Damn.
I couldn’t hurt this thing, at least not with these weapons.
I retreated. I changed out ice for steel and tried again. This time, I sliced a piece out of the tongue, which fell to the floor and writhed like a slug in the sun. Whether that hurt the creature or not, it charged me, and I tried to make like a matador. That didn’t help. It had reach and speed, and what had been its fingers in human form were now claws, diamond-sharp and lightning fast.
I felt the slices like chilly tugs on my side, but there wasn’t any pain, not at first. I didn’t allow myself to look down, I kept moving, turning, keeping myself away from the razor-edged whirlwind that was hissing through the air in pursuit.
Then I hit a corner, and there was nowhere left to run. I slashed, trying to slow it down, but the creature was just too damn fast, and too damn powerful. It smashed through the shield I put up. I didn’t have time to try any Earth powers; fire wouldn’t work, and weather tricks wouldn’t buy me more than another fragile breath.
I was going to lose.
A small, white ball of light hit the thing from the side and plunged beneath the crystalline structure. It lit the creature up like an arc light from within. I couldn’t even estimate the heat; it felt like a nuclear bomb compressed to the size of a baseball, forces well beyond my ability to summon, much less command.
All I could do was duck and cover. Again.
The creature shrieked in that horrible, soul-destroying range again and became a photonegative blast of flame that cooked everything within a foot of it—but not an inch beyond. The inverse flame became white flame, then reversed itself into a tiny, glittering spark . . . and the creature was gone except for a shower of glittering crystalline powder.
A wave of intense pressure passed over me and shoved me hard into the corner.
The white ball of light expanded into a softer glow, and as the wave passed over me I squinted into it and saw the Djinn Venna standing where the creature had been, her pink HELLO KITTY sneakers buried in half an inch of crystal powder.
She looked worse than I had ever seen her: pallid, trembling,
afraid.
She sank down into a crouch, just a frightened little girl, and I couldn’t help but move toward her. I picked her up in my arms, and she shuddered and buried her face in my chest.
Her warmth changed, cooled, became gentle against my skin. I felt my wounds starting to heal, though very slowly. My body began murmuring a shocked report of damages, but I told it to be quiet. Shock felt nice, at the moment. Soothing. I’d take whatever comfort I could get just now.
David reached us a second later, wrapping his arms around us both. “All right?” he asked, and looked into my eyes. He didn’t like what he saw there, clearly, but he liked what he saw in Venna a whole lot less.
I didn’t blame him.
“It’s one of them,” Venna said. “One of the ghosts. It didn’t belong here. It can’t
be here.
”
The confidence of the Old Djinn in their well-ordered universe had just been shattered, and beings that had never feared much in their long, long lives looked into the abyss that humans faced every day—the dark chasm of uncertainty of the future.
“It’s okay, Venna,” I said, and smoothed her long blond hair. “You did great. Ghost or not, you completely kicked its ass.”
“I can’t do it again.” Venna looked at David and took a deep breath. “It took part of my ass with it. And I don’t think I can get any of that back. Maybe ever.”
Cynthia Clark hadn’t boarded with a personal trainer, as it turned out. In fact, she didn’t remember a thing about the entire incident. There didn’t seem to be much point in trying to convince her that she’d been hypnotized into covering up for some otherworldly demonic glass monster. She wouldn’t even believe that David and I hadn’t set her room on fire deliberately, so I figured the whole monster thing was right off the table.
I staggered away to the nearest public lounge while David tried to settle things to everyone’s satisfaction. I was checked out by a small army of Warden medics and Lewis himself—none of whom were happy with me, or my descriptions of events, come to think of it—and eventually was told that I was in no imminent danger of death or coma, but healing was a long way off.
I was still lying there, feet up, grateful to be breathing, when I spotted Aldonza hurrying past, rolling a luggage cart. She did a quick jerk of surprise when she saw me, and loitered. “Are you okay, miss?” she asked, which told me just how terrible I looked. “Can I get you something?”
I didn’t raise my head from the leather pillow. “I’m okay, Aldonza. Sorry about the cabin.”
“The cabin?”
“Miss Clark’s cabin. It’s—ah—kind of a mess.”
