"That's true." He kissed her forehead, but his eyes never left me. "That's very true. I've been taking out her bones, one at a time. What do you think, princess?"
"Too boring." She wasn't even looking at me; she pulled free of Bad Bob and walked a slow circle around Rahel, inspecting her Miss America impersonation. "Make her work for it."
"Hmmmm. There's an idea. Two birds and one very big stone." Bad Bob slammed the book closed and put it under his arm. "All right, then. Let's see what you can do, my child. Impress me."
Moira sat down on a handy boulder, open wine bottle in both hands on her lap, and tossed glossy red hair back over her shoulders. "Rahel," she said. "I want you to break Joanne Baldwin's right leg in two. Use your hands. Do it now." She knew the rules of commanding a Djinn - be specific about intent, method, and time frame. And I could see that they'd had plenty of practice with Rahel - she hadn't gained that traumatized fury without cause.
"Do it slowly," Moira said. "Make her feel every second of it." Rahel's eyes focused on me, and she began walking across the stones toward where I sat.
Not a hell of a lot I could do to stop her; if I tried to resist, my other leg was sure to be crushed, and maybe even pulled off by this tentacle thing Bad Bob was using for a tether.
She still looked ridiculous in her getup, but I didn't let that fool me for a second. I'd seen the Djinn in the grip of truly evil people, and they were no more to be reasoned with than the blade of a knife.
I looked past Rahel at Moira. "I guess you hate me for being the daughter he never had.
Daddy didn't trust you, did he? That's why he came after me in the first place. Because you weren't measuring up. Either that, or he wanted to screw me. Your choice." Bad Bob's face went very still, and I knew I'd guessed right.
So did Moira. She surged to her feet. "Rahel! When I tell you, you're going to kill that bitch for me!"
One rule of commanding an embottled Djinn: Never give your orders angry. Moira had just forgotten to explicitly frame her order as to whom to kill. Bitch could apply to, oh, more than one of us standing here, and unless she caught that error later on, Moira was in for a nasty surprise.
I saw the light flare gold in Rahel's eyes, and I took a deep breath. Wait, I mouthed. The desire to strike was almost primal in her, and she knew she was close, so close to having the freedom to exact her revenge.
I knew I could push that button anytime I wanted to - but first, I had to endure a little more. Moira would think of her mistake if I gave her the time.
I needed to keep her engaged.
Rahel bent down and put her hands on my outstretched right leg, the nontentacled one.
Her opera gloves felt cool and smooth against my skin. "She did say to do this slowly," she said, and I let out a slow breath, then nodded. Rahel was telling me, without wasting words, that she had identified the gaps in Moira's original order. To a Djinn, the word slowly meant something entirely different than it did to a human. Their time-scales were vast, and that instruction was not nearly as specific as Moira might have believed it was.
Now it was up to us to hide that fact.
Rahel froze, with her hands on my leg. I waited. I didn't feel anything - no increase in pressure, no pain, nothing. She'd taken the freedom Moira's instructions offered to simply stretch this out so long that it might take a lifetime for her grip to increase its force enough to crack a bone, much less break it.
"Nice," I murmured, and got a brief, cold parting of her lips. Her teeth were filed to points. "Don't panic, whatever I do."
Rahel raised one arched eyebrow, and I began to struggle against her grip, panting - selling the idea that she was hurting me, when in fact she was doing nothing but pinning my right leg to the stone.
As performances go, this one probably was a bit over the top even for high school melodrama, but Moira lapped it up like cream. I tossed in some begging and bargaining. She loved it. Pretty girl, but either Bad Bob's genetics or Bad Bob's black tattoo had rendered her broken and sick. I remembered someone else like her - Kevin's stepmother, Yvette Prentiss. The avid shine in Moira's blue eyes as I threw myself around and shrieked in simulated agony was almost exactly the same.
Then again, Bad Bob had been involved with Yvette, too. I had the feeling all the sickness came from one poisoned well.
Behind her, seated on his plastic throne, Bad Bob looked less focused on my performance.
