I could feel Lewis working all of that out, and realizing that he was in a trap he couldn't escape.
Just like David.
"Let me have her," David said. "Let me have her and I swear I will not harm you." Lewis's voice came back stripped raw. Bloody. "You think I'm afraid of that ?" He stopped and took a deep breath. "She's too dangerous. You know that. "
"No," David said softly. "I don't know it. You fear it. There's a difference. Let me have her, or I will teach you fear. All of you. You think you've suffered at the hands of the Djinn?
You have no concept of how much I can do to you. "
Lewis knew the minutes were ticking away, and after a certain point, life wouldn't return to the decomposing tissues of my body. Not any kind of life I'd want to have, anyway.
He also knew that forcing David to kill me was even worse.
"Do it," Lewis said. "Save her."
Before the words were out of his mouth, David acted. A silver cascade of power flooded me, pounded on my heart, drowned my brain. This was the pure white light of the Djinn, bathing me from the inside out. And where it met the fading black tangle of Bad Bob's tattoo... the silver light went out.
There was still a deadly core there, hiding inside me. Under the skin. Not even death had taken it away.
I took in a convulsive breath and sat bolt upright, still held in David's arms, and then I relaxed against him, even through the pain. My eyes spilled over with tears of agony, liquid screams that were the only thing I had to give voice to what was raging inside.
If I couldn't come back all the way, come back clean, I didn't want to come back at all.
I shuddered, and my eyes rolled back in my head, and for a precious moment I blacked out as my nervous system simply refused to conduct any more pain.
I returned to consciousness slowly, with the distant awareness of pain but unable to feel it directly. My back was numb again, all the way down to midway on my thighs. I couldn't feel the back of my head, either. Or the tops of my shoulders.
Out of nowhere, I felt the soft press of lips against mine. I felt the exhale of David's trembling sigh. I felt the burning drops of his tears on my face. "That's all I can do," he said. "Jo. Please. Come back to me."
I blinked, and my eyes slowly focused on his.
"It's all right," I whispered. It wasn't. I felt sick and wrong, and the light seemed too bright for my eyes. "I'm so sorry."
David's eyes widened. Instead of bright copper sparks dancing in them, there was ash, as if something inside him had burned itself out. "Nothing to be sorry for," he said. "You saved their lives. If they'd let you die..."
The look he gave Lewis was utterly black with fury. I couldn't imagine being on the receiving end of that much hatred. David really wanted to kill him, slowly and horribly.
Even now, I felt the conviction of that echoing inside him.
I wound my fist in David's shirt, pulling back his attention. "No," I said. "Don't you dare.
Don't use me as an excuse." My voice was a parody of its usual tones, and I had no doubt he could see the sincere fright and dread in my eyes. "No matter what happens. Promise me.
He did that for a reason. "
He lifted a hand and traced the line of my cheekbone, light as a breath. "No."
"Promise me, David."
"No."
"Promise me."
This time he said nothing at all. He was serious about this. Very damn serious indeed.
Lewis was still holding David's bottle. Now, he gestured to Kevin and handed it over. As Kevin's fingers closed over the glass, David's body shattered into mist and re-formed.
Taking on the appearance imposed by his new master.
As he re-formed, I saw the differences, not the similarities: His hands were too broad.
The arms were too muscular, and stained with colorful flaming skull tattoos. His jeans acquired leather motorcycle chaps, and his shirt vanished to reveal a broad, muscular chest beneath a fringed leather jacket.
His head was shaved.
The only things about him that didn't really change was his face, and his eyes. Those remained his.
Those remained the ones that I knew.
Kevin cleared his throat. "Okay, order number one, you will not kill, or allow to be killed, any Warden not actively fighting with Bad Bob Biringanine in the current war. That includes Lewis. Order number two, you will not kill any human, or allow one to be killed, for any reason, unless saving them would put more people at risk. Three - " He sighed.
