Cape Storm

Chapter Seven

The danger sign was that I felt . . . better. Calmer. Steadier.

I shouldn’t have, not at all. I was operating on threads, and yet suddenly I felt assured, in control, and powerful.

The containment was leaking. Leaking badly. I was starting to turn around again, and I needed to do what I’d come to do before that happened.

I wasn’t totally blind. Earth Wardens can sense heat, shapes, all kinds of frequencies not usually accessible to other regular folks (or Wardens), and with my night vision, I could see the hallway, the cool shapes of closed doors, and a long empty stretch.

The hallway ended in a blind T-shaped intersection, and I turned left as Aldonza instructed. At the end was a big double-sized watertight door with all kinds of warnings and crew restrictions blazoned next to it.

I spun the wheel and pulled. The air on the other side felt heavy and thick, unpleasantly stale. No fire, at least. And no ocean flooding in, which made me wonder why we were sitting so low in the water.

The hold was massive, a cave of treasures that would have taken months to map and explore. Cargo containers were stacked in neat, symmetrical rows that glowed cool greens and blues in my night vision.

And I saw the bright red and yellow flicker of bodies up ahead.

None of them were moving.

I struggled with a fiery hot pulse of primal satisfaction, of pleasure. I pushed it back.

I limped ahead, stopping for breath when I had to, and the scene slowly came into focus. There, near the center of the hold, were cages where I supposed duty-free items like liquor and expensive perfumes were kept. There was a massive freestanding safe, too, which no doubt held all those precious goodies the rich passengers had been so loath to leave behind. I wondered how much of it was drugs.

Standing, sitting, or lying in a circle near the safe were bodies. Some had the white-hot glow of Djinn, some the merely warm spectrum of human flesh, but none of them were moving by so much as a breath.

Still alive, though.

Not for long, the darkness inside me whispered, and purred. I felt it stretch its claws.

I limped as close as I dared before I felt something tingling along the edges of my nerves. There was some kind of energy field here that I really didn’t want to encounter directly.

This was the team, Wardens and Djinn, that had come here to fight the skin. I didn’t sense the signature of the one they’d been hunting at all, though. Instead, I saw a broken heap of crystal, and some slagged flesh.

Score one for the good guys. So what had gone wrong?

Kevin was standing only a few feet from me, frozen in midstep. Up on the aetheric, I could see his fury boiling like lava, so he was aware, if unable to move.

“Hey!” I yelled. One of the Djinn—Lyle, with his lead gray skin and rust-colored eyes—was closer to me than the others. “Lyle, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” he said. He couldn’t move, but he could speak.

“What’s happening?”

“We are all that’s holding the ship out of the water,” he said. “We have to hold our concentration, or the forces won’t balance. This deck will collapse. The ship will sink.”

Instead of merely being frozen, the Wardens were in danger of being smashed, because there was a force below us, rising up from the blackest, coldest depths of the ocean . . . and it was pulling us down.

That was why the ship was riding low in the water. It was caught in a downward suction, like a ball at the end of a vacuum hose.

If the Djinn let go, it wasn’t just the team of Wardens who were fatally screwed.

We all were.

Good. This time, the darkness pooled in my guts, warm and velvety, and I had to choke back a sob. It would be so easy to let go. So utterly easy.

There was a grating sound in the hold, something scraping over metal. I crouched down, making myself as small a target as possible, as the voice echoed off of metal, wood, and immobile bodies. I heard the shuffle of footsteps, and saw an odd shape moving among the stacked cargo and luggage. It had the outward shine of a human form, but it was like a superimposition—beneath it lay something dark and twisted.

The skin. It had created some kind of decoy, which was what the pile of glass was not far from Kevin, for the Wardens to chase while the rest of the plan had gone into motion.

Great. We might have killed the powerful one first, but this one was the clever one.

The skin ducked behind a parked, covered Porsche, then flitted around some hanging chains and weights, more like nightmare than human form.

It paused long enough in the glow of an emergency light for me to get a good look at it. The body it wore was one of those fresh-faced kids who looked like they’d be more at home in a television ad for soap than running around murdering people. He was almost as pretty as a Djinn.

“Angelo,” I said. “Angelo Marconi?”

It just looked at me. I could see now that Lyle was right—it was literally just skin, stretched like a Halloween mask over the darkness inside.

Like you, laughed my dark side. Like you are becoming. Not long now . . .

The skin flitted out of the light and into the darkness.

I had no idea what I was going to do if it came to power-on-power, because I was barely staying on my feet.

Ten feet away, the frozen statue garden of Wardens and Djinn glowed steadily in my night vision. I caught a moving glow, much cooler than the others, blue instead of yellow or white.

Angelo darted into the middle of the standing figures. I switched back to regular sight, and saw him put his hands on one of the Djinn. One of Ashan’s, who snarled and struck back with invisible force that bounced off of Angelo’s body like the impact from a water balloon.

Angelo’s skin blackened, crisped, and flaked away, revealing the crystal underneath, as the Djinn fought him. I felt the ship lurch sharply downward as the Djinn’s attention was pulled away from the task of holding the opposing forces in balance.

The Djinn began to turn a soft ashy gray. Rotting from the outside in, the way the Djinn who’d died outside my room had ended her life.

I settled my back against the cold metal of the safe. If I was going to do anything at all, I didn’t want to worry about falling down while I was about it. If what Venna had said was right, this thing was the forerunner of something much bigger, something that devoured on a universal scale. I thought about all those lifeless planets spinning in space that our telescopes and probes had found. How many of them had once been like us? How many had fallen prey and been wiped clean of life?

Why fight it? It’s nature. You are all aberrations, a momentary mistake in the plan of the universe. Let go.

The ship bounced and settled deeper in the water. I heard the almost-human groan of the metal around me. It couldn’t withstand this strain, not for much longer.

And neither could I.

I closed my eyes, visualized the frequencies I needed, and began to set them up in a tightly enclosed ring around the skin and his Djinn victim.

Nothing happened.

The Djinn struggled now, no longer interested in maintaining the balance, but he’d waited too long. He couldn’t break free of the crystal claws that were digging into him, siphoning away his power and his life. He was losing.

I shifted frequencies.

The Djinn shrieked in unworldly agony as his body began to crumble away. The dark part of me met that with trembling eagerness, drinking in every agonized second of it.

