Read Online Undone by Rachel Caine - Free Book Online

apartment shared with two others. The pulse was weak now, the life fading.
    I descended the two flights of stairs at a run, arrived at ground level, and turned the corner.
    A child lay on the ground, with a knot of other children around him. No one was touching him, and I got no sense of malice. Only confusion, and a dawning awareness of something wrong.
    There was a machine next to him—a bicycle.
    He had fallen.
    â€œMove,” I ordered the children, and they scattered like bright birds. I knelt next to the boy, my hands moving slowly above him, sensing the rightness of his body, and then the wrongness in his skull.
    The bone was broken. The brain—
    â€œGet his people,” I said, intent on the task before me.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œHis father! His mother!” My brain struggled to parse words. “Parents.”
    Two of the children ran, shouting at the top of their lungs. I slid my hand carefully behind the boy’s head, and under the feather-soft hair I felt the depression where he’d struck the curb. Blood flooded warm across my fingers.
    I needed Manny, but he was away, and I was alone.
    The Djinn part of me said, It is an accident. It is the way of living things. And the Djinn part of me was content to let it be so.
    But the human part, the human part screamed in frustration, too urgent to ignore.
    I pulled from the reserve of power inside and poured it through my fingertips. Of all that the Djinn knew, we knew this—the template of things. We could build, we could destroy . . . and we could, on occasion, heal, if we held enough power inside, and the injury was fresh and contained.
    I felt the bone shift, and the boy screamed. The sound pierced me like cold metal, but I gritted my teeth and kept focusing on my work, sealing the bone together. I concentrated then on reducing the swelling of his injured brain tissues. The cut in the scalp was stubborn, and continued to leak red despite my commands.
    Human hands closed around my shoulders and yanked me away from the shrieking child. I fell backward, surprised.
    A human man was looming above me, face dark red with rage, a fist clenched. “What are you doing to my kid?” he shouted.
    The boy squirmed away from me, got to his short legs and hurried to his father’s protection, wrapping his arms around the man’s waist. I remembered Isabel grabbing on to Manny’s knees, and the fierce love and protective instinct I’d sensed between them.
    â€œI did not hurt him,” I said. I didn’t move. Violence hung like a black cloud around the man, and any provocation could unleash the storm. “He fell from his bicycle. He struck his head.”
    The words had the desired effect, as did my calm tone and direct gaze. The man’s posture shifted, his fist relaxed, and he looked down at his child. He lifted the boy in his arms and touched the back of the small head.
    His fingers came away bloody. “My God—”
    â€œYou should see a doctor,” I said. Not that the child needed one, but I thought it sounded like a human thing to say. “I don’t think he’s hurt badly, but—”
    The boy began to cry, wails of pain and fright, and buried his face in his father’s chest. The man stared at me for a moment, then nodded once, a dry sort of thanks, before carrying his child away.
    One of the other children grabbed the bicycle and wheeled it after them. One wheel wobbled badly.
    I sat there breathing hard, blood on my hands, blood cooling in the gutter, and wondered what I had just done. I’d reacted virtually without thinking. I’d spent my precious hoard of energy almost down to the last trickle, and I knew that I would have continued to give until the well ran dry, once I had engaged in the battle for the child’s life.
    That frightened me. Djinn were not so careless, nor so caring of others. He was human. Humans die. That was the Djinn philosophy, and it was true .
    Yet I