Cape Storm

Chapter Six

Passengers—even me—weren’t allowed on the bridge. Apparently, that only happens in the movies, or to Cherise. I helped Lewis get through the rest of the passenger and crew interviews in neutral, nonsecure locations. No real surprises: a couple of drug smugglers, some embezzlers, and a few people who had raided the cabin steward’s closet for illegally obtained soaps and pillow mints. Other than that, we were clear of evil influences . . . except for the two we already knew about.

And me, of course. I was acutely aware that the tingles from the numb area on my back were coming with more and more frequency.

By late evening, I was feeling exhausted and even more sore than I’d anticipated. Cherise forced sandwiches on me, and then a glass of scotch, and I dozed off curled up in the corner of a sofa in the first-class-lounge area, listening to half a dozen Wardens debate the logistics of creating a clear course for us to follow. I was wishing that David would drop in, but I knew all too well that Lewis had other plans in motion—plans that specifically excluded me, thanks to the Bad Bob mark on my back. Need to know, and all that.

So I napped.

Lightning flared, startling me, and when I opened my eyes, I was somewhere else.

No . . . I realized that I wasn’t somewhere else. My body was still huddled on the sofa, still watched over by Wardens and Djinn alike. Protected.

But I was also standing in a small concrete room with bare, dusty floors and a few battered old chairs held together with wire and tape, and it was nowhere near the ship that still held my physical form.

It’s not real, I thought, but it felt damned convincing.

The door opened on howling darkness, and I could feel the blast of sea-salted air that rolled through the room to stir up debris.

When the door closed, a bandy-legged old white- haired man moved into the pallid circle of overhead light.

Bad Bob, in the flesh. At least, I presumed it was flesh. I was starting to wonder how real the real world actually was, in relation to what my former boss could accomplish these days.

“Look who dropped in for a visit,” Bob said, and pulled up a rickety chair. He flopped into it—risking total collapse of the ancient wood—and sat there smiling at me as if I were a favorite niece come for the holidays. Honestly, that was the worst thing about him. You couldn’t really tell how crazy he was at a glance.

Or how vile.

I could hear the wind howling and it grated on me, and I wanted to lift my hands to cover my ears—only my ears weren’t physical. I wasn’t physical. I was a spirit in the aetheric, and there was simply no way that Bad Bob could see me, or that my spirit could walk around like this in the real world. Surely this was a dream. No, a nightmare. Except it felt real, from the gritty concrete floor under my feet to the demented shrieking of the storm winds outside.

“I thought I’d give you guys a chance to surrender,” I said. My voice sounded distant and disembodied, and I wasn’t sure he could hear it until his smile widened. He was an evil old man, but he still had a charming smile. It went well with his apple red cheeks and blunt little nose. “I’d hate to skip the niceties. Courtesy is so important.”

“You’re playing my song, sugar,” he said. “You’re also playing my game. I wonder why?”

I smiled to match him. “Guess.”

“If I have to. Well, you found my little friend on board your ship—I felt him shuffle off this mortal coil. Good for you. Bet you can’t do that again, though.” He studied me with those fluorescent eyes—almost Djinn eyes, these days, brighter and more intense than they’d been in the old days when he’d been my boss, a genuine Warden hero. “I have to hand it to you, I figured you guys would argue until doomsday about what to do about me,” he continued. “Seriously now, a cruise ship? I didn’t see that coming. Beautiful. I thought maybe a yacht, or a freighter. But putting all those people in the line of fire? You’re growing a pair, sweetness. I like that.”

I waited. Bad Bob always had liked to hear his own voice more than anyone else’s.

“But you know what I think?” he continued, right on cue. “I think it’s so showy that it’s desperate. Like dressing up in neon and waving look-at-me flags while blaring Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. You really should study magicians. Misdirection, that’s the key to a good trick.”

“You think I’m tricking you?”

“You’re not that subtle,” he said, which stung because it was true, mostly. “But there’s somebody else on board that ship who is.”

We both knew that he was talking about Lewis. “You’ve still got a chance to end this peacefully,” I said. “Let Rahel go. Give up. It doesn’t have to be Armageddon: Atlantic Edition. We can find a way to make this work, Bob. Or whatever you are.”

“I’m still Bob,” he said, and winked at me, just the way Bad Bob would have back in the old days. “I’m just Bob plus. And I don’t think we’re going to come to any nice, peaceful settlement, princess. This isn’t about dividing up territory or setting boundaries. This is about me, wiping all of you off the face of the earth, and then my friends coming in to take everything else. It’s nature’s way, you know. The strong eat the weak. The many eat the few. And I am about to eat you.”