I shifted frequencies again, blind to everything but the dance of molecules, the music of the energy being expended and absorbed.

Come on . . .

It wasn’t strong enough.

Venna had been able to blow her victim to kingdom come, but she was Venna, a power of the ages. I was just a wounded, exhausted Warden up against something I didn’t understand.

I was losing.

The Djinn who’d screamed was no longer recognizable as a Djinn at all. It was a pile of disintegrating ash and dust, sliding away from cohesion to scatter on the deck.

And I felt everything slipping away inside.

The ship groaned again, and I saw metal buckling, vast rivets ripping out of place, and the first jets of water blow through into the open space of the hold.

We started sinking again.

The skin turned to the next Djinn. Lyle.

I felt the shift of power in the room.The water stopped rushing in. The metal sealed and strengthened.

Where David walked, the world mended around him.

“No,” I whispered, but he wasn’t going to stop, not for me. Not this time.

He wasn’t going to allow Lyle to die.

Another watertight door opened on the other side of the hold, and a swarm of Wardens poured in, led by Lewis. In seconds, they had the skin surrounded.

But the skin had its claws buried in Lyle’s chest, like some giant parasitical tick.

I switched frequencies one more time. Lewis saw what I was doing, and joined me; the other Earth Wardens quickly supported us, creating a resonance that was so powerful it began to shatter glass and crystal stored in the crates. Someone’s eyeglasses broke under the strain.

I felt feedback—the exact frequency that this creature’s bones sang to. I began to focus harder, refining the sound until it was at a lethal intensity. I could see the waves now, a standing well of ripples in the air around the creature, battering it from all sides.

“Jo, let go!” Lewis shouted. “Drop out!”

I couldn’t do that. Instead, I reached inside and came up with more power than I’d thought was hiding down in the empty storehouse of my gifts.

Because it felt so good to kill.

The vibrations ramped up into a shriek of power, and instead of Lyle dissolving into ash, the skin that had been Angelo Marconi blew apart into glittering crystal dust.

Lyle sagged and hit the deck, too weak to continue, but David stepped into his place and froze, concentrating.

The ship leveled out—still fighting the downward force but no longer being pulled down.

As quickly as it had come, the extra power I’d found was gone. Vanished. I was just me again, frail and fragile and ready to drop. If Angelo hadn’t been a pile of ragged flesh and demonic parts on the metal floor, he’d have had an easy meal of me.

Lewis reached me a few seconds later, as I slid down to a sprawl against the safe. “I told you to step out!” he snapped, and touched my forehead. “Damn it. What the hell did you do?”

I struck out at him. I couldn’t help it; his anger woke the beast inside, the one that had patiently stalked and laughed and waited.

I couldn’t hold it back anymore.

I burned him.

If it had been anyone but Lewis, I’d have killed him; I wasn’t pulling punches, and the fire that boiled out of me onto him was thick, plasmatic, and clung like napalm. It flickered with a sickly green tint.

Lewis reacted instantly, stepping back from me and concentrating all his will on putting out the fire before it could eat him up. He succeeded, but my attack left him with nasty third-degree burns on his hands and arms.

I laughed.

David called another Djinn to take his place in the fragile power structure that held us above the waves, and flashed across the hold toward me. As he did, Lewis blocked him. “No,” he said. His voice was ragged with pain. “Don’t touch her.”

David looked like he was considering touching Lewis, in a very hostile manner, but he took the advice. He pulled in energy and ignited a small golden ball of light in the palm of his hand. It was cozy, warm, and gave me a false sense of security. The glow woke shades of orange and red in his eyes, made his face into the image of a classical bronze god.

Next to him, a faint mist formed in the air. It didn’t bother to take human form, and it didn’t need to; there was a feeling that came with it, oppressive as the ocean depths, and just as cold.

The Air Oracle. She—or he?—was the Djinn equivalent of an archangel, both supremely powerful and unknowable. Even as Conduit for the Djinn, David couldn’t order an Oracle; he could only petition.

He’d obviously petitioned, and now the Air Oracle was here, looking at me out of a body that barely registered in the world at all. There was communication going on between David and the Oracle. It wasn’t civil, from the look on David’s face.

This was a perfect moment to see just what I could do with all this power.

As I summoned it up in a roiling boil inside me, thick and hot and dizzying, the Air Oracle’s attention focused on me with a snap, and I was driven to my knees.

The Oracle seemed surprised that I hadn’t been driven into tiny little fragments identifiable only by DNA. Very surprised. You’re going to get a lot more shocks, bitch, I thought, and smiled.

David was far sneakier than I gave him credit for. Instead of coming at me directly, he used his link to me, sending a massive burst of power through the aetheric connection between us.

It blew me out of my body. I fell, stunned, and waited for the end. The Air Oracle was no friend of humans in general; I was no better than the slime at the edge of a pond to her. But she didn’t act.

She just left.

David bent and took me in his arms as if I weighed less than my equivalent in feathers. His lips brushed my temple. “Forgive me,” he said. “It’s better if you sleep.”

Before I could even think about protesting, all the light winked out, and I was drifting away into warm, dark, safe eternity.

When I woke up, it was because David could no longer afford even the small pulse of energy it was taking to keep me unconscious.

I swam up out of the thick darkness to the sound of alarms, screaming, and the gale-driven shriek of wind. The air smelled of metal and salt and fear.

Heavenly, that smell.

I opened my eyes on darkness, but in the next second a lightning bolt split the sky above me in half, miles across, like a hot purple zipper letting in the darkness.

It lit up low, thick, black clouds that fired rain down like arrows from the battlements.

I was on my back on the deck, reclining in a white padded chair that was made for lounging. It slid hard to starboard, and I jerked and rolled off and to my feet before it slammed into the promenade railing. My bare soles hit cold, wet wood, and I shivered. I was soaked to the skin. How had I gotten here? And why? And what the hell was going on?

Nothing good, obviously. The deck was thick with uniformed crew and a chaotic swirl of passengers. It was too dangerous out here, but that didn’t seem to be stopping anybody; I wondered why they hadn’t taken refuge inside, but some practical knowledge finally kicked in, and I knew.

Either the crew understood that there was an excellent chance that this ship was going down, or there was something below that was even more dangerous than the storm. Either way, not good news for me or anybody else.

