soon, and my throat ached and bled from the effort. There was no more peace, no more logic, no more planning left inside me. Only the pain, the terror, the despair.

And then, from a vast distance, came the whisper of… music.

It wasn’t music as a human might hear it; this was the language of the Djinn, of tens of thousands of immortal voices raised together in a sound that held nothing but exaltation, beauty, harmony.

It was the sound of worship, and madness… a divine, thoughtless madness that had no room for individual pain or pleasure, sadness or joy. It was my brothers and sisters, but they had ceased to be the individuals I’d once known.

They sang as they killed.

Death was moving across the face of the world, and I could feel it. Worse: I could
be
it. Some part of me knew the insane peace of surrendering will, conscience, logic, of becoming the Great Beast, and hungered to join it.

And then I heard Pearl’s voice whispering to me.
Let go,
she said.
Let the music fill you, Cassiel. Let the earth take you as you change. I will make you into a creature of
terror and beauty, a weapon for the new Mother’s hand. I will make you my angel—not of mercy, but of death. Shining, cutting, crushing death, and you will be as beautiful as a knife. This is why I’ve spared you all this time, to serve me. Fight and die, or surrender and be reborn. Your choices, my sister.

No. No, these could
not
be my only choices. It didn’t matter whether I closed my eyes; I could see nothing, not even a glimmer of light, but now I deliberately squeezed them shut and brought up vibrant images in my mind: Luis, lying propped against pillows in bed, tracing his fingertips over my body, smiling. His skin gleamed like fine new bronze, and the indigo lick of flame tattoos on his arms had a sinuous grace and beauty that made me shiver. His eyes were a rich, dark cocoa, and his kisses held spice and sweetness and woke vast, unhurried needs inside me. His touch trailed heat, and his tongue woke fire.

I reached for him, and for an instant, just a single flash, I
saw him.
Not the image of him from our bed, not the smiling, lazy, sexual creature I’d imagined in that moment—no, this was a frightening vision of a hard, battered man, stained with smoke and blood, and his eyes were as dark as empty windows as he drew and shaped a fireball in his hands.

And I heard him, just a whisper. I might have imagined it, so quickly did it pass.

Luis said,
I’m coming.

And then the singing madness rose inside me to a shattering pitch, and the needles piercing me drove deeper, and it was all darkness, solitude, loss. I was weightless, then falling into the darkness.

Alone.

Trapped.

LIGHT.

It came in a white blaze that seared my skin, blasted my eyes even through the squeezed-closed lids, and I heard myself make a rusty, metallic sound of protest.

It was a single, thin crack in my prison, and I felt a tiny whisper of something so sweet and precious that I couldn’t identify what it might be. Fresh air?
Hope?
Both seemed impossible to me now.

There was a sound that echoed even through the impenetrable walls pressed against me, and I felt a shudder go through the world,
my
world… and then, the tiny crack of light widened into a bar. The darkness shattered and left me bare.

I couldn’t move. The weight that had trapped me in this tiny space was gone, but when I tried to lunge for the light, I couldn’t get free. Moving woke screaming agony everywhere in my flesh and bones, and all I could do was open my eyes and stare in confusion at the blur of brightness in front of me.

There was a sudden, horrifyingly loud babble of
sound. Voices. I couldn’t sort them out. It was all too real, too harsh, and no matter how bad the dark had been, at least it had been
constant
.…

I picked one voice from the noise. “Cass? Cassiel?… Damn you,
let me go
. I have to—”

“No!” said another voice. “Keep him back. He doesn’t need to see this.”

The first voice—I knew it, and I felt something resonating inside me, a kind of warmth, a glow that I hadn’t even known was gone until it returned. Power, flowing into me. Making me live again.

I blinked. The haze before me resolved into the shape of a tall man, dressed in a stained flannel shirt, blue jeans, boots. His hair was long and untidy around his lean, angular face, and he was looking at me with an odd hesitancy.

