Unseen

Chapter 3

EMOTIONS ASIDE, there was really no question of whether Ibby would go to the Wardens’ retreat, or hospital, or school—whatever they wished to call it. At her tender age, with the kind of trauma and training (if one could call it that) that had been visited upon her, I did not believe that she could be counted on to learn right from wrong when it came to her powers, even with our guidance. In the worst case, Luis and I would be hard-pressed to contain her without damage, should it come to that, and keeping her in a situation in which others would be put at risk was a very bad idea. Isabel’s gift was explosive ... literally. She had a second gift of Earth powers that would be much slower to develop, but I’d seen that element misused just as badly as fire, in the wrong hands. But fire—fire was disastrously easy for her, and it was one of the most visible, terrifying gifts. Humans—and I now counted myself among them—had a distinctively sharp fear of burning. I knew she would eventually learn to use that to get her way. What child her age wouldn’t, in the end?

So no matter what Luis had said, or what he (or I) had promised, Isabel would have to be taken to a place of safety and seclusion until her powers could be curbed and properly directed. Betraying her like that would damage the fragile trust she had in me, particularly, but I couldn’t help it.

Even Djinn understood that standing responsible for children meant not always being liked. Luis couldn’t make that decision.

I could.

After Isabel was asleep, I poured Luis a glass of water (he had not been drinking enough) and, when he reached for another beer, closed the refrigerator door not quite on his hand.

“She has to go,” I said. “You know she has to go, no matter what she thinks. No matter how hard it will be. You’d never forgive yourself if she injured herself, or others, because we tried to protect her too much.”

He took the water glass, turned it in his fingers, and stared into it without acknowledging what I’d said. Finally, he drank it in one long, choking gulp and handed the empty back. I refilled it for him.

“I promised her,” he said. “You think I’m going to break my word?”

“No. I am going to break my word. You’ll bear no guilt.”

Luis looked up, frowning. “It’s not about my conscience, Cass.”

“I think it is, and I understand why. But you know that Marion’s arguments are sound. Ibby needs more help than we can give her alone, and better training and protection. If she’s around children with similar experiences, it could be helpful to her.”

“She doesn’t want to go!”

“She’s six years old. Of course she doesn’t want to go. But one of us must make the choice to do what’s necessary.”

“And that’s you,” Luis said. “Always you.” He handed the water back again, and walked away, head down. “All right. You’re right—I know you are. What now?”

“We’ll have to be careful in how we go about it,” I said. “You know that she will fight us, and it can turn very dangerous. This house could easily be destroyed.”

“Hell, we could destroy the whole neighborhood if this goes bad,” he said, and sighed. “I’ve been thinking about it, too. I talked to Marion. She’s not bending—we bring Ibby within the week, or she sends an extraction team, and things get real damn messy. But even if we agree to take Ibby ourselves, things could still get messy.”

In solidarity with him, and in compensation for his lost beer, I drank the rest of the water. I had several sips before I said, “Can’t you catch her sleeping, and deepen her rest to a coma so she doesn’t wake?” It was an Earth Warden skill, but it was tricky, and required constant monitoring to ensure that a false coma didn’t become a true one.

“I could,” he said, and frowned unhappily. “No, I should be able to, but honestly, I think she’s on guard against stuff like that now. Pearl’s training was thorough. I’m afraid she’ll wake up, either as I’m doing it or when we’re traveling, and all hell will break loose. I can’t keep somebody down who’s fighting it without serious risk. She doesn’t really trust you, and we can’t afford to make her feel the same way about me. If she starts distrusting me, I don’t see how we can be sure she won’t be able to block us.” He drank some of his water, not very eagerly. “You think you can get to her quickly enough to take her down without problems?”

I was even less likely to succeed, and I shook my head. “Yet it must be done.”

“Yeah, I know.” Luis was deeply troubled, not only by the risks of keeping her here, or moving her elsewhere, but by the emotional cost to the girl. “Cass, I can’t help thinking that maybe this is what Pearl wanted. To have us rescue Ibby and bring her out here, into the human world, where she can do maximum damage. She could use Ibby to keep all of us pinned down and working twice as hard as we should. She could set these kids off like time bombs.”

I had a difficult time deciding what Pearl’s motivations might have been, at any point; she had always been hard to anticipate even when I had not been her enemy, though that was aeons ago, in a very different world. She could be cruel for cruelty’s sake, or cruel to a purpose, and it was impossible for me to know which her abduction of Isabel had been. But she had a plan; I knew that.

