“No.”
“I’m not going to ask again.
Give it to me.
”
“No!”
There was some kind of struggle, and then Kevin cursed in an unsteady whisper. Cherise was weeping as if her heart was breaking. From everyone else in the small boat came silence, rapid breathing, waves of distress and fear.
God, please, let me go,
I begged. My brain should have been off by now, letting me escape into the comfortable dark, but instead I could feel my nerves slowly dying, my cells screaming for oxygen. Nothing I could do to stop it, either.
I was feeling my body die on a cellular level. God, would I be around for the rest of it? Feeling the dead cells turn into sludge and soup?
Decomposing?
I didn’t want to be trapped in this body as it slowly decayed, with no hope of release or rescue.
I realized, very slowly, that what was binding me here was one tiny thread of silver, stretching through the navel of my body and out through the aetheric.
David
was holding me here, but he couldn’t save me. His power wasn’t mine to touch, and it wasn’t his, either, not as long as someone else held his bottle and he was trapped inside it.
“Lewis—don’t do this, man,” Kevin said. I’d never heard that tone in his voice before, so pleading. “I’m begging you. Don’t. It’s not fucking
fair.
”
“I’m not doing it because it’s fair,” Lewis said. “I have to do it because it’s right. It doesn’t matter how long we wait; when we let him out of that bottle, his grief will be exactly the same. So let him out now. Please.”
The darkness that Bad Bob had put inside of me battered at the prison of my dead body, fighting to reactivate it. To stay alive.
Without the energy of my body sustaining the darkness, it was growing weaker. Dying along with me.
I felt a whisper of power scent the air as the cap came off of David’s prison. I felt him battering furiously at the glass, trying to shatter his way free.
Oh, you fool, Lewis. He’ll destroy you.
“David,” Lewis said. “Come out.”
Wind blasted through the boat, pinning people against the walls, and a wild-eyed angel dropped out of heaven to gather me in his arms.
The sound that came out of him was some horrible cross between a scream and a growl—inhuman, furious, insane with grief. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t control my eyes to focus on his face, so his expression was mercifully blurred.
Suddenly, I felt the pressure of darkness inside me ease. Bad Bob had lost interest in me. Dead, I was of no use to him, none at all. The thick, toxic sludge of power inside me began to bleed away.
But it wasn’t gone.
Not yet.
Lewis said, “David, please understand. You can’t bring her back. Not this time.”
David’s voice was a raw, bloody scream.
“She’s not gone!”
He could touch me. See me. Feel my ghostly presence. He hugged my limp form to his chest and rocked back and forth, his face hidden in my hair.
“Let me save her,” he whispered.
“Order me to save her.”
I felt Lewis shudder. “No. David, you have to let her go. She’s damaged. She can’t fight him off anymore. It’s time to let her go.” He paused, and then said, with absolute precision, “I’m ordering you to let her die, David.”
The silence in the boat was as deep as the ocean. So was the sense of pressure. Even my dead flesh could feel it.
“I’ll kill you for this,” David said. There was nothing in his voice—no emotion, no hate, no grief. Nothing but simple declaration of intent. “I’ll rip you apart one cell at a time, and you’ll live a thousand years through the pain. I might even let you scream, if you beg me.”
He was utterly serious. He would torture Lewis. He’d do it with the kind of cold distance that the Djinn reserved for those they truly, deeply, madly hated.
He’d do it for me.
“Listen to me,” Lewis said, and if he was afraid, it didn’t show in his voice. “I’m ordering you not to save her. I’m ordering you to cut the cord and
let her go.
”
“Well, that’s a paradox,” David said. He still sounded eerily calm, almost relaxed. “Because if I let her go, it destroys the vow that binds me to the bottle, and that means I’m free. Free to pull you apart, Lewis. Free to order the brutal, screaming death of every last one of your kind. Do you really think I won’t?” There was madness in him, I realized. Terrible, burning madness, and Kevin was right—letting David free was a death sentence for Lewis. Not just for him, though. For the Wardens. For
everyone.
In this moment, David was a bigger threat to humanity than anything Bad Bob had ever dreamed.
