Cape Storm

Chapter Nine

So.

It was just me and the sharks. I was acutely aware of the vast, complicated landscape of predator and prey beneath me as I floated; I’d drawn a whole lot of sharks here, and the Great Whites in particular alarmed me, because I’d seen Jaws.

I couldn’t feel my back at all, but the rest of my body was chilled from the water. Still, I wasn’t likely to die of exposure, or even hunger or thirst. I could maintain my body’s electrolyte levels, heat, and general health; I could desalinate water to drink. I could eat raw fish that I could call into my hands, if I wasn’t especially fussy. Wasn’t looking forward to that part; sushi prepared by a brilliant Japanese chef is a far cry from munching on something fresh out of the sea and spitting out the scales and bones.

I floated and watched the rescue craft fleet sail away. The hatch remained open on the lifeboat I’d left, and I heard arguments pouring out of it until the wind carried it away. Cherise had tried to jump out, twice. I could still hear her screaming at the top of her lungs long after other sounds had faded.

“Bye, sweetie,” I whispered, and bobbed in the waves for a while, until the boats were just dazed smudges on the horizon.

I wasn’t a good enough Earth Warden to control several hundred sharks, all operating under their natural instinctive programming. What I could do—and did—was create conditions that made it less fun for the sharks to come near me, basically administering electrical shocks to anything that came closer than ten feet.

It was terrifying. Eventually, though, the sharks lost interest or found other prey to follow. A few continued to circle, but I couldn’t wait; the longer I delayed, the less likely it would be that David’s containment of Bad Bob’s torch would hold for me. I started to swim. It was fun at first, and then boring, and then difficult. The human body is designed for only so much wear and tear without periods of rest, and my Earth Warden powers could maintain it, but repairing overly stressed muscles took time.

Time I wasn’t going to have.

I kept swimming. After a while, pain took on a lulling sort of normality. You really can get used to just about anything, especially if you don’t have any alternatives.

The sun began to dip toward the horizon, and I thought about being out here at night, with a sky full of stars. It was oddly peaceful. I was still myself—rescued from the abyss into which Bad Bob had dragged me, though he hadn’t exactly dragged me there kicking and screaming, to be perfectly honest about it. I had a wide streak of darkness inside, all my own, and it wasn’t just the scars left over from my earlier Demon Mark; I’d always been ambitious. I’d always pursued power.

I guess I wasn’t so different from Bad Bob after all, except that I knew all that was both a strength and a weakness. And I knew it had to have limits.

I felt none of the power or fury that had thundered through me when the torch had been active, but sooner or later, David’s containment field would fail, and without him here to renew it, the torch would burn hotter than ever. I was a Warden. I wouldn’t be that easy to kill, even stranded out here on the ocean.

I’m working too hard, I thought. If I swim all the way to him, I’ll have nothing left when I get there.

Depression set in. It does that when your friends sail off and abandon you, and when you have to say a probably permanent good-bye to the one man in the world you’d not only die for, but live with. Maybe it’s not worth it. Maybe I should just take myself out of the game. That’d throw a curl in Bad Bob’s tail.

It had a seductive, petulant sort of sense to it. If I died, his plans were screwed, at least the ones I’d seen. He wanted me. He might even need me to make his small-A apocalypse come true. Without me, he had his Sentinels, but they were second-raters, and we’d already taken out the real threats.

Then again . . . if I died, that left David snapped into that state of frenzy and rage, and I couldn’t count on him staying imprisoned.

I didn’t want him to stay imprisoned.

But I didn’t want to stay apart. Or go back to the cold, evil bitch I’d become.

I considered all the ways I could make my marriage work while my burning, screaming muscles stroked away at the endless ocean. Nothing solved itself, but I hadn’t really expected it to. Eventually, the effort whited out my problems more efficiently than anything else could have. They weren’t gone, they were just . . . under the surface.

The sun went down. It was a beautiful sight, unbounded by the rules of land—nothing but waves and sea, and an endless bowl of sky. I had to stop more and more frequently and just let myself float. My body hurt so much I cried involuntary, hiccuping tears. Every deliberate movement felt as if my nerves had grown cutting edges and were slicing themselves right out of my skin. My skin felt rubbery and ice-cold, except for my back, which just felt like it wasn’t there at all.

Keep going.

I tried, but my efforts came slower, my rests more frequent. I just couldn’t keep moving. My energy reserves were gone, and although the world was rich in it all around me, I couldn’t tap it like a Djinn could.

