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The Weather Warden boy was still the real danger. He was willing to kill. Eager to. He was just trying to find the right moment, and to avoid hurting Ibby in the process—though I wasn’t at all sure he would flinch from it, if he thought it necessary.

“Get her out,” I said to Luis. “Go. Go now.”

He hesitated. Isabel turned her luminous, too-adult eyes to me, and I saw the shadow in them, the adult understanding. The power.

Pearl had made the child old far beyond her years. Forced her to see and do things that would have damaged someone far more experienced in this world.

I wasn’t sure, suddenly, that we hadn’t been manipulated, once more, but really, what choice was there? Leave Ibby here, to suffer more? No. Not possible. We had to try, or there was no point to any of it.

“Take her,” I said. “You have to save her or none of this will mean anything. Just go, Luis.
Go
.”

He nodded and began to back away, up the tunnel. Agent Ben Turner stepped in to fill his place, standing with feet spread wide apart, blocking any possible pursuit that might have gone after Luis and Ibby. He looked tired and bruised, but also focused and very capable. Between the two of us, we could cover two avenues of attack.

But neither of us could defend against a Weather attack.

Lightning arced from all sides of the tunnel, like a net of energy, striking at both of us. It mostly missed me as I dove forward, but it struck Turner squarely, and he froze, galvanized by the force, but absorbing it into fire energy. Transforming it. Lightning and fire were close cousins, and although it hurt him, it didn’t kill him. He staggered, fell against the curving wall of the tunnel, and stripped off his FBI Windbreaker, which had burns and melted fabric dripping in syrupy streams down the sleeves.

I hit the smooth wall of the tunnel, planted my feet, and adjusted my trajectory, adding Earth Warden speed to my movements, burning energy at a rapid rate now. Lightning continued to fill the tunnel, but I sped up my reflexes and reaction time, and although it brushed close, it never stabbed home.

The children retreated. The boy changed his attack again, pushing me back with a wave of hot wind, and the Earth child darted forward to slam a fist into my chest.

It hit with the overwhelming force of a freight train. It took
years
for an Earth Warden to build up that kind of force, yet this child pulled it in an instant, and I felt it blow through me, damaging everything in its path—ribs, lungs, barely missing my heart. I choked, gasped, and felt a burst of pain bloom like a flower made of knives in my chest.

“Cassiel!” Turner yelled, and sent a burst of fire rolling past me, forcing the Earth Warden child back just as she tried to summon up a second, killing blow. “Jesus, get back!”

I couldn’t. I was already wounded, and if I didn’t finish this quickly, they would.

I ignored the agony. I rolled forward over my right shoulder, came up in a crouch, hands outstretched, slammed both palms against the foreheads of the two children, and sent a jolt of power into them that overloaded their brains, instantly sending them unconscious.

In theory.

One went down.

The one I’d held my metallic left hand to, the Weather Warden, staggered, but as I’d feared, the metal had failed to conduct aetheric power in the same way that flesh did.

It was a fatal moment to learn that for a fact.

The boy had no more hesitation or mercy than the girl at his side, who was already falling to the ground in sleep. He struck me point blank with an invisible blade of hardened air, punching it deep inside me. It was an old form of attack, one that the Wardens had long since abandoned; Weather Wardens didn’t engage in close-quarters fighting, and when they did, they tried to avoid fatal wounds.

This was . . . very close to fatal. Very, very close.

I fell forward, reaching out with my right hand as I did, and slapped it against his forehead. He was a sweet-faced child, Asian in ancestry, with silky black hair cut in a careless shag around his face.

I had just enough focus left to send the pulse of power into him, and he collapsed before I fell on top of him.

I was bleeding. Unable to breathe.

“Cassiel!” A distant voice, shouting. I felt something tugging at me, but it was very remote.

It felt peaceful suddenly.

Someone rolled me over, grabbed the two unconscious children, and hustled them away. I lay there watching the red pool of my blood spread outward across the clean pale floor.

