Cape Storm

Chapter Eleven

Bad Bob talked. He loved to talk, and I let him, because I learned a lot.

Bad Bob, I was starting to realize, really didn’t have much. While we’d been sailing around the Atlantic as a big, juicy target, he’d been conducting a multifront war. Those never work; ask Napoleon. He’d had operatives back home who’d gone after the remaining Wardens, on the theory that if they were any damn good, Lewis wouldn’t have left them behind. That got him a big fat score of fail. The Wardens didn’t lose a single person, or any Djinn.

The Sentinels, who were getting increasingly desperate, had been taken down not by the Wardens themselves but by Homeland Security. They couldn’t even defeat a bunch of government men.

That was kind of rich.

What remained of Bad Bob’s threat to the Wardens was here, on this island, which meant a bunch of fanatics in rags with the aetheric equivalent of a nuclear device.

Not great, but at least isolated.

I couldn’t move much, thanks to my mutated octopus friend, but I could pay attention to Bob’s manic ram blings, in case there was something useful to be learned. I didn’t know if the thing inside had driven him mad, but it certainly didn’t know how to flip the OFF switch.

Eventually, Bad Bob got impatient. He’d expected my rescue to heave over the horizon, but if it was out there, it was smart and very patient.

That was good.

It just wasn’t good for me.

“You’re sure they got the message?” I asked. I’d managed to find a position sitting on the stones, with my pinned leg carefully held straight out. I didn’t want to look too closely at what was happening to me; it felt very much like that tentacle was sinking into my leg, and I’d really had enough of that kind of thing. “Maybe your ransom demand went to voice mail. Sucks when that happens.”

“Oh, they know I have you. They just need some incentive, that’s all,” Bad Bob said cheerfully. The sun was beating down on my unprotected head, and while I wasn’t going to get delirious from the heat, or the lack of water, it wasn’t the most comfortable I’d ever been.

And I didn’t like the sound of incentive.

I liked it a whole lot less when Bad Bob got out of his chair and walked toward me, because as he did, he reached into empty space at his side and brought out the Djinn Ancestor Scriptures.

I stared at it wearily. It wasn’t of human origin, this thing; as far as I knew, it wasn’t of Djinn making, either. The Ancestor Scriptures probably wasn’t even a book, in the strictest sense, although it certainly had that appearance here in this plane—leather binding, wrinkled ancient pages, metal flaps to lock it shut.

What it really was I couldn’t say, but I was pretty sure that it had been written by a higher power than the Oracles, and the Oracles of the Djinn had been entrusted with its care and feeding.

Whether this was one of the three originals or a copy, I couldn’t say—the copies were just as deadly, if maybe not imbued with as much power.

“How’d you get your hands on that?” I asked Bad Bob as he opened the metal latches and began to flip crackling, translucent pages. “Garage sale at the Villain Supply Company?”

“I took it from an Oracle,” he said, but absently, as if it really didn’t matter. He wasn’t bragging. “Air Oracle. Years ago.”

That, I could believe. The Air Oracle had always struck me as hostile, guarded, angry at the world in general and humans in particular. I’d certainly gotten little to no love from him/her/it.

That kind of made sense, if Bad Bob had gotten there first. He’d given bipeds a bad name.

“Hmmmmm.” Bad Bob looked down at a page, considered it, and shook his head. “No, too subtle. This—too messy. Ah, here we go. I’ll just turn on old DNA inside you, see what we get. Maybe you’ll grow a tail, shark teeth, chicken skin . . .”

Well, I definitely wasn’t waiting around for that.

I stole Petrie’s specialty, and formed a whip of pure plasma out of the air, igniting it with a burst of silvery power out of my special Djinn reserve. It burned hot blue, and where it slithered over the rocks, it left melted trails behind.

I snapped it toward Bad Bob.

He caught it in one hand, wrapped it around his fist, and yanked. I slid forward on the stones; the tentacle wrapped around my left leg tightened, and I felt flesh tearing under the strain.

Dammit.

I let go of the whip, and the fire guttered out, leaving just a trail of greasy smoke between us. Bad Bob, for a change, didn’t say anything. He walked over to where I was pinned in place, blood streaking down over the tentacle anchoring me.

