Undone (2 page)

I was shivering. Frozen. I had never known what it was really like, nerves rasping on each other in such a way. It felt horrific and humiliating, being so exposed, so raw and badly formed.

Something warm fell across my naked body, and I rolled into it, groaning uncontrollably. I felt myself lifted up and embraced in David's arms, weak as a newborn child.

I fixed my gaze on his face.
So different.
He was not the bright, burning flame I had known from the aetheric; here, he was in the form of a human man. Still, there was a touch of the Djinn in the hot coppery color of his eyes, and in the gleam of his skin.

David had always loved abiding among mortals, while I'd avoided them, shunned the idea of taking flesh at all. We had never been friends, even so much as Djinn might be; allies from time to time, when the occasion suited. Never more. Ironic we should find ourselves at the same destination, by such different roads.

“Cassiel,” he said again, and brushed hair back from my face as he braced my head against his chest. “What happened to you?” He sounded genuinely concerned, although I was none of his responsibility—but David had always had a touch of the human about him, because of his origins. False-born, a Djinn only in power and not in lineage, bred from humans and brought up to the Djinn only through the catastrophic deaths of thousands. They called themselves the New Djinn. Not like Ashan. Not like
me.
We were the True Djinn, born of the power of the Earth. These others were merely late-coming pretenders.

“Can you hear me? What
happened
?”

Even had I been in command of my new lips, lungs, and tongue, I couldn't confess what had brought me down to this terrible state, not without revealing more than even David should know.

I
would not
tell.

He must have seen that, because I felt his attention focus on me, warm and liquid, passing over and through me. It was . . . soothing. Like his hand, which was stroking my hair, avoiding contact with my fragile, newborn skin.

His expression changed, eyes widening. I didn't have enough experience with human faces to know what that meant. “You've been cut off. Cassiel, you're
dying.
Why has Ashan done this to you?”

He was right; I was dying. I sensed my hunger, a dark core of desperation inside that was growing worse with each labored breath I took. Djinn don't need human food; we sustain ourselves from the aetheric . . . but I could no longer reach it. The life of the Djinn, the very breath of it, was closed to me.

No wonder it all hurt so badly.

I felt David lifting me, felt the drag of gravity heavy on my flesh. What if he dropped me? I imagined the impact, the pain, and felt a horrible surge of terror. I huddled in his arms, helpless and furious with inadequacy.

Cassiel the great. Cassiel the terrible.

Cassiel the undone.

I forced my senses outward, away from my raw flesh, to focus on the world around me. I was in a human home of some type, with no memory of how I'd found it, or how David had found me. Everything seemed too bright, too sharp, too
flat.
I couldn't sense my surroundings as I should have been able to, as a Djinn would have known them; the bed on which he carefully laid me felt cool against my skin, and blissfully soft, but it was just nerves responding to pressure and temperature. Human senses, blunt and awkward.

As a Djinn, I should have been able to know this room at a glance—know its history, know where and how everything in it had originated. I should have been able to unspool the history of each small thing back through time, if I wished. I should know it all down to its smallest particles, and be able to make and unmake it at will, with enough power and ability.

But instead I sensed it as a human might, in surfaces, interpreted in light and smell and touch and sound. And taste. There was a foul metallic coating in my mouth. Blood. I swallowed it, and felt a twinge of nausea. I could
bleed
. The thought made me feel even more fragile.

The bed sagged on one side as David seated himself next to me. “Cassiel,” he said again. “Try to speak.”

I licked my lips with a clumsy, thick tongue, and squeezed air from my lungs to mumble, “David.” Just his name, but it was a triumph of a kind. And his smile was a reward.

“Good,” he said. “Before we do anything else, let me give you some power. You're badly injured. I won't overload you—just enough to stabilize you. All right?”

He took my hands in his—gently, but still my nerves screamed in protest at the unfamiliar touch. I rattled inside, and realized that what I felt was anxiety, channeled through human instincts.

