by Rachel Caine
“I was just defending myself,” Cole said. “I’m sorry. I got rattled.”
While he was speaking, I allowed myself to drift just a bit out of my body so I could examine him in Oversight. His aura was muddy and indistinct—so, a genuine regular human-type guy, no surprise there—and bloody around the edges with guilt and nerves.
“Rattled?” I repeated. “You looked pretty calm to me. Good grouping on your shots.”
“Center mass,” David supplied. “Very well aimed.”
Cole looked from one of us to the other, then fixed on David. His whole body relaxed. “You’re wearing a vest, right? Of course.”
For answer, David unbuttoned his shirt and displayed part of his bare chest.
“David, stop teasing the man,” I said. And me. “Mr. Cole. Look at me, please.” He did, not with any great pleasure, and I deepened my focus to get a better look at the inner Trent.
Not a terribly good experience.
“You’re protecting yourself,” I said aloud. “That’s why you didn’t leave the ship. You know you’re an obvious target if you do. You’re running from something.”
He flinched, but he didn’t move otherwise. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Do you know a man named Robert Biringanine?” This was the money question, but I got nothing from him. Just a continuing roil of anxiety and fury. He didn’t know Bad Bob, at least not by name.
David took his cue. “He looks like this.” And he transformed himself into a perfect replica of Bad Bob, from his flyaway white hair, bloodshot blue eyes, and pug-Irish nose to his bowlegs. In fact, it was so good that I pulled in a startled breath and clenched my fingers on the arms of the chair, then deliberately relaxed. It was just an image, nothing more, and David dismissed it with a flick of his fingers when Trent Cole shook his head.
“Okay,” I said, and tried to slow down the fast beat of my heart. “Who’s after you?”
“None of your business,” Cole barked.
“It is if you plan to go around shooting anybody who looks at you funny on this ship,” I said. “Let us help you. There’s no need to be afraid. Not now.”
Cole stared at me with a perplexed look on his face. Clearly, I wasn’t fitting the pigeonholes he was trying to stuff me into. I was used to that, actually.
“Who are you?” His gaze leaped from me to David, and then back again. “Are you with the government?”
“Yes,” I said. In fact, that was sort of true. And sort of not.
“I’m calling my attorney. He’s kicked the ass of everybody in the Justice Department, from the attorney general to the janitorial service. He’ll make short work of you two jokers.”
Cole reached for his cell phone.
It disappeared. Cole stared at the place where it had been, slapped his hand around, and looked at me with comically big eyes. “What the hell?”
David opened his right hand, and there was Cole’s cell phone. “If you want it back, play nice,” he said. Cole’s mouth dropped open, and he surged to his feet.
“Hey, fucking David Copperfield, give that back!” His face turned brick-red, which I was pretty sure wasn’t an indication of his general good health. “You sons of bitches, my life is in that phone!”
“Then I hold your life in my hand, don’t I?” David pointed out mildly. “Sit.”
I wasn’t sure if it was a suggestion or an order, but Cole’s ass hit the sofa cushions pretty quickly. His high-blood-pressure blush was already fading, as he realized that his biggest problem might not be in retrieving his contact list and scandalous text messages. “What the hell do you people want?” From Cole, that actually sounded kind of subdued.
“We want to be sure there’s no more trouble,” I said. “So we’ll be taking your gun. Anything else contraband in here we should know about? Purely for safety?”
His gaze flicked away from me, racing toward the sweeping staircase, and then returning just as fast. In the aetheric, his aura whispered a fast rainbow of anxiety and guilt. I sat back and looked up at David, who nodded and disappeared, taking Cole’s cell phone with him.
“What—” Cole’s mouth had dropped so far open that I could see all his impressive dental work. I guess he’d figured out that David might share a first name with a famous magician, but he was far, far more impressive. “What are you people?”
“Who said we were people?” I smiled coolly at him. That flummoxed him for a full ten seconds.
“Look, I’m not some terrorist or something, I’m just—Okay, I took some money. A lot of money. From some people I worked with. And they’re trying to get it back from me, that’s all. It’s just business.”
