“I know,” I said. “But I know Luis. He won’t hesitate to protect Isabel, at any cost. If you can find any way to delay, to exploit any weakness in your master, take it. If you give Luis an opening, he will free you. I know he will.”
Rashid bowed his head. “As you say.” He didn’t seem convinced.
“Are you going to keep our agreement? Are you going to save the children who were abducted?”
He flashed me a sudden, blinding smile. “I will,” he said. “Be safe, Cassiel. Watch for others. Your friends may not be your friends.”
As he’d been the closest thing I still had to a living friend among the Djinn, I didn’t think the warning was necessary, but I nodded in turn. The shadows swirled around him, arabesque patterns of black against his skin like living tattoos, and then he was swallowed up.
Gone.
I had no doubt he would fulfill his promise to me. That meant children saved.
All in all, a morning on which I’d won.
It still felt like a hollow sort of victory, since Rashid, despite all his evidence of freedom, was held captive, and a potentially deadly weapon against those I loved.
But I couldn’t turn back. I
couldn’t.
I drove through the day, and well into the night beyond the snow line, until I was too tired to continue. I slept curled on a bed of leaves and pine needles, warded against the cold by layers of more forest litter. It was not a comfortable rest, but it did the job. I woke with the earliest songbirds, did my toilet duties (a thing that had ceased, finally, to horrify me), and washed my face and hands in a cold stream that left me tingling and shivering. I drank as much as I could hold, then got back on the motorcycle for another long day’s ride.
At noon I spotted a roadblock on the freeway ahead, and slowed to assess the situation. It seemed simple enough—an overturned semi truck, with its contents spilled over half the lanes of traffic. Unfortunately, its cargo had been living—cattle, probably destined for an unpleasant end in the slaughterhouse. Some had seen an earlier demise than planned due to the violence of the crash; others wandered aimlessly, confused and frightened. Some were wounded, and limped or lay crying out in pain.
Simple enough for me to edge around the mess and keep going, but there was something in it that stopped me. Wounded men roused little in the way of pity from me, unless they were innocent bystanders in a conflict; humans had a violent, bloody past, and a violent, bloody present to match it. Cows, on the other hand, seemed destined from birth to a hard life and a bad end through no fault of their own.
I liked cows.
I parked the bike and walked past two or three stopped trucks to reach the wreck. Some people were trying to help round up the strays. I wasn’t as concerned about them as I was the ones lying wounded in the road, struggling to breathe. I knelt next to one massive female with a broken right leg, and straightened and set it. That took a little more power than it would have on another animal; with so much stress on the bone, any flaw would cause the mended area to snap again, possibly in a worse configuration. The cow, sensing that the pain was gone, tried to get up, but I held her down until I was sure the repair would hold. Then she struggled up to her hooves, blinked at me with warm, simple eyes, and put her nose against my chest in a gesture that might have been affection. I patted her head with awkward good humor. “I didn’t save you,” I told her. “I only stopped the pain.” For a cow, there were no roads that didn’t end on someone’s dinner table; this one had been a dairy cow once, but her days of prime milk production were over, and a farmer had no doubt rid himself of the burden of buying her hay.
Her trusting mind held memories of a child feeding her treats, of the sun’s blaze on her skin, of the soft, sweet taste of grass and clean water, with the sharpness of dandelions cutting through. Of pain from calving, of pleasure from the rain falling down over her, of caring for her offspring and seeing them taken away either by time, or elements, or humans.
She’d had a good life, by cow standards.
I patted her head again. “Run,” I whispered to her. “Run now.”
She looked at me, as startled as it was possible for a cow to be, because I put an image in her mind of danger—of wolves circling for the hunt. She edged backward nervously, then wheeled with surprising grace and trotted away, moving faster and faster until she was headed for the truck driver, who waved his arms to scare her back into the makeshift corral.
She kept running. He threw himself out of the way, and she achieved the grassy edge of the road and plunged into the trees beyond.
I went on to the next injured cow.
Run
.
