Free Unbroken: Outcast Season: Book Four by Rachel Caine Page B

blackly strange place, and danger was all around me now.
     
    So I went.
     
    The sound of the rain drumming against the child’s shield was punishingly loud, until I stopped a few feet away. Then, the roar cut off cleanly, leaving a silence so charged with tension that I could feel the hair on my arms stir and shiver.
     
    The child had dark eyes, short-cropped silky hair, and a secretive little smile too old for her years. I thought of Ibby, of the destruction of her childhood, and forced the anger away. “Sister,” I said. “Too weak to form your own flesh now?”
     
    “Too careful,” she said, in that lazily amused tone. “What a judgmental thing you’ve become, Cassiel. Humanity has corrupted you quite to the core. Did you like your taste of the Mother’s love? She’d have killed you, you know. Supped on your blood and gnawed the power from your broken bones. She’s a cannibal. And all your human friends will be food for her feast.”
     
    “Hers or yours,” I said, and shrugged. “Death is death, Pearl. You offer nothing better.”
     
    “I offer a stay of execution. A partnership to keep humanity alive. You need me, sister. You know that you do.”
     
    “For what? You’re only seeking to save your own existence. If the Mother destroys the human race, you go with it;you’ve hidden yourself very well, I have to admit, and you did what all the Djinn thought impossible—you hid yourself away and drew power from humans, growing in power as they did. I’d applaud, but I doubt you can successfully root yourself so well in the power of the cockroaches who survive after them, although that would certainly be apt.”
     
    The child’s eyes sparked with a sudden red glow, and power crackled around me in blue-white zaps along the edges of the corridor. “Softly,” she said. “I may not love you so much as all that, Cassiel.”
     
    We fought like humans, I realized then… like siblings. Bitter and acrimonious, too sensitive to each other’s moods and vulnerabilities. The most violent hatreds came from families.
     
    I took a step back and forced myself to stay silent. The glow faded slowly, and the crackling power hissed and fell silent, although a burnt-ozone smell filled the space around me.
     
    “I came in peace,” Pearl said. “I came to save you.”
     
    “We don’t need you,” I told her. I said it firmly, but without anger, and I even gave her a small nod of respect. “If you wish to fight, do so. But the Wardens fight alone, as they always have.”
     
    “You speak for them.”
     
    “They’d say the same.”
     
    The child’s smile was, this time, truly unsettling. “You think so? Really? We’ll see, my sister. But the truth is, I don’t need you. You are an annoyance with which I no longer wish to contend. I gave you a chance. Now I hope you enjoy the consequences. Good-bye, my sister. Say hello to our mother.”
     
    I had a second’s warning this time, purely because Pearl couldn’t help but gloat; it was just enough time to drop to one knee on the muddy ground and punchpower down into the water-drenched soil. I had no dominion over the water, but the soil responded to me, sluggish but powerful. It rose up in a thick, slippery wave under the child’s feet, throwing her—him?—off balance with a high, surprised cry. The attack that was blasting toward me missed, but only just; I felt the incredible heat of it blister my skin and sizzle my hair, and completed my forward motion to fall flat on the mud. My shirt was blazing, and I rolled over to kill the flames. As I did so, I kept moving the ground under the child’s feet, and riding the thick, shifting sludge kept the Fire Warden from launching another effective assault.
     
    The rain shield overhead collapsed, and ice-cold water hit my burned skin in a punishing, breathtaking slap. I felt power shifting on the aetheric, and desperately kept pushing the earth around, trying to buy time. This child’s power was enormous,