by Rachel Caine
“Cher, do these guys look like they’d let us put them into lifeboats?”
“I didn’t say they’d agree. We could, you know, knock them out or something.”
“So we’ve moving up from threats to assault.”
“Oh, come on. Not like you haven’t assaulted anybody recently.” And Cher punched me in the shoulder for emphasis.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” the steward broke in. “In these conditions, we don’t dare launch any lifeboats, not even the new speedboat type that this ship carries. We have to have relatively calm seas or there’s a significant risk of the lifeboats being compromised.”
Compromised was, I assumed, ship-speak for sunk. Which was kind of where we were, from the standpoint of achieving our goal.
I looked around the room again. Thirty-odd people, of which approximately a third were the rich sons of bitches who’d refused to leave, aggressively arrogant and sure that the universe cared too much about them to put them in real danger.
The others were their hapless hangers-on, employees, and family members.
I hated having innocents in the line of fire, but they’d made their choice, and now I had to make mine.
“Let them go back to their cabins,” I said to the steward. “Confine them to quarters for now. If they want anything, deliver it. Don’t let them go roaming around. Let them whine all they want, but do not let them intimidate you.”
“Yes, miss.” He was glad to have a clearly defined order, and he signaled to a couple of discreetly suited security men standing in the wings. They were both impressive specimens—large, muscular, with the kind of no-bullshit expressions that only men who do violence for a living could afford to wear. I figured the bulges in their coats had more to do with weaponry than with overindulging at the all-you-can-eat buffet.
The steward stationed outside was waiting for us when we emerged, and he handed me a key card and a fancy colored map with something circled on it. “Your cabin, miss,” he said, straight-faced. “It’s the least we can do in exchange for your help.”
I remembered my earlier snarky request. “It’s not—”
“Oh, yes, it is. A special thank-you from the captain. And if you can’t locate any stray Godiva chocolates or Dom Perignon, please let me know. I’ll bring some to you straightaway.”
I shook his hand, held up the map, and waggled both in front of Cherise. Her mouth dropped open.
“You didn’t.”
“Botox Diva’s cabin.” I checked the details. “Two bedrooms. Want one?”
“Maybe. And maybe I want my own swanky digs—you ever think of that?”
The steward cleared his throat very respectfully. “The captain’s ordered us to close off all non-essential decks. We only have enough first-class cabins for about half of your party. The other half will get our best accommodations farther toward the stern.”
Cherise gave out a sigh. “Okay, fine. I’ll suffer with your guest room. You’d better not snore.”
We were about halfway to the cabin, according to the map, when I felt a flutter at the edges of my awareness, like a psychic breeze. It felt cool as a mint balm to my irritated soul, and I sighed in sudden relief.
David was back.
I turned my head to see him striding down the broad hallway, heading our way. He glimmered like a hot penny, even under artificial light—silky auburn hair, worn long enough to curl at the ends, perfect bronze skin that would make a self-tanning addict weep in envy. Behind round John Lennon glasses, his eyes sparked brilliant orange, like miniature suns. His eyes were the only thing that gave him away right now as being more than human. He was dressed in well-worn, faded jeans, a white Miami-weight shirt that fluttered in the air-conditioned breeze, and a ball cap advertising a local crab shack. He’d forgone his long vintage military coat, mainly because I’d lectured him enough about the unlikelihood of anyone except terrorists and flashers wearing coats in the Miami heat. Although the idea of David as a flasher—a private-performance-only one, of course—still lingered in my mind.
His gaze was fixed on me, and he crossed the distance fast, although he didn’t appear to be in a hurry. Even so, it still seemed to take forever before his hands touched me—a gentle stroke from my shoulders down my bare arms, to my wrists, then back up to cup my face. My whole body hummed and relaxed into the sensation. At close range, David’s eyes were both less and more human—less human in color and more human in content. He was worried.
He had good reason to be.
