I ran the twenty yards back to the girls in a blur and skidded to a stop in the clearing. Nothing was out of place. Esmeralda still sat coiled, though she’d gone quite still. And Isabel…
Ibby wasn’t there.
No, she was there, but for a disorienting moment I couldn’t process what I was seeing as she turned to face me. That is not Isabel, I thought, but it was. I could see the ghost of the child in the shape of her face, the fine dark eyes… but that child had been six years old, going on seven, and this girl was at least twelve. She’d grown more than a foot, and her body had developed and rounded with it; she looked strong and lovely, and wrong. So very wrong.
I stood there frozen for a long moment. I heard the crunch of leaves as Luis limped rapidly up behind me, and went still and quiet as well.
Then I turned on Esmeralda. “What have you done?” I said it in a whisper, but my voice was trembling with outrage. “What have you done?”
Esmeralda faced me squarely, with a haughty, imperious tilt to her chin. “You’ve been out there arguing about what to do with her,” she said. “You couldn’t deal with a six-year-old, right? Well, she’s not six now. And she can take care of herself.”
“How…” Luis shifted uneasily, unable to take his gaze away from his niece’s suddenly altered face. “How did you do this?”
Esmeralda shrugged. “I can’t do it now, but I did it to myself when I was younger,” she said. “Part of what got me in trouble. But I told the kid how. It was her choice to actually do it—and she’s got the skills. Look, she was bound to do it sooner or later. Better she age herself out of it now, so she won’t be as vulnerable.”
It was a cold assessment, one that I might have made myself once. There was an eminently logical component to it that I couldn’t really deny.
But Luis looked as if he might throw up. “Ibby,” he said. “Jesus, how could you?” He knew, as I did, that she couldn’t reverse the process; a Djinn might be able to manipulate the structure of a body at will, but the changes a human Warden made in aging one were utterly beyond fixing. She had lost six years of her life, at least physically; the cost to her lifespan would be much, much greater, because the power it took to do this was toxic.
“I had to.” Ibby gave him an apologetic look, but focused her reply to me. “I can’t be a little kid anymore, Cassiel. And I can’t have you guys worrying about me all the time. You need me to be strong, and I’m going to be. I have to be able to take care of myself.” She seemed calm and more certain than I felt at this moment. “Esmeralda showed me how to do it, and it didn’t hurt as much as you’d think.”
I had nothing to say, because it was useless to debate the issue now. They had been careful to invoke such power out of my sight, out of my control; there could be no going back for Ibby now. She had lost her childhood, instantly; there would be consequences for such a flagrant use of power, things I could not yet imagine except that her life would be harsher and shorter. Aging a body so quickly ensured pain, accelerated aging, and deadly mutations. Isabel was no longer looking at a normal human lifespan; hers would be brief, like a candle lit with a blowtorch.
Not only that, the risk—using Earth powers at such violent rates, when the Earth herself was awake and aware… that had been a hideously dangerous thing to do. It could have ended all of our lives, abruptly and very painfully.
And yet I couldn’t find it in my heart to disagree with her choice, either. Today was the beginning of the end of mankind, unless a mighty miracle occurred. She’d lost her childhood, but perhaps all childhoods were over, everywhere, starting on this cool, silent morning.
But I mourned the sweet child Ibby had been. The girl who stood before me now, fragile in her newfound power, was not the same at all.
Esmeralda was still staring at me in defiance, dirty chin raised. At the end of her serpentine tail, a rattle hissed softly.
I broke the tension by turning back to Isabel, who stood tense and defensive. “We’ll have to discuss this later; there’s no time for it now. The power you used lit up the aetheric like a flare. We must move fast.”
“Hang on,” Luis said. His voice was soft and even, but very definitely dangerous. “I’m not even going to pretend to be okay with this. I am not okay. Ibby, what you did—you’re an Earth Warden; you can’t use power this way. It’s perverted. It’s dangerous. In different times you’d end up on an operating table getting your powers removed for gross misuse. Understand? Just because the Wardens are a little too panicked right now to enforce the rules doesn’t mean there aren’t any; it just means we have to try harder to stay on the right side of the line. And you crossed it.”
She had gone steadily paler and more still as he talked, but she didn’t look away, and she didn’t try to defend herself, either. She just looked at him for a moment in silence, and then said, “I’m sorry. I’m doing my best. But I was going to hold you back, and I couldn’t do that. I just couldn’t.”
He sighed, swiped a hand over his forehead in a gesture of utter frustration, and then limped over and hugged her. Hard. She came almost up to his chin now. “Okay, here’s the deal. You’re going to feel sick, and you’re going to hurt, a lot. Your bones are still forming. I’m going to see about finding you some calcium pills, vitamins, that kind of stuff; you’re going to need it, a lot of it. You start feeling bad, you say so—none of this silent heroics crap. This shit is risky.” He kissed the top of her head, and then looked up at Esmeralda, who was smirking at the two of them with an entirely inappropriate amount of satisfaction. Luis’s eyes turned dark and dangerous. “You keep an eye on her, too. And don’t think we aren’t going to talk about this again, Es.”
“That’ll be fun,” she said. “I’ll bring cookies.”
I cleared my throat. “You were scouting last night,” I said. “Did you find out if the Warden party and the children made it safely out?” Last night, we’d narrowly escaped a trap meant to kill or capture dozens of gifted Warden children; we’d gotten separated from them, as Ibby and her friend Gillian had gone after those who had tried to kill us. I’d taken Gillian back to the others, but Isabel had refused to turn away, and it had been late enough that neither Luis nor I could force the issue. Luis had been too badly hurt to make the run back, and I couldn’t leave him behind.
Hence, our uncomfortably chilly beds of leaves in the forest for the night.
Esmeralda seemed happy to change the subject, too. She said, “All of them from the school got picked up by a Warden convoy. They’re heading for Seattle, I think. Safe, as far as I know. We’ll need them soon, though. All of them.”
“Not yet,” I said. “Let them be children for as long as they can.” I was looking at Isabel as I said it, and she raised her chin with a jerk. It was bravado, not self-confidence, and I could see that she’d learned that, too, from Esmeralda. The idea of the two of them forming this instant and dangerous connection made me deeply uneasy, but there was nothing I could do to stop it; Esmeralda was an undoubted asset to us, and she had no reason to love those we’d be fighting. As allies went, she was more than acceptable.
Just not for Isabel.
“You’re living in a fantasy, you know; you guys think these kids are some kind of innocents. They’re not,” Esmeralda replied calmly, staring directly into my eyes. “They never have been. They’re Wardens, down to the core. You’re trying to pretend they’re all pure at heart. I know. I was one.”
“You were a killer,” I said bluntly. “A psychopath. And, I observe, you still are.”