And it ended with the destruction of the Djinn, which was an insane goal; it meant ultimately the death of the world itself. Pearl hated everything, and hated it enough to be willing to sweep it all away in her blind rage. Humans, Djinn, animals, plants, the rich life force of the planet itself. She might expire with the rest of it, but she would survive long enough to look on a barren, dying ball of rock, and the death of all that lived. Dying last was her definition of winning.

There was a simple enough way to stop her, if I had the courage to choose it; it would mean the destruction of Isabel, of Luis, of all humans with whom I shared this strange, fragile life—a kind of firebreak, cutting Pearl off from the source of her power. But one species sacrificed for the sake of the planet ... one species out of so, so many. It had been done before.

In dooming me to mortal flesh for refusing his orders, though, Ashan had inadvertently convinced me that killing humanity was the last thing I wanted to do. I was determined to find another way, any way, to defeat my former sister.

But I still didn’t see what that way could be.

“Cass?” Luis’s hand closed over mine, drawing me back from the cold reaches of speculation to a warm, surprisingly sweet present. I felt an instant spark to him, an opening of my attention that surprised me, and I felt myself smile. “We’re going to figure it out. Don’t go there.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Where?”

“To that closed-in, dark place where you always go. Sooner or later, if you go there, you won’t come back to me, and I can’t stand that. I really can’t.”

I knew what he meant, and laid my other hand over his in a silent promise.

I would always come back.

For him.

The solution presented itself to me in an odd way. Ibby herself suggested it the next day, when she grew bored with the things that used to interest her, before her abduction. First she wanted movies, then books, then stories told to her. Toys failed to entice. By noon, she had driven Luis mad with her demands, and I had watched, bemused, as he ran out of ways to try to deal with her patiently.

“That’s enough,” he said, when she shoved the latest game—some sort of puzzle—off the table onto the kitchen floor in a petulant tantrum. “Enough, Isabel. Stop acting like you’re two.”

“Stop pretending like you care,” she shot back. She folded her chubby arms, tucked her chin down, and glared at him, and at me, as I watched from a safe distance. “It’s boring. This is all boring. You’re treating me like a little kid.”

“Then what would you like to do?” I asked her.

“Go somewhere.”

“Where?”

She sighed dramatically. “Anywhere!”

I exchanged a glance with Luis, but only a brief one. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I didn’t really need to know. The glance was only to warn him not to interfere. “Would you like to ride on the back of my motorcycle?”

He frowned at me, and silently mouthed, What are you doing? I shook my head slightly in response, and he subsided.

Ibby, regardless of her trust (or lack of it) for me, brightened immediately at the prospect of doing something implicitly dangerous. “Yes!” She wriggled down from her chair and dashed away.

“What the hell, Cass?” Luis asked, as soon as she was out of earshot. “You’re not going to take her—”

“No,” I said, knowing what he was asking. “Not directly. I’m taking her to see an object lesson.”

“Where?”

“You won’t like it,” I said. “It’s best I don’t tell you about it. Not yet.”

“You want me to come with?”

“No,” I said, as gently as I could. “This needs to be just the two of us. I’m sorry.”

That was asking for a great deal of trust, and I saw it warring inside of him, but he finally bent his head stiffly and said, “Okay.” He wanted to say more, but at last he let it go. “Girl talk. I get it.”

Ibby came back. I couldn’t see that she’d done anything at all to prepare for the trip. “You have to change clothes,” I told her. She was wearing a pale pink flowered dress, one more suited to a party than a motorcycle ride.

“Why?”

“Because you’ll be on a motorcycle. A dress is not suitable for a motorcycle.”

“Why?” Ibby’s dark eyes were wide, and the set of her mouth was dangerously stubborn.

“Because your dress can blow up.”

“So?”

“It’s not appropriate to—” I struggled for an explanation, and glared at Luis as he started to laugh. “Just put on pants, Ibby.” Impossible as it seemed, I found myself being concerned about the child’s appropriate attire.

How the Djinn would have laughed.

Isabel stomped off to change clothes, frowning, and Luis chuckled and leaned over to kiss me lightly on the forehead. “Very good,” he said. “Outstanding. You’re getting the hang of this parent thing.” I felt myself frowning, which made him laugh and kiss me again, this time on the mouth. That felt warm and wet and delicious, and I wished that I hadn’t committed myself quite so quickly to taking Isabel out. Surely we could find something to occupy such a young child for an hour ... or possibly two.

