Cape Storm

Chapter Ten

The Wardens on the Grand Horizon had learned from our mistakes, it appeared; we saw them break through the storm, and they must have set up a series of Djinn/ Warden cooperative alliances to maintain their bubble shield, because I could see the glistening curve of it from the deck of our ship as the waves broke and foamed over the smooth round surface.

I wished them luck in keeping that up. It was brutal, soul-shredding work. “How long until they catch up?”

David handed me a plate. Our pirate cook had made some kind of meat, finely chopped and spiced, with spongy bread. It was delicious, and surprising; I’d somehow expected wormy crusts and rum. I gobbled down the lunch with gratitude.

“Good?” David asked, amused, and shook his head at my garbled reply. “They’re gaining. They’ll catch up to us by midday.”

“Can’t let that happen,” I mumbled. “Lewis was very clear. This needs to be me. Not them.”

“Bad Bob and his storm didn’t slow them down. How do you propose either of us stops them, short of destroying them?”

I chewed and swallowed. “Ask them.”

He evidently hadn’t thought of that. I winked and carried my plate to the wheelhouse, where Josue was dozing on a stained old cot at the back while his navigator did the hard work of steering the tough little vessel on the course I’d set. I asked about the radio and was pointed belowdecks, to a small, claustrophobic closet of a room with bad ventilation and a crew member who evidently liked beans and hated baths. I evicted him from his battered chair and rolled up to check out the radio. It was old, but highly complicated.

“Hey!” I yelled through the closed door. David opened it. “Help me out a little. I’m not Sparky the Wonder Horse.”

That earned me a full, warm smile. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“Watch it.” I meant that; he was looking at me like I was the old Joanne. The less demented one. “Keep your guard up. I mean it, David. Bad Bob can be funny, too. That doesn’t make him any less of a monster. Don’t you dare trust me. I can’t trust myself, not anymore.”

The smile faded, and the sparks in his eyes turned ash-dark. “Yes. I understand.” David looked at the radio, and the dials turned. “There. That should put you in touch with the Grand Horizon’s bridge.”

“Thanks.” I slipped on the headphones as he shut the door between us—less to provide me with privacy than to give me elbow room. There wasn’t enough space in here to breathe. “Merchant vessel—” Oh, hell, what was this ship’s name? “Merchant vessel Sparrow for the cruise vessel Grand Horizon. Please respond, over.” I expected I’d have to repeat myself, but instead I got an immediate crackle of connection.

“Sparrow, this is Grand Horizon.” I knew that voice. “You made it.”

“Lewis.” I kept my voice neutral, although I was glad he’d made it, too. Even if he had tried to kill me. “You’re lucky David hasn’t made a lampshade out of you.”

“Time will tell.” Lewis obviously knew all about how much trouble he was in on that front. “You’re heading straight for Bad Bob.”

“I have a plan. Obviously, it won’t be as good as yours,” I said, “but I make one hell of a good distraction, right? So I go in, do as much damage as possible, and you guys land for the cleanup.”

“That would be great—if I thought for a second we could actually trust you.” Lewis’s voice was bleak and dry, even through the distortion of the radio waves. “You brought us this close. That’s enough, Jo. Break it off. Whatever happens, don’t let him finish what he started in destroying you.”

“What makes you think he can’t do it from a distance?” I asked. “I’d rather go down fighting for you than against you.”

“Jo—”

“Maybe you didn’t get that I wasn’t asking your permission. I was informing you, that’s all. You can not love it all you want, but it’s what’s going to happen, and—” I felt the laboring engines of my little ship begin to struggle. “Don’t you even think about it, man. You start screwing with me and you are in a world of trouble.”

He covered the mike, presumably to warn off the Earth Warden or Djinn who was trying to shut me down. “I’m not interfering,” he said. “I’m just advising, and I advise you very strongly to break this off and run, Jo. Now.”

“You sent me out here,” I said. “You put me on the hook for bait. Let me do this.” No answer but static. “Fine. Joanne Baldwin Prince, signing off—”

“Wait,” he snapped. I did. “Don’t take David with you. We’re not allowing any of the Djinn to make landfall. Too dangerous for them.”

I was a bit unclear on the concept of how one stopped Djinn from doing something, if they weren’t bound to a bottle, but I didn’t bring it up. “And what do you suppose I’m going to do about stopping David?”

His sigh rattled the speaker. “You’re not going to love the idea.”

“Try me.”

He did. I heard him out, although my first impulse was to blow the radio up in a satisfying shower of sparks. I thought about it.

After a long, quiet moment, I agreed.

“Jo?” I was so deep in thought that Lewis’s voice startled me. “Still there?”

“More or less. Look, I can’t trust anyone on this ship, not with what you’re asking. Send me someone.” I thought about that for a second. “Send me someone who isn’t going to take shit from some fairly scary pirates.”

“I’ve got just the guy,” Lewis said. “We’re going to slow down, to give you time to get to the island ahead of us. But we’ll be coming when you need us.”

“I hope so,” I said. “Let’s not say our good-byes this time. Last time was a real bitch.”

He seemed to think so, too. “Grand Horizon, signing off.”