I’m going to die out here. Except that I couldn’t die, not without breaking the tie to David.

Not without setting him on a path of destruction that would annihilate everything.

The stars came out in thick white veils of light, and I floated on my back in the bobbing waves, too tired to keep moving at any cost.

I slept for a while. I floated.

I think I went a little insane, as the endless, isolated hours passed. Then I swam again, and then I slept.

Eventually, I dreamed I heard a ship’s horn.

My ride’s here, I thought. It was crazy, but somehow it all made sense, the way dreams sometimes do when you’re stuck in the middle—life was an ocean, death was a ship to take me away to lands unknown. I’d bought the ticket, right? So why not take the ride?

I heard the blast of noise again, mournful and musical at the same time.

A spotlight appeared out of nowhere and hit the water, so bright I yelled and covered my eyes.

“We’ve caught ourselves a mermaid,” someone said, from behind the blaze of light. “Fish her out. Let’s see what we’ve landed.”

I didn’t realize how much of the sea I’d swallowed until I was out of the ocean. I promptly fell to my hands and knees and vomited up enough foamy water to fill a goldfish bowl or two. I rolled onto my side, and continued hacking up frothing mouthfuls. My lungs were on fire from the inside, and my throat felt like I’d gargled with Clorox.

My head throbbed like thunder. My skin felt rubbery and soft, and I was incredibly dizzy.

“Huh,” somebody said, and I threw up clots of white foam on a pair of sturdy-looking black paramilitary boots. “She don’t look like much, Josue.”

The hot searchlight was still beaming down on me from a stubby upper deck. In comparison to the majestic cruise ship, this looked like a stunted dwarf—a working ship, some kind of smallish freighter. Not very well kept. The metal deck around me was spotted with rust, there were careless piles of rope and haphazardly stacked boxes, and the men standing over me didn’t look like the shipshape type, either. There were four of them, all in filthy, grease-stained T-shirts, cargo-type pants or shorts, and nonskid work boots.

And they all carried knives and guns. Two of them had their firearms shoved casually into waistbands; the other two had what looked like automatic machine pistols slung on bandoliers across their chests.

I was pretty sure those weren’t standard issue for guys on board most cargo ships.

I coughed some more. I tried to sit up. I was, instead, yanked all the way to my feet, where I wavered and nearly went down again. Gravity seemed like a very strange concept to me, after all that time in the water.

I tried my voice, which came out as rusty as the ship I was standing on. “Thanks for the rescue.”

One of them laughed. He was the one who’d declared me alive, I thought, a big, muscular guy the color of mahogany. He looked like he could bite a metal bar and spit bullets. As rescuers went, not exactly comforting.

But I couldn’t help but be relieved that the whole survival thing had been taken out of my hands.

“Hola,” the big guy—apparently, Josue—said, and aimed his machine pistol somewhere in the direction of a number of my more important internal organs. “Is your name Joanne Baldwin?”

I frankly stared at him. “What?”

“Yes or no, mermaid. Joanne Baldwin?” He had an interesting accent to his English—thick, not quite Spanish, more lyrical and unpredictable. Close cousins, though. Portuguese, maybe. “If you’re not, I throw you back. I don’t have room for pets.”

“In that case I’m definitely Joanne.” I swallowed another cough. “Somebody told you to look for me. Who?”

“Why? Enemies would have left you sucking water, eh? Must have been friends.”

He had a point. I couldn’t imagine these guys doing anything without a profit motive, and I hadn’t pissed off anyone bad enough to make them spend a lot of money to kill me. Easy enough to just let me drown.

Wait . . . that meant it was someone who’d known I would be in the water.

“You didn’t come all the way out here to find me,” I said. Josue raised his eyebrows and smiled, not in a comforting sort of way.

“Came for the salvage on the ship that went down,” he said. “Stayed for the profits. You’re worth a lot of money, mermaid.”

“Alive, I guess.”

He shrugged. “Apparently.”

This ship was far from an honest sort of vessel. They’d picked up the maritime distress calls from the Grand Paradise—I assumed the captain had sent them—and of course the lifeboats would have transponders on them, probably sending out automated rescue calls. And in these waters, that would draw two kinds of vessels: well-meaning Good Samaritans, and the kind of ship I’d just been fished onto.

In other words, pirates. And somebody had co-opted them to search specifically for me.

