by Rachel Caine
“You’re sure about this,” Josue said. He continued to stare at David. “I give you some time to think.”
David didn’t smile. “I’m sure. Move along.”
“Well, okay.” He turned to face me. “How about you?”
“You suck at this,” I told him. I got a slow leer in return. “Come on, at least make an effort!”
“You dump this guy, come back to my cabin, I’ll make an effort.”
“To clean up the toenails off the floor?” I asked sweetly. “Come on, Josue. Today.”
He clasped his hands, and tried for a pious expression. I doubted he’d ever seen one, except maybe in the DVD collection belowdecks. “Do you—what’s your name again?”
“Joanne Baldwin.”
“Joanne Balderwin, take this—uh, Prince David, to be your husband? Do you swear to honor and obey him, and to never look at another man, even if this one gets—”
“Sick, old, and fat, yes, I know.”
“What would that matter? He’s a man, yes? It is the prerogative of a man to get sick and old and fat.” The crew laughed raucously behind us. “Do you swear to honor and obey him, even if this one gets poor and lazy?”
I closed my eyes and fought a cage match with my temper. “Ask it right.” He heard the echo of darkness in my voice, and the laughter of the crew died away. “I mean it.”
Josue cleared his throat. When he spoke again, the mocking tone was gone. “Do you take this man as your husband, forsaking all others as long as you both live?”
Close enough. I felt something happening, a stirring in the aetheric like a soft breeze. It swirled around me, lazy and gentle, and then solidified into a silver mist.
“Yes,” I said. “I vow it.”
The mist fell like soft silver rain on the aetheric, and I felt it sliding over my skin in warm threads.
And then it hit the black torch, and all hell broke loose.
“Jo!” David grabbed me as my knees folded. “What—?”
I had to make this work. Had to. Holy crap, Lewis had been right the whole time. Because our wedding vows hadn’t been finished, I’d made myself vulnerable to the invasion by Bad Bob. The equations had been out of balance, and on the aetheric that was a very bad thing.
We were setting it right.
The connection between us went wild, power flooding from him into me in a silver torrent. Power straight from the bloodstream of the aetheric, pure and white-hot.
“Take it out of me,” I panted. “Hurry. Hurry!”
David rolled me over on my stomach and ripped my shirt open, exposing the rippling, angry tattoo on my back. The thing under there was being forced to the surface.
David’s power was acting in self-defense, because I was now part of him. Flesh of his flesh.
I heard his breath rush out, and then he put one hand on the back of my neck and said, “Hold still. It’s coming out.”
I felt blood sheeting over my back, and heard the pirates scrambling backward to get away from the thing that was thrashing its way out of me.
I had enough control left to block the nerves before the pain got unbearable. I couldn’t see what was happening in the real world, but on the aetheric there was something that looked like a cross between a squid and a virus flailing its way out of my silver-shining body.
David fried it into grease and smoke on the deck beside me, and then burned it again.
The change was immediate, and dramatic. Calm flooded me, and confidence, and power—the power of the Djinn.
I directed it to my back, and sealed the ravaged muscles and torn skin—something not even Lewis could have done, as powerful as his talent for things like that was.
I’d just become something else. A bridge between the Wardens and the Djinn . . . and something of both at the same time.
And Bad Bob’s mark was gone.
I was free.
David picked me up and cradled me in his arms. I felt warm and relaxed, contented as a drowsy cat in the sun.
“It worked,” he said. He sounded surprised. “You were right.”
“Damn straight,” I said. “It’s why he wanted to stop us at the wedding. Bad Bob knew that once we exchanged vows, he wouldn’t be able to control me anymore.” I felt drunk on silver bubbles, and I laughed. “Free. We’re free of him.”
David captured my hands and kissed them.“Not quite yet,” he said. “He can’t control you. That doesn’t mean he’s helpless.” He pulled me back to my feet. My shirt was a disaster, so I tied the rags together in a makeshift halter top. Not so bad, really, all things considered.