Aldonza got a blank, terrified look on her face and hurried on. I could hear her horrified cry all the way down the hallway.
A half hour later, a whole phalanx of stewards rolled by, carting La Clark’s salvaged baggage and armloads of expensive clothes. They were moving her to a new cabin.
They moved her into mine, as it turned out. I didn’t find that out until I struggled up from my temporary resting place and met Cherise in the hall, dragging her suitcase and looking half-mournful, half-impressed. “Did you know that
Cynthia Clark
is going to be sleeping in your bed?” she asked. “That’s kind of awesome, in a sucky kind of way. Anyway, we’re down the hall, and
Moses on a motorcycle,
what the hell happened to you, bitch?”
I was better, really I was. I was limping—broken bones had been repaired into merely cracked and hurting bones—and I was singed and bloody and looked like some Halloween fright mask, but hey, I was breathing, upright, and thinking straight again. “You should see the other guy,” I said, and coughed. It turned into a lung-bursting hack like a fifteen-pack-a-day smoker’s. I could still taste that awful taint of death, even though I thought that it was all in my head now.
“Uh, thanks, I faint at the sight of gross anatomy. Come on, sweetie. You need a bunk.”
I didn’t argue about it. I’d been inclined to think I could walk it all off until I’d walked about ten feet, and then priorities had shifted again, drastically.
Rest seemed like a very good idea. I accepted Cherise’s support, staggering the rest of the way to our new cabin.
“Ouch,” Cher sighed, as the door swung open on a cramped little room with two narrow beds facing each other. “Looks like we’ve been bumped to coach. Or maybe servants’ quarters.”
“Don’t care.” I sank down on the closest flat surface—luckily, it had a mattress—and covered my eyes with my forearm. I needed to think.
How
had that creature gotten on the ship? And why? Was it just biding its time, waiting to kill as many Wardens as possible?
Had it killed the nameless Djinn we’d found in the hallway?
Most importantly—were there
more
?
David had sensed it, though not with any accuracy. Venna had been able to nuke it, though only at a drastic cost to herself.
We just couldn’t fight an army of these things, and I had the sense that these were just incidental players in Bad Bob’s upcoming melodrama.
Crap.
Why did this keep happening to me?
“Jo?” The mattress dented on my left side as Cherise perched on the edge. “You crying?”
“No,” I lied. “Fuck.” I swallowed hard. “I can’t do this.
We
can’t do this. We’re sailing away into the middle of nowhere with a bunch of innocent people and we’re all going to die, Cher. I can’t stop it. God, we’ve screwed this up.”
“Hey.” She moved my arm away from my eyes and looked down at me with such gravity that she didn’t look like Cherise at all. “What’s going on?”
“Did you hear me? We just about got our asses kicked!”
“But you didn’t,” she said. “You told me before we got on this ship that it was going to be hard, and people were going to die, because you can’t go to war if you don’t expect casualties. You didn’t want me to come with, remember. You wussing out on me now, Rambette?”
I sniffled. “No.”
“Good, don’t even. You’re a Warden. You don’t let
anything
stand in the way of what you think is right. You have the most lustworthy guy I’ve ever seen madly in love with you. You have fabulous hair. You’re strong and beautiful and smart and evil pees itself when it sees you coming. So don’t you fold up on me, Jo.” Cherise’s mask slipped, just a little. “Because if you do, I don’t think I can keep it together on my own.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “You’re way tougher than me.” I hugged her. “I’m just so tired. I just want to rest.”
“Then rest,” she said, and let go. I settled back on the bed. “But don’t you dare think you’re not up to this. You’re a hero, babe. Heroes don’t wuss.”
“Do they whine?”
“Only to their bosom sidekicks.” She flashed me her bosom to prove she had the cred. Cherise, motivational speaker to the stars.
I managed a weak laugh. I didn’t feel like a hero, not at all. I didn’t think Venna did, either, and I
knew
David didn’t. He was too worried for me, and his anxiety was feeding mine, like a deadly and accelerating loop.
I took some deep breaths. Then I took some more, and let myself drift away from the pain and fear. I imagined myself floating in water, in a sparkling blue pool, with calm clouds whispering by overhead. The sun was warm and soft and kind, and I had on the perfect blue bikini that David liked so much.
