Unseen (38 page)

Authors: Rachel Caine

I let her fall, and collapsed next to her, gasping. My nerves still didn’t seem free of the random, coursing energy; I felt oddly displaced, light-headed, numb.
I shouldn’t have been able to survive that
, I thought, but that, too, seemed distant, almost unimportant.

Esmeralda’s coils writhed into view, and she wrapped her body around the base of a tree. Isabel and Gillian were with her. I saw no sign of the wolves, living or dead; I hoped most of them had escaped with their lives, but Snake Girl looked suspiciously well fed.

“You’ve got them,” she said. She sounded surprised. “Not bad.”

“Glad you like it,” Luis grunted, and sat down—more of a controlled fall, really. “Damn, Ibby, what were you thinking?”

She came to him and gave him a hug, a long one. “I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t really sound sorry. “Es told us they were out here. I was afraid they’d hurt somebody else. I didn’t want them to get Sanjay and Elijah.”

“What if they’d gotten you two?” Luis asked, and hugged her again. “You’ve got to be more careful,
mi hija.
You can’t put yourself at risk.”

Ibby looked at him with sad, sober eyes, and said, “It’s too late for that. You know it is. The Lady wants us, and she’s going to come for us. We’re going to be trouble for you until she gets us.”

“Ibby,” I said. “Your plan wasn’t just to come out here to fight them, was it?”

She shook her head, looking so much older than her years. Older, perhaps, than Esmeralda. She looked at Gillian, who nodded.

“We were going to let them take us,” Ibby said. “If we do that, we can help. We can make the Lady trust us. We can stop her—I know we can.”

“Sweetheart,” Luis whispered, and put his hands on her small, sweet face. “Sweetheart, that’s very brave, but it’s also very stupid. We can’t let you do that. It’s very dangerous.”

It was also too much of a risk in another way, one he wouldn’t acknowledge ... because Ibby had been convinced by Pearl once, and although I knew she was a strong, independent child, she could be subverted again, perhaps without even realizing it.

“It’s dangerous to stay here, too,” Gillian said. Like Ibby, she no longer sounded much like a child. She’d seen and experienced too much. “They’ll keep coming for us. People will get hurt trying to protect us. Innocent people.” I saw the grief in her face, and the glitter of tears in her eyes, and knew she was thinking of the boy, Mike, who’d given his own life to save hers. “It’s better this way.”

Perhaps Esmeralda knew what they were going to do; I felt her shifting restlessly, heard the soft, tentative hiss of her rattle.

But neither Luis nor I was prepared, really.

Ibby had her arms around her uncle, and she kissed him on the cheek. “Sleep,” she said, and I sensed the sudden black wave that crushed down on him.

He fell as if she’d killed him, but I knew she hadn’t; I felt the continued, quiet beat of his heart, the steady pulse of his lungs and his life.

He slept, like the three children we’d taken down.

“Cassie,” Ibby said. She was still looking at her uncle, not at me. “Are you going to let us go?”

I was too weak to fight her, and Gillian, and I didn’t know which way Esmeralda would fall, or if she’d take a side at all. “Take me with you,” I said. “I can help you. I can make sure you’re safe.”

“Nobody’s safe,” Ibby said, and her tears fell on Luis’s burned, torn shirt. “Not me, not you, not him. Not the world. Can’t you feel it?”

Esmeralda looked up, and I heard the buzzing of her rattle burst into frantic, loud life.

The night sky was silent, full of stars, but what I felt, what I heard, wasn’t coming from the sky.

It was a scream, and it was growing louder and louder, and it was coming from the aetheric, and the ground beneath us, and the trees, and the
world.

It was the scream of awakening, of pain, of the sudden and irrevocable changing of our lives.

Isabel stood up. So did I. Esmeralda slithered closer, her rattle shaking out a steady, adrenaline-fueled alarm. Gillian pressed closer against my side, and I put my arm around her for comfort.

The screaming grew so loud it burned in my head and drove me to my knees. The aetheric was burning red, burning like the end of the world.

And I heard Her voice. The Mother. Only the vast, rolling sound of it, the voice of thunder and hurricane, rock and boiling volcano. The scream of life in all its violent, striving agony. There was no meaning to it, no way to interpret it, but I knew what it meant.

It meant that my time was up, and so was Pearl’s. Whatever her plan, she had no time left to prepare. The Mother was
awake
, and the fury of her pain would drive the Djinn to her defense, like white blood cells racing to contain infection ... and that infection most certainly was
humanity
.

Ashan hadn’t triggered this. I didn’t know what wound had been made in the world that had brought it on, but it no longer mattered. The Mother was awake, and the Djinn would be under
her
command now, no longer individuals choosing their paths. Even Ashan would be one of that army, mindless and effectively quite insane.

If I’d taken his offer, if I’d returned to my Djinn strength, I would be just as helpless as the others now.

In a perverse sense, this worked
for
Ashan, not against him. He wanted humanity gone, and the defenses of the Earth would begin to do that bloody work for him. Millions would die. Chaos would descend.

Pearl would have no one to oppose her now; all their energies would be devoted to survival. She could amass her forces and wait for the end, and no one would oppose her.

No one but us.

“We have to go,” Ibby said. “You have to make Uncle Luis understand, Cassie. We need him, too.”

“I know,” I whispered. I swallowed and tasted blood, and ash, and the oncoming deaths that this would bring. “I’ll make him understand.”

There was no place for protecting Ibby now, or Gillian, or any of them.

There was only total war.

TRACK LIST

I found these songs were the perfect inspiration to get through the writing of
Outcast Season: Unseen.
Here’s hoping you enjoy them, too! (As always: Artists exist because you support them
economically
. Please buy music—don’t steal it.)