I dropped into a crouch, teeth bared, made all animal in his presence. The pounding of sweet, hot fire inside me rose up, burning all my control to ashes.
All except that ice-cold core that had been mine since the beginning of time. I am Djinn, it whispered. I am not his meat. I will not be turned.
His back remained to me. His worship was aimed at the moon, and I could see the shudders running through him — sexual, most surely. I could feel the pulses from here, booming inside me like a drum.
I could not approach him, not without losing what little control remained. If I did, I would end up pinned beneath his rampant body, screaming, biting, giving and receiving violence and sex.
I reached instead for the rich warm glow of power, grounded through Luis, and brought it up around the avatar’s feet.
The grasses whipped up, knotting into ropes, growing at a staggering pace. They tied his ankles, then wrapped his legs, his torso … and a thick, meaty vine whipped around his neck and began to tighten.
Behind me, I heard the hollow shriek of the Bacchae. They had found Luis’s trail now, and I sensed the hot burst of his fear through the link between us. He couldn’t outrun them. Not in the dark. He’d have to turn and fight — a battle he was sure to lose.
The howls and shrieks burst out of the night, and I thought I heard Luis call my name, but my world had narrowed to the avatar, and the vine around his neck. I poured all the power I could muster into it, commanding the living green rope to tighten, to squeeze, to crush the life out of the avatar before his minions tore the life out of Luis.
It wasn’t going to work.
The vine was withering fast. The earth didn’t wish to kill him; the creature was part of it, part of her. A memory, a nightmare, a dream. Something lost and almost pitiable in its hunger and loneliness. I couldn’t fight him with the tools of the earth. Iron wouldn’t kill him. Neither would stone. I could batter at him, and the life inside him would heal all I inflicted, because he was raw, bloody power, and nothing else.
I lunged, hit the avatar in the back, and slammed him face down to the grass. The bonds I’d put around him withered, blackened, and turned to ash, and his slick naked body writhed, bucked, tried to turn to face me. I couldn’t risk that. I put a hand on the back of his head and slammed it deeper into the dirt, snarling, but somehow he slipped free, and his body moved beneath me, and then his eyes…
…his eyes…
I felt sanity pour out of me like water from a broken jar, and the moonlight burned cold and empty, blinding me, and suddenly I wanted … I felt … I was …
No.
I am Djinn.
The thing inside me, the thing in the core of me, that tiny spark of ice and rage that would never be human, seized control of my hands, grabbed the avatar’s jaw in my left hand, the back of his head in my right, and pulled power out of Luis in a blinding flood, a scorching wave that burned my muscles with its force.
I don’t remember twisting his head, but I remember the springy, tough resistance of his neck, his body trying to fight me, and I remember the exact instant that the fight was lost, and his bones snapped with sudden, muffled clicks. I kept twisting as the body went limp beneath me. Kept twisting, jerking his head back and forth as if I would wrench his head off his shoulders like a bloody triumph.
His eyes…
His eyes faded into confusion, and then into silent darkness.
I felt, then saw, the black flood pour out of the corpse like mist, creeping over the meadow in all directions, searching for a host. It couldn’t take me. The ice inside me wouldn’t thaw.
Luis. It would take him first.
I stumbled away from the avatar’s body and raced ahead of the mist.
I fell over the first of the Bacchae less than a hundred yards out from the clearing; her naked, battered body lay shuddering on the side of the narrow path. She was curled into a ball, shut away from the horror of what had taken hold of her. Without the avatar’s power fueling them, the Bacchae were just … lost.
I picked her up and carried her. I couldn’t leave her. The mist might reject a female avatar, but it might not. I had to keep all of them away from it.
I found Luis lying another hundred yards out, with the other two Bacchae. He was dirty and scored with cuts, but he’d avoided any serious injury. The Bacchae were, like the one I carried, naked, bloody, and pathetically bruised by their time of insanity; the bottoms of their feet were raw wounds, sliced and torn by their rampage through the forest. They had been knocked unconscious. Luis had collapsed, his breath ragged, felled most likely by the raw power I’d pulled from him to destroy the avatar’s body.
I dumped the third Bacchae, and turned to face the black mist. It was mere threads now, spread too wide and too thinly. The last whisper of the nightmare, creeping over the ground, crawling, searching blindly for rescue.
I dragged Luis another twenty yards, as a precaution.
The mist reached the Bacchae, and they twitched and whimpered and whined, even in their deep trauma.
It couldn’t touch them. It had wounded them too deeply already. That was one small blessing.
I took hold of Luis’s limp form beneath the arms and hauled, gritting my teeth, pulling him one torturous inch after another down the treacherous path until finally, I looked up to see that there was no black mist flowing toward me.
It had pooled on the ground, exhausted, and as I watched, it sank slowly into the ground from which it had come.
Gone like the nightmare it had been.
I collapsed next to Luis, my eyes full of the moon, and like the other Bacchae I curled in on myself, cold and empty and sick with what I had felt.
Luis stirred enough to gather me into his arms, and we lay together in the cold with the whisper of pines around us, as Mother Earth dreamed her insane, cold dreams of hunger and fear and loneliness and need.
After a long few minutes, Luis rolled to his feet and went back up the hill. I didn’t have the strength to protest, curling back into my traumatized ball. The world seemed so cold. So quiet.
One after another, he carried the naked women down the path. He’d retrieved our packs, and he spread out a thin insulating ground cover, then bundled the three together under a blanket. He fed them some water, a little food, and gave them gentle touches on their hair, their faces.
They needed gentleness. I knew, because I was myself starved for it, and I hadn’t sunk so deeply into the violence as the others.
As Luis worked on building a campfire, I managed to pull myself to a sitting position. He was shaking with exhaustion and weariness as he tried to set match to tinder. I took it from him and lit the fire, watched it catch with dull eyes, and took the bottle of water he passed me without much enthusiasm. The first mouthful tasted like filth, and I gagged and spat it out. My mouth still remembered the taste of honey and blood.
The second mouthful was better, and I swallowed and kept swallowing until the foreign taste was gone.
Luis settled back against a tree, stretching out his legs, and I sank down next to him. Not touching, not quite, until he reached out and pulled me closer. My head fell against his shoulder, and I felt his lips brush the dirty, sweating skin of my forehead.
“You’re safe now,” he said, and the heat of his body — a gentle warmth, not the burn of the avatar — crept into me in slow waves. Animal comfort, but a very different kind. I felt trembling muscles slowly begin to relax, and my breathing slowed to a deeper, slower rhythm. “Did he — did you — are you all right?”
I knew what he wanted to ask, and looked up into his face. He had dark eyes, shifting and gleaming in the firelight, but they were not empty. What was in them was gentle and warm and sweet, and it too came from the earth, from human kindness and compassion and … love.