“Look!” said one of the crew, stationed at the railing. He called for light, and the beam burned out into the water, turning it from black to a muddy, sullen blue. At first I didn’t see what he was looking at, and then I caught a glimpse of bobbing wood. A few bits of debris from the ship had followed the same currents I’d used. There was plenty of small, buoyant wreckage still around, though the debris cloud had long since dissipated and spread itself out over dozens of miles of open water. Not much of a grave for such an enormous vessel.

“Everybody get off?” the pirate captain asked me, and shoved me with the barrel of his gun when I delayed my answer. “Everybody in those little boats, yes?”

“You bet,” I said. “Everybody’s been rescued. Well, everybody but me, obviously.”

He seemed disappointed. I guessed he’d been hoping to fish out some rich Americans he could ransom back at a significant profit. I didn’t blame him; I didn’t look like a rich payday, regardless of what his patron had told him.

“How come you didn’t end up on a rescue boat, mermaid? You not fresh enough?”

A couple of his crewmates offered helpful commentary about how yummy I looked. Charming. I was starting to feel like today’s catch, still wiggling on the line.

I took a deep breath. That was a mistake; it resulted in more lung-wrenching coughing, and I spat up some more foam and mucus. “Let’s just say I missed my boat,” I said.

“What makes a woman stay behind when a boat is sinking?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question; he was showing off for his crew. “You have a kid on the ship?”

“No.”

“Money, then.” He flashed me a vulpine grin. “Always money.”

“Speaking of money, who hired you to find me?”

The laughter died out on the man’s face, and left it watchful and dangerous. “Don’t think I want to tell you that,” he said. “Not yet.”

“Why?” I was starting to believe I’d been better off with the sharks.

“Americans, they’re always talking about money. I give you money if you let me go. My family has money. I got important friends who will pay you. That sort of thing. They think they can buy their way out of anything.” He gazed at me for a long, cold few seconds. “You don’t offer nothing. That makes me nervous.”

“Maybe I’m poor.”

He snorted. “Even the poor offer. You don’t even try to make a deal.”

“Maybe I’m crazy.”

He showed me teeth. “Maybe. Maybe you just think we won’t hurt you ’cause you’re so pretty.”

“No,” I said, and held his gaze. “I’m sure you’d try like hell to hurt me, for any reason or none at all. I’m sure you’ve slit throats and raped and tortured if you felt like it. Probably just yesterday.”

That woke a lot of murmuring among the rest of the crew. I heard the slap of boots—more men arriving from other parts of the ship, drawn by the tinfoil smell of trouble in the air.

“Huh,” the captain said. “So what you got to stop me if I want to do the same to you?”

“I’m pretty sure you don’t want to know.” The tingle on my back that I’d felt as I was drowning had subsided, but the nerves were waking up, and I could feel the outline of the torch forming again, black and steady. I could feel the black well of power opening, ready to flood into me if I opened the door. “You guys know comic books? The Incredible Hulk?”

Josue looked blank. He looked around at the others.

“Bruce Banner,” one of the crew piped up. “You won’t like me when I’m angry.” In any group of people, no matter how hard-assed they might appear, there’s always a geek. I was just surprised that, in this company, he’d admitted it.

“It’s like that, only I don’t have to wait to turn green,” I said. “I’m trying to help you out here, gentlemen. Don’t push me, and I won’t push back, and we’ll all be just fine. Somebody’s paying you to keep me alive and in one piece. Let’s just all get along.”

The captain was no longer amused. “Shut up, bitch,” he said, and shoved the barrel of his pistol under my chin. “You don’t threaten me. Not on my own ship. I’m not being paid enough for that.”

I didn’t reach for power. It reached for me, a black tidal wave that pounded into me like surf to shore, immense and burning.

No! I rejected it, slammed the door shut and held it closed as the power thundered on the other side. I felt small and pitiful and ridiculously weak, and I knew I was only a second from death at the hands of these men, these pirates—but my other choice was worse.

“Sure,” I said. Josue hadn’t noticed a thing, from the outside; he thought he was still in control, not one heartbeat away from being a red stain on the deck. “You win.”

If he pushed that gun into me any deeper, we were going to be engaged. “I always do,” he said. “Tell me who you are.”

“Joanne Baldwin.”

“No. Who you are. You’re not afraid of me.”

“I just gave up.”

“Not because you’re afraid.” Josue was way too smart. It was a little creepy. Then he took it too far by saying, “I like women best when they’re afraid. They shut up more.”