“You just don’t lie down, do you?” he said. “I always said you were way too good for the Wardens. You made the rest of us look bad.” He turned and yelled toward his watching followers. There were a lot fewer than I remembered—maybe twenty, if that. Granted, I’d taken some down earlier, but I didn’t think I’d grounded quite that many. He’d probably lost some to incursions and his own craziness—like Petrie—plus I figured that those who could think logically enough to escape had grabbed transportation and taken their chances.

That probably meant they were dead, out there on the ocean, but at least they’d died cleanly, off this black hunk of stone.

His remaining troops scrambled to assemble at his silent wave of command. They were terrified, and they were realizing—all too late—that the savior they’d imagined him to be was all in their heads. He’d used their fears against them.

I imagined he would continue to do that, right up to the end. They had to follow him now. Where else was there to go?

“Get over here!” he yelled. “Bring our friend along!”

The Sentinels began crossing the distance. Some of them were old, some were wounded, none of them looked entirely compos mentis.

They all looked at me like I was dinner—which, considering Bad Bob’s earlier pot roast revelation, was a truly sickening thought.

“Moira,” Bob said, and held out his hand. A spritely little pixie of a young woman stepped out from the others and came forward to lock fingers with him. In her left hand, she carried an old green wine bottle with an equally ancient cork stuffed in the top.

I didn’t know her. She was younger than I was, which surprised me—a lovely young girl with fair skin and full lips and a head of thick, lustrous red hair that glinted gold in its highlights.

She held the bottle up to Bad Bob as if seeking his approval on a choice to serve with dinner. He nodded.

Her eyes were the same blue as Bad Bob’s. “Hey, Da,” she said. “What can I do to help?”

He pecked a kiss onto her perfect milkmaid’s cheek. “Oh, just stand there and look pretty.”

I felt a step or two behind the curve. “Da?” I said. “Unless she’s speaking Russian, you’ve got to be kidding me. You’ve got a kid? Wait—more importantly, some woman actually slept with you? Without a condom?”

“Shut up,” the girl said, and temper blazed up in her like magma. That, more than anything else, convinced me of the paternal bloodline.

“Wow,” I said. “I don’t know whether to say congratulations or condolences. That probably goes for both of you.”

“Moira, meet Joanne,” Bob said. “Moira’s my pride and joy, the fruit of my powerful loins. Isn’t she beautiful?”

Moira, like daughters everywhere, looked annoyed. “Oh, can it, Da.”

“I’m very proud of her. But you know how that feels, don’t you, Jo? You’re a mother. More or less.”

That made me flinch, as he’d known it would. I wanted to demand that he leave my own child out of this—a half-human/half-Djinn hybrid who’d become one of the three Djinn Oracles. The Earth Oracle, in fact, which was how I’d gained access to that particular set of powers—through her.

Imara had been born full-grown, and she was a lot like me—she could, and did, take care of herself. Besides, the Djinn would have closed ranks around their Oracles, protecting them at all costs.

Imara was safe. I was the one at risk. He wanted me to fear for her, but I just stared him down.

“Nothing?” Bad Bob watched my face. “Huh. Well, okay then. Cross that one off my list.” And he pulled the cork on the bottle. “Oh, wait. Let’s revisit that.”

A ghost misted out of the air. My own body, mirrored. My own dark hair. Everything the same, except her golden eyes, and the brick-red layered dress that swirled around her body like smoke.

No. It couldn’t be.

“Damn,” Bad Bob said, and turned to Moira. “I thought I told you to bring the white.”

She smirked. “Sorry.”

I didn’t pay any attention to their playacting. My brain seemed stuck, unable to move past the word No to any kind of possible outcome to this moment.

My daughter Imara was here. And she couldn’t possibly be here. There was no way Bad Bob or any of his minions could have captured her, stolen her from her chapel in Sedona, without triggering an all-out war with the Djinn. They’d fight to the last of them for her, no matter whose daughter she’d been in the beginning. Not only that, but David would have known. There was no way that he and Ashan couldn’t have known, if something happened to Imara. The Earth Herself would have fought back to protect an Oracle.

My daughter looked at me with desperate fear in her eyes, and I couldn’t stop a pulse of maternal anguish from traveling like lightning through my body.

And then I pushed it away. “Nice try,” I said. “But no sale. That’s not my daughter.”

Moira gave her father a harassed look. “Told you she’d never buy that malarkey,” she said, and grabbed the bottle back from him. The form of the Djinn shifted away from Imara’s reflection of my face, took on darker shades and harsher angles. Long, cornrowed hair with gleaming bits of gold beaded in. This was a Djinn I knew.

