Unbroken
(The fourth book in the Outcast Season series)
A novel by Rachel Caine
Books by Rachel Caine
Ill Wind
Heat Stroke
Chill Factor
Windfall
Firestorm
Thin Air
Gale Force
Cape Storm
Total Eclipse
Undone
Unknown
Unseen
Unbroken
Working Stiff
Glass Houses
The Dead Girls’ Dance
Midnight Alley
Feast of Fools
Lord of Misrule
Carpe Corpus
Fade Out
Kiss of Death
Ghost Town
Bite Club
Last Breath
To the amazing professionals who risk their lives every day to bring those devastated by angry nature to a safe place and helping hands…
To volunteers who sacrifice their time, their money, their energy, and their safety to pull survivors from the rubble, serve up food, hand out clothes, deliver comfort, and do a thousand other things that we take for granted in our normal lives…
To all those who donate to rescue organizations and give so constantly and generously to improve the lives of those stricken…
You are my heroes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The last book of the Outcast Season was an emotional and exhausting one, and I want to thank all of those who have loved and supported me during this amazing eight-year ride with the Weather Wardens. May your skies always be fair, my friends.
Special thanks to my husband, Cat, who bore all my hours locked in solitude with cheer, delivered caffeine at regular intervals, and never made me feel as if I was neglecting him, even when it was true. Love you, sweetie.
I also have to thank Claire, Griffin, and Nicola in New Zealand, and Felicity in Australia, all of whom made my journey down under so amazingly fun. THANK YOU!
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
MY NAME IS CASSIEL, and I was once a Djin—a being as old as the Earth herself, rooted in her power. I cared little for the scurrying human creatures who busied themselves with their small lives.
Things have changed. Now I am a scurrying human creature. Thanks to a disagreement with Ashan, the leader of the True Djinn, I can sustain my life only through the charity of the Wardens—humans who control aspects of the powers that surround us, such as wind and fire. The Warden I’m partnered with, Luis Rocha, commands the powers of the living Earth.
I find myself caring too much about Luis, and his niece, Isabel, and others who never would have mattered before. The leader of the Old Djinn tells me that I must destroy humanity to save the Djinn, and all other life on Earth. I do not believe that. I cannot.
I have become too… human.
Before, that would have seemed like a curse.
Now I believe it may be a blessing.
But it will take all I have, all I have ever had, to stop what is to come, because the Earth has awoken, and in her madness she may kill us all.
Chapter 1
ON THE MORNING of the end of the world, I woke up curled beneath the cover of fallen leaves. It was extraordinarily quiet that morning, a hush like nothing I’d ever heard before… the calm that falls before the storm, but this storm, when it came, would never pass.
Not for us.
For most of a million years, the planet beneath me, the pulsing, living Earth herself, had been silent—not dead, but dormant, like a long-sleeping volcano. The past few years had seen warning signs… explosions of violence, as if she had been restless in her dreams. But just yesterday, something wondrous and terrible happened: She awoke in pain.
The quiet around me now was not peace. It was the indrawn breath before the scream.
I lay still for a few moments, savoring the silence. A bird’s wings flapped somewhere in the distance, and condensation tapped on leaves as it slipped from tree branches overhead. The sun was rising, tinting the low-lying mist a soft orange.
I was cold, wet, and afraid, but I felt a precious moment of peace. I could almost believe it was the beginning of the world, the beginning of hope, the beginning of everything.…
Except that I knew, as we all did, that it was the end.
Next to me, buried in the leaves and sharing my warmth, Luis Rocha stirred, groaned, and opened his eyes. His heavy sigh said everything about how he felt about the dawning of the day, and no wonder—of the two of us, Luis had taken the most abuse in the battle of the night before. “Chica,” he said, “if you tell me there’s no coffee, I’m going to die. I mean that. It’s not a metaphor or anything.”
I turned my head in his direction and smiled. It was not a nice smile. “There’s no coffee,” I said. “Nor is there likely to be any for some time.”
“You are one cold bitch. It’s a good thing I love you.” He sounded miserable, but at least he was talking. Breathing. Living.
I brushed the mess of leaf litter away from my leather jacket and jeans, and stood up to stretch my arms high, toward heaven. My muscles were cold and tight and bruised, and I winced with the hot red twinges that the movements woke. My hair was damp and tangled. I looked, I thought, like some strange madwoman, like an ancient Greek maenad who’d spent the night running the hills with the beasts… only perhaps a great deal more frightening. I’d seen it in the stares of others, how odd I could seem—tall, pale, sharply angled, with the unnaturally green eyes of a Djinn.
Luis tried to sit up, failed, and flopped back onto the leaves. He closed his eyes, and his dark caramel skin seemed to pale almost to gold. “Okay, that was a freaking bad idea. A little help, Cassiel?”
I silently extended a hand, and when he took it, hauled him up to his feet and held him there while he swayed. He was still favoring his leg—injured, inexpertly patched—and I was concerned about the continued pallor of his skin. His breathing came in short, pained gasps, then slowly evened out.
I was worried about him, but I didn’t dare say it. Luis wouldn’t thank me for it, and there was little help I could offer now. I could draw power out of the earth around us and speed the healing process, but drawing attention to myself today with the use of my gifts was dangerous. Wardens were going to die today, many of them. Too many, most likely.
I did not want us to be among those unfortunates.
“How’s your leg?” I asked, knowing he’d lie. As he did.
“Fine,” Luis said, and put his weight on it. I felt the wave of pain that cascaded through him in a hot red ripple, but apart from the tightening of his lips, he didn’t show any sign of it on the outside. I was never sure whether he knew how much I felt through our link; my Earth power was channeled by and rooted through his, and it gave me access to emotions and physical sensations I knew he’d sometimes rather keep private. “Where’s Ibby?”
Stupid of me not to have immediately thought of her, and I cursed my own lack of maternal instinct, of human connection. Ibby was a child, and she ought to have been foremost in my mind from the moment of waking. That she wasn’t would be unforgivable to Luis.