by Rachel Caine
Lewis was going to take my head off for it, too.
Chapter Six
Passengers—even me—weren’t allowed on the bridge. Apparently, that only happens in the movies, or to Cherise. I helped Lewis get through the rest of the passenger and crew interviews in neutral, nonsecure locations. No real surprises: a couple of drug smugglers, some embezzlers, and a few people who had raided the cabin steward’s closet for illegally obtained soaps and pillow mints. Other than that, we were clear of evil influences . . . except for the two we already knew about.
And me, of course. I was acutely aware that the tingles from the numb area on my back were coming with more and more frequency.
By late evening, I was feeling exhausted and even more sore than I’d anticipated. Cherise forced sandwiches on me, and then a glass of scotch, and I dozed off curled up in the corner of a sofa in the first-class-lounge area, listening to half a dozen Wardens debate the logistics of creating a clear course for us to follow. I was wishing that David would drop in, but I knew all too well that Lewis had other plans in motion—plans that specifically excluded me, thanks to the Bad Bob mark on my back. Need to know, and all that.
So I napped.
Lightning flared, startling me, and when I opened my eyes, I was somewhere else.
No . . . I realized that I wasn’t somewhere else. My body was still huddled on the sofa, still watched over by Wardens and Djinn alike. Protected.
But I was also standing in a small concrete room with bare, dusty floors and a few battered old chairs held together with wire and tape, and it was nowhere near the ship that still held my physical form.
It’s not real, I thought, but it felt damned convincing.
The door opened on howling darkness, and I could feel the blast of sea-salted air that rolled through the room to stir up debris.
When the door closed, a bandy-legged old white- haired man moved into the pallid circle of overhead light.
Bad Bob, in the flesh. At least, I presumed it was flesh. I was starting to wonder how real the real world actually was, in relation to what my former boss could accomplish these days.
“Look who dropped in for a visit,” Bob said, and pulled up a rickety chair. He flopped into it—risking total collapse of the ancient wood—and sat there smiling at me as if I were a favorite niece come for the holidays. Honestly, that was the worst thing about him. You couldn’t really tell how crazy he was at a glance.
Or how vile.
I could hear the wind howling and it grated on me, and I wanted to lift my hands to cover my ears—only my ears weren’t physical. I wasn’t physical. I was a spirit in the aetheric, and there was simply no way that Bad Bob could see me, or that my spirit could walk around like this in the real world. Surely this was a dream. No, a nightmare. Except it felt real, from the gritty concrete floor under my feet to the demented shrieking of the storm winds outside.
“I thought I’d give you guys a chance to surrender,” I said. My voice sounded distant and disembodied, and I wasn’t sure he could hear it until his smile widened. He was an evil old man, but he still had a charming smile. It went well with his apple red cheeks and blunt little nose. “I’d hate to skip the niceties. Courtesy is so important.”
“You’re playing my song, sugar,” he said. “You’re also playing my game. I wonder why?”
I smiled to match him. “Guess.”
“If I have to. Well, you found my little friend on board your ship—I felt him shuffle off this mortal coil. Good for you. Bet you can’t do that again, though.” He studied me with those fluorescent eyes—almost Djinn eyes, these days, brighter and more intense than they’d been in the old days when he’d been my boss, a genuine Warden hero. “I have to hand it to you, I figured you guys would argue until doomsday about what to do about me,” he continued. “Seriously now, a cruise ship? I didn’t see that coming. Beautiful. I thought maybe a yacht, or a freighter. But putting all those people in the line of fire? You’re growing a pair, sweetness. I like that.”
I waited. Bad Bob always had liked to hear his own voice more than anyone else’s.
“But you know what I think?” he continued, right on cue. “I think it’s so showy that it’s desperate. Like dressing up in neon and waving look-at-me flags while blaring Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. You really should study magicians. Misdirection, that’s the key to a good trick.”
“You think I’m tricking you?”
“You’re not that subtle,” he said, which stung because it was true, mostly. “But there’s somebody else on board that ship who is.”
