by Rachel Caine
I didn’t think they would. If they were strong and confident enough to make it through the hurricane, they’d be more than competent enough to tackle me.
A Djinn breathed into focus on the deck a few feet away, and I prepared for the fight of my life . . .
. . . but it was David.
David.
My David, perfect in every line. Not Kevin’s incarnation of him.
He didn’t say anything. Neither did I. Josue drew a knife and stabbed at him, but David didn’t even bother to cast him a look, just flicked his fingers and sent him flying across the deck.
“Are you here to stop me?” I asked.
“No,” my husband said, and took a step toward me. Then another. I was in the V-shaped well of the bow, pressed against the rails—nowhere to go but over the side, into the black waters. “I’m not here to stop you.”
“Then what?”
He took another step, risking a full attack. I could feel the urge, the need vibrating through me like plucked strings. Don’t let him fool you. Don’t let him stop you. You need to reach Bad Bob. If this goes badly, you know what will happen. The two of you will be responsible for destroying the world.
In the ripping light of a lightning strike on the cruise ship looming slowly up behind us, David’s face was serious and very calm.
“I’m here to help you,” he said.
He opened his hand, and in it were fragments of glass.
The broken pieces of his bottle.
I stared at them for a moment, into his eyes. “How—?”
“Cherise,” he said. “She wants you to live. So do I. She got the bottle away from Kevin. She—trusts me.”
Cherise was a romantic idiot, in this one sense: She simply didn’t understand how dangerous David really was. I wasn’t even sure I understood . . . although I was starting to get a really good idea.
I tightened my grip on the rail as the ship pounded into a particularly deep trough, then painfully plowed up the leading edge of the next wave. “I see. And did you stop for anything else along the way?”
“You mean, did I kill Lewis?” he asked. “Not yet.” He took one more step, and we were body to body, soaked with rain, blinded by lightning. Sealed together by storms. “That doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten him. Don’t ask me to do that.”
I couldn’t begin to try. “How did they raise the ship?”
“Who says they did?” David’s smile was knowing, and a little bitter. “It’s not the Grand Paradise. Lewis lied to you from the beginning. The Grand Paradise was a decoy, designed to lure Bad Bob into showing his hand. He sent the other Wardens out of Fort Lauderdale, aboard the Grand Horizon. It’s a sister ship—a little smaller, a little faster. Crewed entirely with Wardens and Djinn. It’s been making good time and staying off of Bad Bob’s radar. Until now.”
That son of a bitch. Lewis really had suckered me, every step of the way. He’d known I was a risk, if not a ready-made traitor. He’d used me as a stalking horse, although I had to admit he’d put himself on the line, too.
But he’d also exposed Cherise and dozens of other innocents who had no place in this. And an unforgivably large number of Wardens, although I supposed for any kind of a feint to work, he had to commit himself to it.
I would never forgive him for risking so much, no more than David would be able to forgive him for the kill switch that Lewis had put in my brain.
“So by suckering Bad Bob into kicking the living crap out of us, the Grand Horizon got a virtually free ride,” I said. “Right?”
“As far as I know.”
“How could you not know?”
“It’s crewed by Ashan’s Djinn. Everything was compartmentalized from me. Deliberately so.”
We’d both been cut out. Well, I’d been hoping Lewis had fallback positions, in the beginning, and it looked like he’d done a hell of a lot more with a hell of a lot less than I’d have managed in his place.
“They’re in for it now,” I noted, as three lightning strikes crawled the Grand Horizon’s deck, searching for something to destroy. “But we’re still going to get there ahead of them.”
“I know.” He cupped my face in both hands, and he studied me closely. I knew what he was looking for.
“I’m all right,” I said. “Seventy-five percent all right, anyway.”
He seemed to calculate me at about the same rate.
“If we succeed,” he said, “we will have another problem to consider.”
I hadn’t actually thought past the consequences of failure, which were fairly horrific. “Like what?”
