Undone os-1

  Undone

  ( Outcast Season - 1 )

  Rachel Caine

  Once she was Cassiel, a Djinn of limitless power. Now, she has been reshaped in human flesh as punishment for defying her master — and living among the Weather Wardens, whose power she must tap into regularly or she will die. And as she copes with the emotions and frailties of her human condition, a malevolent entity threatens her new existence...

  Undone

  (The first book in the Outcast Season series)

  A novel by Rachel Caine

  To Jean Stuntz, my dear and patient friend,

  who sat with me in a humid bar

  in Oklahoma City and helped me figure out

  what made Outcast Season a halfway good idea.

  You, my dear, rock.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Cynthia Clarke, for services above and beyond!

  My friends P. N. Elrod, Sharon Sams-Adams, and the Time Turners for extraordinary support.

  To beta readers Brooke Carleton, Sonya Volkhardt, and Jesse L. Cairns for masterful commentary and guidance.

  To the Victory dealership in Arlington, Texas, and the Smart Car dealership in Dallas.

  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 o
f 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 quest
ion,” 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?”