We both knew that he was talking about Lewis. “You’ve still got a chance to end this peacefully,” I said. “Let Rahel go. Give up. It doesn’t have to be Armageddon: Atlantic Edition. We can find a way to make this work, Bob. Or whatever you are.”
“I’m still Bob,” he said, and winked at me, just the way Bad Bob would have back in the old days. “I’m just Bob plus. And I don’t think we’re going to come to any nice, peaceful settlement, princess. This isn’t about dividing up territory or setting boundaries. This is about me, wiping all of you off the face of the earth, and then my friends coming in to take everything else. It’s nature’s way, you know. The strong eat the weak. The many eat the few. And I am about to eat you.”
He smiled, opened his mouth, and his jaws gaped hideously wide, like a snake’s. If this was a nightmare, it was a first-class effort out of my very darkest subconscious.
I stepped back from him.
His jaws re-formed and closed. The Cheshire Cat smile remained. “Don’t look so scared,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff I can do with my tongue. Bet I could make you forget all about that wimpy little Djinn boy you’re so taken with. Give me a chance—No? All right, then. I guess I’ll just have to settle for something else. Thanks for being so accommodating and wandering on over here, by the way. I figured you might, sooner or later. The torch has that effect on people. It just draws people to me, whether they like it or not.”
He took two steps forward, thrust out his hand, and put it all the way through my ghostly, insubstantial chest. Unsettling, and a little uncomfortable, but I actually felt a little spurt of triumph. Not as easy as you thought it would be, I was about to say, when I realized that he’d reached to a very specific place.
To the ghostly mark on my back. The black torch. His fingertips brushed against it beneath my translucent skin—I could feel it, even if I couldn’t see it happening.
All of a sudden the room was far too small, like a trap, and I wanted to leave this place, now, before something happened.
Too late.
I felt my physical body, still far away on board the ship, writhing in its sleep. I felt the hot tingle of the black torch begin to spread across my shoulder blade.
I’d lost David’s containment, and because I was asleep, he might not know it.
Bad Bob removed his hand from my chest, shook it as if he was flicking something nasty off his fingers, gave me a feral grin, and walked away. I struggled to figure out what was holding me here, in this place, pinned like a bug to a board. The mark. He was right. Until I figured out how to turn it off—if I could—he could keep me here, out of my body. I knew that the longer I stayed out, the worse it was going to be when I got back.
I remembered the Wardens, lost in the storm. If my spirit was shredded, my body would just . . . stop. And they would never know why.
Outside, a truly ferocious storm raged. I felt the hot, damp blast of hair burst into the room, stirring grit and pushing the rickety sticks of furniture in random fury. Lightning flashed like strobes, turning Bad Bob’s pale hair and face into a fright mask.
He reached outside, and when his hand came back through the doorway, it was holding a spear. I recognized the thing—it was thick, and it sparkled with bursts of something that wasn’t color, wasn’t darkness, wasn’t anything human senses could identify or codify. He’d refined his weapons, I saw. This spear had started out life as a small chu
nk, grown in the dying body of a Djinn, and Bad Bob had given it enough care and feeding to make it a seven-foot-long, wickedly pointed expression of his own appetite for destruction.
The Djinn called it the Unmaking. It was, as best I understood the physics of it, stable antimatter, capable of destroying anything he wanted to destroy.
Including removing Djinn from the fabric of the universe.
“Oh, Bob, that’s just sad,” I said. His grin broadened. “Seriously, why can’t your type ever grow a discus for a weapon, or the world’s largest potato? How come it’s always so—phallic?”
Bob ignored the opportunity to banter, and stepped out into the storm. He looked up at it, into the heart of it. I knew what he was seeing—the raging engine of destruction, the primitive mind forming behind it. This was a living thing, this storm—a predator, yes, but a natural one, like a tiger or a puma.
He ground the butt of his spear against the dirt, and a blinding pulse of something that wasn’t light, wasn’t heat, wasn’t right went up from the pointed end of the spear into the storm.
