Cape Storm

Chapter Five

After Mr. Cole, the others seemed meek as kittens. Spiteful, furious, spitting, hissing kittens with needle-sharp claws and biting teeth. Each cabin seemed to come with its own particularly darling set of divalicious problems. Take Holly Addams, the model. . . . She had two employees, one of whom was solely occupied in making her disgusting-looking smoothies whenever she got hungry. They must have been made out of cardboard and water, because she had less body fat on her than your average piece of dry bone. She also had a trunk full of illegal and controlled substances, which explained why she hadn’t left the ship when ordered. Her employees were just hapless and cowed. I tried not to traumatize them any more than I had to.

Three bankers in a row, two male and one female, all of whom had refused to leave out of lapdog-like devotion to star clients. These were rich people in their own right, but they’d gotten that way by single-minded dedication to that art of brownnosing, and they weren’t about to stop the habit of a lifetime now. No connection to Bad Bob that I could find for them, their assistants, or (in the case of one of them) his mistress, who was ensconced in the downstairs bedroom.

And then we ran into Cynthia Clark.

“The Cynthia Clark?” I asked Aldonza, who was still hustling clean towels around the hallway. She nodded. “Isn’t she making a movie?”

“She was,” Aldonza said. “But she quit. I don’t know why. Now she’s here.”

Cynthia Clark was an old-school star—glamorous, beautiful, icy cool. If Grace Kelly had ever had a rival, or Audrey Hepburn had ever worried about being upstaged, she was the source of their anxiety. Her 1960sera films were classics. So were her ’70s efforts. By the ’80s she’d transitioned from starlet roles to tough matrons, and still did it better than anyone else.

Then she’d had a well-publicized marital disaster, some alcoholism, some rehab, and a whole lot of plastic surgery. Now she looked frozen at the age of fifty, although the twenty-year-old ice was beginning to crack under the strain.

She occupied cabin thirty-two, along with a European maid and a personal trainer, who I suspected doubled as another kind of workout partner.

I knew the minute we entered the cabin that something was off. David did, too. No bullets flying, no obvious signs of danger, but there was something very wrong with the feeling of the whole place. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Maybe Miss Clark had been in the middle of a knockdown, drag-out fight with her assistant. That would have explained the feeling of tension and anger that saturated the air.

Miss Clark was seated, like Mr. Cole, on the grand sofa, but she was wearing a pair of pencil-legged white pants, very ’60s nautical, paired with a blue-and-white-striped knit shirt. Her eyes were the same blue as shallow Caribbean waters, and if her hair was dyed that lustrous shade of blond, I couldn’t tell. Even with the makeovers, she had seriously fierce DNA at work.

I felt as if I should genuflect before taking a seat in the side chair that she offered with a gracious nod. David remained standing, but he didn’t resort to the in timidation stance this time around. More of a tranquil stand-at-ease type of thing.

Clark’s trainer and maid busied themselves in another part of the room. I barely registered them as background noise, because La Clark simply drew every bit of attention to herself just by sitting there.

“Thank you for seeing us, Miss Clark,” I said. “My name is—”

“Joanne Baldwin, yes, I know,” she said. She had a contralto voice, and she used it the way a master musician uses a violin, conveying all shades of meaning in one brilliant stroke. “You represent these Wardens I’ve been hearing so much about. And your companion?”

“David Prince,” he said.

“You’re one of the . . . Djinn?” She tried the taste of the word, and I could tell she liked it. When he nodded, Clark’s eyes drifted half closed, and she sat back against the cushions, studying him. “Extraordinary. I thought there were no surprises left in the world, but here you are. Like something straight out of a fairy tale. The old kind, of course. The frightening ones.”

She offered us coffee, tea, drinks. Neither of us felt thirsty, but I accepted a delicate little teacup steaming with French Roast, just to make this more of a social call. Being able to say I had coffee with Cynthia Clark didn’t factor into that decision at all. Well, not much.

Clark blew on the surface of her own brew and studied us both with X-ray eyes that had reportedly once made Steve McQueen swoon. “How can I help you?” she asked.

“Just a few questions, and then, I promise, we’ll certainly be out of your way,” I said. “First, can you tell me why you didn’t leave the ship before departure, as you were asked to do?”

“Well, you’re direct,” she murmured. “How very refreshing. It’s all a bit embarrassing, I suppose, and it’s going to make me seem like a horrible tyrant. I was terribly tired, and I left strict instructions not to be disturbed for any reason prior to departure. I’m afraid my employees might have taken those instructions a bit too literally. When I finally rose for breakfast, I was informed of the evacuation order, but it was too late for us to make our arrangements and leave.”

There was something odd about Clark’s aura. It seemed very calm, swirling with neutral blues and soft golds, but it also felt artificial. “What kind of arrangements? I’d think you’d want to get out as quickly as possible.”

“I really can’t go into details,” she said. “But it was entirely accidental that we ended up staying here, on the ship. We won’t be any trouble to you. I’m quite content to stay in the cabin.” She gave me a cool smile. “It’s so difficult to find privacy these days out in the real world.”

I wondered, because a curl of hot magenta drifted over her aura. Resentment, maybe. She wasn’t the It Girl anymore when it came to the paparazzi, and she knew it. It probably took a great deal of effort to get herself photographed at all, except in retirement magazines talking about how she was “still young at sixty-five.”

