Gale Force

Chapter Fourteen

The power on the aetheric went wild, currents flowing around us like whirlpools, lashing and foaming in distress. David and I turned together and saw Ashan standing behind us. From the forbidding expression on his face, I was guessing he hadn’t brought us any wedding gifts, or at least none that wouldn’t explode.

“I can’t allow this folly,” Ashan said. “Maybe you truly believe this is right, but we can’t take the chance. You expose us all to slavery, David, not just yourself. No.”

The minister looked justifiably bewildered, and not just by the sudden popping in of supernatural guests. I was thinking his brain had skipped right over that part. The human race was absolutely stellar at plausible deniability. “But I haven’t asked for any objections, ” he said faintly. “We don’t do that anymore. Really, this is most—”

Ashan ignored him. Ignored me, too. He was focused only on David, and if David was a glorious bright star, burning with potential, Ashan was his polar opposite: leached of color; pale as an undertaker; grim as impending death. He was even wearing black—a severe suit, with a black tie paired with a white shirt. His idea of formal attire, I guessed. It might have even passed, if it hadn’t been for the bitter expression and the cold, cold fire in his teal-blue eyes.

“You have no place here,” David said. I felt the power of the Earth rising up in him, rich and thick and irresistible; Ashan was a Conduit, yes, but this was David’s territory, David’s home ground, in a sense. Ashan was an intruder, uninvited and unwelcome. “Leave us.”

Ashan slowly shook his head. “I don’t come for myself,” he said. “I come for all of us, to ask. Don’t do this, David. Don’t destroy us again, for your personal satisfaction.”

I’d expected assault, not a plea, and especially not a plea that had the ring of sincerity to it.

David didn’t respond. He gazed at Ashan, fire in his eyes, but he didn’t lash out.

Ashan said, even more quietly, “I also didn’t come alone.” He didn’t move, not even his gaze, but I felt the shocking flare on the aetheric, and suddenly there was a presence beside him. It was human in shape, but not human at all—a wild power, barely contained by flesh. His skin was hot red, shifting with patterns of color, and his eyes were the pure white of the hottest flame. I’d never seen him take human form before, but I knew him.

The Fire Oracle had left his protected home in a crypt in Seacasket. I hadn’t even known he could.

With a whisper rather than a flare, another presence shaped itself out of the air on Ashan’s other side. Milk-glass skin, a vessel containing fog and ice. The Air Oracle was only barely human as well, and androgynous in form. Two of them. The Air Oracle had no fixed abode that I knew of, but still, it took a major event for it to manifest so publicly.

I knew, without even asking, that it had never happened before. Not in all the history of the Djinn.

Another surge of power, this one familiar, so bitterly and sweetly familiar. My daughter, Imara— human and far more than human, beautiful and unreachable and remote. She looked sad, but sure of herself—a mirror of my face and form, but with a totally individual core she’d inherited from both me and her father.

She was standing with the others, against us.

David closed his eyes, and I knew it hurt him as much as it did me. When he opened them, his eyes had gone dark, almost human. “You’re sure,” he said. “Imara?”

I thought for a few heartbeats that she might defect, might throw her support to us, but then she bowed her head. “I’m sure,” she whispered. “Too dangerous. So much at risk. You can’t, Dad. You just . . . can’t.”

Silence. The audience was whispering. I couldn’t imagine what they were making out of this. Lewis had moved Cherise out of the line of fire, in case there was going to be any, but somehow I knew this wasn’t going to come to fireworks. Not this time.

David slowly turned back to me and said, very simply, “I do.”

My mind went blank for a second, and I felt the seductive flow of power wash over me. Half done. This was an exchange of vows; his was powerful, but not complete without my consent. The minister nervously cleared his throat, eyes darting from David, to me, to Ashan, to the three Oracles.

“Do you, Joanne—” His clerical voice was about half an octave higher than it ought to have been. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Do you, Joanne, take this man—”

“Wait,” I said.

All of the Djinn—even Ashan—let out a sigh, and David’s grip on my hand tightened painfully. His eyes went wide, and his skin bone-pale.

“Jo—”

“Just wait,” I repeated. “Ashan, the Oracles—you admitted yourself that you don’t know what will happen, David. How can we do this? How can we change the rules like this when we don’t even know what’s coming for us?” My voice broke. My heart broke. I was watching the fire die in him, and it hurt. “It isn’t about us. It’s about them, all of the people who depend on us!”

“I’m willing to take the risk,” he whispered. “Believe in us, Jo. Please. Believe.”

His hand came up to trace my cheek, and I felt tears well up in my eyes and burn trails down my cheeks. His fingertips came away wet from my face, and he raised them to his lips.

Please.

I might have changed my mind. I can’t swear that I would have, or I wouldn’t; the fracture between my head and my heart ran right down to my soul.

I didn’t have time to find out.

The aetheric caught fire. At first I thought it was David, erupting in frustration and anger at me for what I’d done, but then I realized that it wasn’t him at all.

We were under attack.

David spun away from me. So did the other Djinn, all facing outward, blindly seeking the threat. “You know what to do,” David shouted to Ashan. “Protect the Oracles!”

A silver scar formed on David’s right cheek, then darkened, and the infection I’d seen earlier at Ortega’s house began to spread its tendrils again under his skin, moving frighteningly fast.

“David!” I grabbed for him, but he spun away, avoiding me. Doing his job. Dispatching his waiting Djinn according to some plan he hadn’t shared with me. . . . Lewis was moving, too, shouting at the Wardens. Everybody had a plan, it seemed, except for me.

I felt the black wave sweep over me. It wasn’t meant for me; it was centered on David, but even the edges of it made me feel faint and sick.

He collapsed against me, shuddering, and I felt a scream trying to rip loose from him. I was the only thing holding him up, the only defense he had left.

The Oracles vanished, leaving gusts of hot wind in their place that fluttered the pale layers of my gown. David’s weight pulled me down. It seemed as though he was growing heavier with every passing second.

Ashan stood there, immobile, impassive, perfect.

“Help!” I screamed at him, and grabbed his hand. It felt like cold marble. “Damn you, he’s your brother! Do something!” The two of them were the same, united by purpose and power, if not by the ties of blood that humans understood.

Ashan pulled free of my grip. “If you want him,” he said, “save him. He won’t save himself. He could, if he wished.”

I couldn’t hold David up. Lewis lunged forward and tried to help take his weight, but there was something strange happening here, something worse than anything I’d expected.

“God,” Lewis muttered. “Hold on, we’re trying to put up the shield. Hold on—”

The Sentinels attacked from all around us, on every front. I heard some physical confrontations, and saw a bloom of fire erupt somewhere off to the side, followed by shouts and screams. Security piled on top of me and began hustling me away; I gathered up my train with both hands, clutching it out of the way of traffic. Lewis had arranged our forces in teams, but even so, the assault was shocking in its suddenness and force. I grabbed Lewis’s arm as he pushed past and shook it fiercely. “They’re using Rahel to get to him! If you’re going to counter, it has to be now. Right now! Go!”

“Already on it,” Lewis snapped, and spun away. “Stay here. Draw them if you can.”

David was down on the ground, surrounded by fierce-eyed Djinn protectors ready to fight anything that came for him, but they let me through. I sank down at his side in a flutter of silk and held him. He was gasping and trembling, eyes molten gold but with ominous sparks of darkness flying through them. The gray mottling on his face was taking on a shocking life of its own, moving dark tendrils beneath his skin. Seeking out the aetheric pipeline that made David the Conduit. Once it had that . . .

“Let her go!” I shouted, and grabbed him by the lapels. “David, you have to let Rahel go, please!”

He shook his head. His hand grabbed for mine and clenched tightly. “Say it,” he said. His voice was raw in his throat, almost primal. “Say the words. Say it!”

I felt tears trembling in my eyes. The whole world was coming apart. I heard the crack of gunfire somewhere off to the side, and more screaming. Someone was shouting about a Warden down; someone else was warning of a Sentinel attack coming in the form of a tidal wave from the ocean.

This couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be.

I squeezed my eyes shut, felt the tears burn down my cheeks, and whispered, “Oh God help me, I do. I do.”