The fear mounted as I felt the warmth David granted cascade into me . . . and pass right through me. I couldn't hold on to what he was trying to give. It was maddening, like watching life-giving water flow by in a tunnel, while dying of thirst.

David let go and sat back. Behind him, the sun was rising through an open window, a fierce ball of fire draped in oranges and reds and pinks, barely filtered by the thin white curtains. I turned my face away from its burning, unable to feel its energy the way I had as a Djinn. The rumpled sheets smelled of human musk. The table beyond the bed held some kind of mechanical device with hard-burning red characters, an abstract thing that only gradually made sense to me as a type of clock for marking hours. So slow, this way of understanding. So pitifully, painfully slow.

A closet on the far side of the room was open, revealing a dizzying rainbow of cloth and color. The room smelled sharply of perfumes, soaps, and sex.

“This is Joanne's room,” David said. “She'll be back soon. Cassiel, can you try to tell me what happened?”

I shook my head, or tried—that was the currently accepted negative gesture, or so I thought. Even though I had never taken flesh before, there were things the Djinn knew, things they absorbed. Human languages. Human habits. We could not avoid them, not even those who held ourselves strictly apart; the knowledge seeped through the aetheric, into our unwilling awareness.

That was the fault of the New Djinn, who had never shed their human beginnings, and gave us connection to these tiny, brief lives.

David looked at me soberly for a moment, then put his hand flat against my forehead. A kind of benediction, very light and gentle.

“You're in pain,” he said. “I'm sorry that I can't help you, but you're not one of my people. You're Ashan's. I can't touch you, and I can't undo what he's done.”

Ashan. Ah yes, I was Ashan's. I was one of the Old Djinn, the First Djinn, who came before any human walked the Earth. I was a spirit of fire and air, and Ashan had cast me down to this heavy, crippling flesh.

I struggled to hold to that knowledge. Already, the aetheric seemed so far away. So unattainable.

“I'll speak with him,” David said, and tried to rise. I forced my muscles to my will, and grabbed his wrist. It was a weak hold, hardly even strong enough to restrain a human child, much less a Djinn, but David understood the gesture. He paused, and I felt his pulse of alarm before I matched it to the frown of his expression. “You don't want me to go to Ashan? You're sure?”

“I'm sure,” I whispered. I had just doubled my output of human words. It felt ridiculously cheering. “He won't listen.”

I was tired from the effort of saying it, and closed my eyes, but the blackness within terrified me, and I opened them again. David was still frowning at me. He began to ask a question, then stopped himself, shook his head, and smoothed my hair again.

“Rest,” he said. “I'll try to find a way to help.”

I struggled with a pitiful feeling of gratitude, and the ghost of an old, imperious wave of contempt. Contempt for him, for caring for me at all. Contempt for my own appalling weakness.

“Rest,” David repeated, and despite everything, I found myself burrowing beneath the warm covers, into the smell of another human's skin, and darkness slipped over my eyes. I didn't want to let go. I fought.

But it won.

 

I woke up to a woman's voice, dry and lightly amused. “Okay, David, I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why there's a naked girl in my bed. No, really, I'm sure. And you have about—oh—five seconds to come up with it.”

I blinked, turned clumsily in my cocoon of sheets and blankets, and saw the woman standing over me, arms folded. She was tall, slender, with long dark hair and eyes like sapphires. Skin like fine porcelain, lightly dusted with gold.

Even as unfamiliar as I was with the subtleties of human facial expressions, she didn't look happy.

I heard David stir on the other side of the room, where he'd taken a seat in a wing chair. He put aside a book he was holding and stood up to come to the woman and put his arms around her. “Her name is Cassiel. Djinn. She's only here until I can help her get her strength back,” he said. “Something happened to her. I can't tell what it was, but I'm trying to find out.”

“One of yours?”

“Actually, no. One of Ashan's.”