It was the only freedom they could know. And maybe it substituted, a little, for the damage that I’d done in the world ... and gave a little release to my own feelings of being trapped by my own existence.
Run.
I wished, for a moment, that I could follow my own advice. I wanted to run. The question I hadn’t settled yet in my own mind was whether I would be running toward Pearl ... or back to Luis. I knew what the logical thing, the
necessary
thing, was, but that image of Rashid kept haunting me.
There was a Djinn at the school, under the control of another with unknown motives. And Rashid was right ... Anything could happen. A creature of Rashid’s might wouldn’t be easily countered, or controlled, even by Marion. If she wasn’t aware of the problem ...
No. It wasn’t my problem. I’d delivered the information to Luis’s cell phone, and Rashid had promised to tell him as well. I’d already done as much as I could do.
I was ready to leave the accident scene and continue when I heard a shriek of horror and anguish cut through—not animal grief or injury, but human. A woman’s cry.
She staggered out of one of the wrecked cars, holding a bloodied child in her arms.
Isabel.
I realized in the next instant that it wasn’t my Ibby—it couldn’t have been—but the impact of the horror was visceral. By the time reality sank in, I was already moving, running for the woman. She sank to her knees, still holding the limp form of the girl in her arms. Ibby’s age, or very close; like Ibby, the child had dark, sleek hair, and what skin that wasn’t covered in blood was a similar coppery brown. She was wearing a blue Princess shirt, with butterflies and rainbows. It looked like something Ibby would have liked.
“Give her to me!” I demanded. The woman—young and very shocked—wasn’t responding. She had a broken leg and, I thought, a concussion. “Let me have her!”
The child didn’t have time for any hesitation; she was bleeding out very quickly from a slash across her femoral artery—the only injury she’d sustained, but a deadly one that had already gone on much too long. I grabbed her and laid her down on the pavement, focusing all my will and strength on her thin, failing body.
Someone grabbed me and pulled me away—the arriving police, meaning well but not understanding what they were doing. I cried out, summoned up Earth power, and threw them off their feet with a roll of the pavement as I lunged back toward the girl. Paramedics were setting down cases and equipment around the motionless child, but they would be useless; it was too late for what they would try, far too late.
She had seconds left, at best. I was her only real hope. Something struck me in the back, bit sharply, and then my entire body spasmed as electric current slashed through me. My muscles lost all control, and I slammed facedown to the hot, blood-streaked pavement. I heard the metallic ticking of the Taser control, and as soon as it ended, there was a knee squarely in the center of my back, holding me down while my muscles continued to writhe in silent agony.
But worse than that, far worse, was seeing the paramedics kneel down, check the small girl’s pulse, exchange a look that clearly said their efforts wouldn’t be enough. Oh, they went through the motions, but I could feel it from where I lay pinned by the police—she was dying.
I could still save her ...
And then, with a last flutter of breath, she was gone.
I didn’t offer any more resistance. With the girl’s death, the police lost any real interest in me, especially when the mother woke from her stupor to tell them I’d been trying to help. A simple nudge of influence that I’d learned from Luis was enough to have them release me, though I didn’t immediately leave. Instead, I watched the paramedics load the body of the girl into their ambulance, and tried to understand what I was feeling. Inexplicable loss, yes. But more than that ... fear, very real fear.
I could lose Ibby, so easily
.
Rashid’s words came back to me with sudden, gut-wrenching force.
If I’m ordered to kill those children, I won’t have a choice.
It became crystal clear to me: I couldn’t go on, not knowing what I knew now. There was someone hiding inside the school, with Isabel and Luis. I could fight all the battles I wished out here, but back there was the one that I
had
to win.
I’d just seen the unmistakable outcome of what would happen if I didn’t. An omen of things to come.
I got back on my motorcycle, and opened the throttle as I raced back the way I’d come, and hoped—no,
prayed
—that I wouldn’t be too late.