“Routine questions, Miss Clark. We just want to be sure we’re aware of any problems that might come up,” I said.

“Such as?”

“Oh, I don’t know . . .Trouble between you and another passenger, maybe a stalker? Business disagreements?”

“Alas, I don’t have that many enemies, Miss Baldwin. I’m sure I’d feel much more important if I did. No, I have no fears, and I’m sure that none of my little party represents any sort of difficulty for you.”

I wished I could figure out what was bothering me. She just didn’t seem . . . right. Was she scared? No, not really, but when I concentrated on her aura, I saw flecks like floating ice. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I was sure that it wasn’t normal.

I let the silence go on too long. “Is that all?” Clark asked, suddenly a good deal less welcoming. “I have a strict meditation schedule. Yoga. It keeps me toned and flexible. I highly recommend it.”

“May I speak with your employees?” I asked her.

“No,” Cynthia Clark said. Just the one word, cold and final. I blinked and glanced at David, who was staring at Clark with very dark eyes. I didn’t know what he was seeing, but it wasn’t good. Not good at all.

Then he looked from Clark to where her two employees stood at the other end of the room.

“Jo,” he said, and touched my shoulder. “You should go.”

“I—What?”

“Now.” The touch turned into a painful squeeze. “Now.”

I stood up, but it was too late. I barely sensed the snap of power coming before it hit me like a pile driver to the chest—not just on the physical plane but on the aetheric, too. I knew this sensation.

It had hit me before. It had killed a whole lot of my friends.

The blitz attack sent me into the air in a tumbling, twisting heap. I flew across the cabin and slammed into the solid wall with a wood-cracking thump. I hardly had time to process the shock of pain before pressure closed around me, deep as the black depths of the ocean, and drove all the air from my lungs. I felt my entire nervous system flickering, overloading, on the verge of burnout. There was an unearthly shrieking roar in my ears, like a mental institution on fire, and everything felt wrong, so wrong.

I fought. I flailed, trying to throw it off, but I couldn’t, because there was nothing to grab hold of. I blinked away darkness and saw David moving like a streak of light toward the two at the far end of the room, but he was too far. It was happening too fast, unbelievably fast. . . .

I was going to die, and he wouldn’t be able to stop it.

You can stop it, Joanne. All you have to do is let go.

The thought bubbled up on some black, greasy tide from the depths of my soul. It was solid as a life preserver in a storm, and I grabbed it, desperate to stop the pain, the shrieking, the sickening and inevitable feeling of every cell in my body being crushed into slime.

You have to let go, it told me. Let go, Joanne. You can save yourself if you choose.

With the weight of mountains on my chest, with my entire body screaming for release, with my bones turning to powder inside and my nervous system frying like a burned-out bulb, I believed it was the only choice.

Then I felt the eager, hot twinge of the black mark on my back, and I knew where that thought was coming from.

No.

Time had proceeded only a tiny fraction of a second. David hadn’t even reached the far end of the room yet, although the Djinn could move at the speed of thought. I was being crushed into greasy paste by a force so vast it felt like Earth herself had landed on me, and the idea of waiting an instant, a single breath, for help was almost impossible.

Save yourself. You can. It’s easy.

Yes. All I had to do was shatter the containment that David had put around the black torch, and it would burn away all my problems.

Forever.

I held on. I don’t know how; it wasn’t inner strength, it wasn’t courage, and it wasn’t anything I could be proud of. Maybe it was just paralyzing terror. The instant passed, and even though I felt death’s breath on my lips, the taste was all that lingered; David reached Cynthia’s personal trainer, and that man—whoever, whatever he was—had no more time for killing me.

I gagged in a trembling breath, rolled on my side, and sobbed in agony. My nerves continued to burn, and the entire circuit board of my brain seemed on the verge of overload. I hadn’t been hurt that suddenly, that deeply, in a long time. The taste of mortality is ash and blood, and I coughed until I could stop gagging on it.

Getting up was like free-climbing the Empire State Building in a hurricane, but I used an overturned table for support until I could feel my legs. They weren’t quite right, somehow. Most of me wasn’t, at that moment. This was going to hurt later. A lot. For a long time.

I forgot all of that when David screamed, “Jo! Cover!”

Fire rolled out from him, blistering white, and I lunged for the sofa, where Cynthia Clark still sat frozen in shock by the explosion of violence. I shoved her down into the cushions and threw myself on top of her. I couldn’t reach the other innocent in the room—her personal assistant—but I extended the fastest, hardest shield of interlocked molecules I could over the woman’s prone body. She’d sensibly dropped to the floor and curled into a ball on the rug.

No time for any other defenses. Whether David had called the fire, or his enemy had, it filled the room like an airburst of napalm. I felt the back of my clothes and my hair smolder, and smelled instant, toxic charring of plastics and carpet and furniture. The flame would have incinerated all three of us if I hadn’t shielded us; mortal flesh would have burned off like flash paper.

It had burned the flesh off of David’s opponent.

The blast flamed out, leaving a thick swirl of smoke, and I raised my head to see my Djinn lover facing a skeletal, blackened thing that was certainly not human, never human—something that should be dead, and yet was still standing. It wasn’t a Demon, though it had some characteristics that reminded me of the way a Demon’s bones curved and spiked.

