Cape Storm tww-8

by Rachel Caine

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

  Ten degrees. Thanks for nothing, Lewis.

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

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

  Then I felt her stop.

  Something was attacking us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I’d been right. Bad Bob knew us.

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

  And I had no idea how he’d done it.

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

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

  It was a dark, silent place after that.

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

  It was a devastating blow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “The storm—”

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

  “You were on the bridge?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What can we do, miss?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Forget it, Ven. Tell us.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She tilted her small head sideways. “What?”

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

  “I’m not. I read about it.”

  “Where? At the Djinn Bookmobile?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “You can’t see them, can you?”

  “What kind of ghosts?”

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

  “Do they like the Djinn?”

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

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

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

  “What about the storm?”

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

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

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

  “You mean he could kill you.”

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

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

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

  Lovely. “Does he have any vulnerabilities?”

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

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

  That wasn’t standard procedure, obviously.

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

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

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

  He nodded. “Anything else?”

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

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

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

  They were measuring themselves against the body bags.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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