He smiled, opened his mouth, and his jaws gaped hideously wide, like a snake’s. If this was a nightmare, it was a first-class effort out of my very darkest subconscious.

I stepped back from him.

His jaws re-formed and closed. The Cheshire Cat smile remained. “Don’t look so scared,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff I can do with my tongue. Bet I could make you forget all about that wimpy little Djinn boy you’re so taken with. Give me a chance—No? All right, then. I guess I’ll just have to settle for something else. Thanks for being so accommodating and wandering on over here, by the way. I figured you might, sooner or later. The torch has that effect on people. It just draws people to me, whether they like it or not.”

He took two steps forward, thrust out his hand, and put it all the way through my ghostly, insubstantial chest. Unsettling, and a little uncomfortable, but I actually felt a little spurt of triumph. Not as easy as you thought it would be, I was about to say, when I realized that he’d reached to a very specific place.

To the ghostly mark on my back. The black torch. His fingertips brushed against it beneath my translucent skin—I could feel it, even if I couldn’t see it happening.

All of a sudden the room was far too small, like a trap, and I wanted to leave this place, now, before something happened.

Too late.

I felt my physical body, still far away on board the ship, writhing in its sleep. I felt the hot tingle of the black torch begin to spread across my shoulder blade.

I’d lost David’s containment, and because I was asleep, he might not know it.

Bad Bob removed his hand from my chest, shook it as if he was flicking something nasty off his fingers, gave me a feral grin, and walked away. I struggled to figure out what was holding me here, in this place, pinned like a bug to a board. The mark. He was right. Until I figured out how to turn it off—if I could—he could keep me here, out of my body. I knew that the longer I stayed out, the worse it was going to be when I got back.

I remembered the Wardens, lost in the storm. If my spirit was shredded, my body would just . . . stop. And they would never know why.

Outside, a truly ferocious storm raged. I felt the hot, damp blast of hair burst into the room, stirring grit and pushing the rickety sticks of furniture in random fury. Lightning flashed like strobes, turning Bad Bob’s pale hair and face into a fright mask.

He reached outside, and when his hand came back through the doorway, it was holding a spear. I recognized the thing—it was thick, and it sparkled with bursts of something that wasn’t color, wasn’t darkness, wasn’t anything human senses could identify or codify. He’d refined his weapons, I saw. This spear had started out life as a small chunk, grown in the dying body of a Djinn, and Bad Bob had given it enough care and feeding to make it a seven-foot-long, wickedly pointed expression of his own appetite for destruction.

The Djinn called it the Unmaking. It was, as best I understood the physics of it, stable antimatter, capable of destroying anything he wanted to destroy.

Including removing Djinn from the fabric of the universe.

“Oh, Bob, that’s just sad,” I said. His grin broadened. “Seriously, why can’t your type ever grow a discus for a weapon, or the world’s largest potato? How come it’s always so—phallic?”

Bob ignored the opportunity to banter, and stepped out into the storm. He looked up at it, into the heart of it. I knew what he was seeing—the raging engine of destruction, the primitive mind forming behind it. This was a living thing, this storm—a predator, yes, but a natural one, like a tiger or a puma.

He ground the butt of his spear against the dirt, and a blinding pulse of something that wasn’t light, wasn’t heat, wasn’t right went up from the pointed end of the spear into the storm.

Again.

Again.

With every thump of that weapon against the earth, I felt the world itself shudder. On the aetheric, muddy red waves spread like blood from a mortal wound.

The force emitted from the spear had a sickening feel to it, and the color—if you could call it a color—was a poisonous, pallid thing, like the glow given off by decay.

The storm’s lightning suddenly flashed, but it wasn’t light.

It was dark. Photonegative energy, but here on the real world. He’d infected the storm itself, made it a force for destruction far different from any natural predator.

And then it flashed that unearthly emerald green.

“Almost ready,” Bad Bob said, and reversed his grip on the spear. Handling that much anti-energy couldn’t have been pleasant, even for him; I could see the skin blackening and flaking away where his hand touched the surface. “Ready for the cherry on top?”

He pointed the spear down at the ground, and drove it in. It went deep, even though he didn’t use any real force—as if it tunneled greedily on its own.