It looked like it was made of glass. In fact, only the smudges and soot that clung to it made it visible at all. I blinked and clicked into Oversight.

It was invisible on the aetheric.

Ghosts, Venna had named them.

The forerunners of the end of all things.

David let out a wordless roar of fury and fastened his hands around the creature’s throat. He was glowing like liquid gold, dripping with living fire.

But where he touched this thing, his fire went out. And darkness began to creep up his arms. No, not darkness—oh God, I knew what that was.

Ash, and dust.

He was being destroyed, just like the Djinn who’d died in the hallway. The touch of this thing was toxic to them. That Djinn must have come across it somehow, maybe even been sent by Ashan to warn us of the danger—and it had killed her.

It had erased her.

Just as it was trying to do to David.

“Let go!” I shouted, and rolled over the top of the couch to land on my feet. I staggered, but I didn’t have time for weakness. “David, back off!”

David didn’t want to, but he did, breaking away and lunging to his left as I strode forward, gathering up raw power in both hands. As I moved, a silver sword formed in my grip—not metal but ice. Hard as steel, reinforced with a binding that left the cutting edge as thin as a whisper.

If this thing could survive David’s heat, I wanted to see how it felt about chills.

The blade hit, bit, and cut, slicing through fragments of muscle and cooked skin, through crystalline bones that glowed blue where the ice slashed.

I chopped right through its neck. I paused, holding in my follow-through, to see what would happen.

The creature’s head stayed on. As I watched, it wobbled a bit on the skeletal column of glassy vertebrae, then settled back into place.

It smiled with needle-sharp crystal teeth. If it had ever been human, other than a casual disguise, it certainly wasn’t playing at it now. This was something out of a big-budget nightmare, and I took a step back from it, fast.

“David, get everybody out!” I yelled. I could sense this thing orienting on me, predator to prey. The last thing I needed right now was mortal trip hazards and speed bumps; it was going to be all I could do to protect myself, much less Cynthia Clark and her employee.

I sensed David grabbing up the noncombatants and hustling them to the door.

The creature facing me opened its mouth and flicked a tongue like a whip at me. It was more like an icicle than living tissue, but it moved like a cobra. The end was as sharp as a needle, and I barely avoided the stabbing turn of it in midair. A return stroke with my ice-knife passed through the tongue without any effect at all.

Damn. I couldn’t hurt this thing, at least not with these weapons.

I retreated. I changed out ice for steel and tried again. This time, I sliced a piece out of the tongue, which fell to the floor and writhed like a slug in the sun. Whether that hurt the creature or not, it charged me, and I tried to make like a matador. That didn’t help. It had reach and speed, and what had been its fingers in human form were now claws, diamond-sharp and lightning fast.

I felt the slices like chilly tugs on my side, but there wasn’t any pain, not at first. I didn’t allow myself to look down, I kept moving, turning, keeping myself away from the razor-edged whirlwind that was hissing through the air in pursuit.

Then I hit a corner, and there was nowhere left to run. I slashed, trying to slow it down, but the creature was just too damn fast, and too damn powerful. It smashed through the shield I put up. I didn’t have time to try any Earth powers; fire wouldn’t work, and weather tricks wouldn’t buy me more than another fragile breath.

I was going to lose.

A small, white ball of light hit the thing from the side and plunged beneath the crystalline structure. It lit the creature up like an arc light from within. I couldn’t even estimate the heat; it felt like a nuclear bomb compressed to the size of a baseball, forces well beyond my ability to summon, much less command.

All I could do was duck and cover. Again.

The creature shrieked in that horrible, soul-destroying range again and became a photonegative blast of flame that cooked everything within a foot of it—but not an inch beyond. The inverse flame became white flame, then reversed itself into a tiny, glittering spark . . . and the creature was gone except for a shower of glittering crystalline powder.

A wave of intense pressure passed over me and shoved me hard into the corner.

The white ball of light expanded into a softer glow, and as the wave passed over me I squinted into it and saw the Djinn Venna standing where the creature had been, her pink HELLO KITTY sneakers buried in half an inch of crystal powder.

She looked worse than I had ever seen her: pallid, trembling, afraid. She sank down into a crouch, just a frightened little girl, and I couldn’t help but move toward her. I picked her up in my arms, and she shuddered and buried her face in my chest.

Her warmth changed, cooled, became gentle against my skin. I felt my wounds starting to heal, though very slowly. My body began murmuring a shocked report of damages, but I told it to be quiet. Shock felt nice, at the moment. Soothing. I’d take whatever comfort I could get just now.

David reached us a second later, wrapping his arms around us both. “All right?” he asked, and looked into my eyes. He didn’t like what he saw there, clearly, but he liked what he saw in Venna a whole lot less.

I didn’t blame him.

“It’s one of them,” Venna said. “One of the ghosts. It didn’t belong here. It can’t be here.”

The confidence of the Old Djinn in their well-ordered universe had just been shattered, and beings that had never feared much in their long, long lives looked into the abyss that humans faced every day—the dark chasm of uncertainty of the future.

“It’s okay, Venna,” I said, and smoothed her long blond hair. “You did great. Ghost or not, you completely kicked its ass.”