“You may inherit his power. And you may be tempted to use it.”
“I could use it for good.”
“So did he. Once. It isn’t a power you can use, Jo. It’s a power you must destroy.”
I looked back at him. “So if I grab it from Bad Bob, you’re going to take it away from me. Or die trying.”
“Maybe,” David said. “But first we have to live to get there, don’t we?”
I turned to face him. The next lurching drop sent him into me. Our lips found each other, hot and hungry and damp, tasting of salt and desperation. For a moment even the storm seemed to stop, suspended between heartbeats.
I felt the darkness in me trying to reach out to him, and slapped it down hard. No. Not yet. David might be here, he might be with me, but he wasn’t with me. And I wasn’t going to be the one to enslave him yet again, not until I had no other choice.
I turned to face south, toward the empty horizon. “He’s not far now,” I said. “One thing at a time, right?”
David’s arms gripped the railing on either side of me, bracing me against the violent bucking of the ship as we plunged toward the darkness. “Right.”
Chapter Ten
The Wardens on the Grand Horizon had learned from our mistakes, it appeared; we saw them break through the storm, and they must have set up a series of Djinn/ Warden cooperative alliances to maintain their bubble shield, because I could see the glistening curve of it from the deck of our ship as the waves broke and foamed over the smooth round surface.
I wished them luck in keeping that up. It was brutal, soul-shredding work. “How long until they catch up?”
David handed me a plate. Our pirate cook had made some kind of meat, finely chopped and spiced, with spongy bread. It was delicious, and surprising; I’d somehow expected wormy crusts and rum. I gobbled down the lunch with gratitude.
“Good?” David asked, amused, and shook his head at my garbled reply. “They’re gaining. They’ll catch up to us by midday.”
“Can’t let that happen,” I mumbled. “Lewis was very clear. This needs to be me. Not them.”
“Bad Bob and his storm didn’t slow them down. How do you propose either of us stops them, short of destroying them?”
I chewed and swallowed. “Ask them.”
He evidently hadn’t thought of that. I winked and carried my plate to the wheelhouse, where Josue was dozing on a stained old cot at the back while his navigator did the hard work of steering the tough little vessel on the course I’d set. I asked about the radio and was pointed belowdecks, to a small, claustrophobic closet of a room with bad ventilation and a crew member who evidently liked beans and hated baths. I evicted him from his battered chair and rolled up to check out the radio. It was old, but highly complicated.
“Hey!” I yelled through the closed door. David opened it. “Help me out a little. I’m not Sparky the Wonder Horse.”
That earned me a full, warm smile. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Watch it.” I meant that; he was looking at me like I was the old Joanne. The less demented one. “Keep your guard up. I mean it, David. Bad Bob can be funny, too. That doesn’t make him any less of a monster. Don’t you dare trust me. I can’t trust myself, not anymore.”
The smile faded, and the sparks in his eyes turned ash-dark. “Yes. I understand.” David looked at the radio, and the dials turned. “There. That should put you in touch
with the Grand Horizon’s bridge.”
“Thanks.” I slipped on the headphones as he shut the door between us—less to provide me with privacy than to give me elbow room. There wasn’t enough space in here to breathe. “Merchant vessel—” Oh, hell, what was this ship’s name? “Merchant vessel Sparrow for the cruise vessel Grand Horizon. Please respond, over.” I expected I’d have to repeat myself, but instead I got an immediate crackle of connection.
“Sparrow, this is Grand Horizon.” I knew that voice. “You made it.”
“Lewis.” I kept my voice neutral, although I was glad he’d made it, too. Even if he had tried to kill me. “You’re lucky David hasn’t made a lampshade out of you.”
“Time will tell.” Lewis obviously knew all about how much trouble he was in on that front. “You’re heading straight for Bad Bob.”
“I have a plan. Obviously, it won’t be as good as yours,” I said, “but I make one hell of a good distraction, right? So I go in, do as much damage as possible, and you guys land for the cleanup.”
