Unseen by Rachel Caine

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 s orry ? 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