Then it began to shake in my hands. Not vibrate. Shake.
And then it exploded.
Shards of it flew everywhere - powdery bits, larger fragments. Some hit the rocks around us and gouged out massive craters as they skidded. The powder whipped away on the wind, a radioactive cloud that glowed hot green in the aetheric.
And one fragment - the largest one - flew straight up, into the eye of the storm.
It shrieked its way through the portal in our world, then the aetheric, and then through every plane stacked above it, ripping a hole just large enough for a single drop of darkness to squeeze through.
It trembled pendulously, then fell from the portal - a dozen feet across, maybe.
Directly above us.
I lunged toward David, trying to push him out of the way. He did the same, trying to save me.
We collided at the center, and the black drop came crashing down on us.
I wrapped my arms around David, felt his go around me, and power flared silver through and around us.
Then the darkness hit us, and the world ended.
I never expected to wake up, and I was really sorry I did. I must have been lying on the rocks for hours, cold and wet and cramped; my muscles were so stiff and strained that I whimpered even before trying to shift my position.
Overhead was a clear night sky, thick with constellations, and a bright yellow moon, three-quarters full.
Wind rustled over the island.
"David?"
No answer. I pushed myself up to a painful, staggering walk. In the moonlight, I saw nothing but black rock and sea spray.
"David?"
There was a body lying a few feet away, half hidden behind a boulder.
Bad Bob, not David. He'd died hard and ugly. Something had blown his torso in two, dividing him neatly in half from the crown of his head to somewhere around his navel. He'd been dead for hours. The blood was mostly dried on the stones around him, and he smelled lightly of decay.
More dead Sentinels littered the landscape. Moira was still draped over the stones where Rahel had left her. Lars Petrie's severed head rocked gently in the tropical wind.
There was a cruise ship standing off the island, all its lights ablaze, but it was too far to swim, feeling as cramped and cold as I already was. God, I felt awful.
It was a mystery to me how I was still alive, or why.
"David?" I fumbled around, trying to find that silvery cord that connected us on the aetheric.
I couldn't find it. Or the aetheric.
I'd gone completely headblind; I was unable to feel anything beyond my own normal human senses.
I'd lost my access to power.
"David!" I screamed it in panic this time, desperate to find him. I felt like I was suffocating, trapped inside my own skin.
So alone. I scrambled over rocks and bodies, looking for him with single-minded intensity, getting more and more panicked with every silent second.
I found him sitting on a boulder at the very tip of the island. He was naked and shivering.
"David? Oh God - honey - "
He was different. Very different.
When he raised his head, I saw that his eyes had gone plain brown.
Human brown.
I crouched down beside him and wrapped him in my arms. He tried to speak, but nothing came out. "My God. What happened to us?"
He couldn't tell me.
I needed to signal the ship anchored out there, let them know we were still alive, but when I reached out for a spark of power, I found nothing. Nothing at all. Not a single tingle of energy that wasn't fueled by the rapidly diminishing level of my own blood sugar.
I had no supernatural power at all.
Neither did David, as far as I could tell.
He got over a little bit of his violent shivering - enough to talk again. "B-b-black corner," he whispered.
I knew what that meant. There'd been damage to the Earth Herself - damage that had destroyed the ability of the planet to channel energy to this part of the world. Most black corners were small; a few measured as much as a city block, but those were rare.
This one... there was no way to know how far it extended, but inside it Wardens wouldn't have power, and Djinn wouldn't be anything more than human - helpless, and ultimately dying as their stored energy ran out.
We had to get off the island. Now .
I gathered up dried palm husks and whatever I could scavenge from the bodies and ripped tents of the Sentinels that was burnable. I found some waterproof matches in a backpack and got a signal fire going. It wouldn't burn for long, but it didn't need to, and while it was burning, I wrapped David in the cast-off clothes of dead men and sat with him at the fire, trying to get him warm enough to stop shaking.
It seemed to take forever for a boat to arrive. When it did, it was full of Wardens, and Lewis was the first to step off the craft and onto the rocks.
He didn't exactly rush to our aid. He looked ill, and almost fell as he made his slow, careful way over the rocks. He wasn't the only one. All the rest of the Wardens looked just as bad.
"What's happened?" I asked. "Lewis?"
He coughed, as if something was broken inside. He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth and leaned his weight against a boulder as if he was too weak to keep standing.