I found myself winding my fingers in his hair, deepening the kiss. The strands felt like warm silk against my skin, and I had a flash of sense-memory that told me how good it would feel brushing against my skin ... elsewhere.

Luis pulled free with an appreciative gasp. “Later,” he promised, and put his finger across my damp lips. “Wish I didn’t have to say that.”

“I wish you didn’t, either,” I said. If I’d still had my powers as a Djinn, I would have stopped time, created space, made a secret hideaway for the two of us. There we could have done as we both wished, for as long as we wished.

Djinn were indulgent, easily seduced creatures. I missed being a Djinn.

A racket of noise from down the hall made us step apart even farther, and Luis shook his head. “A gang of bikers on meth on a Saturday night couldn’t make as much noise as she does just putting on a pair of pants,” he said. He raised his voice. “Isabel, you’d better not be doing what I think you’re doing!”

I looked at him, mystified. “What do you think she’s doing?”

“No idea,” he said. “Doesn’t matter. That’s something her mother taught me—kids always assume you know what they’re doing, even if you don’t.”

The mysteries of humankind.

Isabel appeared a few moments later, neatly dressed in a pair of small blue jeans and a pink knit top. Her cheeks matched the color of her shirt, and I wondered exactly what it was she had been doing that she felt the need to blush. “Something broke,” she said. “But it wasn’t my fault.”

Luis went off to see what it was, and I got down my leather jacket and Isabel’s small, cheerfully stained cloth one, embroidered with smiley-face flowers. Ibby treasured that jacket, and I knew it would be a sad day when she outgrew it; her mother had sewed the flowers with delicate, loving precision, and as long as Ibby wore it, she would feel a connection to Angela.

I had, not long ago, bought a child’s helmet. I had never felt so glad to have made that impulsive purchase. I was prepared to risk my own skull readily enough, but not Ibby’s.

We waved to Luis from the driveway, and I boosted Ibby up on the seat behind me as I straddled the motorcycle and ignited the engine, which caught with a growl and a throb of power. Ibby wrapped her arms around me and squealed in delight. Her helmet, decorated with glittering Disney characters, glowed a shocking shade of hot pink in the sunlight.

Luis was holding two halves of a broken vase, which he juggled in order to wave back. He almost bobbled half of it when I reached out with our shared Earth power and tapped his eardrum, formed vibrations of sound. Stay here, I told him. I have to convince her to do this of her own accord. Pack her things, and ours. Be ready.

He nodded, face shutting down to blankness. That didn’t stop me from feeling his uneasiness, and alarm. Cass—what the hell are you doing?

Trust me, I said in reply, and got a stiff, grudging nod. I had earned that trust, I knew, but this was Isabel, and Luis would not forgive me if I did something that caused her to be hurt.

Then again, I would never forgive myself, either.

I eased the bike out onto the street, and gradually picked up speed, still keeping it well under the posted limits. Isabel wiggled with excitement behind me. “Are you holding on?” I asked her.

“Yes!” she shouted back, and tightened her grip on me to prove it.

“Are you sure you’re holding on?”

“Yes!”

“All right, then.”

We had come to an intersection, and I stopped for the light to change. When it went to green, I pushed the throttle hard over, and the Victory roared out a challenge and shot into the open road. Isabel couldn’t fall off, because I had taken the precaution of using a fair amount of Earth powers to bind her hands tight together around me. Even should we crash—an extremely unlikely event—she would be thrown clear with me, and I would protect her from any injury.

I was taking her somewhere. This was not a joyride, although I could tell that for Isabel it certainly was, as she squealed in delight and turned her face into the wind. For me, it was cold-blooded manipulation. I thought again about the Djinn categories of how we saw others—friends, allies, adversaries, and enemies. I moved from friend to ally with Isabel, and I had been all the way to enemy. At the moment, I fell squarely between ally and adversary, I thought.

I wondered how she would feel about it afterward.

The road was indeed lovely, cool winter desert un-spooling on both sides of us once we reached the freeway, a gleaming black line cutting through the ochre wilderness. Overhead, the sky was cloudless and merciless, the way it often seemed in this part of the world. Vultures spun lazy circles in the distance, and I felt the slow pulse of this world around me—animals foraging, hunting, sleeping, mating; plants living their obscure and hidden lives of sun and shade, pollen and seeds. It was a world in which all things consumed, and were in turn consumed.

All things except the Djinn.

