Unbroken: Outcast Season: Book Four (34 page)

Years ago, he’d been pulled apart on the aetheric—a natural accident, one of the few that could claim the life and soul of a Djinn. Had he not been trying to save others,
humans
, he could have saved himself, but he made the choice to destroy his immortal existence for the sake of a handful of fragile, temporary creatures.

And I had hated him for that. I’d hated the memory
of him still more when I’d discovered that his flesh shell still lived and breathed. Jonathan, then the leader of the Djinn, had decreed that the flesh of Xarus, the avatar, be spared. I hadn’t known why, but perhaps Jonathan had known something. He often did, annoyingly. He’d had a gift for foresight that had bettered anyone’s, even Ashan’s.

Why,
now
, did I feel Xarus’s loss at last, seeing his lifeless body reduced to meat? Why did it
matter
?

I put my hand on his cheek. It felt like human flesh. It
was
human flesh, Xarus’s flesh, crafted like mine from the deepest instincts, the desires none of us ever acknowledged to be mortal, to know what their brief and bright lives were like…

It was the last of something that had been born immortal, and now it was gone.

I sat in the dark silence, with his blood crawling slowly toward the drain, and I grieved in ways that I never had, for one of my own lost. I’d felt anger before; I’d felt betrayal, and sometimes, loss.

But never emptiness. Never the raw knowledge of
caring
in the way that humans cared for each other, and missed each other.

And the ironic thing was that he’d been gone for almost a thousand years, and I’d never really liked him in the first place.

When I returned to the outer room, Luis was asleep. So was Joanne. David and I said nothing to each other, but he knew, and in a way, that eased my pain a little; I had more in common with him than I’d ever fully realized. More in common with all of them.

David was right. I needed to rest.

I couldn’t sleep.

Instead of resting, although I was tired, I found myself
pacing in the narrow confines of the common room as Luis and Joanne sprawled and dreamed on the couches. There was something nagging at me, something beyond my grief and worry, or even the anticipation of a fight to come. There was something we had missed.
Were
missing. It ticked in the back of my mind like a bomb, and as the humans slept, as David and Rahel kept a silent and vigilant watch, I struggled to understand what it was that bothered me so much.…

Joanne woke, and David moved to speak with her in a low voice. She was upset; bad dreams, perhaps. I paid no attention. I admired her survival skills, but not her emotional instability.

“We should go,” I said to Rahel, who was still silent and vigilant at her post. Unlike a human, she didn’t feel the need to fidget, shift, relax, or even look away—the Djinn version of a motion sensor. “There’s no need to linger here now. We can defend ourselves adequately, if pressed, now that we can reach the aetheric.”

“Can we?” She smiled a cynical little smile, and lifted her shoulders in a tiny shrug. “Look at her in Oversight and tell me what you think then.”

By
her
she meant, presumably, Joanne. I leaned against the wall next to Rahel and shifted my eyes into the aetheric spectrum, and saw what she had seen… what David must have seen as well. Joanne was not an especially powerful Earth Warden, able to fight the effects of radiation as part of her natural gifts; Weather Wardens had no such protections, and she’d taken the very worst of the beating down in that pit.

She was saturated with it, cells cooking and dying from the inside out, as if she’d been trapped in an invisible microwave.

“If she and her child are to live,” Rahel said, “then David needs time to heal her. It won’t be easy, and it’s
beyond the capacity of Earth Wardens. So we stay. She has to rest.” This time, just for a split second, her eyes veered from their focus to rest on me, a flash of gold and warmth. “And you, mistress, ought to rest as well. You’re not as strong as you believe.”

I settled into a chair then, unwillingly.
I don’t need rest,
I thought, but as soon as I released my iron hold on my body, it begged to disagree with aches blooming in every muscle. David’s whispering in the Djinn language was a soothing litany meant for Joanne, but it lulled me as well, into an exhausted tumble into the dark.

At the last second, what Rahel had said struck me, rather forcefully.
If she and her child are to live…

Joanne Baldwin was pregnant, and it
must
have been David’s child—the child of a Djinn. And somehow, I hadn’t seen it.

I turned my gaze on her in Oversight, and yes, there it was, the clear though subtle signs of life stirring inside her—curiously, not Djinn life, but something more tethered to the human world. David’s child, but human in form and power.

Joanne and David had something more to fight for, it seemed, than just the world in general. The way that Luis—and yes, me—found strength in our love for Isabel.

David saw me watching them, and looked up. I smiled, just a little, and he returned it. “You think I’m mad, don’t you?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Perhaps,” I said. “And perhaps I’m not mad enough. But I believe that I’m learning.”

Waking up came with a surge of adrenaline and terror, and I didn’t know why. It was utterly silent. Nothing had changed in the room, except that David had fallen silent. I opened my eyes and saw Rahel at the window, looking out,
and in the next second I saw her take a step back and allow the blinds to fall closed.

She turned to David, who looked up. They both nodded.

“Wake him,” Rahel said to me, and pointed to Luis, who was blissfully snoring on the couch. “We need everyone now.”

I shook Luis awake and endured his muttering about the lack of coffee, and we were joining hands to assess the situation on the aetheric when the first attack came.

Something wild and
very
angry slammed headlong into the sealed door. I was surprised that the cheap barrier held; it flexed against the impact, and a thin crack formed down the middle. “Brace it,” I said, and Luis nodded, throwing our combined Earth power into the wood to stiffen it to a packed-steel density. Another, stronger power overlaid ours.