“Jo!” Cherise. I barely recognized my best friend, because I’d rarely seen her look this—well, bedraggled. Drowned-rat wet, pale, and shivering with cold. “God, I thought you’d never wake up. Come on!”

She dragged me off in some random direction. No one had told her that I was prone to irrational bursts of killing fury, I supposed. Good. That would make it easier.

“We need to get to the lifeboat—”

My senses were coming back online, all of them, and in Oversight I saw the thick red streams sweeping around us, closing in.

The storm that Bad Bob had dispatched, the one powered by the Unmaking he’d pulled out of the spear, was almost on us, and it was devastating.

Cherise’s words were lost in a fresh blast of wind, a gust so flat and hard that it slammed her bodily against the metal wall. I suppose that in better times I might have tried to help her. Instead, I just clung to a metal stanchion and watched her struggle.

I saw one of the heavy lounge chairs topple right over the railing and disappear as the ship lurched to starboard again. We were heeling around, getting hammered by churning waves like a punch-drunk boxer.

The ship was still stuck in one spot, anchored by the suction coming from deep beneath the ocean. I could feel it, and it was growing stronger, not weaker.

The Djinn were losing the fight.

“Hang on!” Cherise screamed, and another gigantic wave crested and fell, pounding us with spray like nails. “We have to get off the ship, now!”

How exactly that was going to be accomplished I had no idea, but I nodded. In the brief lull between lashing waves, we staggered to the next handhold. Along the way we ran into more castaways. I barely recognized a sopping-wet Cynthia Clark, who surely hadn’t been this miserable since she’d made that epic disaster movie with Gene Hackman, back in the day. I also recognized Cho Chu Wing, one of our Weather Wardens. Cho was a tiny little thing, skinny as a restaurant greeter. She’d managed to keep herself mostly together; her black hair was pegged back in a tight ball, and only random strands of it clung to her damp face. She’d worn a storm slicker, neon orange, and beneath it she seemed to be drier than any of the rest of us. She waved us frantically toward the bow of the ship. As we slipped and fought our way through blinding spray and stinging, whipping rain, we gathered Weather Wardens in ones and twos, until there was a tight knot of them linking arms together, like a rugby team in a scrum.

I stood apart from them. Remote, even in the midst of my fellow Wardens.

“We need to get a bubble!” Cho screamed. “Focus on giving us clear water for a hundred feet in every direction!”

That wasn’t as hard as it might seem; it was basically wave cancellation, which is a fundamental principle of the physics of anything that moves as a unit—sound, water, a rippling flag. You need to find the specific frequency of the wave and cancel it out, and move the energy elsewhere. Normally that was the tricky part; bleed-off energy could destabilize everything, and whip up a whole mess of side problems you’d never anticipate.

In this melting stew of uncontrolled energy, another few mega joules in the wrong place would hardly matter.

“Tornado!” someone screamed, and I looked up to see the approaching black arms of the hurricane sweeping in like scythes. There were bulbous eruptions forming in the trailing clouds, swelling and then narrowing into cones. Forming tornadoes have a lazy look, almost tentative; they bob and weave and seem impotent at first, until they get their strength consolidated.

I’d never taken time to admire their elegance before. So beautiful. So deadly.

Cho was shouting something at me. She wanted my help.

Well then.

I gave it. I gave it to the tornado, and laughed as it gobbled up power like a greedy shark.

Cho must have realized what I was doing. She stepped up and gave me a sharp elbow to the back of my neck, sending me reeling into another Warden, who put me down on the deck and pinned me, yelling for Djinn.

My pet tornado collapsed—no great surprise, they always were fragile constructs, by the very nature of the physics that drove them—and the waves that battered the Grand Paradise, heeling her violently from one side to the other, eased to merely heavy instead of psychotic. I felt the waves’ pounding rhythms begin to ease, like a racing heart slowing as adrenaline faded.

“You can’t stop it,” I told Cho, who was taking advantage of the breathing space to stare into the heart of the storm. “Everybody dances with the devil.”

I knew the storm was watching too, this monster of a thing that Bad Bob had imbued with life and cunning and cruelty, and a particular kind of insanity. I could feel it gathering itself, studying us. Planning.

It could feel that I was an ally, if only it could reach me. I could have done more, but I felt lazily content to wait.

No hurry. I was enjoying the panic too much to end it quickly.

The ship lurched—not side to side, but down, as if a giant hand had suddenly grabbed the hull from beneath and pulled it straight down. The ship sank like an express elevator, and I watched the ocean pour in over the railings on the decks below, then come for us in a foaming, deadly rush . . .

. . . and then the force let us go, and the ship’s buoyancy popped us violently straight up like a cork from a rubber band. I don’t think the Grand Paradise quite came out of the water, but there was a sickly sense of utter stillness as momentum fought gravity and gravity’s patient pull won.

The ship crashed back into the water and settled. We were sprawled like ninepins all over the deck—Wardens, crew, staff, hapless passengers. The screaming sounded thin and lost.

“We’re loose!” one of the Wardens shouted. “Get everybody on the lifeboats!”

“No!” Cho snapped. “We’re getting control! We’ll stand no chance at all in the smaller boats!”

“Are you?” I asked. “Getting control? I don’t think so!” It felt like the kind of adrenaline rush you get from hurtling down a mountain on skis, straight for a killing drop, knowing it may destroy you but there’s nothing so beautiful as that moment when death means nothing, nothing at all . . .

The Warden holding me down—I realized it was Kevin, as I focused on his face—gave me a solid right cross, trying to put me out.“You’ll have to beat me harder than that,” I told him, very seriously. “Come on, Kevin, dig deep. Hurt me like your stepmother taught you.”

He went pale, and I felt his grip on me loosen. Too easy. I threw him off, not particularly caring where he landed, and stalked to Cho.

Before I reached her, we all staggered as a massive subsonic boom rocked the decking.

Far beneath the Grand Paradise, the seafloor collapsed into a massive trench, sending a crush of seawater flooding downward to fill the sudden mile-deep gap. For a moment, a significant section of the sea dipped into a concave bowl—not by much, distributed over such a huge and adaptable area, but enough.

And a wave formed, rushing over the depression, gathering strength and speed and energy.

Rushing straight at our port side. It would take a minute to get to us, maybe more—not much more, though. We were in deep water, not shallows; that was the only thing that might save us. To survive, the ship had to turn into the wave.

