Cape Storm tww-8

by Rachel Caine

Lewis’s breath was coming in short, desperate gasps now. Nobody could sustain this, not even the most powerful Warden in the world.

  Not even one with a direct connection to the aetheric.

  Which was what Lewis had. He’d always been close to our temperamental Mother Earth, but this was beyond that, way beyond. The power that poured through him to fill this shell of force was like a geyser, tapping directly into the heart of the planet herself.

  Only the connection between Lewis and a Djinn Conduit could do that.

  He’d claimed David. He’d put David in a bottle and made him a slave, and he was using him to open this portal directly into the lifeblood of Earth, to save the ship.

  It would burn Lewis out before David, but not much before.

  They’d both die.

  Some part of me was screaming inside, begging me to stop it. But that was the very last tiny foothold of the old Joanne drowning in a sea of darkness.

  I closed my eyes and sighed. All I had to do was . . . wait.

  I felt a warning tingle in the still, calm air, and as I looked up, I saw a tornado striking down at us from the clouds that writhed overhead. Lightning snaked around it, living barbed wire, and it hit the curved surface of Lewis’s protective bubble around the Grand Paradise and began to probe for weaknesses.

  Then it bombed us.

  I saw the metal shape hurtling down at us through the oddly clear eye of the tornado, that empty funnel space where the cold air and the warm air cycle to fuel the beast’s engines. I didn’t know what it was at first—wreckage, maybe a mass of siding or a barn, or—

  No. That was a ship. A whole, intact ship. A small fishing vessel. The black-painted bottom was heavy with barnacles, and as lightning flared brighter I saw the name on her rusty bow—Abigail.

  There were living men on board. I could see their terrified faces at the railing as the ship dropped toward us in free fall, her weight turning majestically in the air and driving her nose down like the tip of a spear.

  “No,” Lewis moaned, but he didn’t drop the shield. He couldn’t.

  The Abigail hit his protective bubble and exploded into shrapnel, scrap, and bodies. I flinched—instinct, not sympathy. The ship’s fuel tanks burst, slopping marine diesel in a wave across the invisible wall.

  Lightning ignited it, and flames sheeted over us in a semicircle. It didn’t last long. Nothing to burn once the diesel had flamed out.

  The wreckage of the Abigail was gone in even less time, along with her crew. Even if there’d been a chance of saving them—which, after the fury of that crash, I doubted—there was no way to reach them without dropping our own protective shield.

  Bad Bob really was bringing his A game.

  The tornado’s sloppy mouth slithered over Lewis’s shield for another few seconds, and then it withdrew up into the clouds. Not gone, just reloading. I could see this storm sweeping its way from Bad Bob’s location to ours, picking up ammunition along the way, like a boy collecting stones to throw. Congested shipping lanes out there. Naval vessels flying under various flags. Pleasure craft and yachts and sailing ships and cruise ships smaller than this one . . .

  Lewis’s strength gave out, and he lost his grip on the railing. He fell to his knees. I could feel David’s agony rippling through the connection between us. This was tearing them both apart. Lewis’s body was surrendering under the strain.

  I reached out and put my hand on his sweat-matted hair.

  Finally, he turned his head and looked at me. Just one look, not very long. Bone-deep exhaustion in him, and just a tiny trace of regret.

  “Jo, you have to stop yourself,” he said. “Please. Stop yourself.”

  “Too late,” I told him, and took control of the bubble away from him.

  It was a shock, how much power was involved. Even with the enormous flood pouring in from the storm, from Bad Bob himself, the force that hit me was staggering. A normal Warden, no matter how accomplished, would have been shredded in seconds.

  Lewis collapsed limply on the deck, rolled away, and began to crawl slowly.

  I rolled him faceup, and held him in place with a foot on his chest. I turned my face to the storm, looking into the abyss.

  Nietzsche was right—it also looked into me.

  “Stay put,” I said to Lewis. “I want you to see this. You used to be an altruist, but I watched you change. You turned into such a realist, with all your cold win/lose/ draw equations. You just never thought you’d acutally lose, did you?”