Josue had prudently retreated as far as he could from us. Brett Jones was still standing there, looking focused despite the sight of an alien critter ripping out of my flesh.
I nodded to Josue. “Finish it.”
“Hell with you, crazy bitch!”
“Finish it!”
From all the way across the deck, he made the hasty sign of the cross. “Then I declare you married,” he said. “Mazel tov. Kiss the bride before we do.”
He picked up a half-empty bottle of cheap rum, pulled out the cork, and swigged down a gulp, then passed it around. Our version of cheap champagne.
David pulled me into his arms, and what would have been a symbolic kiss turned deep, hot, and thoroughly suggestive. I helped with that part, thinking of nothing except the moment, the sensation of his body against mine.
We’d won. At the very least, we’d won my freedom from becoming Bad Bob’s slave.
Now I had to make sure that David didn’t suffer that fate, either.
We broke the kiss and clung together, panting. He was whispering things to me, quiet wonderful things. Promises.
And then he closed his eyes and said, “I don’t want to do this. Not this way.”
“I know,” I said, and kissed him again, gently. “But it’s important. Tactics and strategy, right?”
“Tactics and strategy.” He sounded resigned, not happy. “All right. I’m ready.”
I nodded over his shoulder to Brett, who unzipped a pocket on his tactical vest and pulled out a small glass bottle with a cork. A little more ornate than I was used to seeing—probably something they had in the stores on the cruise ship, although the cork would have been a new addition.
“I’ve got your agreement to do this, right?” Brett asked. He was asking David. After a long moment, David nodded. “Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound—”
“Wait,” I blurted, and took both of David’s hands in mine. “If this is the last time I see you, I need you to hear this.”
He waited, amber eyes glowing like suns. I fumbled for words. “I—just—David, if something happens to me, if this doesn’t go right, you have to promise me, vow to me, that you will look out for humanity’s good, not just the Djinn’s. Don’t punish the Wardens if I die. Please.”
He knew why I was asking that. “Lewis tried to kill you,” he said. “He did kill you. Are you asking me to forgive him?”
“I’m not going to ask the impossible. I’m asking that you not take revenge for something that turned out not to work anyway, that’s all.”
There’s something very unsettling about a Djinn that doesn’t blink when he’s talking to you—even one you love with a deep, desperate intensity. “You are asking the impossible,” he said. “Lewis hurt you. He did it as part of a plan. I can’t allow that to go unanswered.”
“You have to,” I said. “Please. I need a vow.”
“You know that I can’t say no to you, don’t you?” He wasn’t smiling, though. “Yet this time, I have to. The answer is still no, Jo. He can no longer be trusted by the Djinn.”
That really wasn’t good. “But you’ll still work with him? With the Wardens?”
“To a point,” he said. I could tell he wasn’t going to be more specific about where the point was.
That was all I was going to get from him, even now, even at this most vulnerable moment.
&n
bsp; I nodded to Brett, who repeated the binding phrase again—three times, just to be sure.
David’s hands misted out of mine as the binding took effect. I felt the hammering blow of it shatter the aetheric between us, and then he was exploding into mist, and the mist was sucked into the bottle in Brett’s hands. He corked it with calm efficiency, and I watched him put the bottle in a special padded case, and then into the pocket of his tactical vest.
“With your life,” I told him. “You know that, right?”
“Yes,” he said. It was a simple answer, and it left no room for doubt at all. He’d do it. I couldn’t ask for better than that.
I fried the ship’s engine with a burst of pure Earth power, fusing metal parts together, gunking up everything that looked remotely important. The Sparrow sputtered and began to drift, dead in the water.
Josue stopped looking afraid and started looking alarmed, then angry. “You do something to my ship?”
“Why, is something wrong with it?” I kept my expression as innocent as possible. That was probably what made him glower at me as if he’d like to take me apart but wasn’t sure it was safe to try. “My friends on the cruise ship will help you. Oh, and I wouldn’t try any other guns you might have stashed. Serious mistake on so many levels.”