Again.
Again.
With every thump of that weapon against the earth, I felt the world itself shudder. On the aetheric, muddy red waves spread like blood from a mortal wound.
The force emitted from the spear had a sickening feel to it, and the color—if you could call it a color—was a poisonous, pallid thing, like the glow given off by decay.
The storm’s lightning suddenly flashed, but it wasn’t light.
It was dark. Photonegative energy, but here on the real world. He’d infected the storm itself, made it a force for destruction far different from any natural predator.
And then it flashed that unearthly emerald green.
“Almost ready,” Bad Bob said, and reversed his grip on the spear. Handling that much anti-energy couldn’t have been pleasant, even for him; I could see the skin blackening and flaking away where his hand touched the surface. “Ready for the cherry on top?”
He pointed the spear down at the ground, and drove it in. It went deep, even though he didn’t use any real force—as if it tunneled greedily on its own.
I felt the earth shriek in real pain beneath my ghostly feet, and the whole building shook. Grit filtered down in feathery whispers, and then the real lurch came.
The building exploded as force traveled up through the ground, pulverizing layers of granite into dust. The cinder blocks of the walls buckled, ground themselves into powder against each other, and the ceiling crashed in a twisting, tearing mass of wood and metal that was snatched away by the wind.
Nothing touched me.
I stood exactly where I had as the building disintegrated around me, ripped away by the howling Category 5 winds. The ground lurched like pounding surf underneath me.
Bad Bob rose up into the air, holding to the end of his spear. He kept rising.
The spear grew, and grew, like some poisonous tree with its roots sunk deep.
He broke it off at ground level. It shattered at the stress point with a musical, glassy sound I heard even above the shriek of the storm.
A palm tree toppled and rolled toward me. Through me. Bad Bob landed on the rippling earth in front of me, appallingly normal in this terribly destroyed setting, and used the remaining part of his spear as a walking stick. Thump. Thump. Thump. It echoed through me like the beating of Poe’s telltale heart.
Around us formed a little circle of clear air, stable ground, like the eye of the hurricane. It expanded, and other people appeared out of the chaos. Wardens, once upon a time. I recognized many of them, at least by face if not by name. His pets, his converts to his righteous war against the Djinn—not that Bad Bob cared a bean about killing the Djinn to benefit humanity. Oh no. Bad Bob cared only, and always, about his own ends, and whatever these pathetic, deluded people thought they were getting out of fighting on his side, they were bound to be disillusioned.
I assessed numbers. Might as well, since I was stuck here. It did occur to me that Bad Bob was showing me only what he wanted to show me, of course, but for all that, the guy who keeps showing off will eventually show you something he doesn’t intend to.
Bad Bob was one hell of a chatterbox.
Sixty of them. My spirits sank, which was no doubt what he’d counted on. He had numbers. Of course, we had more, but add to that Bad Bob’s Demon-derived powers and the neat trick of handheld antimatter that the Djinn could neither recognize nor defend against, and we were well on the train to Screwsville.
“You still think you can win?” he asked me. I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t sure I dared tell a lie right now, and a lie was all I really had. “Scared little Jo. It was always going to end like this, you know. You against me, and you never could take me.”
“I did take you,” I said. “You sadistic old bastard.”
He lost his smile and pointed the spear at me. “Wonder what happens if I give it a taste of you in your aetheric form?” he said. “Bet it’ll hurt like fuck.”
“Bet you don’t want to be around when I survive it and come to kick your sorry ass off the face of the planet.”
He laughed and grounded the butt of the spear again. “I always did like that about you. You got sand, I’ll give you that.” He leaned forward, eyes avid and wet. “Fight me, Jo. I love it when you fight me. It won’t matter in the end, but it’ll be damn fun. You thought by dragging the Wardens away from all those innocent people on shore you’d save lives, but I think you just made my job a whole lot easier. See? You were already working for me. And now you’re going to really draw your paycheck, peach.”
