Grit filtered down in feathery whispers, and then the real lurch came.
The building exploded as force traveled up through the ground, pulverizing layers of granite into dust. The cinder blocks of the walls buckled, ground themselves into powder against each other, and the ceiling crashed in a twisting, tearing mass of wood and metal that was snatched away by the wind.
Nothing touched me.
I stood exactly where I had as the building disintegrated around me, ripped away by the howling Category 5 winds. The ground lurched like pounding surf underneath me.
Bad Bob rose up into the air, holding to the end of his spear. He kept rising.
The spear grew, and grew, like some poisonous tree with its roots sunk deep.
He broke it off at ground level. It shattered at the stress point with a musical, glassy sound I heard even above the shriek of the storm.
A palm tree toppled and rolled toward me. Through me. Bad Bob landed on the rippling earth in front of me, appallingly normal in this terribly destroyed setting, and used the remaining part of his spear as a walking stick. Thump. Thump. Thump. It echoed through me like the beating of Poe's telltale heart.
Around us formed a little circle of clear air, stable ground, like the eye of the hurricane.
It expanded, and other people appeared out of the chaos. Wardens, once upon a time. I recognized many of them, at least by face if not by name. His pets, his converts to his righteous war against the Djinn - not that Bad Bob cared a bean about killing the Djinn to benefit humanity. Oh no. Bad Bob cared only, and always, about his own ends, and whatever these pathetic, deluded people thought they were getting out of fighting on his side, they were bound to be disillusioned.
I assessed numbers. Might as well, since I was stuck here. It did occur to me that Bad Bob was showing me only what he wanted to show me, of course, but for all that, the guy who keeps showing off will eventually show you something he doesn't intend to.
Bad Bob was one hell of a chatterbox.
Sixty of them.My spirits sank, which was no doubt what he'd counted on. He had numbers.
Of course, we had more, but add to that Bad Bob's Demon-derived powers and the neat trick of handheld antimatter that the Djinn could neither recognize nor defend against, and we were well on the train to Screwsville.
"You still think you can win?" he asked me. I didn't answer, because I wasn't sure I dared tell a lie right now, and a lie was all I really had. "Scared little Jo. It was always going to end like this, you know. You against me, and you never could take me."
"I did take you," I said. "You sadistic old bastard." He lost his smile and pointed the spear at me. "Wonder what happens if I give it a taste of you in your aetheric form?" he said. "Bet it'll hurt like fuck."
"Bet you don't want to be around when I survive it and come to kick your sorry ass off the face of the planet."
He laughed and grounded the butt of the spear again. "I always did like that about you. You got sand, I'll give you that." He leaned forward, eyes avid and wet. "Fight me, Jo. I love it when you fight me. It won't matter in the end, but it'll be damn fun. You thought by dragging the Wardens away from all those innocent people on shore you'd save lives, but I think you just made my job a whole lot easier. See? You were already working for me. And now you're going to really draw your paycheck, peach."
"Like hell," I said.
He blew me a kiss. Back on the ship's sofa, my body continued to twitch and writhe. Cherise sat down next to me, putting a hand on my forehead, then calling for help.
The sensation of her hand against my skin was just enough to form a link - a way back. I pulled. The black mark felt like Velcro, sticking me here to this spot, but I ripped and tore at it, struggling, and with a hissing snap I came free.
I called lightning.
A white blast of energy erupted out of the clouds overhead - clean, pale energy, not the poisoned kind he'd poured into the storm - and struck me squarely in the top of my insubstantial head, flooding through my form in a splintered glowing ladderwork, then blasting out into the ground.
It shattered the remaining connection that held me at Bad Bob's command, and I flew backward through the screaming darkness, whipping past pitch-black writhing ocean, over half-seen bits of island, into calmer seas.
Into the massive, smugly sailing bulk of the Grand Paradise.
Into my body, with a lurch like a slap.
I came awake with a gasp that felt like a shriek. My back was burning, on fire, and I tried to lunge to my feet. It felt like my entire nervous system cut out, faulty wiring shorting and sparking.