He scanned the horizons restlessly, frowning. His attention was on the effect, not the cause - he wanted my pain to draw my hypothetical rescue out from hiding.
I could have told him that it wasn't coming. Lewis was too careful for that.
I wasn't sure how long Rahel intended to carry on our little drama, but my voice was getting hoarse from all the screaming, and even Moira's attention was starting to wander.
When you're losing your torturer's focus, it's probably time to wrap up the play.
I let out a heartrending shriek of utter agony, and went pitifully limp, weeping like my heart would break. I didn't have to simulate being exhausted. Throwing yourself into something like that takes a sweaty, aching toll.
Ah, she liked that. I had Moira's full attention once more. "Rahel, break Joanne Baldwin's other leg," Moira said, and her pale tongue came out to lick her lips. "Do it just as slowly." Really, you can't spell sadist without the word sad . She'd just forgotten that my other leg was the one wrapped in Bad Bob's tentacle tether.
Rahel might not have normally been able to take the tentacle from my left leg, but she'd just been ordered to do something that allowed her to freely interpret method, and in one lightning-fast move, she reached down, plunged her fingers deep into the base of the tentacle, and ripped.
Oh Christ that hurt. The tentacle fought back, clamping down on my leg with all its muscular strength, and I felt things pop and move that really shouldn't be shifting around inside. Rahel ripped at it again, digging her sharp fingernails into dark flesh and ichor, and tore the thing loose from its roots deep in the rocks.
I rolled free, still wrapped in the black coil.
"What the hell are you doing?" Moira screamed. "Rahel, stop! " Rahel froze, still crouched over the thrashing remains of the tentacle. I had seconds, at most, to make this happen, and I knew it.
Strangely, Bad Bob hadn't reacted at all. I saw his face in a blur as I rolled behind the shelter of more stones, and it was impassive and watchful.
Assessing.
I didn't have time to try to remove the tentacle, but I didn't need to; cut off from its body, the thing was already dissolving into slime. When it drained away, it left my skin pallid, wrinkled, and torn, like old paper soaked for too long. I was losing blood, too much of it. I slammed Earth power through my nerves and pinched off broken capillaries, set up a healing matrix, and shut off the pain.
I couldn't afford it right now.
"Hey, Moira!" I yelled. "How old are you? Maybe nineteen? Twenty? I was about your age the first time your dad tried to screw me!"
No girl wants to hear that about her father, especially when it comes from the daughter-rival that Daddy loves more.
Like I said, I could push that button anytime I wanted.
"Rahel!" Moira's voice was a raw, vicious snarl. "Kill that bitch now !" Again with the lack of specificity.
I felt the energy shift, darken, and as I peered around the edge of the boulder, I saw Rahel streak straight for Moira.
It's possible that Moira might have recovered in time to order her to stop, although Rahel's attack clearly caught her totally by surprise.
To make damn sure it wouldn't fail, I reached out with a burst of power and filled Moira's mouth with seawater. She choked, gagged, and then it was too late. As the water rippled down from Moira's open lips, Rahel's claws sank deep into her throat.
In her thrashing, Moira let go of the wine bottle, and it rolled toward the edge of the boulder.
Bad Bob calmly reached over and caught it as it fell.
Shit.
Moira was sputtering blood, and her face was shockingly pale, her eyes desperate. Rahel remained where she was, claws in the girl's neck, and I saw her flash a look at Bad Bob.
He didn't react at all.
I was gripping the edge of the rock too hard, but I needed the sharp reminder of where I was, what the stakes had become.
Rahel ripped her claws free in a contemptuous gesture, and blood misted and spattered in an arc around her. She willed away the Miss America costume in favor of her more usual tailored pantsuit - in bloodred, not neon.
She turned her back before Moira's pallid, dying body toppled.
Bad Bob was holding her bottle, and unlike Moira, that evil old bastard knew every trick.
"Freeze until I tell you to move again, Rahel," he said. "That was a goddamn stupid waste." There was no genuine emotion left in him, not even for his own child. He saw it as a waste, all right - because Moira hadn't measured up, in the crisis. "Jo. Come out."