“Cassiel,” he said. It was half a whisper, and in a sudden move, he crouched down. I was lying on the ground, I realized. Above me was stone, and the light that had blinded me shone from a single flashlight he’d averted at an angle. “I’m going to get you out of there. You just stay still. Struggling will only hurt more.”

I blinked and tried to speak, but the raw edges in my throat could only make an indistinct rough whisper. I tried to move my head, tilt it forward so I could look down at myself, but he was right; the effort woke sharp and screaming pain in my skull, neck, and shoulders.

“Where is Luis?” I managed to say. The man who crouched over me smiled a little, but his eyes looked tired and heartbroken.

“He’s over there,” he said. “First we have to deal with this, okay? He got us here. Now let me get you out. Stay strong.”

I couldn’t nod, but I blinked to let him know I understood.

Lewis Orwell, the most powerful Warden in the world, took a deep breath, lowered his head for a moment, and when he raised it, there was an aura of golden power that glimmered around him even here, on the human plane.

He bent forward and slid his large hands over my face, through my hair, around my head in a slow, sweeping motion.

It hurt. I stiffened with the snaps of agony, one after another, like tiny bones breaking.

His hands met at the back of my head, then moved down, cupping my neck, spreading out over my shoulders. Every gentle touch sent waves of agony through me, snaps of white-hot pain. He paused there for a moment. He was as close as I’d ever let any human get, his body all but pressed to mine, and Orwell’s lips hovered very close to mine. His eyes were dark, very dark, and full of a power I didn’t fully comprehend.

“Look down,” he whispered.

I did.

I was encased in a coffin that had been fitted exactly to my body, one made of glittering pink crystal that shimmered in the artificial light.

And the coffin was alive, and it had grown into me. Needles of crystal, a whole forest of them, pierced and punctured my skin, some thin and just in the skin, some thicker and driving to muscle. Still others had drilled into bone.

They were flushed red with my blood.

“I have to break them,” Lewis said, still very softly. “This thing is alive. It’s fighting to keep you. It’s feeding off you. I won’t lie, this is going to hurt.”

I could nod now. After a second’s horror, edged with fear, I did.

“Hold on,” he
said, and jerked me violently forward. At the same time, I sensed a hammer blow of power coursing through him, through
me
, and all the crystals shattered at once in a mind-destroying white-hot wave of agony and fury and hunger and disappointment…

… And then I was lying limp on Lewis’s chest, cradled in his arms. Screaming voicelessly, because the pain was
worse
, somehow, as if the crystals were still inside me, still drilling…

And they were.

The broken ends of the crystals were
moving.
Driving in.

Lewis wrapped his arms around me, and I felt another surge of power blast through me in a cresting wave that hit and shattered every one of the deadly fragments, until I was lying limp against him, covered in a coating of shining dust.

“Get Rocha, somebody,” Orwell said. He let his arms fall free to hit the ground at his sides, and didn’t move. I couldn’t. My muscles felt loose and slack, unnaturally dead within my body. My bones felt as if they had been broken into dust as well… and then a strong pair of hands was pulling me up and into another embrace.

Luis.

The smell of him washed over me, familiar and strong—male sweat, damp earth, the spicy sweetness of peppers and chocolate. I saw the tattoos on his arms first, winding sinuously up his bronze skin, and finally I focused on his face.

“Luis,” I whispered. It was all I could manage. He looked shaken and anguished, but he smiled and kissed me.

When he pulled back, there was blood on his face. Fresh red blood in a pattern of dots.

I
raised my fingers to touch my face, and felt the holes left by the crystals, the wetness that seeped from them. My whole body wept red.

“Stay still,” he told me. “Don’t try to move. Just stay still.”

It seemed like sound advice, and just this one time, I obeyed.

Two days in a Warden hospital in Seattle, while they pumped blood into my almost-drained body and carefully closed up every wound. The final count had been in the hundreds of punctures. Damage to my bones had been extensive, they told me, and I had several painful rehabilitation sessions with an Earth Warden to repair them.