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Authors: Rachel Caine

Unknown (22 page)

BOOK: Unknown
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“No,” he said.
“The children are weapons against the Wardens,” I said. “Not the Djinn. But her fight is with the
Djinn.

Luis let out a slow breath. “You mean that she’s got something else. Something worse.”
“I think,” I said, my eyes fixed on Brianna’s sleeping, innocent face, “that we must stop this before she can finish with the Wardens and launch her true war, or my choices will become more and more limited.”
“To what Ashan wanted you to do in the first place.”
“Yes,” I said softly. “I feel like an animal in a trap, Luis. How many parts of myself will I have to cut away to survive?”
His gaze moved involuntarily to my hand, then wrenched away. I closed the metal fingers, and my phantom sensation told me that the metal was cold to the touch. I lifted the fist and opened it. Engraved in delicate etching on the bronze were the lines and whorls of my fingerprints, and the patterns in my palms—ghosts of what had been in flesh. I rubbed the fingertips together, and felt a phantom friction.
“Have the doctors checked her?” I asked. Luis nodded. “Then we need to wake her. Carefully. Can you block her access to power?”
“Maybe,” he said. “It depends. I can try.”
It was risky, having a Fire Warden in a hospital, with so many delicate and fragile lives that could be put at risk. I knew how he felt. We could counter her, but not completely. Not easily. There were protocols to block and even remove powers, but they were difficult and time-consuming, and extremely delicate. Even with the best of care, a percentage of those so treated were left crippled, mad, or dead.
Doing it to a
child
was beyond insane. I knew Luis would use the least amount of interference necessary to render her quiet, but it was a risk.
Not as much of a risk as letting her strike at will.
I nodded, and Luis removed the blocks that kept Brianna in her artificial sleep. She surfaced quickly, driven by more than a natural desire to wake, and when her eyes flew open they were hard, focused, and not at all confused.
Luis pressed his fingers to her temples on either side and went very still, head down. Concentrating. Brianna’s pupils expanded, and she panted for breath in angry frustration. Her hands convulsively opened and closed, making fists, but she didn’t otherwise move.
Couldn’t, I sensed.
“Brianna,” I said, and sat down on the edge of her small, high bed to look deeply into her eyes. In them, I saw echoes of . . . something else. “Brianna Kirksey. My name is Cassiel. Do you know who I am?”
Without question, she knew me. The hatred in her was astonishing. It twisted her face, arched her body, almost launched her from the bed at me.
“I hate you!” Her scream came shockingly loud, echoing from the stark walls and tile as if a dozen of her were shouting the words. “I
hate you
!”
The bedclothes began to smoke, and Agent Turner stepped up to quell the fire. He likely wasn’t anywhere near as strong as young Brianna had been artificially forced to be, but he was capable of counteracting the side effects of her rage. For now.
“I know you hate me,” I said. “You hate me because you were told of the terrible things I’ve done.”
“You
killed them!
” she screamed, and writhed under Luis’s calming influence, thrashing almost uncontrollably. “You killed my parents!
I saw you do it!