“I can’t do it again.” Venna looked at David and took a deep breath. “It took part of my ass with it. And I don’t think I can get any of that back. Maybe ever.”

Cynthia Clark hadn’t boarded with a personal trainer, as it turned out. In fact, she didn’t remember a thing about the entire incident. There didn’t seem to be much point in trying to convince her that she’d been hypnotized into covering up for some otherworldly demonic glass monster. She wouldn’t even believe that David and I hadn’t set her room on fire deliberately, so I figured the whole monster thing was right off the table.

I staggered away to the nearest public lounge while David tried to settle things to everyone’s satisfaction. I was checked out by a small army of Warden medics and Lewis himself—none of whom were happy with me, or my descriptions of events, come to think of it—and eventually was told that I was in no imminent danger of death or coma, but healing was a long way off.

I was still lying there, feet up, grateful to be breathing, when I spotted Aldonza hurrying past, rolling a luggage cart. She did a quick jerk of surprise when she saw me, and loitered. “Are you okay, miss?” she asked, which told me just how terrible I looked. “Can I get you something?”

I didn’t raise my head from the leather pillow. “I’m okay, Aldonza. Sorry about the cabin.”

“The cabin?”

“Miss Clark’s cabin. It’s—ah—kind of a mess.”

Aldonza got a blank, terrified look on her face and hurried on. I could hear her horrified cry all the way down the hallway.

A half hour later, a whole phalanx of stewards rolled by, carting La Clark’s salvaged baggage and armloads of expensive clothes. They were moving her to a new cabin.

They moved her into mine, as it turned out. I didn’t find that out until I struggled up from my temporary resting place and met Cherise in the hall, dragging her suitcase and looking half-mournful, half-impressed. “Did you know that Cynthia Clark is going to be sleeping in your bed?” she asked. “That’s kind of awesome, in a sucky kind of way. Anyway, we’re down the hall, and Moses on a motorcycle, what the hell happened to you, bitch?”

I was better, really I was. I was limping—broken bones had been repaired into merely cracked and hurting bones—and I was singed and bloody and looked like some Halloween fright mask, but hey, I was breathing, upright, and thinking straight again. “You should see the other guy,” I said, and coughed. It turned into a lung-bursting hack like a fifteen-pack-a-day smoker’s. I could still taste that awful taint of death, even though I thought that it was all in my head now.

“Uh, thanks, I faint at the sight of gross anatomy. Come on, sweetie. You need a bunk.”

I didn’t argue about it. I’d been inclined to think I could walk it all off until I’d walked about ten feet, and then priorities had shifted again, drastically.

Rest seemed like a very good idea. I accepted Cherise’s support, staggering the rest of the way to our new cabin.

“Ouch,” Cher sighed, as the door swung open on a cramped little room with two narrow beds facing each other. “Looks like we’ve been bumped to coach. Or maybe servants’ quarters.”

“Don’t care.” I sank down on the closest flat surface—luckily, it had a mattress—and covered my eyes with my forearm. I needed to think. How had that creature gotten on the ship? And why? Was it just biding its time, waiting to kill as many Wardens as possible?

Had it killed the nameless Djinn we’d found in the hallway?

Most importantly—were there more?

David had sensed it, though not with any accuracy. Venna had been able to nuke it, though only at a drastic cost to herself.

We just couldn’t fight an army of these things, and I had the sense that these were just incidental players in Bad Bob’s upcoming melodrama.

Crap. Why did this keep happening to me?

“Jo?” The mattress dented on my left side as Cherise perched on the edge. “You crying?”

“No,” I lied. “Fuck.” I swallowed hard. “I can’t do this. We can’t do this. We’re sailing away into the middle of nowhere with a bunch of innocent people and we’re all going to die, Cher. I can’t stop it. God, we’ve screwed this up.”

“Hey.” She moved my arm away from my eyes and looked down at me with such gravity that she didn’t look like Cherise at all. “What’s going on?”

“Did you hear me? We just about got our asses kicked!”

“But you didn’t,” she said. “You told me before we got on this ship that it was going to be hard, and people were going to die, because you can’t go to war if you don’t expect casualties. You didn’t want me to come with, remember. You wussing out on me now, Rambette?”

I sniffled. “No.”

“Good, don’t even. You’re a Warden. You don’t let anything stand in the way of what you think is right. You have the most lustworthy guy I’ve ever seen madly in love with you. You have fabulous hair. You’re strong and beautiful and smart and evil pees itself when it sees you coming. So don’t you fold up on me, Jo.” Cherise’s mask slipped, just a little. “Because if you do, I don’t think I can keep it together on my own.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “You’re way tougher than me.” I hugged her. “I’m just so tired. I just want to rest.”

“Then rest,” she said, and let go. I settled back on the bed. “But don’t you dare think you’re not up to this. You’re a hero, babe. Heroes don’t wuss.”

“Do they whine?”

“Only to their bosom sidekicks.” She flashed me her bosom to prove she had the cred. Cherise, motivational speaker to the stars.

I managed a weak laugh. I didn’t feel like a hero, not at all. I didn’t think Venna did, either, and I knew David didn’t. He was too worried for me, and his anxiety was feeding mine, like a deadly and accelerating loop.

