Unseen

The boy could kill a Dji

“Don’t touch him!” I screamed to Ashan. “He’ll destroy you!”

Ashan, who’d been reaching out to rip the boy in half, spun away at the last moment. The boy’s grasping hand brushed Ashan’s side, and I saw a black gouge appear in his body. He twisted away, and the shout of pain vibrated on the aetheric, and snapped branches from trees in the physical world. Ashan stumbled back and, with a fluid motion, caught one of the large, heavy falling branches. He let its momentum spin him, threw physical force into it, and slammed the branch home into the boy’s body.

I heard the wet snap of breaking bones, and tried to roll to my knees. I managed that much, but my balance failed as I tried to climb to my feet. I grabbed the trunk of a tree and watched as the boy—crippled now—clawed his way on, still determined to destroy Ashan no matter the cost.

“Stop!” I screamed again, as Ashan lifted the branch for a killing blow. “Ashan, no, not this way—”

He didn’t listen. I turned my head at the last moment, but that didn’t block out the sound of the impact of the branch, or the boy’s choked last gasp. “No,” I whispered, but there was no strength in it, or in me.

Ashan grabbed me and lifted me in his arms, and I saw the last of Pearl’s chosen children, the tiny Weather girl, summoning power in both hands with a dexterity that was chillingly beyond her years. Beyond her, the camp was massing—people I had known, and liked, armed with whatever they could find. They would rush us, kill us if they could. The fury was like fire in the wind.

Ashan looked down at me, and for a second I saw Will, the man I had felt such kinship to—and then Will was gone and only Ashan remained.

“Hold on,” he said, and stepped into the aetheric just as lightning exploded where we had been, burning a crater twenty feet deep in the smoking earth.

Make no mistake: I do not like Ashan. Even among the Dji

That didn’t mean we liked him. It meant we respected him.

In this moment, though, weak and fragile as I felt, overwhelmed as I was, I loved him and hated him with an intensity that made me want to weep bitter human tears. I clung to him as we passed in a mist through the aetheric, speeding away from the camp. Most Dji

Which was seldom, if ever.

We stepped out into night ... a thick, full, velvety darkness, somewhere far enough from human civilization that no hint of lights glimmered, save the stars. The wind hissed through the pines, and Ashan bent to lay me down on a bed of fallen leaves. Starlight painted him in stark contrasts—his eyes had turned full silver now, his skin almost the pale color of mine. We looked like kindred now, except that his beauty was Dji

“You pretended to be human. To be Will,” I said. “Why?”

“Like you, I wanted to see,” he said. “I wanted to know what she was doing, and why. I couldn’t depend on you, Cassiel. I had thought I could, but you began to care too much for them. You aren’t as you were when I sent you here.”

“Neither are you,” I said. “You feigned a human far too well not to have liked being in his skin. I thought we both despised them.”

“We both did,” he said. “But perhaps you’re right. We’ve both changed.”

“You knew who I was all along. You recognized me.”

“No,” he said, and turned away to stare up at the stars. “I didn’t know, not at first. I felt ... something. But you disguised yourself well, just as I had. We both fooled her, for a time—and we fooled each other as well.”

“We won’t fool her again.”

“No, not again. She’s beyond playing coy now.” He turned back to me. “What did she tell you?”

“What we knew: She plans to destroy us. All living things. Even the Mother.” I pulled in a painful breath, and tasted blood in the back of my mouth. “She plans to take her place.”

That froze him. I had rarely seen Ashan surprised; I’d never seen him afraid, but this time, I saw a flash of real alarm blaze around him in the aetheric. He controlled it almost as swiftly and said, “Do you think she could?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed, and rolled on my side to cough. Something in my side hurt, and I spat up blood. “I need to rest.”

“Rest won’t help you,” Ashan said. “You’re broken.” He said it with a remote kind of recognition, nothing more, but when he knelt down and touched me, his hand felt warm and almost gentle. “Stay still.”

“I don’t need your help.”

He smiled, sharp as a knife. “Then I should have left you there to their mercies. My apologies, Cassiel. I didn’t realize you had the situation so well in hand.”

I stubbornly reached out to Luis through the frail co

He was gone.

“You don’t need him anymore,” Ashan was saying, down in the human world. “No need to humble yourself further, my sister. You understand now the gravity of the situation, and what has to be done. I won’t have you tethered to a human, not with what you must do. I can be merciful.”

I stared at him with deadened eyes. “You cut the link.” He didn’t answer. “Give it back, Ashan. Now.”

“No.”

“Give it back.”

“You’ve played human long enough, Cassiel. Enough of that. Take back your place, and do what you have to do.”

“Do it yourself!” I snarled. The anger in me had a sickening quality to it, a nightmare intensity. More than that, my human body was starting to fail, and he knew it. “Kill them yourself if you think it’s so vital!”

“I can’t,” Ashan said. “It will destroy me, and I’m the True Dji

I hadn’t thought of it in such terms, but he was right. Ashan risked bringing down the Dji

Because I was, at the last, expendable.

I felt the pressure that had held me in human flesh suddenly ease, like a door coming open in an airless room. The relief of that was intense and shattering. Flesh was a cage, a prison, and now I could abandon it, rise up to the aetheric and stay there, where I belonged. If I wished to visit this plane, I could descend like an angel at will. Or abandon it completely.

He was offering me my eternal life back, something that I had longed for, something I needed.

It was like being dropped in water after an eternity of thirst. I’d forgotten how it felt, to be so free, so pure, so utterly complete.

It was more seductive than anything I had ever known.

I kept staring at him, reading ages and distances in his silver eyes. He was old, Ashan. Very old. Very powerful. We had that in common, still. We had so much history that we had witnessed.

He thought he knew me.

But in this, this one simple thing, we were completely different, because I had breathed, wept, bled, lived. And he never had, not fully. Not even at the camp, when he pretended to be Will. I could see it in him now, that lack of empathy and understanding; it was possible he could learn, but he had not learned. Not yet.