"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.
But Lewis managed, somehow. He batted me away, sending me reeling back to crash against a metal rail. Somewhere out in the churning iron gray sea, Freddy - a Fire Warden, with no power over either the water or the living things in it - yelled for help with panic in his voice. Something about sharks.
As Lewis staggered and fell, the bottle that held David's soul entrapped fell out of his pocket and skittered across the deck. I reached out for it.
Cherise got to it first.
She backed up, fast, both hands clenched around the small glass form. She pulled it in to her chest.
The Wardens closed ranks between her and me.
"Back off," Kevin said, pushing his way to the front - and Cherise.
" Youback off," I snapped. "I saved your life, you rancid little murderer. You owe me."
"I owe Joanne," he said. "I don't know who the fuck you are, and I don't care. You make a move against Cherise and - "
"And what?" I asked, and took a step forward. "You'll cut me? Oh, shut up. Get out of my way if you want to live."
Venna misted into place next to him. She didn't speak. She didn't have to. I got the message well enough.
"I've fought you before," I said.
"You lost," she pointed out. "The poisoned water may sustain you, but it's still poisoned.
Don't make the mistake of thinking you're my equal. Ever."
" Booyah, bitch," Kevin said. Someone else, with more sense and better self-preservation instincts, muttered for him to shut up.
"I'm going to kill you all," I said. I meant it. I felt it coming, a kind of inevitable darkness.
"I have to." I was still just a little sorry about that, but it really was necessary. Lewis had been right that somewhere deep inside me, the old Joanne was still struggling - poisoning my thoughts, driving my actions.
No more.
I flung my arms wide, felt the storm roar and answer, and shouted, "Now!" The Djinn Rahel erupted from out of the ocean.
No, not Rahel - Rahel as commanded by her master, Bad Bob, the Black Warden.
Rahel was as large as the cruise ship. Her hair was a nest of writhing eels. Her face was distorted, pointed into an extreme triangle, and her mouth was full of rows of teeth. She was dressed in rags and weeds and pearls and fish scales, and in both hands she held swords as long as the hull of the ship.
"Oh, Christ," someone said, appalled, and then the screaming started. Not among the Wardens, who instantly began pulling up every defense they had.
It really wasn't going to do them any good at all.
Venna, pretty and fresh in a sparkly pink shirt with a unicorn on it, jumped flat-footed from the deck to balance on the railing. The storm winds hit her like the wave front of an explosive blast, blowing her hair back in a rippling blond flag, but she was absolutely steady as she balanced. Rahel saw her, and that shark-toothed mouth gaped in a menacing smile.
Venna executed a perfect dive, and before she hit the waves, she'd changed into something else, something vast and dark that swam straight at the terrifying sea-hag that Rahel had become.
Rahel's shark teeth parted on a shriek, and she was yanked down under the waves. The Grand Paradise rocked violently as the water churned, and the storm winds lashed the ship in swirling gusts.
Rahel wasn't the attack, of course. Just a diversion, something to help get attention away from me. While the Wardens were focused on the water, I concentrated on the metal of the ship's hull, below the water line.
Metal bent and screamed, and the entire ship twisted as if it had been T-boned. It rolled starboard, then over-corrected to port, sending people flying and rolling and screaming.
Rahel broke the surface of the water and was yanked under again. The battle continued, not that it mattered to anyone on the ship anymore.
I could feel the damage.
It wasn't containable.
I smiled.
Lewis left the deck in a sudden burst and went airborne - a trick that few Weather Wardens could manage under stress, even at full power. Formidable, I thought, filing it away for future reference.
Then something hit us hard on the side, and the ship, already dying, rolled all the way over.
Disaster can be oddly beautiful. It seems to happen in slow motion, like ballet, and if your emotions aren't involved, then it's only input.
All I was feeling, as the ship died around me, was a quiet kind of satisfaction.
It took about ten seconds for the Grand Paradise to capsize, and then I was in the water, floating away from the ship. It looked exactly like it had ten seconds before, only now it was upside down and wreathed in so many cascading bubbles that it was like some wild New Year's Eve party gone badly wrong.
There was a ripped section of hull below the waterline, extending nearly half the length of the ship. I could see inside to hallways, storerooms, and the complicated mechanics of what was probably the engineering section.
I had done that. Just me.
I saw people flailing amid the strangely serene wreckage of what had been our only salvation out here in the middle of this watery desert.
Rahel's massive sea-monster body dived past me, driven by a tail that was as much eel as mermaid, and disappeared into the gloomy depths. She was followed by a pink, sparkle-skinned unicorn with eyes of fire, gills, and flippers instead of legs. Its horn was shimmering crystal, lighting up the dark as it shot away in pursuit of Rahel.
The water was shockingly cold, or at least that was my impression. I instinctively reached for power and warmed myself, oblivious to the screaming people bobbing around me in the waves. Weather Wardens were quickly reacting, encasing people in protective bubbles and popping them to the surface if they'd been unlucky enough to end up sucking sea. I supposed they'd be all about saving those who were trapped, too.
I felt the suction of water rushing into the ship.
Rahel and Venna broke the surface again, two giants now screaming and ripping at each other, far less human than I'd have ever imagined; Venna had given up her My Little Pony sparkles and was fish-belly white now, and Rahel's body was a dark mesh of scales and teeth, too confusing to identify individual features.
Venna drove Rahel back under the surface again, and bubbles geysered in their wake.
Lewis rose out of the water. Levitated, like a freaking superhero, dripping gallons of seawater.
"Everybody, move close together!" he yelled. "Grab on to each other. Kevin, you're in charge. Count noses!"
The noses were still bobbing to the surface, like corks. Kevin swam to the center of the chaos and forcibly dragged people to form the first tight layer of the circle, then ducked beneath them to form up the next ring, and the next. "Hold on to each other!" he yelled.