It was the best day I had ever spent with Isabel, a delirious whirl of riding the roads, eating at roadside diners, shopping at odd little dusty stores. We were both filthy from the road’s dirt by the time we got to where I had planned to take her all along—Mabel’s Exotic Pets, a nearly deserted place in a very empty area outside of Albuquerque, where the mountains were only a smudge on the horizon. It was a single building coated with thick, faded white stucco, with small barred windows and a creaking sign that rattled in the wind. COME SEE THE REPTILE GIRL! the sign blared in red, dripping letters.

I released the binding on Isabel and let her climb down; she looked very small and uncertain as she stood there in her handmade jacket and Disney Princess helmet. Even her sneakers sparkled with glitter. “Why are we going here?” she asked. “It looks scary.”

“It is, a little,” I said, and held out my hand. “There’s someone I want you to meet.” When she hesitated, I said, “And they have ice cream inside.”

She brightened immediately and took my hand. In that moment, I felt a surge of something dark and sticky boiling up from my stomach—guilt, and the sick certainty that I was doing the right thing, no matter how unpleasant it would be for either of us.

Luis would be furious when he found out.

There were only a few other vehicles in the parking lot. One was a rusted van with a giant, crude painting of a woman with a cobra’s head, and red letters that screamed SEE THE SNAKE WOMAN! ONLY AT MABEL’S EXOTIC PETS!

Ibby was looking more and more apprehensive. I’d left my helmet with the bike, but she had chosen to keep hers on, and her hand was clammy and sweaty as it gripped mine tightly.

I pushed open the door to the shop. It gave out a rusty sound not unlike a shriek, and Ibby flinched and pulled back. I looked down at her, and she looked up at me, and then she finally nodded and gave me a trembling smile.

That smile almost broke my resolve, but I looked away and walked inside Mabel’s Exotic Pets, bringing the girl in with me.

Inside, the place was no chamber of horrors—it was surprisingly clean and cool, with dim lighting that somehow managed to seem soothing instead of sinister. Ringing the four walls were rows of tanks, lit with bluertinted fluorescent bulbs and the reddish glow of heat lamps. Within each tank was a tiny ecosystem, painstakingly preserved ... a desert for the bearded dragons of Australia, who sat happily in their sand under the heat, watching us pass with curiously cocked heads. In the next tank a Chinese water dragon luxuriated in a jungle of leaves and raindrops, and Ibby stopped to examine the lizard’s bright jewel-green color. At another tank she shrieked in horrified delight as a large blue gecko licked its own eye; it didn’t seem in the least impressed with her, choosing to chase after a cricket in its tank.

I heard a dry rustle of beads, and a warm woman’s voice said, “Can I help you folks?”

Ibby, engrossed in the discovery of a truly huge iguana stretched out, uncaged, across a branch at the back of the shop, didn’t even register the question. The sign next to the iguana read, YES, YOU CAN PET ME AS LONG AS YOU’RE NICE. She tentatively reached out and ran her fingers over the iguana’s giant, jowl-heavy head, and it lazily opened a golden eye and then closed it again. She patted it, and the iguana held up its head for more. I heard the silvery glitter of Ibby’s laughter, and it hurt me—it felt in that moment as if I was on the verge of destroying all the innocence left in her.

I looked at the women who’d spoken to us. She had come out of the back of the shop—middle-aged, dried out by age and the sun, with gray streaks through her shoulder-length dark hair. There was a bearded dragon riding on her shoulder, looking at me with perky interest.

I held out my hand, and the dragon leapt without hesitation from her to me, where it sat in my palm and stared up at me. It was lighter than I had expected, and very warm. Its skin was soft and dry, and it cocked its head quizzically, as if asking a question I could not hear.

“Hello, little brother,” I told him, and touched my finger lightly to his head. He settled down comfortably in my palm, and I handed him back to Mabel. She took him back with raised eyebrows.

“You’re different,” she said. “Djinn, right? I used to have a Djinn, back in the day. He was a big fella, scary as hell. Used to really have to watch my step around him. Part of why I got out of the business when I did.”

“The business” being, of course, the Warden business. Mabel was a former Warden—Earth, of course—who had elected to have her powers blunted and leave the service. I had no doubt she still retained a strong influence over the living creatures in her shop; they were uniformly healthy and happy, from the snakes to the lizards to the arthropods like tarantulas and scorpions, who were surprisingly complacent.

“My name is Cassiel,” I said. “I came to introduce young Isabel there to your friend.”

Mabel’s face, which had been open and friendly, shut down completely. I felt the entire mood of the shop shift, and the iguana moved on his perch under Isabel’s hand, lifting himself up on strong, muscular legs. His large, mottled dewlap came down from concealment, making him look even larger, and he bobbed his head up and down in rapid, aggressive movements. Ibby took a step back in surprise, but the iguana was looking at me, not her.