Ah.
This
was how Pearl ensured the loyalty of her soldiers, at least the ones aimed at me; she showed them horror, and cast me as the leering villain. In reality, Pearl—or, more likely, one of her trusted subordinates—had killed Brianna’s parents, and disguised the killer as me. It was also possible that Brianna had been shown photographs, or video, doctored to place the blame on me. Children believed things in a very literal manner. She’d have no reason to think anyone would lie.
There was absolutely no point in convincing the child—or
attempting
to convince her—that I had not done these things. I abandoned the conversation, looked at Luis and Turner, and said, “I will go.” They nodded. Turner looked relieved; Luis looked determined, but then, he was focusing almost all his powers inward, on the girl.
I heard her screaming all the way down the hall, and then I heard her stop. I leaned against the wall, eyes shut, listening to her voice, her tears, her anguish.
I am not your enemy,
I thought to her, although she neither would know nor care. She had been bitterly hurt, if not physically, then emotionally. Her pain was the price of Pearl’s determination to remove me from the equation.
I bared my teeth in a silent, fierce grin.
We’ll see, sister,
I thought.
We’ll see who is left standing in the end.
I took the scroll from my jacket and held it in my right hand. There was a catch on the hard protective cover, which was surprisingly difficult to work with my prosthetic left fingers; I fumbled it open, took hold of the scroll, and began to scan the list of names. So many names. So many children, and all of them hopelessly at risk.
There must be
something
I could do.
I traced the first name with my metallic fingertip, and felt a distant echo. Not the same intense contact that I had before; this was more of a whisper, something just at the edge of awareness.
The metal was creating a mostly-inert barrier between me and the power of the list. I felt a surge of interest, almost of hope, and controlled it with an effort.
Not proven,
I thought.
Not until Pearl attacks, and fails to reach me.
I sat down on a nearby bench and tried again, touching first one name, then another. I got a confusing, indistinct jumble of impressions. Normal life, I thought. Nothing I could understand easily. I glided my finger down the list, until I felt something
not
normal.
Intense, fierce emotion. It overwhelmed me for a moment, and then it clarified. Rage. Fear. Terror.
I looked down at the name beneath my finger.
Alex Carter. La Jolla, California.
It was happening here. Right here.
I took a breath and placed my real-flesh right index finger on Alex’s name, and shuddered as the emotion rolled through me, flaying my nerves raw. With the fear and pain came knowledge, sure and instinctive.
I knew where he was.
And he was not at all far.
I let the scroll snap shut, closed the case, and put it back in my jacket pocket. I could still hear Brianna’s sleepy, still-angry voice, punctuated by Luis’s, or Turner’s.
No,
I thought.
This is mine to do. Mine.
As if on cue, as I headed for the exit, my cell phone rang. I flipped it open without looking at the display and said, “Rashid.” No answer. “Rashid, where are you? Are you still following the man who abducted Gloria?”
A burst of static greeted me, and then the Djinn’s voice said, “—help—” He was no longer proud. No longer confident. He was afraid. Or at least, he sounded that way.
“Tell me where.”
He didn’t, not in words. Instead, a burst of data came across the screen, resolving into a map, with a glowing, pulsing dot.
“I’m coming,” I said, and ran out into the darkness. There were a few motorcycles parked in a special area in front of the hospital, locked in place. I snapped one of the chains with a simple jerk of my fingers that ripped the link in half. Then I took the link in my hand, melted it into flowing liquid, and poured it into the ignition, where it hardened into a perfect key.
It was a Harley. That was, apparently, a very popular brand. It was even larger than the last one I’d ridden, all chrome and heavy black leather saddlebags. There was aggression in the lines of it. Anger.
I liked it immediately. It suited my mood.
I opened the throttles and sent the bike roaring from the parking lot in front of Scripps Memorial Hospital, out onto Genesee, heading for Rashid’s location as it was marked on the tiny map. Rose Canyon, which was—by no coincidence, I was sure—the same location I had sensed for the Warden child in distress, Alex Carter. I pushed the motorcycle faster, faster still, until the lights around me were a blur, until I was dangerously fast even for Djinn reflexes—which I no longer possessed in full measure. But the fact remained: Rashid was trapped, and the child, Alex Carter, was in pain. In danger. And I might be in time, if I hurried.
I never made it.
I turned down a side street, focused intently on the map, on finding a less obvious way to the goal. Darkened buildings flashed by me in a smear; streetlights blurred together.