I took some deep breaths. Then I took some more, and let myself drift away from the pain and fear. I imagined myself floating in water, in a sparkling blue pool, with calm clouds whispering by overhead. The sun was warm and soft and kind, and I had on the perfect blue bikini that David liked so much.

The Grand Paradise’s rocking motion lulled me into a mindless calm, and as I hung there, suspended, I felt my body reaching for relief. It healed itself, bit by bit, cell by cell, using power drawn from the energy around me. The temperature of the cabin lowered in response, and I heard Cherise get up and check the thermostat, then break out the blankets. One settled over me, thick and soft.

“You okay?” Cherise whispered. I didn’t open my eyes.

“Yep,” I murmured. “Check it: Heroes don’t wuss.”

I was hoping that Venna had been wrong about her damage. I mean, shock, right? But no. Venna had been not just injured but diminished by the battle in Clark’s cabin.

When David told me that, sitting on the edge of my narrow bed in much the same way Cherise had earlier, I could tell that he was trying not to give away how much it disturbed him. He had on his just-the-facts-ma’am face, and he’d damped down the link between us to a low hum, suggestions of emotion, nothing more.

That was as close to cutting himself off from me as he could manage, since our wedding ceremony had joined us together on that powerful level.

I didn’t like it.

“She’s all right,” David told me. He was looking at me, but not—eyes unfocused, and miles away. “Physically . . . aetherically . . . she’s all right, she’s just . . . less than she was. As if pieces of her had been burned away.”

“Or eaten,” I said.

“You’re thinking of an Ifrit,” he said, and the focus sharpened in his eyes. “That wasn’t an Ifrit.” No, it definitely had not been an Ifrit. Those were Djinn, badly damaged and transformed, yes, feeding on their own kind, but still recognizably of the Djinn DNA family.

This thing . . . not so much.

“What if it was part Ifrit?” I said slowly. I struggled up to a reclining position, with my pillow bracing my aching back. “Part Demon, too? Some kind of hybrid?”

“That would be bad,” David said, very softly.

“Yeah, it’d suck like an industrial-strength Hoover. Demons are hard to kill; Ifrits can consume pieces of other Djinn, right?” As I understood it, Ifrits were the result of damage occurring to a Djinn’s ability to process energy from the aetheric. Starving and desperate, they did what any living creature might do to survive; they turned cannibal, stealing energy from their own kind. Dark, nightmarish vampire Djinn, usually with a nearly complete lack of higher mental faculties. Maddened by hunger.

Marry that to a Demon, and you’ve got a truly terrifying weapon against the Djinn, not to mention anyone else who gets in the way, like Wardens.

In a word, one of Venna’s ghosts—invisible, deadly, and adaptable.

“Can she recover?” I asked, thinking again of Venna. David gave me a highly suspect shrug. “Check that—can she recover in time to do that again?”

“I don’t know. I’m not her Conduit.”

“Cop-out.”

“Hey!”

“You know. You may not be able to help her, but you know whether or not Ashan can help her.”

“Ashan isn’t saying much,” David said. “You know how he is.”

Oh, I knew. We’d hit the same brick wall when trying to help another of Ashan’s Old Djinn, a particularly arrogant specimen named Cassiel who’d pissed the old dude off and been cast out to fend for herself for her troubles. She hadn’t quite become an Ifrit. Instead, she’d decided to go the less conventional route of binding herself to the Wardens for her daily dose of life energy . . . and I wasn’t at all sure that had been a good idea, still. Thank God, she wasn’t here with us, causing trouble. Wherever she was, I hoped she was doing better than we were.

Ashan had refused to talk about that incident, too. He wasn’t, in general, the chattiest of all my many enemies. He’d read the guidelines for villainy, the first one being Don’t monologue.

“Is she staying?” I asked. Because Venna being Venna, she could stay or go, exactly as she pleased. In her place, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have gone off to the Djinn Day Spa for the next several millennia, and left us human idiots to our own devices.

“Of course she’s staying,” David said, and smiled just a little. “Venna’s more like you than she’d like to admit.”

“Apart from being cuter.”

“Debatable.”

“I don’t have any HELLO KITTY shoes.”

“Could be remedied.” He lifted my hand to his lips, and I shivered at the gentle touch, not to mention the look in his eyes. “I’m sorry about earlier. I realized I wasn’t helping you recover. It’s hard to remember how much we share now. I don’t want to add to your problems.”

“You were worried,” I said. “Hell, join the club. We have T-shirts and free-drink coupons. Open bar every Wednesday.”

“Come here.” He folded me in his arms, and I let out a long sigh. Most of my remaining tension went with it. “You did very well back there.”

“What, getting myself backed into a corner to be chopped up by the walking meat slicer? Yeah, spectacular job. Mom would be proud.”

“I don’t think many humans could have stood against it at all,” he said. “Fewer still would have tried. I talked with Venna about how she destroyed it. She vibrated it. I think you could do the same?”

“Vibrated—” Of course. Crystalline structure in its bones and claws and teeth. Strong, but hit it with the right oscillated frequency, and you could hurt it, maybe destroy it. “I’d need to experiment to get it right. I don’t suppose you have any remains . . . ?”