“Sparrow, signing off.” I put the old click-to-talk mike down and sat for a moment in silence, staring at the equipment.

Then I rummaged around in the desk drawers. It was a battered old thing, looked like it had seen service in the First World War, and I surprised a long-tailed rat in the top drawer, who stared at me with beady little eyes and an entire lack of alarm. A pet, maybe. Or maybe this was his ship, and I was the infestation.

I shut that drawer and tried the next one. The rats had made nests of the paperwork that had once been in there; it was nothing but shreds.

The third drawer yielded an almost empty bottle of Cutty Sark.

“Score,” I said. I unscrewed the cap, wiped the lip of the bottle with my shirt, and threw back the rest of the booze in one long, thirsty pull. When there were no more threads of amber snaking their way down the glass to my mouth, I lowered the bottle and set it on the desk.

“David?”

He opened the door.

It’s not that easy to catch a Djinn who’s alert for treachery, and David—even though he loved me—knew better. I’d just told him not to trust me.

But he gave me the benefit of the doubt, even with the empty bottle open on the desk in front of me.

I looked up at him and said, “We need to talk, honey.”

Lewis sent Brett Jones, Fire Warden, former Special Forces. He was bigger than Josue, and after a dick-measuring initial meeting, Josue evidently accepted that Brett was meaner as well. I didn’t know Brett that well, but Lewis did, and if Lewis sent him to take care of us, then we could trust him.

“Watch your back,” I whispered to Brett as I passed him. He’d come armed to the teeth, which made him fit right in with all my pirate crewmates; on him, though, it looked like professional accessories. He nodded to me. It seemed like a thousand years since we’d sat in the movie theater on the Grand Paradise, watching as our colleagues were carried off in body bags after that first clash with Bad Bob’s storm.

Brett looked as hard and tired as I felt. He also looked very alone, standing at the bow with his arms folded, watching the speedboat head back to the distant cruise ship. The weather was still foul over in that direction. The storm just wasn’t about to give up its prize, no matter how hopeless it was.

Standing in the filthy confines of Josue’s tiny captain’s cabin, I brushed the worst of the tangles out of my hair, and used a burst of power to clean my clothes and remove the worst of the grime from my skin. As accommodations went, even temporary accommodations, these earned zero stars; the bed was filthy, the floor was littered with toenail clippings, and the walls were pasted over with hard-core porn actresses in action shots.

David opened the cabin door and stepped in. He watched me in silence, not touching me. We’d talked about all this, but convincing him was another matter altogether. And even when he bowed to necessity, he did it grudgingly.

I wished I could really tell what he was thinking, but then, he probably was wishing the same thing.

“One good thing about this,” I said. “This time, we get to do it right.”

He shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, the first time was good enough for eternity.”

That made me smile. “You must be a romantic. I mean, what with all the mayhem and the chaos and the not finishing the ceremony—”

“If I wasn’t a romantic, I wouldn’t be here.”

He had an excellent point. I decided not to pursue it. Instead, I put down Josue’s comb and did another critical review. I looked . . . surprisingly good, actually. The sun and sea had given me a blush of bronze, and my eyes seemed clear and cool as the Caribbean waters. My hair had, for a change, taken its glossy curls to a style, instead of to a mess.

David slid his hands over my shoulders, and I looked up at him. “It’s time,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to keep the guests waiting.”

The guests were, of course, the assembled pirates of the ship I’d recently, and randomly, named the Sparrow. None of them had made any effort to change clothes, splash water on their faces, or brush their teeth, but they were seated cross-legged on the deck, clearly happy with slack-off time.

Josue had donned a ridiculous coat. A tuxedo jacket, obviously ripped off from some prior victim on a yacht. I hoped I wouldn’t notice any bloodstains.

“Hurry your asses up,” he said. “We don’t have long.”

Not exactly the wedding march, but it would do. I exchanged a look with David, and he gave me his hand, and we walked the short length of the deck to the bow, where Josue was standing. The sun was behind clouds again, and the air smelled heavy with brewing storms. David’s best man—and, I supposed, standing in for my maid of honor—was the Fire Warden, Brett Jones. Big and foreboding as a Djinn, only armed like a pirate and watching Josue and everybody else, including me, with smart, cold focus.

I felt both protected and unsettled.

“I don’t have no holy books,” Josue said. “So I make it up as I go along. You don’t like it, you go get married in hell.”

“As long as you get the important stuff right,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“I get paid first.”

There was a brief pause, and then David reached into his pocket and brought out a small handful of very large bills. Josue grabbed them and flashed a highly inappropriate smile, then asked, “What’s your name?”

“David Prince.”

“David Prince, you come here with this woman to be married. Right?”

I didn’t dare throw a glance at David, because there was something so weirdly hilarious about this that I was already choking on it. After a beat, he said, “Obviously.”

I coughed.

“You sure you want to do that?” Josue said. “Because you got to take care of her, love her, never look at another woman. Even if she’s sick or gets old and fat.”

My coughing turned into a full-fledged fit.

“If you mean will I stand by her in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for all the days of our lives—yes, I will,” David said, very quietly. The urge to laugh left me suddenly, and I squeezed his hand. “I vow that I will.”

