I rolled free, still wrapped in the black coil.
“What the hell are you doing?” Moira screamed. “Rahel,
stop!
”
Rahel froze, still crouched over the thrashing remains of the tentacle. I had seconds, at most, to make this happen, and I knew it.
Strangely, Bad Bob hadn’t reacted at all. I saw his face in a blur as I rolled behind the shelter of more stones, and it was impassive and watchful.
Assessing.
I didn’t have time to try to remove the tentacle, but I didn’t need to; cut off from its body, the thing was already dissolving into slime. When it drained away, it left my skin pallid, wrinkled, and torn, like old paper soaked for too long. I was losing blood, too much of it. I slammed Earth power through my nerves and pinched off broken capillaries, set up a healing matrix, and shut off the pain.
I couldn’t afford it right now.
“Hey, Moira!” I yelled. “How old are you? Maybe nineteen? Twenty? I was about your age the first time your dad tried to screw me!”
No girl wants to hear that about her father, especially when it comes from the daughter-rival that Daddy loves more.
Like I said, I could push that button anytime I wanted.
“Rahel!” Moira’s voice was a raw, vicious snarl. “Kill that bitch
now
!”
Again with the lack of specificity.
I felt the energy shift, darken, and as I peered around the edge of the boulder, I saw Rahel streak straight for Moira.
It’s possible that Moira might have recovered in time to order her to stop, although Rahel’s attack clearly caught her totally by surprise.
To make damn sure it wouldn’t fail, I reached out with a burst of power and filled Moira’s mouth with seawater. She choked, gagged, and then it was too late. As the water rippled down from Moira’s open lips, Rahel’s claws sank deep into her throat.
In her thrashing, Moira let go of the wine bottle, and it rolled toward the edge of the boulder.
Bad Bob calmly reached over and caught it as it fell.
Shit.
Moira was sputtering blood, and her face was shockingly pale, her eyes desperate. Rahel remained where she was, claws in the girl’s neck, and I saw her flash a look at Bad Bob.
He didn’t react at all.
I was gripping the edge of the rock too hard, but I needed the sharp reminder of where I was, what the stakes had become.
Rahel ripped her claws free in a contemptuous gesture, and blood misted and spattered in an arc around her. She willed away the Miss America costume in favor of her more usual tailored pantsuit—in bloodred, not neon.
She turned her back before Moira’s pallid, dying body toppled.
Bad Bob was holding her bottle, and unlike Moira, that evil old bastard knew every trick. “Freeze until I tell you to move again, Rahel,” he said. “That was a goddamn stupid waste.” There was no genuine emotion left in him, not even for his own child. He saw it as a waste, all right—because Moira hadn’t measured up, in the crisis. “Jo. Come out.”
“Yeah, not likely!” I yelled. I tried to slow down my breathing, order my thoughts. “This isn’t going well for you, Bob. Maybe you should just give up now.”
He laughed. “No.”
He still had the book, and even though he hadn’t bothered to bring it out yet, he also had the spear, the Unmaking. I hadn’t even managed to free Rahel, dammit, and if his daughter’s bloody end hadn’t been enough to distract him, I couldn’t think of much else to try.
“Fair enough,” I said. “Want to call it a draw? Lose/lose?”
“I want to call the game,” he said. “On account of the death of the world.”
I’d have liked to think he was just being grandiose, but there was a dark undertone to his voice now. Seeing Moira die had destroyed his fun, apparently; he was ready to just skip right to the end, which in his book was
and then the universe blew up. The end.
“That really what you want?” I slowly got up, hopping on my good right leg, and braced myself on the boulder I’d been using for sparse cover. “Come on, Bob. If the world ends, so do you. I thought you wanted to destroy the Wardens and savor your victory first.”
“As long as we all go out together, I’m fine with it,” he said. I expected him to reach for the Ancestor Scriptures, but instead, he stretched out his hand, which disappeared in a tingle of blue sparks and reemerged holding a thick, matte-black cylinder like a spear, sharp on both ends.