I felt the earth shriek in real pain beneath my ghostly feet, and the whole building shook. Grit filtered down in feathery whispers, and then the real lurch came.

The building exploded as force traveled up through the ground, pulverizing layers of granite into dust. The cinder blocks of the walls buckled, ground themselves into powder against each other, and the ceiling crashed in a twisting, tearing mass of wood and metal that was snatched away by the wind.

Nothing touched me.

I stood exactly where I had as the building disintegrated around me, ripped away by the howling Category 5 winds. The ground lurched like pounding surf underneath me.

Bad Bob rose up into the air, holding to the end of his spear. He kept rising.

The spear grew, and grew, like some poisonous tree with its roots sunk deep.

He broke it off at ground level. It shattered at the stress point with a musical, glassy sound I heard even above the shriek of the storm.

A palm tree toppled and rolled toward me. Through me. Bad Bob landed on the rippling earth in front of me, appallingly normal in this terribly destroyed setting, and used the remaining part of his spear as a walking stick. Thump. Thump. Thump. It echoed through me like the beating of Poe’s telltale heart.

Around us formed a little circle of clear air, stable ground, like the eye of the hurricane. It expanded, and other people appeared out of the chaos. Wardens, once upon a time. I recognized many of them, at least by face if not by name. His pets, his converts to his righteous war against the Djinn—not that Bad Bob cared a bean about killing the Djinn to benefit humanity. Oh no. Bad Bob cared only, and always, about his own ends, and whatever these pathetic, deluded people thought they were getting out of fighting on his side, they were bound to be disillusioned.

I assessed numbers. Might as well, since I was stuck here. It did occur to me that Bad Bob was showing me only what he wanted to show me, of course, but for all that, the guy who keeps showing off will eventually show you something he doesn’t intend to.

Bad Bob was one hell of a chatterbox.

Sixty of them. My spirits sank, which was no doubt what he’d counted on. He had numbers. Of course, we had more, but add to that Bad Bob’s Demon-derived powers and the neat trick of handheld antimatter that the Djinn could neither recognize nor defend against, and we were well on the train to Screwsville.

“You still think you can win?” he asked me. I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t sure I dared tell a lie right now, and a lie was all I really had. “Scared little Jo. It was always going to end like this, you know. You against me, and you never could take me.”

“I did take you,” I said. “You sadistic old bastard.”

He lost his smile and pointed the spear at me. “Wonder what happens if I give it a taste of you in your aetheric form?” he said. “Bet it’ll hurt like fuck.”

“Bet you don’t want to be around when I survive it and come to kick your sorry ass off the face of the planet.”

He laughed and grounded the butt of the spear again. “I always did like that about you. You got sand, I’ll give you that.” He leaned forward, eyes avid and wet. “Fight me, Jo. I love it when you fight me. It won’t matter in the end, but it’ll be damn fun. You thought by dragging the Wardens away from all those innocent people on shore you’d save lives, but I think you just made my job a whole lot easier. See? You were already working for me. And now you’re going to really draw your paycheck, peach.”

“Like hell,” I said.

He blew me a kiss. Back on the ship’s sofa, my body continued to twitch and writhe. Cherise sat down next to me, putting a hand on my forehead, then calling for help.

The sensation of her hand against my skin was just enough to form a link—a way back. I pulled. The black mark felt like Velcro, sticking me here to this spot, but I ripped and tore at it, struggling, and with a hissing snap I came free.

I called lightning.

A white blast of energy erupted out of the clouds overhead—clean, pale energy, not the poisoned kind he’d poured into the storm—and struck me squarely in the top of my insubstantial head, flooding through my form in a splintered glowing ladderwork, then blasting out into the ground.

It shattered the remaining connection that held me at Bad Bob’s command, and I flew backward through the screaming darkness, whipping past pitch-black writhing ocean, over half-seen bits of island, into calmer seas.

Into the massive, smugly sailing bulk of the Grand Paradise.

Into my body, with a lurch like a slap.

I came awake with a gasp that felt like a shriek. My back was burning, on fire, and I tried to lunge to my feet. It felt like my entire nervous system cut out, faulty wiring shorting and sparking.

I pitched off the sofa to the carpet and got a taste of rug.

Cherise was instantly on her knees beside me, trying to cradle me in her arms. I couldn’t let her touch me. Everything felt wrong, strange, bad, vile . . . and I wasn’t sure that it wasn’t contagious.

“No,” I panted, and crab-crawled back to jam myself against the bottom of the sofa. “No, leave me alone!”