I felt no corresponding surge from the aetheric, the way I had the first time we’d done this, but then, David had completed his side of the vows the last time we’d done this.

I hadn’t, not officially. Which was why Lewis and I had decided to go through with this. It was an experiment—probably doomed to failure—to see whether or not it would make any difference in the way Djinn and humans were bound together . . . if we were bound together by ritual, completely.

“You’re sure about this,” Josue said. He continued to stare at David. “I give you some time to think.”

David didn’t smile. “I’m sure. Move along.”

“Well, okay.” He turned to face me. “How about you?”

“You suck at this,” I told him. I got a slow leer in return. “Come on, at least make an effort!”

“You dump this guy, come back to my cabin, I’ll make an effort.”

“To clean up the toenails off the floor?” I asked sweetly. “Come on, Josue. Today.”

He clasped his hands, and tried for a pious expression. I doubted he’d ever seen one, except maybe in the DVD collection belowdecks. “Do you—what’s your name again?”

“Joanne Baldwin.”

“Joanne Balderwin, take this—uh, Prince David, to be your husband? Do you swear to honor and obey him, and to never look at another man, even if this one gets—”

“Sick, old, and fat, yes, I know.”

“What would that matter? He’s a man, yes? It is the prerogative of a man to get sick and old and fat.” The crew laughed raucously behind us. “Do you swear to honor and obey him, even if this one gets poor and lazy?”

I closed my eyes and fought a cage match with my temper. “Ask it right.” He heard the echo of darkness in my voice, and the laughter of the crew died away. “I mean it.”

Josue cleared his throat. When he spoke again, the mocking tone was gone. “Do you take this man as your husband, forsaking all others as long as you both live?”

Close enough. I felt something happening, a stirring in the aetheric like a soft breeze. It swirled around me, lazy and gentle, and then solidified into a silver mist.

“Yes,” I said. “I vow it.”

The mist fell like soft silver rain on the aetheric, and I felt it sliding over my skin in warm threads.

And then it hit the black torch, and all hell broke loose.

“Jo!” David grabbed me as my knees folded. “What—?”

I had to make this work. Had to. Holy crap, Lewis had been right the whole time. Because our wedding vows hadn’t been finished, I’d made myself vulnerable to the invasion by Bad Bob. The equations had been out of balance, and on the aetheric that was a very bad thing.

We were setting it right.

The connection between us went wild, power flooding from him into me in a silver torrent. Power straight from the bloodstream of the aetheric, pure and white-hot.

“Take it out of me,” I panted. “Hurry. Hurry!”

David rolled me over on my stomach and ripped my shirt open, exposing the rippling, angry tattoo on my back. The thing under there was being forced to the surface.

David’s power was acting in self-defense, because I was now part of him. Flesh of his flesh.

I heard his breath rush out, and then he put one hand on the back of my neck and said, “Hold still. It’s coming out.”

I felt blood sheeting over my back, and heard the pirates scrambling backward to get away from the thing that was thrashing its way out of me.

I had enough control left to block the nerves before the pain got unbearable. I couldn’t see what was happening in the real world, but on the aetheric there was something that looked like a cross between a squid and a virus flailing its way out of my silver-shining body.

David fried it into grease and smoke on the deck beside me, and then burned it again.

The change was immediate, and dramatic. Calm flooded me, and confidence, and power—the power of the Djinn.

I directed it to my back, and sealed the ravaged muscles and torn skin—something not even Lewis could have done, as powerful as his talent for things like that was.

I’d just become something else. A bridge between the Wardens and the Djinn . . . and something of both at the same time.

And Bad Bob’s mark was gone.

I was free.

David picked me up and cradled me in his arms. I felt warm and relaxed, contented as a drowsy cat in the sun.

“It worked,” he said. He sounded surprised. “You were right.”

“Damn straight,” I said. “It’s why he wanted to stop us at the wedding. Bad Bob knew that once we exchanged vows, he wouldn’t be able to control me anymore.” I felt drunk on silver bubbles, and I laughed. “Free. We’re free of him.”

David captured my hands and kissed them.“Not quite yet,” he said. “He can’t control you. That doesn’t mean he’s helpless.” He pulled me back to my feet. My shirt was a disaster, so I tied the rags together in a makeshift halter top. Not so bad, really, all things considered.

Josue had prudently retreated as far as he could from us. Brett Jones was still standing there, looking focused despite the sight of an alien critter ripping out of my flesh.

I nodded to Josue. “Finish it.”

“Hell with you, crazy bitch!”

“Finish it!”

From all the way across the deck, he made the hasty sign of the cross. “Then I declare you married,” he said. “Mazel tov. Kiss the bride before we do.”

He picked up a half-empty bottle of cheap rum, pulled out the cork, and swigged down a gulp, then passed it around. Our version of cheap champagne.

David pulled me into his arms, and what would have been a symbolic kiss turned deep, hot, and thoroughly suggestive. I helped with that part, thinking of nothing except the moment, the sensation of his body against mine.

We’d won. At the very least, we’d won my freedom from becoming Bad Bob’s slave.

Now I had to make sure that David didn’t suffer that fate, either.

