“Hold on,” he said, and jerked me violently forward. At the same time, I sensed a hammer blow of power coursing through him, through me, and all the crystals shattered at once in a mind-destroying white-hot wave of agony and fury and hunger and disappointment…
… And then I was lying limp on Lewis’s chest, cradled in his arms. Screaming voicelessly, because the pain was worse, somehow, as if the crystals were still inside me, still drilling…
And they were.
The broken ends of the crystals were moving. Driving in.
Lewis wrapped his arms around me, and I felt another surge of power blast through me in a cresting wave that hit and shattered every one of the deadly fragments, until I was lying limp against him, covered in a coating of shining dust.
“Get Rocha, somebody,” Orwell said. He let his arms fall free to hit the ground at his sides, and didn’t move. I couldn’t. My muscles felt loose and slack, unnaturally dead within my body. My bones felt as if they had been broken into dust as well… and then a strong pair of hands was pulling me up and into another embrace.
Luis.
The smell of him washed over me, familiar and strong—male sweat, damp earth, the spicy sweetness of peppers and chocolate. I saw the tattoos on his arms first, winding sinuously up his bronze skin, and finally I focused on his face.
“Luis,” I whispered. It was all I could manage. He looked shaken and anguished, but he smiled and kissed me.
When he pulled back, there was blood on his face. Fresh red blood in a pattern of dots.
I raised my fingers to touch my face, and felt the holes left by the crystals, the wetness that seeped from them. My whole body wept red.
“Stay still,” he told me. “Don’t try to move. Just stay still.”
It seemed like sound advice, and just this one time, I obeyed.
Two days in a Warden hospital in Seattle, while they pumped blood into my almost-drained body and carefully closed up every wound. The final count had been in the hundreds of punctures. Damage to my bones had been extensive, they told me, and I had several painful rehabilitation sessions with an Earth Warden to repair them.
No one explained to me what had happened until the afternoon of the second day, when Lewis Orwell dropped in and shut the door on a fluttering entourage of anxious Wardens with questions, alerts, and requests. He nodded to Luis, who was sitting at my side holding my right hand in both of his; Luis nodded back cautiously. “How’s she doing?” Orwell asked. He had a pleasant, resonant voice, and like many Earth Wardens (except me) he seemed to exude a soothing, reassuring presence that everyone liked.
“I am fine,” I answered before Luis could speak. “There’s no need to keep me confined to this bed. The bones are healing.”
“Note the present tense,” Luis said. “You’re not out of the woods, Cassiel.”
“Of course not. We are in the Pacific Northwest.”
“And… that was too literal. I meant—”
“I know what you meant,” I said, “but I am fine. The healing will continue whether I am in the bed or out of it.”
“She’s right,” Orwell said, and dragged a steel-backed chair over to the other side of my bed, which he straddled. He rested his chin on crossed arms and studied me with clinical interest. “You’re a fast healer. Comes from the Djinn part of you, most likely.” He fell silent, and I wondered what he was thinking, or wanted me to say.
I stared back, unwilling to give the first ground.
“I expected you to be full of questions,” he said.
“Did you?”
“Most people couldn’t have come out of that sane,” he told me. There was an interestingly tentative edge to his voice now, as if he couldn’t quite understand something he’d previously thought an open book. “But those who did would want to know what happened to them. They’d be demanding it. Unlike you.”
I shrugged. It hurt; healing meant that the functions were intact, but the residual pain would continue for a while, like the fading ache of deep bruises. “You’ll tell me when you think you know,” I said. “I could tell from the discussion in the halls that no one understood very much.”
He tilted his head a little to the side, as if trying to consider me from a slightly different angle. “Hasn’t he told you?” Orwell glanced at Luis, who was sitting silently at my side. There was an odd dynamic between these two men, something like a power struggle, but I didn’t understand why.
“He hasn’t been forthcoming,” I said. “He says he doesn’t remember what happened after we broke through in the mine and found the Djinn standing at the top.”
“And you?”
“Something came, something even the Djinn feared. Ashan retreated, but they took the others with them. I didn’t see what it was that threatened them, but it took me for its own. Then I remember waking up in the—confinement.” It hadn’t been a prison. It had been a coffin—no, worse. It had been a chrysalis, something that would have transformed me into something else altogether. What, I didn’t know, but I had come perilously close to finding out. “The other Wardens? Alive?”
“We found Rocha and the other five unconscious five miles from the mine entrance,” Orwell said. “Rocha tells me they were going to be killed by the Djinn, so they went at it hard; one died of her injuries, but they were all pretty bad off when we found them. The first thing he wanted to do when he was on his feet was saddle up and go off looking for you.”
“And you let him.”
“No, I went with him. Good thing I did; you were buried in there deep, and there weren’t a lot of traces to track. Between the two of us, we managed.” He gave a modest shrug. “Then it was just a matter of digging you out.”
Somehow, I doubted it was quite that simple. I thought back to the nightmare of coming into the light, of the crystals drilled into my flesh and bone. “What was it doing to me?”
“You don’t know?” Orwell stared at me steadily for a long moment, then shrugged. “I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen anything like it. Your flesh was turning crystalline, hard as diamonds. Your eyes—it had only just started, I can tell you that much. What you would have been at the end of it is anybody’s guess, but it would have been…”
“Irresistible,” Luis put in softly, and drew both our gazes. “Like the irresistible force. And beautiful, too. Scary beautiful.”
It reminded me far too much of what Pearl had promised. I ached still in every cell; I was, I sensed, lucky that the process hadn’t gone much further or I’d have never survived the reversal.
I forced myself to think beyond my own fears. “How long have you been here, Orwell? Where are the Wardens who went out to sea with you? The Djinn?”
“We docked in Miami four days ago,” he said. “The Wardens are where they’re needed. The Djinn…” He hesitated, and looked away. “They were taken as soon as we got out of the black corner. We lost them, one way or another.”
“But they held,” I said, and felt a burst of amazement that was almost pride. “The Wardens held. Against the Djinn.”
“We’re maintaining,” Orwell agreed. He looked exhausted, I thought; leadership sat well on him, but it was a crushing load. “We’re not winning. Look, I know from Brennan that you think dealing with Shinju is dealing with the devil, but trust me: Right now, I’ll take the devil and all his pointy-headed minions as long as they do what I tell them. I have to, because our only other choice is obliteration.” He let that sink in before he continued. “As best we can tell, the reason Rocha and the other Wardens who survived that mine are still alive is that Shinju brought her kids and fought on their side. They’d have been ground into hamburger, otherwise. As it was, the odds were way too close.”
“Pearl—Shinju—is the one who sealed me in that prison,” I told him. “I know it. I heard her voice.”
“Maybe so, but I’ve got no energy right now for personal grudges,” he said. “Revenge can wait until we’ve got bandwidth. For now, I need every soldier fighting our enemies, not each other.”