The Unmaking. Its presence set up a horrible crawling repulsion in me, an itching all up and down my nervous system. I wasn’t sure if the scientists were right, and it was stable antimatter, or if it was something even more exotic, like dark matter. Whatever it was, it did not have a place here, not in this world.
It was
wrong.
It was also radioactive as hell, and it had almost destroyed me the last time I’d come anywhere near it. Now I was so closely connected to David, sharing the same well of power, that I didn’t dare risk it again. If I was poisoned, he might be, too. And through him, half the Djinn.
Bad Bob rested one end of the shaft against the stones at his feet and leaned on it. The thing was a little taller than his head now, wickedly pointed. “You really bamboozled me, you know. I never thought you’d come alone. Never thought David would let you.”
“He didn’t,” I said. “Nobody lets me do anything. You know that.”
He nodded, but the look in his eyes was far, far away. “I liked you,” he said. “Back in the day. Before things went wrong.”
“I liked you, too.” I hadn’t, exactly, but I’d admired him. We’d all admired him. “I know you took the Demon Mark on for the right reasons—you wanted to save lives. You just weren’t strong enough, in the end.”
“Neither were you,” he said. We weren’t accusing each other now; there wasn’t any heat to this exchange at all, just simple fact. “You’d have hatched out a Demon in the end, if you hadn’t gotten all tangled up with the Djinn. But look what it did for you—all the things you’ve seen, all you’ve done. I made you stronger.”
He wanted my approval.
I felt a hot breath of wind, then a gust off the ocean. Something was stirring out there. It blew my hair into a writhing cloud, and waves crashed the rocks at my back, dousing me in spray.
“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” I said. “And whatever
does
kill you—”
“Makes you invincible, if you’re lucky,” Bad Bob said, and smiled. I sensed a kind of good-bye in that smile, because it was real. Not a manic stretch of his lips, but a genuine expression of feeling and warmth. “You’ll always be my kid, Jo. My crazy, brave, stupid kid.”
And he’d always, in some sense, be my father. My mentor. The man who’d pushed me over the edge and made me grow wings to survive. The most abusive bastard father in the world.
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“Here it comes,” Bad Bob said, and looked up.
Something fell out of the eye of the hurricane. It was like a glass ball, soap-bubble thin, and it hit the rocks of the island and smashed into smaller spheres, each of which bounced and rolled over the rocks, uncoiled, and stood on two or four legs.
Crystalline skeletons, creatures out of drug dreams, that vanished like ghosts against the sunlight.
The Sentinels—those still standing—were unprepared. A few of them defended themselves, but most died, ripped apart on the rocks. My old colleagues, who’d lost their way and followed a false messiah.
I couldn’t help them. Worse: I didn’t
want
to help them.
Here at the end of the world, we were all going to have to settle up our debts.
“They’re parasites,” Bad Bob said. “Like dust mites. Bugs crawling through a crack in the wall. Vicious little things, though.”
He slammed the Unmaking down onto the rocks, and a ringing vibration rippled out from its quivering length—the same frequency I’d used before, but a thousand times more powerful. Every crystalline skeleton exploded into powder.
Another glass ball fell, but it exploded well before contact with the ground when he slammed the point down again and woke that awful sound.
I’d clapped my hands over my ears. I couldn’t help it.
“I thought you’d welcome their help,” I said. I kept watching Rahel, hoping that she’d be able to somehow break out of her paralysis, but she was as still as the rocks around me, and just about as lifeless. My only ally was completely out of commission. “Since it looks like it’s just the two of us.”
“What would they be good for? You can kill them. I’ve seen you do it.” He shook his head. “We’re on to bigger things. You feel the lines of force under us? This is a nexus point, Jo. It’s the thinnest space between the planes, and between the worlds.”
The island hadn’t come to this place by accident. I could feel the humming power underneath my feet, and in the air around me. He’d been very careful about his choice of location for this. A born manipulator.
Like Lewis.
Where are you, Lewis?
“Basic principles of magic, Jo,” he said softly. “Like calls to like. And sacrifices have special weight here.”
He threw the Unmaking to me—not
at
me, but
to
me, a low underhanded pitch.