We broke the kiss and clung together, panting. He was whispering things to me, quiet wonderful things. Promises.

And then he closed his eyes and said, “I don’t want to do this. Not this way.”

“I know,” I said, and kissed him again, gently. “But it’s important. Tactics and strategy, right?”

“Tactics and strategy.” He sounded resigned, not happy. “All right. I’m ready.”

I nodded over his shoulder to Brett, who unzipped a pocket on his tactical vest and pulled out a small glass bottle with a cork. A little more ornate than I was used to seeing—probably something they had in the stores on the cruise ship, although the cork would have been a new addition.

“I’ve got your agreement to do this, right?” Brett asked. He was asking David. After a long moment, David nodded. “Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound—”

“Wait,” I blurted, and took both of David’s hands in mine. “If this is the last time I see you, I need you to hear this.”

He waited, amber eyes glowing like suns. I fumbled for words. “I—just—David, if something happens to me, if this doesn’t go right, you have to promise me, vow to me, that you will look out for humanity’s good, not just the Djinn’s. Don’t punish the Wardens if I die. Please.”

He knew why I was asking that. “Lewis tried to kill you,” he said. “He did kill you. Are you asking me to forgive him?”

“I’m not going to ask the impossible. I’m asking that you not take revenge for something that turned out not to work anyway, that’s all.”

There’s something very unsettling about a Djinn that doesn’t blink when he’s talking to you—even one you love with a deep, desperate intensity. “You are asking the impossible,” he said. “Lewis hurt you. He did it as part of a plan. I can’t allow that to go unanswered.”

“You have to,” I said. “Please. I need a vow.”

“You know that I can’t say no to you, don’t you?” He wasn’t smiling, though. “Yet this time, I have to. The answer is still no, Jo. He can no longer be trusted by the Djinn.”

That really wasn’t good. “But you’ll still work with him? With the Wardens?”

“To a point,” he said. I could tell he wasn’t going to be more specific about where the point was.

That was all I was going to get from him, even now, even at this most vulnerable moment.

I nodded to Brett, who repeated the binding phrase again—three times, just to be sure.

David’s hands misted out of mine as the binding took effect. I felt the hammering blow of it shatter the aetheric between us, and then he was exploding into mist, and the mist was sucked into the bottle in Brett’s hands. He corked it with calm efficiency, and I watched him put the bottle in a special padded case, and then into the pocket of his tactical vest.

“With your life,” I told him. “You know that, right?”

“Yes,” he said. It was a simple answer, and it left no room for doubt at all. He’d do it. I couldn’t ask for better than that.

I fried the ship’s engine with a burst of pure Earth power, fusing metal parts together, gunking up everything that looked remotely important. The Sparrow sputtered and began to drift, dead in the water.

Josue stopped looking afraid and started looking alarmed, then angry. “You do something to my ship?”

“Why, is something wrong with it?” I kept my expression as innocent as possible. That was probably what made him glower at me as if he’d like to take me apart but wasn’t sure it was safe to try. “My friends on the cruise ship will help you. Oh, and I wouldn’t try any other guns you might have stashed. Serious mistake on so many levels.”

He gave me his most dangerous look. In earlier days, I might have actually been intimidated by it. Today . . . not so much. “Worst day of my life, the day I fished you out of the ocean, mermaid.”

“Really? The sad thing is, it wasn’t the worst day of mine.” I stepped up on the railing at the vee of the bow, balancing on the balls of my feet. He backed away, watching me. Not quite certain of what I was doing. “Good luck.”

He crossed himself. “Go with God, so long as you go.” His sudden piety didn’t convince me he wouldn’t stab me in the back if he could get a clear throw when I turned around. I gave Josue one last look, and then I dived from the railing of the Sparrow into the open ocean water, heading south.

Bad Bob wasn’t on an island, after all. Well, to be accurate, he was on an island—but the island was floating and he was moving it wherever he wanted.

Neat trick. First, most islands aren’t all that prone to float, since they’re really the tops of underwater mountains. This one was able to drift, withstand the full force of a Category 5 hurricane, and navigate at will.

It also explained why he was so crazy hard to track down. I wasted time and frustration until I figured out that I was heading not for a specific spot in the ocean but a mobile spot. I found it as the sunrise spilled over the long, rocky key of the island, which was moving away from me at a fairly rapid speed. I had an embarrassment of choices for first impressions, but you’ve got to be kidding me was certainly in the hunt for first place.

The entire island was turning, the mirror image of the mouth of a black-and-green hurricane that was hovering above it, just . . . spinning.

Not even Bad Bob—I hoped—had the power to do this alone. No, he had to be augmenting it somehow . . . And then it occurred to me. I was filled with silvery aetheric light now, thanks to my connection to David; Bad Bob had a Djinn, too. Rahel. He’d taken her by force, and that explained the negative energy in what I saw hovering over the island.

Of course, Bad Bob himself was no Prince of Positive Thinking, either.

The scary thing was that with that much power, he could do almost anything he liked, and this floating fortress was just demented enough to amuse him.

I kept swimming. I’d been at it for hours, and I was very, very tired, but I also wasn’t about to give up. Besides, I was building up some fierce quadriceps.