“Help!” Cherise shouted. That got the attention of some passing crew members. A passing steward—I still didn’t know his name, but he was the one who’d been trying to manage the First-Class rebellion before we’d set sail—shoved aside the coffee table and reached down for me. “Miss, are you all right? Should I get medical help?”

I wrapped my hand convulsively around the white lapel of his jacket, and where my fingers gripped the fabric, it started to smoke and hiss.

He exclaimed and tried to claw his way free. I couldn’t let go. My hand didn’t seem to be mine, exactly; it was moving, and I could feel what it was doing, but it was holding him in place.

Part of me wanted to destroy him. A big part of me, and it was growing larger as the broken containment on my back allowed the poison from the torch mark to flood into me. The dam was breached.

I was being swept away.

The steward struggled, panted, yelled for help, and finally managed to slip out of his jacket, which remained clutched in my fist as it burst into full smoking flame. I heard other voices—Wardens?—in a rising babble. Somebody tried to tamp down the fire that was bubbling up from my fingers, but I couldn’t stop it. All my nerves were fried, useless; all my control had gone with them.

The jacket caught the rug on fire.

Someone hit me with a good old-fashioned fire extinguisher, but as soon as the icy foam stopped blasting, fire erupted from both my hands, crawling up my arms like snakes, twining around my body in living veils of flame.

I could feel other things happening inside me now—fire was always the easiest of powers to call, because it was virtually unstoppable even in natural form, but now I could feel my other abilities stirring, too. Something inside me was rifling through my mind, my soul, shuffling aside unwanted things to find the most devastating things on offer.

I was an open doorway, and something was reaching through.

I think I might have screamed, but if I did, it was just in my head. My body stood up, dripping flame as my clothing burned away, leaving me draped in living energy. I could see myself reflected in the lounge windows—a pillar of fire, a pagan goddess, naked and primal. My hair didn’t burn, but it rose and fluttered on the waves of heat created from my skin.

My eyes were Djinn eyes, flaring gold, and where I touched, things blackened and smoked and charred into ruin.

“Back!” someone snapped to the growing cluster of onlookers, and a hardened bubble of air formed around me, thick as steel. The fire erupting out of me consumed the available oxygen in seconds, then began to gutter and fail as its fuel ran out.

I felt nothing, except that all-consuming heat exploding from the black torch on my shoulder. It seemed to be getting worse, not better, as if someone had injected me with acid. If I’d had control of my voice, I’d have been begging for it to stop.

The cold, blackened part of me inside still had control, but it allowed me to collapse into a naked, smoking heap inside the air bubble. I struggled to breathe, but there was nothing left to fill my lungs that wasn’t toxic.

Someone stepped up on the other side of the bubble.

Lewis.

The darkness in me took over, but it did it in a hor rifyingly clever way.

I lifted my hand and slapped my palm flat against the bubble, pleading for mercy. My fingernails were turning a delicate robin’s-egg shade of blue. I must have looked completely pathetic and weak.

I wasn’t. Not at all.

There was something very strange in the way he was looking at me. Something my grandmother used to say. Tombstone eyes . . .

Lewis’s head snapped around, not fast enough, and something collided with him. A streak of bronze light that froze into the form of David, on the other side of my invisible prison.

I watched Lewis’s lips move. He was yelling at David, telling him not to be a fool, not to fall for it. He knew.

He needn’t have worried. David might be passionate, but he was no kind of a fool. He crouched down and put his hand flat against mine, separated by five inches of thickened, impenetrable, interlocked molecules. His face was a mask, his eyes dark and secretive, but not quite managing to hide his fury—at me, at himself, at Bad Bob for putting us here.

I smiled, tasting his despair—it felt good.

The talisman burned into my back hit a white-hot peak, and I felt my Weather powers flooding out of me, battering at the prison holding me. Lewis was incredibly strong, maybe the strongest Warden who’d ever lived, but I was damn close on this front. I hadn’t always been, or at least I hadn’t always known it, but I was afraid that very strength was going to be my undoing now . . . because I could feel my powers eating away at the force he’d set up to keep me contained. Once it broke, there was no telling what I’d do. What I could do. Possibilities raced through my mind, each worse than the last—poison gas drifting through the sealed corridors of the ship, killing everyone it touched. Or maybe I’d just blow a gigantic hole through the bottom, sending this beautiful floating coffin down to join other famous wrecks. I could almost see that one—the foaming rush of the sea through the shattered hull, the rooms filling up, all these people trapped and dying . . .