For answer, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a single crystal tooth, about the size of a small switch-blade. He held it in his palm for a moment, weighing it, and then handed it to me. “Careful,” he said. “Sharp.”

He was right; it still held a wicked edge. I wrapped it in handfuls of tissue paper from the box on the night-stand and put it in my own pocket for later study.

“Do we know if there are more on board?” I asked. “Because we really don’t need another ugly surprise.”

David got up and opened the cabin door. In walked another Djinn, a brawny, bald-headed sort who looked like he might have moonlighted on a cleaner bottle from time to time. His skin was a dull metallic gray, and his eyes were the color of rust.

He looked around the sparse cabin with an expression like he’d bitten a bug in half, then dragged over the small side chair. Cherise wasn’t in at the moment, for which I was grateful; she’d gone off in search of medicinal ice cream. I could imagine her running commentary on this scene.

“This is Lyle,” David said.

“Seriously?” I blurted. They both shot me an odd look. “I mean, come on. Lyle?”

Lyle smiled. He’d filed his teeth into sharp little points. “You got a problem with that?” He had a surprising Deep South accent, slow and warm. It didn’t sound artificial, as if he was mocking me, either.

Another oddity.

“Uh, no, no problem,” I said. “It’s just not exactly the kind of name I’m used to hearing from supernatural beings. A little too—”

“Human?”

“Country,” I said. “Not even a little bit rock and roll.”

David decided it was time to intervene before my conversational skills cost me a bruise or two. “Lyle became a Djinn during one of the World Wars.”

“Which one?”

“They come so close together,” David said. “First?”

Lyle nodded. “I kept my human name. A lot of Djinn don’t bother. Sorry it doesn’t meet with your approval, Warden.”

“No, you’re not,” I said, and he smiled again. This time, he’d put away the scary teeth, and his dentition was blindingly white and perfectly human-normal.

If anything, that was weirder.

“Lyle was checking for energy signatures,” David said. “Did you find anything?”

“Yes. Weaker than the one you two tripped across, though, and well hidden.” Lyle’s rust-colored eyes darkened just a shade. “They’re hiding as humans.”

“How many?”

“Two.”

“Two more?” My throat threatened to close up around the words, and Lyle sent me a sharp look. I needed to work on my poker face. “What do we know about them?”

“They’re wearing skins,” Lyle said. “The skins used to be people, so they have history and weight in the aetheric. They took care not to kill the skins. I think they knew it was a good disguise. Good enough to fool most Djinn, even.”

He was trying to describe something that I was trying equally hard not to imagine. “These people—can we save them?”

“Not people,” Lyle said. “Like I said, they’re just skins now. Nothing inside.”

I wished he hadn’t said that. Or at least, hadn’t sounded so matter-of-fact about it.

“Why haven’t they attacked us already?” I asked. “They probably know their big brother’s gone, right? What are they waiting for, the all-you-can-eat-buffet light to go on?”

“They’re definitely waiting on some type of signal, if they haven’t struck at us yet,” David said. “They can afford to bide their time. We don’t even really know what they’re capable of doing, not yet.”

“No,” I said slowly. “They did strike already. They killed the Djinn we found in the hallway outside my old cabin. We just don’t know why, because we can’t figure out who she was or what she was doing at the time.”

It was the perfect dead end, and it was wasted on David and Lyle, who looked at each other as if silently thinking that I’d gone just slightly nuts. Humans, Lyle’s shrug said. Who knows what goes on in their tiny heads?

“We need to backtrack and figure out why they felt threatened by that Djinn,” I said. “Or why they had to stop what she was doing. David—” He was still giving me that blank look. “Never mind. I’ll figure it out. Anyway, one good thing about it—they’re probably worried about how we managed to kill their strongest monster already.” I swallowed. “Please tell me that it was the strongest one.”

“It was,” David said. I heaved a deep sigh of relief.

“We should kill them now,” Lyle said.

“How? Just one of them was capable of nearly killing me, fighting David to a standstill, and halfway destroying Venna,” I said. “So I’m not feeling real good about our chances with taking on two of them at once. Any other options?”

Lyle cocked one thin eyebrow. “Swim back to shore.”

“Just run away.”

“Unless you want to wait for them to strike first.”

“You weren’t serious about the running away, right?”

“Oh, he was,” David said.

Lyle nodded. Lyle was turning out to be the least confrontational supernatural being I’d ever met. Under normal circumstances, that would have been a refreshing change, but considering that I wanted a bunch of fire-eating, hard-charging badasses to back me up right now . . . not so much.

We both looked at David, who seemed to be half a world away. He dragged himself back with an effort. “We bide our time,” he said. “It’s too dangerous to go after them right now. Venna can’t be used against them again, and we need to know more than we know now. Joanne—”

“Yeah, got it. Find out the right frequencies to do damage, and get everybody up to speed on the info, quietly. Oh, you probably should tell me just who I’m avoiding, here. Not Wardens?” Because I’d hate to have missed that in my initial checks.

“No,” Lyle said, relieving me of screwups. “One is crew, an engineering mate below passenger decks. The other is hiding as a stowaway in the ship’s hold. He will be difficult to reach, and harder to trap.”