  Lewis reached in his pocket and pulled out a small glass bottle. It was sturdy, one of those pocket travel samples of men’s cologne. Designed to be break-resistant, but still meeting all the glass-only requirements of a Djinn containment bottle. The cap, of course, was off, because Lewis had been accessing David’s powers.

  I saw him struggle with the choice. That was a no-win scenario.

  He eventually did the moral thing, and tried to smash it against the deck. It didn’t break.

  “Where are the other Djinn?” I asked. Lewis shook his head and collapsed, panting. He was holding the bottle in a death grip. “Let me guess. I have a good idea of how you think. You ordered David to send them all away, to a place of safety. Maybe Jonathan’s house.”

  Lewis nodded, eyes tightly closed. I wondered why he wouldn’t look at me. I wondered what he saw.

  “I’ll bet you told yourself it was temporary,” I said, and took my foot off of Lewis’s back to crouch down next to him, staring at his face. “You’d let him go as soon as the emergency was over. But that’s not human nature, Lewis. We don’t work that way. We take power, and we keep it. We don’t give it up. Someone has to come along and take it from us, usually violently.” I smiled softly. “There’s always another goddamn crisis, baby. Don’t you get that?”

  He didn’t want to look at me. I wondered what was so terrible about my face; I felt positively great. Better than I had for ages.

  Finally, Lewis got up his strength to ask, “What are you going to do?”

  “Take this ship where it was going anyway,” I said. “Directly to Bad Bob. The difference is, most of you will be dead by the time it arrives, I’m afraid.” I paused, waiting to feel some kind of regret. Nothing came. The last little bit of me was slipping under the waves, and I really couldn’t even care.

  Lewis rolled over on his side and wiped blood from his nose and eyes, still avoiding my gaze. His pupils were huge, like those of a man who’d never left the darkness.

  “Well?” I asked, and cocked my head. “What are you going to do about this little situation? Aren’t you going to stop me?”

  He coughed. It sounded wet and deep, like something had broken deep inside him. “No.”

  “Really.”

  “You’re the one with the hero complex, not me.”

  “And what are you?” He didn’t answer. “Oh, that’s right. You’re the one who doesn’t have to feel good about himself to know he did the right thing. Then live up to it, Lewis. You can stop me. You’ve got the answer in your hand.”

  His fingers closed around the bottle.

  David’s bottle.

  “Come on,” I whispered. “Let him out. You know you want to. Wouldn’t it do your heart good to make him come after me? Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  “Stop.”

  “Make me.”

  The look on his face made fires ignite deep inside me. Tasty. “No.”

  “It’s too late to get all noble on me now, Lewis. You put a Djinn in a bottle. Worse, you put a Conduit in a bottle. Don’t you think that’s going to piss the Djinn off? The last war was about them wanting their freedom. This one’s going to be pure revenge, and they won’t care about who’s innocent and who’s guilty. Congratulations. You’ve single-handedly destroyed the Wardens.”

  “I’m not the one who made the Djinn . . . vulnerable to capture,” he said. He had to stop for breath. “You knew marrying David . . . would do this. Vows. You didn’t care.”

  A wave washed over t
he bubble above us, leaving a thin, lacy film behind. It was like looking through my mother’s kitchen curtains. The storm outside raged on, but it was losing some of its fury. It knew I’d won.

  We’d won. Me and the storm, together.

  “I’m a selfish bitch,” I agreed. “I tried, okay? I did the good-girl thing. I fought the good fight, and where did it get me? My skin burned off, Lewis. Nobody was telling me so, but I was never going to get better, was I? I’m damned if I’m going to walk around with no fucking skin the rest of my life so that I can feel all good about adhering to my strict moral code.” I took a deep breath and tasted ozone from the storm’s whipping frenzy. “It’s just power. Doesn’t matter where it comes from, or where it goes.”

  “And you can quit any time you want.”

  My tone hardened. I still didn’t like being mocked. “Fuck your intervention. I’m the one still standing.”

  Lewis’s fingers tightened around the bottle. The one holding the only thing that might stop me. I’d known from the moment I walked out on the promenade that it was going to come down to this.