"Especially don't kill me, yo. And get back in the bottle." David took all that without a flicker, and then he was gone. His eyes were the last thing to leave, and they never wavered from mine.
I felt sick down to my soul. He had come so close, so close to doing worse than I could imagine... and for me.
Just for me.
"So what now?" I asked Lewis. My voice sounded scratchy and uncertain. I felt stretched as thin as rice paper, and just as fragile.
Lewis slid down to a sitting position and rested his head in both hands. "I don't know," he said. "He's put blocks around the mark to keep you from being taken over, but it won't be enough, not for long. This thing is vicious, Jo. It's fatal. We're back where we started, and I think you know I can't let that stand."
My hands were shaking. I pressed them down on my thighs. "I'm listening."
"I need you to get off the boat," he said. "I need you to let us leave you behind." In the open water.
With the sharks.
I swallowed hard and didn't answer. I was too busy reliving what that had felt like - the teeth hot in my flesh, pieces of me coming off.
Blood.
Lewis didn't blink. "I'm taking everyone else to landfall. I need you to go on, alone."
"Alone," I repeated, because I could not have heard him right. "You want me to go after Bad Bob all by myself. Swimming. Through shark-infested seas. Are you fucking insane ?" He hated himself. I could see the loathing, but I could also see the cold steel underneath it. He knew what he had to do, and he wasn't afraid to do it.
He never was. I loved that about him, and I hated it, too.
"I can't keep you here," he said. "You're a bomb. Sooner or later, you're going to go off, and I can't risk what you're going to do. If you want to save yourself, you need to do it alone."
"Don't feed me crap and tell me it's chocolate," I said. "I'm, what? A Trojan horse? Bait?
Your own personal suicide bomber?"
"You're what you need to be. The way you always are." He reached over and smoothed a hand down my tangled, damp hair. His long fingers felt cool and strange on my skin. "The hardest thing I've ever had to do was kill you. Don't make me do it again. I'm already going to die for it; we both know that. He's never going to forget." I leaned into the comfort of his touch, closed my eyes, and said, "David will forgive you.
Eventually."
"No, I really don't think so." He kissed my forehead. "Especially after I do this." I felt his emotion spill into me, Earth Warden to Earth Warden - complicated waves of painful guilt, staggering responsibility, and love. So much love it hurt. He shouldn't love me so much. He knew I couldn't love him in the same way.
I started to tell him that, once and for all, but he touched my lips with his thumb. "I know," he murmured. "I just wanted you to remember it. One way or another, this is good-bye, Jo. We're not going to step in the same river twice." Lewis stood up and spun the hatch. It was a sliding door at the top of the craft, and climbing the steps to get up to it seemed like the march to the gallows.
Lewis held my hand to keep me steady.
I emerged into bright sunlight, blinded by the glitter of the whitecaps and the endless roll of the ocean. By the reflective yellow surface of the fiberglass hull. The storm hung sullenly in the distance, a vast black curtain rippling with wind and power and fury. It couldn't reach me now, but it would follow.
It had to. It was still keyed to the power locked into Bad Bob's mark.
I looked back down as I stripped off the blanket and handed it to Lewis. "Thanks for the apple juice," I said. "The beer's on you if I live." He didn't smile. There was darkness as thick as the storm hanging around him; his aura was shot through with it.
"Tell David - " I said, and couldn't think of anything to say that David wouldn't already know. "Tell him I'll see him soon." I looked past Lewis's hard face and saw Kevin hovering behind him. "Don't treat David like your slave. If you do, I'll make sure you regret it.
Just - leave him in the bottle. Promise me."
Kevin blinked. "You don't want me to let him go?"
"Not yet," I said. "You can't take the risk. If anything happens to me - Well, you saw. I don't want you guys to pay for it." I was condemning David to life imprisonment, if - as was very probable - I died. Not exactly the happy ending I'd been hoping for, but it could have been worse.