He gave me his most dangerous look. In earlier days, I might have actually been intimidated by it. Today . . . not so much. “Worst day of my life, the day I fished you out of the ocean, mermaid.”
“Really? The sad thing is, it wasn’t the worst day of mine.” I stepped up on the railing at the vee of the bow, balancing on the balls of my feet. He backed away, watching me. Not quite certain of what I was doing. “Good luck.”
He crossed himself. “Go with God, so long as you go.” His sudden piety didn’t convince me he wouldn’t stab me in the back if he could get a clear throw when I turned around. I gave Josue one last look, and then I dived from the railing of the Sparrow into the open ocean water, heading south.
Bad Bob wasn’t on an island, after all. Well, to be accurate, he was on an island—but the island was floating and he was moving it wherever he wanted.
Neat trick. First, most islands aren’t all that prone to float, since they’re really the tops of underwater mountains. This one was able to drift, withstand the full force of a Category 5 hurricane, and navigate at will.
It also explained why he was so crazy hard to track down. I wasted time and frustration until I figured out that I was heading not for a specific spot in the ocean but a mobile spot. I found it as the sunrise spilled over the long, rocky key of the island, which was moving away from me at a fairly rapid speed. I had an embarrassment of choices for first impressions, but you’ve got to be kidding me was certainly in the hunt for first place.
The entire island was turning, the mirror image of the mouth of a black-and-green hurricane that was hovering above it, just . . . spinning.
Not even Bad Bob—I hoped—had the power to do this alone. No, he had to be augmenting it somehow . . . And then it occurred to me. I was filled with silvery aetheric light now, thanks to my connection to David; Bad Bob had a Djinn, too. Rahel. He’d taken her by force, and that explained the negative energy in what I saw hovering over the island.
Of course, Bad Bob himself was no Prince of Positive Thinking, either.
The scary thing was that with that much power, he could do almost anything he liked, and this floating fortress was just demented enough to amuse him.
I kept swimming. I’d been at it for hours, and I was very, very tired, but I also wasn’t about to give up. Besides, I was building up some fierce quadriceps.
Jo, a voice whispered in my ear. I gasped, startled, and sucked down a lungful of water. I paused, treading water. Jo, can you hear me?
It was Lewis’s voice. I shook my head and bopped myself in the ear, hoping I was just having a hallucination.
Stop hitting yourself. Yes, it’s me.
“How do you know I’m hitting myself?”
I can hear the pops in your eardrum. It’s an old Earth Warden trick. Works great for covert ops. Lewis was making an effort to sound like nothing had passed between us the past few days. Like it was all just the same old. How’s the swim?
“Long,” I said. My teeth were chattering. “You didn’t dial me up on the ear-phone to chat.”
He paused for a few seconds. With Lewis, that was weighty. Did David agree? Is he in the bottle?
“Yes.” Better not to overshare on that, I decided. “Could we speed this up? Water cold. Body tired.”
Can you do this? Are you sure?
What a dumb-ass question. “No, I’m not sure,” I snapped. “Of course I’m not sure. Why? Second thoughts?”
Yes. We’ve got one shot at this. He may not even let you get close. He may kill you before you get anywhere near him.
Cheery thought. “If he does, you’ve still got a shipful of Wardens and Djinn ready to bring the wrath of God down on him and—” It occurred to me suddenly why Lewis was taking the trouble to say these things. “David.”
You and I know that he’d stop at nothing to destroy what killed you.
Oh Christ. “You cannot be serious with this. Lewis. Please, tell me you’re not asking me to go and deliberately get my ass killed so that it will trigger David into a homicidal rampage against your enemies?”
It would work.
Sure it would. It would leave Bad Bob and whoever was around him radioactive dust. Including, probably, the cruise ship, which would become collateral damage.
The hideous thing was that as a nuclear option, it was not bad. So long as you accepted that the pile of bodies would be unthinkable, but at the end of the day, the enemy would be gone. . . .
No. “Not happening, Lewis,” I said. “If I get killed anyway, fine, all bets are off. But I’m fighting all the way down. Get me?”
