Cape Storm

Chapter Three

The map was confusing. That was all right; there were plenty of staff members around. Seems that the cruise line and the Wardens had thrown around a hell of a lot of talk about triple pay and hazard pay and bonuses, and as a result, the current passenger complement was outnumbered by its service staff by about two to one.

Which I’ve got to say would have been potentially amazing had I not regarded every single one of them as another weight of guilt on my conscience.

Three staff members and three sets of directions later, I arrived at the ship’s movie theater. I was late, of course, but not very. The lights were up, revealing opulently layered velvet curtains in the traditional dark reds and purples on the walls, some lovely Art Deco sconces, and seats for a couple of hundred people and their snacks.

There were thirty-eight Weather Wardens on board, and as I swiftly counted heads, I realized that I was one of the last to arrive.

Lewis watched me move down the stairs toward the stage, and I knew he was noting the way I slightly favored my newly funky leg. “Did someone forget to tell you to watch your step?” he asked in an undertone. Not that anyone was paying attention. The Wardens were talking among themselves, probably arguing the finer points of weather control.

“Funny,” I said. “Am I on time for the matinee of A Night to Remember?”

He wasn’t sidetracked. “What happened?”

“I got smacked on the aetheric. Hard. And I couldn’t see anybody doing it—not a trail, not a wave, nothing. No trace. And it hurt.”

That got his attention. “Hurt?”

“Like, ow, crap, damn. And when I came back down, my leg went out on me, like a power failure. It came back, but not right away.”

“Hmmmm.” Without the slightest self-consciousness, Lewis got down on one knee and put his large hands around my thigh. The conversations out in the auditorium came to a stammering halt, and I felt every pair of eyes in the place turn to focus on us.

I jumped a little, and there might have been a gasp involved, but he wasn’t interested in naughty groping at the moment. I felt his power slowly filter into me, rich and warm as sunlight. It followed the nerves in a slow glide down my leg, into my foot, and out.

You could have heard a pin drop in the place.

Lewis finally sat back. “I’m not finding anything except some strains in your muscles. Normal stuff.” He realized that everyone was staring and, for a moment, looked completely vapor-locked about it.

I cleared my throat. “Thanks for the laying on of hands. You might want to stop now, being that it looks a little odd.”

“Oh.” He let go and rose to his full, lanky height. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to—”

“I know.” The other Wardens were still watching us, but after a moment they started whispering together again. Yeah, I could bet what they were whispering. “Just be glad that David—”

“That David didn’t see you?” That was David, of course, arriving in a white whisper of fog that poured itself into his human form in less than an eyeblink. He sounded amused. “David did.”

“I’ll take it as written that you said to keep my grubby hands off your woman,” Lewis said. David raised an eyebrow. “Grubby not strong enough?”

“Before you say that in the future, most Djinn find the concept of owning someone else slightly offensive,” David said, and I could almost feel Lewis’s wince. “Jo’s her own woman. If she felt uncomfortable, she’d tell you.”

“Yeah, she always has.”

“Uh, guys?” I waved my hands. “Thanks for the macho plumage display, very attractive, but are we done? Time’s a-wasting.”

David smiled. He wasn’t competing with Lewis; he hadn’t for some time. He was possessive, on levels that he would never let anyone but me see, but he was done with jealousy. We were bonded, in his eyes, for eternity, or as long as my human body lasted. He had absolutely no reason to worry. “I came to tell you that the Djinn have completed preparations. We can begin anytime you’re ready.”

“Let’s not delay,” Lewis said, and stepped up to the edge of the theater’s proscenium. “Everybody focus. We’ve got work to do.”

There weren’t five people in the world who could get thirty-odd Wardens to shut up and listen without arguing, but Lewis was one of them. I wasn’t, so I shut up and paid attention, too. He’d taken his hour of downtime to shower, shave, and change clothes, and although he still looked exhausted, I wouldn’t have bet against him in a fight.

Which was good, because we were about to step into the ring for the fight of our lives.

“David,” Lewis said, “I need the Djinn to form a perimeter around the storm. Keep it from moving toward us. Try to hold it in place while we cut its generators.” By that, I understood that he was going to do the logical thing and try to affect not the storm but the underlying forces that fed its fury. There were relatively simple ways to do it, but out on the open ocean, they also required massive amounts of power. The less energy we spent chasing the damn thing around, the better.

David nodded. “It’ll stay as still as we can manage.”

That wouldn’t be easy, but he had at least fourteen Djinn at his command—ten of his own, four of Ashan’s. I didn’t think there were many things that a couple of Djinn couldn’t do, so fourteen seemed a pretty comfortable safety margin.

Still. I was getting a clammy line of sweat forming along my spine. Bad Bob knows us. He knows how we think. He’s one of us.

I wished I hadn’t thought of that.

Lewis paced, because that was what Lewis did when he was under stress. He prowled the stage, talking without focusing directly on anyone, even me. “Four teams,” he said. “Jo, you’re heading the team that will focus on a rapid cooling of the water temperature directly beneath the storm and out to a margin of about half a mile beyond. We’re shooting for a minimum drop of at least ten degrees.”

Someone in the audience whistled, and it was all I could do not to echo it. Ten degrees on the open ocean? Holy crap, that was hard. The amount of force it took to effect even one degree of change in that vast amount of water was astonishing.