“Let them hide for now,” David said. “Watch them. Any change, any indication something’s happening, report it as soon as you can. If they try to sabotage the ship—” I hadn’t even thought of that, and the idea twisted me deep in the gut. “Could they?”

“Of course. But not easily, and probably not fatally. With the Wardens and Djinn aboard, most damage can be repaired immediately.” David sounded a lot more confident than I felt at the moment. I guess I was glad somebody was. “If you need help—”

Lyle gave a very human-sounding snort. “Why would I?”

“Because Joanne’s right,” David said. “One of these things nearly won against two Djinn and a powerful Warden. Don’t let your confidence blind you to the possibility of losing spectacularly.” At that moment, I thought he sounded a whole lot like his predecessor, Jonathan—calm, acidic, absolutely in control. And Lyle must have thought so too, because he inclined his head a bit and looked contrite.

“Their names,” I said.

“What?” Both Djinn looked at me.

“The people. I’d like to know their names.”

“Why does it matter?” Lyle asked. “They’re skins. I told you, they’re empty.”

“You also told me the skins used to be real people. Real histories. Families. Friends.” I held his gaze. Good thing I’d had practice with that, because Lyle had the eerie Djinn thing down pat. “I want to know because it’s the only way we can honor their memories.”

He seemed to understand that. “The engineer’s mate is Jason Ng. He joined the crew twelve years ago. He had a wife and three children in New Orleans, and a mistress in Brazil. The other was once named Angelo Marconi, from Naples. His sister owns a restaurant there. His family thinks he’s still away at school.”

“School,” I murmured. “How old—”

“He is dead, Warden.”

“How old?”

“The skin is sixteen,” Lyle said. “I’m sorry. But you can’t let what they’re wearing fool you into hesitating. You know that, don’t you?”

I knew. I also knew that if push came to shove, if I had to stand there and sling fire at a sixteen-year-old boy, I wasn’t going to be very good at it.

But I knew someone who would be.

I found Kevin Prentiss on the ship’s main promenade deck, standing at the railing. He was watching the thick gray foaming clouds and the iron-colored water with its lacings of white, and he looked—as always—like a punk streetwise kid who needed to learn the concept of personal hygiene.

The difference these days was that Kevin had pulled himself together, to a greater extent than I’d ever thought possible. He’d earned himself some respect from his fellow Fire Wardens. He’d learned something from his apprenticeship to Lewis. He still looked greasy, but it was mostly hair product and deliberately baggy clothing. He had at least a handshake acquaintance with regular bathing.

However, Kevin still hated me. The look he sent me as I approached was a shot across my own personal bow, warning me to steer clear. I ignored it and took up a post at the rail beside him, leaning on the wood and bracing myself against the rise and fall of the deck with my feet well spread.

“You look like shit,” Kevin said, and flipped half a lit cigarette into the air. Before it hit the water, it had burst into flame. Nothing but ash to litter the ocean. “Congratulations on the improvement.”

“Well, you know me, I’m all about the cutting-edge fashion trends.”

“What, beat to shit is the new black?” Kevin abandoned the ocean to turn and face me. He still needed a haircut, but his pimples were mostly gone now, and he’d filled out while I wasn’t looking, turning from a skinny beanpole to something closer to lean and hungry. I supposed some girls went for that.

Like Cherise, now that I thought about it. The kid was legal age. I knew she’d originally been attracted to him because he was needy, broken, and bad; I also knew that she’d been the perfect foil for him, to remind him that he had better things inside.

Kevin liked to put on the badass hat, though. And always would.

He studied me out of the corner of his eye. “You want something,” he said.

“Why would you say that?”

“Because you never talk to me unless you want something.”

“So not true,” I said. I held my breath for a second, then let it out. “Okay, I want something.”

He didn’t even have to waste his breath on an I told you so. “Big or small?”

“Pretty big.”

“And I’d do it for you because . . . ?”

“Because you’re a good man, somewhere deep underneath all that greasy stupid kid disguise,” I said. “Because you want to be, or you wouldn’t be out here on this insanely stupid trip. And because you don’t want anything to happen to Cherise.”

He straightened up. He was getting taller all the time, and now his body language reminded me less of skate parks and more of Lewis in a really foul mood. “You should never have dragged her off with us.”

“I didn’t. Cher goes everywhere with her eyes wide open, you know that. I’m just saying that of all of us, she’s the least able to defend herself if something bad happens, so she’s a good reminder note, because we both care about her.”

Kevin muttered something impolite under his breath that I pretended not to hear, and turned back to glare at the ocean. Steam rose from a couple of waves before he got himself back under control. I was impressed. A few months ago, he’d have vaporized a few metric tons of ocean in a fit of pique.

Of course, not having a fit of pique would be better still, but baby steps.

“What do you want?” he asked, in a different kind of tone than before. Actually asking for information instead of confronting. Good for him. And good for me, of course.

“I want you to make friends with a Djinn named Lyle,” I said. “Pick a team and stay alert. You may have to react quickly.”

“Lyle?” Kevin let out a braying laugh that got whipped away by the fiercely driven wind. I licked my lips, and tasted salt and metal. “You’re shitting me. Okay, never mind, I won’t even ask. React quickly to what?”