Rahel.

The Djinn had fought to keep that part of her appearance the same—at what cost, I couldn’t quite imagine—but she’d lost the war on clothing. Moira dressed her like a Barbie, and the effects were ridiculous. Rahel was wearing a wine-colored evening gown, sleeveless, with a plunging neckline and a slit up the side. White opera gloves. Dangling diamond earrings.

Rahel was a beautiful creature, but this looked wrong on her. Deeply, stupidly insane.

“Wait,” Moira said, and giggled. She added a tiara on top of Rahel’s head, a ridiculously ornate confection of chrome and fake diamonds. “Wave to the adoring crowds, Miss America.”

Rahel’s right hand came up and did a mechanical, empty wave.

Her eyes were locked on mine, and I hated what I saw in them, because it was a very close cousin to the madness that I’d recently seen in David, when he thought I was gone. A desire to crush and destroy and kill everything in her path. She’d been tormented, forced to do horrible things. And she, like David, was not inclined to forgive.

“Hey,” I said to Moira. “Seriously, is that the best you can do? Because that’s not even original. Honestly, I used to be a Djinn. I had a teenage boy for a master. Now, he had an imagination. You’re just—sad. But then again, like father, like daughter . . .”

I got that pulse of fury out of her again. “You shut your whore mouth!”

“Wow. Like I said. Sad. When you have to quote a MySpace graphic, you’ve just given up.” I ignored Moira and looked at her father. “What’s the point of having the kid here? Were you just lonely for somebody who had an extra helping of crazy in the veins?”

The girl smirked at me, turned, and skinned up the edge of her thin white shirt.

She didn’t have a torch mark. Instead, her back was a mass of writhing fire, moving just below the skin—worse than mine had ever gotten, even at its most painful. “I’m one of the chosen,” she said, and dropped the fabric. “Like you used to be, before you gave it all up.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Just when I thought you’d hit rock bottom, Bob. Congratulations on tunneling down.”

“It’s the family business,” he said. “Bringing an end to this travesty we call humanity.”

I checked the horizon. No ships breaking the smooth outline of the sea.

I was starting to sweat.

“So what now?” I asked. “Not that this isn’t fun, but my leg’s falling asleep. Can we move the end of the world along a little? Or at least work in a nap?”

Moira laughed. Bad Bob shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “For you, sweetness, I’ll kick it into high gear. But you know that means you’re going to suffer, don’t you?”

“I figured,” I said, and shrugged. “I’m already suffering. These rocks are really uncomfortable.”

He laughed. “What a girl,” he said, and elbowed his daughter. “Right?”

By her expression, she found me a good deal less charming. “She’s nothing,” she said. “You never needed her, Da. You always had me.” Oooooh, jealous. Very jealous. I could use it.

“That’s true.” He kissed her forehead, but his eyes never left me. “That’s very true. I’ve been taking out her bones, one at a time. What do you think, princess?”

“Too boring.” She wasn’t even looking at me; she pulled free of Bad Bob and walked a slow circle around Rahel, inspecting her Miss America impersonation. “Make her work for it.”

“Hmmmm. There’s an idea. Two birds and one very big stone.” Bad Bob slammed the book closed and put it under his arm. “All right, then. Let’s see what you can do, my child. Impress me.”

Moira sat down on a handy boulder, open wine bottle in both hands on her lap, and tossed glossy red hair back over her shoulders. “Rahel,” she said. “I want you to break Joanne Baldwin’s right leg in two. Use your hands. Do it now.”

She knew the rules of commanding a Djinn—be specific about intent, method, and time frame. And I could see that they’d had plenty of practice with Rahel—she hadn’t gained that traumatized fury without cause.

“Do it slowly,” Moira said. “Make her feel every second of it.”

Rahel’s eyes focused on me, and she began walking across the stones toward where I sat. Not a hell of a lot I could do to stop her; if I tried to resist, my other leg was sure to be crushed, and maybe even pulled off by this tentacle thing Bad Bob was using for a tether. She still looked ridiculous in her getup, but I didn’t let that fool me for a second. I’d seen the Djinn in the grip of truly evil people, and they were no more to be reasoned with than the blade of a knife.

I looked past Rahel at Moira. “I guess you hate me for being the daughter he never had. Daddy didn’t trust you, did he? That’s why he came after me in the first place. Because you weren’t measuring up. Either that, or he wanted to screw me. Your choice.”