“Like hell,” I said.
He blew me a kiss. Back on the ship’s sofa, my body continued to twitch and writhe. Cherise sat down next to me, putting a hand on my forehead, then calling for help.
The sensation of her hand against my skin was just enough to form a link—a way back. I pulled. The black mark felt like Velcro, sticking me here to this spot, but I ripped and tore at it, struggling, and with a hissing snap I came free.
I called lightning.
A white blast of energy erupted out of the clouds overhead—clean, pale energy, not the poisoned kind he’d poured into the storm—and struck me squarely in the top of my insubstantial head, flooding through my form in a splintered glowing ladderwork, then blasting out into the ground.
It shattered the remaining connection that held me at Bad Bob’s command, and I flew backward through the screaming darkness, whipping past pitch-black writhing ocean, over half-seen bits of island, into calmer seas.
Into the massive, smugly sailing bulk of the Grand Paradise.
Into my body, with a lurch like a slap.
I came awake with a gasp that felt like a shriek. My back was burning, on fire, and I tried to lunge to my feet. It felt like my entire nervous system cut out, faulty wiring shorting and sparking.
I pitched off the sofa to the carpet and got a taste of rug.
Cherise was instantly on her knees beside me, trying to cradle me in her arms. I couldn’t let her touch me. Everything felt wrong, strange, bad, vile . . . and I wasn’t sure that it wasn’t contagious.
“No,” I panted, and crab-crawled back to jam myself against the bottom of the sofa. “No, leave me alone!”
“Help!” Cherise shouted. That got the attention of some passing crew members. A passing steward—I still didn’t know his name, but he was the one who’d been trying to manage the First-Class rebellion before we’d set sail—shoved aside the coffee table and reached down for me. “Miss, are you all right? Should I get medical help?”
I wrapped my hand convulsively around the white lapel of his jacket, and where my fingers gripped the fabric, it started to smoke and hiss.
He exclaimed and tried to claw his way free. I couldn’t let go. My hand didn’t seem to be mine, exactly; it was moving, and I could feel what it was doing, but it was holding him in place.
Part of me wanted to destroy him. A big part of me, and it was
growing larger as the broken containment on my back allowed the poison from the torch mark to flood into me. The dam was breached.
I was being swept away.
The steward struggled, panted, yelled for help, and finally managed to slip out of his jacket, which remained clutched in my fist as it burst into full smoking flame. I heard other voices—Wardens?—in a rising babble. Somebody tried to tamp down the fire that was bubbling up from my fingers, but I couldn’t stop it. All my nerves were fried, useless; all my control had gone with them.
The jacket caught the rug on fire.
Someone hit me with a good old-fashioned fire extinguisher, but as soon as the icy foam stopped blasting, fire erupted from both my hands, crawling up my arms like snakes, twining around my body in living veils of flame.
I could feel other things happening inside me now—fire was always the easiest of powers to call, because it was virtually unstoppable even in natural form, but now I could feel my other abilities stirring, too. Something inside me was rifling through my mind, my soul, shuffling aside unwanted things to find the most devastating things on offer.
I was an open doorway, and something was reaching through.
I think I might have screamed, but if I did, it was just in my head. My body stood up, dripping flame as my clothing burned away, leaving me draped in living energy. I could see myself reflected in the lounge windows—a pillar of fire, a pagan goddess, naked and primal. My hair didn’t burn, but it rose and fluttered on the waves of heat created from my skin.
My eyes were Djinn eyes, flaring gold, and where I touched, things blackened and smoked and charred into ruin.
“Back!” someone snapped to the growing cluster of onlookers, and a hardened bubble of air formed around me, thick as steel. The fire erupting out of me consumed the available oxygen in seconds, then began to gutter and fail as its fuel ran out.
I felt nothing, except that all-consuming heat exploding from the black torch on my shoulder. It seemed to be getting worse, not better, as if someone had injected me with acid. If I’d had control of my voice, I’d have been begging for it to stop.