"Tactics and strategy." He sounded resigned, not happy. "All right. I'm ready." I nodded over his shoulder to Brett, who unzipped a pocket on his tactical vest and pulled out a small glass bottle with a cork. A little more ornate than I was used to seeing -
probably something they had in the stores on the cruise ship, although the cork would have been a new addition.
"I've got your agreement to do this, right?" Brett asked. He was asking David. After a long moment, David nodded. "Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound - "
"Wait," I blurted, and took both of David's hands in mine. "If this is the last time I see you, I need you to hear this."
He waited, amber eyes glowing like suns. I fumbled for words. "I - just - David, if something happens to me, if this doesn't go right, you have to promise me, vow to me, that you will look out for humanity's good, not just the Djinn's. Don't punish the Wardens if I die. Please."
He knew why I was asking that. "Lewis tried to kill you," he said. "He did kill you. Are you asking me to forgive him?"
"I'm not going to ask the impossible. I'm asking that you not take revenge for something that turned out not to work anyway, that's all."
There's something very unsettling about a Djinn that doesn't blink when he's talking to you - even one you love with a deep, desperate intensity. "You are asking the impossible," he said. "Lewis hurt you. He did it as part of a plan. I can't allow that to go unanswered."
"You have to," I said. "Please. I need a vow."
"You know that I can't say no to you, don't you?" He wasn't smiling, though. "Yet this time, I have to. The answer is still no, Jo. He can no longer be trusted by the Djinn." That really wasn't good. "But you'll still work with him? With the Wardens?"
"To a point," he said. I could tell he wasn't going to be more specific about where the point was.
That was all I was going to get from him, even now, even at this most vulnerable moment.
I nodded to Brett, who repeated the binding phrase again - three times, just to be sure.
David's hands misted out of mine as the binding took effect. I felt the hammering blow of it shatter the aetheric between us, and then he was exploding into mist, and the mist was sucked into the bottle in Brett's hands. He corked it with calm efficiency, and I watched him put the bottle in a special padded case, and then into the pocket of his tactical vest.
"With your life," I told him. "You know that, right?"
"Yes," he said. It was a simple answer, and it left no room for doubt at all. He'd do it. I couldn't ask for better than that.
I fried the ship's engine with a burst of pure Earth power, fusing metal parts together, gunking up everything that looked remotely important. The Sparrow sputtered and began to drift, dead in the water.
Josue stopped looking afraid and started looking alarmed, then angry. "You do something to my ship?"
"Why, is something wrong with it?" I kept my expression as innocent as possible. That was probably what made him glower at me as if he'd like to take me apart but wasn't sure it was safe to try. "My friends on the cruise ship will help you. Oh, and I wouldn't try any other guns you might have stashed. Serious mistake on so many levels." He gave me his most dangerous look. In earlier days, I might have actually been intimidated by it. Today... not so much. "Worst day of my life, the day I fished you out of the ocean, mermaid."
"Really? The sad thing is, it wasn't the worst day of mine." I stepped up on the railing at the vee of the bow, balancing on the balls of my feet. He backed away, watching me. Not quite certain of what I was doing. "Good luck."
He crossed himself. "Go with God, so long as you go." His sudden piety didn't convince me he wouldn't stab me in the back if he could get a clear throw when I turned around. I gave Josue one last look, and then I dived from the railing of the Sparrow into the open ocean water, heading south.
Bad Bob wasn't on an island, after all. Well, to be accurate, he was on an island - but the island was floating and he was moving it wherever he wanted.
Neat trick. First, most islands aren't all that prone to float, since they're really the tops of underwater mountains. This one was able to drift, withstand the full force of a Category 5 hurricane, and navigate at will.
It also explained why he was so crazy hard to track down. I wasted time and frustration until I figured out that I was heading not for a specific spot in the ocean but a mobile spot. I found it as the sunrise spilled over the long, rocky key of the island, which was moving away from me at a fairly rapid speed. I had an embarrassment of choices for first impressions, but you've got to be kidding me was certainly in the hunt for first place.
