“Cass?” Luis’s voice, from behind me. I sat back on my heels and looked over my shoulder at him. The flickering firelight was almost extinguished now, but the trees were still popping and smoldering, dropping cinders, not flaming leaves. Heavy gray smoke had replaced the earlier mist, and it rolled sullenly around our feet and hazed the air. “Cass, we’ve got to get the hell out of here. If there’s one Djinn, she’ll send others.”
“Maybe not,” Isabel said in a distracted tone as she focused on controlling the last still-burning tree that ringed us. “The battle with the Wardens outside of Portland is really fierce. I don’t know if she’ll care enough about us.”
“Better we don’t find that out, Iz. Let’s get these out and move.” Now, Luis linked hands with her, and together they snuffed out the flames.
Isabel looked at him oddly. “Iz?” she said. “You’ve never called me that before.”
He stomped out a few remaining embers that were trying to take root in the half-burnt leaves. “I called you Ibby,” he said. “But Ibby’s gone. You’re different. So now you’re Iz.”
She’d aged her body overnight, and matured in many ways over the past few months, but that was still the hurt of a child on her face, swiftly hidden. “Iz,” she repeated, and forced a smile. “Okay, Tío. Iz it is.”
“Iz it is,” Esmeralda repeated, and laughed. She held out her hand, and Isabel slapped it. “Awesome. I like it better. Ibby was a baby’s name. Now you’re fierce.”
She was. There was something sharp and angry in Isabel now, something forged out of hardship and pain. I didn’t like it, but I was practical enough to know that we needed it now. All of us needed to be sharp, angry, and strong.
This world was no longer any place for a child.
I cast a last look at Rashid, lying almost-dead in the leaves, and nodded to Luis. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 2
OUR REAL ENEMY was not Mother Earth, but she was a formidable obstacle to overcome in finding our true fight; she was awake, though not fully aware. In the entire history of the Djinn, I could remember only a handful of times she had stirred in her long, ancient sleep, and those had been catastrophic events that had obliterated entire species, simply wiped them from the geologic record.
I’d never seen her so close to actual living thought. If she came fully to life, was able to direct the Djinn as a real army instead of an instinctive team of antibodies fighting infection, the battle would be short, devastating, and there wouldn’t be even bones to mark the end of the human race, which seemed to be where she had focused her rage. Animals, plants, insects—those were collateral damage, as they so often were. But humans… Humans were the target. Their homes would be gone, their illusions of safety shattered. There was nowhere to hide when nature herself hunted you.
By contrast, the enemy we sought—my former sister, Pearl—had wrapped herself in layers of protection, hiding herself so thoroughly that it would be hard indeed to dig her out now. She hoped that most of humanity died; it would be easier for her to rule in the aftermath, I suspected.
“We need to join the Wardens,” Luis said when we stopped for water and to consume a piece of energy bar that he’d split among us (except for Esmeralda, who smiled and told us she’d eaten her fill before; I think none of us wanted to know exactly what she’d consumed). “They’re getting hammered out there. They need every possible pair of hands.”
I wanted to argue that we should continue against Pearl, but my heart wasn’t in it. There was no point in winning that fight, should the Wardens lose their own; one way or another, humanity would perish. “All right,” I said. “For now we will join them. Where is the need greatest?”
“Hang on,” Esmeralda said. “I didn’t slither my ass all the way up from New Mexico to come fight on the side of the fucking Wardens. I thought we were going after the bitch who did things to Iz and the other kids.”
“We will,” I said. “But this is more pressing. You know what’s at stake. Is your grudge more important?”
Esmeralda tossed her hair back over her shoulders, crossed her arms, and swayed on the thick, muscular column of her snake’s body. “Pretty much, yeah,” she said. “I don’t forgive, and I don’t forget. I thought you knew that, freak.”
I smiled. It felt sinister on my lips. “Freak,” I repeated. “Interesting, coming from you.”
“Hey!” Isabel said sharply, and put herself between us. “Es, I need you with me, and if Cassiel and Luis say we need to help the Wardens, then that’s what we should do. Are you with me?”
Esmeralda didn’t look away from me and my smile. “Sure,” she said. “But I’m not with them. I’m never with them, and they don’t get to give me any fucking orders.”
“We’ll see,” I whispered. Her dark pupils began to contract into reptilian slits.
“Enough!” Isabel shouted, and pointed at me. “Cassiel, stop it. You, too, Es. This is the last thing we need!”
She was right in that, although I thought it wouldn’t be long before Esmeralda and I chose to finish our dance. I nodded and stepped back. The mutant girl nodded, too, and showed just a little of her snaky fangs as she grinned, like a swordsman baring the first inch of blade.
Luis was staring at me with worried focus. “We going to have a problem?” he asked. “Because Iz is right—we don’t need it right now. And she saved our lives. Rashid was going to roast us like marshmallows.”
“I know,” I said. “And I also know that she can’t be trusted. Not completely.” I didn’t bother to keep my voice down.
“And you can?” Esmeralda took a swig from a water bottle and passed it on to Isabel, who drank as well. “Because I heard you were all about Djinn first, humans second.”
“I used to be,” I said. “Not so long ago. Yes. But I’ve changed.”
I hoped I had, at any rate. At this moment, with my instincts and hackles raised against Esmeralda’s perceived threat, I wasn’t so certain… until Luis took my hand, and I glanced at him. The concern in his dark eyes warmed me and made the darkness slip away in shame. Yes, I’d changed. We’d all changed.
Even Esmeralda, because before she’d become friends with Isabel, she’d never have bothered to act to save a life except her own. Not that Esmeralda would ever acknowledge it.
Around us, the forest was coming alive again—birds calling, the soft whisper of animals moving through the underbrush. The oppressive sense of danger had passed, and below us the trees stretched down into a soft winter-brown valley still streaked with mist even now that the sun was high. It was chilly, but not cold, and the clear blue sky promised no chance of snow, which was good news for our progress.
“We need to get to the road,” Luis said. “Commandeer some transport—the bigger and stronger, the better. We can’t walk all the way to Portland.”
“We need a van,” Isabel put in. “Maybe a moving van, something Es can be comfortable in.”
That made the snake girl look at her oddly, as if no one had ever really considered Esmeralda’s comfort before. That might have actually been true, or at least since she’d changed into that form and been locked there by vengeful Djinn; she was dangerous, and quite possibly as sociopathic as I had been before being trapped in human form.
Yet Isabel managed to reach some hidden depth in her that wanted the emotional connection of friends. That was Ibby’s gift, perhaps… and Iz’s, now, even if this new, questionably improved girl was different in many ways.
When Isabel smiled at me, unguarded, it melted my heart and made me love her all over again, as she had been, and as she was. As she would be, in days when she was fully adult.