God, I wanted to do it.

I couldn’t let this happen. I couldn’t be the cause of so much death.

Bad Bob had done one thing for me, thanks to this little exercise in hellish torment; he’d shown me how to break loose. I wasn’t trapped in my body; my body existed separately from my spirit, connected only by random impulses and autonomic functions. I pulled away and stretched to the limit. I arrowed up into the aetheric, feeling the bond stretch and pull, thinner and thinner. At the top of the aetheric, there was a flickering white milky light—the boundary of another world above that one. Another plane of existence. The Djinn could pass through it. Humans couldn’t, not even Wardens.

I touched it, trailed ethereal fingers against the barrier, and looked down. Distances and heights didn’t mean the same things up on the higher planes, but in this sense they did—there was a form of gravity, and momentum, and forces that translated from the aetheric back to the physical.

I let go, turned, and put all my power into an accelerated dive back to my physical body. Instead of letting myself fall, I raced, gathering as much force along the way as I could. Pulling it directly from the aetheric, like the wake from a speedboat. I’d never tried this; I knew that there were Earth Wardens who had, who’d managed to get a power boost through this technique. It wouldn’t last, and it came at a heavy cost, but it was at least something to try.

They never told me how bad it would hurt, though.

Hitting the physical form of my body had a psychic shock wave, like slamming head-on into a bank vault at eighty miles per hour. Then the aetheric wake slammed in behind me, temporarily compressing me inside.

I blew it out through the mark on my back, channeling it through the black lines. It overloaded within an instant, shocking the mark into silence, sending it back into its containment state.

I raised my head and looked David in the eye and mouthed Help. I didn’t know if he’d believe me or not—I almost hoped he wouldn’t—but without him, I knew that sooner or later this was going to end in my death.

My whole body was trembling, anoxic, on the edge of unconsciousness. I couldn’t create oxygen from the toxic soup of molecules left inside this bubble; I’d have to break the shell, get some kind of feed from the outside.

Or maybe I’d die. That wasn’t a bad solution, all things considered. Not my fave, admittedly, but it would save innocent lives, and—

David’s outstretched palm pushed through the hard shell of air. Stress fractures formed as white cracks around his fingers, and then he broke through, and a rush of delicious air fanned my hair back from my face. The bubble disintegrated. I dropped facedown to the floor.

A weight settled on top of me—David, straddling me. Slamming his hand down on top of the black mark, and if I’d thought that sucker was painful already, this was a thousand times worse, so bad that I couldn’t stop screaming, writhing, trying to claw my way out of the pain.

“I’ll kill you!” I was screaming. And worse. And I meant it.

Lewis took my wrists and held me still. Somebody else grabbed my flailing legs and anchored them. It was like old-style surgery without the benefit of anesthesia, this feeling of something vital being cut out of me, bloody and dripping . . .

And then it stopped.

I collapsed, sobbing helplessly. I couldn’t feel David’s hand on my back. I couldn’t feel anything from the nape of my neck to my waistline; it had all gone icily numb.

“Mother of God,” someone among the onlookers murmured, and the tone was so appalled that I wondered just what he was seeing. I didn’t care. It was enough that it didn’t hurt, just for a few precious breaths.

“Get the medical team,” Lewis said. His voice sounded strangely rough, low in his throat. When I turned my head and focused on him, his eyes were red, lids swollen. There were tears tracking down his cheeks.

He was still holding my wrists in a brutally tight grip.

“I’m okay,” I said. I wasn’t. I felt hollow and odd, as if I was floating several feet from my own emotions. “Hey. Don’t worry. I won’t go nuclear on you.” I didn’t think I had anything left, anyway. “I’m losing, you know. Can’t hold it.”

Lewis let go, very slowly, and swiped his arm across his eyes. He sat back on his haunches, and his gaze moved away from me, up and behind.

Locking eyes with David, presumably.

I felt David’s warm hand touch the back of my neck. “Don’t move,” he said. He sounded almost as odd as Lewis. “I need to tell you something.”

This didn’t sound positive. “What?”

“The mark. It’s gone.”

Wasn’t that good? “And?”

There was a short, heavy silence. David said, “It burned off your skin, all the way down to the bone in places. I’ve tried to close the wound, but—”

“It won’t let you,” I finished for him. That explained the emergency numbness covering my entire back, and the shocked trembling of my muscles. I felt cold, too. My body was trying to marshal its resources against a life-threatening crisis. “It doesn’t matter, the mark’s still there. It’s buried inside me. I can’t burn it out. Was anyone hurt?”