There was an eerie second of utter silence, not even the wind moving. Conflicts stopped, pinned on the instant, and I felt something inside me shifting, aligning like a puzzle box.

And a wave of pure golden power flowed into me, through me, and out.

I opened my eyes and saw David watching my face with a look I could think of only as awed relief. The gray faded from his face, back to a silvery scar. Gone.

And I felt the echoing power between us build, and build, and build, waves on the beach, pounding and ceaseless, cascading out into the other Djinn, enhancing their raw power and refining it into surgical weapons.

I’d just made the New Djinn a quantum leap more powerful, by giving them a second anchor into the aetheric.

I’d also just gotten married, even if the minister hadn’t quite gotten around to saying the words before he’d fled to the hills, along with most of the others.

The Djinn snapped a glowing shield of power over us, brilliant as shimmering gold. It covered not just the two of us, but all of the Palms—hell, it went so far out that it might have been covering all of Florida. Whatever the Sentinels were doing, they quit doing it, fast, rightly recognizing that they had just been dealt a very serious blow. It would take them time to figure out exactly what had happened.

“Did you know?” I felt giddy, halfway to heaven. Endorphins kicking in. “Did you plan that?”

David grabbed me and kissed me, long and hard, with a good deal less restraint than most bridegrooms would have shown under similar circumstances. His hands roamed, stroking down the silk, crushing it to my hips, his fingertips brushing over the skin left exposed by the open V of the corset at my back.

“Absolutely,” he said, deadpan, when he pulled back.

“You had no idea.”

“I knew.”

“You liar. You guessed!”

He laughed and buried his face against my neck, picked me up, and whirled me around in the deserted gazebo. A storm wind lashed surf against the rocks, and a wild cascade of lightning slashed out of the sky and grounded spectacularly out at sea. It was the joy of the Djinn, made real.

David sobered, but the light stayed in him, burning fiercely. He kissed me again, this time more gently, with a promise of things to come, and I felt the curling smile on his lips. “I need to go,” he said. “Things to do.”

“Same here,” I said. “They’ll be looking for an explanation of what just happened.”

He stepped back, and his gaze raked me from head to toe, ravenous and warm. “Don’t change,” he said. “I’ll be back. I want to take that off you.”

I shivered, nodded, and watched my lover—no, I supposed I was going to have to get used to the idea of husband—mist away on the hot, humid breeze.

I couldn’t see any other Djinn, but there were plenty of hired security, all looking grim and efficient as they herded guests to cover. I had a whole contingent of them stationed near me, all facing outward. I reached up and tapped the nearest one on the shoulder. “Hey!”

“Ma’am?” He angled in my direction a huge ear that looked as though it had been badly mangled in some kind of sculpting accident, but didn’t turn to face me. “You ready to go?”

“Guess so. Looks like the wedding’s over!”

He snorted. “Right. Let’s get you to the safe zone!”

“Sure,” I said. I felt giddy. Almost invincible, actually, but even if bullets might bounce off me, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t do the dress any good. Priorities. “Hey, didn’t you notice all the cool stuff going on? Supernatural stuff all over the place?”

“Lady,” he said wearily, “I’ve guarded the Rolling Stones. Trust me, you guys are amateurs.”

When the phalanx of guards closed in around me, it was like being in a moving tank of body armor; I clutched the train of my dress well out of reach of their boots, and hustled along down the path, up the steps, and into the narrow hallways I’d come through before. No staff were smiling at me this time; they were probably busy toting up the damage charges. I hoped David’s black AmEx was up to the job.

My security detail arrowed me straight past Lewis and a group of Wardens all huddled together; I tried to bail out to talk to them, but clearly that wasn’t in the plans. No matter how loud I yelled, we continued moving straight for the elevators. The guards broke up there, facing outward in an arc while the guy in charge—Mr. Squishy Ear—took my elbow in one massive, scarred hand and escorted me firmly across the threshold and into one of the lifts. He punched in a key card, and away we went, just the two of us.

“Where’s Cherise? My maid of honor?” I asked.

“Cute little thing? ’Bout this high?” He marked off a height just above the waistband of his ripstop pants. “Blond?”

“That’s the one.”

“Yeah, she’s already upstairs. We got her out ASAP. She wasn’t any too happy about it. Said she wanted to see you kick some ass.” He sent me a sideways look that doubted my ass-kicking abilities. Sucker.

I smiled sweetly. “Not in these shoes. They’re rentals.”

The elevator lurched and came to a stop, and when my bodyguard came to alert, I held out a hand and launched myself up into the aetheric, searching for trouble. A Sentinel was in the woodwork, trying to short-circuit the brakes and snap the cable. Nice. I didn’t even have to act; the Wardens and the Djinn swarmed in a golden blur, smothering the unfortunate enemy combatant. I smiled serenely at the guard, who looked tense and prone to frowns, and leaned against the polished wood of the elevator wall. “So,” I said, as the lift trembled and started up again. “Rolling Stones, eh? Crazy?”

“Hard to believe, I know”—he shrugged—“but I gotta say, lady, in the crazy sweepstakes, you and your wedding are coming up fast.”

“I wouldn’t bet against us.”

The doors dinged at the penthouse level, and I strolled majestically out into the foyer. More bodyguards, equally grim and serious looking. I wasn’t asked for ID; apparently, the dress was a big tip-off.

I went into the suite, walked straight to the bar, and poured myself a stiff, two-fingered shot of tequila. No lime, no salt, none of the party trappings. This was about serious alcohol, delivered in its purest form at maximum impact. It was like getting slapped with an agave cactus; I gasped and bent over the bar, tingling all over.

“Wow,” Cherise said, watching me. “It’s like Brides Gone Wild. Impressive.”

I held out my arms, she ran into them, and we hugged. “Glad you’re okay,” she whispered. “I was so scared. . . .”

“I wasn’t,” Kevin said. He was stretched out on my nice beige jacquard sofa, ruining a perfectly good tuxedo and getting his nicely polished shoes all over the fabric. Unlike Lewis and David, he wasn’t improved by formal wear. He looked like a hoodlum who’d mugged a groomsman. “I was betting you’d be barbecued.”

“Asshole,” Cherise said. It sounded like she meant it for a change, and Kevin’s perpetual slouch straightened a little. “Her wedding just got blown all to hell. You could at least not be a total wad about it. For once.”

He sat up completely, brushed the hair out of his eyes, and looked a little less smug. “Sorry,” he said, and almost meant it. “I mean, I knew it was going to come out the way you wanted it to. You wanted to draw the Sentinels out; you did it. Most of them got obliterated, right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The plan was to force them out in the open so we could identify them. That seems to be working pretty well.”

“It wasn’t just the wedding,” Kevin said. “All the shiny pieces were here, right? Ashan? The Oracles?”

Yeah, as if I’d actually planned that part. “Sure. The better to get them to step out and show themselves. ”

“So you got him. The old guy.” He meant Bad Bob. I didn’t answer. I poured another shot glass of tequila and downed it.

“You might want to leave,” I said. “Because this isn’t over.”

Both Kevin and Cherise looked taken aback, looking around at the calm, orderly luxury of the penthouse. Out at sea, the storms were dissipating; there was still tension in the tectonic plates, but it was being bled off in harmless ways by the Earth Wardens. The Ma’at were all over the whole balancing problem. It all looked . . . calm.

“Leave,” I said, even more softly. I poured two shot glasses and put the bottle aside. “Go now.”

Kevin grabbed Cherise’s hand and dragged her, still protesting, toward the door. I didn’t raise my head to watch them go. I stayed focused on the silvery glitter of the alcohol in crystal, and when I heard the door click shut, I said, “You might as well show yourself. I know you’re here.” I could feel his presence now. I couldn’t believe how it felt—how cold, how empty.

I heard the chuckle, and it was so familiar, so damned familiar it burned. I tried hard not to shudder, tried to keep my head up and my back straight. “Tequila,” Bad Bob said. “Always thought you were a scotch girl, Jo.”

“I am,” I said. “But I remember you always had a taste for the stuff.” I took a shot glass and turned, holding it out.

Sure enough, on the other side of the room, Bad Bob stood watching me. He was wearing a tuxedo, too, or half of one, anyway; the pants were formal, the shirt untucked, the tie loosened. No coat. His suspenders were in a garish rainbow that brought to mind the early oeuvre of Robin Williams.

