When I looked over my shoulder, I saw that Lewis had made his way out onto the deck. Behind him was the Warden army—faces I knew and some I outright hated.
Ah, good.
Finally, we were at the showdown. Time to rumble.
I turned to face them.
“You’re getting off the ship,” Lewis told me. “I’m sorry, Jo.”
“Oh no. Mutiny! Whatever shall I do?” I put the back of my hand dramatically to my forehead. “Wait. I know. Kill you.”
He didn’t look especially petrified. Lewis had healed up some overnight—faster than I’d have thought, but he’d probably had tons of Earth Warden help to accelerate the process. He looked badass and focused, and whereas I was clean, scrubbed, and dressed for sexy success, he hadn’t shaved, showered, slept, or changed clothes.
I was ahead on style points, but I wasn’t counting the Wardens out. Not yet.
“You can’t win this,” Lewis said. “Don’t push me, Jo. I’m telling you the truth: You can’t.”
He sounded confident, but then, Lewis always did sound confident when it came to crunch time.
I felt the whispers of wind tease my hair, and the storm—my own personal pet now—yawned and began to spin its engine harder, preparing for battle.
“You going to talk, or are you going to fight?” I asked. “Because the alternative is hate sex, and I’m kind of over you right now.” I noted, on a highly academic level, that I was starting to sound more and more like Bad Bob, even to the ironic dark twist in my tone.
Lewis took a step toward me. Just one. But I felt my skin tighten, and something inside me turned silent and watchful, all humor gone.
“You’re talking a good game, but I’m still waiting for you to back it up.”
I laughed. “Are you
begging
me to kill you? Seriously? Tactics, man. Look into it.”
“No,” he said softly. “I’m telling you that deep inside, there’s a part of you that’s still protected. Still fighting. If there weren’t, you’d be walking around this ship like the incarnation of Kali, destroying everything crossing your path. Think about it. You haven’t killed anybody. And what is your master evil plan? You’re taking us to Bad Bob. That’s where we wanted to go.”
I froze, staring at him. It was true. I’d lashed out at him, but I hadn’t killed him. Hadn’t killed anyone, yet. Lots of talk, no action.
And he was right, something inside me had convinced me that the ship
should
be taken to Bad Bob . . . but it was the old Joanne, struggling to push me in the direction she considered right.
I opened my right hand, and a tiny pearl of light formed, flickered, and grew, expanding into a white-hot ball.
“Talk’s over,” I said. “It’s time to play.”
I threw the ball of fire into the middle of them. Lewis hit it with a blast of cold air along the way, shrinking it, and then casually batted it out over the railing when it reached him. “Going to have to play harder than that.”
I was aware that while my attention was fixed on Lewis, the other Wardens were trying to get to me. Not physically, but the Earth Wardens were messing with my body chemistry. All kinds of ways the human engine can go wonky—they weren’t trying to give me cancer, but they were trying to crash my blood sugar, give me blinding headaches, and disrupt nerve impulses.
I snapped a lightning bolt down. One of the Weather Wardens stepped out and flung up both hands, intercepting the thick, ropy stream of energy and deflecting it, but it left her limp and moaning on the deck, with a black burned patch on the wood that stretched a dozen feet around her in a blast pattern.
I felt an odd tug at my leg and looked down. The decking was growing green shoots, and they were twining up my leg in thick, twisted strands. I hissed in frustration and snapped the plant off at the root, but while I was occupied with that, more fast-growing tendrils erupted up around me, anchoring me in place. It was stupidly annoying, and I finally summoned up a pulse of fire to burn them away from me.
Then I pushed the wave of flame out at the Wardens.
A Fire Warden named Freddy Pierce stepped out and shoved the attack back at me. Then, surprising me, he rushed
through
the flame and hit me in a low tackle. As attacks went, it wasn’t subtle, but it caught me completely off guard, and the man was stronger than he looked. I slammed down on my back, and Freddy flipped me over and held me down with one sharp knee digging into my spine.