“You’re a real charmer, did you know that?” He flashed me his pirate smile. “All right, so you’re going to put me in the hold. What then? You turn me over to whoever paid you to come get me?” I had an awful feeling I already knew who that would be, and his initials were Bad Bob Biringanine.

“Something like that,” Josue agreed. “Unless you plan to make me a better offer.”

“I’ll pay you twice what he’s paying you,” I said. I did want to get to Bad Bob. Just not as his helpless captive. Much better if I could hire myself a hard-bitten pirate crew and take the fight to him unexpectedly.

Josue slowly showed his teeth in a smile. He had two gold-plated incisors, both on the bottom, and it gave him a glam vampire look that must have been pretty effective in his line of work.

“Where you got all that money hidden, mermaid? In your panties?” He made a grab, as if he was about to make a withdrawal. I fended him off.

“No, idiot. I keep my money in a bank, like every other criminal who isn’t a complete moron. Look, I was on that ship with some of the wealthiest people on earth. I’m not just some casino rat. I know people.”

Josue looked unimpressed. “What people?”

“Cynthia Clark. The movie star?”

Pirates started naming movies with the geeky enthusiasm of film obsessives everywhere. From the breadth of their knowledge, I figured they must have the biggest DVD collection ever somewhere belowdecks. Not that they’d ever paid for any of it, of course.

“Famous friends doesn’t mean you have money. How you expect to pay me?” Captain Josue asked, and spread his hands to show how unencumbered I was by those phantom millions.

“Electronic transfer,” I said. “It’s how business works these days. People don’t carry cash, they carry personal identification numbers and ATM cards.”

He wasn’t convinced. “And how does this help me? Do you see any computers on my ship?”

I gave him a very slow smile. “If you take me where I want to go, I promise you, I’ll fill your ship so full of dollars you won’t be able to sleep without restacking bundles of cash.”

“Then give me your account number and PIN code. I’ll check it out.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I thought you didn’t have a computer.”

“That’s not what I said.” He laughed. “You give me the information and I’ll verify that you’re not a lying whore. That seems fair.”

“Sorry. It’s all I have to bargain with. Guess you’ll just have to trust me.”

“I was born at night, mermaid. Not last night,” he said. I didn’t like the confidence of his smile. “You show me cash, and then I believe you. Not before. Thiago, take her below.”

The guy who’d copped to being a comic book geek grabbed my arm and hustled me down the narrow space between the wheelhouse and the railing, toward the stern of the boat. “Hey, Thiago?” I asked. “I could use some help here. Talk to your boss, would you?”

“Shut up,” he said. “You won’t like me when I’m angry.”

So much for geek solidarity.

Two hatches later, I was shoved across a rusty threshold and into some kind of ship’s hold. It was nothing like the vast, spacious warehouse of the Grand Paradise; this was a cramped, hot, stinking metal box that gave mute evidence that the ship had once been a fishing vessel.

I swore I’d never eat tuna again.

“Hey!” I yelled, as the hatch banged shut behind me. “You’re really going to regret this!”

And that sounded so stock B-movie that I shut up and found a place to sit and rest my aching head on my aching crossed arms.

The burning torch on my back throbbed in time with my heartbeat, and I could feel it stretching back through the aetheric, a slimy tether that kept pulling on me, trying to drag me to the dark side.

“Keep your shirt on, Bob,” I murmured to the dead fish. “A girl’s got to sleep sometime.”

I curled up in a nest of burlap and old packing material from one of the crates, and fell completely unconscious.

Not a care in the world, strangely enough. Too tired to have one.

When I woke up, my whole body ached less, but that only meant the alert level had gone down from red to orange, damage-wise. No way could I swim far in my current state. I needed the ship if I intended to stay alive.

Well, if I couldn’t buy it, there were other ways. They were as dangerous to me as to the captain, though.

I banged on the hatch until I got attention, and was dragged back up on deck. It was midday, and the sun was dazzling on the water. I blinked against the glare.

Josue was once again lounging at the rail. “Don’t you ever work?” I asked him.

“Don’t you ever shut up?” He nodded to the crew-man holding my arm, and another gun dug into my ribs. “Now, maybe you’re willing to tell me the account number of all this mythical money you have to share?”

I shook my head.

“Wrong answer.” He turned to Thiago, who was holding me. “Shoot her and put her over the side. Do it in the stomach. That way she has time to change her mind before the sharks come.”

Damn. I was glad this guy wasn’t a Warden.

Thiago tried to follow orders, but when he pulled the trigger, it resulted in a dry click. He tried again, frowning.