Bad Bob’s face went very still, and I knew I’d guessed right.

So did Moira. She surged to her feet. “Rahel! When I tell you, you’re going to kill that bitch for me!”

One rule of commanding an embottled Djinn: Never give your orders angry. Moira had just forgotten to explicitly frame her order as to whom to kill. Bitch could apply to, oh, more than one of us standing here, and unless she caught that error later on, Moira was in for a nasty surprise.

I saw the light flare gold in Rahel’s eyes, and I took a deep breath. Wait, I mouthed. The desire to strike was almost primal in her, and she knew she was close, so close to having the freedom to exact her revenge.

I knew I could push that button anytime I wanted to—but first, I had to endure a little more. Moira would think of her mistake if I gave her the time.

I needed to keep her engaged.

Rahel bent down and put her hands on my outstretched right leg, the nontentacled one. Her opera gloves felt cool and smooth against my skin. “She did say to do this slowly,” she said, and I let out a slow breath, then nodded. Rahel was telling me, without wasting words, that she had identified the gaps in Moira’s original order. To a Djinn, the word slowly meant something entirely different than it did to a human. Their time-scales were vast, and that instruction was not nearly as specific as Moira might have believed it was.

Now it was up to us to hide that fact.

Rahel froze, with her hands on my leg. I waited. I didn’t feel anything—no increase in pressure, no pain, nothing. She’d taken the freedom Moira’s instructions offered to simply stretch this out so long that it might take a lifetime for her grip to increase its force enough to crack a bone, much less break it.

“Nice,” I murmured, and got a brief, cold parting of her lips. Her teeth were filed to points. “Don’t panic, whatever I do.”

Rahel raised one arched eyebrow, and I began to struggle against her grip, panting—selling the idea that she was hurting me, when in fact she was doing nothing but pinning my right leg to the stone.

As performances go, this one probably was a bit over the top even for high school melodrama, but Moira lapped it up like cream. I tossed in some begging and bargaining. She loved it. Pretty girl, but either Bad Bob’s genetics or Bad Bob’s black tattoo had rendered her broken and sick. I remembered someone else like her—Kevin’s stepmother, Yvette Prentiss. The avid shine in Moira’s blue eyes as I threw myself around and shrieked in simulated agony was almost exactly the same.

Then again, Bad Bob had been involved with Yvette, too. I had the feeling all the sickness came from one poisoned well.

Behind her, seated on his plastic throne, Bad Bob looked less focused on my performance. He scanned the horizons restlessly, frowning. His attention was on the effect, not the cause—he wanted my pain to draw my hypothetical rescue out from hiding.

I could have told him that it wasn’t coming. Lewis was too careful for that.

I wasn’t sure how long Rahel intended to carry on our little drama, but my voice was getting hoarse from all the screaming, and even Moira’s attention was starting to wander. When you’re losing your torturer’s focus, it’s probably time to wrap up the play.

I let out a heartrending shriek of utter agony, and went pitifully limp, weeping like my heart would break. I didn’t have to simulate being exhausted. Throwing yourself into something like that takes a sweaty, aching toll.

Ah, she liked that. I had Moira’s full attention once more. “Rahel, break Joanne Baldwin’s other leg,” Moira said, and her pale tongue came out to lick her lips. “Do it just as slowly.”

Really, you can’t spell sadist without the word sad. She’d just forgotten that my other leg was the one wrapped in Bad Bob’s tentacle tether.

Rahel might not have normally been able to take the tentacle from my left leg, but she’d just been ordered to do something that allowed her to freely interpret method, and in one lightning-fast move, she reached down, plunged her fingers deep into the base of the tentacle, and ripped.

Oh Christ that hurt. The tentacle fought back, clamping down on my leg with all its muscular strength, and I felt things pop and move that really shouldn’t be shifting around inside. Rahel ripped at it again, digging her sharp fingernails into dark flesh and ichor, and tore the thing loose from its roots deep in the rocks.

I rolled free, still wrapped in the black coil.

“What the hell are you doing?” Moira screamed. “Rahel, stop!”

Rahel froze, still crouched over the thrashing remains of the tentacle. I had seconds, at most, to make this happen, and I knew it.

Strangely, Bad Bob hadn’t reacted at all. I saw his face in a blur as I rolled behind the shelter of more stones, and it was impassive and watchful.

Assessing.

