by Rachel Caine
“Oh yeah? You think?” I leaned back against the hard cabin wall and crossed my arms. “You’ve been drinking Lewis’s Kool-Aid about how bad I am, boo-hoo. But I understand why you’d go that way. He’s still got an open position for girlfriend-slash-wife, so hold out for the brass ring, kid.” She gave me an uncomprehending stare. “Wouldn’t be the first man you’ve screwed for fun and profit.”
“Would you shut up? God, you can be such a bitch! Since—since your back thing happened, you’ve been changing. Slowly at first, but then it got worse, and now you’re—” Cherise made a helpless gesture that encompassed everything about me, from head to toe. “Look at you.”
I looked down. “What?” Granted, the clothes might be a bit sluttier than my usual, but I liked them, and besides, it was a cruise ship. South Beach rules of conduct and dress.
“It’s not the outfit, Jo. It’s you. It’s the look in your eyes, the kind of smile you give people. The way you think about them.” Cherise swallowed and ducked her chin to avoid eye contact. “When you think they’re not looking, it’s like you’re examining pieces of meat—like they’re not people at all. You never did that before.”
I deliberately relaxed again.“Yeah? You’re sure about that? Maybe you just never caught me at it before.”
“No. I know you, and this—this isn’t you. Looks like you, feels like you, sounds like you. It’s in your skin, but it’s not the Joanne Baldwin I’m friends with.”
I didn’t know why this should wake a feeling of anxiety in me. Pale and faint, yes, but still . . . I wanted to make her feel better. “People change,” I offered.
“Not this much. Not this fast. You let something inside you.”
I tried to explain—again, I wasn’t sure why I bothered, except that the genuine warm concern in Cherise’s eyes actually reached something in me, something I’d thought long drowned in darkness. “It’s just giving me access to power. Like having a Djinn at my command, only—better. Faster. You’re going to have to get used to the fact that I can’t be Miss Congeniality anymore. This is war.”
“Jo, the war’s over. You lost. You’re a casualty.”
I came up from the bed in one sinuous motion and took a step into her space. “You know what’s really over? This conversation. I’m leaving.”
“You have to go through me first.”
“Can do.”
“What? You’re going to hurt me?” Cherise—tiny little Cherise, with her perfect tan and perfect teeth and glistening hair. Funny and sexy and quirky. “Go ahead.”
Frustration erupted inside me. It burned from the torch on my back under my skin, traveling lines and ladders of nerves, and I felt fire tingle at the ends of my fingers. “Move.”
“Make me, bitch.”
I wanted to, oh God, I did. Instead, I bared my teeth. “You know what you are?” I asked, low in my throat.
“You’re nothing. Even among human beings, you’re a worthless failure. Model? A model is just some girl who strips for cash—a body for hire. A walking mannequin with a shelf life of about five minutes. Take away your looks and you’ve got nothing to sell. Who’s going to love you then, the Human Torch out there? Face it, without tagging along to somebody better, you’re nothing, peach. You used to be entourage. Now you’re not even that.”
The color faded out of Cherise’s face, leaving the tan like some eerie overlay, and I saw a real spark of fear in her clear blue eyes.
It turned hot.
“Why’d you just call me peach?”
Of all the things she could have said, that was the one that stopped me in my tracks. Peach. Sweetness. Bad Bob liked expressions like those, mockingly sentimental, used to wound. He’d used them on me all the time.
I took a step back. My hands locked into fists, and I felt the fire from the torch on my back flare hotter. It didn’t like me doubting myself.
It didn’t like me thinking.
“It’s just another kind of Demon Mark,” Cherise said. “Remember? Remember how that felt? You told me about it, how it made you feel so powerful, so free—”
“Shut up.” My voice didn’t have much force to it.
“He’s using it to destroy you. You’ve got to stop. You’re going to destroy everyone and everything you love.”
I closed my eyes. Images flashed across the darkness—David, the first time I’d seen him, a dusty stranger on the road. David, naked in morning light, looking at me as if I was the most glorious thing he had ever seen.
Lewis, standing against the storm, and compromising himself and his beliefs to find the strength. Not asking for my praise or my applause. Knowing I might kill him for it.
Cherise, without the power to light a match, signing on because it was the right thing to do.
Everything I loved was right here, on this ship, and I was destroying it.
And I still couldn’t care.
“You understand,” said a little-girl voice from behind me. “That’s good. I wouldn’t want you to die without understanding that it had to be done.”
Venna stood behind me in her Alice pinafore, perfect and shining and eerie. I looked from her to Cherise.
“How the hell did you hook up with the Djinn?”
She shrugged. “Diplomacy. Ain’t it a bitch?”
“And so am I.” But I didn’t strike at either one of them. Instead, I sat down on the bed and crossed my legs into the lotus position. It was a bit of a tight fit, in the jeans.
I stared idly at the far side of the cabin—Cherise’s side—where she had beauty products lined up in thick clusters on the shelf. All kinds of things—tubes of makeup, lipsticks, eye shadow compacts.
Bottles of expensive perfume, just the right size to hold a Djinn.
Venna smiled. “I’d kill you first,” she said, and there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that she meant it. “There wouldn’t be enough of you to summon the sharks.”
I held up my hands. “Can’t blame me for thinking about it.”
“Oh, I can,” she said. “I most certainly can. But it would be amusing to see you make the attempt. Your vows with David gave humans access to the New Djinn, not my kind.” She was studying me with alien, utterly cold intensity. “But I think I understand you. If someone offered you poisoned water in the desert, would you rather die of thirst, or take longer to die of poison?”