“Ten degrees,” I said, and managed to keep the incredulity out of my voice. “All right.”

“Pick your team.”

David watched me as I looked out over the audience and called names. I knew most of them, and more important, I knew their capabilities. I wanted raw power, and for this, at least, I wasn’t overly concerned about fine control. There wasn’t a single person out there I’d name my bosom friend, but they were all solid talents. Good enough.

Predictably enough, though, someone raised a hand. It was Henry Jellico, whom I hadn’t picked. Henry was one of the worst know-it-alls that I’d ever met, despite being an overall nice enough guy. He’d studied hard, and dammit, he wanted every single person to know it. “Excuse me, Lewis, but wouldn’t it be wise to also match the cooling of the water with lowering the temperature of the exhaust process? Try matching it to the temperature of the eye to expand it outward?”

Lewis stopped pacing, but he didn’t face Jellico. “I believe I said four teams,” he said. “Henry, you’re in charge of team two. Exhaust process matched to the core temperature of the eye. Once you’ve got those equations balanced, try taking the whole thing down another five degrees.”

“Five?”

“Please.”

Henry Jellico wasn’t in for any picnic, either. Lewis waited as Henry picked his ten Wardens, and then chose Amanda Chavez to head up the third team, which was smaller and focused on lowering wind speed. The fourth team batted cleanup, remaining in reserve and watching for any imminent threats, and it was headed up by Lewis himself.

I sat down on the edge of the stage, my legs dangling over the lip, and lowered my head in concentration. Out in the audience, all the Wardens did the same. We looked like we were engaged in prayer; in a sense, that was what we were doing, only on a slightly more active scale.

“Anybody got an eyewall wind speed on this beast?” someone asked.

“Approaching two hundred fifty miles per hour,” Lewis said. We had a moment of contemplation on that one. The storm was seriously powerful. The highest speed the Wardens had ever measured in an eyewall was two hundred fifty-five, give or take a bit. There was no such thing as a Category 6 storm, but if there was, this might have been the template. “One last thing. There’s been a report that our enemies might have the ability to strike us while we’re on the aetheric, maybe even causing physical side effects. Watch yourselves, and my team will deal with any attacks that come at you.” That raised a few heads. “Let’s get it done. The faster we’re in and out, the safer we are.”

I rose up into the aetheric, and the entire roomful of Wardens rose up with me. They were an army of glittering, powerful forms, shifting from the limitations of the physical to the more metaphorical shapes we registered on higher planes. I never knew what I looked like—none of us did—but I watched Henry Jellico morph from a mild little man into a bulky, muscular warrior who’d have been at home in World of Warcraft swinging a barbarian axe. Some Wardens didn’t even keep human shapes; Greta Van Der Waal became a shining white dog that bounded and leaped through the clouds. We all had our fantasies, our true natures, and we couldn’t really control how others saw us.

Lewis looked like himself. Always. He had a powerful aura, but the essence of him never changed, and that was both impressive and a bit on the scary side.

Speech wasn’t possible on the aetheric—after all, no lips, tongues, teeth, or lungs—but the Wardens had developed their own methods of communication, mostly hand signals. I grabbed my team members’ attention and arrowed up, fast and high, getting above the towering storm. It was like taking a glass elevator past a vertical oil spill. Nasty, and shiver-inducing. We went up almost ten miles into the atmosphere and leveled out at the top, where the storm formed a smooth dome. This was where the intake/exhaust process went on, dragging in warm air, cycling it down through the eye, breathing it out.

It was a living thing, after all, however strange it might be to our senses and logic.

The aura colors of the storm hadn’t changed significantly from my first impressions—dark, shot through with photonegative spots and shapes, with livid purple around the edges. I didn’t see any sign of that poisonous, otherworldly green that I’d glimpsed, though.

Good.

I felt a shudder running through the aetheric—a thicker atmosphere than the regular physical world, almost like matter caught in a phase transition from gas to liquid. Few things in the real world could stay at that balance point, but I’d always thought the aetheric was nothing but that—a place where everything, always, was transitional.

The shudder that ran through the aetheric came from the Djinn grabbing the storm and pulling it to a violent halt.

It fought them almost instantly, twisting, slashing back with waves of power. This was the dangerous part; if the forces got too far out of balance, things would happen that none of us could anticipate or control. We were dealing with the power of several nuclear bombs. Not the sort of thing where you want to apologize for a mistake to whatever survivors are left wandering around.

I signaled my team, and we took the express elevator back down, plunging through the storm and into the thick black water beneath it. The area directly beneath it was devoid of life; the residents of the sea that normally thronged the area had prudently departed. Good. I didn’t want to be responsible for any massive fish kills, anyway.

My team—good people all—spread themselves out in an approximate rough circle near the edges of the storm’s fury, and each of us concentrated on a pie-shaped wedge of the water—not that water was static, of course, which was what made this so difficult. Water, like air, was always in motion. Unlike air, it had real density, and it took a lot more effort to really make a change in it on the molecular level.

Ten degrees. Thanks for nothing, Lewis.

I’d pushed my section down a solid eight degrees, but I could sense that there were massive imbalances emerging from the change. Some of the others were having trouble managing the temperature shift at all. Nobody had hit the ten-degree mark. To make matters worse, power was collecting in odd places, like pockets of gas in a mine. That was the risk of working with multiple Wardens.