I'd seen how bad it could get. Our devotion to each other had a horrible dark side. I'd been willing to call fire, burn twenty innocent people alive to make my point. David had been willing to destroy millions to avenge me.
It wasn't David's fault that he could never, ever forgive; it was just his Djinn nature. Now I had to protect him from his own worst impulses.
I blinked away tears and focused on Kevin, with the bottle in his hand - and Cherise, clinging to Kevin and crying. "Keep David safe for me," I said. "I love all of you. I won't forget."
And then I turned and dived off the boat, into the water.
Chapter Nine
So.
It was just me and the sharks. I was acutely aware of the vast, complicated landscape of predator and prey beneath me as I floated; I'd drawn a whole lot of sharks here, and the Great Whites in particular alarmed me, because I'd seen Jaws .
I couldn't feel my back at all, but the rest of my body was chilled from the water. Still, I wasn't likely to die of exposure, or even hunger or thirst. I could maintain my body's electrolyte levels, heat, and general health; I could desalinate water to drink. I could eat raw fish that I could call into my hands, if I wasn't especially fussy. Wasn't looking forward to that part; sushi prepared by a brilliant Japanese chef is a far cry from munching on something fresh out of the sea and spitting out the scales and bones.
I floated and watched the rescue craft fleet sail away. The hatch remained open on the lifeboat I'd left, and I heard arguments pouring out of it until the wind carried it away.
Cherise had tried to jump out, twice. I could still hear her screaming at the top of her lungs long after other sounds had faded.
"Bye, sweetie," I whispered, and bobbed in the waves for a while, until the boats were just dazed smudges on the horizon.
I wasn't a good enough Earth Warden to control several hundred sharks, all operating under their natural instinctive programming. What I could do - and did - was create conditions that made it less fun for the sharks to come near me, basically administering electrical shocks to anything that came closer than ten feet.
It was terrifying. Eventually, though, the sharks lost interest or found other prey to follow. A few continued to circle, but I couldn't wait; the longer I delayed, the less likely it would be that David's containment of Bad Bob's torch would hold for me. I started to swim.
It was fun at first, and then boring, and then difficult. The human body is designed for only so much wear and tear without periods of rest, and my Earth Warden powers could maintain it, but repairing overly stressed muscles took time.
Time I wasn't going to have.
I kept swimming. After a while, pain took on a lulling sort of normality. You really can get used to just about anything, especially if you don't have any alternatives.
The sun began to dip toward the horizon, and I thought about being out here at night, with a sky full of stars. It was oddly peaceful. I was still myself - rescued from the abyss into which Bad Bob had dragged me, though he hadn't exactly dragged me there kicking and screaming, to be perfectly honest about it. I had a wide streak of darkness inside, all my own, and it wasn't just the scars left over from my earlier Demon Mark; I'd always been ambitious. I'd always pursued power.
I guess I wasn't so different from Bad Bob after all, except that I knew all that was both a strength and a weakness. And I knew it had to have limits.
I felt none of the power or fury that had thundered through me when the torch had been active, but sooner or later, David's containment field would fail, and without him here to renew it, the torch would burn hotter than ever. I was a Warden. I wouldn't be that easy to kill, even stranded out here on the ocean.
I'm working too hard,I thought. If I swim all the way to him, I'll have nothing left when I get there.
Depression set in. It does that when your friends sail off and abandon you, and when you have to say a probably permanent good-bye to the one man in the world you'd not only die for, but live with . Maybe it's not worth it. Maybe I should just take myself out of the game. That'd throw a curl in Bad Bob's tail.
It had a seductive, petulant sort of sense to it. If I died, his plans were screwed, at least the ones I'd seen. He wanted me. He might even need me to make his small-A apocalypse come true. Without me, he had his Sentinels, but they were second-raters, and we'd already taken out the real threats.
Then again... if I died, that left David snapped into that state of frenzy and rage, and I couldn't count on him staying imprisoned.
