I was losing.
The Djinn who’d screamed was no longer recognizable as a Djinn at all. It was a pile of disintegrating ash and dust, sliding away from cohesion to scatter on the deck.
And I felt everything slipping away inside.
The ship groaned again, and I saw metal buckling, vast rivets ripping out of place, and the first jets of water blow through into the open space of the hold.
We started sinking again.
The skin turned to the next Djinn. Lyle.
I felt the shift of power in the room.The water stopped rushing in. The metal sealed and strengthened.
Where David walked, the world mended around him.
“No,” I whispered, but he wasn’t going to stop, not for me. Not this time.
He wasn’t going to allow Lyle to die.
Another watertight door opened on the other side of the hold, and a swarm of Wardens poured in, led by Lewis. In seconds, they had the skin surrounded.
But the skin had its claws buried in Lyle’s chest, like some giant parasitical tick.
I switched frequencies one more time. Lewis saw what I was doing, and joined me; the other Earth Wardens quickly supported us, creating a resonance that was so powerful it began to shatter glass and crystal stored in the crates. Someone’s eyeglasses broke under the strain.
I felt feedback—the exact frequency that this creature’s bones sang to. I began to focus harder, refining the sound until it was at a lethal intensity. I could
see
the waves now, a standing well of ripples in the air around the creature, battering it from all sides.
“Jo, let go!” Lewis shouted. “Drop out!”
I couldn’t do that. Instead, I reached inside and came up with more power than I’d thought was hiding down in the empty storehouse of my gifts.
Because it felt so
good
to kill.
The vibrations ramped up into a shriek of power, and instead of Lyle dissolving into ash, the skin that had been Angelo Marconi blew apart into glittering crystal dust.
Lyle sagged and hit the deck, too weak to continue, but David stepped into his place and froze, concentrating.
The ship leveled out—still fighting the downward force but no longer being pulled down.
As quickly as it had come, the extra power I’d found was gone. Vanished. I was just me again, frail and fragile and ready to drop. If Angelo hadn’t been a pile of ragged flesh and demonic parts on the metal floor, he’d have had an easy meal of me.
Lewis reached me a few seconds later, as I slid down to a sprawl against the safe. “I told you to step out!” he snapped, and touched my forehead. “Damn it. What the hell did you do?”
I struck out at him. I couldn’t help it; his anger woke the beast inside, the one that had patiently stalked and laughed and waited.
I couldn’t hold it back anymore.
I burned him.
If it had been anyone but Lewis, I’d have killed him; I wasn’t pulling punches, and the fire that boiled out of me onto him was thick, plasmatic, and clung like napalm. It flickered with a sickly green tint.
Lewis reacted instantly, stepping back from me and concentrating all his will on putting out the fire before it could eat him up. He succeeded, but my attack left him with nasty third-degree burns on his hands and arms.
I laughed.
David called another Djinn to take his place in the fragile power structure that held us above the waves, and flashed across the hold toward me. As he did, Lewis blocked him. “No,” he said. His voice was ragged with pain. “Don’t touch her.”
David looked like he was considering touching Lewis, in a very hostile manner, but he took the advice. He pulled in energy and ignited a small golden ball of light in the palm of his hand. It was cozy, warm, and gave me a false sense of security. The glow woke shades of orange and red in his eyes, made his face into the image of a classical bronze god.
Next to him, a faint mist formed in the air. It didn’t bother to take human form, and it didn’t need to; there was a
feeling
that came with it, oppressive as the ocean depths, and just as cold.
The Air Oracle. She—or he?—was the Djinn equivalent of an archangel, both supremely powerful and unknowable. Even as Conduit for the Djinn, David couldn’t order an Oracle; he could only petition.
He’d obviously petitioned, and now the Air Oracle was here, looking at me out of a body that barely registered in the world at all. There was communication going on between David and the Oracle. It wasn’t civil, from the look on David’s face.
This was a perfect moment to see just what I could do with all this
power.