I think I sensed trouble coming—an oddly thick ripple in the aetheric, maybe—and then I saw one of my Wardens spin helplessly out of position, losing control of her weather working. She vanished into the heart of the storm, and I felt her screaming.

Then I felt her stop.

Something was attacking us.

The fragile balances that the Wardens had built—layers of control, of forces, of risk—began to shatter like a glass tower in an earthquake. I desperately struggled to hold on to what we’d achieved. More Wardens were being attacked around me by invisible forces—battered the same way I had been earlier, but with far deadlier results. I could sense terrible things happening, but I had to hold on. Hold on. The strain increased. I was strong, but this was too much for any one Warden to hold on to . . . and then the storm ripped free of the Djinn holding it and began to move.

No way I could stay with it as it roared closer, heading for the Grand Paradise.

Something grabbed me as I faltered, but instead of bracing me, it dragged me backward, away from the fight. Up. Out.

I was just far enough away to survive what happened next.

The storm pulsed and shifted into that poisonous green color, shot through with drifting flecks of red and jagged cutting edges of black.

The power that the Wardens had been manipulating exploded in a brilliant burst of light, and I felt it rip through me, flaying apart my aetheric body. I re-formed, slowly and painfully, and fell with unbalanced speed back into my own body.

I jerked, gasped, and almost fell off the edge of the stage. David had me by the arms, and he dragged me backward into his embrace. He was seated on the stage, and I fell weakly against his chest. I felt broken inside, shredded, unable to think or feel.

My eyes focused slowly, and my hearing told me that people were shouting. Screaming.

Earth Wardens were arriving in the theater, summoned by emergency signal, and they were dragging limp Weather Wardens out of their seats and laying them flat for treatment. Lewis was already down there, holding Henry Jellico in his arms, pressing his palm to Henry’s pale, high forehead. Henry was completely still. Lewis was gasping, shuddering, barely holding himself together.

“What happened?” I whispered. David’s arms tightened around me.

“Don’t try to move,” he said. “You can’t help them.”

“But—” I tried to get my body under control, but it was like swimming through syrup. Slow and cold and clumsy. “They’re—”

“Dying,” David said. His voice was low and hushed, and very gentle. “Most of them are dying, and there’s nothing you can do to help that now.”

“No!” This time I put real effort into the struggle. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t David’s strength holding me back—it was my own weakness. I collapsed against him again, sweating and shaking, and watched as my fellow Wardens slipped away into the dark.

I’d been right. Bad Bob knew us.

In one stroke, he’d chopped down a significant number of the Wardens who could have posed a threat to him.

And I had no idea how he’d done it.

In the end, more than half of the Weather Wardens couldn’t be saved. They’d been the closest to that blast of power, or they’d been drawn into the storm’s hungry maw. Their aetheric forms had been completely destroyed, and there was no soul to come back into the bodies they’d left behind. Without that, the body stuttered and died, and there was nothing any Earth Warden, however powerful, could do to stop it.

That didn’t mean Lewis didn’t try with every last ounce of courage he had left before he collapsed and had to be carried away.

It was a dark, silent place after that.

I sat there numbed, watching as the dead were lined up on the stage. Most of my water team had caught the blast, or been spun into the center of the storm by invisible attacks. Henry’s team, which had been mirrored above, had been a little luckier, but not that much.

It was a devastating blow.

“Sons of bitches were waiting for us,” I whispered. I didn’t feel as shaky now, but I was still cold and weak. Someone had done me the kindness of wrapping me tightly in a thick thermal blanket, and my body heat was slowly coming back.

Cherise was holding my hand. I don’t know who’d called her, but she’d appeared before David had let go of me, and I hadn’t been left without human contact since. I wondered if they were afraid I would just dissolve without it, like those poor bastards we’d just led to their deaths.

David had gone to see to Lewis, though I doubted that there was much that could be done for him, either. He was strong. He would survive.

It was our mutual curse, seemed like. Being strong.

“Somebody pulled me out,” I said. “Was it David?”

Cherise’s thumb rubbed lightly over my knuckles, and she squeezed my fingers. “I don’t know. He’s not so sharey right now.” Even Cher’s usual defiant good cheer was gone, replaced by a sobriety that was new to me. “You just sit and rest.”

“The storm—”

“It’s moved off to the west,” she said, which surprised me. “At least, that’s what the bridge crew told me.”

“You were on the bridge?”

She raised an eyebrow, and an echo of the old Cherise came bouncing back. “Honey, there are men in uniform on the bridge.” She let it fade again. “It looks like we’re in the clear. For a while, anyway. Let yourself recover a little.”

I nodded, still feeling numb, and for no apparent reason, burst into tears. Cherise rubbed my back and murmured things that I didn’t hear, a comforting sound like rain on the window. I wasn’t the only person having a breakdown. At least three of the other Wardens had already been removed from the room, unable to stop crying and shaking.

“You should go lie down,” Cherise said. “Nothing you can do here, babe.”

She was right, but with Lewis flat on his back, the Wardens needed a leader, and by default I was it. I wiped my eyes, took a deep breath, and shook my head. I unwrapped the blanket and stood up.

Cherise took my arm, balancing me on my feet before stepping away and letting me go it on my own.

I found a knot of uniformed crew members outside in the theater lobby, whispering together. They fell silent when they spotted me—fear, or respect, I couldn’t tell and didn’t care. I suspected my blue eyes held something terrible, because none of them would look at me directly.