I needed to stop it from turning.

“Jo.” That was Cherise, laying her hand on my shoulder. “Jo, stop.”

I turned to look at her, and I saw fear ignite in her eyes. “Oh God,” she breathed. “Oh my God—”

She was so fragile. So easy.

Cherise’s fear was like incense rising on the air, and I wanted more of it. All of it.

Every last, red drop.

She raised her chin, and the fear faded.

“This isn’t you,” she said. “And I think you can stop it, Jo. You’re the hero.”

She was wrong. I wasn’t the hero now—if I ever had been. What I’d done to Lewis was proof of that. What I’d tried to do with the tornado.

Part of me still liked Cherise, but it was a small part, and it was getting smaller all the time, like a tiny island of color in an inky flood.

I didn’t hurt her. I’m not really sure why.

I felt the shudder beneath my feet, as the Grand Paradise’s enormous bulk began to make its ponderous, city-blocks-wide turn toward the wave that was sweeping closer.

I looked up, drawn by a pulse of power, and saw Lewis and David standing on a balcony above us. Arguing.

David tried to turn away.

Lewis grabbed David by the fabric of his shirt. His lips moved.

David disappeared. No misting, no sense of transition, just . . . gone.

And Lewis didn’t look surprised. I was—not just by David’s sudden vanishing act but by the sensation that rippled through me, liquid and hot and wrong.

What just happened?

Lewis shoved something in his pocket as he vaulted the balcony railing. He landed flat-footed, keeping his balance on the still-lurching deck with one hand on the railing. “Get everybody inside!” he yelled. “Everybody!”

Cherise turned and began pushing people to the nearest entrances. People seemed more than motivated to follow instructions, for once—in fact, there was a traffic jam until officers began funneling people to other doors.

I didn’t follow. I stood at the railing, hands folded, calm and content. It was all unraveling around me.

All I had to do was enjoy the ride down.

The ship had managed to slew around at an impressive rate, but the waves kicked up as the Wardens’ fears eroded their concentration. It significantly slowed our progress.

Lewis joined me at the railing, far enough away that it indicated he knew what a risk it was to be near me.

“Where’s David?” I asked. I looked over at him, noting the healing burns on his hands. I wondered if it hurt. I certainly hoped so.

“Where you can’t hurt him,” Lewis said. “I know what’s happening to you.”

I shrugged. “So you know,” I said. “Can you stop it?”

“Do you want me to stop it?”

I laughed. That was probably enough of an answer.

On the horizon, there was a mountain. One big rising mass, heading for us. At this rate, we didn’t have another minute. Maybe thirty seconds, I was guessing.

Maybe less.

“The ship will capsize,” I said. “You can’t turn fast enough. Where are the Djinn?”

“Gone,” Lewis said. “For their own protection. We’re all alone now.”

David wouldn’t have run, not to save himself. He was foolish that way. “You’ve done something.” He didn’t deny it. It was big, whatever it was; it was more than likely an unforgivable sin. But Lewis was the sort to make that choice, if he had to. Or thought he had to. “Something to David?”

He didn’t answer me directly. “We’re going to capsize, even if that wave doesn’t hit us broadside.” And it probably would. We just didn’t have enough time to hit it bow-first.

“You could turn it,” I remarked. He locked stares with me, and his eyes were bleak, tired, and frightened.

“No, I can’t,” he said. “You can.”

I smiled. “I won’t.”

I felt the front of the ship dipping down, and then rising, more like a speedboat than a giant of the seas.

Lewis seemed very calm. Very tall and still, hair ruffling in the wind. There was a glow about him, a power that I couldn’t remember seeing before.

As the mountain of water roared down at us, I turned and walked calmly toward the nearest door.

Cherise and one of the white-coated officers waved me urgently on. Cher grabbed my arm and pulled me over the high threshold, and the officer slammed the door shut and turned the locking mechanism.

“Hatch twenty-three sealed!” he shouted into his radio, in the high-pitched voice of utter panic. I took a moment to look around. It was a bar, large and casual, but all the bottles and glasses had been stowed away, and the place had an unfinished look to it. The room was packed with refugees, some of whom were gazing longingly at the bar as if they wondered where all the rum had gone. I spotted Cho Wing and three other Wardens, all seeming tense and expectant. They knew what was coming. The civilian passengers seemed confused and a little bored.

The bridge officers assuredly knew that their worst fears were coming true; they could see it from their windows.

Cherise was chattering at me, trying to get me to take cover. I shook myself free. She gave me one last, despairing look, then wedged herself in a corner and tipped an armchair over herself.

I heard the wave coming, even through the steel plates. I felt the rumble of it.

The bow of the Grand Paradise lifted sharply, and kept rising, rising. Tables and chairs started sliding, and people screamed and clung to whatever was within reach, stable or not. I heard glass crashing; that was probably unsecured stock somewhere under the counters.

A huge wooden cabinet, designed to look primitive and rough-hewn, began to topple down from one wall. There were six people beneath it. I watched with placid interest.

Cho yelled a warning. One of the Earth Wardens flung out a hand and stopped the falling cabinet.

Disappointing.

A racing bite of energy spread over me like a hot blanket of fire, concentrating on my back and then flowing down my arms and into the core of my body. I went down to one knee, bracing myself as the horizon continued to rise toward the sky. People slid past me, screaming, flailing. I didn’t pay much attention.

“We’re going over!” someone shouted amid the chaos and crashing furniture. We were still climbing. The floor passed a forty-five-degree upward angle, heading for vertical, and I felt the whole ship slip sideways, twist, and start to tumble out of control.

We were falling.

Then we stopped falling, and the ship’s torturous descent changed, smoothed, and entered an eerie kind of calm. The ship slowly drifted back to a stable, horizontal line, but it didn’t feel like we were in flat seas. It didn’t feel like we were in the water at all.

I rose and walked to the large picture window that commanded a view of the promenade.

Lewis was standing just where I’d left him, at the railing, and his glow was Djinn-bright, the color of soft morning sunshine against the blackness of the storms. Yes, the storms were still there, whipping around us in a frenzy, but we were floating in a bubble of force that stretched all around the ship in a perfect sphere. Ship in a bottle, I thought, and for just an instant I was too angry to think properly. No Warden could do this, not alone.

Not even Lewis.

We were floating on the storm in our own little self-contained pocket universe of calm sea and air.

