He wasn’t wrong, but the fact was that there were no others to call on. Marion couldn’t leave the children; most of the other powerful Wardens had been called out to the emergency at sea. Pearl had timed her move to active strikes just perfectly; Ashan wouldn’t commit the Old Djinn to fighting her, and David couldn’t. He’d already tasked them to the Wardens and to combat existing threats.
We were very much on our own, and very vulnerable indeed.
“Go,” I said aloud, in the real world. “Break loose. I can’t risk you.”
“You can’t do this alone. If she’s that powerful, she’ll destroy you in ten seconds and you know it.”
“And your help will only add another ten seconds to our lives! I’d rather do this alone. Ibby needs you more than I do.”
“You think I’m just going to back off and leave you? That’s you who leaves, Cass. Not me.”
On the aetheric, his glowing form turned toward me, and both our hands joined. We turned in slow, dreamlike circles, eddied by the currents of power. Beyond us, the fire of Pearl’s black hatred danced, and the smoke it gave off in the aetheric was the ash of a thousand burning Djinn.
“I’m not going. Ibby needs us both,” Luis said, down in the real world. “You can’t fight her. Not alone, Cass. Not now. Please don’t do this.”
“It’s the best chance we have to stop her,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I hung up the phone.
In that instant, the bonfire ceased to shimmer its toxic colors upward, toward the roof of the Djinn world; instead, the tendrils suddenly whipped outward, flowing with wicked speed toward the two of us. We’d been at a safe boundary distance, I’d thought, but no longer.
Now it was coming for us.
Coming very, very fast.
I tried to push Luis away, toward safety, but he hung on with a tenacity I hadn’t expected. Instead of pulling apart, he dragged me closer, closer ... and instead of a physical embrace, our aetheric bodies slid together.
They merged, sinking into each other, forming one heart, one spirit, one mind.
The resulting explosion of power was soundless, and bright as a star, and as Pearl’s poisonous tendrils of shadow whipped around us, I realized that she couldn’t touch us. Not as long as that brilliant light burned between us, within us.
I clung to Luis on the aetheric, and the power amplifying between us roared on, louder and louder, setting up resonances and waves that rippled in all directions. It disrupted the attack coming against us, and then broke in a soundless shatter against Pearl’s central column of force.
But Pearl’s column wavered under the attack, and came near to dispersing completely.
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.