“Here, let me see,” I said. I took the pistol from him, held it in my hand, and melted the barrel into dripping slag that ran through my glowing fingers and in streams across the deck. “Oh, there’s your problem. Man, they really don’t make these things like they used to.”

I heard more clicks as other pirates joined the hunting party, but I’d disrupted the firing mechanisms of every single gun aboard the ship in one fast burst. So many delicate parts to a gun, really. Not like a good blunt object. “Don’t make me blow up your ammunition,” I said. “It’ll take your hands off with it when it goes up. Classic choice, though. Who wants a hook to complete the whole pirate image?”

Guns hit the deck and tumbled, metal on metal.Weapons skidded from side to side in the pitch and roll of the waves, and an Uzi nudged my foot. I kicked it to the rail, where it hesitated on the edge, then tipped over.

“Good boys,” I said. The captain—no coward, even if he didn’t understand what was happening—pulled his knife, the better to fillet me. “Okay, not you, obviously, and I’m voting you off the island. Thank you for playing. Say hello to the sharks.”

I blew him over the side of the ship, out into the water. He hit with a tremendous splash and came up screaming.

I ignored him. “Right,” I said. “Your captain had an attention problem. Who wants to be in charge now?”

They all looked at each other. Nobody dared make a move to rescue Josue, who was flailing like a gaffed fish, although their gazes frequently cut in his direction. One man stepped forward—Thiago, who I suspected was the second in command anyway. “You are,” he said. “Miss.”

I smiled at him—my best, most winning smile, fueled by a wild edge. “You’re a smart guy. Thiago, do you want to make some money?”

“Sure.”

“Same deal I tried to make with your ex-boss. You take me in that direction”—I pointed toward where I knew Bad Bob was, as the torch on my back throbbed when I faced that way; no clue what the nautical course was, and I didn’t much care—“and I can promise you that you’ll get one hell of a great payday out of it. Better than holding up unlucky pleasure boaters, anyway.”

He exchanged looks with his fellow scavengers—okay, pirates—and one by one, they nodded. The sound of their captain’s increasingly desperate calls for rescue off the port bow probably had something to do with their quorum.

“Can we pick him up, please?” Thiago asked, like it was an afterthought, and pointed toward their captain. I turned my head and looked at him. The dawn wind blew my damp hair over my face, but I was pretty sure he could see my expression even at that distance, with that concealment.

“If he points so much as a dirty look in my direction, I’ll shoot him in the stomach and let him tell it to the sharks,” I said. “Make sure he knows that. I don’t feel like giving second chances right now.”

Thiago nodded. He had a good poker face, but there was a shadow of uneasiness in his dark eyes. “What do you want us to call you, miss?”

I smiled. “You can call me whatever you want, buddy. This isn’t going to be a long-term relationship. Believe me.”

Thiago gave some orders, the content of which was lost on me, but the ten or so men that crewed this rusty scow snapped to it. Somebody fished the captain out of the ocean and got him safely out of my sight. I felt the engines growl, shift, and surge beneath my feet as we got under way. The bow turned, heading toward a destination that wasn’t visible in any way on the horizon—except to me.

After enjoying the view for a while, I went down to the hold, where I found the captain enjoying the hospitality of the rotting tuna. I pulled up an empty crate. “So,” I said. “How about you tell me who hired you to fish me out of the water, Josue?”

“Vai pro Inferno,” he said. “Foda-se.”

“Want to see a magic trick?” I asked, and put my hand out, palm up. Nothing in it. I turned it palm down, then over again.

Lightning danced along the skin, clung to my fingertips, and dangled from my knuckles like a handful of tangled string.

Josue sat back.

“You know anything about Tasers? This is the same thing, only without the delivery system. Oh, and the batteries. And you know the best thing?” I leaned forward and smiled. “It never runs out of juice.”

There’s no such thing as a loyal pirate. “He was a man,” Josue said.

“Name?”

“I don’t ask names. He gave me cash money.”

“White hair? Big, blue eyes? Red nose? About this tall?” I indicated Bad Bob’s height, but Josue was shaking his head.

“No, never seen that one. This one, he was weird. Shaved head. Wearing leather like out of some motorcycle movie. Scary.”

My heart took a running leap. “How’d he pay you?”

“You won’t believe it: gold. Sunken treasure. He said he’d just found some.” Josue laughed and shook his head. “Crazy people out here. All crazy. I thought I’d find you, see if you were worth keeping. He shows up again, I shoot him if I like you and keep the money anyway.”

