The blaze—Pearl herself?—pulled itself rapidly into a hard black shaft of swirling shadows, then into a ball, which contracted to a tiny pinpoint of darkness ...
And sped away through the aetheric, leaving behind the ghostly shimmer of power that I’d seen at other locations.
That was how Pearl moved from one of her camps to another. We’d just forced her to stage a hasty retreat.
On the physical plane, my cell phone rang, and I fumbled it open, still splitting my attention between the two realms of existence. “Madre,” Luis’s voice said shakily. “Can you feel this? What the hell is this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. We were still merged on the aetheric, and it felt ... incredible. I wanted to weep with the beauty of it, and scream, and run away from its intimacy. There was nothing in my experience like it, not even among the Djinn. This was ... wrong, and yet it felt so addictively right. “Let go.”
“I can’t,” Luis whispered, from a great distance away. “I can’t let you go. I can never let you go. Don’t you feel that? God, Cass, no matter what happens, no matter how we feel ... this is right.”
The truth of it echoed between us in breathtaking clarity. That was the painful part, as well as the beauty; we were not meant to feel this kind of connection, not at this level. It was reserved for Djinn, and too powerful for humans to channel.
I tried again to pull away, but I couldn’t. I wanted ... I wanted to stay connected to him, in just this incredibly powerful, intimate way, forever.
The light between us flickered, and I realized with a jolt that he was the one fueling all this power, and it was draining him dry. He would allow it, in this state. He wouldn’t feel self-preservation, or fear. Not when we were too closely joined to differentiate ourselves.
I had to end it. Quickly.
It took the effort of my life, but I ripped us apart—and the pain was unbelievable, cell- and soul-destroying. On the physical plane, I heard Luis scream through the cell phone, and heard my own agonized cry. On the aetheric, we bled black waves of anguish as our conjoined bodies came apart, and wisps of our aetheric essence broke loose to swirl in bright, then fading colors around us. The wisps quickly cooled to ash gray, and fell away.
On the phone, Luis went ominously silent, and in the aetheric his form went still, drifting aimlessly in the visible and invisible currents of force. The colors of his body, normally so bright, were fading to pastel.
He was injured.
He might be dying.
I was hurt, but not so badly; I could see places on my aetheric body where I continued to bleed off energy in brightly colored streams. I concentrated on stopping the flows, and slowly, painfully, the bleeding became trickles.
I let go of my hold on the aetheric, and the gravitational pull of my physical body snapped me back through a dizzyingly long distance, a rush of starlight and waves of color, a fall from heaven. ...
I came upright in the chair in the motel with a gasp. I was still holding the cell phone, but there was only static and distant noise on the line. “Luis?” I said. “Luis, answer me if you can hear me!”
Nothing. I heard more noise now, other voices, and then a rustle as someone else picked up the cell phone. “Cassiel?” Marion’s voice. She sounded guarded.
“Is he all right?”
“Don’t know yet; he’s out cold. No obvious physical damage, but I’ve had a good look at Luis Rocha these past few days, and if he’s hurting, it’s a real problem. What happened?”
I didn’t want to tell her. There was something frightening and intimate about what we’d done; it felt forbidden, though as far as I knew there were no customs or laws against it.
But then, there never were until someone invented the newest perversion.
“We joined on the aetheric,” I finally said, choosing my words carefully. “Not touched. Joined. Became one. I had to pull us apart; it was killing him.” When she didn’t immediately reply, I asked, “Do you know of this? Have you seen it done?”
“Not by humans,” she said. “A very few times by a human and a Djinn, but it takes a strong bond to even attempt it. Maybe the Djinn have something like it among themselves ...?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think there’s anything like that in Djinn experience. Did I kill him, Marion? Did I—”
“No, he’s not dead,” she said. “Hurt, yes, but not dead. No worries, we’ll take care of him here.” She cleared her throat. “Perhaps you shouldn’t—”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Perhaps we shouldn’t. Ever.”
I hung up, staring thoughtfully at the blank wall in front of me. Djinn couldn’t—or didn’t, in any case—merge in the way that Luis and I had on the aetheric; that seemed to be reserved exclusively for Wardens and Djinn ... but technically speaking, I wasn’t even a Djinn, only the remnants of one.
Odd, that I was the first to discover this intimate, cruelly beautiful connection that could occur between two people on the aetheric—unless it couldn’t occur to anyone but me. Perhaps that was one of the strange outlying pieces of my once-Djinn self; perhaps Ashan had deliberately left that capability to me, to help me protect myself here on the aetheric from Pearl.
I wouldn’t rule it out. Ashan played very long, very obscure games, and he had manipulated me from the beginning. If this was some kind of weapon left to me to discover, then it was a dangerously seductive one.
It appeared that I could protect myself from the worst that Pearl could do, on the aetheric. All I needed to do was kill the Warden who stood with me.
I rested my aching forehead on my palms, and quietly, deeply hated Ashan all over again, the smug and unfeeling bastard brother of my soul.
I left the next morning, as soon as I could be sure of recovery from my adventures on the aetheric ... because I had a new destination. It was far, far across the country, but the first new lead that I had on Pearl and her plans.
First, I had to get to Trenton, New Jersey, but I needed to do it without triggering the interest of the FBI, which had to be actively on the lookout for me now. I was an easy target to spot—after all, I was tall, thin, albino in coloring, with green eyes and a hand and forearm made of copper. Not exactly average, especially in my white motorcycle leathers and on the sleek Victory I was riding.
I needed a human makeover.
My first task that morning was standing in front of the mirror and concentrating very, very hard on altering my appearance, one feature at a time. The hair was the most obvious, and easiest ... I slowly darkened it from pink-streaked white to a smooth cap of black. My skin was much harder to alter, and I decided not to try; I had seen others with similar coloring who achieved it through application of makeup, and although they attracted attention, I would be a stereotype, difficult to identify as an individual.
Hair completed, I went to a cheap, dingy thrift shop, where I found a tight, long-sleeved black shirt, a battered black jacket, and black nylon cargo pants covered with massive silver zippers and nonsensical pockets. When the clothes were paired with equally battered black boots, I looked ... different. I studied myself in the mirror critically.
“Needs something,” the clerk said. He was an old man, with rheumy eyes and a humped back from age and bone loss. What little hair he still had was a dirty gray. It stuck out like the mane of a lion and hadn’t been washed in some time. “I got it. Hold on.”
He shuffled off at a speed that was, for him, fast, and returned a few moments later with two things: a black collar studded with silver spikes, and a necklace. I dropped the chain of the necklace over my head, and a snarling silver skull with wings leered back at me.
I liked it.
The collar fitted around my neck with just enough room to feel comfortable, and I had to admit that the two additions made the ensemble memorable, and at the same time, utterly not matching the description of the woman the FBI would be seeking.