I didn’t have time to try to remove the tentacle, but I didn’t need to; cut off from its body, the thing was already dissolving into slime. When it drained away, it left my skin pallid, wrinkled, and torn, like old paper soaked for too long. I was losing blood, too much of it. I slammed Earth power through my nerves and pinched off broken capillaries, set up a healing matrix, and shut off the pain.

I couldn’t afford it right now.

“Hey, Moira!” I yelled. “How old are you? Maybe nineteen? Twenty? I was about your age the first time your dad tried to screw me!”

No girl wants to hear that about her father, especially when it comes from the daughter-rival that Daddy loves more.

Like I said, I could push that button anytime I wanted.

“Rahel!” Moira’s voice was a raw, vicious snarl. “Kill that bitch now!”

Again with the lack of specificity.

I felt the energy shift, darken, and as I peered around the edge of the boulder, I saw Rahel streak straight for Moira.

It’s possible that Moira might have recovered in time to order her to stop, although Rahel’s attack clearly caught her totally by surprise.

To make damn sure it wouldn’t fail, I reached out with a burst of power and filled Moira’s mouth with seawater. She choked, gagged, and then it was too late. As the water rippled down from Moira’s open lips, Rahel’s claws sank deep into her throat.

In her thrashing, Moira let go of the wine bottle, and it rolled toward the edge of the boulder.

Bad Bob calmly reached over and caught it as it fell.

Shit.

Moira was sputtering blood, and her face was shockingly pale, her eyes desperate. Rahel remained where she was, claws in the girl’s neck, and I saw her flash a look at Bad Bob.

He didn’t react at all.

I was gripping the edge of the rock too hard, but I needed the sharp reminder of where I was, what the stakes had become.

Rahel ripped her claws free in a contemptuous gesture, and blood misted and spattered in an arc around her. She willed away the Miss America costume in favor of her more usual tailored pantsuit—in bloodred, not neon.

She turned her back before Moira’s pallid, dying body toppled.

Bad Bob was holding her bottle, and unlike Moira, that evil old bastard knew every trick. “Freeze until I tell you to move again, Rahel,” he said. “That was a goddamn stupid waste.” There was no genuine emotion left in him, not even for his own child. He saw it as a waste, all right—because Moira hadn’t measured up, in the crisis. “Jo. Come out.”

“Yeah, not likely!” I yelled. I tried to slow down my breathing, order my thoughts. “This isn’t going well for you, Bob. Maybe you should just give up now.”

He laughed. “No.”

He still had the book, and even though he hadn’t bothered to bring it out yet, he also had the spear, the Unmaking. I hadn’t even managed to free Rahel, dammit, and if his daughter’s bloody end hadn’t been enough to distract him, I couldn’t think of much else to try.

“Fair enough,” I said. “Want to call it a draw? Lose/lose?”

“I want to call the game,” he said. “On account of the death of the world.”

I’d have liked to think he was just being grandiose, but there was a dark undertone to his voice now. Seeing Moira die had destroyed his fun, apparently; he was ready to just skip right to the end, which in his book was and then the universe blew up. The end.

“That really what you want?” I slowly got up, hopping on my good right leg, and braced myself on the boulder I’d been using for sparse cover. “Come on, Bob. If the world ends, so do you. I thought you wanted to destroy the Wardens and savor your victory first.”

“As long as we all go out together, I’m fine with it,” he said. I expected him to reach for the Ancestor Scriptures, but instead, he stretched out his hand, which disappeared in a tingle of blue sparks and reemerged holding a thick, matte-black cylinder like a spear, sharp on both ends.

The Unmaking. Its presence set up a horrible crawling repulsion in me, an itching all up and down my nervous system. I wasn’t sure if the scientists were right, and it was stable antimatter, or if it was something even more exotic, like dark matter. Whatever it was, it did not have a place here, not in this world.

It was wrong.

It was also radioactive as hell, and it had almost destroyed me the last time I’d come anywhere near it. Now I was so closely connected to David, sharing the same well of power, that I didn’t dare risk it again. If I was poisoned, he might be, too. And through him, half the Djinn.

Bad Bob rested one end of the shaft against the stones at his feet and leaned on it. The thing was a little taller than his head now, wickedly pointed. “You really bamboozled me, you know. I never thought you’d come alone. Never thought David would let you.”

“He didn’t,” I said. “Nobody lets me do anything. You know that.”