“Costs five dollars each to see the Snake Girl,” Mabel said. Her words were monotone, stripped of any kind of emotion. She held out her hand. I opened my wallet and placed a ten in her palm, and she met my eyes. Hers were black, bitter, and hard. “She ain’t my friend,” Mabel said. “And I only do this because she wants me to. If it was my choice—”

But it wasn’t, clearly, because she shook her head and stalked over to the swaying beaded curtain in the doorway. She held it open, face averted.

“Ibby,” I said, and held out my hand. “We have someone to meet.”

“Can’t I stay here?” she asked. Her voice sounded faint. “I like the iguana. He’s nice.”

“His name’s Darwin,” Mabel said. “He’s very nice. Maybe the kid ought to stay here.”

“She needs to see,” I said.

Mabel looked up, startled, and I could see the calculations moving through her mind until she finally nodded. “All right,” she said. “All right, then. Come on, little one, your friend’s already paid for you. Darwin will wait for you, I promise.”

Isabel frowned, looked back at the iguana with real misgivings, but he laid his head back down on the branch with every indication that he was agreeing with Mabel’s statement.

I took Ibby’s hand, and together we went to meet the Snake Girl.

The first indication of something unusual was that there were bars at the end of the hallway—a gate, one with a lock. Mabel walked ahead of us, keys jingling in her hand. She unlocked the gate and slid it aside with a scrape of metal. The air was warm, and smelled feral.

“Right,” she said. “Rules. Snake Girl is on the other side of the glass. Don’t touch the glass. Don’t get her upset; it takes days to calm her down. Don’t try to talk to her, either. You only look and you go. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t intend to follow any of those rules, but Mabel didn’t need to be advised of that fact.

“Straight down on the left,” Mabel said. She slid the gate in place behind us and locked it. “I’ll wait here until you’re done.”

Despite the warm, 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 deeply unpleasant, and her body twisted sinuously to one side, then the other. It was mesmerizing and terrifying, and I could feel Isabel trembling. “I could do anything. To anybody. For anybody. You understand how that feels?”

Isabel didn’t nod, but I did. I understood all too well how that felt.

“Well, I thought I could do anything, anyway,” Snake Girl said. “But how do you know if you don’t try? So I wanted to see if I could.” She hesitated, studying me, then Isabel. “You sure you want me to go into it?”

“Yes,” I said. Isabel said nothing.

“Your nickel,” Snake Girl said with a shrug. “I started small, with animals, making them into other things. Some died. Some went all crazy. But I kept going, because why not, okay? I turned dogs and cats into bears and lions, only it didn’t go so well most of the time. Big messes to clean up and hide. I figured I’d messed around with animals long enough, so I finally changed a couple of kids, made them grow six feet tall in a day.” Her fierce, malicious smile faded. “They said they wanted to grow up. Well, I made them grown-up. Only they didn’t do any better in the end than the dogs and cats, and there was an even bigger mess to clean up. And I got caught.”

I knew the next part of the story, the part that involved the Djinn—it was something all Djinn knew—but Snake Girl seemed reluctant to continue, or else she enjoyed dragging out the suspense. The silence stretched until I said, “And then?”

“And then the curanderas got a Djinn to come and stop me. I almost won, you know. I turned myself into a giant rattlesnake and I bit him, but not before he turned it all against me. I killed him. I killed a Djinn. Can you believe that?” She laughed, and this time the huge white fangs in her mouth came down with terrifying ease, glinting and wet with venom. “But he got his revenge. He trapped me like this. Not human enough to live, not snake enough to die. A freak show. And while I’m a freak show, I’m damned sure going to make money from it!”

There was silence after she’d finished, except for the dry rustle of her coils.

And then, unexpectedly, Ibby spoke. “Aren’t you sorry?” she asked. “For what you did?”

“Sorry?” Snake Girl tossed her hair back over her shoulders and gave the other girl a look of smoldering arrogance. “Why should I be sorry? I didn’t ask for all this power in the first place. What, did you? You get yours at the Internet store, idiota?”

“I’d be sorry about it,” Ibby said very softly. “If I did what you did. I’d feel sick. I’d hate myself.”

Snake Girl’s face distorted with something like fury, and her warning rattled sharply again through the speakers. The writhing coils of her body slammed against the glass with such force that a crack appeared in its surface. Just a small one, but it was significant.