“What can we do, miss?”

“Body bags,” I said. “I assume you have some on board. I’ll also need some medical assistance, as we have some very traumatized people. Bring tranquilizers.”

They all exchanged startled glances. One of the female stewards nodded and stepped away to a phone. The response time for the medical staff was impressive, but then again, it wasn’t like they had lots to occupy them right now. I followed the gurneys, doctors, and nurses into the theater, and went to consult with the next most senior Warden in the room.

That was a Fire Warden named Brett Jones. Brett was a big man, solid; I’d heard he played professional football, once upon a time, but he’d taken retirement before it had left him too busted up. He nodded when I approached him. The Fire Warden contingent of our little war party had been kept out of danger so far, but I could see that the losses had affected him just as deeply as they had me.

“What went wrong, Jo?” he asked. He sat me down next to him, angling to face me as much as a man that big could in theater chairs. “Nobody can give me a decent explanation of what went on up there.”

“I’m not sure I can, either,” I said. “There’s something on the aetheric. I can’t see it, but I can feel it, and it can hurt us. That’s how it started. Then the storm itself—it was like it converted our power into something else. It changed, Brett. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I have,” said a childlike third voice, and we both looked up to see the Djinn Venna leaning over a seat in the next row, staring at us with unearthly calm blue eyes. “Do you want to know what it is?”

We exchanged looks. “Uh, if you don’t mind?” Brett said. He knew what Venna was, and he was nervous. So was I, but for different reasons.

Venna’s small, pointed face screwed up into a frown. “If I minded, why would I have offered?”

“Forget it, Ven. Tell us.”

The frown smoothed out into a bland mask. “You shouldn’t order me, you know.”

I felt a savage bite of anger. “It’s been a bad day. And I’m not too concerned about your fragile Djinn feelings right now. You’ll live.”

From the disbelieving stare Brett was giving me, I could tell he couldn’t quite grasp that I was sassing a supernatural time bomb of power this way, but I really didn’t care. Venna wasn’t going to hurt us, and I didn’t want to play ego games.

She let it pass. “A long time ago, there was a thing that happened. It doesn’t matter what it was, but it left a kind of scar between the highest plane of our existence and another place. A bad place.”

“The place where Demons dwell,” I said. “Right?”

“Oh no,” she replied. “Much worse than that. The Demons love aetheric energy, but really all they want is to eat their fill and go back where they belong. No, this is a place the Demons fear. We don’t know what lives there, but it came through, once.”

“Came through,” Brett repeated. “What happened when it did?”

“The universe died,” Venna said. “I told you it was a long time ago.”

I stared at her, speechless. So did Brett. So did everyone else within earshot of this bizarre conversation.

She tilted her small head sideways. “What?”

“Um—even you can’t be that old, Venna.”

“I’m not. I read about it.”

“Where? At the Djinn Bookmobile?”

“Of course not.” She kicked her feet, just like a regular kid at the movies. “In the stars. In the dirt. In the water. It’s all around us. You can’t see it?” She answered her own question with a shake of her head. “Of course you can’t. Even most of the Djinn can’t see back that far. What we are wasn’t always this, you know. Everything in the universe recycles. Universes expand, contract, explode again. But this wasn’t from our universe. It was bad.”

“I’m—not sure how this is going to help us,” Brett said.

I was. “You’re saying that what’s on the aetheric, what took over the storm, it’s what came through last time?”

“No. I’m saying that it started this way, before. With the storm, and the power, and the ghosts.”

“Ghosts.” It was my turn to repeat her words. “On the aetheric.”

“You can’t see them, can you?”

“What kind of ghosts?”

“I can’t see them either,” Venna said, “but they’re angry. They don’t like Wardens.”

“Do they like the Djinn?”

“They don’t notice us, really. At least, not so far.”

This was interesting, but it wasn’t getting us where I needed to be. “Venna, I need a way to stop this. Is Bad Bob behind it?”

“He was,” she said, and her eyes went unfocused and distant. “He opened the door, but he’s not interested in what’s coming through. Chaos is what he wants. It’s what he’s getting.” She snapped back to focus with such suddenness that I flinched. “You can stop it, but not if he keeps the gate open. You need to stop him, and then you can worry about the rest.”

“What about the storm?”

“You can’t hurt it. You can only survive it.”

Kind of like this day. “Venna,” I said, and looked right into her eyes. Not a comfortable experience, really. “Can you kill Bad Bob for me?”

She considered the question for a long, silent moment. “No,” she said. “I could hurt him, but he could hurt me just as much. His power cancels mine in many ways, and I think he might just be worse than I am.”

“You mean he could kill you.”

“No, he probably couldn’t. But I wouldn’t like what was left of me, in the end, if I won.” She said it without much emphasis—just a calm assessment of her chances, nothing to be afraid of. “It’s better if you do it, anyway. Humans. You don’t have the same vulnerabilities that we do.”

It was very odd to hear a Djinn talk about human strengths instead of considering us slightly less useful than a soiled tissue.

Of course, she ruined it by adding, “And you’re much more easily replaced.”

Lovely. “Does he have any vulnerabilities?”

“Of course. He can still die,” she said. “He can still feel pain. Part of him is still human. A small part, but it remains, and it feels things the way humans do. The way you do.”