I pitched off the sofa to the carpet and got a taste of rug.
Cherise was instantly on her knees beside me, trying to cradle me in her arms. I couldn't let her touch me. Everything felt wrong, strange, bad, vile... and I wasn't sure that it wasn't contagious.
"No," I panted, and crab-crawled back to jam myself against the bottom of the sofa. "No, leave me alone!"
"Help!" Cherise shouted. That got the attention of some passing crew members. A passing steward - I still didn't know his name, but he was the one who'd been trying to manage the First-Class rebellion before we'd set sail - shoved aside the coffee table and reached down for me. "Miss, are you all right? Should I get medical help?" I wrapped my hand convulsively around the white lapel of his jacket, and where my fingers gripped the fabric, it started to smoke and hiss.
He exclaimed and tried to claw his way free. I couldn't let go. My hand didn't seem to be mine, exactly; it was moving, and I could feel what it was doing, but it was holding him in place.
Part of me wanted to destroy him. A big part of me, and it was growing larger as the broken containment on my back allowed the poison from the torch mark to flood into me.
The dam was breached.
I was being swept away.
The steward struggled, panted, yelled for help, and finally managed to slip out of his jacket, which remained clutched in my fist as it burst into full smoking flame. I heard other voices - Wardens? - in a rising babble. Somebody tried to tamp down the fire that was bubbling up from my fingers, but I couldn't stop it. All my nerves were fried, useless; all my control had gone with them.
The jacket caught the rug on fire.
Someone hit me with a good old-fashioned fire extinguisher, but as soon as the icy foam stopped blasting, fire erupted from both my hands, crawling up my arms like snakes, twining around my body in living veils of flame.
I could feel other things happening inside me now - fire was always the easiest of powers to call, because it was virtually unstoppable even in natural form, but now I could feel my other abilities stirring, too. Something inside me was rifling through my mind, my soul, shuffling aside unwanted things to find the most devastating things on offer.
I was an open doorway, and something was reaching through.
I think I might have screamed, but if I did, it was just in my head. My body stood up, dripping flame as my clothing burned away, leaving me draped in living energy. I could see myself reflected in the lounge windows - a pillar of fire, a pagan goddess, naked and primal.
My hair didn't burn, but it rose and fluttered on the waves of heat created from my skin.
My eyes were Djinn eyes, flaring gold, and where I touched, things blackened and smoked and charred into ruin.
"Back!" someone snapped to the growing cluster of onlookers, and a hardened bubble of air formed around me, thick as steel. The fire erupting out of me consumed the available oxygen in seconds, then began to gutter and fail as its fuel ran out.
I felt nothing, except that all-consuming heat exploding from the black torch on my shoulder. It seemed to be getting worse, not better, as if someone had injected me with acid. If I'd had control of my voice, I'd have been begging for it to stop.
The cold, blackened part of me inside still had control, but it allowed me to collapse into a naked, smoking heap inside the air bubble. I struggled to breathe, but there was nothing left to fill my lungs that wasn't toxic.
Someone stepped up on the other side of the bubble.
Lewis.
The darkness in me took over, but it did it in a hor rifyingly clever way.
I lifted my hand and slapped my palm flat against the bubble, pleading for mercy. My fingernails were turning a delicate robin's-egg shade of blue. I must have looked completely pathetic and weak.
I wasn't. Not at all.
There was something very strange in the way he was looking at me. Something my grandmother used to say. Tombstone eyes...
Lewis's head snapped around, not fast enough, and something collided with him. A streak of bronze light that froze into the form of David, on the other side of my invisible prison.
I watched Lewis's lips move. He was yelling at David, telling him not to be a fool, not to fall for it. He knew .
He needn't have worried. David might be passionate, but he was no kind of a fool. He crouched down and put his hand flat against mine, separated by five inches of thickened, impenetrable, interlocked molecules. His face was a mask, his eyes dark and secretive, but not quite managing to hide his fury - at me, at himself, at Bad Bob for putting us here.
I smiled, tasting his despair - it felt good.