I tried to unlock the watertight door, but it seemed stuck. I sent a snap of Earth power from my fingertips out through the metal, realigning the surfaces, and when I turned the handle again, the door slid smoothly open.

“Jo!” Cher was right behind me. Her eyes were huge and frightened. “What’s happening?”

“I’ll find out,” I said, with utter calm. I felt alive inside, manic with glee, but I didn’t want her to see that. “Wait inside.”

“But—”

I slammed the door between us and hit it with the heel of my hand, hard enough to make a hollow boom. “Lock it!”

I heard the heavy clash of metal engaging, and then I turned toward Lewis, standing like a misplaced figure-head at the rail.

He opened his eyes. I could see the energy spilling out of him, a raw wound that split him open to the core.

He was bleeding on the aetheric. Bleeding himself to death.

“How?” I asked, and leaned on the railing. He didn’t answer me. Couldn’t, perhaps. His nose was bleeding, and his eyes were flushed red under the stress of what he was doing. Fifteen Djinn and four times as many Wardens hadn’t been able to stop the storm, but Lewis was somehow fighting it, toe to toe.

Not winning, though.

Not hardly.

“You’ll kill yourself,” I commented. “For God’s sake, Lewis, what does it matter? What does any of it matter? Just let go. The ship will get torn apart. People will drown. Life will go on, for a while, until it doesn’t.” I shrugged. “Just let go. It’s that easy.”

Lewis let out a gasping sob. His knees buckled, but he held fast to the railing.

He held the bubble of force against the storm.

“You aren’t doing this alone,” I said. “But you didn’t have time to get the other Wardens to help. And even if you did, they’re not capable of this kind of power. Not alone—” I paused, because I finally worked it out. “But you’re not alone, are you?”

Lewis’s breath was coming in short, desperate gasps now. Nobody could sustain this, not even the most powerful Warden in the world.

Not even one with a direct connection to the aetheric.

Which was what Lewis had. He’d always been close to our temperamental Mother Earth, but this was beyond that, way beyond. The power that poured through him to fill this shell of force was like a geyser, tapping directly into the heart of the planet herself.

Only the connection between Lewis and a Djinn Conduit could do that.

He’d claimed David. He’d put David in a bottle and made him a slave, and he was using him to open this portal directly into the lifeblood of Earth, to save the ship.

It would burn Lewis out before David, but not much before.

They’d both die.

Some part of me was screaming inside, begging me to stop it. But that was the very last tiny foothold of the old Joanne drowning in a sea of darkness.

I closed my eyes and sighed. All I had to do was . . . wait.

I felt a warning tingle in the still, calm air, and as I looked up, I saw a tornado striking down at us from the clouds that writhed overhead. Lightning snaked around it, living barbed wire, and it hit the curved surface of Lewis’s protective bubble around the Grand Paradise and began to probe for weaknesses.

Then it bombed us.

I saw the metal shape hurtling down at us through the oddly clear eye of the tornado, that empty funnel space where the cold air and the warm air cycle to fuel the beast’s engines. I didn’t know what it was at first—wreckage, maybe a mass of siding or a barn, or—

No. That was a ship. A whole, intact ship. A small fishing vessel. The black-painted bottom was heavy with barnacles, and as lightning flared brighter I saw the name on her rusty bow—Abigail.

There were living men on board. I could see their terrified faces at the railing as the ship dropped toward us in free fall, her weight turning majestically in the air and driving her nose down like the tip of a spear.

“No,” Lewis moaned, but he didn’t drop the shield. He couldn’t.

The Abigail hit his protective bubble and exploded into shrapnel, scrap, and bodies. I flinched—instinct, not sympathy. The ship’s fuel tanks burst, slopping marine diesel in a wave across the invisible wall.

Lightning ignited it, and flames sheeted over us in a semicircle. It didn’t last long. Nothing to burn once the diesel had flamed out.

The wreckage of the Abigail was gone in even less time, along with her crew. Even if there’d been a chance of saving them—which, after the fury of that crash, I doubted—there was no way to reach them without dropping our own protective shield.

Bad Bob really was bringing his A game.

The tornado’s sloppy mouth slithered over Lewis’s shield for another few seconds, and then it withdrew up into the clouds. Not gone, just reloading. I could see this storm sweeping its way from Bad Bob’s location to ours, picking up ammunition along the way, like a boy collecting stones to throw. Congested shipping lanes out there. Naval vessels flying under various flags. Pleasure craft and yachts and sailing ships and cruise ships smaller than this one . . .

Lewis’s strength gave out, and he lost his grip on the railing. He fell to his knees. I could feel David’s agony rippling through the connection between us. This was tearing them both apart. Lewis’s body was surrendering under the strain.

I reached out and put my hand on his sweat-matted hair.

Finally, he turned his head and looked at me. Just one look, not very long. Bone-deep exhaustion in him, and just a tiny trace of regret.

“Jo, you have to stop yourself,” he said. “Please. Stop yourself.”

“Too late,” I told him, and took control of the bubble away from him.

It was a shock, how much power was involved. Even with the enormous flood pouring in from the storm, from Bad Bob himself, the force that hit me was staggering. A normal Warden, no matter how accomplished, would have been shredded in seconds.

Lewis collapsed limply on the deck, rolled away, and began to crawl slowly.

I rolled him faceup, and held him in place with a foot on his chest. I turned my face to the storm, looking into the abyss.

Nietzsche was right—it also looked into me.

“Stay put,” I said to Lewis. “I want you to see this. You used to be an altruist, but I watched you change. You turned into such a realist, with all your cold win/lose/ draw equations. You just never thought you’d acutally lose, did you?”

Lewis reached in his pocket and pulled out a small glass bottle. It was sturdy, one of those pocket travel samples of men’s cologne. Designed to be break-resistant, but still meeting all the glass-only requirements of a Djinn containment bottle. The cap, of course, was off, because Lewis had been accessing David’s powers.

I saw him struggle with the choice. That was a no-win scenario.

He eventually did the moral thing, and tried to smash it against the deck. It didn’t break.

“Where are the other Djinn?” I asked. Lewis shook his head and collapsed, panting. He was holding the bottle in a death grip. “Let me guess. I have a good idea of how you think. You ordered David to send them all away, to a place of safety. Maybe Jonathan’s house.”

