Cape Storm

Chapter Twelve

At the center of the slowly rotating mass of energy was the portal to the other world. The real world.

It was like a drop of pure darkness, maybe a dozen feet across—space made liquid. I could feel a kind of pull coming from it—not gravity, not force, nothing so simple as that. It was aware, and awake. It was hungry and endlessly patient, and I realized that it was like the slow, vast intelligence of the planet below me . . . like, but so much more. The Earth was a virus, a microbe. What lay on the other side of the portal was God. Not ours, though. A jealous, angry, hungry God.

In the aetheric, the spear I was carrying was tremendously heavy, and the higher I tried to rise, the heavier it got. It was like swimming with an anvil.

Then a truck full of anvils.

Then the world in my arms.

I screamed in soundless frustration and gained another few feet.

Then another. I was so close. I could see the shimmering waves in the portal, feel its draw. I could feel the answering vibration in the Unmaking, the key for the lock, and the lock that wanted to be turned.

My whole aetheric body was on fire. My senses had shifted, changed into a different spectrum, and I could finally see what was holding me back from completing my mission . . .

The Djinn.

They were all around me, grabbing on to me, pulling me down. So many of them. Between me darted human forms—Wardens, trying to stand between me and the destiny of everything.

It was the magical weight of the world, and it was all against me.

I snarled and surged forward, again. I tried stabbing at the Djinn with the spear, but they easily avoided me.

The Wardens did, too.

I was being dragged backward, and as I was pulled, I gouged bloody holes in the aetheric in my fury. The spear left a gaping black trail, a scar between worlds—not enough to open the door, though.

I reversed my efforts, and instead of trying to break free and go up, I charged down, arrowing through the unprepared Djinn line, and used a burst of hot black power to brake myself back into my body.

Bad Bob was on his back, trying to crab-walk away from the Djinn who was advancing on him—who had already hurt him, from the burns and scars on his face and arms. His hair was half burned off, and his eyes glittered with absolute insanity.

I didn’t recognize the Djinn, because it was shining like a golden sun, power incarnate. It reached down and picked up the Ancestor Scriptures from where Bad Bob had dropped them.

The Djinn’s back was to me. I didn’t think, I just acted.

I raised the spear.

He turned.

It was David. David standing there, facing me. Facing his own death at my hands. I couldn’t identify what I saw in his face, in his eyes, except that it was not anger, not at all.

I snarled and lunged for him. The Unmaking had me now, dark and cold and certain, and it was going to take us both.

He said, “Fides mihi,” and touched his hand to his chest, over where a human heart would be.

And suddenly, the world went quiet. Time stopped.

The Unmaking swallowed its unending shriek.

And I remembered.

I was an observer to the past.

The lifeboat, where Lewis had killed me.

I was dead on the floor, lying in David’s arms. Pale and limp and open-eyed. Done, and yet still trapped inside the shell.

My old self took in a convulsive breath and tried to fight her way free. I knew this moment. I recognized the agony that rippled through her body as Bad Bob’s torch fought her for control.

I watched her pass out, head lolling against David’s body as he poured energy into her to seal off the mark and cut her off from the black influence of the thing, one last time.

I didn’t remember anything else, but the scene played on, a bare few seconds that changed everything.

“The containment won’t last,” Lewis said. “You know it won’t. I used one fail-safe on her. We can put in a second one while she’s out.”

“Not without her consent.”

“She already gave consent.” That was lawyering the point, but David allowed it to slip past. “We can’t kill her. We can’t save her. The best we can do now is to make sure that she can be controlled if this goes bad.”

David bared his teeth like a wild thing, and I thought for a second that he really would lunge right for Lewis’s throat. “You’re not deciding when she lives or dies,” he said. “Not you.”

Lewis closed his eyes in what looked like gratitude and relief. “I don’t want to,” he said. “I never wanted to. You have to be the one, David. You’re the only one she trusts enough to get close at the last moment. If it’s Joanne or the world, you have to choose.”

David froze, and the people clustered around the edges of the tableau shuffled. Cherise was the one who finally spoke.

“She’d want it to be you,” she said. “She really would.”

There were tears shining in my friend’s eyes.

“I’ll put the fail-safe in place,” Lewis said. “You choose the codes.”

It was a combination, of course. Words, and deeds.

Fides mihi. Trust me.

And his hand, giving me his heart.

Fides mihi.

David’s use of the fail-safe should have killed me. If I’d been myself, only myself, it would have turned me off like a light, gone forever.

The Unmaking deflected it from shutting down my body, but it couldn’t stop the memory from returning, and the memory brought its own clarity. Its own powerful, unstoppable force.