I didn't want him to stay imprisoned.
Just like David.
"Let me have her," David said. "Let me have her and I swear I will not harm you." Lewis's voice came back stripped raw. Bloody. "You think I'm afraid of that ?" He stopped and took a deep breath. "She's too dangerous. You know that. "
"No," David said softly. "I don't know it. You fear it. There's a difference. Let me have her, or I will teach you fear. All of you. You think you've suffered at the hands of the Djinn?
You have no concept of how much I can do to you. "
Lewis knew the minutes were ticking away, and after a certain point, life wouldn't return to the decomposing tissues of my body. Not any kind of life I'd want to have, anyway.
He also knew that forcing David to kill me was even worse.
"Do it," Lewis said. "Save her."
Before the words were out of his mouth, David acted. A silver cascade of power flooded me, pounded on my heart, drowned my brain. This was the pure white light of the Djinn, bathing me from the inside out. And where it met the fading black tangle of Bad Bob's tattoo... the silver light went out.
There was still a deadly core there, hiding inside me. Under the skin. Not even death had taken it away.
I took in a convulsive breath and sat bolt upright, still held in David's arms, and then I relaxed against him, even through the pain. My eyes spilled over with tears of agony, liquid screams that were the only thing I had to give voice to what was raging inside.
If I couldn't come back all the way, come back clean, I didn't want to come back at all.
I shuddered, and my eyes rolled back in my head, and for a precious moment I blacked out as my nervous system simply refused to conduct any more pain.
I returned to consciousness slowly, with the distant awareness of pain but unable to feel it directly. My back was numb again, all the way down to midway on my thighs. I couldn't feel the back of my head, either. Or the tops of my shoulders.
Out of nowhere, I felt the soft press of lips against mine. I felt the exhale of David's trembling sigh. I felt the burning drops of his tears on my face. "That's all I can do," he said. "Jo. Please. Come back to me."
I blinked, and my eyes slowly focused on his.
"It's all right," I whispered. It wasn't. I felt sick and wrong, and the light seemed too bright for my eyes. "I'm so sorry."
David's eyes widened. Instead of bright copper sparks dancing in them, there was ash, as if something inside him had burned itself out. "Nothing to be sorry for," he said. "You saved their lives. If they'd let you die..."
The look he gave Lewis was utterly black with fury. I couldn't imagine being on the receiving end of that much hatred. David really wanted to kill him, slowly and horribly.
Even now, I felt the conviction of that echoing inside him.
I wound my fist in David's shirt, pulling back his attention. "No," I said. "Don't you dare.
Don't use me as an excuse." My voice was a parody of its usual tones, and I had no doubt he could see the sincere fright and dread in my eyes. "No matter what happens. Promise me.
He did that for a reason. "
He lifted a hand and traced the line of my cheekbone, light as a breath. "No."
"Promise me, David."
"No."
"Promise me."
This time he said nothing at all. He was serious about this. Very damn serious indeed.
Lewis was still holding David's bottle. Now, he gestured to Kevin and handed it over. As Kevin's fingers closed over the glass, David's body shattered into mist and re-formed.
Taking on the appearance imposed by his new master.
As he re-formed, I saw the differences, not the similarities: His hands were too broad.
The arms were too muscular, and stained with colorful flaming skull tattoos. His jeans acquired leather motorcycle chaps, and his shirt vanished to reveal a broad, muscular chest beneath a fringed leather jacket.
His head was shaved.
The only things about him that didn't really change was his face, and his eyes. Those remained his.
Those remained the ones that I knew.
Kevin cleared his throat. "Okay, order number one, you will not kill, or allow to be killed, any Warden not actively fighting with Bad Bob Biringanine in the current war. That includes Lewis. Order number two, you will not kill any human, or allow one to be killed, for any reason, unless saving them would put more people at risk. Three - " He sighed.