As I summoned it up in a roiling boil inside me, thick and hot and dizzying, the Air Oracle’s attention focused on me with a snap, and I was driven to my knees.
The Oracle seemed surprised that I hadn’t been driven into tiny little fragments identifiable only by DNA.
Very
surprised.
You’re going to get a lot more shocks, bitch,
I thought, and smiled.
David was far sneakier than I gave him credit for. Instead of coming at me directly, he used his link to me, sending a massive burst of power through the aetheric connection between us.
It blew me out of my body. I fell, stunned, and waited for the end. The Air Oracle was no friend of humans in general; I was no better than the slime at the edge of a pond to her. But she didn’t act.
She just left.
David bent and took me in his arms as if I weighed less than my equivalent in feathers. His lips brushed my temple. “Forgive me,” he said. “It’s better if you sleep.”
Before I could even think about protesting, all the light winked out, and I was drifting away into warm, dark, safe eternity.
When I woke up, it was because David could no longer afford even the small pulse of energy it was taking to keep me unconscious.
I swam up out of the thick darkness to the sound of alarms, screaming, and the gale-driven shriek of wind. The air smelled of metal and salt and fear.
Heavenly, that smell.
I opened my eyes on darkness, but in the next second a lightning bolt split the sky above me in half, miles across, like a hot purple zipper letting in the darkness.
It lit up low, thick, black clouds that fired rain down like arrows from the battlements.
I was on my back on the deck, reclining in a white padded chair that was made for lounging. It slid hard to starboard, and I jerked and rolled off and to my feet before it slammed into the promenade railing. My bare soles hit cold, wet wood, and I shivered. I was soaked to the skin. How had I gotten here? And why? And what the
hell
was going on?
Nothing good, obviously. The deck was thick with uniformed crew and a chaotic swirl of passengers. It was too dangerous out here, but that didn’t seem to be stopping anybody; I wondered why they hadn’t taken refuge inside, but some practical knowledge finally kicked in, and I knew.
Either the crew understood that there was an excellent chance that this ship was going down, or there was something below that was even more dangerous than the storm. Either way, not good news for me or anybody else.
“Jo!” Cherise. I barely recognized my best friend, because I’d rarely seen her look this—well, bedraggled. Drowned-rat wet, pale, and shivering with cold. “God, I thought you’d never wake up. Come on!”
She dragged me off in some random direction. No one had told her that I was prone to irrational bursts of killing fury, I supposed.
Good.
That would make it easier.
“We need to get to the lifeboat—”
My senses were coming back online, all of them, and in Oversight I saw the thick red streams sweeping around us, closing in.
The storm that Bad Bob had dispatched, the one powered by the Unmaking he’d pulled out of the spear, was almost on us, and it was devastating.
Cherise’s words were lost in a fresh blast of wind, a gust so flat and hard that it slammed her bodily against the metal wall. I suppose that in better times I might have tried to help her. Instead, I just clung to a metal stanchion and watched her struggle.
I saw one of the heavy lounge chairs topple right over the railing and disappear as the ship lurched to starboard again. We were heeling around, getting hammered by churning waves like a punch-drunk boxer.
The ship was still stuck in one spot, anchored by the suction coming from deep beneath the ocean. I could feel it, and it was growing stronger, not weaker.
The Djinn were losing the fight.
“Hang on!” Cherise screamed, and another gigantic wave crested and fell, pounding us with spray like nails. “We have to get off the ship,
now
!”
How exactly that was going to be accomplished I had no idea, but I nodded. In the brief lull between lashing waves, we staggered to the next handhold. Along the way we ran into more castaways. I barely recognized a sopping-wet Cynthia Clark, who surely hadn’t been this miserable since she’d made that epic disaster movie with Gene Hackman, back in the day. I also recognized Cho Chu Wing, one of our Weather Wardens. Cho was a tiny little thing, skinny as a restaurant greeter. She’d managed to keep herself mostly together; her black hair was pegged back in a tight ball, and only random strands of it clung to her damp face. She’d worn a storm slicker, neon orange, and beneath it she seemed to be drier than any of the rest of us. She waved us frantically toward the bow of the ship. As we slipped and fought our way through blinding spray and stinging, whipping rain, we gathered Weather Wardens in ones and twos, until there was a tight knot of them linking arms together, like a rugby team in a scrum.