“That would be great—if I thought for a second we could actually trust you.” Lewis’s voice was bleak and dry, even through the distortion of the radio waves. “You brought us this close. That’s enough, Jo. Break it off. Whatever happens, don’t let him finish what he started in destroying you.”
“What makes you think he can’t do it from a distance?” I asked. “I’d rather go down fighting for you than against you.”
“Jo—”
“Maybe you didn’t get that I wasn’t asking your permission. I was informing you, that’s all. You can not love it all you want, but it’s what’s going to happen, and—” I felt the laboring engines of my little ship begin to struggle. “Don’t you even think about it, man. You start screwing with me and you are in a world of trouble.”
He covered the mike, presumably to warn off the Earth Warden or Djinn who was trying to shut me down. “I’m not interfering,” he said. “I’m just advising, and I advise you very strongly to break this off and run, Jo. Now.”
“You sent me out here,” I said. “You put me on the hook for bait. Let me do this.” No answer but static. “Fine. Joanne Baldwin Prince, signing off—”
“Wait,” he snapped. I did. “Don’t take David with you. We’re not allowing any of the Djinn to make landfall. Too dangerous for them.”
I was a bit unclear on the concept of how one stopped Djinn from doing something, if they weren’t bound to a bottle, but I didn’t bring it up. “And what do you suppose I’m going to do about stopping David?”
His sigh rattled the speaker. “You’re not going to love the idea.”
“Try me.”
He did. I heard him out, although my first impulse was to blow the radio up in a satisfying shower of sparks. I thought about it.
After a long, quiet moment, I agreed.
“Jo?” I was so deep in thought that Lewis’s voice startled me. “Still there?”
“More or less. Look, I can’t trust anyone on this ship, not with what you’re asking. Send me someone.” I thought about that for a second. “Send me someone who isn’t going to take shit from some fairly scary pirates.”
“I’ve got just the guy,” Lewis said. “We’re going to slow down, to give you time to get to the island ahead of us. But we’ll be coming when you need us.”
“I hope so,” I said. “Let’s not say our good-byes this time. Last time was a real bitch.”
He seemed to think so, too. “Grand Horizon, signing off.”
“Sparrow, signing off.” I put the old click-to-talk mike down and sat for a moment in silence, staring at the equipment.
Then I rummaged around in the desk drawers. It was a battered old thing, looked like it had seen service in the First World War, and I surprised a long-tailed rat in the top drawer, who stared at me with beady little eyes and an entire lack of alarm. A pet, maybe. Or maybe this was his ship, and I was the infestation.
I shut that drawer and tried the next one. The rats had made nests of the paperwork that had once been in there; it was nothing but shreds.
The third drawer yielded an almost empty bottle of Cutty Sark.
“Score,” I said. I unscrewed the cap, wiped the lip of the bottle with my shirt, and threw back the rest of the booze in one long, thirsty pull. When there were no more threads of amber snaking their way down the glass to my mouth, I lowered the bottle and set it on the desk.
“David?”
He opened the door.
It’s not that easy to catch a Djinn who’s alert for treachery, and David—even though he loved me—knew better. I’d just told him not to trust me.
But he gave me the benefit of the doubt, even with the empty bottle open on the desk in front of me.
I looked up at him and said, “We need to talk, honey.”
Lewis sent Brett Jones, Fire Warden, former Special Forces. He was bigger than Josue, and after a dick-measuring initial meeting, Josue evidently accepted that Brett was meaner as well. I didn’t know Brett that well, but Lewis did, and if Lewis sent him to take care of us, then we could trust him.
“Watch your back,” I whispered to Brett as I passed him. He’d come armed to the teeth, which made him fit right in with all my pirate crewmates; on him, though, it looked like professional accessories. He nodded to me. It seemed like a thousand years since we’d sat in the movie theater on the Grand Paradise, watching as our colleagues were carried off in body bags after that first clash with Bad Bob’s storm.