"Especially don't kill me, yo. And get back in the bottle." David took all that without a flicker, and then he was gone. His eyes were the last thing to leave, and they never wavered from mine.
I felt sick down to my soul. He had come so close, so close to doing worse than I could imagine... and for me.
Just for me.
"So what now?" I asked Lewis. My voice sounded scratchy and uncertain. I felt stretched as thin as rice paper, and just as fragile.
Lewis slid down to a sitting position and rested his head in both hands. "I don't know," he said. "He's put blocks around the mark to keep you from being taken over, but it won't be enough, not for long. This thing is vicious, Jo. It's fatal. We're back where we started, and I think you know I can't let that stand."
My hands were shaking. I pressed them down on my thighs. "I'm listening."
"I need you to get off the boat," he said. "I need you to let us leave you behind." In the open water.
With the sharks.
I swallowed hard and didn't answer. I was too busy reliving what that had felt like - the teeth hot in my flesh, pieces of me coming off.
Blood.
Lewis didn't blink. "I'm taking everyone else to landfall. I need you to go on, alone."
"Alone," I repeated, because I could not have heard him right. "You want me to go after Bad Bob all by myself. Swimming. Through shark-infested seas. Are you fucking insane ?" He hated himself. I could see the loathing, but I could also see the cold steel underneath it. He knew what he had to do, and he wasn't afraid to do it.
He never was. I loved that about him, and I hated it, too.
"I can't keep you here," he said. "You're a bomb. Sooner or later, you're going to go off, and I can't risk what you're going to do. If you want to save yourself, you need to do it alone."
"Don't feed me crap and tell me it's chocolate," I said. "I'm, what? A Trojan horse? Bait?
Your own personal suicide bomber?"
"You're what you need to be. The way you always are." He reached over and smoothed a hand down my tangled, damp hair. His long fingers felt cool and strange on my skin. "The hardest thing I've ever had to do was kill you. Don't make me do it again. I'm already going to die for it; we both know that. He's never going to forget." I leaned into the comfort of his touch, closed my eyes, and said, "David will forgive you.
Eventually."
"No, I really don't think so." He kissed my forehead. "Especially after I do this." I felt his emotion spill into me, Earth Warden to Earth Warden - complicated waves of painful guilt, staggering responsibility, and love. So much love it hurt. He shouldn't love me so much. He knew I couldn't love him in the same way.
I started to tell him that, once and for all, but he touched my lips with his thumb. "I know," he murmured. "I just wanted you to remember it. One way or another, this is good-bye, Jo. We're not going to step in the same river twice." Lewis stood up and spun the hatch. It was a sliding door at the top of the craft, and climbing the steps to get up to it seemed like the march to the gallows.
Lewis held my hand to keep me steady.
I emerged into bright sunlight, blinded by the glitter of the whitecaps and the endless roll of the ocean. By the reflective yellow surface of the fiberglass hull. The storm hung sullenly in the distance, a vast black curtain rippling with wind and power and fury. It couldn't reach me now, but it would follow.
It had to. It was still keyed to the power locked into Bad Bob's mark.
I looked back down as I stripped off the blanket and handed it to Lewis. "Thanks for the apple juice," I said. "The beer's on you if I live." He didn't smile. There was darkness as thick as the storm hanging around him; his aura was shot through with it.
"Tell David - " I said, and couldn't think of anything to say that David wouldn't already know. "Tell him I'll see him soon." I looked past Lewis's hard face and saw Kevin hovering behind him. "Don't treat David like your slave. If you do, I'll make sure you regret it.
Just - leave him in the bottle. Promise me."
Kevin blinked. "You don't want me to let him go?"
"Not yet," I said. "You can't take the risk. If anything happens to me - Well, you saw. I don't want you guys to pay for it." I was condemning David to life imprisonment, if - as was very probable - I died. Not exactly the happy ending I'd been hoping for, but it could have been worse.