And then something hit me from behind, like a massive punch from a giant’s fist, throwing me and the motorcycle forward into an uncontrolled slide, and then I felt myself airborne, felt the world spinning sickly around me, and heard the crunch of metal and glass, and saw my own face reflected starkly in a mirror. No, not a mirror, a plate-glass window in a dark building, which I slammed into at almost a hundred miles an hour, fragmenting glass with such force it turned almost to powder where my body impacted it. At the edges, though, it turned lethally sharp, and I felt it rip at me like a shark, only for a single hot instant, and then I was hitting a wall, and falling back, seeing the splash of blood where I had impacted . . . ... and then I was down, lying still, staring up at swaying lights.
I heard the crunch of bootheels on glass.
A Djinn looked down at me.
Rashid.
Handsome and exotic and remotely dispassionate. “You’re badly wounded,” he said. “What will you cut off this time to save yourself, Cassiel? Your head? That would be entertaining.”
I rolled slowly to my hands and knees.
Rashid’s boot thudded heavily into my back, driving me facedown into the broken glass. I might have cried out. The sight of my blood, again, was disconnecting me from the immediacy of my injury; I felt serene, on some level, and alert.
But I couldn’t get up. “Rashid,” I said, and turned my face to the side, looking up at him through bloodied pale hair. “You don’t seem as if you need help after all.” There was something eerie in my voice, as well. Light, unconcerned, almost indifferent. The Djinn in me, rising like a monster from the dark. Rashid gazed down at me, and his eyebrows slowly rose, widening his eyes.
“From you?” he asked, and yawned, showing needle-sharp teeth. “Why ever would I? No. Never.”
“Someone called me,” I said. “Someone pretending to be you. I was provided with a map. I came to save you.”
“Amusing,” he said. “But not really important. I’m not so sensitive as all that, to take offense to something not even done to me.”
“You should,” I said. “If you’re not Pearl’s creature. She’s using you to lure me. Doesn’t that offend you?”
The weight of his boot lifted from my back, and Rashid sank into a smooth, almost feline crouch, staring at me with inhuman intensity. “I am no one’s creature.”
“So I believed,” I said. “Yet you just attacked me.” And I was hurt, although not devastatingly so. I just didn’t allow him to see it. “If you aren’t hers, why?”
Rashid shrugged. “I didn’t attack you, I just saw your crash. Why would I strike out at you? What does it get me?”
I rolled over on my side in a crunch of broken glass, staring up at him. He cocked an eyebrow.
“Then who was it?”
“You have a truly impressive number of enemies,” he said. “I, however, am not necessarily one of them. I came to see if you were dead, that’s all. I was curious.”
Curious. Of course. I felt a cold, sick wave of anger, and pushed it down; anger wouldn’t help me in dealing with Rashid, or any Djinn, unless I was truly in a position to fight. “I thank you for checking,” I said, and couldn’t keep the sarcasm from the words. “If not you—?”
“Some human.” He said it as if they were all interchangeable. From his perspective, most likely they were.
“Help me stand,” I said.
“It will hurt.”
“I’m well aware of that, thank you.”
He leaned down, hooked a hand under my arm, and hauled me up to a standing position. I braced myself against the wall. Blood sheeted down my sides and pattered on the floor. I concentrated hard on slowing the flow from the wounds—hundreds of them, small and deadly slices that would drain me dry—while at the same time trying to clear my head.
“You’re standing,” Rashid said. He sounded surprised. I opened my eyes to look at him. “Well, for the moment, perhaps.”
“Listen to me,” I said. “This war isn’t against the humans, do you understand? It’s against the Djinn. It’s against
you
. Fight now or fight later, when she’s much stronger. Your choice.”
“You’re giving me a choice to fight at your side? Considering how well you’re doing so far? I’m flattered.” His attention strayed away from me, out to the dark, as if he was listening to something far away. “Something’s coming for you. You should leave.”
“Rashid,” I snarled, “
fight with me, or get the hell out of my way.
The New Djinn must be ashamed to have you among them, running coward that you are.”
He froze, face going immobile, eyes blazing, and then I felt a growl echo in the air around me, starting from low in his throat but building in the very bricks and concrete around us. What glass hadn’t already shattered did so, with a sharp, concussive
pop.
Then he turned and put his back to the wall beside me. “If you die,” he said, “I will not be overly sorry. But I won’t let you survive to tell your lies of my cowardice.”
“You may assume that I won’t be sorry if you fall as well,” I said, and coughed. Blood sprayed the air in a fine mist, but I felt better, after. “Who is it coming for us?”
“Not who,” he said. “
What.

With a scream of fracturing rock, the street outside erupted, pulping metal and stone in a geyser of smoke and dust, and something . . . stood up from the wreckage.
BOOK: Unknown
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