I felt the ship’s speed lurch, accelerating. Some of the ship’s staff looked startled.

That wasn’t standard procedure, obviously.

“I sped us up,” Venna said. “We were moving too slowly. I don’t want the storm catching us again. It would be inconvenient.”

Maybe, but now I could feel the thudding impacts of waves through the ship, and the very slight rolling had increased to a definite wallow. A ship this large dampened the usual motion of the sea, but in waves this high, at unnatural speed, we were going to be in for a rough ride.

I glanced at Brett, who was already looking distinctly uncomfortable. “Better get the ship’s stores to break out the giant economy-size Dramamine.”

He nodded. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. Bad Bob was a Weather Warden, when he still had just his regular set of powers. Fire may be our best bet to overcome him—it’s his biggest weakness. You get your guys ready. I want original ideas, something he can’t anticipate or plan for.” I chewed my lip for a second. “And whatever your plans are—don’t tell me about them. I’d rather you keep it in your team.”

Whatever he thought of that, Brett nodded and left me. I sat, watching the dead Wardens being loaded into body bags, then trundled away on gurneys.

I looked at the faces of the survivors. Almost all the Wardens had gathered now, except those with specific duties related to the voyage or standing lookout up on the aetheric, and they all had a similar expression.

They were measuring themselves against the body bags.

I stood up and walked to the stage. I didn’t go up, just stood in front of where the medical team was working. Venna turned in her seat to watch me, and all the Wardens did as well.

“Okay,” I said, “I’m not going to lie to you. We knew this trip would be tough, and today we got clear evidence of that. We made a mistake, and it cost lives, but those lives were not wasted. It’s the duty of Wardens to give their lives in the protection of others. It’s part of the oath we all took when we signed on to this job.” I paused and made sure that sank in. “Now we know things we didn’t know before, and couldn’t know without triggering that trap. It sucks, yes, but our enemies aren’t playing around. They want us dead, every single one of us. Every Warden and every Djinn. Once we’re gone, there’s nothing standing between them and the defenseless human beings of Earth. Once humans are gone, they’ll strip this planet clean of every single thing with a connection to the aetheric—every animal, plant, insect, and bacterium. They’ll devour all the aetheric energy they can get, and then they’ll leave. It’s what they do.”

The only sound in the theater was that of body bags being quietly zipped behind me.

“The Wardens were formed to save people,” I said. “For thousands of years, we’ve tried our best to do that. Sometimes we’ve been better at it than others. Sometimes we’ve outright sucked, like lately. But we can save people. We have to. We’re Wardens, and we cannot give up. Ever. Agreed?”

A few of them murmured or nodded. Wintry, unwilling agreement, but at least it was a start. “So what now?” asked one of the Earth Wardens, holding the hand of a still-trembling and shell-shocked Weather Warden survivor.

“Now we get ready to kill us a Demon,” I said. “And if you’ve got any good ideas, start talking.”

Sometime later—hours later, in fact—I realized that I was hungry, and so tired I was likely to doze off even if Bad Bob himself showed up and asked me to tango. Food wasn’t an issue; the ship’s staff brought us buffets, mountains of sandwiches and chips and drinks, entrées steaming in silver trays, sliced cheeses and elaborate desserts. I guessed we were getting first-class treatment. It tasted good, although I didn’t linger after I got a turkey sandwich into my system.

I grabbed a ship’s map and tried to find my way back to my cabin. The effort was marginally successful. Hallways were clearly labeled, but faded into one another with dizzying regularity. Add in the other decks, and I could see that I’d be getting lost for some time to come. That was something I really couldn’t afford. You never know when you might need to get somewhere in a real hurry.

Following my map led me down a maze of corridors, mostly deserted . . . whole decks were empty and lifeless now. Somehow, my exhausted brain betrayed me during some turning, and I found myself in an area that didn’t match up to my less-than-expert map reading.

A housekeeper was just coming out of one of the cabins, and I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned, smiling. She was a cinnamon-skinned young woman with black hair pulled back in a sleek, lacquered bun, and warm chocolate eyes. Not very tall, but graceful. I could see her as a dancer, somehow, moonlighting as a maid.

“Miss?” she asked. “Can I be of assistance?” She spoke excellent English, though I could tell it wasn’t her mother tongue.

I held out my hand. “My name is Joanne Baldwin. I’m one of your—ah—special guests. You’re on staff, right?”

She looked at my outstretched hand, at my face, and slowly took my fingers to shake. “Hello, Miss Baldwin. But I’m not staff. I’m crew.”

“There’s a difference? Call me Joanne.”

“We’re not allowed to use the first names of guests, miss,” she said. “Yes, staff would be the people who work in guest relations areas. I’m a cabin stewardess. We’re crew, not staff.” She read the expression on my face, and smiled. “Ships are very tightly regimented, miss. We all know our duties and where we fit.”

“Trust me, the rules are going to be shredded on this trip. So I’m Joanne, and you are . . . ?”

“Aldonza Araujo,” she said, and her handshake grew a little more firm. We were about the same age, I thought. “Aldonza, miss.”

I gave up temporarily on forcing informality on her. “I’m looking for my cabin. I know I’m close, but—”

She got my cabin number and showed me the route by tracing a French-manicured fingernail on the map. I’d mirror-imaged my route, and I’d somehow ended up on the opposite side of where I should have been. Port, not starboard, in nautical terms. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go around this way,” she said.