In the second that passed, the terrible certainties that had filled me since Bad Bob put the Unmaking in my hand began to unravel. No. This is wrong. This is all wrong. I can’t do this.

David wasn’t the enemy.

This life wasn’t a fiction. It was the only reality I had. The only one I wanted, no matter what the creature beyond that portal promised me.

But even though my brain caught up with the realities and horror of being taken over, I couldn’t stop the physics of what was already in motion—me. I was already lunging for him, and I was too close to miss him.

David put the Ancestor Scriptures between us.

The Unmaking hit the book, and for a second it pushed deep into the pages, tunneling through toward David’s chest. Then it stopped moving, as if it had hit an impenetrable wall.

Then it began to shake in my hands. Not vibrate. Shake.

And then it exploded.

Shards of it flew everywhere—powdery bits, larger fragments. Some hit the rocks around us and gouged out massive craters as they skidded. The powder whipped away on the wind, a radioactive cloud that glowed hot green in the aetheric.

And one fragment—the largest one—flew straight up, into the eye of the storm.

It shrieked its way through the portal in our world, then the aetheric, and then through every plane stacked above it, ripping a hole just large enough for a single drop of darkness to squeeze through.

It trembled pendulously, then fell from the portal—a dozen feet across, maybe.

Directly above us.

I lunged toward David, trying to push him out of the way. He did the same, trying to save me.

We collided at the center, and the black drop came crashing down on us.

I wrapped my arms around David, felt his go around me, and power flared silver through and around us.

Then the darkness hit us, and the world ended.

I never expected to wake up, and I was really sorry I did. I must have been lying on the rocks for hours, cold and wet and cramped; my muscles were so stiff and strained that I whimpered even before trying to shift my position.

Overhead was a clear night sky, thick with constellations, and a bright yellow moon, three-quarters full.

Wind rustled over the island.

“David?”

No answer. I pushed myself up to a painful, staggering walk. In the moonlight, I saw nothing but black rock and sea spray.

“David?”

There was a body lying a few feet away, half hidden behind a boulder.

Bad Bob, not David. He’d died hard and ugly. Something had blown his torso in two, dividing him neatly in half from the crown of his head to somewhere around his navel. He’d been dead for hours. The blood was mostly dried on the stones around him, and he smelled lightly of decay.

More dead Sentinels littered the landscape. Moira was still draped over the stones where Rahel had left her. Lars Petrie’s severed head rocked gently in the tropical wind.

There was a cruise ship standing off the island, all its lights ablaze, but it was too far to swim, feeling as cramped and cold as I already was. God, I felt awful.

It was a mystery to me how I was still alive, or why.

“David?” I fumbled around, trying to find that silvery cord that connected us on the aetheric.

I couldn’t find it. Or the aetheric.

I’d gone completely headblind; I was unable to feel anything beyond my own normal human senses.

I’d lost my access to power.

“David!” I screamed it in panic this time, desperate to find him. I felt like I was suffocating, trapped inside my own skin.

So alone. I scrambled over rocks and bodies, looking for him with single-minded intensity, getting more and more panicked with every silent second.

I found him sitting on a boulder at the very tip of the island. He was naked and shivering.

“David? Oh God—honey—”

He was different. Very different.

When he raised his head, I saw that his eyes had gone plain brown.

Human brown.

I crouched down beside him and wrapped him in my arms. He tried to speak, but nothing came out. “My God. What happened to us?”

He couldn’t tell me.

I needed to signal the ship anchored out there, let them know we were still alive, but when I reached out for a spark of power, I found nothing. Nothing at all. Not a single tingle of energy that wasn’t fueled by the rapidly diminishing level of my own blood sugar.

I had no supernatural power at all.

Neither did David, as far as I could tell.

He got over a little bit of his violent shivering—enough to talk again. “B-b-black corner,” he whispered.

I knew what that meant. There’d been damage to the Earth Herself—damage that had destroyed the ability of the planet to channel energy to this part of the world. Most black corners were small; a few measured as much as a city block, but those were rare.

This one . . . there was no way to know how far it extended, but inside it Wardens wouldn’t have power, and Djinn wouldn’t be anything more than human—helpless, and ultimately dying as their stored energy ran out.

We had to get off the island. Now.

I gathered up dried palm husks and whatever I could scavenge from the bodies and ripped tents of the Sentinels that was burnable. I found some waterproof matches in a backpack and got a signal fire going. It wouldn’t burn for long, but it didn’t need to, and while it was burning, I wrapped David in the cast-off clothes of dead men and sat with him at the fire, trying to get him warm enough to stop shaking.