I'd seen how bad it could get. Our devotion to each other had a horrible dark side. I'd been willing to call fire, burn twenty innocent people alive to make my point. David had been willing to destroy millions to avenge me.
It wasn't David's fault that he could never, ever forgive; it was just his Djinn nature. Now I had to protect him from his own worst impulses.
I blinked away tears and focused on Kevin, with the bottle in his hand - and Cherise, clinging to Kevin and crying. "Keep David safe for me," I said. "I love all of you. I won't forget."
And then I turned and dived off the boat, into the water.
Chapter Nine
So.
It was just me and the sharks. I was acutely aware of the vast, complicated landscape of predator and prey beneath me as I floated; I'd drawn a whole lot of sharks here, and the Great Whites in particular alarmed me, because I'd seen Jaws .
I couldn't feel my back at all, but the rest of my body was chilled from the water. Still, I wasn't likely to die of exposure, or even hunger or thirst. I could maintain my body's electrolyte levels, heat, and general health; I could desalinate water to drink. I could eat raw fish that I could call into my hands, if I wasn't especially fussy. Wasn't looking forward to that part; sushi prepared by a brilliant Japanese chef is a far cry from munching on something fresh out of the sea and spitting out the scales and bones.
I floated and watched the rescue craft fleet sail away. The hatch remained open on the lifeboat I'd left, and I heard arguments pouring out of it until the wind carried it away.
Cherise had tried to jump out, twice. I could still hear her screaming at the top of her lungs long after other sounds had faded.
"Bye, sweetie," I whispered, and bobbed in the waves for a while, until the boats were just dazed smudges on the horizon.
I wasn't a good enough Earth Warden to control several hundred sharks, all operating under their natural instinctive programming. What I could do - and did - was create conditions that made it less fun for the sharks to come near me, basically administering electrical shocks to anything that came closer than ten feet.
It was terrifying. Eventually, though, the sharks lost interest or found other prey to follow. A few continued to circle, but I couldn't wait; the longer I delayed, the less likely it would be that David's containment of Bad Bob's torch would hold for me. I started to swim.
It was fun at first, and then boring, and then difficult. The human body is designed for only so much wear and tear without periods of rest, and my Earth Warden powers could maintain it, but repairing overly stressed muscles took time.
Time I wasn't going to have.
I kept swimming. After a while, pain took on a lulling sort of normality. You really can get used to just about anything, especially if you don't have any alternatives.
The sun began to dip toward the horizon, and I thought about being out here at night, with a sky full of stars. It was oddly peaceful. I was still myself - rescued from the abyss into which Bad Bob had dragged me, though he hadn't exactly dragged me there kicking and screaming, to be perfectly honest about it. I had a wide streak of darkness inside, all my own, and it wasn't just the scars left over from my earlier Demon Mark; I'd always been ambitious. I'd always pursued power.
I guess I wasn't so different from Bad Bob after all, except that I knew all that was both a strength and a weakness. And I knew it had to have limits.
I felt none of the power or fury that had thundered through me when the torch had been active, but sooner or later, David's containment field would fail, and without him here to renew it, the torch would burn hotter than ever. I was a Warden. I wouldn't be that easy to kill, even stranded out here on the ocean.
I'm working too hard,I thought. If I swim all the way to him, I'll have nothing left when I get there.
Depression set in. It does that when your friends sail off and abandon you, and when you have to say a probably permanent good-bye to the one man in the world you'd not only die for, but live with . Maybe it's not worth it. Maybe I should just take myself out of the game. That'd throw a curl in Bad Bob's tail.
It had a seductive, petulant sort of sense to it. If I died, his plans were screwed, at least the ones I'd seen. He wanted me. He might even need me to make his small-A apocalypse come true. Without me, he had his Sentinels, but they were second-raters, and we'd already taken out the real threats.
Then again... if I died, that left David snapped into that state of frenzy and rage, and I couldn't count on him staying imprisoned.
I didn't want him to stay imprisoned.