“Come on,” Lewis said, and stepped through the guttering flames to stand over me. His voice was low, kind, and a little sad. “You’re not going to kill us. You won’t, Jo. And that makes things tougher, because I can’t kill
you
if I know you’re still in there somewhere.”
I laughed and turned my cheek to one side, staring up at him through a mask of tumbling hair. “Do you really think so?” I asked, and blew Freddy off my back.
I blew him
off the ship
.
Into the water.
Then I lunged up, wrapped my hands around Lewis’s throat, and called fire. It wrapped around me in a dripping mantle, and Lewis’s clothes ignited instantly. He controlled that, but I was attacking him on multiple fronts; while he was putting out the flames, I was turning his breath toxic in his lungs, turning his blood to sludge in his veins. Earth Wardens knew a million painful ways to kill, and it was hard to fight, especially when you were on fire.
But Lewis managed, somehow. He batted me away, sending me reeling back to crash against a metal rail. Somewhere out in the churning iron gray sea, Freddy— a Fire Warden, with no power over either the water or the living things in it—yelled for help with panic in his voice. Something about sharks.
As Lewis staggered and fell, the bottle that held David’s soul entrapped fell out of his pocket and skittered across the deck. I reached out for it.
Cherise got to it first.
She backed up, fast, both hands clenched around the small glass form. She pulled it in to her chest.
The Wardens closed ranks between her and me.
“Back off,” Kevin said, pushing his way to the front—and Cherise.
“
You
back off,” I snapped. “I saved your life, you rancid little murderer. You owe me.”
“I owe Joanne,” he said. “I don’t know who the fuck you are, and I don’t care. You make a move against Cherise and—”
“And what?” I asked, and took a step forward. “You’ll cut me? Oh, shut up. Get out of my way if you want to live.”
Venna misted into place next to him. She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. I got the message well enough.
“I’ve fought you before,” I said.
“You lost,” she pointed out. “The poisoned water may sustain you, but it’s still poisoned. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re my equal. Ever.”
“
Boo
yah, bitch,” Kevin said. Someone else, with more sense and better self-preservation instincts, muttered for him to shut up.
“I’m going to kill you all,” I said. I meant it. I felt it coming, a kind of inevitable darkness. “I have to.” I was still just a little sorry about that, but it really was necessary. Lewis had been right that somewhere deep inside me, the old Joanne was still struggling—poisoning my thoughts, driving my actions.
No more.
I flung my arms wide, felt the storm roar and answer, and shouted,
“Now!”
The Djinn Rahel erupted from out of the ocean.
No,
not
Rahel—Rahel as commanded by her master, Bad Bob, the Black Warden.
Rahel was as large as the cruise ship. Her hair was a nest of writhing eels. Her face was distorted, pointed into an extreme triangle, and her mouth was full of rows of teeth. She was dressed in rags and weeds and pearls and fish scales, and in both hands she held swords as long as the hull of the ship.
“Oh, Christ,” someone said, appalled, and then the screaming started. Not among the Wardens, who instantly began pulling up every defense they had.
It really wasn’t going to do them any good at all.
Venna, pretty and fresh in a sparkly pink shirt with a unicorn on it, jumped flat-footed from the deck to balance on the railing. The storm winds hit her like the wave front of an explosive blast, blowing her hair back in a rippling blond flag, but she was absolutely steady as she balanced. Rahel saw her, and that shark-toothed mouth gaped in a menacing smile.
Venna executed a perfect dive, and before she hit the waves, she’d changed into something else, something vast and dark that swam straight at the terrifying sea-hag that Rahel had become.
Rahel’s shark teeth parted on a shriek, and she was yanked down under the waves. The
Grand Paradise
rocked violently as the water churned, and the storm winds lashed the ship in swirling gusts.
Rahel wasn’t the attack, of course. Just a diversion, something to help get attention away from me. While the Wardens were focused on the water, I concentrated on the metal of the ship’s hull, below the water line.
Metal bent and screamed, and the entire ship
twisted
as if it had been T-boned. It rolled starboard, then over-corrected to port, sending people flying and rolling and screaming.