Business mob-style, I gathered. Which explained why he wanted to hole up in his suite with a warm gun, and why he hadn’t disembarked with the others. A common criminal.
I could live with that.
David ghosted back into view behind me and dropped a hand on my shoulder. I twisted to look at him.
“Boyfriend,” he said. “Up in the bedroom. He had this.” David deposited another gun in my lap, a match for the semiautomatic we’d confiscated from Cole. “Do you want to take a look?”
“Why, is he naked?”
It’s hard to get a complete double take from a Djinn, but I managed. “I didn’t notice,” he said. Which was, no doubt, a crushing blow to Mr. Cole. I was sad for him. “What do you think? Pass?”
“Pass,” I said. “Whatever problems he has aren’t any concern of ours. Mr. Cole, we’re done here. I’ll be taking your guns with me, though. If you have intruder problems, David will be happy to come to your rescue.” I batted my eyelashes again. David didn’t look pleased with being volunteered. “Thanks.”
“Thanks for what?” Cole asked, mystified. I walked over to the bar and retrieved the second pistol from the ice bucket. Nicely cooled down.
“Not shooting me, too,” I said. “That would have been awkward.”
“No,” David said. “That would have been fatal for Mr. Cole.”
I gathered that Mr. Cole was a man of few boundaries, but he recognized that one, and he nodded. “It won’t happen again. Sorry. Eh—what’s your name?”
“I’m David Prince. Her name is Joanne Baldwin,” David said. “But you can call her Mrs. Prince.”
I got a shiver out of that. A nice one.
We left Cole on the couch, still grappling with the utter destruction of his worldview.
All in all, not a bad first interrogation. Then again, my standards are pretty low. If I survive it, it can’t be that bad.
Chapter Five
After Mr. Cole, the others seemed meek as kittens. Spiteful, furious, spitting, hissing kittens with needle-sharp claws and biting teeth. Each cabin seemed to come with its own particularly darling set of divalicious problems. Take Holly Addams, the model. . . . She had two employees, one of whom was solely occupied in making her disgusting-looking smoothies whenever she got hungry. They must have been made out of cardboard and water, because she had less body fat on her than your average piece of dry bone. She also had a trunk full of illegal and controlled substances, which explained why she hadn’t left the ship when ordered. Her employees were just hapless and cowed. I tried not to traumatize them any more than I had to.
Three bankers in a row, two male and one female, all of whom had refused to leave out of lapdog-like devotion to star clients. These were rich people in their own right, but they’d gotten that way by single-minded dedication to that art of brownnosing, and they weren’t about to stop the habit of a lifetime now. No connection to Bad Bob that I could find for them, their assistants, or (in the case of one of them) his mistress, who was ensconced in the downstairs bedroom.
And then we ran into Cynthia Clark.
“The Cynthia Clark?” I asked Aldonza, who was still hustling clean towels around the hallway. She nodded. “Isn’t she making a movie?”
“She was,” Aldonza said. “But she quit. I don’t know why. Now she’s here.”
Cynthi
a Clark was an old-school star—glamorous, beautiful, icy cool. If Grace Kelly had ever had a rival, or Audrey Hepburn had ever worried about being upstaged, she was the source of their anxiety. Her 1960sera films were classics. So were her ’70s efforts. By the ’80s she’d transitioned from starlet roles to tough matrons, and still did it better than anyone else.
Then she’d had a well-publicized marital disaster, some alcoholism, some rehab, and a whole lot of plastic surgery. Now she looked frozen at the age of fifty, although the twenty-year-old ice was beginning to crack under the strain.
She occupied cabin thirty-two, along with a European maid and a personal trainer, who I suspected doubled as another kind of workout partner.
I knew the minute we entered the cabin that something was off. David did, too. No bullets flying, no obvious signs of danger, but there was something very wrong with the feeling of the whole place. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Maybe Miss Clark had been in the middle of a knockdown, drag-out fight with her assistant. That would have explained the feeling of tension and anger that saturated the air.