Jo, a voice whispered in my ear. I gasped, startled, and sucked down a lungful of water. I paused, treading water. Jo, can you hear me?

It was Lewis’s voice. I shook my head and bopped myself in the ear, hoping I was just having a hallucination.

Stop hitting yourself. Yes, it’s me.

“How do you know I’m hitting myself?”

I can hear the pops in your eardrum. It’s an old Earth Warden trick. Works great for covert ops. Lewis was making an effort to sound like nothing had passed between us the past few days. Like it was all just the same old. How’s the swim?

“Long,” I said. My teeth were chattering. “You didn’t dial me up on the ear-phone to chat.”

He paused for a few seconds. With Lewis, that was weighty. Did David agree? Is he in the bottle?

“Yes.” Better not to overshare on that, I decided. “Could we speed this up? Water cold. Body tired.”

Can you do this? Are you sure?

What a dumb-ass question. “No, I’m not sure,” I snapped. “Of course I’m not sure. Why? Second thoughts?”

Yes. We’ve got one shot at this. He may not even let you get close. He may kill you before you get anywhere near him.

Cheery thought. “If he does, you’ve still got a shipful of Wardens and Djinn ready to bring the wrath of God down on him and—” It occurred to me suddenly why Lewis was taking the trouble to say these things. “David.”

You and I know that he’d stop at nothing to destroy what killed you.

Oh Christ. “You cannot be serious with this. Lewis. Please, tell me you’re not asking me to go and deliberately get my ass killed so that it will trigger David into a homicidal rampage against your enemies?”

It would work.

Sure it would. It would leave Bad Bob and whoever was around him radioactive dust. Including, probably, the cruise ship, which would become collateral damage.

The hideous thing was that as a nuclear option, it was not bad. So long as you accepted that the pile of bodies would be unthinkable, but at the end of the day, the enemy would be gone. . . .

No. “Not happening, Lewis,” I said. “If I get killed anyway, fine, all bets are off. But I’m fighting all the way down. Get me?”

Yes. You understand that I had to ask.

Not really. But I was starting to think that in some ways David was right—I never would truly know Lewis. Not at his core.

“I’m signing off, Lewis,” I said, and spit salt water as a wave slapped me. “Hey. Thanks.”

For what?

“Letting me say no.”

I got a dry, tinny chuckle in my ear. How could I ever stop you?

“See you on the other side, then.”

Yes.

That was it. Our big good-bye. As romantic scenes went, it lacked, but that was all right. We were past all that now.

After a good half hour of chasing down the floating island, my flailing hand finally slapped a boulder on the island’s rocky shore—whatever sand there once was had long ago been scoured away, so there was nothing left to this beast but slick, water-smoothed stone. I grabbed at the rock, but my hand slid off. I kicked, gritted my teeth, and lunged up out of the water as far as I could.

My rib cage thumped down painfully on the smooth surface, and I started to slip back, but more kicking and clawing paid off. I found a handhold, at the cost of the last memory of my French manicure, and hauled myself out of the pounding surf to lie exhausted and dripping, draped like Josue’s proverbial drowned mermaid over extremely uncomfortable terrain.

“Damn,” I whispered. “Why am I doing this again?” Oh yeah—because I was probably the only one who could, with anything like certainty.

And because sometimes I just had to face my own demons—and Demons—head-on.

I spent several moments just letting my muscles shake and cry out in relief, and then rolled up to a sitting position to take a look around. It wasn’t much of a garden spot—lots of black basalt and granite. This place wasn’t more than a few dozen millennia away from the lava flows that had built it in the first place. It still had most of its sharp edges.

That wasn’t great for me, of course. I’d worn heavy boots, but my battered shorts probably weren’t going to protect me from gathering some new and interesting scars as I scrambled across the edgy landscape.

I climbed up on the tallest boulder I could find and did a quick survey. The island was bigger than I’d expected—maybe a solid mile across—and toward the middle there was an unlikely small collection of jagged palms, all dying now. Whatever fresh water had nourished them was long gone.

This island was a rotting hulk, and I wondered uneasily how Bad Bob had kept sixty Sentinels—that I knew about—alive on such a bare span of rock. I supposed he’d laid in supplies, but he didn’t seem to be a logistical kind of guy.

Maybe they were eating each other. It wouldn’t surprise me, given the level of devotion he inspired in people.

This was not the place I’d have picked as my home away from home if I had to choose a portable island paradise, that was for damn sure. No beaches, no living trees, no water, no shade. Just razor-edged rock and the odd crab scuttling by. The surface of Mars, only at least fifty percent less hospitable.

If I hadn’t been doing such a careful survey of the island, I might have missed the first attack that came at me. There was nothing to give it away but a faint shimmer against the rocks, like a reflection of waves—but it didn’t move with the waves.

It was bending light, and it was moving fast, heading my direction.

I’d never seen one in full daylight before. That was a crystalline skeleton, barely visible without the human disguise its kind had adopted back on the Grand Paradise . I knew now why it had gone for the skins; the creature made a vibration on the aetheric as it moved, a kind of ringing like a finger tapping an ice-cold crystal glass.