“Ashan's? Oh, that's great. Perfect.” With a shock, I realized that the woman must be Joanne Baldwin. I knew who she was, of course. All of the Djinn knew of the Weather Warden, and her love affair with one of the two leaders of the Djinn world. She was both one of the more warily respected of the billions of humans crawling the face of the planet . . . and one of the most hated, in many quarters, including Ashan's. “And why isn't she in his bed, then, instead of mine?”

“Good question,” David said. “I don't know. She isn't saying much. She can't.”

Joanne wasn't angry, I realized, despite her words. She was looking at me with what I thought was vague kindness. “Cassiel,” she said. “David—you're sure she's really a Djinn? I mean—”

That frightened me. How could she not be certain of that? Had I fallen so low that I could be mistaken for a
human
?

“Old Djinn,” I managed to say. “Ashan's.”

Her next question came right to me. “I've never met you before, have I?”

“No.” Because I had never worn flesh before. Never craved it.

She nodded slowly, and a slight frown grooved itself between her eyebrows. “David says you're hurt.” Her blue eyes unfocused, and her black pupils expanded. She was looking into the aetheric, I knew, and seeing my damaged soul. “My God. You really
are
hurt. Can you draw power at all?”

I managed to shake my head in the negative. Joanne turned to David. “What the hell is that bastard doing, dumping her out here on us? Is he trying to kill her, or just interfere with what we're doing? We need to get out there, dammit! We're supposed to be
bait
for the Sentinels, not—General Hospital for Wayward Djinn.”

They exchanged a look, a long one, that contained information I could not understand. David touched her gently, a stroke of fingers along the skin of her arm.

“I don't know what he intends, but if we can't figure out a way to get her access to the aetheric, this will kill her, no question about it,” David said. “She's very weak. She could barely settle into this form. No chance she can shift again, at this point. She's living on whatever she has in reserve right now, and what I try to give her just bleeds away. I think because she's Ashan's creature, I can't really touch her. Not even to save her.”

Joanne pulled up a chair and sat, elbows on her knees. She was wearing a close-fitting red top and rough blue woven pants, and there was a glitter of gold on her left hand with a fire-red ruby in its center. “Want me to try?” she asked, cutting her eyes toward David. He crossed his arms, frowning deeply. “C'mon, it's worth a shot. You already tried. Ashan's clearly left the clue phone off the hook. Let me have a go. Better than just letting her up and die on us, right?”

He gave her one sharp nod, but said, “If anything happens, I'm cutting the connection. Careful. Cassiel's strong, and she's not herself.”

I wanted to be offended by such presumption from a mere New Djinn—even one such as David—but I couldn't deny the truth. I was not myself. I no longer even knew, truly, what portion of myself I'd lost, or what remained.

I felt that I was losing more of myself with every beat of my all-too-human heart.

Joanne took a deep breath, reached out, and folded her long, carefully manicured fingers around my strange pale ones.

And power snapped a connection tight between us, like lightning leaping to ground, and I felt my whole body convulse with the impact. Such
power
, rolling like red-hot lava through veins and nerves, feeding and filling the dark hollows of my bones. I almost wept in relief, so strong was it, so great was my need, and I greedily pulled power from her vast, rich store, bathing in it, glorying in it. . . . . . . Until a sharp, heavy, black force slammed between us, and the flow of energy disappeared.

David stood between us, and he pushed me back down, one hand solidly on my chest. He held me on the bed as I struggled, panting, but his attention was on Joanne Baldwin. She was standing against the far wall, and the chair in which she'd been sitting was lying overturned on the floor. As I watched, she slid slowly down the wall and hid her face in shaking hands.

“Jo?” David sounded alarmed and angry. “Are you all right?”

She waved vaguely without looking up. “Okay,” she said. “Give me a minute. Not fun.”

He pulled in a breath and turned his focus back to me. “Be still,” he snapped, and I stopped struggling, suddenly aware how desperate I seemed—how primeval—and of the anger in his eyes. I stilled myself, except for fast, panting breaths, and nodded to let him know I had control of myself again. He reluctantly let me go. I sat up, but slowly, making no sudden moves to trigger his defenses.