I stood apart from them. Remote, even in the midst of my fellow Wardens.
“We need to get a bubble!” Cho screamed. “Focus on giving us clear water for a hundred feet in every direction!”
That wasn’t as hard as it might seem; it was basically wave cancellation, which is a fundamental principle of the physics of anything that moves as a unit—sound, water, a rippling flag. You need to find the specific frequency of the wave and cancel it out, and move the energy elsewhere. Normally that was the tricky part; bleed-off energy could destabilize everything, and whip up a whole mess of side problems you’d never anticipate.
In this melting stew of uncontrolled energy, another few mega joules in the wrong place would hardly matter.
“Tornado!” someone screamed, and I looked up to see the approaching black arms of the hurricane sweeping in like scythes. There were bulbous eruptions forming in the trailing clouds, swelling and then narrowing into cones. Forming tornadoes have a lazy look, almost tentative; they bob and weave and seem impotent at first, until they get their strength consolidated.
I’d never taken time to admire their elegance before.
So beautiful. So deadly.
Cho was shouting something at me. She wanted my help.
Well then.
I gave it. I gave it to the tornado, and laughed as it gobbled up power like a greedy shark.
Cho must have realized what I was doing. She stepped up and gave me a sharp elbow to the back of my neck, sending me reeling into another Warden, who put me down on the deck and pinned me, yelling for Djinn.
My pet tornado collapsed—no great surprise, they always were fragile constructs, by the very nature of the physics that drove them—and the waves that battered the
Grand Paradise,
heeling her violently from one side to the other, eased to merely heavy instead of psychotic. I felt the waves’ pounding rhythms begin to ease, like a racing heart slowing as adrenaline faded.
“You can’t stop it,” I told Cho, who was taking advantage of the breathing space to stare into the heart of the storm. “Everybody dances with the devil.”
I knew the storm was watching too, this monster of a thing that Bad Bob had imbued with life and cunning and cruelty, and a particular kind of insanity. I could feel it gathering itself, studying us.
Planning.
It could feel that I was an ally, if only it could reach me. I could have done more, but I felt lazily content to wait.
No hurry. I was enjoying the panic too much to end it quickly.
The ship lurched—not side to side, but
down
, as if a giant hand had suddenly grabbed the hull from beneath and pulled it straight down. The ship sank like an express elevator, and I watched the ocean pour in over the railings on the decks below, then come for us in a foaming, deadly rush . . .
. . . and then the force let us go, and the ship’s buoyancy popped us violently straight up like a cork from a rubber band. I don’t think the
Grand Paradise
quite came out of the water, but there was a sickly sense of utter stillness as momentum fought gravity and gravity’s patient pull won.
The ship crashed back into the water and settled. We were sprawled like ninepins all over the deck—Wardens, crew, staff, hapless passengers. The screaming sounded thin and lost.
“We’re loose!” one of the Wardens shouted. “Get everybody on the lifeboats!”
“No!” Cho snapped. “We’re getting control! We’ll stand no chance at all in the smaller boats!”
“Are you?” I asked. “Getting control? I don’t think so!” It felt like the kind of adrenaline rush you get from hurtling down a mountain on skis, straight for a killing drop, knowing it may destroy you but there’s nothing so beautiful as that moment when death means nothing, nothing at all . . .
The Warden holding me down—I realized it was Kevin, as I focused on his face—gave me a solid right cross, trying to put me out.“You’ll have to beat me harder than that,” I told him, very seriously. “Come on, Kevin, dig deep. Hurt me like your stepmother taught you.”
He went pale, and I felt his grip on me loosen. Too easy. I threw him off, not particularly caring where he landed, and stalked to Cho.
Before I reached her, we all staggered as a massive subsonic
boom
rocked the decking.