Unseen

Merle had resisted. Look what that had earned him.

I had to get free. Somehow, insane as it was, I had to find a way out of this.

“She’s plotting,” the boy Earth Warden said—Pearl’s personal executioner, as Zedala had become her personal torturer. “She’s going to try something.”

“Not yet,” Pearl said serenely. “She’s injured, and she’s alone. She’ll bide her time. Cassiel is good at that. But I, my sister, am far, far better practiced.” She bent over me, and brushed her smooth, damp, cool lips against mine. I resisted the urge to bite, only because it wouldn’t help—or even hurt her. The touch gave me the truth of her human form—it was still artificial, not genuinely human. She didn’t yet have the real power to create a body down to the cellular level. This was a shell only, lovely as it was. “If you’re counting on your Warden lover, I wouldn’t,” she continued, still bent close to me. Her eyes were black, lid to lid, and shimmering like oil. “He won’t leave the child’s side, not to rescue you. And if he does, I’ll have you all, won’t I? Foster father ... foster mother ... and child.”

“You’ll never have Isabel,” I said. “She’s free now.”

“You think so?” Pearl’s smile was nauseating, seen at close range—not in the least human. She straightened, and glanced at Zedala.

“You’d better kill me,” I said, and meant it. “If you don’t, I promise you, I’ll destroy you. At whatever cost.”

“You can’t do anything without power,” Pearl said, “but I was pla

She nodded to the small black-haired boy, the one from whom I sensed no identifiable kind of Warden power at all ... and he reached out a single finger, and touched me just as Zedala yanked her hand away from my forehead.

Void.

His power was its absence. He lived and breathed, but what filled him was cut off from the roots of life. He existed without co

It would be slow, and I would feel every second.

I was going to die, in a way more painful than I’d ever imagined, and more thorough than any other kind of death. It would devour the very Dji

And there was nothing at all I could do to stop it.

Chapter 12

THE DJINN PART OF ME, the Cassiel part, was no more than a whisper, but it did not want to die. I felt it flow through me in a silvery thread, coiling in the power that I could now reach, since Zedala had withdrawn her block—but the power couldn’t survive against the black-hole pull of the Void.

The organics of my body were coming apart. Instead, the power flowed into my inert metal hand.

I was no longer consciously directing the power; it was driven by Dji

And then my Dji

The mocking echo of her laughter remained.

I had no choice of what to do next. I slashed across my body, and cut off the finger of the Void conduit where it pressed against my skull.

The boy screamed and fell backward. He sounded like a wounded child, not a vicious empty thing, and for a fatal second, I hesitated with my blade ready for a killing stroke.

That gave Zedala time to lunge forward and grab my arm. A burst of star-hot power blew through the metal, heating it into dripping slag. I threw her off, but it was too late; the moment was gone. The Void child still cowered in shock, but the others were on me.

The Earth Warden boy slapped his hands flat on my chest, and drove me down, down through the metal frame of the bed, down into the wooden floor of the room, down into the hard-packed dirt beneath.

Down into the rock.

I was blind here, but I had power again, and softened the rock and earth to loose, slippery sand, taking away his momentum. We struggled together, lost in the earth. He tried to use his control to shatter my bones, but here, in my element, he couldn’t find an easily exploited vulnerability.

I was weak from the Void attack, and still suffering from the beating I’d taken from Zedala. He finally focused on that point of weakness, and I felt his power pushing at it, trying to shatter the cracked skull like an eggshell. If he drove bone into my fragile human brain, I’d be lost. I had to fight, but my strength wasn’t unlimited, and in the heat of battle I couldn’t draw on Luis, not at this distance.

I was losing.

Something flowed past me, like a shark through water, and slammed bodily into the boy. On the aetheric I saw it as a hard human-shaped light in cool gray, overlaid with the elusive watery spectrum of a Dji

I used the last of my strength to claw myself up at an angle, away from the building where I’d been held, and found the soft, turned earth of the field. I broke the surface and crawled toward the fence. My skull was on fire, and I felt cold and sluggish. I’d bled too much, both in plasma and in power. I had very little left. My mutilated left hand, now just a misshapen, melted blog of metal, made it difficult to claw forward.

Someone tried to grab me and pull me backward. Zedala, who’d chased me. I used the blunt, twisted club that had once been my metallic hand and slammed it into her, and she went down with a scream.

I touched the cold metal of the fence, but I didn’t have enough power left to do more than bend the links.

Trapped.

I felt that human/Dji

Will. It was Will.

He grabbed my shoulders even as the fence blew outward in a spray of melted metal behind me, and dragged me through to the other side. Zedala had rolled to her feet, feral and furious; the blood on her face only added to the savagery of her expression. As she lunged at Will, he drew back his hand, gathered power, and threw it in a tight, silver ball at her chest. It hit her and slammed her backward to the soft earth. She slapped at it, trying to throw it off, but it ate its relentless, merciless way through her body until she lay still and silent in the dirt.

Will’s face was smeared with dirt and mud, and now I recognized his eyes, those gray, emotionless eyes. I recognized the implacable rage with which he’d just killed the girl.

He turned it on the boy Earth Warden, who lunged up from the dirt and took a tearing grip on my hair. I didn’t see what happened to the boy, but I felt it. I saw the blood explosion on the aetheric, and saw his violent streaming colors go pale, then black.

“Stop,” I whispered. “Ashan, stop.”

“No,” he said, and kept dragging me. “They have to be destroyed. All of these abominations must be ended!”

“No!”

He dropped the human disguise of Will, abandoning the warmth, the sweetness, the lovely and seductive illusion. What was left was the prince of the Old Dji

He was also a cruel, conscienceless murderer, and now he turned that focus to the boy containing the Void, who was coming after the two of us with a fanatic’s disregard for personal safety.