"Yeah, not likely!" I yelled. I tried to slow down my breathing, order my thoughts. "This isn't going well for you, Bob. Maybe you should just give up now." He laughed. "No."
He still had the book, and even though he hadn't bothered to bring it out yet, he also had the spear, the Unmaking. I hadn't even managed to free Rahel, dammit, and if his daughter's bloody end hadn't been enough to distract him, I couldn't think of much else to try.
"Fair enough," I said. "Want to call it a draw? Lose/lose?"
"I want to call the game," he said. "On account of the death of the world." I'd have liked to think he was just being grandiose, but there was a dark undertone to his voice now. Seeing Moira die had destroyed his fun, apparently; he was ready to just skip right to the end, which in his book was and then the universe blew up. The end.
"That really what you want?" I slowly got up, hopping on my good right leg, and braced myself on the boulder I'd been using for sparse cover. "Come on, Bob. If the world ends, so do you. I thought you wanted to destroy the Wardens and savor your victory first."
"As long as we all go out together, I'm fine with it," he said. I expected him to reach for the Ancestor Scriptures, but instead, he stretched out his hand, which disappeared in a tingle of blue sparks and reemerged holding a thick, matte-black cylinder like a spear, sharp on both ends.
The Unmaking. Its presence set up a horrible crawling repulsion in me, an itching all up and down my nervous system. I wasn't sure if the scientists were right, and it was stable antimatter, or if it was something even more exotic, like dark matter. Whatever it was, it did not have a place here, not in this world.
It was wrong.
It was also radioactive as hell, and it had almost destroyed me the last time I'd come anywhere near it. Now I was so closely connected to David, sharing the same well of power, that I didn't dare risk it again. If I was poisoned, he might be, too. And through him, half the Djinn.
Bad Bob rested one end of the shaft against the stones at his feet and leaned on it. The thing was a little taller than his head now, wickedly pointed. "You really bamboozled me, you know. I never thought you'd come alone. Never thought David would let you."
"He didn't," I said. "Nobody lets me do anything. You know that." He nodded, but the look in his eyes was far, far away. "I liked you," he said. "Back in the day. Before things went wrong."
"I liked you, too." I hadn't, exactly, but I'd admired him. We'd all admired him. "I know you took the Demon Mark on for the right reasons - you wanted to save lives. You just weren't strong enough, in the end."
"Neither were you," he said. We weren't accusing each other now; there wasn't any heat to this exchange at all, just simple fact. "You'd have hatched out a Demon in the end, if you hadn't gotten all tangled up with the Djinn. But look what it did for you - all the things you've seen, all you've done. I made you stronger." He wanted my approval.
I felt a hot breath of wind, then a gust off the ocean. Something was stirring out there.
It blew my hair into a writhing cloud, and waves crashed the rocks at my back, dousing me in spray.
"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger," I said. "And whatever does kill you - "
"Makes you invincible, if you're lucky," Bad Bob said, and smiled. I sensed a kind of good-bye in that smile, because it was real. Not a manic stretch of his lips, but a genuine expression of feeling and warmth. "You'll always be my kid, Jo. My crazy, brave, stupid kid." And he'd always, in some sense, be my father. My mentor. The man who'd pushed me over the edge and made me grow wings to survive. The most abusive bastard father in the world.
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
"Here it comes," Bad Bob said, and looked up.
Something fell out of the eye of the hurricane. It was like a glass ball, soap-bubble thin, and it hit the rocks of the island and smashed into smaller spheres, each of which bounced and rolled over the rocks, uncoiled, and stood on two or four legs.
Crystalline skeletons, creatures out of drug dreams, that vanished like ghosts against the sunlight.
The Sentinels - those still standing - were unprepared. A few of them defended themselves, but most died, ripped apart on the rocks. My old colleagues, who'd lost their way and followed a false messiah.
I couldn't help them. Worse: I didn't want to help them.
Here at the end of the world, we were all going to have to settle up our debts.