The entire island was turning , the mirror image of the mouth of a black-and-green hurricane that was hovering above it, just... spinning.
Not even Bad Bob - I hoped - had the power to do this alone. No, he had to be augmenting it somehow... And then it occurred to me. I was filled with silvery aetheric light now, thanks to my connection to David; Bad Bob had a Djinn, too. Rahel. He'd taken her by force, and that explained the negative energy in what I saw hovering over the island.
Of course, Bad Bob himself was no Prince of Positive Thinking, either.
The scary thing was that with that much power, he could do almost anything he liked, and this floating fortress was just demented enough to amuse him.
I kept swimming. I'd been at it for hours, and I was very, very tired, but I also wasn't about to give up. Besides, I was building up some fierce quadriceps.
Jo,a voice whispered in my ear. I gasped, startled, and sucked down a lungful of water. I paused, treading water. Jo, can you hear me?
It was Lewis's voice. I shook my head and bopped myself in the ear, hoping I was just having a hallucination.
Stop hitting yourself. Yes, it's me.
"How do you know I'm hitting myself?"
I can hear the pops in your eardrum. It's an old Earth Warden trick. Works great for covert ops.Lewis was making an effort to sound like nothing had passed between us the past few days. Like it was all just the same old. How's the swim?
"Long," I said. My teeth were chattering. "You didn't dial me up on the ear-phone to chat." He paused for a few seconds. With Lewis, that was weighty. Did David agree? Is he in the bottle?
"Yes." Better not to overshare on that, I decided. "Could we speed this up? Water cold. Body tired."
Can you do this? Are you sure?
What a dumb-ass question. "No, I'm not sure," I snapped. "Of course I'm not sure. Why? Second thoughts?"
Yes. We've got one shot at this. He may not even let you get close. He may kill you before you get anywhere near him.
Cheery thought. "If he does, you've still got a shipful of Wardens and Djinn ready to bring the wrath of God down on him and - " It occurred to me suddenly why Lewis was taking the trouble to say these things. "David."
You and I know that he'd stop at nothing to destroy what killed you.
Oh Christ."You cannot be serious with this. Lewis. Please, tell me you're not asking me to go and deliberately get my ass killed so that it will trigger David into a homicidal rampage against your enemies?"
It would work.
Sure it would. It would leave Bad Bob and whoever was around him radioactive dust.
Including, probably, the cruise ship, which would become collateral damage.
The hideous thing was that as a nuclear option, it was not bad. So long as you accepted that the pile of bodies would be unthinkable, but at the end of the day, the enemy would be gone....
No. "Not happening, Lewis," I said. "If I get killed anyway, fine, all bets are off. But I'm fighting all the way down. Get me?"
Yes. You understand that I had to ask.
Not really. But I was starting to think that in some ways David was right - I never would truly know Lewis. Not at his core.
"I'm signing off, Lewis," I said, and spit salt water as a wave slapped me. "Hey. Thanks." For what?
"Letting me say no."
I got a dry, tinny chuckle in my ear. How could I ever stop you?
"See you on the other side, then."
Yes.
That was it. Our big good-bye. As romantic scenes went, it lacked, but that was all right.
We were past all that now.
After a good half hour of chasing down the floating island, my flailing hand finally slapped a boulder on the island's rocky shore - whatever sand there once was had long ago been scoured away, so there was nothing left to this beast but slick, water-smoothed stone. I grabbed at the rock, but my hand slid off. I kicked, gritted my teeth, and lunged up out of the water as far as I could.
My rib cage thumped down painfully on the smooth surface, and I started to slip back, but more kicking and clawing paid off. I found a handhold, at the cost of the last memory of my French manicure, and hauled myself out of the pounding surf to lie exhausted and dripping, draped like Josue's proverbial drowned mermaid over extremely uncomfortable terrain.
"Damn," I whispered. "Why am I doing this again?" Oh yeah - because I was probably the only one who could, with anything like certainty.