The
Grand Paradise
’s rocking motion lulled me into a mindless calm, and as I hung there, suspended, I felt my body reaching for relief. It healed itself, bit by bit, cell by cell, using power drawn from the energy around me. The temperature of the cabin lowered in response, and I heard Cherise get up and check the thermostat, then break out the blankets. One settled over me, thick and soft.
“You okay?” Cherise whispered. I didn’t open my eyes.
“Yep,” I murmured. “Check it: Heroes don’t wuss.”
I was hoping that Venna had been wrong about her damage. I mean, shock, right? But no. Venna had been not just injured but
diminished
by the battle in Clark’s cabin.
When David told me that, sitting on the edge of my narrow bed in much the same way Cherise had earlier, I could tell that he was trying not to give away how much it disturbed him. He had on his
just-the-facts-ma’am
face, and he’d damped down the link between us to a low hum, suggestions of emotion, nothing more.
That was as close to cutting himself off from me as he could manage, since our wedding ceremony had joined us together on that powerful level.
I didn’t like it.
“She’s all right,” David told me. He was looking at me, but not—eyes unfocused, and miles away. “Physically . . . aetherically . . . she’s all right, she’s just . . . less than she was. As if pieces of her had been burned away.”
“Or eaten,” I said.
“You’re thinking of an Ifrit,” he said, and the focus sharpened in his eyes. “That wasn’t an Ifrit.” No, it definitely had
not
been an Ifrit. Those were Djinn, badly damaged and transformed, yes, feeding on their own kind, but still recognizably of the Djinn DNA family.
This thing . . . not so much.
“What if it was part Ifrit?” I said slowly. I struggled up to a reclining position, with my pillow bracing my aching back. “Part Demon, too? Some kind of hybrid?”
“That would be bad,” David said, very softly.
“Yeah, it’d suck like an industrial-strength Hoover. Demons are hard to kill; Ifrits can consume pieces of other Djinn, right?” As I understood it, Ifrits were the result of damage occurring to a Djinn’s ability to process energy from the aetheric. Starving and desperate, they did what any living creature might do to survive; they turned cannibal, stealing energy from their own kind. Dark, nightmarish vampire Djinn, usually with a nearly complete lack of higher mental faculties. Maddened by hunger.
Marry that to a Demon, and you’ve got a truly terrifying weapon against the Djinn, not to mention anyone else who gets in the way, like Wardens.
In a word, one of Venna’s ghosts—invisible, deadly, and adaptable.
“Can she recover?” I asked, thinking again of Venna. David gave me a highly suspect shrug. “Check that—can she recover in time to do that again?”
“I don’t know. I’m not her Conduit.”
“Cop-out.”
“Hey!”
“You know. You may not be able to help her, but you know whether or not
Ashan
can help her.”
“Ashan isn’t saying much,” David said. “You know how he is.”
Oh, I knew. We’d hit the same brick wall when trying to help another of Ashan’s Old Djinn, a particularly arrogant specimen named Cassiel who’d pissed the old dude off and been cast out to fend for herself for her troubles. She hadn’t
quite
become an Ifrit. Instead, she’d decided to go the less conventional route of binding herself to the Wardens for her daily dose of life energy . . . and I wasn’t at all sure that had been a good idea, still. Thank God, she wasn’t here with us, causing trouble. Wherever she was, I hoped she was doing better than we were.
Ashan had refused to talk about that incident, too. He wasn’t, in general, the chattiest of all my many enemies. He’d read the guidelines for villainy, the first one being
Don’t monologue.
“Is she staying?” I asked. Because Venna being Venna, she could stay or go, exactly as she pleased. In her place, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have gone off to the Djinn Day Spa for the next several millennia, and left us human idiots to our own devices.
“Of course she’s staying,” David said, and smiled just a little. “Venna’s more like you than she’d like to admit.”
“Apart from being cuter.”
“Debatable.”
“I don’t have any HELLO KITTY shoes.”
“Could be remedied.” He lifted my hand to his lips, and I shivered at the gentle touch, not to mention the look in his eyes. “I’m sorry about earlier. I realized I wasn’t helping you recover. It’s hard to remember how much we share now. I don’t want to add to your problems.”