Rahel broke the surface of the water and was yanked under again. The battle continued, not that it mattered to anyone on the ship anymore.
I could feel the damage.
It wasn’t containable.
I smiled.
Lewis left the deck in a sudden burst and went airborne—a trick that few Weather Wardens could manage under stress, even at full power.
Formidable,
I thought, filing it away for future reference.
Then something hit us hard on the side, and the ship, already dying, rolled all the way over.
Disaster can be oddly beautiful. It seems to happen in slow motion, like ballet, and if your emotions aren’t involved, then it’s only input.
All I was feeling, as the ship died around me, was a quiet kind of satisfaction.
It took about ten seconds for the
Grand Paradise
to capsize, and then I was in the water, floating away from the ship. It looked exactly like it had ten seconds before, only now it was upside down and wreathed in so many cascading bubbles that it was like some wild New Year’s Eve party gone badly wrong.
There was a ripped section of hull below the waterline, extending nearly half the length of the ship. I could see inside to hallways, storerooms, and the complicated mechanics of what was probably the engineering section.
I had done that. Just me.
I saw people flailing amid the strangely serene wreckage of what had been our only salvation out here in the middle of this watery desert.
Rahel’s massive sea-monster body dived past me, driven by a tail that was as much eel as mermaid, and disappeared into the gloomy depths. She was followed by a pink, sparkle-skinned unicorn with eyes of fire, gills, and flippers instead of legs. Its horn was shimmering crystal, lighting up the dark as it shot away in pursuit of Rahel.
The water was shockingly cold, or at least that was my impression. I instinctively reached for power and warmed myself, oblivious to the screaming people bobbing around me in the waves. Weather Wardens were quickly reacting, encasing people in protective bubbles and popping them to the surface if they’d been unlucky enough to end up sucking sea. I supposed they’d be all about saving those who were trapped, too.
I felt the suction of water rushing into the ship.
Rahel and Venna broke the surface again, two giants now screaming and ripping at each other, far less human than I’d have ever imagined; Venna had given up her My Little Pony sparkles and was fish-belly white now, and Rahel’s body was a dark mesh of scales and teeth, too confusing to identify individual features.
Venna drove Rahel back under the surface again, and bubbles geysered in their wake.
Lewis rose out of the water. Levitated, like a freaking superhero, dripping gallons of seawater.
“Everybody, move close together!” he yelled. “Grab on to each other. Kevin, you’re in charge. Count noses!”
The noses were still bobbing to the surface, like corks. Kevin swam to the center of the chaos and forcibly dragged people to form the first tight layer of the circle, then ducked beneath them to form up the next ring, and the next. “Hold on to each other!” he yelled. “Just like you’re in a huddle! And keep kicking!” Now the survivors looked like a giant skydiving stunt, concentric rings of people floating with their arms around each other. Scared, sure, but human contact helped, especially for those who couldn’t swim or were too terrified to remember how.
I bobbed in place, watching them for a moment, and then I called sharks.
Lewis felt the pulse traveling out through the water, and he knew what it meant. I saw his head snap around, his eyes widen, and the shock and horror on his face set up a warm, liquid glow deep inside me.
“Now I’ve got your attention,” I said. “Don’t I?” There weren’t enough Earth Wardens to control big predators like sharks, not if they had to be focused on not drowning at the same time. The Fire and Weather Wardens would be completely vulnerable.
There were thousands of sharks out there.
Thousands.
And now they turned and headed our way, drawn by an imaginary smell of blood in the water.
Something in Lewis’s face changed. He’d made a decision, not one he liked. I wondered what it was.
Between the two of us, a vividly painted craft suddenly erupted through the waves. It was reflective yellow, bright as a traffic sign, and it was completely enclosed, sleek as a science fiction submarine.
A lifeboat.
More of them were popping up now, all around the Wardens. Lewis—or Venna—had broken them free of the sinking wreck. “Ladders at the back!” Lewis yelled. “Last row of the circle boards first! Each one of these will take about forty people. Wardens, I want a minimum of three of you per boat, and try to evenly distribute the powers!”