Brett looked as hard and tired as I felt. He also looked very alone, standing at the bow with his arms folded, watching the speedboat head back to the distant cruise ship. The weather was still foul over in that direction. The storm just wasn’t about to give up its prize, no matter how hopeless it was.
Standing in the filthy confines of Josue’s tiny captain’s cabin, I brushed the worst of the tangles out of my hair, and used a burst of power to clean my clothes and remove the worst of the grime from my skin. As accommodations went, even temporary accommodations, these earned zero stars; the bed was filthy, the floor was littered with toenail clippings, and the walls were pasted over with hard-core porn actresses in action shots.
David opened the cabin door and stepped in. He watched me in silence, not touching me. We’d talked about all this, but convincing him was another matter altogether. And even when he bowed to necessity, he did it grudgingly.
I wished I could really tell what he was thinking, but then, he probably was wishing the same thing.
“One good thing about this,” I said. “This time, we get to do it right.”
He shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, the first time was good enough for eternity.”
That made me smile. “You must be a romantic. I mean, what with all the mayhem and the chaos and the not finishing the ceremony—”
“If I wasn’t a romantic, I wouldn’t be here.”
He had an excellent point. I decided not to pursue it. Instead, I put down Josue’s comb and did another critical review. I looked . . . surprisingly good, actually. The sun and sea had given me a blush of bronze, and my eyes seemed clear and cool as the Caribbean waters. My hair had, for a change, taken its glossy curls to a style, instead of to a mess.
David slid his hands over my shoulders, and I looked up at him. “It’s time,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to keep the guests waiting.”
The guests were, of course, the assembled pirates of the ship I’d recently, and randomly, named the Sparrow. None of them had made any effort to change clothes, splash water on their faces, or brush their teeth, but they were seated cross-legged on the deck, clearly happy with slack-off time.
Josue had donned a ridiculous coat. A tuxedo jacket, obviously ripped off from some prior victim on a yacht. I hoped I wouldn’t notice any bloodstains.
“Hurry your asses up,” he said. “We don’t have long.”
Not exactly the wedding march, but it would do. I exchanged a look with David, and he gave me his hand,
and we walked the short length of the deck to the bow, where Josue was standing. The sun was behind clouds again, and the air smelled heavy with brewing storms. David’s best man—and, I supposed, standing in for my maid of honor—was the Fire Warden, Brett Jones. Big and foreboding as a Djinn, only armed like a pirate and watching Josue and everybody else, including me, with smart, cold focus.
I felt both protected and unsettled.
“I don’t have no holy books,” Josue said. “So I make it up as I go along. You don’t like it, you go get married in hell.”
“As long as you get the important stuff right,” I said. “Go ahead.”
“I get paid first.”
There was a brief pause, and then David reached into his pocket and brought out a small handful of very large bills. Josue grabbed them and flashed a highly inappropriate smile, then asked, “What’s your name?”
“David Prince.”
“David Prince, you come here with this woman to be married. Right?”
I didn’t dare throw a glance at David, because there was something so weirdly hilarious about this that I was already choking on it. After a beat, he said, “Obviously.”
I coughed.
“You sure you want to do that?” Josue said. “Because you got to take care of her, love her, never look at another woman. Even if she’s sick or gets old and fat.”
My coughing turned into a full-fledged fit.
“If you mean will I stand by her in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for all the days of our lives—yes, I will,” David said, very quietly. The urge to laugh left me suddenly, and I squeezed his hand. “I vow that I will.”
I felt no corresponding surge from the aetheric, the way I had the first time we’d done this, but then, David had completed his side of the vows the last time we’d done this.
I hadn’t, not officially. Which was why Lewis and I had decided to go through with this. It was an experiment—probably doomed to failure—to see whether or not it would make any difference in the way Djinn and humans were bound together . . . if we were bound together by ritual, completely.