Joanne was awake and on her feet now, and despite the sudden emergency, she looked almost herself again—tall, strong, confident, with a smile curving her full lips and a light in her eyes. She loved battle almost as much as I did, I thought. That was… unique, in a Warden. “Time to get down to business,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

Rahel evidently did not think our combined talents were enough, as she pushed a massive piece of furniture against it. “It will not hold,” she said. “We should leave now, quickly. Is there a back door?”

“There’s company waiting for us there as well,” David said. “We’re surrounded.”

“Did you not think to warn us of that?” I snapped. “I
told
you we should have run last night!”

“It wasn’t an option,” David replied flatly. “We can get out of this. It’s just going to take a little creativity.”

Whatever was on the other side of the door hit with such violence that the barrier, even strengthened by
three Wardens and a Djinn, bowed inward, almost ripping free of the wall in which it was anchored.

“What the hell is out there?” Luis blurted. Rahel seemed to find the question amusing.

“I don’t think it would do your sanity any good to know. We must go up, not out. Nothing waiting out there strikes me as good at climbing, but they are
very
good at battering holes in things.”

It was David who ripped an opening in the roof above; the hotel’s guest room tower was seven stories tall, but at this end, the building was a simple one-story affair. Only fifteen feet, straight up.

David, of course, merely flexed his legs and easily made the jump upward. I grabbed my backpack and made sure it was securely against me, then began to think about how the rest of us were to get up to safety.

“Damn,” Luis said. “Forgot my jet pack. Knew I should have packed that.” I made a cradle of fingers and leaned down. He raised his eyebrows. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Do I seem to be?”

“Hardly ever,
chica
,” he said. He put his booted foot in my cupped hands, and I pulled Earth power to saturate my muscles as I lifted him, straight up. It hurt, that particular enrichment of the very limited capabilities of my human body; I felt the shriek burn its way out of my mouth without my consent, but the effort worked. I threw him high enough that David could grab his arm and lift him onto the surface of the roof.

But I also knew I wouldn’t be able to do that for myself. Not effectively. Which left…

Rahel.

I hardly heard David ordering her to bring me; it was unnecessary that he do so, because after all, I held her bottle. I could have done it just as easily. Only I knew
that doing so would open up a million subtle avenues of resistance to her, as irresistible to her as catnip, even now. It was a risk not worth taking, as the door protecting us continued to steadily break under the mindless, violent assault.

“Sistah,” Rahel said. I stared back at her, watching that shark’s smile on her face. There was hate in it, and I understood it very well. I’d always had nothing but contempt for the New Djinn; I’d treated them as not just second class, but
other
—a mongrel breed of human and Djinn, unworthy.

And she hated me for that, and for enslaving her and so many others, even if it had to be done to save them. No doubt she had other grudges; we all did, we immortals with our endlessly long memories. I had few friends even among the True Djinn, and none among her kind.

Joanne asked, perhaps jokingly, if she had to make it an order for Rahel to save me… and Rahel almost laughed, knowing as well as I did that an order from Joanne carried even less weight than one from me. “No need,” Rahel replied. “And no time. I’ll cleanse myself of her contamination later.”

Before I could respond, she had seized me, and jumped, and in almost the same motion, pushed me away. I landed on the roof, disoriented and off balance, and tumbled. I felt the crashing impact of the backpack hitting the hard surface and rolled back to my feet, rage a comforting warmth inside me, and spun to face her again as the cold desert breeze stirred my hair.

Rahel grinned, and made a little
come on
gesture.
Her
bottle had not been smashed, though others certainly had been.

No time for settling our scores now, or even for taking stock of what we’d just lost. Joanne, Weather Warden and in firm command of the winds, levitated easily up
through the hole, while Rahel, at David’s terse order, began repairing the rip through which we’d come. Below, the sound of destruction was increasing. Whatever was below, it was
angry.

I ventured to the edge of the roof and looked down. Luis joined me, took one look, and quickly stepped back. “Okay, I don’t really want to ask, but… what the hell is that?”

“It’s a chimera, a forced merger of several animal forms. Bear, mountain lion, scorpion.” I said it easily enough; identification was automatic, and he could have done it as well, if he’d been able to overcome his instinctive nausea and horror at what we were seeing. As a human, it was disconcerting enough, but as an Earth Warden, feeling the utter vileness of what had been done… That was what drove him back, sent him reeling and gagging.

And it was what I was fighting, silently, as well.

There were at least four of the chimera in view now; one had a bear’s head clumsily balanced atop a mountain lion’s strong, sinuous body, but there were extra, armored legs erupting from the lion’s sides, and a segmented tail with a vicious stinger curving out from the back and overhead. Nauseating and fierce, and mad.

“This isn’t the Mother,” Joanne said. She was standing with me, looking over, holding her long, dark hair back as the breeze batted at us. She was pale and grim, but not as revolted as Luis was, or I felt. “It can’t be her doing this.”

And it wasn’t. I’d worried at that last night, paced, tried to shake sense out of what the avatar had been doing… and now, finally, it clicked together.
This
was what the avatar had been doing, under the cover of darkness, shielded from the eyes of the Djinn and even from the Mother. No, not the avatar; the avatar was only a
flesh puppet, a conduit for another’s power. And I knew now, looking at these things, who had wielded that power.