Unseen

His sense of humor was back, for which I was heartily grateful. I braced him until he could stand on his own, and tried to step away.

He didn’t let me. His hands went around my upper arms, and held me in place, close to him. “You bet our lives,” he said. “On a Dji

“It was better than betting it on his obedience,” I said. “You tricked him into the bottle. It wasn’t his choice. This was. You have to trust Dji

I was speaking of Rashid, most certainly, but I was also speaking of myself. And he knew that.

“You still hate me?” he asked. “Don’t go saying you didn’t. I felt it. I know how much it hurt you, what I did. What I said, sure, but mostly what I did. I never wanted that, Cass. Never.”

“And I never wanted to leave you,” I said. “Please believe that.”

He nodded, eyes gone dark. “Did you find her?”

“Yes.”

“Did you hurt her?”

“Some,” I said, and shook my head. “Not enough. Not nearly enough.”

“You will.”

“We will.”

“Yes.” He kissed my forehead, with so much tenderness it melted the last of the icy pain within me. “We will.”

We left the ruins behind.

The other Wardens had met us on the way to the fire road, to the east ... a ragtag, injured bunch, but they hadn’t lost anyone else. A few asked about Janice. None of us commented on her loss with more than a brief acknowledgment of it. I wondered what Marion would say, in the end. She, more than anyone else, had made a catastrophic mistake in allowing Janice such unfettered, trusted access to her most vulnerable charges. The pain of that weighed heavily on her—visibly, in fact, in the slump of her shoulders and the new lines on her face. I’d managed to retrieve her wheelchair from the ruins, but the electrical power had been destroyed, and no one had the energy left to repair it. She pushed herself along the rocky path, face welded into an emotionless mask. Alone with her thoughts, and her failures.

Miraculously, only one of the children had died: Mike, whom I’d found outside of the building. Gillian seemed inconsolable; she’d sought out Isabel, and the two girls walked together, hands clasped. I wondered how that friendship had developed. They didn’t seem at all similar, really.

Humans often confused me, though.

The Wardens traveled in unexpected silence, communicating in careful whispers and gestures as we moved down the twisting path. At regular intervals, we paused to take a head count.

Just before we reached the fire road, we stopped for the last one. Luis and I stood together, not touching but closer than we’d felt since the decision to bring Isabel here. I still didn’t know if that had been a mistake, or a necessary evil; she seemed better, despite the desperate last stand in the school. Maybe Marion’s treatments had helped, though the seizures she’d suffered still frightened me, as did the pessimistic estimate of her chance of long-term survival.

I looked around for her, but there were two other Warden children behind us. “Ibby?”

Someone shushed me. Gayle passed me, rapidly conducting her head count. Then she came back, frowning, counting again.

Dread gathered in my stomach. I stopped her. “What is it?”

“Two short,” she said. “I didn’t see anyone leave.”

Neither had I, and it alarmed me. I’d been vigilant. Whoever had left the party had done so under cover of a veil, and a very good one.

Luis and I exchanged a look of perfect understanding, and spun away in separate directions, checking faces. When I reached the end of the line, I turned and ran back to meet him halfway. We instinctively grabbed hold of each other.

“She’s not here,” Luis panted. “Ibby’s gone. The other girl, too. Gillian.”

Gillian, who had been so distraught. But had they gone on their own, or had they been taken?

“We have to look for them,” Luis said. “They’ve only been gone fifteen minutes, since the last check. Can’t have gone far.”

Gayle grabbed him and pulled him to a halt. “Hey!” she hissed. “We’ve got refugees and wounded, and we don’t know that they’re safe yet! We can’t go tearing through the woods shouting!”

He shoved her back, but he must have known, as I did, that she was right. “Then what?” he spat back, but quietly enough. “Someone took her! I’m not just giving up on her!”

“We may be able to track her on the aetheric,” I said quietly. “And we don’t know that she was taken, Luis. We don’t know that at all.”

I was trying to prepare him, because I didn’t believe, not for a moment, that Ibby had been spirited away against her will. The child was, if nothing else, a fighter; she’d been taken once, and she would never go quietly again. Added to that, she was in the midst of a group, and no one had noticed her, or Gillian’s, disappearance.

She’d gone willingly, wherever she had gone. And she’d taken Gillian with her.

“Well?” Gayle whispered. “We can’t wait. I have to keep them moving. We’re vulnerable out here.”

“Go,” Luis said. “We’re staying.” I nodded. We stepped out of the group, and Gayle, after a troubled frown, led the others on into the dark. It took surprisingly little time before we were lost in the dark again, just the two of us.

Luis limped over to me as I stood surveying the dark, cold woods. The school’s fires had gone out, or at least sunk to sullen ashes; it was once again full, true night, and a moonless one. “Let’s go,” he said, and limped on, back toward the trail. “We might be able to pick up their tracks where they left the group.” I didn’t move. After several steps, he stopped and looked back. “Cass?”

“Stay where you are,” I said softly. “Don’t move.”

I heard a soft, whispering laugh through the trees. “You’re good; I’ll give you that,” said a woman’s voice. I recognized it all too easily. “Mira, he’s a tasty one. Yours?”

Luis started to turn, but Esmeralda—Snake Girl—whipped out of the shadows with blinding, reptilian speed, wrapping coils around him with crushing force. Her human half rose up, beautiful and terrifying as she hissed and bared her venomous fangs. Luis struggled, but Esmeralda was too physically strong to budge ... and when I tried to break her hold, my Earth-based powers bounced off of her without effect. In a very real sense, Esmeralda was part of that power. It had taken a Dji

I thought I could defeat her, but not with Luis held hostage in those muscular, tensing coils. She could crush him before I could save him.

“Very tasty,” Esmeralda said, and lowered herself to look into Luis’s eyes. “You have good instincts, Dji

Luis tried something—I couldn’t tell what, but it didn’t matter; at the first sign of his drawing power, Esmeralda tightened her coils, and I heard bones and muscles creaking under the stress. He gasped, and then couldn’t pull in another breath to replace the one he’d lost. The panic in his face made her smile. “Definitely a tiger,” she said. “But tigers die just like rabbits, hombre. So play nice.”

“Let him breathe,” I said. “Please.”

She glanced at me, raised her eyebrows, and tossed her dark hair back over her shoulders. “Since you ask so nice, sure.” Her smile was real, and vicious. “You want to ask me why I’m here?”

“I know why you’re here,” I said. “You’re here because Ibby told you to come here. When?”

That startled Snake Girl, and once again I saw that flash that betrayed her genuine youth. She might exude self-confidence, but beneath it she was still a girl, one who’d made tremendous mistakes. “Who says I come ru

“Because you liked her. Because you saw in her what you once were. And because she asked your name.”