“Like it?” He snapped the suspenders with his thumbs. “Thought I’d help you celebrate the happy day. And it’s a happy day, isn’t it? You and David, all cozy and bound up together, till death do you part.” Bad Bob grinned, all teeth and crazy blue eyes. “I’ll take that drink now.”

I levitated it across to him. He laughed and snatched it out of the air, threw it back, and blew the shot glass into powder in midair with a random burst of power.

“You know what I am, don’t you?” he asked. He continued to grin, relentless as a shark, and ambled slowly around the room, poking and touching things at random. “You know why I’m so set on getting you.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve killed three of you so far.”

That snapped his head around fast, and the grin turned bloody in its intensity. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he said. “You used our own against us twice. That doesn’t even count. Any fool Warden could have done it. But the last—ah, the last one was special. She was mine.”

“I didn’t think the Demons had family.”

“I didn’t say she was family; I said she was mine. I created her; I cultivated her. I set her on you. And you stood there and watched her die.” His smile twitched insanely. “Poetic justice, I suppose, your Djinn pouring poison down her throat the way I did it to you in the first place. Never been much for poetry, myself.” He stretched out a hand. The bottle of tequila left the bar and arrowed across the room to smack into his palm. He swallowed one mouthful, then two, and licked his lips. “Down to us, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” I cocked my head and smiled back at him, trying to be as winter cold as he. “So what’re you going to do, Bob? The Djinn have twice the power they did an hour ago, and none of the restraints they used to have. You can’t command them. You can’t trick them. And you damn sure can’t scare them anymore. The Wardens know you now, and the ones who thought the idea of the Sentinels made sense are learning better, fast. You can’t threaten to go public. What’s left?”

“Same thing that’s always left, girly-girl.” He shrugged. “Death, horror, destruction. No matter how good you are, you can’t stop it all. I’ll push you until you break, you, the Wardens, the Djinn. Until you make a mistake and I come for you.”

“You don’t think coming here was a mistake?” I asked. “ ’Cause I have to admit, ballsy. Not real smart, but ballsy.”

“Oh, I’ll be gone well before help arrives,” he said. “Might surprise you, but I can do the Djinn thing now—blip around through the aetheric. Handy when you want to visit old, suspicious friends.”

I felt the atmosphere shift, slide toward the darker spectrums. “Okay. Nice to see you, Bob. Now, fuck off.”

“I always did love your sharp tongue,” he said. “I’m not going to fight you today. Be a shame to destroy that dress.” The bastard winked at me. “No, I’ll just go home, play with my new friends. You know them, I’ll bet: Rahel, that rascal, pretending to be all soft and human like that. Oh, and my new friend. Someone very special.”

He reached into the shadows, and he pulled out my daughter.

Imara stumbled and fell to her knees, the brick-red dress she normally wore now fluttering and writhing around her. He’d bound her up with black ropes of twisting, glittering power, and where they touched her, they burned. No, I thought numbly. Impossible. She was safe; she was taken back to the chapel; Ashan was guarding her. . . .

“Ashan never did like this one,” he said. “Figures on appointing a new Earth Oracle in short order. Nice friends you have. Maybe you ought to reconsider which side of this you’re on, girl; what do you think?”

I lunged for Imara and slammed into a barrier, one that blew me back across the room to slam full force into the glass tiles of the bar. I saw stars and darkness, and sank to an awkward sitting position on the floor, surrounded by fallen shards of mirror.

“Oh, don’t fuss. She’s not really here. Just thought I’d give you fair warning, because it’s going to hurt you a whole lot worse than it hurts me when I do get around to taking your kid.”

“Stop,” I said. I felt light-headed, sick, hot. I no longer felt in the least invulnerable. “What do you want?”

“I want to make a deal,” Bad Bob said. “Your daughter’s life for David’s. Fair trade.”

“No.” I snarled it. “You don’t even have her, you bastard; you already said so!”

“I said I don’t have her now. Not that I wouldn’t have her by the time your little rescue party fails to take me out. Sorry, kid,” he said to Imara’s image. “Mommy doesn’t love you all that well, looks like. Too bad, you’re a cutie.”

He showed me what he was going to do to her, to my child, and I didn’t look away. I wanted to, desperately,but something in me that was far colder, far wiser than my heart made me stay strong.

“When I’m finished,” he said, in a whisper as black as the Unmaking itself, “then I’ll reach through her to destroy you. But not before. I want you to feel every moment of it, Joanne. Every . . . single . . . moment.”

The Wardens and the Djinn had finally arrived, no doubt summoned by Kevin and Cherise. I felt the flare of power outside the doors; they were out there, but Bad Bob was keeping them shut out. He could do that. He had power to burn . . . but he wasn’t doing it alone. I recognized the signature behind it.

Ashan. Ashan was still interfering, throwing up barriers, trying to get me killed. He’d consider his problems solved, if I just disappeared from the face of the earth. After all, the vows David and I had exchanged had elevated the New Djinn in power—made them, I suspected, a match for the Old Djinn. Maybe even more than a match.

“You don’t have my daughter, and you’re not going to have her,” I said, with an icy calm that I was far from feeling. “The Djinn would be all over you right now if you’d harmed a hair on an Oracle’s head. You’re a fool if you think anything else—and that includes Ashan, by the way. He might be using you, but he’ll never stand with you.”

Bad Bob stared at me for a second. The grisly vision of Imara vanished into mist. Gone. He lifted the tequila bottle to his lips and drank. Drank it dry. Then he tossed the bottle back to me, and I snatched it out of the air.

“You come on, princess,” he said. “You find out what I’ve got. Call my bluff.”

I didn’t blink. “All right,” I said. “I call.” Anything, anything to buy time. My backup didn’t dare come at him unprepared, any more than I dared a direct assault against him; they had to be sure he was cut off from his support, and that they could get to him before he got me. Bad Bob had it in him to slaughter me, right here, right now. I felt it in the air. David needed to counter Ashan’s influence first.

We’d wanted this. We’d asked for it. I only hoped that we were prepared to actually deal with it, now that the moment was staring us in the face.

“Good girl.” That smile, that evil, dark smile, grew wider still. “So give me your expert opinion: Do you think this is just another illusion?” He reached aside, into the shadows, and this time he pulled out a book: the book, a twin to the one, bound in leather and wrapped in iron, that I’d last seen in the vault in Ortega’s Miami mansion.

I felt the pull of it from here, and the whisper of power. Nope, that was not an illusion. And our time was running out. I reached through the golden thread that welded me fast to David and whispered, It’s here; he has it here, and felt the Djinn surge in response.

They slammed hard into a black shell of crackling power that Bad Bob threw up so fast it made me shudder. The Wardens backed off, and the Djinn melted away, circling, looking for weakness.

I was trapped.

Bad Bob took the iron peg out of the latch with a flick of his finger, opened the book, and flipped pages. “You have any idea what’s in here, sweetheart?” he asked. “What kind of havoc I can wreak? Ah, here’s a good one. . . .” Words spilled out of his mouth, strange and liquid, and something in my brain trembled and screamed an alarm.

I froze as the last syllable left his lips, and felt something seize control of me, and a burning sensation high on my right shoulder blade, like a brand being pressed deep into the flesh. I couldn’t flinch. Couldn’t scream. I smelled my own skin burning, and couldn’t so much as cry.

This shouldn’t happen. This can’t happen!

“Hush,” Bob murmured. “Sooner done, soonest over. There. Now I own you, sweet little Jo. The way it was meant to be.” He snapped the book shut and dropped it; it vanished into mist before it hit the floor. He was storing it in a pocket universe, somewhere in the aetheric. No way to get to it without knowing exactly where, without having the keys he’d crafted to hide it.

I still couldn’t move. I stayed stiff and silent as Bad Bob walked toward me. He was a short, bandy-legged old man, but none of that mattered. I was looking at him on the aetheric, and he was no longer troubling to hide himself at all. He was a morass of boiling black, tentacles whipping and tangling, razor edges slashing at everything around him, and where he touched it, the aetheric bled.

