Free Unseen by Rachel Caine Page B

musk-scented air, I felt a chill move through my body. I felt it in Isabel, too.
    Was I doing the right thing?
    It was too late to change my mind. It’s for the best , I told myself.
    And I hoped that I was right.
     
    Isabel and I walked down the narrow brick hallway, which ended in an arched doorway that opened into a larger room. Half of the room was closed off by a giant glass barrier—heavy glass, at least four inches thick, with steel reinforcing wire inside. At the back of the room was another door, one with no handle on the inside. There was a slot at the bottom wide enough to admit trays for food.
    Inside the room, sitting on a battered sofa that had once been antique gold in color, was a young woman of about twenty. She was stunningly beautiful—an exotic Aztec cast to her perfectly proportioned face, and skin like rich, glowing copper. Her eyes were black, and so was her hair, flowing in ebony waves down her back.
    She looked annoyed. She was lying slumped on the sofa, clicking a remote control at a big flat-screen television across the room. She finally gave it up and tossed the remote to a nearby coffee table, which held stacks of well-thumbed magazines and soft drink cans. She seemed partial to Dr Pepper.
    “What?” she snapped at us, finally giving us her attention. Her voice came through clearly, but off to the side from a speaker installed in the wall. “You never seen a Snake Girl before? Vámanos , losers. You’ve got your five bucks’ worth.”
    The girl was perfectly human down to her waist, and wearing an old, faded T-shirt that featured the same cartoon character decorating Isabel’s crash helmet. From the waist down, however, her body turned into the muscular coils of a serpent—massive, and patterned like a rattlesnake in tan, brown, and black. The scales glistened in the light, and as the coils began to move, undraping from the sofa, I saw the gleam of white bone at the end of her body.
    She had a long rattle, and it began to set up a relentless buzzing, like a thousand hives of agitated bees.
    Isabel, wide-eyed, had said nothing at all. Finally, she looked up at me and said, “What happened to her?”
    Snake Girl laughed. It was a harsh, unpleasant sound like knives stabbing a chalkboard. “ Mira , it talks. What you think happened to me, little bitch? I got cursed by an evil witch. What else? Only I was the evil witch.” She stopped laughing and moved with frightening speed to the glass, her top half swaying above the massive, muscular snake’s body as she stared down at us, but especially at Isabel. She finally looked directly at me. “You. You look Djinn.”
    I shrugged. “I was.”
    “Explains how you knew I was here,” she said. “I don’t take out ads in the Yellow Pages. Didn’t think the Djinn paid that much attention to the Wardens’ failures.”
    I didn’t blink as I watched her; there was something very predatory and primally frightening about her. “The Djinn never forget a failure like you,” I said.
    That seemed to please her, in some bizarre, obscure way. She focused again on Ibby. “And you. You’re just like I was when I was your age. Maybe a little skinnier. But I was shorter.”
    Ibby took a big step back, but I wouldn’t let her run away. Not yet. She tried to pull free, but I exerted a little Earth power to freeze her feet where they stood. Snake Girl pressed both her very human hands to the glass, then squashed her face against it, too, turning the beautiful features into something alien and monstrous. Then she pulled back and laughed, clearly delighted by the discomfort she was causing.
    Ibby was shaking with it.
    “I was so smart ,” Snake Girl said. “I knew better than anybody. See, I was good, and I learned really fast. Eight years old and I was setting bones and curing diseases. Ten, and I was making crops grow out of dead ground. I was a fucking miracle , that’s what I was. They all said so, all the curanderas .” She smiled, but it was