I frowned down at the map. “What about this way?” It was marked in featureless gray.

“Those are service areas, miss. You can’t go that way.”

“I’m pretty sure that for us there is no such thing as off-limits. We’re not regular guests. You know what I mean?”

She did, but her smile instantly froze solid. “I—I am sorry, but I can’t—we’re not allowed—”

“Aldonza.” I interrupted her gently enough, but firmly, and took her hand in both of mine. “You signed the waivers, right? The Wardens explained to you what kind of risk was involved in staying on this ship?”

She nodded mutely. I could sense that she wanted to pull away from me, but also that her curiosity was burning a hole in her head. Instead of asking, she just waited.

“The fact is, we’re not going to be regular passengers,” I said. “Think of us as policemen, or military personnel. We don’t need coddling, but we do need to know everything about this ship we can, from the technical stuff to the most insignificant details. It could mean the difference between life and death for everybody on board if things get worse.”

I watched that sink in, but Aldonza still shook her head in refusal. “I can’t let you in, not without someone telling me I can. It’s strictly against regulations.”

“Okay, you can tell me how to get there, and if I happen to stumble accidentally into the crew areas, then it’s not your fault, right?” She hesitated. “Please, Aldonza. It could be important. I promise, I’ll talk to Security and to the Chief Engineer too, but in my experience, the bosses don’t know everything.They think they know everything. You are the guys who really understand the ship.”

She actually laughed, covering her mouth with her hand, as if too loud a sound was definitely Not Done in the posh areas, at least not when wearing a uniform. “That’s true,” she agreed, but she sobered from her brief burst of laughter far too quickly. “It’s not possible for you to go through the crew area without being seen and stopped. The ship has lots of surveillance. Cameras everywhere. We all know each other. We have to, living in such close quarters. If they don’t know you and you’re in off-limits areas, they’ll call security and escort you out.” She was shaking her head again, clearly talking herself out of even trying it. “We have very good security people. It’s not worth the risk. Talk to the captain or the Executive Officer.”

I tried to imagine any of the security people being prepared to deal with even a middle-grade Warden, much less somebody like me or Lewis or the Djinn. I failed. “Okay,” I said, because Aldonza clearly was feeling more and more uncomfortable. “I suppose it’s a bad idea anyway. I’ll take the long way around.—But, just for future reference, what do the crew-area doors look like?”

Aldonza blinked. “I thought you knew.”

Huh? My confusion must have registered, because she looked behind me at a simple door with a swipe card lock labeled PRIVATE.

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Thanks.”

She clearly thought I was crazy, and she wasn’t about to get fired over it. From the glances she threw back at me as she moved down the hallway, she was trying to make sure I wouldn’t do anything wrong—at least not before she was safely away from the scene of the crime.

Couldn’t really blame her.

I pretended to read my map, waiting until she’d had plenty of escape time. I marked the location of the crew door on it and noted the locations of the surveillance cameras, too.

I could pop the door right open, with a relatively minor pulse of power. I could fritz out the cameras, too.

But the truth was, I could do that anytime I needed to, and right now it wasn’t my first choice. I just wanted to reach my soft, expensively appointed bed.

I looked up at the surveillance eyes focused on where I stood, sighed, and took the long way around.

I still got lost. This huge floating palace was like some creepily deserted amusement park—all the lights were on, but there seemed to be a faintly sinister edge to everything. It was made to be inhabited, to be full of life and fun and conversation, and instead there was just fear. The few people I spotted were staff (crew?) going about their business.

I somehow ended up on the Grand Promenade, or at least that was what I read on the map. It was the big railed expanse looking out over the ocean. Overhead, the sky was nail gray, and the water looked just as hard and unfriendly, with sharp-edged waves. The Grand Paradise was big and heavy enough to cleave its way through like a knife, even at the labored speed we were moving.

The promenade was deserted, too. I stood in the clammy wind for a while, watching the endless rolling of the waves, and then I yawned and felt my eyelids growing even heavier.

So tired.

At least, I was tired until I felt a hot, seductive tingle on my back, just over the shoulder blade. That jerked me back to full alert like a jab from a cattle prod.

I didn’t make any more stops on my way.

Safely in the bedroom—no sign of Cherise downstairs—I sat down, closed my eyes, and focused on David. I can’t really describe the connection between the two of us; the ceremony and the vows—even though our wedding had been interrupted by Bad Bob’s attack, and technically not really finished—had pulled us together, bound us in ways that even now I couldn’t understand, except that it made it easier to call him when I needed him.

When I opened my eyes, David was forming out of the air in a swirl of gray and gold. There was something blank in his eyes this time, as if I’d taken him away from something both terrible and important. He’d been with Lewis. I wondered how bad it was.

Then he took a deep breath and willed it away, whatever it was.

“The mark is burning,” I said, without any preamble at all. He took on human form and flesh and sat down next to me. He felt warm as summer, and he smelled faintly of spices and real, human sweat, deliciously male. His fingers unbuttoned my cotton camisole and pushed it down my arms, and then he unhooked my bra and slid it off. There was no seduction in it, or at least not as much as I’d have liked; he was very focused on the job at hand.