Lewis nodded, eyes tightly closed. I wondered why he wouldn’t look at me. I wondered what he saw.

“I’ll bet you told yourself it was temporary,” I said, and took my foot off of Lewis’s back to crouch down next to him, staring at his face. “You’d let him go as soon as the emergency was over. But that’s not human nature, Lewis. We don’t work that way. We take power, and we keep it. We don’t give it up. Someone has to come along and take it from us, usually violently.” I smiled softly. “There’s always another goddamn crisis, baby. Don’t you get that?”

He didn’t want to look at me. I wondered what was so terrible about my face; I felt positively great. Better than I had for ages.

Finally, Lewis got up his strength to ask, “What are you going to do?”

“Take this ship where it was going anyway,” I said. “Directly to Bad Bob. The difference is, most of you will be dead by the time it arrives, I’m afraid.” I paused, waiting to feel some kind of regret. Nothing came. The last little bit of me was slipping under the waves, and I really couldn’t even care.

Lewis rolled over on his side and wiped blood from his nose and eyes, still avoiding my gaze. His pupils were huge, like those of a man who’d never left the darkness.

“Well?” I asked, and cocked my head. “What are you going to do about this little situation? Aren’t you going to stop me?”

He coughed. It sounded wet and deep, like something had broken deep inside him. “No.”

“Really.”

“You’re the one with the hero complex, not me.”

“And what are you?” He didn’t answer. “Oh, that’s right. You’re the one who doesn’t have to feel good about himself to know he did the right thing. Then live up to it, Lewis. You can stop me. You’ve got the answer in your hand.”

His fingers closed around the bottle.

David’s bottle.

“Come on,” I whispered. “Let him out. You know you want to. Wouldn’t it do your heart good to make him come after me? Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“Stop.”

“Make me.”

The look on his face made fires ignite deep inside me. Tasty. “No.”

“It’s too late to get all noble on me now, Lewis. You put a Djinn in a bottle. Worse, you put a Conduit in a bottle. Don’t you think that’s going to piss the Djinn off? The last war was about them wanting their freedom. This one’s going to be pure revenge, and they won’t care about who’s innocent and who’s guilty. Congratulations. You’ve single-handedly destroyed the Wardens.”

“I’m not the one who made the Djinn . . . vulnerable to capture,” he said. He had to stop for breath. “You knew marrying David . . . would do this. Vows. You didn’t care.”

A wave washed over the bubble above us, leaving a thin, lacy film behind. It was like looking through my mother’s kitchen curtains. The storm outside raged on, but it was losing some of its fury. It knew I’d won.

We’d won. Me and the storm, together.

“I’m a selfish bitch,” I agreed. “I tried, okay? I did the good-girl thing. I fought the good fight, and where did it get me? My skin burned off, Lewis. Nobody was telling me so, but I was never going to get better, was I? I’m damned if I’m going to walk around with no fucking skin the rest of my life so that I can feel all good about adhering to my strict moral code.” I took a deep breath and tasted ozone from the storm’s whipping frenzy. “It’s just power. Doesn’t matter where it comes from, or where it goes.”

“And you can quit any time you want.”

My tone hardened. I still didn’t like being mocked. “Fuck your intervention. I’m the one still standing.”

Lewis’s fingers tightened around the bottle. The one holding the only thing that might stop me. I’d known from the moment I walked out on the promenade that it was going to come down to this.

I smiled.

And he surprised me. “No. I’m not calling David. Not just for his sake—for yours. If you live through it, I don’t want you having that on your conscience.”

“I’m not Bad Bob,” I said. “I love him.”

He coughed blood. “You kind of loved me, too. Look how that turned out.”

I slapped my hand down hard next to his head. Hard enough to split the wood. Overhead, the storm shrieked harmony to the howling rage inside me. “Call him!”

“No way in hell.”

All he had to do was get David out in the open. That was all I wanted. I slapped the deck again, and again, and again. Splinters jabbed deep, and I left primal bloody handprints behind.

It felt so good.

Lewis opened his eyes and locked stares with me at point-blank range. “No,” he said, very softly. “This isn’t going to happen the way you want.”

I looked up. There were other people out on the Promenade now—Wardens, arraying themselves against me.

Cherise, standing with them, like an actual person who mattered. They all wore identical tense, focused expressions . . . the look of soldiers just before the battle.

I looked down at Lewis and smiled a real, warm, sunny smile. “We’ll see,” I said, and stood up to put my hands on my hips. “We’ll see about that.”

Then I walked away to get some air.

Nobody stopped me as I walked.

In time, I felt the last whispers of power click into place, locking me into the storm. We were one now—a symbiotic dark engine, generating our own power. Our own reality. The storm and I were one.

Easy, I told it. Easy, for now.

And the winds began to slow. It could bide its time.

So could I.

I waited until the winds died a bit, then let go of the bubble of force that Lewis and David had built at such cost.

I ended up on the port side of the ship, in a bar—preciously named Arpeggio’s—where some of the non-Warden guests and crew were still gathered. Tables and chairs had been righted. There’d been some minor injuries, but not even a broken bone, remarkably. I supposed we’d gotten off light, unlike the crew of the Abigail.

I bellied up to the serving bar and perched on one of the high chairs. There were three guys behind the bar. One was cleaning up broken glass. The other two were taking orders. A lot of people were drinking. I didn’t blame them at all.

“What’ll it be, miss?” the server asked me, and gave me a smile so even and white that he should have been in a commercial. It faded quickly. Even across the other side of a ship the size of a small city, word traveled fast, and it clicked in quickly who—or what—I was. The room went quiet. He cleared his throat nervously. “Anything to drink?”

“Cyanide?” I was trying to be charming, but I could see from the alarm in his eyes that I was somehow missing the target.

“Fresh out, miss,” he said weakly. “Some other poison, perhaps?”

I gave up. “How about a vodka tonic?” That was my sorry-for-myself drink, and this seemed an ideal place to throw a ten-minute pity party. He turned away, mixed the drink, and put it on the coaster. I sipped. It was excellent. “I’m surprised the bar is open.”

“Anything to keep people calm.” There was more than a touch of febrile panic in his eyes now.

“Be sure to save some for yourself.” I smiled, with teeth. “You’re going to need it.”

He poured himself a shot of whiskey and downed it without a pause, then fled, leaving me in possession of the entire bar’s contents. I sipped my vodka tonic and took a self-assessment as pretty much everybody else followed the bartender’s lead and got the hell out of Dodge.