I felt the
hunger
of the place stir. It liked blood. It loved mine.

Sister.
Pearl’s voice, echoing in my head, unwelcome in this peaceful state I’d reached.
No, this won’t do. I can’t have you giving your life. That’s to no purpose at all.

Sorry to disappoint you,
I replied. I felt . . . remote now. Like an Oracle myself, removed from the concerns of the world. I remembered how I’d longed for peace, for solitude, for silence.

I was finding it, breath by breath. Soon, it would surround me entirely.

You’d leave the man,
Pearl said.
I find that hard to believe. You’ve become so human. So bound to skin. And he does so love you, already. Like the child. It was hard to turn her against you. I had to hurt her many times to do that.

I felt a stir of hate, an echo of emotion that troubled me. It had no place here, where I was leaving things behind.

The pool of red crawled outward, spreading into a lake.

There was one more Warden child left in the hallway, the one who’d backed away from the fight once Isabel had been taken. He was an older boy, about ten years, and I saw in him the shadow of the man he might one day become, if he survived all this—if he survived all of us—to be a genuine Warden.

He would be the next Lewis Orwell. There was a light in him . . . a light . . . .

He reached out and touched me, spreading his hand over the open wet wound that the knife of air had left. “No,” I whispered. “No, don’t.” Because as close as I had come to the edge, I might pull him with me. I
would not
pull him into the dark. “Let me go. It’s all right.”

Shhhhh,
Pearl said soothingly in my mind.
Oh my sister, he’s mine to give. And I give you this gift. I’m not ready to let you go quite yet. It’s not time.

“No!” I screamed it, but it was too late.

The boy wasn’t acting of his own accord. This child, this marvelous and beautiful child who would grow to be a marvelous, beautiful man, was completely under her control. Against his own will, he poured power into me, emptied every reserve. It roared into me in a fierce, white-hot cascade, burning through my nerves, spilling in a flood through the wounded tissues. Healing. Mending sliced arteries. Forcing the wound closed.

Saving me. Destroying himself.

“No!” I whispered, but I couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t sever the connection. I was too weak, and perhaps, at some primal level, I was too afraid. Too afraid of dying myself.

She emptied him of everything. Every tiny scrap of power, even the tiny bursts of energy that kept the cells of his body alive.

She killed him to save me.

“No!” My scream was raw, and it filled the narrow space of the hallway, raced through the space, echoed from the roots of my soul.

I caught the boy as he fell, but it was too late. He was emptied by Pearl and discarded like garbage.

I was weak, pale, and horribly damaged, but I was no longer on the edge of death. He had gone on without me, into the dark.

Not by his choice.

I heard voices in the distance, a confusion of shouting, running feet.
You should go now, sister,
Pearl said.
I wouldn’t have you waste my gift. But I won’t allow you to take more of my children. I need them for our next meeting.

“I will,” I said out loud. My voice was bloody, ragged with rage. “I will stop you from doing this.
I will stop you.
”

You know how,
Pearl said.
All you have to do is act. But if you do, this one child dead before you is the first of billions. Then again, if you don’t act, I will do the same to the Djinn, the Oracles, to the faithless Mother who turned her back on me. Which would you prefer?

Let the Djinn save themselves. I couldn’t face another death now, much less the deaths of billions.

But there had to be another way.

“I will stop you,” I repeated. “However it has to happen.”

I gathered up the fallen child in my arms. My blood soaked into the boy’s clothing from my own, and I staggered and fell against the wall, dizzy from the effort and a sudden, overwhelming feeling of anguish.
I am guilty of this,
I thought.
Guilty of destroying something astonishing.
I might have stopped him, if I’d been strong enough. His life, for mine. It wasn’t a fair bargain.

I had to find some way to make it worthwhile. And I had to face his parents, look them in the eyes, and explain why I had failed their son.

I owed him that.

