Unbroken: Outcast Season: Book Four (33 page)

“I think I lost money here once,” Luis said. “Didn’t really look all that much better then. I’ll bet the drinks were stronger, though.”

“Oh, you
know
they took the liquor with them when they left.” Joanne sighed. “Liquor and cash. And frankly, a big-screen plasma isn’t going to be much good to us in the current circumstances. Not even with free HBO.”

She sounded cheerful, but with a bright edge of mania; Joanne, like the rest of us, had been pushed too close to the edge, and was all too aware of the drop looming below. Still, she was smiling. I was far from sure that I had the same grace within me. I worried that we’d not get out of here alive. I worried what Isabel was doing,
and who had charge of her—and I prayed it wasn’t Shinju or Esmeralda. I worried about… everyone.

Including Luis. He was holding together, but there were only so many shocks any of us could take before coming apart, however temporarily. He seemed stolid, but I remembered the ashen certainty I’d seen in him of the fate of humanity. How long before he, too, would lose faith?

Joanne led the way across the destruction and into a back room, which was less affected by smoke, mold, and general neglect; it had a small kitchenette, tables, couches, and bathroom areas beyond. A room for the staff, not guests; the furnishings here were even cheaper and more utilitarian than outside.

Luxurious, under the current circumstances, though I could imagine staff members grumbling about its Spartan pleasures.

As Luis and I helped David—still shaken and blinded by the disruption of the aetheric, as a human would be by a sudden loss of gravity—into a chair, Joanne turned to additional defenses. She called up power and began to melt the metal edges of the door and frame into a sturdy, permanent seal; it took a while and some fine concentration to create a solid barrier. Joanne finally let out a heavy sigh, rubbed her forehead, and must have realized that she was still holding a pistol in a tight, white-knuckled grip. “Probably not going to do much good anyway,” she said, when she saw me watching.

“Maybe not,” I agreed. “But we can ill afford to reject any line of defense.”

She nodded and stuck it in the waistband of her pants, and I made way for her as she came to David’s side. She took his hand, and his fixed stare slowly focused on her face. I turned away to give them privacy, and saw someone standing in the shadows.

Gold eyes gleaming.

Rahel, who must have been listening to Joanne and David’s exchange, because she said softly, “David was right about the aetheric.” Joanne responded instantly, summoning a handful of fire as she spun to face the potential threat, then held it at the sight of the Djinn. “I was following. I hit… something. I had to take physical form to get this far, and I don’t think I can reach much of my power. It’s as if we’re in…”

“In a black corner,” David finished, when she hesitated. “But only at half the strength of a natural-developing one. It feels artificial. Imposed.”

I had never experienced one in physical form, and on the aetheric black corners—which occurred naturally, but with utmost rarity—were easy to see and easier to avoid, unless they formed around you. If this was how it felt at half strength, I never wanted to be trapped in one at full power; when I reached for the aetheric, I felt as if I was suffocating on darkness, and although I
could
reach my power, it felt muffled, tenuous, vulnerable. It would be worse for the full Djinn, of course. Much worse.

Rahel was eating candy as she contemplated our situation, and it made me feel unexpectedly quite hungry. As if she sensed it, Rahel scooped more snacks from the guts of the machine she’d cracked open, and tossed them to us in turn. I received some sort of chocolate-covered cookie. It was unexpectedly crispy beneath the sweet coating, and there was a lingering kiss of caramel. It was a taste, I decided, that I could have come to love.

A pity that what I was eating would likely be the last candy the human race would ever produce.

Rahel and Joanne were talking, but it was more banter than substantive conversation, I thought—unimportant. Rahel would not be so casual if there was any chance of our enemies striking at us immediately, which meant we
could delay our inevitable deaths by at least a bit more. Then again, the Djinn were badly handicapped just now; they depended on the aetheric as their primary reality, with this world as unreal to them as that realm was to humans. It was possible she was… overconfident.

“Perhaps you should keep watch,” I said, raising my voice over their repartee; both stopped and gave me a look, but then Joanne nodded.

“Rahel, that’s your job,” she said. “You see anything,
anything,
that looks suspicious, you tell Cassiel or Luis. Let David rest. And don’t give me any of that wily Djinn crap, either. You know how serious this is.”

Rahel said, “It doesn’t get more serious, I believe. So yes, I will indulge you, sistah. But where are you going?”

“We’ve got bathrooms,” Joanne said. “Hell, we might even have running water, if there’s a miracle the size of China. I’m going to take advantage.”

As Joanne walked away, heading for the back area, Rahel moved the blinds on a small strip of window that looked out on the lobby and froze in that position, as if she could stand forever.

No doubt she could.

“Let me see your arm,” I said, turning to Luis. He seemed surprised, and looked down at it with a frown. His right was a bloody mess; the wounds still bled, but the eagle’s claws hadn’t reached any significant blood vessels, at least. The shredded tissues looked bad.

“Damn.” He sank down on the tan couch, and his laugh rang hollow. “Kinda forgot about that. Thanks for reminding me.” I sat next to him and examined the wound, then put my hands on either side of it. “Hey, if you’re going to seal it, try to keep the tat intact. Took days to get that inked.”

I gave him a flash of a look, then turned my attention to the problem at hand. There was muscle, nerve, and tissue
damage—a surprising lot of it, given the fast and glancing nature of the attack. Birds had real power in them, and this one more than most. I began weaving together the muscles; nerves were trickier, requiring fine control that was difficult with the heavy, dark pressure on the aetheric. Closing the skin was, by contrast, a simple matter.