Miss Clark was seated, like Mr. Cole, on the grand sofa, but she was wearing a pair of pencil-legged white pants, very ’60s nautical, paired with a blue-and-white-striped knit shirt. Her eyes were the same blue as shallow Caribbean waters, and if her hair was dyed that lustrous shade of blond, I couldn’t tell. Even with the makeovers, she had seriously fierce DNA at work.
I felt as if I should genuflect before taking a seat in the side chair that she offered with a gracious nod. David remained standing, but he didn’t resort to the in timidation stance this time around. More of a tranquil stand-at-ease type of thing.
Clark’s trainer and maid busied themselves in another part of the room. I barely registered them as background noise, because La Clark simply drew every bit of attention to herself just by sitting there.
“Thank you for seeing us, Miss Clark,” I said. “My name is—”
“Joanne Baldwin, yes, I know,” she said. She had a contralto voice, and she used it the way a master musician uses a violin, conveying all shades of meaning in one brilliant stroke. “You represent these Wardens I’ve been hearing so much about. And your companion?”
“David Prince,” he said.
“You’re one of the . . . Djinn?” She tried the taste of the word, and I could tell she liked it. When he nodded, Clark’s eyes drifted half closed, and she sat back against the cushions, studying him. “Extraordinary. I thought there were no surprises left in the world, but here you are. Like something straight out of a fairy tale. The old kind, of course. The frightening ones.”
She offered us coffee, tea, drinks. Neither of us felt thirsty, but I accepted a delicate little teacup steaming with French Roast, just to make this more of a social call. Being able to say I had coffee with Cynthia Clark didn’t factor into that decision at all. Well, not much.
Clark blew on the surface of her own brew and studied us both with X-ray eyes that had reportedly once made Steve McQueen swoon. “How can I help you?” she asked.
“Just a few questions, and then, I promise, we’ll certainly be out of your way,” I said. “First, can you tell me why you didn’t leave the ship before departure, as you were asked to do?”
“Well, you’re direct,” she murmured. “How very refreshing. It’s all a bit embarrassing, I suppose, and it’s going to make me seem like a horrible tyrant. I was terribly tired, and I left strict instructions not to be disturbed for any reason prior to departure. I’m afraid my employees might have taken those instructions a bit too literally. When I finally rose for breakfast, I was informed of the evacuation order, but it was too late for us to make our arrangements and leave.”
There was something odd about Clark’s aura. It seemed very calm, swirling with neutral blues and soft golds, but it also felt artificial. “What kind of arrangements? I’d think you’d want to get out as quickly as possible.”
“I really can’t go into details,” she said. “But it was entirely accidental that we ended up staying here, on the ship. We won’t be any trouble to you. I’m quite content to stay in the cabin.” She gave me a cool smile. “It’s so difficult to find privacy these days out in the real world.”
I wondered, because a curl of hot magenta drifted over her aura. Resentment, maybe. She wasn’t the It Girl anymore when it came to the paparazzi, and she knew it. It probably took a great deal of effort to get herself photographed at all, except in retirement magazines talking about how she was “still young at sixty-five.”
“Routine questions, Miss Clark. We just want to be sure we’re aware of any problems that might come up,” I said.
“Such as?”
“Oh, I don’t know . . .Trouble between you and another passenger, maybe a stalker? Business disagreements?”
“Alas, I don’t have that many enemies, Miss Baldwin. I’m sure I’d feel much more important if I did. No, I have no fears, and I’m sure that none of my little party represents any sort of difficulty for you.”
I wished I could figure out what was bothering me. She just didn’t seem . . . right. Was she scared? No, not really, but when I concentrated on her aura, I saw flecks like floating ice. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I was sure that it wasn’t normal.
I let the silence go on too long. “Is that all?” Clark asked, suddenly a good deal less welcoming. “I have a strict meditation schedule. Yoga. It keeps me toned and flexible. I highly recommend it.”
“May I speak with your employees?” I asked her.