I couldn’t even close my eyes. You son of a bitch, I thought. How dare you do this. How dare you. . . .

I felt the power of the Wardens and the Djinn beyond the room flare up into one white-hot unity, burning through the black shield he’d put up.

Not quickly enough.

“You know, you cost me,” Bad Bob said. “I spent a while cultivating all that hate, all that fear from the Sentinels. And you had to go put on a public show and get all the fanatics to wriggle out of the woodwork, whether I wanted them to or not.” He leaned very close to me, lips lover-close, and whispered, “That’s why I need you, Joanne. Be thou bound to my service.”

That made no sense. I was no Djinn. The Rule of Three didn’t work on me, and in any case the agreement between the Warden and the Djinn had ended; it was just words. It meant nothing.

It had to be a bluff.

And I couldn’t help a surge of pure fear, because there was so much visceral delight in his face.

“Be thou bound to my service.” His eyes were blood-shot, not entirely human anymore. His breath smelled foul and ancient, something ages in the ground.

Stop, I wanted to say. I couldn’t. He wasn’t even letting me breathe, and my lungs were crying out for air. I couldn’t even wield the power necessary to supply a trickle of oxygen. Stop this.

“Be . . . thou . . . bound . . . to . . . my . . .” He whispered each word separately, eyes drifting half closed in pleasure, and then smiled. “Service. Ahhhh.”

I felt the white-hot force of the united Wardens and Djinn break apart into a million spinning pieces. The thread between me and David held, but only barely. Things were changing, terribly changing, and I couldn’t see the edges of the wave that was rippling out from this moment. I didn’t know what he’d done, or how, but it was flooding the world, drowning everything.

And when the flood receded, there was an ominous silence. The aetheric felt clean and very empty.

I drew in a whooping, gasping breath and sobbed it out, then breathed in again. Some of the black spots dancing in front of my eyes started to recede . . . not all, by any means. I felt one half step from unconscious, but I kept myself on my feet, facing Bad Bob.

“There,” he said. “That’s better.” He chucked me under the chin, as if I were his favorite niece who’d just performed a cute trick. Or a puppy. “Oh, you have questions, don’t you?”

I managed to get enough breath to gasp, “What— did—you—”

“You had a Demon Mark, once upon a time,” he said. “You may have gotten rid of the Mark, but it left you stained. Vulnerable. Mine.”

The Wardens burned through the shield and launched their assault, with or without the Djinn, and the doors of the penthouse blew off the hinges. Lewis strode in, surrounded by a barely visible nimbus of red light, and behind him came a grim-faced phalanx of my friends: Marion Bearheart, walking with a cane; Kevin, scared but determined; Luis Rocha, the Earth Warden I’d first met during the original Fort Lauderdale event. Dozens more, people I knew and liked, people I hadn’t even known would put themselves at risk for me.

David stepped out of the center of the group.

“Whoops, Daddy’s home,” Bob said. “Time for me to be leaving. You will come see me, won’t you? I’ll expect you around sunset. Love that bloody color on the water.”

My muscles were working again. I shakily reached for power and pulled it down, pulled it from all around me, every surface. The room lit up with miniature lightning strikes, all bleeding toward me.

“Bride of Frankenstein,” Bad Bob said. “All right, all right, I’m going. Don’t set your hair on fire.”

He crooked his little finger and vanished with an audible pop of air. I stared at the spot in the aetheric; the writhing black tentacles took longer to leave, finally slipping through a raw wound in the world.

I didn’t drop, though I’m sure everybody expected me to. Instead, I turned to David and asked in what seemed like a very normal tone of voice, “How badly are we screwed?”

He should have rushed to me, taken me in his arms. It was what he always did—what I expected him to do.

But he stayed where he was, watching me, and I no longer understood what I saw in his bright, burning-penny eyes.

He said, “Ashan was right. The vow we exchanged has made the New Djinn vulnerable again to the Rule of Three. My people are at risk now. From yours. We did this, the two of us.”

He sounded . . . distant. Almost cold. I couldn’t control a shiver. Go to him, I told myself, but I couldn’t seem to move. If I moved, I’d fall down.

“He’s already turned Rahel to his cause,” he continued. “She belongs to him. You can’t trust her anymore. Remember that.”

He sounded so alone. I got myself steadied, a little, and took a step toward him.

He stepped back. Keeping plenty of space between us.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry. I have to see to the safety of my people now.”

“David—”

For an instant, I saw the torment inside him, and it stopped whatever I was going to say dead in my throat. “I can’t,” he whispered. “He’s destroying her. He’s taking great pleasure in it. How many more of my people have to die, Jo? We’re not mortal. This shouldn’t be happening to us. It should never have happened.” He blinked, and the metallic shine came back in his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

The Djinn left. Just . . . left. All of the Djinn, gone without a sound, including David.

He hadn’t even said good-bye.

I collapsed to my knees. Someone—I didn’t even see who—helped me up. I told everyone to get out, but they wouldn’t. Understandable, I supposed.

I went into the bathroom, slammed and locked the door, and skinned down the fabric of the dress to get a look at my right shoulder blade.

Bad Bob had branded me, the same way he’d branded his Sentinels. It was a mark in the shape of a torch. The old stains left from the Demon Mark I’d once carried had given him a gateway . . . like a cut letting in bacteria. And now I was infected.

The proof was right there on my skin.

I stared into the mirror at the black mark, hideously reminded of the Demon Mark that had once grown inside me, and how that had felt.

How good that had felt.

I flinched at a hesitant knock on the door.

“You okay in there?” Lewis asked.

My eyes, in the mirror, were wide and empty. He can have me, any time he wants me. I couldn’t allow that. If David wasn’t going to fight Bad Bob . . .

Then I had to.

We settled up damages with the Palms; nobody acquainted me with a final figure, for which I was very grateful. I hoped the Wardens’ bank account wouldn’t snap under the strain. I changed out of the lovely wedding dress alone, not daring to let anybody— especially Cherise—catch a look at the brand-new black tattoo I was sporting. When I came out of the bedroom dressed in jeans and a purple knit shirt, the entire crowded roomful of Wardens stopped talking.

“What?” I snapped. “Never saw anybody left at the altar before?” Wow. Being dumped made me bitchy, which was, of course, a brave front. I didn’t feel bitchy; I felt . . . alone. I felt as if my whole world had gone the dead, burned color of the torch on my shoulder.

Looks were exchanged among my friends. I wanted to kick and punch something, preferably Bad Bob, until the sun burned out, but I’d have settled for anyone who said something flippant right at that moment.

Nobody did. Cherise finally stood up and said, “Let me take that.”

Oh. The dress. It was draped over my arm like a limp silk corpse. I held it out to her, and she zipped it safely back in its protective plastic cocoon.

“Probably should get that back to the store,” I said. I was trying to disconnect, trying to shut off all my emotions. I was being pretty successful at it, too.

Cherise looked devastated, as if I’d admitted defeat. “No,” she said. “Um—can’t return it. There was a smudge.” She put on her determined face, which was just cute, and dared me to say otherwise. “You’ll have to keep it.”

“What for?” I asked. “Not like we’re going to get a do-over on the wedding.” And that nearly broke me. I wanted David. I wanted him to manifest out of the thin air and sweep me up in his arms and carry me off. I wanted Bad Bob to be gone and all to be right with the world, for once.

That wasn’t going to happen. At least, it wasn’t going to happen unless I made it happen. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. I supposed old Edmund Burke had meant to include women in that. And if he hadn’t, well, screw him.

“What’s the plan?” I asked Lewis. Lewis seemed lost in thought, but that was probably because, in his typical fashion, he was manipulating a dozen different things at once. Now, he looked up, met my eyes, and I had a second of icy doubt. Could he see what Bad Bob had done to me? No. If he could have, Paul would have been busted for a Sentinel the second Lewis laid eyes on him. Whatever Bad Bob had done to me, it was invisible to the Wardens. And the Djinn, I reminded myself. David hadn’t tipped to Paul’s betrayal, either.

I knew I should say something, but if I did, I’d be making it real.

I’d be admitting defeat.

“We have to go after him,” Lewis said. “We got most of his support, I think; he’s isolated, maybe even alone. We need to get him before he can recruit more followers.”