When his fingertips pressed on the black torch mark on my back, we both gasped. He spread his whole left hand over it, and the heat spread, increased to an agonizing burn that felt as if it should come with the sound of sizzling. His right arm went around me, holding me up, keeping me from fighting him to get away from the pain.

With shocking suddenness, the fire turned to ice, a chill that ripped all the way through me, and I shuddered. When I exhaled, my breath frosted the air in delicate feathers that vanished in seconds.

I couldn’t feel the mark on my back anymore, and that was a huge relief. But, as David trailed his fingers over it, I realized that I could feel less of the area around it, too. The numb spot was growing.

I turned to look at him, and caught the unguarded pain in his face before he could hide it from me. He was tired, and he was anguished. Worse, he was despairing.

“Stop that,” I said. “What’s happening?”

“It’s getting larger,” he said. “I had to expand the containment to keep it within the boundaries. You can’t push yourself this hard.”

“I know that, and yet I’m not seeing I have much of a choice. How’s Lewis?”

He didn’t want to tell me, but I think he knew I wasn’t about to let him slip away without an explanation.“Fighting his guilt,” David finally said. “He blames himself for the deaths. He feels he made a tactical error.”

That wasn’t unexpected. “He made the right choices at the time. We had to give it a try.”

“I know. He’s afraid that he rushed into it. He’s afraid that he allowed personal issues to color the decision.”

“That’ll be the day,” I said, and then wondered what that meant. “Personal, how?” Please, let it not be about me.

“Rahel,” David said softly. “He can feel her suffering, just as I can. Bad Bob is making sure we can feel it.”

Bad Bob had a Djinn named Rahel in his clutches—one of David’s New Djinn, and someone I could almost call a friend. He could do whatever he wanted to her—the curse of a Djinn being bound to a bottle, of having her will taken away. And she couldn’t fight back. The nightmare dimensions of that stretched on and on into the darkness, because I knew how sick Bad Bob’s imagination had been even years back. God only knew how much worse he was these days, with so much Demon in his body that I wasn’t even sure the old Bad Bob was still around in any form I would recognize.

Rahel had done me some very kind favors in the past. She was never to be trifled with, or underestimated, but unlike a lot of the Djinn, she did care, however remotely, about the fate of individual humans—and the fate of the human race.

David, as her connection to the power source of Mother Earth, would feel every injury done to her. I wasn’t sure, but I thought that her connection to Lewis was more about personal feelings than old-fashioned lines of fealty. She liked him. He liked her. Maybe it went deeper than that. He’d never felt the need to tell me, and I didn’t ask. I had thought their relationship was more of a hookup than love, but I could have been wrong.

I put my hand on David’s cheek and looked him full in the face for a long, long moment. “How bad is it with her?” I asked him. I didn’t want a kind evasion. I didn’t want anything but the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and he could sense that from me. “Is he going to destroy her?”

“Eventually,” he said, and gently took my wrist. “There’s nothing more I can do for Rahel just now. She would want me to focus on those I can help.”

“You’ve done all you can for me, too.”

“Yes,” he said, and I could see he hated to admit that. “I’m slowing it down, but that’s all I can do. It’s deep, and it’s still growing. But I intend to keep trying. I’m not giving up, not on either of you.”

He wasn’t saying anything we didn’t both know, but I could hear the frustration in his voice, and the anguish. I slipped my arms around his neck and the two of us cuddled close for a moment. His lips found mine, long and lingering.

“You’re tired,” he murmured. Like the gentleman he was at heart, David slipped the bra back up my arms, turned me around, and fastened it for me. He even buttoned up my camisole. “I want you to rest.”

I was more used to him undressing me. This felt . . . warm. Intimate in a way that seemed more personal than unbridled passion. It was the kind of thing a husband did for a wife—an everyday kind of gentleness.

It made me crave him so badly.

“David?” My voice came out very small. “I can’t sleep. Will you stay with me? Just for now?”

His arms wrapped around me and his head rested on my shoulder. I felt a shudder go through him, some emotion I couldn’t name. When he looked up, the intensity of it was enough to shatter my heart.

“I’ll stay,” he said, and eased me down onto the bed. “I’ll stay as long as you’re awake.”

“Big promises, Mister Big Shot,” I said. “What if a cat gets stuck up a tree in Peoria? I bet you’d go running off to the rescue.”

“You know how seriously I take a vow. Unless I made one to the cat, you’re my priority.” He tapped me gently on the nose, and there was humor in his face now. “Clothes off or on?”

“Oh God, off. Off off off.”

We were naked before our backs hit the mattress, thanks to David’s wondrous Djinn fabric-vanishing powers. The duvet settled over us like snowfall, but it was warm beneath it, so warm, and when his lips touched mine it was a dreamlike kiss, damp and gentle and sweet. I rested my head on the pillow of his arm and moved in closer, drawn without a word being spoken. His fingers brushed hair from my face and feathered it back, then lingered on my cheek, drawing heat down to my chin.

“Please,” I whispered. “Please make all this go away. Just for a while. Can you do that?”

“I’m only a Djinn,” he said. “Not God Himself. But I’ll do what I can.”

His lips brushed their heat down, taking all the time in the world, pausing in unexpected and vulnerable places. The inner aspect of my forearms. My wrists. The delicate skin just beneath my breasts. He began to suck, drawing my blood to the skin with slow deliberation. He left a map of visible kisses down my body, a slow and thorough awakening of my entire body that made me writhe silently, sheets fisted in my hands.