My back didn’t hurt anymore. It also wasn’t numb. It felt normal, natural . . . and as I angled around to get a look in the still-intact bar mirror, I saw the shadow of a black form under the new skin.

A torch, embedded instead of tattooed.

Much, much larger.

One or two of the ship’s staff hadn’t fled with the rest. One stern-looking woman poured me a second vodka tonic without being asked. “On the house,” she said. “If you can get us out of this and home, you’re welcome to drink the place dry.”

I drank it all in a gulp, and said, “Two things. First, if I want to drink this place dry, you definitely haven’t got a thing on board this floating sewage plant that can stop me. Second, you’re not going home. Get used to the idea.”

Then I tossed a twenty on the bar and resumed my stroll. I paused at the big, flat stern of the ship to gaze out over our churning gray wake. Nothing in sight, not on any side, but open water and storm.

I leaned on the railing and opened myself up through the darkness, searching. It didn’t take me long to find the wellspring of that black flood. It was directly to starboard, and close.

Maybe a day away, if that.

“I’m coming,” I whispered into the dark. “You’re getting what you wanted, you evil old bastard.”

I felt Bad Bob’s chuckle inside me like lips against skin. “Knew you wouldn’t let me down, little girl,” he said. When I shut my eyes I could see him standing beside me in ghostly outlines. “You bring me the ship and the Wardens. That’s a good start to our work. From then on, no limits. No limits at all.”

“On my way,” I said, and broke the connection with him. I used my Earth powers to lock out the computer controls of the ship and put in the destination.

Then I went in search of more vodka.

By early morning, the black torch mark was a bold swirl beneath my skin, stretching from the flame at the nape of my neck to the elaborate scrolled cap, just below the flare of my hips. The flames at its top weren’t just black ink anymore. They were real fire, moving silently beneath the translucent covering of my flesh. It was the ultimate tribal stamp, declaring who and what I was to anyone with the courage to look.

It should have frightened me, I guess. Instead, I admired it for a moment, then picked up the hair dryer and began to make myself presentable for the day.

An hour later, I strode out from the cabin—perfectly put together. My hair was curly and tumbling glossy black down toward my waist. I wore a skimpy aqua-blue top with cap sleeves that bared most of my midriff, and low-rise jeans that hugged every curve. David had stocked the closets with anything I might want, for any conceivable mood or occasion.

I decided today was Seduction Day.

I ran into Cherise and Kevin in the hallway. They were talking with that suppressed urgency of two people trying to keep a secret, and they stopped when they saw me.

“What?” I put my hands on my hips and raised my eyebrows. “Not enjoying the three-hour tour, Mary Ann? Of course, that makes him Gilligan. It fits.”

Cherise didn’t smile. I’d never seen her not-smile at a Gilligan’s Island joke before. “We should talk,” she said. There was a faint quiver in her voice, and I saw her take Kevin’s hand for support. “Maybe back in the room?”

“Maybe you should get out of my way and stop bothering me,” I said. I let it lie there for a few seconds, then lightened it up with a grin that felt strange on my lips. “I mean, you’re between me and breakfast. You know how dangerous that is.”

“Don’t,” Kevin said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t you fucking dare threaten her. She’s trying to save your life.” Kevin stepped in front of her, or tried to. Cherise hauled him back and gave him a look that would have frozen Lake Michigan. “Sorry.” Insignificant as she might be, Cherise wanted to fight her own battles. Well, I could have told him that.

“I just want to talk,” Cherise said, returning her attention to me. “Please.”

She didn’t demand anything, and I knew that if I pushed it, she’d back down. And I was tempted to push, very tempted, not so much because of her—Cherise really wasn’t on the radar anymore—but because the simmering, furious violence in Kevin was addictively delicious. All I had to do was hurt her, and I could drink my fill.

Not yet, I told myself. Don’t enjoy yourself too much.

“Please,” Cherise repeated.

“Jeez, okay, don’t beg,” I said. “Just you, though. Not him.”

Kevin held up his hands in surrender, a sour look on his face. “Dude, like I want to spend time coddling your self-involved evil-turning ass.” His glance at Cherise said something different, though. “Be careful.”

“I’m going to hurt her? I’m not the one with the body count, Kevin,” I said. He flinched, just a little. “Why don’t you loiter out here looking menacing while you wait? Maybe you can beat up cabin stewards, just to keep in practice.”

He flipped me off, but that wasn’t original for him. I took Cherise’s arm, and we headed back to the cabin.

She locked the door behind us. I raised my eyebrows as I settled on my unmade bed. “Oooh,” I said. “Is this going to be hot girl-on-girl action, or what?”

“Shut up.” Cherise hugged herself and stayed where she was, between me and the door. “Something’s really wrong with you.”

“Oh yeah? You think?” I leaned back against the hard cabin wall and crossed my arms. “You’ve been drinking Lewis’s Kool-Aid about how bad I am, boo-hoo. But I understand why you’d go that way. He’s still got an open position for girlfriend-slash-wife, so hold out for the brass ring, kid.” She gave me an uncomprehending stare. “Wouldn’t be the first man you’ve screwed for fun and profit.”

“Would you shut up? God, you can be such a bitch! Since—since your back thing happened, you’ve been changing. Slowly at first, but then it got worse, and now you’re—” Cherise made a helpless gesture that encompassed everything about me, from head to toe. “Look at you.”

I looked down. “What?” Granted, the clothes might be a bit sluttier than my usual, but I liked them, and besides, it was a cruise ship. South Beach rules of conduct and dress.

“It’s not the outfit, Jo. It’s you. It’s the look in your eyes, the kind of smile you give people. The way you think about them.” Cherise swallowed and ducked her chin to avoid eye contact. “When you think they’re not looking, it’s like you’re examining pieces of meat—like they’re not people at all. You never did that before.”

I deliberately relaxed again.“Yeah? You’re sure about that? Maybe you just never caught me at it before.”

“No. I know you, and this—this isn’t you. Looks like you, feels like you, sounds like you. It’s in your skin, but it’s not the Joanne Baldwin I’m friends with.”

I didn’t know why this should wake a feeling of anxiety in me. Pale and faint, yes, but still . . . I wanted to make her feel better. “People change,” I offered.