“He’s going to go after the Oracles,” I said. “After my daughter, Lewis. I can’t let that happen.”

He didn’t argue the point. “He won’t go after anybody if we don’t give him the time.”

“Do we have anything that can counter what he’s got?” Meaning, the Unmaking. And his sheer, horrible power.

“Maybe,” Lewis said. “But I think this is going to be more a matter of wearing him down until we can strike. More of a siege than a blitz attack.”

The light dawned. “You know where he is.”

“He’s at the Wardens’ safe house, on the beach,” he said. “He didn’t try to hide it. He’s inviting us to come get him.”

“Which means it’s a trap.”

Lewis nodded. “But what are our options? We’ve lost the Djinn, but if we don’t go for him now, he’ll have time to build up his organization again. Even if Bad Bob’s got control of Rahel, we may never have a better opportunity.”

No, I didn’t like it. This was Bad Bob’s version of our wedding—an obvious, juicy target, just waiting for us to strike it. “We can wait him out.”

“He can move through the aetheric, like a Djinn. How do you propose we seal him off, without the Djinn’s cooperation?”

Lewis had a point. We needed to get Bad Bob to fight us on our terms, and that meant letting him think he was winning.

That meant walking into the trap—but being ready to turn the trap to our advantage.

Lewis was thinking of something I hadn’t, but then, he usually was. “Your link to David. It’s still holding?”

I went still, listening. It was—slender as a silk thread, but strong as steel. I couldn’t reach him, because he was blocking me, but I could feel him. I nodded.

“Can you draw power from it?” Lewis asked.

I concentrated, and felt a tingle of energy creep along the link from David to me. Then more. I held up my hand, and a golden, unfocused glow formed in my palm.

Lewis didn’t look happy with the outcome, which surprised me until he said, “Then you’re the one who has the best chance. He’ll send you energy to keep you alive, and as the Conduit, he’s got access to more energy than any other Djinn except Ashan. That could give you the edge you need to defeat Rahel, if it comes to that. And Bad Bob.”

I needed to tell him, couldn’t avoid the embarrassing and fatal truth any longer. I shook the glow out like a match and opened my mouth to explain about the mark Bad Bob had burned into my back— about my vulnerability to him.

I couldn’t. Not a single word.

“Jo?”

I focused past him, to the delicate, antique desk in the corner. There was creamy, expensive hotel stationery and a Montblanc pen right there, just waiting for me to scribble out a warning if I couldn’t force my voice box to cooperate.

Except I couldn’t so much as make a move toward it.

Dammit. Bad Bob had installed safeguards.

“Nothing,” I heard myself say. “I think you’re right. Send me in. I think I’m your best bet.”

Lewis didn’t seem happy with it, but I knew he’d do it. “Not alone,” he said. “I’ve already got teams surrounding the compound. I’ll go with you.”

“No, you won’t,” I said, and I meant it. “Lewis, one of us at risk is enough. The Wardens need a leader, and like it or not, you’re it. I’m expendable.”

“Don’t say that,” he said. Not, I noticed, a denial, just an avoidance. Lewis was far too practical not to realize that I was right about that. “I said you had the best chance, but we can do this another way, Jo. All you have to do is say the word, and we’ll—”

“Lose? Yeah, that works great. Good plan.” I felt tears sting my eyes. “Come on. Have I ever backed off from certain death? Ever? Even when I had something to live for?”

He flinched at that one, but he didn’t look away. “No,” he said. “Bad Bob knows that, too. He’s going to count on it. Don’t let him push you into a corner, or you’ll die for nothing. I don’t think I can stand that. You mean too much to me, Jo.”

It was the closest he’d come to admitting how he felt about me, and he’d done it right out in public. The room—full of Wardens—was deathly still, though whether they were waiting for more revelations or for me to reject him, I couldn’t tell.

“I know,” I said softly. “I won’t.”

Cherise cleared her throat. “If you need somebody to, you know, ride along and—”

“No,” I said flatly. “Not this time. This is no job for anyone who can’t throw a lightning bolt, a car, or a ball of fire the size of Cleveland. I don’t want you anywhere near Bad Bob.”

She looked disappointed, but not really surprised. Despite the chaos of the day, there wasn’t a smudge on her. Kevin put his arm around her and looked down; elfin and lovely and entirely human, she looked up into his face. The smile they exchanged made my heart ache.

“You’re going?” she asked him. Kevin shrugged.

“Might as well,” he said. “Got nothing else planned for the day. My Nintendo’s busted.”

“Watch your ass,” she told him.

Ah, young love.

“Ready?” Lewis asked me. I nodded. I still wished I could live a normal life, have what I wanted, be at peace. I should have taken all of my vacation. I was just now starting to see the wisdom of waiting for trouble, instead of courting it. “Can you get David to help at all?”

I shook my head. “No. He’s—staying away.”

Lewis looked very, very grim. “You mean, he’s walled himself off on the aetheric. The way Jonathan used to do.”

“I can’t be sure. He’s not giving me anything back about where he is, but it would make sense.” David could save himself, and his people, by shutting himself off like that for as long as necessary. Ages, if need be.

Lewis pulled in breath to say something, then decided that discretion was the better part of valor; he held up his hands and walked away to confer with the others.

He didn’t have to say it. I’d already figured out that if David had really withdrawn into his stronghold on the aetheric, I might never see him again.

Not even to say good-bye.

To say that there was a military operation at work on the beach when we arrived was an understatement. One handy thing about the Wardens coming out in public was that we no longer had to make do with covert ops-style equipment. No, this time we had cops, FBI, air surveillance, coast guard boats . . . everything but the dancing bear and big top.

I was pretty sure that none of it was going to mean a damn thing to Bad Bob, in the end. Mortal firepower was beyond insignificant to him, except as an inconvenience, and with the Djinn off the board, we had very little left to counter him.

Just me, the battered and damaged white queen, with a little fleck of black to betray her true allegiances.

Lewis and I sat in a surveillance van, the tricked-out kind, watching monitors in all different spectrums. There was no movement from the beach house. SWAT teams had gone into position, stealthily moving from cover to cover inside the overgrown estate grounds. It wouldn’t help them. Bad Bob knew they were there; he had to know. He probably just didn’t damn well care. Humans weren’t his thing, and in fact they mattered very little to him except as window dressing.

“Nothing on any of the monitors or sensors,” one of the Wardens reported. “Maybe he’s not there.”

“He’s there,” I said. I was watching the house itself. I couldn’t sense or see anything, and I had absolutely no basis for believing what I’d said, but somehow, I knew. I just knew. “He’s got ways to conceal himself. Probably using Rahel.”

“We need physical recon,” Lewis said.

“I think that’s my cue.” I didn’t wait for them to approve; I didn’t wait for the protests. I just jumped down onto the road and walked up to the gates. I looked up at the perimeter camera, and felt Bad Bob’s smile like a fetid ghost all around me.

“Jo, wait!” That was Lewis, trying to order me back.

“For what?” I asked him, and he had absolutely no answer to that. I read it in his eyes, though.

He wanted me to say something, anything, to make this easier. But I didn’t have it, and neither did he.

So I went on.

The gates creaked open, and I walked alone, shadowed by the SWAT commandos and FBI tactical units, up the winding path. I remembered walking it with David, in happier times; Ortega was still alive then, still delighting in all his lovely things. I hadn’t feared Bad Bob, except as a ghost safely sealed in my memories.

The night was cool, and there were clouds blowing up at the horizon. A natural front, nothing sinister about it. Overhead, the stars were chips of ice, sharp enough to cut.

If I’d been walking with my lover, with my husband, it would have been magical. I love you, I whispered to him, along the bond between us. I will always love you. I’m sorry.

I felt nothing in response.

I walked up the steps, moving steadily and without hesitation. I reached for the knob, and opened the front door. It was unlocked. I’d known it would be.

Bad Bob was sitting in a leather wing chair next to the fireplace, feet up, puffing on a cigar. He had a bottle of liquor next to him—scotch, this time. He raised the bottle, and I levitated it to me. The taste of liquid gold burned the roof of my mouth, then poured down my throat and started a sickening burn in the cold pit of my stomach.