“No,” Cynthia Clark said. Just the one word, cold and final. I blinked and glanced at David, who was staring at Clark with very dark eyes. I didn’t know what he was seeing, but it wasn’t good. Not good at all.
Then he looked from Clark to where her two employees stood at the other end of the room.
“Jo,” he said, and touched my shoulder. “You should go.”
“I—What?”
“Now.” The touch turned into a painful squeeze. “Now.”
I stood up, but it was too late. I barely sensed the snap of power coming before it hit me like a pile driver to the chest—not just on the physical plane but on the aetheric, too. I knew this sensation.
It had hit me before. It had killed a whole lot of my friends.
The blitz attack sent me into the air in a tumbling, twisting heap. I flew across the cabin and slammed into the solid wall with a wood-cracking thump. I hardly had time to process the shock of pain before pressure closed around me, deep as the black depths of the ocean, and drove all the air from my lungs. I felt my entire nervous system flickering, overloading, on the verge of burnout. There was an unearthly shrieking roar in my ears, like a mental institution on fire, and everything felt wrong, so wrong.
I fought. I flailed, trying to throw it off, but I couldn’t, because there was nothing to grab hold of. I blinked away darkness and saw David moving like a streak of light toward the two at the far end of the room, but he was too far. It was happening too fast, unbelievably fast. . . .
I was going to die, and he wouldn’t be able to stop it.
You can stop it, Joanne. All you have to do is let go.
The thought bubbled up on some black, greasy tide from the depths of my soul. It was solid as a life preserver in a storm, and I grabbed it, desperate to stop the pain, the shrieking, the sickening and inevitable feeling of every cell in my body being crushed into slime.
You have to let go, it told me. Let go, Joanne. You can save yourself if you choose.
With the weight of mountains on my chest, with my entire body screaming for release, with my bones turning to powder inside and my nervous system frying like a burned-out bulb, I believed it was the only choice.
Then I felt the eager, hot twinge of the black mark on my back, and I knew where that thought was coming from.
No.
Time had proceeded only a tiny fraction of a second. David hadn’t even reached the far end of the room yet, although the
Djinn could move at the speed of thought. I was being crushed into greasy paste by a force so vast it felt like Earth herself had landed on me, and the idea of waiting an instant, a single breath, for help was almost impossible.
Save yourself. You can. It’s easy.
Yes. All I had to do was shatter the containment that David had put around the black torch, and it would burn away all my problems.
Forever.
I held on. I don’t know how; it wasn’t inner strength, it wasn’t courage, and it wasn’t anything I could be proud of. Maybe it was just paralyzing terror. The instant passed, and even though I felt death’s breath on my lips, the taste was all that lingered; David reached Cynthia’s personal trainer, and that man—whoever, whatever he was—had no more time for killing me.
I gagged in a trembling breath, rolled on my side, and sobbed in agony. My nerves continued to burn, and the entire circuit board of my brain seemed on the verge of overload. I hadn’t been hurt that suddenly, that deeply, in a long time. The taste of mortality is ash and blood, and I coughed until I could stop gagging on it.
Getting up was like free-climbing the Empire State Building in a hurricane, but I used an overturned table for support until I could feel my legs. They weren’t quite right, somehow. Most of me wasn’t, at that moment. This was going to hurt later. A lot. For a long time.
I forgot all of that when David screamed, “Jo! Cover!”
Fire rolled out from him, blistering white, and I lunged for the sofa, where Cynthia Clark still sat frozen in shock by the explosion of violence. I shoved her down into the cushions and threw myself on top of her. I couldn’t reach the other innocent in the room—her personal assistant—but I extended the fastest, hardest shield of interlocked molecules I could over the woman’s prone body. She’d sensibly dropped to the floor and curled into a ball on the rug.
No time for any other defenses. Whether David had called the fire, or his enemy had, it filled the room like an airburst of napalm. I felt the back of my clothes and my hair smolder, and smelled instant, toxic charring of plastics and carpet and furniture. The flame would have incinerated all three of us if I hadn’t shielded us; mortal flesh would have burned off like flash paper.