She really did understand. “If I hadn’t taken the poison, I’d be dead already. None of you were offering anything else,” I said. “Alive, I can always turn myself around, right? Go to rehab, some twelve-step thing?”
Venna’s eyes turned black. “I’ve heard this excuse from others,” she said. “Most recently from Lewis, as he violated our most basic trust. There will be an accounting, when this is done. No Djinn—not even our younger cousins—will be imprisoned by your kind again. Expedience is not excuse.”
I shrugged. “So? Are we throwing down, MiniMe, or are we done now? Because I don’t really think even you can stop me now. Or that you’re allowed to try.” Venna’s presence was waking a kind of utterly unsettling hunger inside me; she had so much power, and I had a bottomless appetite for it. If she fought me, she’d expend power.
If she lost, I could take it all.
Venna said, “There is only one person who can save this ship. You, Joanne. If you wish.”
“Well, I don’t. I’m taking it to meet Bad Bob, and what happens from there doesn’t really concern me.”
Cherise covered her mouth with both hands, appalled and shocked. That was funny. Had she really not seen that coming?
“They won’t allow you to do this so easily. They’ll fight,” Venna said. It sounded like she was analyzing the next move in a Grand Masters chess game.
“Hope so,” I said, and slid off the bed to stretch, yawn, and shake my hair back over my shoulders. “Fun time’s over, girls. I need to do some work now, so I’m going. You can either move out of the way, or I can walk over your bleeding corpses. That’s metaphorical for you, Venna, but
you get the point.”
Neither of them moved. Cherise looked uncertainly at Venna, but for the little girl Djinn I was the only thing in the world holding her focus.
I walked right up to her. She looked up into my eyes with eerie, ancient eyes, and then moved out of my way.
“You can’t do this,” Cherise whispered.
I used a casual punch of power to slam her across the room, into a wall, and she tumbled limply to the floor.
Bleeding.
“You’re not completely his,” Venna said, as I opened the cabin door. I looked back. She was standing in the same place, still calm and self-contained. “Do you want to know how I know?”
“Do tell.” I drummed my fingernails on the wood of the door impatiently.
Venna’s gaze flicked to Cherise, and then back. “You didn’t keep your threat. She’s bleeding. She isn’t dead.”
“Yet,” I said. “I thought that as a Djinn you’d understand the importance of timing.”
Chapter Eight
As I sat in Arpeggio’s deserted bar-cum-breakfast-nook, munched my command-ordered bagel and light cream cheese, and sipped coffee, I wondered what Cherise would report to Lewis—assuming Lewis was still in any shape to be reported to. Nobody bothered me, not even other Wardens.
The few fellow diners who’d endured my presence got up and left, quickly, when Venna appeared in the middle of the room, clearly and utterly alien in the way she looked and moved. She sat opposite me at the polished wooden table, a glass of orange juice in front of her, and stared at me with impassive intensity.
“I thought we were done,” I said. I sipped my coffee. It was bitter, dark, and exactly what I needed.
“For the sake of what you were, I thought I would try once more.” That was irritatingly superior.
“You can run back and tell Lewis that I’m done with pretending to care about every little life that stubs its toe, every goddamn kitten up a tree. I’ve spent my life bleeding for humans. I’ve died for them. Enough. If that makes me evil, then fine. I am.”
Venna said nothing. She drank her juice like a little girl, two hands wrapped around the glass for stability, and it left her with a faint orange ring around her lips that she tried to lick off before wiping it away. “Cherise is right,” she said. “You are more like us than them now.”
“Let me sum that up with ewwwwww.”
She stared at her empty juice glass. It filled up, welling from the bottom of the glass. She emptied it again.
“Was that supposed to be a metaphor? Sorry. Don’t get it.” I ate the last bite of my bagel and pushed my chair back to stand as I swigged the dregs of my coffee. “Bother me again, and I’ll seriously inconvenience you.” From the pulse of power inside me, it was entirely possible that I could really hurt her.
“You didn’t ask,” she said.
“Ask what?”
“Anything. Why the staff of this ship are still willing to make your bagels when their world is crumbling around them.” Venna shrugged again. “You don’t ask anything, because you don’t care anymore. It means nothing to you. It’s very Djinn.”
“I’m not Djinn.”
“No,” she agreed. “You’re becoming something else. It’s—interesting.”
“But not good.”
“No. Not good at all. Not for anyone, really.”
I didn’t care. Some part of me could not wait to blow past these conventional, stupid rules.
And some tiny, whispering part of me was mourning that very thing.
“I won’t see you again,” Venna said. “Not until this is over. I’m sorry. I liked you. It would have been better if I’d killed you.”
I put my hands flat on the table. “So? Do it now.”
“I can’t,” she said, which was surprisingly honest. “And I won’t. That’s for your own to do, not me.”
She finished another half glass of OJ, then misted away without another word.
I thought she looked a little grave, and a little sad.
I got up and stiff-armed the door out onto the promenade.
The Grand Paradise had left the storm behind during the night, although it was following us like a pit bull on a leash, obedient to my every wish.
The ship cut a rapid, hissing passage through the still-high waves, making for the destination I’d identified. Home, part of me said. Not the best part.
Sunlight flooded the promenade, glittering on drops of spray, turning the place into a gallery of diamonds. Watertight doors had opened all up and down the length of the ship. Wardens who’d been gearing up for the fight of the century, or at least the storm of the century, were left wondering what to do. I didn’t seem to be much of a threat, standing at the railing and enjoying the day.
Nothing but sun and fresh wind now. It was a beautiful morning.
I felt the winds shift. Gravity shift, at least on the aetheric level. A heavyweight had arrived.
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 mes
sing 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.