I was still two hundred miles out when the attack came, in the form of a thickly falling rain. It wasn’t a normal storm, I could sense that, but I was no Weather Warden, and the purpose of the storm failed to come to me until it was too late ... until the tide of mud rushed down the steep hill on my left in a thick, choking rush. I didn’t have enough warning, and though it was certainly of the earth, and under my control, the water in it was the active force, and the vast amount of power in it hit me with the force of a speeding train, knocking me and the Victory off the road and sweeping us along in a grinding roar of rocks, earth, and malice.
I kicked away from the bike and tried to move with the tide, but the churning, thick mud made me clumsy and slowed my efforts. I couldn’t keep my head above the muck and, after a few uselessly spent moments of flailing, allowed myself to sink as I reached out for power ...
... And found myself almost exhausted. I expended what power I could to try to slow the avalanche of mud, but it wasn’t enough. I fought my way toward the surface, slicing myself on tumbling rocks, and came up in a tangle of black roots that held me under the surface like a thick, fibrous cage. I was able to grab a quick, muddy gasp of rain and air before the tumbling flow pushed me down again.
Panic and lack of oxygen quickly robbed my limbs of strength, and I lost track of where I was or how much time had passed. I knew only that I had to get free, quickly, or I would never draw a clear breath again.
My flailing hand fell on something sharp, and I felt the sting of the cut even over the muffling grip of desperation. My fingers closed around it—a torn, razor-edged piece of metal about as long as my forearm. I gripped it hard and used it to slice at the roots that had wrapped around my head and neck, hacking wildly until I felt it give way and tumble away in the tide.
Then I touched rock beneath me, and with the last, fading glimmers of power, I launched myself up, out of the mud. I made it to the rolling top of the flow and saw a chance—just one—as it took me toward a thick overhanging branch.
I stabbed the metal into the tree branch and, screaming with primal effort, pulled my legs out of the muddy avalanche. I wrapped them around the wood and slowly, painfully crawled up on the thick, sheltering tree. I was freezing and shivering, and so caked with mud that I could hardly move with the weight of it. It seemed to take forever, but I gradually stopped shaking as the wet, sucking tide beneath me slowed to a stagnant pool of muck. Things surfaced from its depths: shredded plants, broken and unidentifiable; sad, muddy lumps of dead animals caught in the trap. I caught a glimpse of something metallic, and dropped down into the chest-high mud to wade toward it.
The Victory was buried beneath what seemed like a ton of slowly congealing mud, but the wheels were intact, and I managed to get it upright. I rolled/dragged it to a shallower area and finally got it up onto dry land again. The rain continued in a torrential downpour, but this time to my benefit, as it sluiced the thick, heavy coating of black earth from my body and the bike.
I didn’t know if the Vision could possibly still be functional after that ordeal, and at first it seemed that it wasn’t; attempts at starting her met with nothing but impotent sputters. I was beginning to think that I ought to abandon it, sad though the thought made me, but I gave it one last halfhearted try, and the engine coughed, struggled, and then roared in triumph.
I mounted the bike and leaned forward, resting my cheek on the handlebars. “Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you.”
The Victory gave a rough purr beneath me ... not perfect, but running with the same determination I felt myself.
I walked it downhill, until I found a trail, and then rode.
I didn’t dare come at the school in the same direction as before; I would rather let my enemies think that they’d destroyed me. It was only luck and stubbornness that had saved me, in truth, but I couldn’t risk another encounter. I didn’t have the power.
Rushing into danger without it, though, was a fool’s errand. I needed to draw power; the question was, from what. Or from whom.
The obvious and easy answer was Luis, but the relationship between us was, at present, neither obvious nor easy, and I wasn’t sure he would respond ... but he hadn’t broken the link between us, which still pulsed and whispered deep within me. As I searched the aetheric for a better, less obvious route to where I was going, I also—very carefully—sent a wordless signal down the connection, like a tap on a wire.
I received a single, wordless pulse back from him. The relief I felt was immense, almost choking, and I had to steady myself for a moment before I tried to think what to do next. I was too weak to force open the connection wider on my end, and too weak to communicate with him in even that indirect whisper we’d used so often before. All I could do was signal, like someone walled up in wreckage, and hope that he’d act on his own.