Oh, I forgot. I forgot everything.

Gradually, his mouth became demanding. Challenging. Nips of his teeth, strokes of his tongue. My control slipped, and I made a tortured sound in the back of my throat, rising up to meet him. I didn’t want seduction right now. I wanted to be ravished, and he could feel it echoing out of me like a ringing bell.

I could tell the exact second that his control slipped gears. His body language shifted, tensed, and he raised his head and looked at me. My already quickened pulse jumped, because the look in those Djinn-bronze eyes was feral. Wanting. I sat up and met him halfway through the space and devoured his mouth, hungry and desperate, full of feverish need and frantic energy. It fed back through the link between us, striking like lightning through a grounded circuit, shorting out whatever defenses we’d kept built between us.

When I pulled back, David’s eyes were no longer bronze. They were fire, with pupils of absolute darkness. Mine, I thought incoherently. Mine. I didn’t know if that came from me or from him. It had the force of a Djinn emotion, something vastly more complex than simple human possessiveness.

David growled and put a hand on my chest and pushed me all the way back full length on the bed. He followed, not quite putting his weight on me. Brushes of his hot skin teased and tortured us both. He ran his palm lightly over the rising tilt of my left nipple and flicked his tongue over the right, and the difference in sensations made me gasp. His hand was light, delicate, and burning hot; his mouth was heavy, demanding, and deliciously wet. I bit my lip and felt my whole body shudder in response. I heard an answering sound from David—need, lust, love, wordless reassurance.

We were both on the knife-edge of control. David had never fully let his Djinn instincts out to play before, not like this. I think he’d been too afraid—afraid of hurting me, afraid that I’d be shocked by the depths of his needs and desires.

I knew better. I put my hands around his face and held him still for a moment, staring deep into those inhuman eyes.

And then I nodded. No words, and none necessary.

His skin took on a dusting of gold, and then darker shades, until he seemed more metal than flesh—but it was flesh to the touch, warm and soft and firm. He tasted like exotic spices—cardamom, saffron, wild honey from the rocks. Everything about him was different, and yet everything was exactly the same.

His hand slipped lower down my body, into the slick folds between my thighs. The sensation was overwhelming—burning and cooling at the same time. His thumb pressed and stroked while his long, lovely fingers slipped within. His mouth closed over mine, cinnamon-hot, and I sucked his tongue and tasted fire.

Ecstasy to the power of infinity.

The old, wild magic spiraled up inside of me, exultant, slow pulses that built on each other. Yes, God, yes . . . When I came I did it silently, rigidly, holding the awesome force of it inside and giving it to David through the link between us.

It drove him beyond human disguises, and light exploded in the room. I heard him gasping, struggling to stay with me in flesh, because flesh was what we both needed just now.

He solidified again into skin, hot and firm against me. I rolled over and up to my hands and knees, and felt the fiery stroke of his hands over my back, down my hips, between my thighs . . .

I gasped and dropped my head to the pillow as the relentless pleasure of him filled me. Nothing mattered in that moment—only the need, the all-encompassing need to feel. Every thrust traveled through my body in shattering waves, as intense as any sensation I’d ever known. I heard David whispering in that liquid, sibilant language that I knew must have been his native tongue, the language of fire, of Djinn. I didn’t know the words, but I heard the music—dark, delicious, and utterly abandoned.

He knew just the right spot to hit to shatter me completely. I screamed as another orgasm flooded me like boiling light. It spilled into him, triggering a matching explosion that rocked us both to the core.

The room was full of light.

I caught my breath to hold on to the pure, silvery perfection of that moment, riding the waves, feeling them slowly and gently diminish.

We hadn’t said a word, not in English. David still didn’t. He continued to move inside me—slow, gentle strokes—and kissed the small of my back. It was the gentlest gesture after such an aggressive, passionate coupling, and it promised me, without the luxury of words, that whatever boundaries we found ourselves crossing, he would always lead me back.

David eased down next to me on the bed, flushed and glowing and triumphant. Human, and not.

So much power and control, made vulnerable through me.

I felt a tingle of heat in my back. No. Not now. It faded, more like a warning than an attack.

I curled into David’s body and recovered my breath. Despite everything the past few hours flooded back, bringing guilt and regret. What right do I have to be happy? I had none. Maybe I never would. That wasn’t safe. I couldn’t surrender control like that, not with Bad Bob’s mark on my back. What if he’d taken advantage of that moment to strike? What if he’d taken control?

“Jo.” David’s voice was rough, not quite steady. When I looked up into his eyes, I recognized the expression. “I see I can’t make the world stop for long. And you think too much.”

“I was just thinking what a terrible risk that was,” I said. “Because—”

“Because of the mark.”

I nodded. He lifted himself up on one elbow and looked down at me, golden skin still shimmering in the light, flushed in all the right places.

“I know,” he said, and trailed his fingertips over the line of my collarbone. “But you’re my wife, and no matter what the risks might be, that matters more to me.”

“I love you,” I whispered. “But you need to be careful. Especially with me.”

His smile was warm enough to light every candle in the world. “I was, at first. But I fell in love with you instead. Now there is no safety from you.”

I burrowed close to him, and his arms wrapped around me, and for the moment it was all quiet. All peace.

“For as long as we live,” he said, and kissed the top of my head. “Which means forever, if I have any say in it.”