“It’s not poisoned,” I noted, and sent it back. He caught it effortlessly out of the air and chugged a few mouthfuls, then put it aside.

“Wouldn’t waste good scotch. Or good poison,” he said. “Wouldn’t kill you, anyway, would it? Nothing kills you. Goddamn cockroach, you are. You’ll survive a nuclear winter.”

“Look who’s talking,” I said. I sat down on the edge of the couch across from him. There were a few lights burning, not many, and the whole effect was ghostly. Outside the windows, the beach was dark, the water slick and almost flat—a calm sea. “You’ve been dead a few times, I hear.”

He chuckled. “Hurricane Andrew should’ve killed me,” he said. “Came damn close, actually. But there was always just one more damn challenge, one more thing to do. One more life to save. You know how it is.”

“That’s your story? That you were in the business of saving lives?” I leaned back and folded my arms. “Oh, come on.”

“I’ll put my scores up against anybody’s. Including yours.”

“You killed people!”

“How many collateral goddamn damages have you had over the past few years, girl? What the fuck makes you the hero of the story? No, more to the point: What makes me the villain?”

I stared at him, not exactly sure what he was doing. I’d come here intending to make him kill me, or to destroy him in the process, if that was possible; to wound him badly enough that Lewis could finish him off. I hadn’t expected him to be so damn defensive about, of all things, his record as a good guy.

“Your hands aren’t clean,” he pointed out. “Hell, you’ve stood by and let people die, if nothing else. How come I’m the bad guy?”

“Because—” I ground my teeth together. “Because nobody ever became evil overnight. Because the bad guys don’t see what they do as evil; they see it as their own personal good. Sound familiar?”

He took another slug, straight from the bottle. “Joanne Baldwin, big-time hero. If I hadn’t given you that Demon Mark, you’d still be paddling around the shallow-personality pool, wondering if you could destroy a tornado fast enough to make the shoe sale at Macy’s. Not good, not evil. Not anything.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, hands clasped. “I’ve made you strong. I’m going to make you stronger. Stronger than any goddamn Warden in history. And I’m going to do that by changing the whole ecosystem of the planet— by destroying the Djinn. Makes humans the real apex predators of this little ball of rock. And I’m putting you in charge of it.”

It hit me what he was trying to say. “You—you think this is a good thing for me. For the Wardens.”

“I don’t give a shit if it’s good or bad. It’s what’s necessary. I always do what’s necessary.” Bob’s grin flashed. “Sometimes that’s also fun, though.”

I didn’t want to hear any more. Outside the windows, the seas began to chop as the wind moved faster, as temperatures shifted and swirled. He was playing with the weather. Taunting us. Sending temperatures into a downward spiral out near Cuba, creating an imbalance that would surely force intervention.

“I’m going to kill you,” I said. “Demon or not. Dead or not. You’re not walking away today, not if it costs me every last breath I have. If you made me what I am, then what I am is coming after you.”

He sighed. “Ah, Jo. Wave a red flag, and you run at it like a bull, every time. You think I didn’t know that?”

Which was exactly how I wanted him to think. My gaze had fixed on something black and glittering, mounted like some exotic trophy weapon on the back wall of the house, right out in the open, almost as a taunt.

The whole house was lethally radioactive. I was, in effect, already dead. Even as an Earth Warden, I couldn’t diffuse that much radiation through my system without damaging my own cells. Maybe Lewis could, but not me. My daughter had cut herself off from me—had been forced to.

The power I was drawing from David in a steady stream was keeping me alive, but it wouldn’t save me over the long haul. It was a treatment, not a cure.

I turned away from Bad Bob and walked to the Unmaking. It was glimmering with its own black aura, sending its poisonous tendrils deep into the house, into the aetheric.

“You don’t want to do that, honey,” he said. “It’s suicide.”

I picked it up.

The outside of it felt shockingly hot. A slightly rough texture when I ran my fingers lightly down, finding the balance point. The horrible thing was heavier than I’d expected, and my muscles began to shake, trying to rid me of the burden.

Bad Bob hadn’t moved. He raised the cigar to his mouth and puffed, eyes half closed. “You got the wrong idea, Jo. You can’t kill me this way.”

“You’re probably right,” I panted. I fought, but lost, the battle for control of the weather system that was rotating in past Cuba, moving high and fast and wild. It collided with warmer air, and the clouds built walls of thick, heavy gray. Lightning burned inside it, living and dying in rapid-fire flares. “But I’ll bet it slows you down for the others to finish.”

“They’ll have their hands full trying to keep half of Florida alive by nightfall. If I make things bad enough, the Djinn will have to show their faces just to keep the balance, and once that happens . . . they’re mine.” His pale blue eyes focused on me. “Put it down, kid. You’re just killing yourself faster.”

I shook my head. Sweat dripped down my face, matted my hair. “No. Make me. I know you can.”

“Why should I?” he asked. “You want to kill me, kill me. Do it. Maybe you’ll be right. Maybe it’ll just be that easy.”

I lunged, both hands barely able to keep hold of the black spear, and as I did I had an involuntary flash of sense-memory, of Jerome Silverton digging that black shard from a dead Djinn, and of my dream of David lying dead in the street, pierced just like this.

I dragged myself to a wild, panting halt, flat-footed, staring at Bad Bob’s blue eyes. The tip of the Unmaking trembled just an inch from his chest. He made no effort to get away.

“Do it,” he said. “Maybe I’m not your enemy after all. You ever think of that?”

Sweat burned down my face, in my eyes, and I felt my hands spasming, trying to drop this thing that was already killing me. It wouldn’t do any good, but you couldn’t blame my body for trying to save itself.

He was trying to tell me something. There was a message under all this, a message unknown and beyond translation, but somehow, one I was receiving.

Bad Bob had expected me. He wasn’t the type to go in for self-sacrifice, and he knew how to set the hook firmly.

How to use the best possible bait . . . himself.

He had the power to stop me, if he wanted. Why wasn’t he?

He’d taunted me. He’d threatened my daughter. He’d done everything he could to drive me to this moment. He’d used my vows with David to open the Djinn up to the Rule of Three. We knew he had Rahel. And Rahel had a gift . . . for mimicry.

The last piece fell into place with a physical shock. This wasn’t Bad Bob.

It was Rahel. It had to be Rahel, forced to take on his shape, be his puppet, his sacrificial goat.

I felt a pulse of power in the black torch on my back. Bad Bob was getting impatient with me. I wasn’t following the script.

I closed my eyes and reached for the cord that bound me to David. Energy was flowing through the connection, thick and golden, a torrent that was racing through my body in a frantic effort to keep me alive. It wasn’t working anymore. I need you to show me, I whispered. I need to see. Help me see.

I went up into the aetheric. It was hard, so very hard that it was like ripping off my own skin; I barely made it into the lowest levels, and my Oversight revealed the room in dull reds and blacks.

It wasn’t Rahel in the chair after all. Rahel was outside, heading to the van. Bad Bob was holding me here, and going after our flank by attacking Lewis.

I needed to act. If Rahel was out there, that meant that Bad Bob was in front of me. Had to be. I just had to strike that last inch. . . .

I saw a bright copper flash, just a flash, with the last fading strength of Oversight before I fell back into my skin, and I knew. I knew the truth.

David hadn’t gone to the aetheric. Bad Bob had used Rahel to lure him here, and he’d bound him, just as he’d bound Rahel.

David was sitting in the chair in front of me, and I was an inch away from taking his life. I’d come so close, so horribly close, to making the wrong choice. One more inch, just one, and my life would have been over, even if I’d survived this day.

David had been trying to warn me all along. Maybe I’m not your enemy.

Oh God.

I tried to keep my expression the same, except for a slight involuntary widening of my eyes. I was barely hanging on; subtleties would be lost, if Bad Bob was— and I knew he would be—watching.

He wouldn’t want to miss seeing me make such a catastrophic mistake.

I know it’s you, I tried to say to David, through our locked stare. Trust me. If Bad Bob had put him in thrall, he wouldn’t have much room to maneuver, and no room to give me any real assistance. All I could hope was that Bad Bob, clever and cruel as he was, hadn’t thought of everything.

And of course, that I had, which wasn’t too damn likely.