He nodded, but the look in his eyes was far, far away. “I liked you,” he said. “Back in the day. Before things went wrong.”

“I liked you, too.” I hadn’t, exactly, but I’d admired him. We’d all admired him. “I know you took the Demon Mark on for the right reasons—you wanted to save lives. You just weren’t strong enough, in the end.”

“Neither were you,” he said. We weren’t accusing each other now; there wasn’t any heat to this exchange at all, just simple fact. “You’d have hatched out a Demon in the end, if you hadn’t gotten all tangled up with the Djinn. But look what it did for you—all the things you’ve seen, all you’ve done. I made you stronger.”

He wanted my approval.

I felt a hot breath of wind, then a gust off the ocean. Something was stirring out there. It blew my hair into a writhing cloud, and waves crashed the rocks at my back, dousing me in spray.

“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” I said. “And whatever does kill you—”

“Makes you invincible, if you’re lucky,” Bad Bob said, and smiled. I sensed a kind of good-bye in that smile, because it was real. Not a manic stretch of his lips, but a genuine expression of feeling and warmth. “You’ll always be my kid, Jo. My crazy, brave, stupid kid.”

And he’d always, in some sense, be my father. My mentor. The man who’d pushed me over the edge and made me grow wings to survive. The most abusive bastard father in the world.

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

“Here it comes,” Bad Bob said, and looked up.

Something fell out of the eye of the hurricane. It was like a glass ball, soap-bubble thin, and it hit the rocks of the island and smashed into smaller spheres, each of which bounced and rolled over the rocks, uncoiled, and stood on two or four legs.

Crystalline skeletons, creatures out of drug dreams, that vanished like ghosts against the sunlight.

The Sentinels—those still standing—were unprepared. A few of them defended themselves, but most died, ripped apart on the rocks. My old colleagues, who’d lost their way and followed a false messiah.

I couldn’t help them. Worse: I didn’t want to help them.

Here at the end of the world, we were all going to have to settle up our debts.

“They’re parasites,” Bad Bob said. “Like dust mites. Bugs crawling through a crack in the wall. Vicious little things, though.”

He slammed the Unmaking down onto the rocks, and a ringing vibration rippled out from its quivering length—the same frequency I’d used before, but a thousand times more powerful. Every crystalline skeleton exploded into powder.

Another glass ball fell, but it exploded well before contact with the ground when he slammed the point down again and woke that awful sound.

I’d clapped my hands over my ears. I couldn’t help it.

“I thought you’d welcome their help,” I said. I kept watching Rahel, hoping that she’d be able to somehow break out of her paralysis, but she was as still as the rocks around me, and just about as lifeless. My only ally was completely out of commission. “Since it looks like it’s just the two of us.”

“What would they be good for? You can kill them. I’ve seen you do it.” He shook his head. “We’re on to bigger things. You feel the lines of force under us? This is a nexus point, Jo. It’s the thinnest space between the planes, and between the worlds.”

The island hadn’t come to this place by accident. I could feel the humming power underneath my feet, and in the air around me. He’d been very careful about his choice of location for this. A born manipulator.

Like Lewis. Where are you, Lewis?

“Basic principles of magic, Jo,” he said softly. “Like calls to like. And sacrifices have special weight here.”

He threw the Unmaking to me—not at me, but to me, a low underhanded pitch.

I dodged it easily, but it didn’t fall; it turned and hovered in midair, pointing at me. Menace radiated off of it like black light. I backed up, carefully, not taking my eyes off it.

It darted straight for my chest. It was too fast, and I had no room to maneuver.

My body reacted instinctively, and wrongly.

I put out my hands and grabbed it to hold it back from my exposed chest.

It was like plunging my hands into a vat of dry ice—instant, agonizing cold.

The pool of Djinn power inside of me turned toxic and black, poisoned at its source, and I felt myself begin to rot from the inside out. I was just enough Djinn to be vulnerable, and just enough human to be corruptible.

He’d counted on that. And on my survival instincts.

The spear felt hot and heavy in my hands. It had burned me, before, but now its touch felt different—almost like flesh. I could hear it singing to me, a fascinating whisper of noise that had nothing in common with the music of our world, any of our worlds.

It made me sick and dizzy at first. I tried to drop it. I gagged and tried to throw up the darkness inside, but it wasn’t the kind that sat heavy in the stomach. This darkness filled me to the brim.