David let out an uneven breath. “Other than you?” I felt his weight ease off of me, and then he moved into view, kneeling next to me. Lewis moved out of his way. “No. You didn’t hurt anyone. You fought it off.”

“No. Not really.” I swallowed and tried to order my drifting, scattered priorities. “I saw Bad Bob. He has sixty former Wardens with him. I can tell you where.”

“Jo—” That was Lewis again, soft and almost regretful. “We can’t believe you now. You understand that, don’t you? You can’t know that any of what you saw is real. He could have put it there. He’s a manipulative son of a bitch. Even if it was true, he’ll move before we can get there.”

“He knows,” I said. “He knows we got one of the skins. He’ll be activating the others. You have to move, now. Stop them.”

Lewis tore his gaze away from me. “David, I’m going to need you.”

“No,” David said.

“If this ship goes down, she still dies. Is that what you want?”

David’s eyes flashed—not fire, not bronze, but white-hot, like the flash from the sharp edge of a diamond. “I’ll give you all the power you need. I’ll assign Djinn to you. But I won’t leave her. Don’t ask me again.” The edge to his voice scared me, and I reached out to touch his hand.

“No,” I said. “I’m not dead, I’m just massively screwed up.” I sucked in a deep breath. “Help me sit up.”

David didn’t like the idea, but he saw that if he didn’t, I’d flail around and do it anyway, probably hurting myself even more. “Wait,” he said. “Bandages.”

I suppose the medical team had arrived, because I was lifted up to a sitting position, my arms were raised, and I got wrapped up like a mummy, from waist to just under my armpits. It was a very odd sensation—I could feel every bit of the pressure and texture on my front and sides, but the bandages simply disappeared when they touched my back.

It took care of half the problem that I was naked in the middle of a crowd. Somebody brought in one of the cruise line’s fluffy guest robes, which took care of the other half once I’d gotten it on and belted.

When I faltered getting up, Cherise ducked in and braced me, arms around my waist. David held me up on the other side. “I’d carry you, but—” I understood. There was no way for him to do it without putting pressure on my ruined back.

“It’s fine. I can walk.” I wasn’t sure I could, but damned if I wasn’t going to try. As I stood there catching my breath and my balance, though, I took a look around.

I’d pretty much managed to trash the first-class lounge. The sofa was a skeletal wreck, burned through to the springs. The carpet where I’d been standing (or lying) was melted and blackened into a tangled knot of ash and acrylic fibers. Add to that the still-lingering smoke that curled blackly around the room, seeking exits, and the general reek of burned flesh . . . Yeah. That security deposit was gone for good.

“Sorry,” I apologized, to no one in particular, and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other on the way out of the room.

I heard a dull boom from below us, somewhere in the bowels of the ship, and looked at David’s tense expression.

“It’s not your problem,” he said.

Whether it was or not, he wasn’t going to let me claim responsibility of any kind.

“Are we sinking?” I asked.

We were sitting on my narrow bed—me lying on my stomach, David propped on the edge, looking down at me. The ship was rocking much worse than before, slamming into waves with such force that I swore I could hear metal groaning somewhere in the bowels of the vessel. Of course, that was stupid; big as this thing was, I’d never know if something was going catastrophically wrong. The iceberg that had killed the Titanic hadn’t even knocked over glasses in the dining room.

Of course, the Titanic hadn’t been wallowing in massively turmoiled seas, beset from all sides, and between being driven toward an even worse predator. We were like a whale being stalked by a school of sharks. Sooner or later, they’d take out enough bites to make a difference.

“No,” David said, and stroked my hair. “No, we’re not sinking.”

“You think the mark’s gone,” I murmured, and closed my eyes. “It’s not. I can still feel it.” My mind kept wanting to shut down, lock itself off, focus on summoning up its strength for healing, but I couldn’t seem to let it go.

David shifted. He probably touched my shoulder, or at least the bandages over the open wound, but I couldn’t feel anything. “I know,” he said. “I can see it on the aetheric.”

“It’s bigger.”

“Yes.”

“I said I’d kill you, didn’t I?” He didn’t answer. “I meant it. I really did, David. The only thing that’s stopping me is the containment. You understand?”

“I do.” He brushed fingers gently over my forehead. “It’s not your fault.”