And because sometimes I just had to face my own demons - and Demons - head-on.
I spent several moments just letting my muscles shake and cry out in relief, and then rolled up to a sitting position to take a look around. It wasn't much of a garden spot - lots of black basalt and granite. This place wasn't more than a few dozen millennia away from the lava flows that had built it in the first place. It still had most of its sharp edges.
That wasn't great for me, of course. I'd worn heavy boots, but my battered shorts probably weren't going to protect me from gathering some new and interesting scars as I scrambled across the edgy landscape.
I climbed up on the tallest boulder I could find and did a quick survey. The island was bigger than I'd expected - maybe a solid mile across - and toward the middle there was an unlikely small collection of jagged palms, all dying now. Whatever fresh water had nourished them was long gone.
This island was a rotting hulk, and I wondered uneasily how Bad Bob had kept sixty Sentinels - that I knew about - alive on such a bare span of rock. I supposed he'd laid in supplies, but he didn't seem to be a logistical kind of guy.
Maybe they were eating each other. It wouldn't surprise me, given the level of devotion he inspired in people.
This was not the place I'd have picked as my home away from home if I had to choose a portable island paradise, that was for damn sure. No beaches, no living trees, no water, no shade. Just razor-edged rock and the odd crab scuttling by. The surface of Mars, only at least fifty percent less hospitable.
If I hadn't been doing such a careful survey of the island, I might have missed the first attack that came at me. There was nothing to give it away but a faint shimmer against the rocks, like a reflection of waves - but it didn't move with the waves.
It was bending light, and it was moving fast, heading my direction.
I'd never seen one in full daylight before. That was a crystalline skeleton, barely visible without the human disguise its kind had adopted back on the Grand Paradise . I knew now why it had gone for the skins; the creature made a vibration on the aetheric as it moved, a kind of ringing like a finger tapping an ice-cold crystal glass.
The skins had muted the vibrations, hidden them in the natural noise of human existence.
The crystal shimmer disappeared, lost in the glare of the sun for a second, and then I saw the blur of it against the piles of rocks only about three feet away from me.
I didn't have time for fancy moves, just dived out of the way. It was fast, but the rocks were just as hazardous to its footing as to mine, and I saw it stumble and try to catch its balance as it checked its momentum. Instead, it tumbled off into the water.
It sank below the surface in seconds, pulled down by the density of its bones.
Well, that was great news, but as I looked up, I counted three more shimmers against the rocks, heading in my direction. I calculated frequencies. I didn't have time to try very many, but the good news was that I'd already killed one of these things on my own. Well, with help, but close enough. I knew the theory, and even without the direct access to the aetheric that I'd have had with David free, I wasn't starved for power. I was almost shining with what had spilled into me at our wedding ceremony.
The next creature lunged for me, and I opened my mouth and picked a note. Nerves forced the amplitude of the sound too high, and the creature just kept coming. I adjusted the range of the note, holding it steady, and fine-tuned it as the beast came closer, and closer, and -
- and then it burst into a powder-fine shower of disrupted crystal. Instant sand.
Gotcha.
Two more on the way, bounding over the rocks. I dug deep into my diaphragm and half-remembered old singing lessons. I kept the note going, and amplified it a thousand times, sending it in a shock wave out across the island from end to end. The intensity of the sound swept out like a bomb blast. I was immune to it, but across the island, a dozen crystal ghosts exploded into dust and shards as the wave of sound rolled over them.
The note did more than take care of them; it also brought Bad Bob's other allies out of hiding. Farther inland, near the stunted, mummified trees, Bad Bob's former Wardens were coming out of camouflaged tents and starting to get organized. The shock wave rolled over them, and dozens more went down - not dead, but stunned and probably deafened. I'd caught them by surprise.
They returned the favor.
As I took a step forward, stone softened under my boot, and I sank in to my ankles. A rival Earth power was trying to harden the matrix again around my body, which would have not just trapped me but pulverized flesh and bone, if I was lucky - or amputated both feet at the ankles, if I wasn't.