“He’s going to be keeping watch on a couple of people who aren’t supposed to be here.” I reached out and grabbed Kevin’s shoulder, turning him toward me. “Kevin. Pay attention. This isn’t a joke. These two are very, very dangerous, even to the Djinn. Even to you. So don’t get cocky.”

“Me?” He gave me a look so ironic it was practically tipped over into sincerity. “You’re not telling me something. Or, like, anything.”

“I told you they’re dangerous.”

“How, toxic body odor? Really sour attitudes? Can they kill me with their brains?”

I gave up, and held on to the rail as the ship took a particularly hard dip into the water, almost a bounce. The waves were getting thicker and deeper, and the storm behind us was finding gangs of friends to our port and up ahead. It was going to hit us sooner rather than later.

“They’re not human,” I said. “They’re fast, they’re deadly. Think Alien, made out of indestructible crystal, only with human skin.”

“Wouldn’t that be Terminator or something?”

“Enough of the movies. This isn’t funny, Kevin, it’s serious. The one in the ship’s hold is wearing the body of a sixteen-year-old boy.” There, I’d said it.

And he understood it. “And that’s easier for me, right? Because I won’t see him as just a kid. I see him as more of an equal.”

I nodded unwillingly. “I’m not putting you out there alone,” I said. “But I know you. I know you won’t hesitate if—”

“If I have to kill somebody who looks like he just got passed up for his junior prom? Yeah, I’m definitely that guy.”

I didn’t answer that, because there was a new note in his voice: self-loathing. Kevin hadn’t lived an easy life. He was more pragmatic than most kids I’d ever met, and tougher, too. But that didn’t mean he wanted to be, even though he wore his damage like a badge of honor.

“I’m sorry,” I said, finally. “I wish I didn’t have to ask you.”

“I wish I wasn’t the go-to guy to kill monsters dressed as teens, but there you go.” He shrugged. “At least I’ve got experience.”

And that was the heart of it, at last. I’d come to Kevin because I’d seen him kill without hesitation, and without remorse. Granted, he’d had plenty of personal hatred built up, but it took a special kind of detachment to do what he’d done and never suffer much guilt about it. He mostly resented the fact that we all knew about it—not that he’d been forced to do it.

“I’m not your pet psycho.” I flinched, because Kevin could have been reading my mind. “But yeah, I’ll find Lyle and do this. Just don’t put me on speed dial the next time you have to push a school bus off a cliff or something. So. What’s our approved monster-killing technique?”

I pulled the tissue-wrapped crystal tooth out of my pocket. “Let’s find out.” The thing glittered like a diamond in the dull light.

We took the fragment with us, found a crew member to open up the gym for us, and moved equipment to get clear floor space for our experiments. Kevin took to the scientific method with enthusiasm, because there’s nothing a teenage kid likes better than trying to destroy something that’s indestructible. Kevin tried so many kinds of fire that even I was impressed with the variety and breadth of control he had over it, especially since he didn’t kill us in the process.

Except that nothing worked, and eventually Kevin tried stomping on the thing in frustration. That didn’t work so well, either.

“Let me,” I said, and crouched down across from where the glittering crystal shard lay between us. Kevin mimicked me from about four feet away.

“No fair using Earth powers,” he said. “I’ll call bullshit.”

“You’ll be working with an Earth warden, idiot,” I said. “Watch and learn. I’m going to start with super-low frequencies and work my way up. You watch the structure with me. If you see any response at all, tell me.”

“If I’d known this favor of yours would mean sitting around watching you use a vibrator, I would’ve said hell yeah earlier—”

“Bite me,” I said. He flipped me off. I ignored him—mostly—and paid attention to the structure of the crystal.

It took the better part of an hour, but we pinpointed the frequency range that had the greatest effect on the thing. I couldn’t get to Venna’s epic pulverizing effect, but I figured that anything that cracked and shattered the bone would do. At the very least, it would distract the holy living hell out of the enemy.

“Yeah, that’s great,” Kevin said, as I wrote down the numbers. “Big problem. I can’t do that, genius. It takes a tree hugger.”

“And I’ll get one for you,” I said. “But I wouldn’t call her a tree hugger if I was you. She’ll make your face grow backwards if you piss her off.” I wrote down the name—Maida Manning. Three hundred pounds of extremely sarcastic Earth Warden who wouldn’t take any of Kevin’s bullshit. Maida also had a vicious sense of humor. I could see a beautiful friendship developing, unless of course they managed to kill each other first.

I’m so public-spirited.

“Give her this,” I said, and handed him the written instructions. “Tell her I’ll give her a raise if she manages to not kill you before you kill the bad guys. But whatever you do, wait for Lyle to give a signal to move. Got it?”

“Of course I’ve got it. I’ve got an IQ above your dress size.” He paused. “Then again, it might be the other way around. I mean, do they even make dress sizes in the hundred and fifties?”

Cherise was having a terrible influence on the kid. I decided that one of us really needed to stay focused on professional dignity, and so I settled for a rude gesture instead of a comeback.

“Score,” he said. He walked away, just another bad-attitude teen from his messy, uncombed hair to his dragging, world-weary sneakers.

It takes a special kind of courage to know your own darkness, I thought. I wished he didn’t have to be such an expert, but as long as he was, I had no choice but to take advantage of his skills.

Lewis was going to take my head off for it, too.