“It will be,” I said. I felt a distant, inescapable grief, but like everything else, it was arm’s length from me. I really couldn’t feel anything. “How’s Kevin doing?”

David was silent for a long enough minute that I had to fight to stay awake to hear the answer. “He’s doing well.” My lover sounded surprised. Well, I supposed I was a little bit surprised, too. Pleasantly so. “One of the skins has already been destroyed. They’re hunting the other one in the hold. They’re getting close.”

“No problems?” It was odd to be worried by that, but I was. Things never went that easily, did they? Not in my experience.

“If there are, it’s for someone else to handle,” he said. “Rest. We’ll see to things.”

He seemed confident. I went over that in my head like a string of worry beads, and finally said, “You did warn Lyle, right? Not to take the skin on directly?”

David frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you remember?” I rolled over on my side to stare up at him. “These things are lethal to Djinn. David, you have to pull the Djinn back. Let the Wardens handle this one.”

“I will.”

Was he just humoring me? It was understandable if he was; I wasn’t sounding overly competent just now. Too tired, too sick, too much in shock. Besides, I was compromised. Even burning the tattoo right off my body hadn’t destroyed the link between me and Bad Bob. I wasn’t sure anything, short of my horrific and gruesomely painful death, would. That meant I couldn’t really count on my mind being my own, or be sure that Bad Bob wasn’t hooked into me like some kind of long-distance spy bug. I’d be perfectly placed for that kind of duty. He could use me, and there would be nothing—nothing—I could do to stop him.

Bad Bob could use me as the hammer to shatter the entire Warden organization, not to mention the Djinn. Through my link to David, I compromised their safety, too.

“Jo.” David must have known what was going through my mind, because his tone and his touch were both gentle. “You’re alive. Don’t underestimate your ability to come through this. I don’t.”

“You want to be there, with them.”

“My place is here.”

“Your place is at the front of the battle. You’re not Jonathan. You don’t sit things out.” I couldn’t quite suppress a smile. “Being the Boss of Bosses doesn’t really suit you, you know. You’re more of a hands-on guy.”

“I’m not sitting anything out. I’m a Djinn. I don’t have to be physically present to make things happen, you know.”

My brain drifted away, randomly connecting things. Wardens didn’t have to be present to make things happen, either, although for Fire and Earth Wardens it was certainly a whole lot easier to be in close proximity—which was why Fire Wardens had a tendency to die fighting their fires. . . .

My eyes opened. “David,” I said. “Who’s with Kevin?”

“Don’t worry, Lewis sent a whole team. Kevin’s only part of it.” He thought I was worried about Kevin. I struggled to sit up, but my arms felt like wet spaghetti. David helped me. “What?”

I didn’t know exactly, but I felt something. “I need to get to them. Right now.” A building anxiety. A conviction that something was very, very wrong. My arm’s-length emotions were rapidly closing in on me.

“No. You’re not going anywhere,” David said. He was right, horribly right; I couldn’t summon up the energy to make it off the bed, much less carry on to a fight. But my heart was pounding, my palms sweating, and I could feel dread boiling up from the pit of my stomach. “What is it?”

“I don’t know! It’s just—”

The whole ship shuddered beneath us. I looked at David, horrified, remembering the lessons of the Titanic all too clearly. I could see the same thing reflected in his face.

“Stay here.” He flared white and disappeared.

The Grand Paradise groaned like a living thing and heeled ponderously to starboard, rising and then settling back to vertical. Our little cabin didn’t have the luxury of a balcony, but it did have a small reinforced porthole. I dragged myself off the bed and shoved aside the single guest chair to reach it.

I was staring at water. That wasn’t possible. The deck we were on was far above the waterline—six stories above it, probably. How could I be looking at the water?

Were we sinking?

There was chaos outside. Shouting, screaming, rich people boiling out of their cabins and demanding to see the captain, which was their standard response to everything from being out of toothpaste to a terrorist attack. I kept myself upright by sheer force of will, edging along the wood paneling, heading for—what? I didn’t know. I just knew I needed to get there.

Two people were in my way. I blinked, because quite frankly, the last two people I expected to see holding on to each other were the cabin stewardess Aldonza and movie princess Cynthia Clark. Their body language wasn’t what I expected, either—no subservience from Aldonza, no arrogance from Clark. They were just two women, staying together for support and comfort.

They turned and looked at me with identical expressions of surprise that turned into concern.