The talisman burned into my back hit a white-hot peak, and I felt my Weather powers flooding out of me, battering at the prison holding me. Lewis was incredibly strong, maybe the strongest Warden who'd ever lived, but I was damn close on this front. I hadn't always been, or at least I hadn't always known it, but I was afraid that very strength was going to be my undoing now... because I could feel my powers eating away at the force he'd set up to keep me contained. Once it broke, there was no telling what I'd do. What I could do.
Possibilities raced through my mind, each worse than the last - poison gas drifting through the sealed corridors of the ship, killing everyone it touched. Or maybe I'd just blow a gigantic hole through the bottom, sending this beautiful floating coffin down to join other famous wrecks. I could almost see that one - the foaming rush of the sea through the shattered hull, the rooms filling up, all these people trapped and dying...
God,I wanted to do it.
I couldn't let this happen. I couldn't be the cause of so much death.
Bad Bob had done one thing for me, thanks to this little exercise in hellish torment; he'd shown me how to break loose. I wasn't trapped in my body; my body existed separately from my spirit, connected only by random impulses and autonomic functions. I pulled away and stretched to the limit. I arrowed up into the aetheric, feeling the bond stretch and pull, thinner and thinner. At the top of the aetheric, there was a flickering white milky light - the boundary of another world above that one. Another plane of existence. The Djinn could pass through it. Humans couldn't, not even Wardens.
I touched it, trailed ethereal fingers against the barrier, and looked down. Distances and heights didn't mean the same things up on the higher planes, but in this sense they did -
there was a form of gravity, and momentum, and forces that translated from the aetheric back to the physical.
I let go, turned, and put all my power into an accelerated dive back to my physical body.
Instead of letting myself fall , I raced , gathering as much force along the way as I could.
Pulling it directly from the aetheric, like the wake from a speedboat. I'd never tried this; I knew that there were Earth Wardens who had, who'd managed to get a power boost through this technique. It wouldn't last, and it came at a heavy cost, but it was at least something to try.
They never told me how bad it would hurt, though .
Hitting the physical form of my body had a psychic shock wave, like slamming head-on into a bank vault at eighty miles per hour. Then the aetheric wake slammed in behind me, temporarily compressing me inside.
I blew it out through the mark on my back, channeling it through the black lines. It overloaded within an instant, shocking the mark into silence, sending it back into its containment state.
I raised my head and looked David in the eye and mouthed Help . I didn't know if he'd believe me or not - I almost hoped he wouldn't - but without him, I knew that sooner or later this was going to end in my death.
My whole body was trembling, anoxic, on the edge of unconsciousness. I couldn't create oxygen from the toxic soup of molecules left inside this bubble; I'd have to break the shell, get some kind of feed from the outside.
Or maybe I'd die. That wasn't a bad solution, all things considered. Not my fave, admittedly, but it would save innocent lives, and -
David's outstretched palm pushed through the hard shell of air. Stress fractures formed as white cracks around his fingers, and then he broke through, and a rush of delicious air fanned my hair back from my face. The bubble disintegrated. I dropped facedown to the floor.
A weight settled on top of me - David, straddling me. Slamming his hand down on top of the black mark, and if I'd thought that sucker was painful already, this was a thousand times worse, so bad that I couldn't stop screaming, writhing, trying to claw my way out of the pain.
"I'll kill you!" I was screaming. And worse. And I meant it.
Lewis took my wrists and held me still. Somebody else grabbed my flailing legs and anchored them. It was like old-style surgery without the benefit of anesthesia, this feeling of something vital being cut out of me, bloody and dripping...
And then it stopped.
I collapsed, sobbing helplessly. I couldn't feel David's hand on my back. I couldn't feel anything from the nape of my neck to my waistline; it had all gone icily numb.
"Mother of God," someone among the onlookers murmured, and the tone was so appalled that I wondered just what he was seeing. I didn't care. It was enough that it didn't hurt, just for a few precious breaths.
"Get the medical team," Lewis said. His voice sounded strangely rough, low in his throat.