It took me over, completely.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw things differently. Literally. Holding the Unmaking made colors shift and burn, the whole structure of matter and light twist around me. It was beautifully destructive.

“We need more,” Bad Bob said. He was a pillar of blazing darkness in front of me, alien and somehow not alien at all. “You know how to make more of it, Joanne.”

I knew. I’d seen the process at work. The antimatter incubated inside the body of a Djinn, converting the power into its raw, black opposite, stabilized into a form we could handle and use.

Rahel knew it, too. I saw the fatal acceptance in her face, and the haughty courage, even though she was trapped in place by the bottle that Bad Bob held in his hand. Come, then, she seemed to be saying. If you can.

If I’d been myself, any version of myself, I wouldn’t have done it. Couldn’t have.

But holding the Unmaking had taken all that away from me, just as Bad Bob had intended.

I heard myself scream, a raw sound that fused oddly with the music of the Unmaking as it crawled through my nerves.

I lifted the spear in both hands and plunged it toward Rahel’s chest.

It never got there.

A pulse of pure hot Earth power rolled up through the rocks and blasted them into knife-edged fragments under our feet, sending me flying in one direction, Rahel in another.

The attack came from underneath us.

Bad Bob was caught by surprise. He staggered, leaped for stable ground, but it dissolved underneath his sandals. He fell. The Ancestor Scriptures skittered across stone, and the bottle dropped toward a fatal impact with the edge of a piece of lava rock.

I got to Rahel before the bottle hit stone. I felt the firm impact of the spear hitting her flesh, and then—then she was gone, and the spear was broken off at the tip, vibrating like a tuning fork in my hands.

Rahel’s bottle had shattered into pieces, and she was gone.

Rahel was free.

The Unmaking howled at me. It was angry at being cheated.

“Son of a bitch!” Bad Bob clawed his way out of the hole in the island, and jumped again as another hole was blasted up through it from beneath. Water geysered into the air between us. I held the spear in both hands and cast my own awareness out, too.

It was an impossibly stupid thing to do, but Lewis had taken the Grand Horizon down, like the world’s most unwieldy submarine. It floated in its protective, glistening bubble right below the island, and as I looked down into one of the holes, I could see people on the decks looking up at me a dozen feet below.

Something hit me from behind with stunning force, and I toppled into the water. The spear was as heavy as an iron bar, and it dragged me down toward the ship below.

Rahel wrapped her arms around me and pulled me back before the spear could touch the fragile surface of Lewis’s protective shield that kept everyone on the ship alive beneath the waves. I fought to get free, and when that didn’t work, I tried to move the spear around to stab her from behind.

She pinned my elbows and dragged me back, swimming like a dolphin at attack speed.

The protective dome sparked with golden light, and I saw Wardens emerging. Lots of them. They were accompanied by the bright silver glow of Djinn, and it was all bright, and weirdly beautiful, and I realized that I was running out of air. The screaming of the Unmaking in my head was so loud it blotted out everything.

Rahel wouldn’t let me breathe. I fought with everything I had, trying to throw her off, and for a moment it seemed like I’d succeeded.

I seized the opportunity and shot myself through the water at cannon speed, heading up. I blasted a path through the rocks and came up in the middle of the floating island, gasping and shuddering. I grabbed the husk of a dead palm tree and pulled myself from the water just a second before the hole sealed itself over beneath my boots. I used the Unmaking to lever myself to my feet. Where it touched, the rocks blackened and dissolved as if I’d doused them with acid.

My hands were black now, and my forearms were the gray of dead flesh, but I didn’t hurt at all.

Bad Bob slid down a small mountain of rubble, and it exploded into flame and shrapnel behind him. He thumped down next to me, and we both looked up.

The storm circling overhead had taken on a thick darkness, pregnant with menace. As I watched, the clouds inverted their colors—a negative image, just a flash, and then emerald lightning tore through the sky, breaking in all directions.

“Time,” Bad Bob said. “Take that up, Jo. Take it to the other side.”

Now I knew what he wanted from me. The Unmaking had made it clear to me, in ways that nothing had ever been clear before. None of this mattered. None of this was real. I’d been living an illusion all this time, a sad little nightmare of a life that started nowhere and ended in darkness.

Beyond that portal lay the real world. The only world.

This was just a fiction, and it needed to end so that we could all go to a better place.

I took a firmer grip on the spear, and rose up into the aetheric, into the heart of the storm.