  I smiled.

  And he surprised me. “No. I’m not calling David. Not just for his sake—for yours. If you live through it, I don’t want you having that on your conscience.”

  “I’m not Bad Bob,” I said. “I love him.”

  He coughed blood. “You kind of loved me, too. Look how that turned out.”

  I slapped my hand down hard next to his head. Hard enough to split the wood. Overhead, the storm shrieked harmony to the howling rage inside me. “Call him!”

  “No way in hell.”

  All he had to do was get David out in the open. That was all I wanted. I slapped the deck again, and again, and again. Splinters jabbed deep, and I left primal bloody handprints behind.

  It felt so good.

  Lewis opened his eyes and locked stares with me at point-blank range. “No,” he said, very softly. “This isn’t going to happen the way you want.”

  I looked up. There were other people out on the Promenade now—Wardens, arraying themselves against me.

  Cherise, standing with them, like an actual person who mattered. They all wore identical tense, focused expressions . . . the look of soldiers just before the battle.

  I looked down at Lewis and smiled a real, warm, sunny smile. “We’ll see,” I said, and stood up to put my hands on my hips. “We’ll see about that.”

  Then I walked away to get some air.

  Nobody stopped me as I walked.

  In time, I felt the last whispers of power click into place, locking me into the storm. We were one now—a symbiotic dark engine, generating our own power. Our own reality. The storm and I were one.

  Easy, I told it. Easy, for now.

  And the winds began to slow. It could bide its time.

  So could I.

  I waited until the winds died a bit, then let go of the bubble of force that Lewis and David had built at such cost.

  I ended up on the port side of the ship, in a bar—preciously named Arpeggio’s—where some of the non-Warden guests and crew were still gathered. Tables and chairs had been righted. There’d been some minor injuries, but not even a broken bone, remarkably. I supposed we’d gotten off light, unlike the crew of the Abigail.

  I bellied up to the serving bar and perched on one of the high chairs. There were three guys behind the bar. One was cleaning up broken glass. The other two were taking orders. A lot of people were drinking. I didn’t blame them at all.

  “What’ll it be, miss?” the server asked me, and gave me a smile so even and white that he should have been in a commercial. It faded quickly. Even across the other side of a ship the size of a small city, word traveled fast, and it clicked in quickly who—or what—I was. The room went quiet. He cleared his throat nervously. “Anything to drink?”

  “Cyanide?” I was trying to be charming, but I could see from the alarm in his eyes that I was somehow missing the target.

  “Fresh out, miss,” he said weakly. “Some other poison, perhaps?”

  I gave up. “How about a vodka tonic?” That was my sorry-for-myself drink, and this seemed an ideal place to throw a ten-minute pity party. He turned away, mixed the drink, and put it on the coaster. I sipped. It was excellent. “I’m surprised the bar is open.”

  “Anything to keep people calm.” There was more than a touch of febrile panic in his eyes now.

  “Be sure to save some for yourself.” I smiled, with teeth. “You’re going to need it.”

  He poured himself a shot of whiskey and downed it without a pause, then fled, leaving me in possession of the entire bar’s contents. I sipped my vodka tonic and took a self-assessment as pretty much everybody else followed the bartender’s lead and got the hell out of Dodge.

  My back didn’t hurt anymore. It also wasn’t numb. It felt normal, natural . . . and as I angled around to get a look in the still-intact bar mirror, I saw the shadow of a black form under the new skin.

  A torch, embedded instead of tattooed.

  Much, much larger.

  One or two of the ship’s staff hadn’t fled with the rest. One stern-looking woman poured me a second vodka tonic without being asked. “On the house,” she said. “If you can get us out of this and home, you’re welcome to drink the place dry.”

  I drank it all in a gulp, and said, “Two things. First, if I want to drink this place dry, you definitely haven’t got a thing on board this floating sewage plant that can stop me. Second, you’re not going home. Get used to the idea.”

  Then I tossed a twenty on the bar and resumed my stroll. I paused at the big, flat stern of the ship to gaze out over our churning gray wake. Nothing in sight, not on any side, but open water and storm.

