Unknown

“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 Dji

“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 Dji

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 Dji

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 Dji

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, pi

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 a

Ah, yes, of course. I had chopped off my hand.

Their reactions made perfect sense, then.

“I’m all right,” I said. Indeed, I was. My pain had receded, and the light- headed feeling was going away. The absence of the invading darkness left me feeling unreasonably strong. “Were you able to stop the bleeding?” As if I was inquiring politely about the health of a distant relative, or the weather. Something that had no bearing on my own ability to survive the night.

Luis swallowed. His skin looked cream- pale beneath its burnish of bronze. “It’s stopped,” he said. “I deadened the nerves and sealed the blood vessels. But it’s not good, Cass. Christ, why?”

“Pearl,” I said. “If I hadn’t acted, she’d have destroyed me. It had to be done.”

“I could have stopped it,” Rashid said. I gave him a long look. “Perhaps.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” I said. “You wanted the list. I can’t give it to you. I couldn’t depend on your goodwill, Rashid. Or would you say that you would have acted to save me, regardless?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. I’d felt it from him, felt that avarice and pure, selfish desire. I knew him.

I had once been Rashid, or very like him.

“It was the only way,” I said, and for some reason it came out almost kind. I deliberately hardened my tone. “If you want to make amends, Rashid, you may. The girl, Gloria. Go and get her. There will be no bargain. You will do it because I tell you to do it.”

Rashid’s eyes widened. He looked at the table, where my blackened, severed hand still lay pi