“What the devil happened to you?” Cynthia Clark asked, and grabbed my left arm to support me. “Mrs. Prince?”

That still sounded odd to me. “Oh, hell, call me Jo. Everybody does,” I said. I felt sick and dizzy and a little bit high. “Aldonza. I need a door to the crew area. Right now.”

“Yes, Jo,” she said. Finally I’d made her give up the formality. Just in time for disaster. “This way.” She took the lead, glancing back to make sure we were struggling along in her wake. The ship seemed to be wallowing more and more now, side to side. Lights were flickering.

I looked at Clark, taking the bulk of my weight, who seemed composed despite all the chaos around us. “Thanks,” I said.

“You seem to be one of the people who can make sure we survive this,” she said. “It seems reasonable to be sure you get where you’re going.”

“Can I have your autograph?”

She smiled, and even now I couldn’t see the strain. What an actor! “Maybe later,” she said. “I’ll have my assistant drop some photos by. I hope I can sign them: To the woman who saved my life.”

“Well, if you can’t, I’ll let you off the hook for the headshots,” I said. I was shaking off my shock and weakness, though not quickly; I felt more alert, steadier on my feet. Good enough for shopping, maybe, if not fighting evil.

Too bad I was heading for the latter.

The subdued, elegant lighting in the hall flickered again, buzzed, and then died. After a heart-pounding five seconds of absolute blackness, emergency lighting clicked on with a hiss—glaring white halogens, not flattering to anyone’s complexion, much less when people are distorted with terror. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I kept seeing water rising, rushing through corridors. . . .

“Yeah,” I muttered to myself. “Wish I’d never seen that damned movie.”

Aldonza paused at a simple metal door labeled PRIVATE, with a key card reader to the side. She swiped a card that was hanging from a pull cord at her side, but nothing happened. Of course. Emergency regulations—all electronic locks would have popped, allowing for easy evacuation. I grabbed the knob and turned it, and opened the door on a different world.

It was as startling as opening up a broom closet at the Ritz—all of a sudden, there was no expensive thick carpet, no indirect lighting, no artwork. Just metal, some indoor-outdoor carpet for traction, and plain fixtures that wouldn’t have been out of place on a fish trawler. Aldonza stepped over the watertight lip of the door and gestured me inside. Clark tried to go with us, but I stopped her with an outstretched hand. “No,” I said. “Get to the lifeboat stations. The captain’s probably going to try to get you off as quickly as possible.”

“In this storm? How?”

“Trust me. He’ll find a way.” I shook her hand. “Love your movies, by the way. Sorry about incinerating your cabin.”

“These things happen,” she said, deadpan. “And I hope you find a way to stop this before it goes any further.”

Me too, I thought, but I didn’t even really know what I was heading toward in the first place.

Aldonza shut the watertight door and spun the locking mechanism. Nobody would be getting in that way, not now.

“Come on,” she said, and offered me her shoulder. “You want the hold, yes? Where your friends went?”

I nodded, and off we went.

The hallways here were narrow industrial constructions, and as we passed larger open spaces they were uniformly workmanlike. A TV lounge area big enough for a few dozen, with comfortable but un-fancy Sears-style furniture. A computer area with banks of monitors and keyboards. A mess hall with all the charm of mess halls everywhere.

The place was deserted. “Where is everybody?”

“Duty stations,” Aldonza said. “Organizing the passengers.”

All of them? I supposed that made sense; we were heading down now, flights of narrow stairs descending into the emergency-lit bowels of the ship. Stairs. Lovely. Feel the burn, Baldwin.

I wondered where David had gone.

“One more,” Aldonza murmured, when I had to stop for trembling breaths. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

“No choice,” I said, and coughed. “Let’s go.”

The bottom of the stairs opened into another hallway. This one held crew quarters—four narrow bunks to a room, top and bottom on each side, with small lockers in the middle on the far wall. Most had homey touches—photos of family, home, friends. Magazines to read, or books. Colorful nonstandard blankets and pillows.

Aldonza stopped.

“What?” I asked. She let go of me and took a step back. I braced myself on the metal wall, looking first at her, then down the hall.

Lights were going out, one by one, marching up the corridor toward us.

“Which way to the hold?”

“That way,” she said. “Straight on, then go left when you must turn. The crew entrance to the hold is there.”

“Get out of here,” I said. “Run.”

She stared at me in confusion for a few seconds, then she must have seen what was happening inside me.

She backed away and ran.

And I went toward the darkness.

And the darkness went into me.