"They're parasites," Bad Bob said. "Like dust mites. Bugs crawling through a crack in the wall. Vicious little things, though."
"Too boring." She wasn't even looking at me; she pulled free of Bad Bob and walked a slow circle around Rahel, inspecting her Miss America impersonation. "Make her work for it."
"Hmmmm. There's an idea. Two birds and one very big stone." Bad Bob slammed the book closed and put it under his arm. "All right, then. Let's see what you can do, my child. Impress me."
Moira sat down on a handy boulder, open wine bottle in both hands on her lap, and tossed glossy red hair back over her shoulders. "Rahel," she said. "I want you to break Joanne Baldwin's right leg in two. Use your hands. Do it now." She knew the rules of commanding a Djinn - be specific about intent, method, and time frame. And I could see that they'd had plenty of practice with Rahel - she hadn't gained that traumatized fury without cause.
"Do it slowly," Moira said. "Make her feel every second of it." Rahel's eyes focused on me, and she began walking across the stones toward where I sat.
Not a hell of a lot I could do to stop her; if I tried to resist, my other leg was sure to be crushed, and maybe even pulled off by this tentacle thing Bad Bob was using for a tether.
She still looked ridiculous in her getup, but I didn't let that fool me for a second. I'd seen the Djinn in the grip of truly evil people, and they were no more to be reasoned with than the blade of a knife.
I looked past Rahel at Moira. "I guess you hate me for being the daughter he never had.
Daddy didn't trust you, did he? That's why he came after me in the first place. Because you weren't measuring up. Either that, or he wanted to screw me. Your choice." Bad Bob's face went very still, and I knew I'd guessed right.
So did Moira. She surged to her feet. "Rahel! When I tell you, you're going to kill that bitch for me!"
One rule of commanding an embottled Djinn: Never give your orders angry. Moira had just forgotten to explicitly frame her order as to whom to kill. Bitch could apply to, oh, more than one of us standing here, and unless she caught that error later on, Moira was in for a nasty surprise.
I saw the light flare gold in Rahel's eyes, and I took a deep breath. Wait, I mouthed. The desire to strike was almost primal in her, and she knew she was close, so close to having the freedom to exact her revenge.
I knew I could push that button anytime I wanted to - but first, I had to endure a little more. Moira would think of her mistake if I gave her the time.
I needed to keep her engaged.
Rahel bent down and put her hands on my outstretched right leg, the nontentacled one.
Her opera gloves felt cool and smooth against my skin. "She did say to do this slowly," she said, and I let out a slow breath, then nodded. Rahel was telling me, without wasting words, that she had identified the gaps in Moira's original order. To a Djinn, the word slowly meant something entirely different than it did to a human. Their time-scales were vast, and that instruction was not nearly as specific as Moira might have believed it was.
Now it was up to us to hide that fact.
Rahel froze, with her hands on my leg. I waited. I didn't feel anything - no increase in pressure, no pain, nothing. She'd taken the freedom Moira's instructions offered to simply stretch this out so long that it might take a lifetime for her grip to increase its force enough to crack a bone, much less break it.
"Nice," I murmured, and got a brief, cold parting of her lips. Her teeth were filed to points. "Don't panic, whatever I do."
Rahel raised one arched eyebrow, and I began to struggle against her grip, panting - selling the idea that she was hurting me, when in fact she was doing nothing but pinning my right leg to the stone.
As performances go, this one probably was a bit over the top even for high school melodrama, but Moira lapped it up like cream. I tossed in some begging and bargaining. She loved it. Pretty girl, but either Bad Bob's genetics or Bad Bob's black tattoo had rendered her broken and sick. I remembered someone else like her - Kevin's stepmother, Yvette Prentiss. The avid shine in Moira's blue eyes as I threw myself around and shrieked in simulated agony was almost exactly the same.
Then again, Bad Bob had been involved with Yvette, too. I had the feeling all the sickness came from one poisoned well.
Behind her, seated on his plastic throne, Bad Bob looked less focused on my performance.
He scanned the horizons restlessly, frowning. His attention was on the effect, not the cause - he wanted my pain to draw my hypothetical rescue out from hiding.