I didn’t want to linger like this. I wanted to tell him it was all right, that Lewis had done it for a reason, a good one, and I didn’t really mind. The darkness was dripping out of me in an invisible stain on the deck. I felt . . . clear, at last. Finally, myself again.
I couldn’t bring myself back to life; it violated all the laws of the universe. All I could do, now that I was clear of Bad Bob’s influence again, was choose to die. But if I did that, if I severed the cord holding me and David together, the result would be the same; he’d be lost, and alone, and mad with fury and grief.
I could feel Lewis working all of that out, and realizing that he was in a trap he couldn’t escape.
Just like David.
“Let me have her,” David said. “Let me have her and I swear I will not harm you.”
Lewis’s voice came back stripped raw. Bloody. “You think I’m afraid of
that
?” He stopped and took a deep breath. “She’s too dangerous.
You know that.
”
“No,” David said softly. “I don’t know it. You fear it. There’s a difference. Let me have her, or I will teach you fear.
All of you.
You think you’ve suffered at the hands of the Djinn?
You have no concept of how much I can do to you.
”
Lewis knew the minutes were ticking away, and after a certain point, life wouldn’t return to the decomposing tissues of my body. Not any kind of life I’d want to have, anyway.
He also knew that forcing David to kill me was even worse.
“Do it,” Lewis said. “Save her.”
Before the words were out of his mouth, David acted. A silver cascade of power flooded me, pounded on my heart, drowned my brain. This was the pure white light of the Djinn, bathing me from the inside out. And where it met the fading black tangle of Bad Bob’s tattoo . . .
. . . the silver light went out.
There was still a deadly core there, hiding inside me. Under the skin. Not even death had taken it away.
I took in a convulsive breath and sat bolt upright, still held in David’s arms, and then I relaxed against him, even through the pain. My eyes spilled over with tears of agony, liquid screams that were the only thing I had to give voice to what was raging inside.
If I couldn’t come back all the way, come back
clean,
I didn’t want to come back at all.
I shuddered, and my eyes rolled back in my head, and for a precious moment I blacked out as my nervous system simply refused to conduct any more pain.
I returned to consciousness slowly, with the distant awareness of pain but unable to feel it directly. My back was numb again, all the way down to midway on my thighs. I couldn’t feel the back of my head, either. Or the tops of my shoulders.
Out of nowhere, I felt the soft press of lips against mine. I felt the exhale of David’s trembling sigh. I felt the burning drops of his tears on my face. “That’s all I can do,” he said. “Jo. Please. Come back to me.”
I blinked, and my eyes slowly focused on his.
“It’s all right,” I whispered. It wasn’t. I felt sick and wrong, and the light seemed too bright for my eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
David’s eyes widened. Instead of bright copper sparks dancing in them, there was ash, as if something inside him had burned itself out. “Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. “You saved their lives. If they’d let you die . . .”
The look he gave Lewis was utterly black with fury. I couldn’t imagine being on the receiving end of that much hatred. David really
wanted
to kill him, slowly and horribly. Even now, I felt the conviction of that echoing inside him.
I wound my fist in David’s shirt, pulling back his attention. “No,” I said. “Don’t you dare. Don’t use me as an excuse.” My voice was a parody of its usual tones, and I had no doubt he could see the sincere fright and dread in my eyes. “No matter what happens. Promise me. He did that for a
reason.
”
He lifted a hand and traced the line of my cheekbone, light as a breath. “No.”
“Promise me, David.”
“No.”
“Promise me.”
This time he said nothing at all. He was serious about this. Very damn serious indeed.
Lewis was still holding David’s bottle. Now, he gestured to Kevin and handed it over. As Kevin’s fingers closed over the glass, David’s body shattered into mist and re-formed.
Taking on the appearance imposed by his new master.
As he re-formed, I saw the differences, not the similarities: His hands were too broad. The arms were too muscular, and stained with colorful flaming skull tattoos. His jeans acquired leather motorcycle chaps, and his shirt vanished to reveal a broad, muscular chest beneath a fringed leather jacket.
His head was shaved.