Josue had no idea what a bad idea that would have been. “Did he say what to do with me when you found me?”

“Yeah.” Josue’s smile was a model of impish delight. “He said tell you Kevin said hello. And to take you back to port and let you go. Crazy. Like I said.”

I let out a slow sigh. “And you figured you’d threaten me into giving you something else? Or just rape and kill me?”

Josue shrugged. “It’s the way things are.”

“You are such a lucky man that things didn’t work out your way,” I said. “If they had, you’d be screaming your way to hell right about now, along with everybody else on this ship.”

He didn’t believe me, but he should have. I was in no mood to be Ms. Nice Guy, but compared to the fury that David would have unleashed on them if they’d hurt me, there was literally nothing I could do to them that would be anywhere near as horrible.

“My offer’s still open,” I said. “You take me where I want to go, and I’ll pay you enough money to make you king of the pirates forever.”

He tried not to look interested. “How do I know you’ll keep your promise?”

I turned my hand over again. Lightning flashed and crawled. “You know I’ll keep this one.”

Josue sat up straighter, his eyes flicking around as if he was trying to figure out an exit strategy. He finally nodded. “It’s a deal,” he said. “Just—put that away, bruxa.”

“Hey, Josue? Call me a witch again, I will Taser the holy shit out of you.” I felt the black exhilaration creep over me once more, the stealthy march of Bad Bob’s influence running through my veins. “Oh, hell, maybe I’ll just do it anyway.”

I didn’t, but it was fun watching him think I would.

I paced the bridge as Josue ordered the crew around. I had nothing to do, really, except wait and think.

Think about Kevin sneaking around behind Lewis’s back to let David out of his bottle, sending him to pluck me out of the ocean.

Why?

Cherise, I thought. I couldn’t imagine Kevin getting the initiative to come running to my rescue any other way. We’d always cordially hated each other.

I was even more surprised that David hadn’t tricked his way out of the bottle again by now. It wouldn’t take much slack for him to snap the rope that bound him; Djinn had been doing it for millennia, and they were very, very good at finding loopholes to exploit. Either Kevin had been very specific about what he wanted him to do, or David didn’t really want to get free just now.

Maybe because he knew that if he did, he might end up fighting me, and neither of us wanted that. He’d wanted to save me. Kevin had allowed him to do it.

Kevin, you’re a romantic. That made me smile. I supposed I’d have to thank him some way.

Maybe by not killing him. That was a gift that kept on giving, right?

The sun was putting on a spectacular evening display, all clouds and blood, when the lookout called a warning. At least, I thought it was a warning—Portuguese wasn’t exactly my strong suit, but the tone definitely sounded urgent.

“What is it?” I asked Josue, as he left the bow rail to head toward the stern.

“A ship,” he said. “Coming up behind us, and moving fast. Big, maybe a military ship or a tanker.”

“Tankers don’t move that fast,” I said.

Josue continued to stare over the stern rail, frowning. “Could be more trouble than you’re worth, mermaid. I’m thinking I throw you back.”

“You want to go downstairs again, talk it over?”

He gave me a scornful sneer. “You can’t sail the ship alone. My men won’t work for you.”

“Want to bet? Just do what I tell you, Josue. If I feel this ship slow down, you’re over the side, and your crew goes with you. That’s a promise.”

He knew I meant it. He nodded. I had no doubt that later on, he’d try to stab me in the back, maroon me, or otherwise screw me over, but for now he was treading carefully—partly because I was a potential payday, but equally out of sheer morbid fear. He’d seen a sample of what I could do, and he didn’t want to see more.

I didn’t really blame him for that. I wasn’t wild to see it, either.

I locked my hands behind my back and kept my legs spread wide, riding the bucking of the waves with the ease of a long-practiced sailor. We both watched the dim shape on the horizon take on edges and definition.

Definitely a ship. Big.

The lookout called another warning. Josue looked up, frowning, and blinked. He cursed in Portuguese—no, I didn’t recognize the words, but the flavor’s the same in any language. “Storm,” he said. “Coming on fast from the south.”

My friend the storm had hung back, content to let me run; I wasn’t sure anymore whether I was holding its leash or it was holding mine. But something had changed. Maybe it sensed that the containment around the mark on my back was fading again, or that I wasn’t following my approved script.

It was heading our way. Fast.

The blood sunset had disappeared behind a boiling, rising mass of clouds—iron gray ones, with greenish-black underpinnings. It was already crawling with lightning inside. Power had been poured into it—an awful lot of power.

