Undone

Chapter 1

IT ONLY TOOK one word to destroy me, after millennia of living in peace and security, and the word was No.

I knew as I made my answer that it would not come without consequences. Had I known just how vast those would be, and how far they would ripple, I doubt I would have had the courage.

Humans say that ignorance is bliss, and perhaps that’s true, even for Djinn.

For a moment, it seemed that my act of outright defiance brought with it no reaction. Ashan, the Djinn facing me—one of the oldest of the Old Ones—was a swirl of brilliance without form, a being without the trap of flesh, just as I was.

I thought that perhaps, this time, my defiance might go unpunished, and then I felt a ripple in the aetheric currents surrounding me. The aetheric was the world in which I lived, a plane of light and energy, heat and fire. It had little in common with the lower planes, the ones tied to dirt and death. I lived in heaven, and a ripple in heaven was ominous indeed.

I watched as Ashan—brother, father, god of my existence, newly made Conduit from Mother Earth to the Djinn—took on form and substance. It required power to do such a thing here, in this place; I had not bothered with form in so many turnings of the world I didn’t think I could even remember the shapes, and even if I did, I had not the raw force necessary to manipulate things here.

Ashan’s aetheric form became ominously solid and dark, and I felt the ripples grow stronger, rocking the reality around us. The bands and currents of colors, pastel and perfect, took on sharp edges. Rainbows bled and wept.

“No?” He repeated it from a mouth that was almost human form, giving me the chance to change my answer. To save myself.

“I cannot. No.”

This time, the rainbow burned. Another ripple hit me in a wave, hot and thick with menace, and I felt a strange pulling sensation that quickly became . . . pain, as much as one could feel pain without physical form. I was in danger; every instinct screamed it.

“Last chance,” Ashan said. “Cassiel, don’t test me. I can’t allow your rebellion. Not now. Do as you are ordered.”

What I was doing wasn’t rebellion, but he couldn’t see this so clearly, and I could not explain. I had never been known for my reasonable nature, and I never explained myself.

I stayed silent.

“Then you chose this. Remember that.”

I felt the tugging inside of me turn white-hot, searing in its intensity. I felt the exact moment when Ashan ripped away my connection to the aetheric, to him, to the mother of us all, the Earth.

Beyond that, the vast and unknowable God.

I felt the exact moment when I died as a Djinn, and fell, screaming. I crashed through all the planes of heaven, shattering each in turn, a bright white star burning as it fell. I took on form.

Solidity.

Pain.

I landed facedown in the mud and dirt.

Destroyed.

“Cassiel.”

The voice was a whisper, but it burned in my ears like acid. The slightest sound—even my own name—was agonizing. I had never been hurt before, and I was drowning in the sensations, the agony of it. The humiliating fury of helplessness, of being trapped in flesh. Of being mutilated and emptied and cut off.

The worst of it was that it was my own fault.

I rolled away from the sound of my name being called again, and from the gentle brushing touch of a hand. My fresh-born nerves screamed, outraged by every hint of pressure. I couldn’t separate my thoughts from the overwhelming, crushing burden of senses I had never bothered to master before, because I had never bothered to be human.

“Cassiel, it’s David. Can you hear me?”

David. Yes. David was Djinn, a Conduit like Ashan. He would understand. He could help. He could sense the echoing emptiness inside me where my power had once been; he could tell how badly damaged I was. He could make it stop.

“Help,” I whispered, or tried to. I don’t know if he understood me. The sounds that came from my mouth sounded less like words than the raw whimpering of a wounded animal. There was no elegance to my plea, no eloquence. I had no grace. I was trapped in a prison of heavy, uncooperative flesh, and everything hurt. I tried to get away from the pain, but no matter how I writhed, changing my skin, changing inside it, the burn was constant. The agony of being alone never went away.

His voice grew louder, more urgent. “Cassiel. Listen to me. You’re shifting too fast. You have to choose a shape and hold on to it, do you understand? You’re killing yourself. Stop shifting!”

I didn’t understand. It was all flesh, and nothing felt right, nothing felt true. I kept blindly changing my form—the shape of my face, the length of my legs and arms, my height, my weight. I abandoned human templates altogether for something smaller, something catlike, but that felt wrong, too, worse than wrong, and I clawed back into human flesh and fell on my side again, panting and exhausted. I blinked my eyes—oh, so limited, these eyes, seeing such a narrow spectrum of light—and saw that my exhausted body had settled into a female form, long-limbed, pale. The hair that straggled across my field of vision was very pale, as well—white, with a touch of ice blue. It matched the devastating cold inside of me.

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—GeneralHospital 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.

“I’m sorry,” I said, forming the words more easily now. “I did not mean to hurt her.”

“Well, that makes it all better,” Joanne said, and groaned. “And also, by the way, ow. Crap, that hurt.” Her blue eyes were bloodshot and vague, as if she’d taken a blow to the head. “Right. Maybe I’m not cut out for being Florence Nightingale to the Djinn.”