The only things about him that didn’t really change was his face, and his eyes. Those remained his.
Those remained the ones that I knew.
Kevin cleared his throat. “Okay, order number one, you will not kill, or allow to be killed, any Warden not actively fighting with Bad Bob Biringanine in the current war. That includes Lewis. Order number two, you will not kill any human, or allow one to be killed, for any reason, unless saving them would put more people at risk. Three—” He sighed. “Especially don’t kill me, yo. And get back in the bottle.”
David took all that without a flicker, and then he was gone. His eyes were the last thing to leave, and they never wavered from mine.
I felt sick down to my soul. He had come so close, so close to doing worse than I could imagine . . . and for me.
Just for me.
“So what now?” I asked Lewis. My voice sounded scratchy and uncertain. I felt stretched as thin as rice paper, and just as fragile.
Lewis slid down to a sitting position and rested his head in both hands. “I don’t know,” he said. “He’s put blocks around the mark to keep you from being taken over, but it won’t be enough, not for long. This thing is vicious, Jo. It’s fatal. We’re back where we started, and I think you know I can’t let that stand.”
My hands were shaking. I pressed them down on my thighs. “I’m listening.”
“I need you to get off the boat,” he said. “I need you to let us leave you behind.”
In the open water.
With the sharks.
I swallowed hard and didn’t answer. I was too busy reliving what that had felt like—the teeth hot in my flesh, pieces of me coming off.
Blood.
Lewis didn’t blink. “I’m taking everyone else to landfall. I need you to go on, alone.”
“Alone,” I repeated, because I could
not
have heard him right. “You want me to go after Bad Bob all by myself. Swimming. Through shark-infested seas. Are you fucking
insane
?”
He hated himself. I could see the loathing, but I could also see the cold steel underneath it. He knew what he had to do, and he wasn’t afraid to do it.
He never was. I loved that about him, and I hated it, too.
“I can’t keep you here,” he said. “You’re a bomb. Sooner or later, you’re going to go off, and I can’t risk what you’re going to do. If you want to save yourself, you need to do it alone.”
“Don’t feed me crap and tell me it’s chocolate,” I said. “I’m, what? A Trojan horse? Bait? Your own personal suicide bomber?”
“You’re what you need to be. The way you always are.” He reached over and smoothed a hand down my tangled, damp hair. His long fingers felt cool and strange on my skin. “The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was kill you. Don’t make me do it again. I’m already going to die for it; we both know that. He’s never going to forget.”
I leaned into the comfort of his touch, closed my eyes, and said, “David will forgive you. Eventually.”
“No, I really don’t think so.” He kissed my forehead. “Especially after I do this.”
I felt his emotion spill into me, Earth Warden to Earth Warden—complicated waves of painful guilt, staggering responsibility, and love. So much love it hurt. He shouldn’t love me so much. He knew I couldn’t love him in the same way.
I started to tell him that, once and for all, but he touched my lips with his thumb. “I know,” he murmured. “I just wanted you to remember it. One way or another, this is good-bye, Jo. We’re not going to step in the same river twice.”
Lewis stood up and spun the hatch. It was a sliding door at the top of the craft, and climbing the steps to get up to it seemed like the march to the gallows.
Lewis held my hand to keep me steady.
I emerged into bright sunlight, blinded by the glitter of the whitecaps and the endless roll of the ocean. By the reflective yellow surface of the fiberglass hull. The storm hung sullenly in the distance, a vast black curtain rippling with wind and power and fury. It couldn’t reach me now, but it would follow.
It had to. It was still keyed to the power locked into Bad Bob’s mark.
I looked back down as I stripped off the blanket and handed it to Lewis. “Thanks for the apple juice,” I said. “The beer’s on you if I live.”
He didn’t smile. There was darkness as thick as the storm hanging around him; his aura was shot through with it.
“Tell David—” I said, and couldn’t think of anything to say that David wouldn’t already know. “Tell him I’ll see him soon.” I looked past Lewis’s hard face and saw Kevin hovering behind him. “Don’t treat David like your slave. If you do, I’ll make sure you regret it. Just—leave him in the bottle. Promise me.”