I let Isabel go. She ran to the far corner of the room, still facing the Snake Girl, as if she couldn’t stand to turn her back to what she was seeing. I couldn’t, either, but I let none of that show on my face, and I did not retreat. I refused to retreat from the murderer of a Djinn.

“You can’t hurt anyone now,” I said, not so much for the Snake Girl’s benefit as for Isabel’s. “You’re frozen—no power to shift yourself to either side. And so you will live, and die, between things. Between worlds.” Just as I will, I thought, but at least my predicament was not so dramatic. “Didn’t the Wardens try to help you?”

Snake Girl laughed. “Oh, yes. They tranquilized me, and they had their best Earth Wardens try to fix me. I guess that Djinn was just a little too good. Too bad, really. If they’d restored me, I’d have destroyed all of them.”

“Why?” I asked only because I wondered if maybe, just maybe, this peculiar creature could give me a glimpse inside the mind of Pearl, my enemy. I didn’t particularly care about Snake Girl, just as she didn’t particularly care about the victims she had destroyed. It was a fitting, Djinn-style punishment, what had been done to her. Better she should suffer.

“Why not?” Snake Girl asked, and laughed again. She looked very pretty in that moment, and very insane. “Because they’d stop me from doing what I wanted, of course. They say I used too much power. I say I didn’t use nearly enough. But the truth is, they could have killed me and they didn’t. So I kind of owe them for that, I guess.”

She stopped talking and stayed there, swaying back and forth, then whipped around suddenly as a steel door opened in the back of the room, and a rabbit hopped through, hesitant and worried. It sat up to survey the situation, not quite sure what to make of Snake Girl.

She moved in a blur of scales and fangs, all prettiness vanished into a deadly fury, and I caught a glimpse of the nightmare of her face distended, jaw unhinged to take in her prey, just before the rabbit discovered its last, fatal mistake.

I turned my back on it and went to Isabel. I didn’t hold out my hand to her; I knew she wouldn’t take it. Her gaze was wide, and fixed past me to the glass, and what was happening behind it.

I crouched down to put myself even with her, and said, “Ibby. Look at me.”

She didn’t at first, but finally, with a great effort, she transferred her attention to me. I expected anger, but I didn’t see any. What I saw, very clearly, was fear.

“You wanted me to see,” she whispered. “You wanted me to see what happens if I do the wrong things. If I become like her.”

I nodded slowly. “One possibility of it,” I said. “People are not Djinn; Djinn are born to power, bred for it, shaped for it. People are ... fragile, even the best. And power is a heavy thing; it warps even the strongest. I know this is much for you to learn, but you have too much ability not to understand what you could risk.”

We both looked at Snake Girl, who was swallowing the kicking feet of the unfortunate rabbit. She smiled at us with bloodied teeth.

I expected Isabel to flee, but she didn’t. She walked around me, right up to the glass, and stared Snake Girl full in the face. Snake Girl, for her part, bent her body in a sinuous curve to put herself on a level with Ibby. “What?” she demanded. “You not get your five bucks’ worth, bitch?”

Isabel gulped, but her voice was steady when she said, “I just wanted to know your name.”

For the first time, I saw Snake Girl surprised. In that moment, she didn’t look much older than Isabel. Then her face hardened, and she said, “Snake Girl. That’s who I am now.”

“Who were you then? Before?”

“Why you want to know?”

“I just do,” Ibby said. “Please.”

It might have been the first time Snake Girl had been asked for anything since sealing herself in this cage—or being sealed in, perhaps. She was silent a moment, except for the restless writhing of her coils and the dry scrape of scales, and then she said, “Esmeralda. My brother called me Es.”

“I don’t have a brother,” Ibby said. “But my mami called me Ibby. Thank you, Es.”

“For what?”

Ibby shrugged. “Just thanks.” In an act of courage so vivid that I could not quite believe I was seeing it, Ibby put her small hand flat against the glass. “I hope you feel better someday, Es.”

Snake Girl—Esmeralda—stared at her with odd, troubled eyes for a long moment, then slowly reached out and put her hand against Ibby’s, with four inches of glass and steel wire between them.

“Adios, Ibby,” she said. “Don’t trust the Djinn. She’s a cold one, like me.”

“I don’t trust anybody,” Ibby said. “Not really.”

Esmeralda nodded, and Ibby did as well, and then she walked back to me. I rose to my full height, and Isabel held out her hand to me. I took it.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“To leave?”

“To go to the school.” She looked at me very seriously. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”