“Hold course,” I said. I didn’t think all that effort Bad Bob was putting out was meant solely for us. We weren’t that hard to sink, frankly.

As we sailed steadily toward it, the storm spread out, flattened, swirled, consolidated, gained density and deeper color.

Then it started to spin around a center axis—slowly, majestically, unevenly at first, then spiraling out like a deadly galaxy. The blender of the gods, taking shape right in front of me.

“We need to get out of its way!” Josue shouted. I felt the first breath of wind sweep over us, vivid with the smell of rain. The clouds were whipping toward us. He cursed me in Portuguese, and ordered his men to follow his instructions.

I locked the rudder in place with a burst of Earth power. They worked frantically to free it, but they weren’t getting anywhere.

As the wind increased, so did the amplitude of the waves, and the small ship was nowhere near as able to crush through the turmoil as the Grand Paradise had been. The vessel was battered, and when it slammed bow-first into the rising waves, the spray fractured into foam and coated everything on board in slippery, unpleasant slime.

Then came the rain, hammering in sheets that felt like needles. Josue’s crew broke out battered rain slickers. I ignored the offer, and stood at the bow, watching the storm’s progress. I could feel its blind menace, its anger, but it wasn’t directed downward at me, not even as the rain intensified into a heavy, strangely hot downpour. The wind speed increased, and the clouds rotated faster. It intensified as the ship crashed and fell through the waves. I tethered myself to the rail and resisted the waves that crested the bow and washed the decks, trying to pull me over.

Something wild inside me broke free as we rode through the storm, and in the blaze of lightning and pounding surf, I felt at home. Finally, completely at home. All those years of fighting the storms, and I’d never realized how much a part of them I was. How complete I was when I was with them.

I was almost sorry when we hit the eye of the storm and calm fell over us—but I looked up into the primal heart of the enemy, and it looked back at me with a kind of affectionate recognition.

Good dog.

When we hit the trailing side, the winds lashed us so viciously that we lost two of the crew, even though they’d been tethered. The seas swamped the decks, shattered glass, woke terror from seasoned pirates who picked their teeth and yawned at the idea of a normal tempest.

After a white-knuckled eternity, the storm was past us, and heading for its real victim.

The ship closing in on us from behind.

The seas continued heavy against us, and Josue wanted to slow our pace. The engines were laboring, and the crew was exhausted and sick.

“No,” I said. I didn’t need them anymore. They’d served their purpose, both ship and crew, and I no longer had to worry about their breaking points. “Just keep the throttle open. We’ll be fine.”

I wrapped energy around the straining pumps and valves and increased their speed. It wouldn’t last long, but it would give us more of a lead against our pursuer, who had the full weight of the storm to deal with now. I looked back to see its forward progress stalling, as if it had met cooler air to slow it. The storm was lashing that other ship with all its supernatural fury.

Josue, also watching, crossed himself.

The moon rose, but it was quickly veiled by clouds. As night descended on us, it was thick and black and claustrophobic. Only the shattered reflections of our running lights spoiled the illusion of sailing through empty, limitless space.

“Mãe de Deus,” Josue murmured. “It’s still coming, that ship. Like a ghost out of the grave.”

It was a ghost.

The Grand Paradise had gone down, I’d seen it. It had been too badly damaged and too thoroughly flooded to float, and yet there it was, gaining on our tail. The running lights were all working, blazing merrily in the darkness, and it was charging at a speed that didn’t seem natural for such an enormous ship.

It was trying to get to me before I reached my destination.

“Hold on,” I told Josue, and opened the throttles even more on our nameless little pirate ship, sending it leaping and slamming through the waves like an oversized, wallowing speedboat. The hull wouldn’t take it for long, but it didn’t have to.

Out there in the darkness was my destination.

I felt a Warden grabbing for control of our engines, and whipped a black scythe of power across the lines of force. It must have hurt, and badly. “Do it again, and you’ll pull back a stump,” I muttered, and gripped the rail tighter. “Back off.”

I didn’t think they would. If they were strong and confident enough to make it through the hurricane, they’d be more than competent enough to tackle me.

A Djinn breathed into focus on the deck a few feet away, and I prepared for the fight of my life . . .

. . . but it was David.

David.

My David, perfect in every line. Not Kevin’s incarnation of him.

He didn’t say anything. Neither did I. Josue drew a knife and stabbed at him, but David didn’t even bother to cast him a look, just flicked his fingers and sent him flying across the deck.