  I leaned on the railing and opened myself up through the darkness, searching. It didn’t take me long to find the wellspring of that black flood. It was directly to starboard, and close.

  Maybe a day away, if that.

  “I’m coming,” I whispered into the dark. “You’re getting what you wanted, you evil old bastard.”

  I felt Bad Bob’s chuckle inside me like lips against skin. “Knew you wouldn’t let me down, little girl,” he said. When I shut my eyes I could see him standing beside me in ghostly outlines. “You bring me the ship and the Wardens. That’s a good start to our work. From then on, no limits. No limits at all.”

  “On my way,” I said, and broke the connection with him. I used my Earth powers to lock out the computer controls of the ship and put in the destination.

  Then I went in search of more vodka.

  * * *

  By early morning, the black torch mark was a bold swirl beneath my skin, stretching from the flame at the nape of my neck to the elaborate scrolled cap, just below the flare of my hips. The flames at its top weren’t just black ink anymore. They were real fire, moving silently beneath the translucent covering of my flesh. It was the ultimate tribal stamp, declaring who and what I was to anyone with the courage to look.

  It should have frightened me, I guess. Instead, I admired it for a moment, then picked up the hair dryer and began to make myself presentable for the day.

  An hour later, I strode out from the cabin—perfectly put together. My hair was curly and tumbling glossy black down toward my waist. I wore a skimpy aqua-blue top with cap sleeves that bared most of my midriff, and low-rise jeans that hugged every curve. David had stocked the closets with anything I might want, for any conceivable mood or occasion.

  I decided today was Seduction Day.

  I ran into Cherise and Kevin in the hallway. They were talking with that suppressed urgency of two people trying to keep a secret, and they stopped when they saw me.

  “What?” I put my hands on my hips and raised my eyebrows. “Not enjoying the three-hour tour, Mary Ann? Of course, that makes him Gilligan. It fits.”

  Cherise didn’t smile. I’d never seen her not-smile at a Gilligan’s Island joke before. “We should talk,” she said. There was a f
aint quiver in her voice, and I saw her take Kevin’s hand for support. “Maybe back in the room?”

  “Maybe you should get out of my way and stop bothering me,” I said. I let it lie there for a few seconds, then lightened it up with a grin that felt strange on my lips. “I mean, you’re between me and breakfast. You know how dangerous that is.”

  “Don’t,” Kevin said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t you fucking dare threaten her. She’s trying to save your life.” Kevin stepped in front of her, or tried to. Cherise hauled him back and gave him a look that would have frozen Lake Michigan. “Sorry.” Insignificant as she might be, Cherise wanted to fight her own battles. Well, I could have told him that.

  “I just want to talk,” Cherise said, returning her attention to me. “Please.”

  She didn’t demand anything, and I knew that if I pushed it, she’d back down. And I was tempted to push, very tempted, not so much because of her—Cherise really wasn’t on the radar anymore—but because the simmering, furious violence in Kevin was addictively delicious. All I had to do was hurt her, and I could drink my fill.

  Not yet, I told myself. Don’t enjoy yourself too much.

  “Please,” Cherise repeated.

  “Jeez, okay, don’t beg,” I said. “Just you, though. Not him.”

  Kevin held up his hands in surrender, a sour look on his face. “Dude, like I want to spend time coddling your self-involved evil-turning ass.” His glance at Cherise said something different, though. “Be careful.”

  “I’m going to hurt her? I’m not the one with the body count, Kevin,” I said. He flinched, just a little. “Why don’t you loiter out here looking menacing while you wait? Maybe you can beat up cabin stewards, just to keep in practice.”

  He flipped me off, but that wasn’t original for him. I took Cherise’s arm, and we headed back to the cabin.

  She locked the door behind us. I raised my eyebrows as I settled on my unmade bed. “Oooh,” I said. “Is this going to be hot girl-on-girl action, or what?”

  “Shut up.” Cherise hugged herself and stayed where she was, between me and the door. “Something’s really wrong with you.”