“Where?” I shaped the word only with my lips, burning my question into Bad Bob’s eyes, trying to get across one simple, impossible message. For a second I thought I’d guessed wrong, that I’d just destroyed myself for nothing and missed my only chance, but then those blue eyes darted quickly away, to a point just behind me and to my right.

The doorway. Of course. Bad Bob would want to see this up close.

One thing about the Unmaking; it was pointed on both ends. I didn’t have enough strength and control left to turn, so I lunged backward, angling toward the doorway. One step, two, fast and hard, letting my own exhausted weight do the work as I drove the weapon in reverse, straight for the real enemy.

I felt the end of the spear slam home, and felt the whole thing vibrate like a struck bell. It shook my hands off its heated surface, and my whole body threw itself into an uncontrollable spasm, every muscle sparking and spasming and driving me hard to the floor.

In the chair next to the window, the fake Bad Bob continued to sit, watching me—unable to move, because he couldn’t move.

I writhed over on my back. Sweaty hair clung to my face, obscuring my vision, but as I swiped it away I saw Bad Bob—the real one—standing over me, staring down at the black rod that had punched completely through his stomach and emerged glittering and bloody from the other side.

He laughed. “Good thinking,” he said, and blood fountained out over his chin and bubbled in his mouth. “Damn, girl. Still got an arm.”

He fell heavily to his knees, face draining white, and gripped the Unmaking with both hands. I wriggled backward away from him as he began to pull it free of his body, one torturous inch at a time. His hands were shaking, turning gray, but he kept at it with single-minded intensity.

And what he pulled out of his body was thicker. He was creating more of it, generating it from his own body.

But it looked as if it hurt like a son of a bitch.

I crab-crawled back until I bumped into the legs of the man sitting in the chair, and looked up at him. I saw a single flare of Djinn fire break free of the disguise.

“David,” I whispered. I got no response, of course. There was a container somewhere; there had to be if Bad Bob had bound a Djinn—something glass, something breakable. But even though the beach house was relatively uncluttered, I didn’t have time or strength to search. Bottles in the kitchen, the refrigerator, hidden in cupboards, forgotten in the attic—it could be anywhere.

Bad Bob grunted with effort as he pulled, one convulsive jerk after another. The Unmaking was sliding slowly out of him. I watched the sharp end disappear into his back. Another two or three pulls, and he’d have it out, bigger and more powerful than ever.

I’d bought us some time, but it was running out. Outside, I heard explosions, and felt the ground tremble under my feet. Rahel had reached the van, and she was going after Lewis. It was a free-for-all outside.

I closed my eyes and found what little small, still pool of Earth power I had. I’d never had time for real training, real control, but for this, I didn’t need it. It’s always easier to destroy than to create.

I attuned myself to the specific frequencies of glass, crystal, and porcelain, and sent out a pulse of power that rippled out from me like a sonic boom.

It hit the bottles in the bar and exploded them in a mist of silica. Crystal decanters and tumblers vibrated apart. The wave reached the windows and blew them out in sprays of glitter. It rolled over Bad Bob, past him, and shattered everything that could be shattered, continuing relentlessly through the entire house, as far as I could push it.

He could have hidden his bottles somewhere else, but he’d want to keep them close. Warden instinct. I pushed the wave front as far as I could, but my strength failed before I reached the gates of the estate.

“Bitch,” Bad Bob whispered, and with one convulsive jerk, pulled the spear completely out of his body. The gaping wound crisped black at the edges, then began to knit itself closed.

In the chair, the false image of Bad Bob flinched, and I felt the timbre of power in the room shift and flow as the force that had been holding David apart from me cut off.

I’d destroyed the bottle.

David was free.

The golden thread between us vibrated and snapped tight again.

In a second, he had his hands around me and was pulling me up, preparing to carry me through the open window.

“No you don’t,” Bad Bob gasped, and pointed his finger at us. I froze, off balance, unable to control my muscles. Dammit! I’d forgotten about the torch mark on my shoulder blade. It wasn’t only David he’d been able to manipulate.

“If you won’t play, you pay,” Bad Bob said, and grinned with bloody teeth. He reversed his grip on the Unmaking, found the balance point . . . and drove it straight down, into the floor—through the floor, into the concrete.

Through the concrete, into the bedrock of the earth.

I felt the sentience of the planet cry out, a wave of horror and emotion that overrode every synapse in my body. I felt her agony. She hadn’t been hurt so badly in a long, long time. David cried out, and I felt his hands slide away. He lunged past me, heading for Bad Bob, but after one step he pitched onto his side, convulsing.

Conduit to the aetheric and Mother Earth, he was also the most vulnerable to her pain.

The earthquake hit with the force of a bomb, shattering steel and wood and concrete as if it were so much glass. I sensed the perimeter troops, Warden and human alike, being tossed around like dice outside. I heard explosions, cracks, the sound of trees groaning in agony and breaking off in lethally heavy pieces.

I couldn’t move. Bad Bob didn’t move, either; he stood staring at me, one hand still outstretched, the other gripping the shaft of the Unmaking still sticking out of the ground.

Walls roared, cracked, and shattered. The floor rippled like liquid, then, the carpet shredding, it broke into jagged fragments. Dust became a mist, then a storm.

The roof joists snapped, and the entire thing inverted into a V, crashing toward us.

Bad Bob never stopped grinning. He waved merrily, ripped the Unmaking out of the ground in a single mighty pull, and vanished.

I dropped like a discarded puppet, rolled into a ball, and felt the first heavy piece of debris hit me. It was the wing chair, tipping on top of me. I curled underneath it for protection and screamed as the entire house came down in a rush of smoke, sparks, and crushing chaos.

The chair might as well have been made of plastic.

Breathe.

I couldn’t. Something was on my chest. I couldn’t get enough room to allow my lungs to expand. My diaphragm fluttered, trying vainly to pull in air. I choked and tried to reach for power, but it felt slippery, greasy, elusive. All my strength was gone.

You have to stay calm. Master your panic.

I had a house on top of me. Not that easy to stay calm.

You’re alive.

And dying fast.

David—

I heard the distant groan of wood being moved. Rising noise, scrapes, the tortured scream of metal.

Can’t breathe. I concentrated on putting my body into a state of meditation, to minimize oxygen burn. Slow and steady, wait, wait . . .

Something shifted, and I felt a piece of debris as heavy as the fist of God slam down on my lower chest. Ribs snapped in hot little starry snaps. I heard myself whimper, and then the weight shifted again, vanishing in a cloud of dust, and the pressure against me was gone.

“Oh Christ,” someone said. It sounded like Lewis. I tried to open my eyes, but it was too much of an effort. “We’re losing her.”

A warm hand was under my head, cradling it. I felt a strangely comforting sense of cold creeping through my limbs, tunneling through me toward my heart. Energy cascaded through me, trying to fight the chill, but the chill was stronger. Harder. More determined.

“No.” It was David’s voice, choked and despairing. “No, no. Jo, hold on—”

I pulled in a delicious breath and let it out, one last time. I wished I could open my eyes and see him, but in my mind I saw him as he’d been at the wedding, alight and golden and perfect.

I hadn’t wanted to hurt him this way.

It didn’t hurt at all, slipping away on a tide of darkness. It felt . . . peaceful. Hello again, I said to death. I was resigned, if not ready.

And then I was caught by a sharp, red-hot hook. The tide tried to pull me, but the hook—burning through my body, back to front, on my right shoulder blade—held fast. Heat flared and blazed—not the gentle healing of Earth power, something else. Something wild and dark and harsh, burning black in every nerve.

The next breath I took I let out in a raw, thin scream. I opened my eyes, and saw Lewis leaning over me, and David, and Marion Bearheart. Kevin was standing in the background, looking helpless and oddly vulnerable. Dozens of others were behind him. The sky ripped open with lightning, and rain began to fall in a cold silver curtain.

I laughed. My body put itself back together in hot, agonizing snaps and jerks, every nerve carrying every second of the pain to my brain.

And the pain felt so good.

Lewis let go of me, staring in bafflement that was turning fast to grim horror.

David didn’t move, but I saw the same thing in his face—the same revulsion and sickness.

“You think I’d let her go that easy?” It was Bad Bob’s voice, but coming raw from my own throat. “You think I’d let any of you go that easy? She’s the future, boys. My future.”