I felt better. Steadier, if nowhere near normal. At least my human form seemed to be working properly—that was a start. I pushed the covers back and swung my legs off the bed, but it took a long, agonizing moment before I could drag myself upright and find my balance.

David didn’t help me. In fact, both he and Joanne kept a wary, watchful distance.

“She’s stuck in that form?” Joanne said.

“As far as I can tell.” He was looking at me with a kind of clinical interest, and I put one foot carefully in front of the other, taking my first trembling steps as a human, until I arrived at the mirror on the closet door.

Tall, this body. Thin. For a female form, it was narrow, barely rounded at the breast and hip. Long arms and legs, all of my skin very pale. My hair was a white puffball around my head, frail and ethereal, and my eyes . . . . . . My eyes were the cool green of arctic ice. No shine of Djinn to them, despite the color. I had no power to spare for that sort of display.

“Too bad, really,” Joanne said as she levered herself back to her feet, staggering only a little. “Because I’m pretty sure the albino look will limit your fashion choices. And it does make you stand out. Then again, there’s always spray tanning.”

This was the form I’d chosen, out of instinct. It must have had some truth to it. I shrugged, watching the play of muscles beneath the flawless white skin.

David cocked his head, watching me as I inspected my new body.

Joanne noticed. “Uh, honey? Unless you’re planning to start stuffing dollars in her nonexistent G-string, a robe might be nice.”

He smiled, and retrieved a garment from the back of her closet door. It was a long, pale pink fall of silken cloth, and it settled cold against my skin but began to warm almost immediately. My first clothing. The color reminded me of disjointed things: primroses in the spring, cherry blossoms fluttering in the wind, sunrise. And it reminded me most strongly of the shifting, ethereal colors of a Djinn’s aura on the aetheric, so pale as to be transparent.

I smoothed the fabric, belted it, and looked up at the two of them. David had moved to Joanne’s side, both of them staring at me with identical expressions that were not quite welcoming, not quite mistrustful. Cautious. “Thank you,” I said. “I am better now.”

I had not, in a thousand years, said a word of gratitude to a New Djinn, let alone to a human. Humans were lesser beings, and I felt nothing for them but contempt, when I bothered to feel anything for them at all.

So it cost me to speak the words, and I still felt a core of anger that I had been brought so low. I knew she heard the resonance of it. The arrogance. But is it arrogance if one is truly superior?

“Don’t thank me yet. You’re feeling better, but that’s not going to last,” Joanne said. “The power you pulled from me is going to dry up on you, and it’ll go faster the more you try to use your powers. Best I can tell, you can’t access the aetheric at all yourself; you can only do it when touching a human. A Warden.” Her eyes grew narrow and very dark. “Which makes you a kind of Ifrit. One who preys on humans instead of other Djinn. I can’t even tell you how much that doesn’t make me happy.”

Ifrit. It was the dark dream of all Djinn, that existence—too damaged to be healed, yet existing nevertheless. Endlessly consuming the power and vital essences of other Djinn to survive. I wasn’t an Ifrit, not quite, but she was right. . . . It was a close thing. And Wardens were vulnerable to me.

Wardens, I realized with a startled flash, were food.

It required some kind of statement. Some promise. “I will not prey on you,” I said, and somehow it sounded, to my ears, as if I found the whole concept distasteful. “You need not fear me.”

“Oh, I don’t,” Joanne said, and crossed her arms. “If I feared you, believe me, this would be a very different conversation. But I’m not letting you wander off to grab a snack off any Warden who crosses your path, either. What you did to me would have killed most of them.”

I felt my whole body stiffen, and power tingled in my fingertips. I wondered if my eyes had taken on that metallic shine, like David’s. “How will you stop me?” I asked, very softly. “I will not be caged. Nor bottled, Warden. My kind has seen quite enough of that.”

I had never in my life been a slave to the humans. Unlike many of my fellows, who had been tricked or suborned into service by the Wardens over many thousands of years, I had never been captured, never made their property. I had no love of mortals, and no fear of them, either. And I would not ever be owned.

We stood there, the three of us, in a peculiar triangle, in such a human-seeming, normal home. David, fierce and powerful, but with little hold over me because I was a different kind of Djinn altogether. Joanne, just as fierce, but fragile and mortal, therefore of no more consequence to me than any of her kind.

But . . . what was I?

I didn’t know. I was neither human, nor was I Djinn, and it terrified me. I said, very quietly, “Where can I go? If not here, where?”

Even to my ears, it sounded strangely empty and weak. Joanne exchanged a long look with David, some silent communication in their own language I couldn’t share.

“She’s got a point,” he said.

Joanne sighed. “You can stay,” she said. “For a couple of days, no more. But one wrong move, Cassiel, and you’re going to wish we’d let you dry up and fade away.”