Yes. You understand that I had to ask.
Not really. But I was starting to think that in some ways David was right—I never would truly know Lewis. Not at his core.
“I’m signing off, Lewis,” I said, and spit salt water as a wave slapped me. “Hey. Thanks.”
For what?
“Letting me say no.”
I got a dry, tinny chuckle in my ear. How could I ever stop you?
“See you on the other side, then.”
Yes.
That was it. Our big good-bye. As romantic scenes went, it lacked, but that was all right. We were past all that now.
After a good half hour of chasing down the floating island, my flailing hand finally slapped a boulder on the island’s rocky shore—whatever sand there once was had long ago been scoured away, so there was nothing left to this beast but slick, water-smoothed stone. I grabbed at the rock, but my hand slid off. I kicked, gritted my teeth, and lunged up out of the water as far as I could.
My rib cage thumped down painfully on the smooth surface, and I started to slip back, but more kicking and clawing paid off. I found a handhold, at the cost of the last memory of my French manicure, and hauled myself out of the pounding surf to lie exhausted and dripping, draped like Josue’s proverbial drowned mermaid over extremely uncomfortable terrain.
“Damn,” I whispered. “Why am I doing this again?” Oh yeah—because I was probably the only one who could, with anything like certainty.
And because sometimes I just had to face my own demons—and Demons—head-on.
I spent several moments just letting my muscles shake and cry out in relief, and then rolled up to a sitting position to take a look around. It wasn’t much of a garden spot—lots of black basalt and granite. This place wasn’t more than a few dozen millennia away from the lava flows that had built it in the first place. It still had most of its sharp edges.
That wasn’t great for me, of course. I’d worn heavy boots, but my battered shorts probably weren’t going to protect me from gathering some new and interesting scars as I scrambled across the edgy landscape.
I climbed up on the
tallest boulder I could find and did a quick survey. The island was bigger than I’d expected—maybe a solid mile across—and toward the middle there was an unlikely small collection of jagged palms, all dying now. Whatever fresh water had nourished them was long gone.
This island was a rotting hulk, and I wondered uneasily how Bad Bob had kept sixty Sentinels—that I knew about—alive on such a bare span of rock. I supposed he’d laid in supplies, but he didn’t seem to be a logistical kind of guy.
Maybe they were eating each other. It wouldn’t surprise me, given the level of devotion he inspired in people.
This was not the place I’d have picked as my home away from home if I had to choose a portable island paradise, that was for damn sure. No beaches, no living trees, no water, no shade. Just razor-edged rock and the odd crab scuttling by. The surface of Mars, only at least fifty percent less hospitable.
If I hadn’t been doing such a careful survey of the island, I might have missed the first attack that came at me. There was nothing to give it away but a faint shimmer against the rocks, like a reflection of waves—but it didn’t move with the waves.
It was bending light, and it was moving fast, heading my direction.
I’d never seen one in full daylight before. That was a crystalline skeleton, barely visible without the human disguise its kind had adopted back on the Grand Paradise . I knew now why it had gone for the skins; the creature made a vibration on the aetheric as it moved, a kind of ringing like a finger tapping an ice-cold crystal glass.
The skins had muted the vibrations, hidden them in the natural noise of human existence.
The crystal shimmer disappeared, lost in the glare of the sun for a second, and then I saw the blur of it against the piles of rocks only about three feet away from me.
I didn’t have time for fancy moves, just dived out of the way. It was fast, but the rocks were just as hazardous to its footing as to mine, and I saw it stumble and try to catch its balance as it checked its momentum. Instead, it tumbled off into the water.
It sank below the surface in seconds, pulled down by the density of its bones.
Well, that was great news, but as I looked up, I counted three more shimmers against the rocks, heading in my direction. I calculated frequencies. I didn’t have time to try very many, but the good news was that I’d already killed one of these things on my own. Well, with help, but close enough. I knew the theory, and even without the direct access to the aetheric that I’d have had with David free, I wasn’t starved for power. I was almost shining with what had spilled into me at our wedding ceremony.