“How are you holding up?” he asked me. His voice was low and intimate, like the warmth of his body near mine. “Any pain?”
“Nope,” I said. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
His gaze held mine, searching. Waiting. I was dimly conscious of Cherise standing a few feet away, doing the awkward dance of exclusion from an intimate moment. With no key card of her own, she’d have to wait.
“I promise, if I feel anything change, you’re the first to know,” I told him, and put my hands on him, because I couldn’t not put my hands on him. I stepped forward and folded myself against his chest, and his arms closed over me, holding me close. I felt his lips brush my hair, a butterfly touch that made my heart skip.
“Let me check the mark,” he said. I shook my head. “Jo. Let me see it.”
“It’s fine.”
“Jo.”
I sighed and backed up a step, then turned so my back was facing him. His fingers touched my shoulder and moved down and in, pushing back the fabric and moving the strap of my bra aside to look at the thing on my shoulder blade.
It looked like a black torch tattoo. I knew that, because I’d spent enough time staring at it in pocket mirror reflections. It was the parting gift of my old boss, Bad Bob Biringanine—or what was left of him, anyway. He’d once been one of the most powerful Wardens in the world, but he’d gotten it illegally, the way some athletes abuse steroids. His particular poison was a Demon Mark—he’d volunteered himself as a host for a gestating Demon, and in return it had given him all the power he needed.
Until it was done with him, at least. I wasn’t sure that what was currently walking around in his skin had much in common with the original Bad Bob.
Bad Bob had also given me a Demon Mark—unwillingly—and eventually I’d gotten rid of it. I never wanted to feel Bad Bob’s sticky, foul fingers pulling my strings again; the very thought of it made my skin crawl and made me long for a shower and a steel scrub brush.
David’s gentle touch slid over the black torch mark, and it was as if his fingers disappeared as they passed across the dead space of it. I couldn’t feel the pressure at all. Then his touch was back, real and warm, on the other side of the numbed spot.
“It’s still contained,” he said. His voice was very quiet, meant only for my ears. “If you start to feel anything—”
I already had felt something—that sickening longing for destruction as I’d watched the storm. I knew it was bleed-over from the black tattoo . . . but I couldn’t make myself tell him, either.
“Yeah, I know, yell for help.” I hated being helpless. Hated it. But somehow, Bad Bob had found a way to strip away my defenses, and I couldn’t fight this thing. Not on my own. David could help, at least for now. He wasn’t making any guarantees long-term, though. We needed to get to Bad Bob and make the evil old son of a bitch take the thing off of me.
Or kill him. That’d work, too. I hoped. Though I had to admit, it hadn’t worked too well the last time I’d thought I put him in the ground.
I tugged my bra strap back in place and turned to face my lover. No—husband. I had to get used to that. Husband. We’d had the wedding ceremony, kind of. It had been interrupted by various attacks, but I thought we were married, anyway. I just didn’t feel married. “So, you’ve been AWOL most of the morning.”
“Busy,” he said, which was uninformative, as explanations go. His shoulders lifted and fell, as if he knew what I was thinking. “Djinn business.”
Which mean
t none of mine. “So what’s the plan? You guys coming with?”
“Some are,” David said. “This is obviously our fight as well as yours. He has Rahel prisoner. Even Ashan agrees that we can’t let this go without an answer.”
Just as David was in charge of the New Djinn, the ones who traced their origins to human ancestry, Ashan was the Mack Daddy of the Old Djinn . . . who liked to refer to themselves as the True Djinn. You see where this is going, because if half the Djinn are “true,” then the other half must be, well, “false.” It’s the equivalent of racial prejudice, among supernatural beings.
Most Djinn I’ve ever met are about seventy percent arrogance, twenty-eight percent altruism, and two percent compassion. David blew the curve; he was the least arrogant Djinn I’d ever met, and he maxed out on compassion. That made him incredibly hot to me, but it also made him vulnerable. Ashan buried the needle on the other end; he didn’t know the meaning of altruism, and he couldn’t care less about compassion. All arrogance, all the time.