I could have told him that it wasn't coming. Lewis was too careful for that.
I wasn't sure how long Rahel intended to carry on our little drama, but my voice was getting hoarse from all the screaming, and even Moira's attention was starting to wander.
When you're losing your torturer's focus, it's probably time to wrap up the play.
I let out a heartrending shriek of utter agony, and went pitifully limp, weeping like my heart would break. I didn't have to simulate being exhausted. Throwing yourself into something like that takes a sweaty, aching toll.
Ah, she liked that. I had Moira's full attention once more. "Rahel, break Joanne Baldwin's other leg," Moira said, and her pale tongue came out to lick her lips. "Do it just as slowly." Really, you can't spell sadist without the word sad . She'd just forgotten that my other leg was the one wrapped in Bad Bob's tentacle tether.
Rahel might not have normally been able to take the tentacle from my left leg, but she'd just been ordered to do something that allowed her to freely interpret method, and in one lightning-fast move, she reached down, plunged her fingers deep into the base of the tentacle, and ripped.
Oh Christ that hurt. The tentacle fought back, clamping down on my leg with all its muscular strength, and I felt things pop and move that really shouldn't be shifting around inside. Rahel ripped at it again, digging her sharp fingernails into dark flesh and ichor, and tore the thing loose from its roots deep in the rocks.
I rolled free, still wrapped in the black coil.
"What the hell are you doing?" Moira screamed. "Rahel, stop! " Rahel froze, still crouched over the thrashing remains of the tentacle. I had seconds, at most, to make this happen, and I knew it.
Strangely, Bad Bob hadn't reacted at all. I saw his face in a blur as I rolled behind the shelter of more stones, and it was impassive and watchful.
Assessing.
I didn't have time to try to remove the tentacle, but I didn't need to; cut off from its body, the thing was already dissolving into slime. When it drained away, it left my skin pallid, wrinkled, and torn, like old paper soaked for too long. I was losing blood, too much of it. I slammed Earth power through my nerves and pinched off broken capillaries, set up a healing matrix, and shut off the pain.
I couldn't afford it right now.
"Hey, Moira!" I yelled. "How old are you? Maybe nineteen? Twenty? I was about your age the first time your dad tried to screw me!"
No girl wants to hear that about her father, especially when it comes from the daughter-rival that Daddy loves more.
Like I said, I could push that button anytime I wanted.
"Rahel!" Moira's voice was a raw, vicious snarl. "Kill that bitch now !" Again with the lack of specificity.
I felt the energy shift, darken, and as I peered around the edge of the boulder, I saw Rahel streak straight for Moira.
It's possible that Moira might have recovered in time to order her to stop, although Rahel's attack clearly caught her totally by surprise.
To make damn sure it wouldn't fail, I reached out with a burst of power and filled Moira's mouth with seawater. She choked, gagged, and then it was too late. As the water rippled down from Moira's open lips, Rahel's claws sank deep into her throat.
In her thrashing, Moira let go of the wine bottle, and it rolled toward the edge of the boulder.
Bad Bob calmly reached over and caught it as it fell.
Shit.
Moira was sputtering blood, and her face was shockingly pale, her eyes desperate. Rahel remained where she was, claws in the girl's neck, and I saw her flash a look at Bad Bob.
He didn't react at all.
I was gripping the edge of the rock too hard, but I needed the sharp reminder of where I was, what the stakes had become.
Rahel ripped her claws free in a contemptuous gesture, and blood misted and spattered in an arc around her. She willed away the Miss America costume in favor of her more usual tailored pantsuit - in bloodred, not neon.
She turned her back before Moira's pallid, dying body toppled.
Bad Bob was holding her bottle, and unlike Moira, that evil old bastard knew every trick.
"Freeze until I tell you to move again, Rahel," he said. "That was a goddamn stupid waste." There was no genuine emotion left in him, not even for his own child. He saw it as a waste, all right - because Moira hadn't measured up, in the crisis. "Jo. Come out."