"Just like you're in a huddle! And keep kicking!" Now the survivors looked like a giant skydiving stunt, concentric rings of people floating with their arms around each other.
Scared, sure, but human contact helped, especially for those who couldn't swim or were too terrified to remember how.
I bobbed in place, watching them for a moment, and then I called sharks.
Lewis felt the pulse traveling out through the water, and he knew what it meant. I saw his head snap around, his eyes widen, and the shock and horror on his face set up a warm, liquid glow deep inside me.
"Now I've got your attention," I said. "Don't I?" There weren't enough Earth Wardens to control big predators like sharks, not if they had to be focused on not drowning at the same time. The Fire and Weather Wardens would be completely vulnerable.
There were thousands of sharks out there. Thousands.
And now they turned and headed our way, drawn by an imaginary smell of blood in the water.
Something in Lewis's face changed. He'd made a decision, not one he liked. I wondered what it was.
Between the two of us, a vividly painted craft suddenly erupted through the waves. It was reflective yellow, bright as a traffic sign, and it was completely enclosed, sleek as a science fiction submarine.
A lifeboat.
More of them were popping up now, all around the Wardens. Lewis - or Venna - had broken them free of the sinking wreck. "Ladders at the back!" Lewis yelled. "Last row of the circle boards first! Each one of these will take about forty people. Wardens, I want a minimum of three of you per boat, and try to evenly distribute the powers!" The railings around the ship were studded with these strange little craft - fiberglass, highly buoyant, with diesel engines and very little chance of being swamped even in high seas. I assumed they'd have life vests and provisions inside.
It was a race to see if he could get the Wardens into the boats before my sharks arrived for their feast. Lewis correctly deployed his forces, keeping the Earth Wardens focused on repelling attacking predators as the Fire and Weather Wardens, staff, and crew boarded their ships. Then he evacuated the last of them.
I bobbed in the pounding waves, cold and shivering, watching.
The Grand Paradise, that floating castle, rolled like a dying whale, heeling in the direction of its fatal wound, and then the stern rose at a ninety-degree angle out of the water, exposing the massive propulsion pods and steering mechanisms. I could see, very briefly, the entertainment area of the ship that I'd never had time to visit - the rock-climbing wall, the pools, the spas.
And then it all slipped beneath the waves with a deep, gurgling death groan, churning foam and debris, and was gone in less than a minute.
I put my face beneath the water and watched its free-fall descent into the dark, and laughed, because even if the Wardens survived all this, that was going to be one hell of a security deposit problem.
I was still laughing when something suddenly lunged up from the depths at me. I had one flash of a second to recognize the gaping maw, the dead eyes.
Shark.
Sometimes, no matter who you are, or how powerful, Mother Nature still wins.
I floated on my back, bouncing on the churning waves, watching clouds fly in black, menacing swoops overhead. My storm circled in thwarted, anxious fury.
I was bleeding badly, and I couldn't seem to stop it. I'd blown the shark into bloody meat, but too late; it had gouged a giant chunk from my thigh, and although I'd shut down the pain receptors, I knew how bad it was. The power I had at my command wasn't meant to heal. It was meant to destroy.
Maybe it was a hallucination, but I could have sworn Bad Bob was standing on the wave-tops, looking down at me. He was wearing that same crappy, loud Hawaiian shirt, and his thin white hair blew in the same wind that blew spume from the water into my mouth as I struggled for air.
"What is it the kids today say, Jo? Epic fail?" He crouched down next to me. I could see the water rippling over his toes, but he could have been standing on concrete, while my struggles to stay afloat were getting weaker and weaker. "I think you let this happen. I think you were so damn guilty, you thought a shark bite was what you deserved."
"Fuck you," I whispered, and coughed. God, I hated him. The darkness inside me had filled me to bursting, and I needed to gag it out before it choked me. "I killed the ship for you."
"Yes, you did. Not a bad job. But you let the lifeboats survive. That's a whole lot less impressive."
I blinked away burning salt in my eyes. "Help me."
"Wait, what was the pithy phrase you just used? Fuck you, Jo. You kill Lewis Orwell for me.
Then we'll talk about how I can help you." He smirked down at me, his pale eyes as vicious and shallow as those of the shark that had come after me. "Consider it the fairness doctrine in action."
And with that, his image turned into a black mist and blew away.
But I didn't think he'd ever really been there anyway.
There were more sharks coming. I'd drawn them here, and now there really was blood in the water - mine. My wounds were pumping out more all the time, and the shark I'd destroyed was functioning as bait too. The next one to arrive wouldn't be so tentative.
He'd just rip me in half.
I wondered if it was shock that was making me so fatalistic about that.
The lifeboats were all heading off to the horizon now.
All except one, which peeled off and turned back.
I was unconscious before it arrived.
I woke up lying on the floor of the lifeboat, with two Earth Wardens healing up my bites as best they could.
It hurt.
It hurt a lot.
Cherise, Kevin, Cho Chu Wing, and the remaining crew were on this lifeboat, as well as the Grand Paradise 's Captain Miller, a sturdy gentleman who retained his military dignity despite his waterlogged uniform. He didn't say much. I didn't suppose he was regretting not going down with his ship, but maybe he was thinking about all the inevitable paperwork.
Or, if he knew I was responsible, he was thinking about finishing up what the sharks had left undone.
"We need to split up the boats," Lewis was telling the captain as I drifted in, out, and around consciousness. "We're like ducks in a shooting gallery out here on the open water." The captain nodded, but not as if he really understood or cared. I didn't think he cared about much anymore. "I've already sent out distress calls," he said. "Six freighters are heading our way, including a Saudi tanker. They'll start rendezvousing with the other lifeboats within the hour."