He and David got along about as well as you’d expect, when they were actually talking at all.
“And is the great Ashan going to grace us with his presence?” I asked. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.
“He’ll be around,” David answered, which was a typically Djinn sort of evasion. Around could mean anything, and nothing. “He’s sending a delegation of four of his own, though.”
“Four? He did get the memo, right? World ending, danger, et cetera?”
“Four of his most powerful,” David clarified. “One of them is Venna.”
Oh. Well, that was all right, then; Venna, I trusted. For an Old Djinn, she was a-okay; she even displayed an interest in regular folks, in the way a kid develops a fascination with an ant farm. She didn’t consider us equals, but she thought we were kind of cool in a science-lab sort of way.
She liked to walk around in the guise of a child, but in no way could you classify Venna as vulnerable. Terrifying, yes. Frail, no.
David looked over my shoulder, and I followed his gaze. There at the other end of the hallway stood Venna, with three other, much taller Djinn. The expressions on the faces of the other three Djinn, whom I didn’t know, were identical: pricelessly annoyed. Not here by choice, I gathered. Their smelling-something-bad scowls could have shattered titanium.
Venna, however, waved cheerfully. She was dressed in child-sized pants and a cute little pink top with a sparkly rainbow. She’d largely given up her predilection for dressing as Alice from Alice in Wonderland, but she’d kept the long blond hair and innocent blue eyes.
I waved back. Venna said something to her fellow Old Djinn, and the four of them promptly vanished, misted away on the air like a mirage. Heading for their own quarters, I assumed, if they cared about such things.
“I’ve brought ten of the New Djinn,” David said.
“In case something happens, I’ve also left someone at Jonathan’s house who can take over as Conduit, at least temporarily.”
David, in other words, had made arrangements in the event of his own death. Jonathan’s house—Jonathan had been his friend, and the leader of the Djinn for thousands of years—existed in a kind of pocket universe, apart from both the human world and the other planes of reality where the Djinn could travel. It was the equivalent of a defensive bunker.
If David thought this was dire enough to name a successor and stash him away in the ultimate Undisclosed Location, then things were really not at all good.
“David—” I didn’t know what I wanted to say, except that I wanted it to all be okay. For once.
His fingers squeezed mine, very lightly. “I know,” he said. “But we’re in this together. For life. Whatever may happen.”
He meant it.
My husband.
I blinked back a sudden irrational flood of tears and hugged him, hard, until the impulse to weep passed. “Okay,” I said, and cleared my throat to bring my voice back to its normal steady range. “Want to help us out with something really, really trivial?”
“Always.”
“In the first-class lounge, you’ll find a couple of stewards, a couple of security guards, and a bunch of very rich jerks who don’t want to take orders and are probably giving the staff a very hard time. It might speed things along if they had something more to be afraid of than their platinum card getting declined.”
“You want me to intimidate them?”
“You betcha, buster.”
David smiled, and this time his smile had a whole different cast to it. Dark, powerful, frightening—even to me. His skin darkened and took on a metallic sheen beneath its surface, and his eyes glowed like storm lanterns. He looked fey and dangerous and oh my God, hot.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said. “Point me.”
We left the harbor before the storm made landfall, which was lucky for nearly everyone except, obviously, us. The Grand Paradise was a pretty massive vessel, but she also had considerable speed at her command. Ships didn’t use old-fashioned screws anymore, but propulsion pods, and she was a lot more maneuverable than I’d suspected; we moved quickly but smoothly through the long navigation channel and out toward the open sea.
It was a good thing the ship was fast. That was all that allowed us to exit the man-made cut in time; otherwise, we’d have been boxed in, trapped like a ship in a bottle. And the bottle would have been smashed to smithereens.