The skins had muted the vibrations, hidden them in the natural noise of human existence.

The crystal shimmer disappeared, lost in the glare of the sun for a second, and then I saw the blur of it against the piles of rocks only about three feet away from me.

I didn’t have time for fancy moves, just dived out of the way. It was fast, but the rocks were just as hazardous to its footing as to mine, and I saw it stumble and try to catch its balance as it checked its momentum. Instead, it tumbled off into the water.

It sank below the surface in seconds, pulled down by the density of its bones.

Well, that was great news, but as I looked up, I counted three more shimmers against the rocks, heading in my direction. I calculated frequencies. I didn’t have time to try very many, but the good news was that I’d already killed one of these things on my own. Well, with help, but close enough. I knew the theory, and even without the direct access to the aetheric that I’d have had with David free, I wasn’t starved for power. I was almost shining with what had spilled into me at our wedding ceremony.

The next creature lunged for me, and I opened my mouth and picked a note. Nerves forced the amplitude of the sound too high, and the creature just kept coming. I adjusted the range of the note, holding it steady, and fine-tuned it as the beast came closer, and closer, and—

—and then it burst into a powder-fine shower of disrupted crystal. Instant sand.

Gotcha.

Two more on the way, bounding over the rocks. I dug deep into my diaphragm and half-remembered old singing lessons. I kept the note going, and amplified it a thousand times, sending it in a shock wave out across the island from end to end. The intensity of the sound swept out like a bomb blast. I was immune to it, but across the island, a dozen crystal ghosts exploded into dust and shards as the wave of sound rolled over them.

The note did more than take care of them; it also brought Bad Bob’s other allies out of hiding. Farther inland, near the stunted, mummified trees, Bad Bob’s former Wardens were coming out of camouflaged tents and starting to get organized. The shock wave rolled over them, and dozens more went down—not dead, but stunned and probably deafened. I’d caught them by surprise.

They returned the favor.

As I took a step forward, stone softened under my boot, and I sank in to my ankles. A rival Earth power was trying to harden the matrix again around my body, which would have not just trapped me but pulverized flesh and bone, if I was lucky—or amputated both feet at the ankles, if I wasn’t.

I held her off, and found some weedy grass struggling to survive between the rocks near my opponent. I added a giant shot of power to send it growing and weaving between the stones. It slithered out of a crevice and wrapped around her ankles, yanking her flat on the ground, then dragged her out into the open where I could see her.

I knew the woman. She was a thin little thing, older than many of my peers in power—a veteran, someone who’d ruled with an iron hand in the old days. A contemporary of Bad Bob’s. Her name was Deborah Kirke. She’d been wounded in the Djinn rebellion, I remembered, and she’d lost most of her family when her Djinn had destroyed her house around her. She had cause to believe Bad Bob’s anti-Djinn agenda, but that didn’t mean I could give her a pass. She’d taken up arms against me and the other Wardens.

That meant she had to be stopped.

“Deborah,” I yelled. “Just stay down, dammit. I don’t want to hurt you!”

She didn’t. I suppose, from her perspective, she really couldn’t.

I trapped her under a clump of boulders and reinforced it by melting the top layer into a concrete cage. She could breathe, and in time she’d probably dig her way out of it. I was heartsick doing this to an old lady, but I had a war to fight, and mercy wasn’t going to win me any consideration from their side in return.

Another former Warden had emerged from cover as well. I knew this one, too—Lars Petrie, a Fire Warden. He liked to form whips out of living flame, and sure enough, one hissed through the air and cut a burning path down my right arm. It wrapped around my wrist and yanked me off balance. I wasn’t prepared, and the burn bit deep, charring skin and muscle. That was bad; burns created distractions, made it harder to concentrate, channel, control the forces I needed to balance.

I grabbed water out of the sea. It rose in an arc into my hand, frozen solid, and compacted into a spear. I barely paused before sending it arrowing at Petrie’s chest.

He dodged. The spear hit the rocks behind him and shattered into snow, but it distracted him. While it did, I formed another blade of ice and slashed it through the whip. The flame fell apart on my side of the cut, leaving ugly black spirals up the skin of my arm, with red exposed muscle.

I tried not to think about how much that was going to hurt once the nerves woke up.

I started running for him, knife clutched in my uninjured hand, and while I was at it, I shook the rocks under his feet, a miniature earthquake that sent him stumbling. He wrapped his fire whip around a boulder to steady himself, but I was there when he straightened, already cutting at him with the knife.

I got it under his chin and held the cold edge there. Our eyes met, and Petrie’s widened in shock and horror.

“Listen to me,” I said. “Lars, we have no fight here. None.You can’t win, and he doesn’t expect you to.You’re nothing but compost and cannon fodder to him.”

“Yeah? And what the hell am I to you?” he demanded, and shoved me backward. “I watched four Wardens die while Djinn ripped them apart, and where were you? Screwing one of them. You don’t care about us, any of us. Don’t pretend we’re the same.”

The fire whip formed in his hand again, and I moved my right foot back for better stability as I tried to anticipate which way I needed to dodge. He trailed the whip on the ground, snaking it this way and that, hissing the burning edges of it over stones. A tiny alarmed crab scuttled out of a tide pool and toward the sea. A second later, the whip touched the pool and turned it into steam, baking whatever was unlucky enough still to be trapped there.