The laughter that exploded out of me was like a black, nauseating cloud, and this time even David flinched away from it. I rolled up to my hands and knees, covered in fine dust like flour where I wasn’t streaked in blood.

Alive. Whole. Even the radiation sickness had been flushed out of me.

The torch on my back burned, burned so hot. . . .

“So who’s the bad guy now?” I taunted. He taunted.

There wasn’t any difference now.

I turned my face up to the rain, and laughed, and for the first time, I understood why he was as he was, what about this was so intoxicating. No ties. No worries. No burdens. Just power, as pure as it came. People didn’t matter. All that mattered was winning.

I didn’t care about David, or Lewis, or any miserable little collection of cells walking the planet. They were all just meat and fuel for the engine.

And it was so . . . beautiful.

Then Bad Bob let me go, once he’d shown me the world as he saw it, a landscape where flesh and blood were as meaningless and desolate as sand and rock. I felt the fire gutter and die on my back, and my whole body jerked and folded in on itself.

Mourning for what I’d just lost.

I felt tears burning in my eyes and knew that the worst thing of all this was that I couldn’t be sure anymore that if he offered me the choice to feel that again, of my own free will, that I wouldn’t take it.

So who’s the bad guy now?

The circle of people around me waited tensely. I lifted my face again, and said, “He’s gone.” My words were almost lost in a blast of wind flying in from the ocean, blowing dust and debris and tattered palm leaves into the air. “I have to go after him.”

The Wardens shifted, looking at each other, at Lewis. He slowly shook his head. “We’re not doing that,” he said. “Christ, Jo. What just happened to you?”

David knew. He reached around and pulled the back of my shirt down, and I saw Lewis’s face turn a sick shade of white. “Oh God,” he said. “We need to get it off you.”

“I don’t think laser removal is going to cut it,” I said. I felt hollow, cored out. Beyond anything but gallows humor. “It’s deep. I don’t know how to shut him out.”

“Then you can’t go,” Lewis said. “We need to keep you safe. If he can use you—”

“He can use me here. Against you. I need to—I need to finish this.” I swallowed hard. “He’s still got a Djinn. Rahel. And he’s going to use her to make that thing he has even stronger. The next time he puts the Unmaking into the Earth, do you really think any of us is going to survive it?”

I turned and looked at the night sky. Impossible to see how much damage had been done, but I saw fires, heard sirens in the distance.

“I can block him,” David said. “If you’ll let me. But it will hurt.”

He hadn’t said a word about being bound, about my almost killing him in the beach house; I supposed there would be plenty of time for that later. But for now, I nodded.

David put his hand flat against my bare skin on my back, and I felt power surge up from beneath me, racing through my body, concentrating in a red-hot ball around the torch tattoo. Burning. I trembled and felt David’s other hand close around mine, sending me strength and support.

“I’m here,” he whispered. “I’m here, my love.”

I stood it for as long as I could, and then turned with a cry and threw myself into his arms. The white-hot pain in my back faded slowly, but it didn’t go away. I couldn’t see what he’d done, but it felt as if the mark had been overlaid by something else. Contained.

Masked.

“It won’t last,” David said, and stroked my hair. “I’ll have to renew the block when it weakens.”

Joy. “How often?”

“That depends on how hard he’s trying to reach you.” His arms tightened around me. “I’m so sorry.”

That covered . . . everything. For now. I took a deep breath and stepped back, smiling despite the continuing low sizzle of pain. “Can you stay?”

“I’ll try,” he said. “You’re right. My people have to try to stop him. We don’t have a choice. He’s hurting the Mother directly now. We’re her only defense.”

“Not the only one,” Ashan said, striding out of the darkness. Behind him stretched all of the Old Djinn, hundreds of them. The mightiest Djinn force I’d ever seen in one place—maybe the mightiest ever assembled.

On David’s side, the New Djinn began to take shape out of the shadows—maybe just out of self-defense. The Wardens, caught in the middle, looked understandably worried. These two clans had been in cold-war status for ages, but the war had heated up, and I wasn’t sure what Ashan would consider defense these days.

His cold, teal-blue eyes turned on me. I felt him considering whether or not to strike.

“Try and I’ll destroy you,” David said, low in his throat. Lightning ripped the sky again, breaking into dozens of streams of light.

“Amusing as that contest would be, you’re probably right,” Ashan said, and his smile was as cold as the rain. “She’s our guide into the abyss. We can use her to track our enemy. And to tempt him into the open.”

“Wait,” Lewis said. “What are you saying? You’re all going after him? All of you?”

“The New Djinn are vulnerable. The Old Djinn aren’t—at least, not yet. Besides, we have no choice now,” David replied. “We can’t let him go. He may actually be able to destroy the Djinn.” He paused, and looked at the Wardens. “This isn’t your fight anymore. Go home.”

“Hell with that,” Kevin said. “I’m not taking orders from you.”

“Tell him,” David said, spearing Lewis with a glare. “Tell them all.”

Lewis looked around at the Wardens, taking his time. When he spoke, he had the unmistakable ring of command in his voice. “He’s right. I make the decisions for the Wardens. You’ll all follow my orders.” He paused for deliberate effect. “And my orders are that the Wardens will send a support team with Joanne and the Djinn.”

“And where exactly are we planning to send them?” Marion asked.

I looked up at the clouds, then out to sea.

“He’s gone where he thinks we can’t follow,” I said. “To the Cradle of Storms.” As far as I knew, no Warden had ever ventured out to sea in that area and made it back to shore alive. The storms out there were sentient, and they were vicious. And a Warden, any Warden, became a Jonah. Any ship they were on became prey.

And I was about to lead a whole team of them into the jaws of death.

This was not the way I’d planned to take a honeymoon cruise to Bermuda.

Sunrise came. Sunrise always comes, no matter how dark the night—it’s one of those tired truths of life, one you can take as either positive or negative as the situation calls for.

For me, this morning, it was just the morning after the night before. No change, except that there was more light to see the damage.

The burning sensation on my back had faded into a dull buzz, but the whole area still felt warm and tender to the touch. I still felt hollow and empty, and I ached for . . . something—something to feel; something to make this morning worth living through the night.

I felt too disconnected from the others, who had things to do. I wandered away—not too far, watched constantly by an FBI surveillance team—and sat alone on the beach, a blanket around my shoulders. I watched the sun gild the rolling waves and thought about Hurricane Andrew rolling in over these waters; about a Warden named Bob Biringanine wading out into the pounding surf and giving up his soul.

“Can I join you?”

I shaded my eyes and looked up. David was standing next to me, looking out at the ocean. Sunrise looked good on him, but he seemed remote and guarded.

“Sure. Pull up some sand,” I said. He folded himself down with raw, beautiful grace, and put his arm around my shoulders. I let my head rest against his chest, and felt a little of the darkness bleed out of me—just a little.

“I should go help,” I said dully. “There’s so much to do. So many people hurt—”

“And you’re one of them,” David said, and pulled me into his lap, cradling me in his arms so he could look at me at close range. He gave me the distant Djinn X-ray stare for a second, and then the distance faded away. “So much pain, Jo. You can’t hold that much pain. You have to let it go.”

“It’s all my fault,” I said. “I could have—”

“You could have done a million things differently, and Bad Bob would have been the same creature,” David said. “He’s no longer human, Jo. He hasn’t been human for a long time. You’re not to blame for what he does.”

“Only for what I do. I should have said no. If I’d said no to you, none of this—”

“If you’d said no to me, Bad Bob would have found another way to control the Djinn. Maybe just by taking you away from me.” His lips found mine, gentle and sweet and salted from the sea spray. “You make me vulnerable, yes, but you also make me strong. Jonathan knew that. He knew this was coming, and that he wasn’t capable of fighting it, not alone. He knew the two of us would be, together. I love you. I will always love you. With or without a vow, a ring, a wedding. Yes?”

“Yes,” I whispered. Our lips were still touching. “I—yes.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. We understood each other completely in that moment.

The sun cleared the waves, burning through the clouds in bands of hot gold and orange, and in its warmth, in his arms, I got my wish.

However brief the moment, whatever would come, we had peace.