“Are you here to stop me?” I asked.

“No,” my husband said, and took a step toward me. Then another. I was in the V-shaped well of the bow, pressed against the rails—nowhere to go but over the side, into the black waters. “I’m not here to stop you.”

“Then what?”

He took another step, risking a full attack. I could feel the urge, the need vibrating through me like plucked strings. Don’t let him fool you. Don’t let him stop you. You need to reach Bad Bob. If this goes badly, you know what will happen. The two of you will be responsible for destroying the world.

In the ripping light of a lightning strike on the cruise ship looming slowly up behind us, David’s face was serious and very calm.

“I’m here to help you,” he said.

He opened his hand, and in it were fragments of glass.

The broken pieces of his bottle.

I stared at them for a moment, into his eyes. “How—?”

“Cherise,” he said. “She wants you to live. So do I. She got the bottle away from Kevin. She—trusts me.”

Cherise was a romantic idiot, in this one sense: She simply didn’t understand how dangerous David really was. I wasn’t even sure I understood . . . although I was starting to get a really good idea.

I tightened my grip on the rail as the ship pounded into a particularly deep trough, then painfully plowed up the leading edge of the next wave. “I see. And did you stop for anything else along the way?”

“You mean, did I kill Lewis?” he asked. “Not yet.” He took one more step, and we were body to body, soaked with rain, blinded by lightning. Sealed together by storms. “That doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten him. Don’t ask me to do that.”

I couldn’t begin to try. “How did they raise the ship?”

“Who says they did?” David’s smile was knowing, and a little bitter. “It’s not the Grand Paradise. Lewis lied to you from the beginning. The Grand Paradise was a decoy, designed to lure Bad Bob into showing his hand. He sent the other Wardens out of Fort Lauderdale, aboard the Grand Horizon. It’s a sister ship—a little smaller, a little faster. Crewed entirely with Wardens and Djinn. It’s been making good time and staying off of Bad Bob’s radar. Until now.”

That son of a bitch. Lewis really had suckered me, every step of the way. He’d known I was a risk, if not a ready-made traitor. He’d used me as a stalking horse, although I had to admit he’d put himself on the line, too.

But he’d also exposed Cherise and dozens of other innocents who had no place in this. And an unforgivably large number of Wardens, although I supposed for any kind of a feint to work, he had to commit himself to it.

I would never forgive him for risking so much, no more than David would be able to forgive him for the kill switch that Lewis had put in my brain.

“So by suckering Bad Bob into kicking the living crap out of us, the Grand Horizon got a virtually free ride,” I said. “Right?”

“As far as I know.”

“How could you not know?”

“It’s crewed by Ashan’s Djinn. Everything was compartmentalized from me. Deliberately so.”

We’d both been cut out. Well, I’d been hoping Lewis had fallback positions, in the beginning, and it looked like he’d done a hell of a lot more with a hell of a lot less than I’d have managed in his place.

“They’re in for it now,” I noted, as three lightning strikes crawled the Grand Horizon’s deck, searching for something to destroy. “But we’re still going to get there ahead of them.”

“I know.” He cupped my face in both hands, and he studied me closely. I knew what he was looking for.

“I’m all right,” I said. “Seventy-five percent all right, anyway.”

He seemed to calculate me at about the same rate.

“If we succeed,” he said, “we will have another problem to consider.”

I hadn’t actually thought past the consequences of failure, which were fairly horrific. “Like what?”

“You may inherit his power. And you may be tempted to use it.”

“I could use it for good.”

“So did he. Once. It isn’t a power you can use, Jo. It’s a power you must destroy.”

I looked back at him. “So if I grab it from Bad Bob, you’re going to take it away from me. Or die trying.”

“Maybe,” David said. “But first we have to live to get there, don’t we?”

I turned to face him. The next lurching drop sent him into me. Our lips found each other, hot and hungry and damp, tasting of salt and desperation. For a moment even the storm seemed to stop, suspended between heartbeats.

I felt the darkness in me trying to reach out to him, and slapped it down hard. No. Not yet. David might be here, he might be with me, but he wasn’t with me. And I wasn’t going to be the one to enslave him yet again, not until I had no other choice.

I turned to face south, toward the empty horizon. “He’s not far now,” I said. “One thing at a time, right?”

David’s arms gripped the railing on either side of me, bracing me against the violent bucking of the ship as we plunged toward the darkness. “Right.”