Luis looked as grim as I felt. “Even if you were a full Djinn, that’d be a hat trick,” he said. “You said it kills fast. They wouldn’t get far. What we need to do is find their bodies and burn them—but you need to go after Priya while we do that. Only way this works is if we split up. Me and the girls, you after the Djinn.”
It made sense, and I took a deep breath and nodded. “I need transportation.”
He gave me an unexpected grin, but there was little humor in it. “Yeah, well, I checked the nav system. Turns out there’s a biker bar about two miles ahead. I’m pretty sure someone will be happy to give up their chopper for the cause.”
A motorcycle. Freedom, and the wind in my face, and the exultance of the chase.
I smiled back, with just as much of the predator in my smile as I’d seen in his. “I’m sure,” I agreed, and pressed the accelerator hard.
As I parked the truck at Busty’s Roadhouse, I admired the selection of two-wheeled vehicles neatly lined up outside. Gleaming, well-maintained machines, with the addition of a few muddied, hard-ridden trail bikes. I immediately focused on a Victory; the sleek shape drew me to it like a magnet. This particular model was different from my cherished Vision; it was more aggressive, muscular, heavily chromed, and a steel-hard blue.
I loved it.
“Cass.” Luis had gotten out of the truck, and was now quietly standing beside me. When I looked up at him, he jerked his chin toward the roadhouse. “Too quiet in there for this many guys.”
He was right. I’d been caught up in my fascination with the machine, but now as I looked in that direction, I realized that I heard music playing inside, but nothing else. No laughs, shouts, conversation. I turned and saw the grim set of Luis’s face. We didn’t need to speak about it. I nodded and led the way into the building.
They were all dead. All of them. The bodies lay everywhere, fallen and limp and silent; the jukebox still banged out a loud tune from the corner, but it was playing to an unhearing audience. I crouched next to the first one nearest the door—a barmaid, dressed in shorts and a tight red top, young and fit—and looked at her face.
“It’s the same,” I said. Her eyes had the same redness, and the smell of vomit was overwhelming in this abattoir, mixed with other rancid odors that made my stomach clench hard in reaction. “Look in Oversight.”
I did it at the same time Luis did, and heard him murmur, “Dios.” The room was a rolling boil of black and red, infection and disease and agony. The bodies crawled with it. I saw the stuff trying to jump from the bodies around me to my own, and edged backward. “Spread by contact, looks like,” Luis said. “These boys must have grabbed stuff at the store back there and come straight here, just as they started dying. Anybody they touched got it, too.”
“Then someone should have lived to make it to the motorcycles, or to a vehicle,” I said. “Humans are masters of self-preservation. Someone must have tried to exercise it, and run.”
“We don’t know how long the symptoms take to set in. Could be seconds, could be minutes.” Luis shook his head. “Got to be thirty people in here, Cass. And they haven’t been dead long.”
“I’m more concerned with any that might have gotten away. If they make it to a point where they can infect larger groups that disperse…” As fast-burning as this illness was, it would be devastating in the context of a town, or a city. Priya might already have appeared there, beautiful as a burning star, to deliver that deathly touch. She could have gone anywhere, far beyond my reach, far beyond the capacity of humans to fight her unless an Earth Warden was standing right in front of her.
This was what the Earth would become: fields of the dead, cities of silence, where lonely music played unheeded. It took my breath for a moment, and for the first time, I felt fear. Real, bone-deep fear. We were butterflies in an avalanche, and what could we do, really do, to stop it?
“Steady,” Luis murmured. His hand gripped mine, strong and warm. “Bright side: This stuff isn’t airborne, or we’d already be dead. It’s contact only, which means it’s containable.…”
“Not if she spreads it in a city,” I said. “Or an airport. Or—”
I caught a flash of movement from the corner of my eye, and spun around… to find a pale, glowing hand outstretched toward me, a single finger pointing at my forehead. Behind the hand, the face of Priya, her Djinn-fired eyes burning into me with unseeing intensity.
I stumbled back, and Luis grabbed her forearm.
“No!” I screamed, but he ignored me. His whole focus was on Priya, who turned her gaze on him, as emotionless as a machine. She didn’t attempt to break free of his hold, or move at all. I reached out for him, but Luis shook his head sharply.
“Don’t,” he said. “I’m already infected.” He sounded so calm. So sure. “I can do this, Cass. Just stay back.”
He couldn’t. A human, even a Warden as powerful as Luis, couldn’t defeat a Djinn one-on-one in that kind of single combat… not when she was pouring infection into him, rotting him from within. He needed me, he needed someone to amplify and direct that power with fine control, like a laser. I could do that. I could help him hit her where she was most vulnerable.
But instinct told me to back away. Stupid, ingrained human instinct that demanded I preserve my life at all costs, even the cost of the ones I loved…
I am not a human. I am a Djinn. Djinn!
I gasped in a breath and lunged forward, adding my grip to his where it wrapped around her arm. “Together,” I said. “We’re stronger together, Luis. Let me help you!”
He let out a strange, wild little laugh, and closed his eyes. Priya wasn’t trying to pull away from us; she simply stood like a hot, burning statue, not quite flesh, not quite spirit. Exalted by her mission, and hardly noticing us at all, any more than a star might notice the ants crawling far below.
The sickness was already eating its way inside Luis, and the most difficult thing for Earth Wardens to do was to heal themselves; I channeled his energy out, and back in, burning the infection away, and then helping him drive back against the source. Priya was a teeming, seething incubator of the plague; she had been hollowed out, filled with this blackness, and set in motion. The Priya I had known was gone, as surely as those who’d inhabited the dead around us were no more. And that struck me hard, the grief of it; Priya had been an immortal, and she had been thrown away to become a vessel for destruction.
She had been my sister once.
I closed my eyes and threw myself into the fight, rising into the aetheric to more clearly see the struggle. Priya’s body was no longer the beautiful, harmonious form it had been; it was distorted, rotted, cancerous with the poison she carried inside. Luis glowed bright as a star, tinted with a fire’s edge of glittering orange from his rage and fear, and as I watched, his fire burned clean the portion of Priya’s arm he held. I poured my own strength into him, careless of the cost, and guided his Earth Warden instincts into the pathways inside her body, carrying his purifying fire deeper. Each second was a bloody, costly struggle for supremacy between the infection trying to kill, and Luis—with my focus magnifying his power—trying to heal. Priya’s body went a milky pale white where his healing touched it; the flesh was only a shell now, and as he destroyed what filled it, all that was left of her was the diamond-hard casing that was not quite living tissue.
And even so, even with spending so much power, so much strength, so much courage… we began to lose.
Priya did not fight us, because she didn’t need to; the infection roared back, boiled up within Luis and began to choke off his strong, steady pulse of life—and through him, mine as well. Death was stronger than our temporary passions, and it was patient as the tide.