I dodged it easily, but it didn’t fall; it turned and hovered in midair, pointing at me. Menace radiated off of it like black light. I backed up, carefully, not taking my eyes off it.
It darted straight for my chest. It was too fast, and I had no room to maneuver.
My body reacted instinctively, and wrongly.
I put out my hands and grabbed it to hold it back from my exposed chest.
It was like plunging my hands into a vat of dry ice—instant, agonizing cold.
The pool of Djinn power inside of me turned toxic and black, poisoned at its source, and I felt myself begin to rot from the inside out. I was just enough Djinn to be vulnerable, and just enough human to be corruptible.
He’d counted on that. And on my survival instincts.
The spear felt hot and heavy in my hands. It had burned me, before, but now its touch felt different—almost like flesh. I could hear it singing to me, a fascinating whisper of noise that had nothing in common with the music of our world,
any
of our worlds.
It made me sick and dizzy at first. I tried to drop it. I gagged and tried to throw up the darkness inside, but it wasn’t the kind that sat heavy in the stomach. This darkness filled me to the brim.
It took me over, completely.
When I opened my eyes again, I saw things differently. Literally. Holding the Unmaking made colors shift and burn, the whole structure of matter and light twist around me. It was beautifully destructive.
“We need more,” Bad Bob said. He was a pillar of blazing darkness in front of me, alien and somehow not alien at all. “You know how to make more of it, Joanne.”
I knew. I’d seen the process at work. The antimatter incubated inside the body of a Djinn, converting the power into its raw, black opposite, stabilized into a form we could handle and use.
Rahel knew it, too. I saw the fatal acceptance in her face, and the haughty courage, even though she was trapped in place by the bottle that Bad Bob held in his hand.
Come, then,
she seemed to be saying.
If you can.
If I’d been myself, any version of myself, I wouldn’t have done it. Couldn’t have.
But holding the Unmaking had taken all that away from me, just as Bad Bob had intended.
I heard myself scream, a raw sound that fused oddly with the music of the Unmaking as it crawled through my nerves.
I lifted the spear in both hands and plunged it toward Rahel’s chest.
It never got there.
A pulse of pure hot Earth power rolled up through the rocks and blasted them into knife-edged fragments under our feet, sending me flying in one direction, Rahel in another.
The attack came from underneath us.
Bad Bob was caught by surprise. He staggered, leaped for stable ground, but it dissolved underneath his sandals. He fell. The Ancestor Scriptures skittered across stone, and the bottle dropped toward a fatal impact with the edge of a piece of lava rock.
I got to Rahel before the bottle hit stone. I felt the firm impact of the spear hitting her flesh, and then—then she was gone, and the spear was broken off at the tip, vibrating like a tuning fork in my hands.
Rahel’s bottle had shattered into pieces, and she was gone.
Rahel was
free.
The Unmaking howled at me. It was angry at being cheated.
“Son of a
bitch
!” Bad Bob clawed his way out of the hole in the island, and jumped again as another hole was blasted up through it from beneath. Water geysered into the air between us. I held the spear in both hands and cast my own awareness out, too.
It was an impossibly stupid thing to do, but Lewis had taken the
Grand Horizon
down, like the world’s most unwieldy submarine. It floated in its protective, glistening bubble right below the island, and as I looked down into one of the holes, I could see people on the decks looking up at me a dozen feet below.
Something hit me from behind with stunning force, and I toppled into the water. The spear was as heavy as an iron bar, and it dragged me down toward the ship below.
Rahel wrapped her arms around me and pulled me back before the spear could touch the fragile surface of Lewis’s protective shield that kept everyone on the ship alive beneath the waves. I fought to get free, and when that didn’t work, I tried to move the spear around to stab her from behind.
She pinned my elbows and dragged me back, swimming like a dolphin at attack speed.
The protective dome sparked with golden light, and I saw Wardens emerging. Lots of them. They were accompanied by the bright silver glow of Djinn, and it was all bright, and weirdly beautiful, and I realized that I was running out of air. The screaming of the Unmaking in my head was so loud it blotted out everything.