It seemed to take forever for a boat to arrive. When it did, it was full of Wardens, and Lewis was the first to step off the craft and onto the rocks.

He didn’t exactly rush to our aid. He looked ill, and almost fell as he made his slow, careful way over the rocks. He wasn’t the only one. All the rest of the Wardens looked just as bad.

“What’s happened?” I asked. “Lewis?”

He coughed, as if something was broken inside. He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth and leaned his weight against a boulder as if he was too weak to keep standing.

“When the portal leaked, you and David took the hit. You absorbed it and stopped it from going any deeper into the earth. If you hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here right now.” He stopped to cough again, and this time I wasn’t sure he’d stop. When he finally did, his voice was scratchy and thin. “But because you were joined when you took the hit, the shock bounced both ways. Through the Djinn, and through the Wardens.”

Oh dear God. “How bad is it?”

“It’s turned this whole part of the ocean into a giant black corner,” Lewis said. “We’ve got to get under way. If we run the engines hard, we might make it out of the dead zone before the Djinn start to die.”

David raised his head for the first time. “Won’t help us,” he said. “You and me.” He nodded to me, and I knelt next to him, my knees digging painfully into the edges of the stones.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What about us?”

“The blast—had to shift everything away to keep us alive—”

Lewis was getting it now, that bad feeling. I saw it as he straightened and looked more intensely at the two of us. “What is he talking about?”

David grabbed my arms. “Our powers are gone,” he said. “Had to destroy them. Had to.”

I wasn’t sure I could even dare to speak. I finally, slowly shook my head. I wanted to reject this. I wanted to believe that we were just wounded, maybe, temporarily stunned. Something.

“You mean the impact left the two of you human,” Lewis said. “No powers. Nothing but—human.”

David nodded, relief flooding over his face. He hadn’t been able to put enough words together, in his shattered state, to make sense out of it.

Human.

The two of us. Human.

I was suddenly aware of him in ways I’d never been before—of anxiety that I’d never felt before.

He was mortal. And I couldn’t protect him, or myself, from anything that could fly at us—weather, fire, earth. Demons. I couldn’t even bat away a simple tornado.

We were fragile.

“No,” he whispered, and put the warmth of his palm against my face. “No, think it through, Jo.”

It was hard to push past the fear, the knowledge that we were so much at risk, but I looked into his eyes for a long moment, and then I saw what he meant.

We were both human.

We could have a life together. A normal life.

We could have children of our own together.

“But—” My trembling fingers touched and traced his lips. The same lips, and different. “But you used to be—”

“I used to be human,” he said. “Long, long ago. And if I have to be human now, I can’t imagine a better partner for my life.”

He kissed me. It was a real, human kiss, intimate in ways that even our most amazing kisses hadn’t been, somehow. Bordered by our own awareness of mortality.

“Hate to interrupt this tender moment,” Lewis said, “but we’re fucked if we stay here. And by the way, your powers aren’t gone. They’re still out there, somewhere. Basic conservation of energy.”

We both looked at him. I saw a weary flash of utter hatred in David’s face. No, being human hadn’t taken away any of that antipathy. Definitely not. “Someone else inherited our powers.”

“The problem is we don’t know where they went,” Lewis said. “Or who’s got them. If we survive outrunning the black corner, we’ve still got to find out where your powers went. Worst-case Warden scenario—someone just woke up with enough power to destroy half the world and hasn’t got a clue what to do with it.”

“And the Djinn?”

“Ashan,” he said.“Worst-case scenario is that Ashan is now the sole Conduit for all of the Djinn, and he’s going to be very, very pissed off about Wardens in general.”

I pulled David to his feet, and realized that I could barely walk. My left leg and arm were covered with the scars that hadn’t had time to heal since the battle. Nothing was bleeding, but everything hurt, and hurt badly. I fought back tears and braced David as he took careful, halting steps.

He stopped, breathing hard, shaking his head. Overwhelmed.

“Hey,” I said, and grabbed his face in both my hands. “Don’t you give up on me now. We’re alive. We’re together. Don’t let him get to you. Our worst-case scenario is that we end up together. Human. Alive. That doesn’t sound so bad, right?”

He nodded, and a convulsive shudder went through him. He put his arms around me, and his head rested on my shoulder. The last of the Wardens boarded the rescue craft, and then it was our turn.

I didn’t want to let go.

“Fides mihi,” he said. “I said that, didn’t I? To get you back in time to save both of us?”

“I will always trust you.” I kissed him gently on cheeks that tasted of sweat and sea. “And I will always bring you home, my love.”

Fides mihi.

Now I had to make it count.