After a long few minutes, Luis rolled to his feet and went back up the hill. I didn"t have the strength to protest, curling back into my traumatized ball. The world seemed so cold. So quiet.

One after another, he carried the naked women down the path. He"d retrieved our packs, and he spread out a thin insulating ground cover, then bundled the three together under a blanket. He fed them some water, a little food, and gave them gentle touches on their hair, their faces.

They needed gentleness. I knew, because I was myself starved for it, and I hadn"t sunk so deeply into the violence as the others.

As Luis worked on building a campfire, I managed to pull myself to a sitting position. He was shaking with exhaustion and weariness as he tried to set match to tinder. I took it from him and lit the fire, watched it catch with dull eyes, and took the bottle of water he pa.s.sed me without much enthusiasm. The first mouthful tasted like filth, and I gagged and spat it out. My mouth still remembered the taste of honey and blood.

The second mouthful was better, and I swallowed and kept swallowing until the foreign taste was gone.

Luis settled back against a tree, stretching out his legs, and I sank down next to him. Not touching, not quite, until he reached out and pulled me closer. My head fell against his shoulder, and I felt his lips brush the dirty, sweating skin of my forehead.

"You"re safe now," he said, and the heat of his body - a gentle warmth, not the burn of the avatar - crept into me in slow waves. Animal comfort, but a very different kind. I felt trembling muscles slowly begin to relax, and my breathing slowed to a deeper, slower rhythm. "Did he - did you - are you all right?"

I knew what he wanted to ask, and looked up into his face. He had dark eyes, shifting and gleaming in the firelight, but they were not empty. What was in them was gentle and warm and sweet, and it too came from the earth, from human kindness and compa.s.sion and ... love.

"He didn"t take me," I said, in all the ways it could be meant. "He couldn"t. I"m not human, Luis. Not fully. You understand that?"

He did, and it made him sad. He touched my hair, stroked it, and the pleasure of that echoed inside us both. I relaxed and let my head rest once more against his chest, listening to the hollow rush of his breathing, the solid, steady beat of his heart.

"Don"t worry about it. Being human ain"t what it"s cracked up to be," he said, and I knew he was looking at the women, who might never be able to face what they had done. What had been done to them, by forces they couldn"t possibly comprehend or resist. "I"m glad you"re who you are, Ca.s.siel."

In that moment, that oddly gentle, oddly sweet moment that I closed my eyes and let the night steal over me ... I was glad, too.

Rachel Caine is a fictional person who writes many, many novels, including the "Weather Warden" series (8 novels to date, and one more in 2010), the "Morganville Vampires" series (8 novels, with 12 planned), and the "Outcast Season" series

(3 novels so far, with 1 more to come). She lives in the Dallas, Texas area. Her website is at www.rachelcaine.com.

Ca.s.siel was once a Djinn (genie), and is now, thanks to a disagreement with a higher ranking Djinn, trapped in human form as a punishment. Her only hope for long-term survival is partnership with a supernaturally-gifted Warden, Luis Rocha, who controls the elements of the earth. Ca.s.siel and Luis both reside in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when not battling supernatural forces elsewhere.

Those Who Fight Monsters.

end.