“I’m not your enemy,” I said, and held out empty hands toward him. “Come on, man. Let’s not do this.”

Petrie, like Deborah, was a post-traumatic survivor of the Djinn attacks. I didn’t know what had happened to him, but I remembered that the review team had removed him from his duties, and that Miriam, the head of the internal security team of the Wardens, had put in precautions . . .

Petrie had a fail-safe in his brain. Dammit. Standard Earth Warden procedure was to put a two-stage fail-safe in place. The first one stunned, and the second one killed. If I knew the stun code . . .

But I didn’t. And I had no time to find out, because even if Lars was damaged and irrational, he was one hell of a master of that whipping loop of fire. It flared at me without warning, and I dropped to a crouch. That saved my neck, most likely; he’d been aiming to decapitate me, and I felt the scorching heat as the living flame snaked over my head.

I lunged forward and pulled up seawater with both hands, forming a massive wave that shattered over the rocks and hit Lars from behind, sending him flying and dousing his fire whip in a hot blast of steam.

I threw myself on his chest as he sprawled on top of the rocks. “Stop!” I screamed at him, and banged his head against the rock. “Stop fighting me!”

I put a forearm over his chest to hold him down as he struggled. My arm was bloody and torn from the fight, dripping on his chest, and I felt savage. So much for the black torch being responsible for all my darkness; Bad Bob had been right, I’d had some of it all along.

And I always would.

He got an arm free and put it to use by landing a right hook to my jaw—but not hard enough to break free, or to break my bones.

“Just stop,” I said. “Please stop.” I didn’t know if I was talking to Lars Petrie, or to myself.

I let Petrie go, and he sat up, exultant triumph lighting up his plain, middle-aged face. I backed away.

I heard a dry, ironic sort of clapping behind me. “Impressive.” Bad Bob’s voice. “Damn if you aren’t still a do-gooder, after all this effort.”

Petrie’s face twisted in fury, and his fire whip formed in his hand, then snapped toward me.

From directly behind me, Bad Bob said, “Duck.”

I did. Well, I was going to do that anyway.

A sheet of ice the thickness of a razor slashed through the air, spinning like a saw blade. It sliced feathering hairs from the top of my head, bit into Petrie’s neck, and kept on spinning.

I gasped as Petrie’s hot blood splashed over me in a wave. That blade hadn’t been aimed at me.

It had been intended for Petrie. I whirled around while Petrie was still falling.

Bad Bob was sitting in a battered deck chair behind me, right out in the open, on top of a pile of rocks that I’d have sworn had been empty a few seconds before. He grinned and waved at me, and made a discus-throwing motion. “Hell of a shot, eh? I should turn pro.”

Petrie’s head and body hit the stones separately, spattering me with even more blood.

I couldn’t turn to look. I didn’t dare take my gaze away from Bad Bob, who was no illusion, not this time. He was here. Within striking distance.

Victory was at hand . . . for one of us.

“You look tired,” Bad Bob said. “Rough trip?” He sipped a beach drink. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt in vomit yellow and pinkeye pink that clashed with his skin and hair. He also was wearing old man shorts, socks, and flip-flops. If I hadn’t known who and what he was, he’d have looked like any old pensioner roaming Fort Lauderdale or asking directions at Disney.

“Why?” I blurted. He knew what I was asking, so I didn’t even look at Petrie.

“Thought I’d give you a helping hand, since you seemed to be having some crisis of conscience. Tell me, why is that, anyway? I figured you’d be well on down the road to not caring about anyone but yourself by now.”

I tried slow, even breaths. The burn on my arm was getting worse, and shock was setting in. I needed to heal myself, and I had the power to do it; I just didn’t dare spare the concentration it would take to build the matrix of energy and direct the healing.

Bad Bob didn’t blink. “Oh, where are my manners? Have a seat, kid. You look just about done in.”

And with a wave of his hand, there was another beach chair, this one shaded by a ruffling yellow awning fringed in white. There was even a little side table, and a fruity cocktail with a blue folding umbrella.

“No, thanks,” I said. It was only three steps to the chair, but I wasn’t at all sure the chair wouldn’t turn out to be a spring-loaded bear trap. Messy, and undignified, as a way to exit stage left. “I think I’ll just stand. It’s great for the calf muscles.”

“Suit yourself, but your calf muscles have always been top flight, especially in those heels you like to wear.” He smacked his lips, just another leering old geezer. “Come here all by yourself, did you?”

“Sure. Why not? You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”

“Never in a million years, sweetness.”

Oh sure. I remembered being forced down on my back, and Bad Bob handing a bottle to his Djinn, and a Demon sliding its black tentacles down my throat.

No, he’d never hurt me at all.

“Turn around,” he said. “Let me see the progress.”

He meant let him see the black torch.

Moment of truth. I’d spent time in the water forming an illusion, one that had all the weight of reality to it. The twisting shadow on my back looked and felt like the real thing.

I hoped Bad Bob couldn’t tell the difference at this range.