“Not this much. Not this fast. You let something inside you.”

I tried to explain—again, I wasn’t sure why I bothered, except that the genuine warm concern in Cherise’s eyes actually reached something in me, something I’d thought long drowned in darkness. “It’s just giving me access to power. Like having a Djinn at my command, only—better. Faster. You’re going to have to get used to the fact that I can’t be Miss Congeniality anymore. This is war.”

“Jo, the war’s over. You lost. You’re a casualty.”

I came up from the bed in one sinuous motion and took a step into her space. “You know what’s really over? This conversation. I’m leaving.”

“You have to go through me first.”

“Can do.”

“What? You’re going to hurt me?” Cherise—tiny little Cherise, with her perfect tan and perfect teeth and glistening hair. Funny and sexy and quirky. “Go ahead.”

Frustration erupted inside me. It burned from the torch on my back under my skin, traveling lines and ladders of nerves, and I felt fire tingle at the ends of my fingers. “Move.”

“Make me, bitch.”

I wanted to, oh God, I did. Instead, I bared my teeth. “You know what you are?” I asked, low in my throat.

“You’re nothing. Even among human beings, you’re a worthless failure. Model? A model is just some girl who strips for cash—a body for hire. A walking mannequin with a shelf life of about five minutes. Take away your looks and you’ve got nothing to sell. Who’s going to love you then, the Human Torch out there? Face it, without tagging along to somebody better, you’re nothing, peach. You used to be entourage. Now you’re not even that.”

The color faded out of Cherise’s face, leaving the tan like some eerie overlay, and I saw a real spark of fear in her clear blue eyes.

It turned hot.

“Why’d you just call me peach?”

Of all the things she could have said, that was the one that stopped me in my tracks. Peach. Sweetness. Bad Bob liked expressions like those, mockingly sentimental, used to wound. He’d used them on me all the time.

I took a step back. My hands locked into fists, and I felt the fire from the torch on my back flare hotter. It didn’t like me doubting myself.

It didn’t like me thinking.

“It’s just another kind of Demon Mark,” Cherise said. “Remember? Remember how that felt? You told me about it, how it made you feel so powerful, so free—”

“Shut up.” My voice didn’t have much force to it.

“He’s using it to destroy you. You’ve got to stop. You’re going to destroy everyone and everything you love.”

I closed my eyes. Images flashed across the darkness—David, the first time I’d seen him, a dusty stranger on the road. David, naked in morning light, looking at me as if I was the most glorious thing he had ever seen.

Lewis, standing against the storm, and compromising himself and his beliefs to find the strength. Not asking for my praise or my applause. Knowing I might kill him for it.

Cherise, without the power to light a match, signing on because it was the right thing to do.

Everything I loved was right here, on this ship, and I was destroying it.

And I still couldn’t care.

“You understand,” said a little-girl voice from behind me. “That’s good. I wouldn’t want you to die without understanding that it had to be done.”

Venna stood behind me in her Alice pinafore, perfect and shining and eerie. I looked from her to Cherise.

“How the hell did you hook up with the Djinn?”

She shrugged. “Diplomacy. Ain’t it a bitch?”

“And so am I.” But I didn’t strike at either one of them. Instead, I sat down on the bed and crossed my legs into the lotus position. It was a bit of a tight fit, in the jeans.

I stared idly at the far side of the cabin—Cherise’s side—where she had beauty products lined up in thick clusters on the shelf. All kinds of things—tubes of makeup, lipsticks, eye shadow compacts.

Bottles of expensive perfume, just the right size to hold a Djinn.

Venna smiled. “I’d kill you first,” she said, and there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that she meant it. “There wouldn’t be enough of you to summon the sharks.”

I held up my hands. “Can’t blame me for thinking about it.”

“Oh, I can,” she said. “I most certainly can. But it would be amusing to see you make the attempt. Your vows with David gave humans access to the New Djinn, not my kind.” She was studying me with alien, utterly cold intensity. “But I think I understand you. If someone offered you poisoned water in the desert, would you rather die of thirst, or take longer to die of poison?”

She really did understand. “If I hadn’t taken the poison, I’d be dead already. None of you were offering anything else,” I said. “Alive, I can always turn myself around, right? Go to rehab, some twelve-step thing?”

Venna’s eyes turned black. “I’ve heard this excuse from others,” she said. “Most recently from Lewis, as he violated our most basic trust. There will be an accounting, when this is done. No Djinn—not even our younger cousins—will be imprisoned by your kind again. Expedience is not excuse.”

I shrugged. “So? Are we throwing down, MiniMe, or are we done now? Because I don’t really think even you can stop me now. Or that you’re allowed to try.” Venna’s presence was waking a kind of utterly unsettling hunger inside me; she had so much power, and I had a bottomless appetite for it. If she fought me, she’d expend power.

If she lost, I could take it all.

Venna said, “There is only one person who can save this ship. You, Joanne. If you wish.”

“Well, I don’t. I’m taking it to meet Bad Bob, and what happens from there doesn’t really concern me.”

Cherise covered her mouth with both hands, appalled and shocked. That was funny. Had she really not seen that coming?

“They won’t allow you to do this so easily. They’ll fight,” Venna said. It sounded like she was analyzing the next move in a Grand Masters chess game.

“Hope so,” I said, and slid off the bed to stretch, yawn, and shake my hair back over my shoulders. “Fun time’s over, girls. I need to do some work now, so I’m going. You can either move out of the way, or I can walk over your bleeding corpses. That’s metaphorical for you, Venna, but you get the point.”

Neither of them moved. Cherise looked uncertainly at Venna, but for the little girl Djinn I was the only thing in the world holding her focus.

I walked right up to her. She looked up into my eyes with eerie, ancient eyes, and then moved out of my way.

“You can’t do this,” Cherise whispered.

I used a casual punch of power to slam her across the room, into a wall, and she tumbled limply to the floor.

Bleeding.

“You’re not completely his,” Venna said, as I opened the cabin door. I looked back. She was standing in the same place, still calm and self-contained. “Do you want to know how I know?”

“Do tell.” I drummed my fingernails on the wood of the door impatiently.

Venna’s gaze flicked to Cherise, and then back. “You didn’t keep your threat. She’s bleeding. She isn’t dead.”

“Yet,” I said. “I thought that as a Djinn you’d understand the importance of timing.”