“Huh,” he said, looking down at what I’d done after I wiped the blood away. “Not bad. Gives the tat some character with the scars. Here. Rest.” He raised the arm—carefully, as it was likely still aching from the accelerated healing—and settled it on the back of the couch, and I removed my backpack and leaned in and against him. We both needed showers, but I could hear water running from the back; evidently, the owners of this place hadn’t shut off all of the utilities before the fog of chaos had descended. That would be Joanne, I would bet; she had been the worst off, in terms of needing a wash. I didn’t mind the way Luis smelled, though; his body smelled sharply male, vibrantly alive in ways that I would not have thought I could appreciate. I breathed him in deeply, and pressed closer. Now that the adrenaline of the ride was passing, even though I
knew
we were still under threat, I felt the drag of exhaustion pulling at me, trying to close my eyes. Here, in his arms, I felt safe. Illusion though it was, it was powerful.

And it lasted until Rahel suddenly swiveled her head sharply, at an utterly inhuman angle, to stare toward the showers. David came to his feet in a fluid and boneless motion, and I felt it, too, a power moving through the air around us, something hot and feral and
living.

And aware of us.

David turned to Luis and me, and pointed. His eyes were blazing gold. “Stay here!” he ordered us, and he vanished in a blur, heading toward the showers.

“I don’t take your orders,” I said, and stood up; it was
entirely possible that Joanne needed more help than David, in his currently weakened state, could offer.

Rahel flashed across the distance between us, and before I could blink, was standing in my way with one taloned hand extended to me.

The pointed, razor-sharp ends of her nails were embedded, ever so shallowly, in my skin, just over my heart. “You
should
take his orders,” she said, and narrowed her eyes as she smiled. “David’s remarkably good at what he does when it comes to her safety, and he’s far better suited to deal with this. So you just stay still like a good little human, Cassiel.”

I drew in breath to order her away, and she casually reached out her other hand to lay a slender finger across my lips.

My voice locked in my throat. She took the finger away to waggle it mockingly in my face. “Ah, ah, ah,” she said. “No cheating and ordering me to let you pass,
mistress.
I’ve been at this game a lot longer than you. If I don’t want to do something, you can’t make me. You’re not human enough to surprise me. You’re Djinn at heart, and I know how you think.”

Luis stood up. I expected him to come to my defense, but instead he walked over to the chair where David had been sitting. Rahel glanced at him, then back to me. As long as I had her bottle, what he did was of little consequence to her…

… Until he picked up the shotgun David had dropped beside the chair, racked the slide, and pointed it directly at Rahel’s head. “How about me?” he asked her. “Do I surprise you? Let her go.
Now.
”

Before Rahel could respond—either to attack him, or release me, and I knew they were equal weight in her at that moment—there was the explosive crack of a gunshot from the other room, and it was as if that single shot
had cracked a black glass jar that had been pressing down over all of us. The thick pressure shattered, though the release carried with it a stinging whip crack of power that woke a red pain behind my eyes. Rahel staggered, and then her eyes widened. She released me instantly, pulled her claws back, and turned toward the bathroom as if my interference no longer mattered at all.

Joanne came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, hair wet and pressed in dripping strings around her face. Her expression was blank, but there was a terrible distance in her eyes as David led her along with a hand on her arm. He eased her down in the chair.

She was still holding a pistol in her hand. He took it from her and placed it aside, then brushed his fingertips over her forehead, trailing them down across her face, her parted lips.

She slipped into a deep, gentle sleep. David sat back on his heels with a sigh and looked at the three of us. He focused on the shotgun, then Luis’s face, and Luis cleared his throat and raised the shotgun to rest against his shoulder in a safe carry position.

“What happened?” Luis asked.

“The avatar, the empty one,” David said. “Whoever is after us, they were using it to source the aetheric block around us. It—came after Jo. We had to be sure it wouldn’t happen again.”

“So you killed it,” Rahel said. I couldn’t tell, from the way she said it, whether that was praise or blame.

Perhaps David didn’t know, either. He shook his head and settled against the wall, tense and fluid, eyes penny-bright. “Not me,” he said. “Watch the lobby. They’ll be coming soon enough, now that they know they can’t cut us off from the aetheric any longer. You two should rest while you can.” That last was directed at Luis and me.

“The avatar,” I said. “It was an empty shell?”

“It
was a Djinn once,” he said. “You know him. Go and look.”

I stared at him for a moment, frowning, and then nodded. I walked past Luis, who was now sitting again on the couch; he started to rise to go with me, but I gestured for him to stay.

This I needed to do for myself.

The body of the avatar lay limp on the wet floor tiles. Its eyes were open, but entirely dead black now. It was just flesh, real down to the circulatory system, and blood ran sluggishly down the tile crevices toward the drain, but it was leakage, not true bleeding. One had to be alive to bleed.

I crouched down, staring at his face. It seemed familiar, and I took each of the features individually, trying to place him. Djinn could, and did, change appearance, but for some reason once we settled on a human form, we didn’t often shift out of it and into another. It became part of our self-image, I supposed. My memory was long, but human faces had never formed much of a meaning for me.…

And then I knew.

He was one of my brothers, a True Djinn.

The memory came back to me, shockingly painful. His name was Xarus, and unlike me, he’d always been fascinated by humans. He’d walked in human flesh often, formed friendships, attachments. I’d always thought him peculiar, and weak.