My shirt was knit, and sleeveless. I pulled it up so that my back was revealed. “Satisfied?” I didn’t wait for an answer, just dropped it back down again. “I’m still on your team, Bob. You saw to that, whether I like it or not. I was your first-round draft pick.”

Had he bought it? I couldn’t be sure. He sat there looking at me, nothing in particular showing in his expression, and then nodded. “Just wanted to be sure,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe all the crazy crap people pull trying to get into the VIP section these days. Some Djinn came in here about three hours ago, pretending to be you, if you can believe that. Talk about your Trojan horses. That was a dumb idea. They think I can’t tell the difference?”

I felt my throat go tight and my guts clench. “Who was it?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t ask. She looked just like you, though, right down to the sassy attitude. Good copy. If I hadn’t known that tattoo was a fake, I might have just let my guard down for her.”

Was he taunting me? I was afraid that he was, but I didn’t want to force things until I knew for sure. “So where is she now?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not on great terms with them anymore.” That was almost true.

He lit a cigar, a big Cuban thing, and puffed until he was satisfied with the draw. “What do you think happened? I’ve got dependents, you know. People got to eat.”

Whatever I’d expected, it wasn’t that. “What?”

He gave me more of that horrible grin. “Sweetheart, you ever order a Djinn to become a pot roast for dinner? Unbelievable, the things you can do when you’ve got power over them. It’s a real education.”

I felt an actual wave of sickness travel through me, like the blast from a bomb of nausea. And he kept on smiling.

I couldn’t stop the words that rolled out of my mouth. “You fucking sick awful evil—”

“Ah, that’s the old Jo,” he said, and winked at me. “You know what’s wrong with all my old friends, the ones I talked out here to the middle of Buttcrack, Nowhere, with me? I tell them how to humiliate and mutilate a Djinn, and they dive right in. They think it’s payback. I hate to say it, but the human race is starting to completely disgust me, sweet pea, and that’s why I’m so glad you’re here. You, I can still shock. You restore my faith in humanity.”

That logic was so twisted it ought to be served salted, with a side of mustard. “You just killed your own guy,” I said. “That can’t be good for morale.”

Bob dismissed it with a shrug. “Petrie was nuts. Everybody knew it. But I’ll tell you what, sugar, I was really amazed at how many Wardens I got to turn their coats. I didn’t even work that hard at it. Talk about morale, you guys need some team-building retreats or something. Then again, you’ll all be dead, so that problem solves itself, really.”

This sounded so much like Bad Bob that it lulled me into believing that he’d keep on talking, forever . . . and then a thick black tentacle burst up out of the rocks beneath my feet and writhed its way up my ankle, my calf, my thigh.

“Oh, damn,” he said, and sipped his drink. “Try not to move. It’ll take your skin clean off if you struggle.”

The thing was like an octopus tentacle, and I could feel the obscene, cold suction of hundreds of tiny cups against my skin. I froze. It didn’t read as alive on the aetheric, and it wouldn’t respond to any kind of Earth power that I could wield.

“Let me go,” I said. Bad Bob tilted his head, eyes burning an incandescent, almost Djinn shade of blue.

“Nope,” he said. “Did you really think I wouldn’t know you slipped the leash? Nice trick, by the way. I can always try it again, but I have the feeling you won’t be all that easy to screw with again—Hold still or you’ll lose that leg, you know.”

I gave up struggling. “Fine. So what are you going to do with me? I don’t make a very good pot roast, I’m just telling you right now.”

Bob sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, like I’d given him a monster headache. “What the hell am I gonna do with you?” he repeated. “You’re kidding. This isn’t remedial school for half-assed criminals. I’m going to kill the holy hell out of you, but first, you get to help me get what I need out of the Wardens.”

I winced as my boot slipped against the rocks, and the tentacle wrapping my leg gained a couple more inches and got very, very friendly. “Lewis won’t deal.”

“Of course he’ll deal. That boy loves you, always has. I know him. I picked him for the Wardens.” Bad Bob looked positively malevolent for a second. “Lewis never did want responsibility. He isn’t going to step up to it now, with your life on the line.”

I blinked. Bad Bob, the all-knowing and all-powerful, was talking like an old man, set in his ways, reciting out-of-date facts. Lewis certainly had once been like that, but like Bad Bob himself, he’d changed. Bad Bob hadn’t bothered to find out how much.

“So what am I worth?” I asked. “What are you going to ask?”

“He’s not stupid. He grabbed all the Djinn he could find and bottled them. My folks back on the mainland couldn’t find much, and what they did find got them killed. So I’ll trade you for a cargo full of bottles. How’s that? Make you feel any better?”

Not really. But I didn’t believe for a second that Lewis would trade one Djinn for me, much less a boatload. Besides, rescue was on its way.

Right?

It had been maybe ten minutes since my arrival on the island. The Grand Horizon was supposed to be visible by now, but I couldn’t see its distinctive outline anywhere on the open seas around us, and it was way too big to miss. Had something happened? Had Bad Bob managed to sink the second ship, too?

Was I all alone here, at the end?

Well, if I was, I was going to go down fighting.

God, please, don’t let him kill me.

Because David really would destroy everything.