Leaving port didn’t mean we were free, though. Not even close. The storm wheeled like a flock of crows and came roaring after us, brushing Miami with the hem of its black skirts and probably creating another aneurysm for insurance adjusters, although it was nowhere near the destruction that could have rained down on them. The Grand Paradise’s engines growled and throbbed, louder than I imagined they normally would be for pleasure-cruise speeds, and we took on extra speed, crashing through the choppy seas as fast as the captain dared.
The storm gained on us.
I stood at one of the thick glass windows in the first-class lounge and watched the trouble unfolding. The storm’s outer bands had spiraled over the city, but through the driving rain I could see the lights of the towers. Power was still on, and that meant things weren’t so bad. Miami was tough. It would make it.
I wasn’t so sure, now that we were sailing full speed ahead, that the same could be said of the Grand Paradise.
After a quick Weather Warden meeting, we agreed that we would attack the storm as one unit, but we’d wait until we’d lured it out well away from the mainland and any populous islands before we started screwing with it. Deeper, cooler waters would slow it down, too, which was to our benefit. The Grand Paradise was fast enough to keep ahead of the storm for a few hours at least, though the margin of safety would be steadily eroding. The winds inside the eyewall were ferocious.
Effectively, that meant I had an hour off, more or less, so I went to my cabin.
Considering that we were sailing off on a potentially lethal sort of mission, it was a bit surprising to find that I was enjoying the moment a little. I hadn’t been on a sailing ship in a very long time, and this luxurious-cruise thing was something I hadn’t even dreamed about. Dream honeymoon, part of me sighed. Except for the imminent threat of total destruction, another part warned.
Yeah, so, this is my life.
No sign of Cherise, but the downstairs shower was running. I hadn’t brought any luggage, so my unpacking consisted of trudging upstairs to the second level, and slipping off my shoes. My feet sighed, and so did I. The carpet felt like clouds exported from heaven in the ultimate free-trade agreement. I tried out the bed, and it was definitely from God’s own bedroom, from the body-contouring mattress to the silken sheets.
Then I sniffed myself. “Ugh,” I said, and fought my way back upright. It wasn’t right, subjecting this kind of luxury to the stench of my body. Besides, I’d been craving a shower for days now, and being caught in the cold, pounding rain hadn’t exactly counted.
The small bath pro
ved to have a very nice shower, complimentary robes and slippers, and a variety of expensive shampoos and soaps.
Score. I spent a blissful half hour naked and slippery beneath the massaging showerhead, washing away the sticky exhaustion. When my fingertips started wrinkling, I finally shut down the water—honestly, it was better than a ride at Disney—and belted the robe as I walked down the curving stairs to the first floor.
The room was smaller than I’d expected, but still larger than many hotel suites, and it had all the good stuff even the most discriminating guest would demand. Polished mahogany, fine carpets, luxurious furniture. Genuine artwork on the walls. I was taking a disbelieving inventory when Cher came out of her own bedroom, dressed in a matching robe, toweling her blond hair dry.
“Dude,” she said. This particular inflection of that many-shaded word meant I’m completely impressed. “This is straight out of Titanic. I’m surprised they didn’t pipe Celine Dion into the shower or something.”
“Great. Now I’ll never get that song out of my head,” I said with a sigh. “How’s your room?”
“Fantastic. Wait, check that. Why’d I get the downstairs room? Because I’m the sidekick?”
“Because you’re shorter. I didn’t think your little legs could manage the stairs.”
She stuck her tongue out at me. Sometime in the past few weeks, while I hadn’t been paying attention, she’d had it pierced. A tiny diamond stud winked impudently at me in the butter-soft room lighting. “Are you and David going to be love bunnies and keep me up all night?”
“Maybe.”
“Oooh, promise? Because the porn’s all pay-per-view.” She fluttered her eyelashes. Cher was silly and goofy and endearing, and her silliness had a point; she knew how serious all this was. How dangerous. She’d signed up to go with me, knowing there might not be any coming back from it, and she didn’t even have any superpowers.
Just courage.