"Yeah, not likely!" I yelled. I tried to slow down my breathing, order my thoughts. "This isn't going well for you, Bob. Maybe you should just give up now." He laughed. "No."
He still had the book, and even though he hadn't bothered to bring it out yet, he also had the spear, the Unmaking. I hadn't even managed to free Rahel, dammit, and if his daughter's bloody end hadn't been enough to distract him, I couldn't think of much else to try.
"Fair enough," I said. "Want to call it a draw? Lose/lose?"
"I want to call the game," he said. "On account of the death of the world." I'd have liked to think he was just being grandiose, but there was a dark undertone to his voice now. Seeing Moira die had destroyed his fun, apparently; he was ready to just skip right to the end, which in his book was and then the universe blew up. The end.
"That really what you want?" I slowly got up, hopping on my good right leg, and braced myself on the boulder I'd been using for sparse cover. "Come on, Bob. If the world ends, so do you. I thought you wanted to destroy the Wardens and savor your victory first."
"As long as we all go out together, I'm fine with it," he said. I expected him to reach for the Ancestor Scriptures, but instead, he stretched out his hand, which disappeared in a tingle of blue sparks and reemerged holding a thick, matte-black cylinder like a spear, sharp on both ends.
The Unmaking. Its presence set up a horrible crawling repulsion in me, an itching all up and down my nervous system. I wasn't sure if the scientists were right, and it was stable antimatter, or if it was something even more exotic, like dark matter. Whatever it was, it did not have a place here, not in this world.
It was wrong.
It was also radioactive as hell, and it had almost destroyed me the last time I'd come anywhere near it. Now I was so closely connected to David, sharing the same well of power, that I didn't dare risk it again. If I was poisoned, he might be, too. And through him, half the Djinn.
Bad Bob rested one end of the shaft against the stones at his feet and leaned on it. The thing was a little taller than his head now, wickedly pointed. "You really bamboozled me, you know. I never thought you'd come alone. Never thought David would let you."
"He didn't," I said. "Nobody lets me do anything. You know that." He nodded, but the look in his eyes was far, far away. "I liked you," he said. "Back in the day. Before things went wrong."
"I liked you, too." I hadn't, exactly, but I'd admired him. We'd all admired him. "I know you took the Demon Mark on for the right reasons - you wanted to save lives. You just weren't strong enough, in the end."
"Neither were you," he said. We weren't accusing each other now; there wasn't any heat to this exchange at all, just simple fact. "You'd have hatched out a Demon in the end, if you hadn't gotten all tangled up with the Djinn. But look what it did for you - all the things you've seen, all you've done. I made you stronger." He wanted my approval.
I felt a hot breath of wind, then a gust off the ocean. Something was stirring out there.
It blew my hair into a writhing cloud, and waves crashed the rocks at my back, dousing me in spray.
"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger," I said. "And whatever does kill you - "
"Makes you invincible, if you're lucky," Bad Bob said, and smiled. I sensed a kind of good-bye in that smile, because it was real. Not a manic stretch of his lips, but a genuine expression of feeling and warmth. "You'll always be my kid, Jo. My crazy, brave, stupid kid." And he'd always, in some sense, be my father. My mentor. The man who'd pushed me over the edge and made me grow wings to survive. The most abusive bastard father in the world.
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
"Here it comes," Bad Bob said, and looked up.
Something fell out of the eye of the hurricane. It was like a glass ball, soap-bubble thin, and it hit the rocks of the island and smashed into smaller spheres, each of which bounced and rolled over the rocks, uncoiled, and stood on two or four legs.
Crystalline skeletons, creatures out of drug dreams, that vanished like ghosts against the sunlight.
The Sentinels - those still standing - were unprepared. A few of them defended themselves, but most died, ripped apart on the rocks. My old colleagues, who'd lost their way and followed a false messiah.
I couldn't help them. Worse: I didn't want to help them.
Here at the end of the world, we were all going to have to settle up our debts.
"They're parasites," Bad Bob said. "Like dust mites. Bugs crawling through a crack in the wall. Vicious little things, though."