A dark shape rounded the far end of the sloping hallway, at the opposite curve from my exit—not a child, an adult. Tall and broad, and armed with a rifle, which he aimed in my direction. I had no time for subtleties; I melted the barrel of his gun just as he pulled the trigger. It exploded in his hands, sending him reeling back into the man behind him, who shoved his bleeding, screaming colleague aside to raise his own rifle and squeeze off two fast shots. His aim was poor, thanks to quick reactions and adrenaline, but the hallway was narrow, and one of the bullets caught me low in the side, in the bulletproof vest.

I turned my back as he vaulted forward, screaming his defiance, followed by a whole rank of his friends.

I ran for the exit. The weight of the dead boy was like lead in my arms, and my body felt as if it might collapse with every dull step, but I rounded the corner still ten feet ahead of the pursuers . . .

... and the door was closed.

I slammed my hand down on the nacreous surface, willing it to open, but it refused.

I didn’t say I would make it easy, sister,
Pearl laughed in my head.
I want you suffering. For a very long time, the way you made me suffer. I want to bury that tiny part of you in the ground, trapped and bleeding and aware, aware for all time. I want to feel your screams echoing in eternity. You deserve that.

I put my back to the blank wall where the door should have been, breathing hard, and watched all the soldiers plug the hallway, blocking any possible alternate routes. Metallic clicks as they aimed their weapons, but the man in the front rank held up a clenched fist, and no one fired.

“Put him down,” the man said. “And get on your knees, hands behind your head.”

I couldn’t disable so many weapons. Even if I could, they had other weapons, and I sensed that some of them, if not many, had other powers they could bring to bear against me.

I was trapped, completely and utterly trapped.

But I was not giving up the boy.

Or kneeling.

Not now. Not to them. Not ever.

The leader of the security force must have recognized that, because he nodded sharply and put his weapon to his shoulder, sighted, and fired. One shot.

It hit me in the leg, shattering my femur, and I screamed and almost went down.

He adjusted his aim to target the other leg. When I reached out with power to try to disable his gun, something blocked me—him, or one of his men.

The wall softened behind my back, sagged outward under my weight, and I fell as it popped and pulled aside in that eerie round mouth.

Spitting me out, this time.

“Cassiel!” Luis screamed. He grabbed my hand and dragged me around the curve of the dome, slapped a hand on its surface, and dialed the opening close in the face of the security leader. “Oh God, what the hell . . . ?”

There was chaos at the perimeter. FBI agents had driven an armored truck down the slope of the hill, and were engaged in a full firefight against a squad of Pearl’s human guards, while still others were fighting off an assault by the chimera bear/panther predators. It was all lit by a hellish, fiery glow as the treetops burned around us.

Turner, panting, raced toward us, stopping along the way to trade shots with a human guard. He grabbed me by one arm, Luis took the other, and they started to drag me off.

The boy tumbled from my grip. “No!” I shrieked. “No, bring him! Bring him!” I fought them in a frenzy, grabbing at the boy’s body. Luis recognized that we would all die if he didn’t try to help me, and slung the boy over one shoulder as he pulled me along, limping on one bloody leg, toward the armored carrier.

He and Turner thrust me inside, along with a medic who climbed in with a pack of supplies. Also in the truck

I found the two sleeping Warden children, and Isabel, who was curled up in a ball in one corner, watching the fight with bright, terrified eyes. She looked at me—bloody, pale, wild as I was—and threw herself into my arms as I collapsed on the seat beside her.

I tried to hold her as the world slipped greasily around me, but the pain came in waves, blacking out everything, and I heard the medic say, “Hold still,” and then it was all dark.

Not even the rattle of gunfire followed me.

I WOKE IN SILENCE,
in sunlight, in my own bed in my own apartment. The covers were twisted over me. My leg was bandaged and braced, and I felt exhausted, feverish, achy.

Human, and lost because of it.

I smelled coffee brewing, and the pressure of a full bladder forced me up to the necessary task. I then seized a pair of crutches leaning against the wall and hobbled my way into the small kitchen, where I found a pot of coffee simmering on the burner. I poured a mug and drank, then refilled it, without sitting down.