"When the portal leaked, you and David took the hit. You absorbed it and stopped it from going any deeper into the earth. If you hadn't, we wouldn't be here right now." He stopped to cough again, and this time I wasn't sure he'd stop. When he finally did, his voice was scratchy and thin. "But because you were joined when you took the hit, the shock bounced both ways. Through the Djinn, and through the Wardens." Oh dear God."How bad is it?"
"It's turned this whole part of the ocean into a giant black corner," Lewis said. "We've got to get under way. If we run the engines hard, we might make it out of the dead zone before the Djinn start to die."
David raised his head for the first time. "Won't help us," he said. "You and me." He nodded to me, and I knelt next to him, my knees digging painfully into the edges of the stones.
"What are you talking about?" I asked. "What about us?"
"The blast - had to shift everything away to keep us alive - " Lewis was getting it now, that bad feeling. I saw it as he straightened and looked more intensely at the two of us. "What is he talking about?" David grabbed my arms. "Our powers are gone," he said. "Had to destroy them. Had to." I wasn't sure I could even dare to speak. I finally, slowly shook my head. I wanted to reject this. I wanted to believe that we were just wounded, maybe, temporarily stunned.
Something.
"You mean the impact left the two of you human," Lewis said. "No powers. Nothing but - human."
David nodded, relief flooding over his face. He hadn't been able to put enough words together, in his shattered state, to make sense out of it.
Human.
The two of us. Human.
I was suddenly aware of him in ways I'd never been before - of anxiety that I'd never felt before.
He was mortal. And I couldn't protect him, or myself, from anything that could fly at us - weather, fire, earth. Demons. I couldn't even bat away a simple tornado.
We were fragile.
"No," he whispered, and put the warmth of his palm against my face. "No, think it through, Jo."
It was hard to push past the fear, the knowledge that we were so much at risk, but I looked into his eyes for a long moment, and then I saw what he meant.
We were both human.
We could have a life together. A normal life.
We could have children of our own together.
"But - " My trembling fingers touched and traced his lips. The same lips, and different.
"But you used to be - "
"I used to be human," he said. "Long, long ago. And if I have to be human now, I can't imagine a better partner for my life."
He kissed me. It was a real, human kiss, intimate in ways that even our most amazing kisses hadn't been, somehow. Bordered by our own awareness of mortality.
"Hate to interrupt this tender moment," Lewis said, "but we're fucked if we stay here. And by the way, your powers aren't gone. They're still out there, somewhere. Basic conservation of energy."
We both looked at him. I saw a weary flash of utter hatred in David's face. No, being human hadn't taken away any of that antipathy. Definitely not. "Someone else inherited our powers."
"The problem is we don't know where they went," Lewis said. "Or who's got them. If we survive outrunning the black corner, we've still got to find out where your powers went.
Worst-case Warden scenario - someone just woke up with enough power to destroy half the world and hasn't got a clue what to do with it."
"And the Djinn?"
"Ashan," he said."Worst-case scenario is that Ashan is now the sole Conduit for all of the Djinn, and he's going to be very, very pissed off about Wardens in general." I pulled David to his feet, and realized that I could barely walk. My left leg and arm were covered with the scars that hadn't had time to heal since the battle. Nothing was bleeding, but everything hurt, and hurt badly. I fought back tears and braced David as he took careful, halting steps.
He stopped, breathing hard, shaking his head. Overwhelmed.
"Hey," I said, and grabbed his face in both my hands. "Don't you give up on me now. We're alive. We're together. Don't let him get to you. Our worst-case scenario is that we end up together. Human. Alive. That doesn't sound so bad, right?" He nodded, and a convulsive shudder went through him. He put his arms around me, and his head rested on my shoulder. The last of the Wardens boarded the rescue craft, and then it was our turn.
I didn't want to let go.
"Fides mihi,"he said. "I said that, didn't I? To get you back in time to save both of us?"
"I will always trust you." I kissed him gently on cheeks that tasted of sweat and sea. "And I will always bring you home, my love."
Fides mihi.
Now I had to make it count.
And then it exploded.
Shards of it flew everywhere - powdery bits, larger fragments. Some hit the rocks around us and gouged out massive craters as they skidded. The powder whipped away on the wind, a radioactive cloud that glowed hot green in the aetheric.
And one fragment - the largest one - flew straight up, into the eye of the storm.
It shrieked its way through the portal in our world, then the aetheric, and then through every plane stacked above it, ripping a hole just large enough for a single drop of darkness to squeeze through.
It trembled pendulously, then fell from the portal - a dozen feet across, maybe.
Directly above us.
I lunged toward David, trying to push him out of the way. He did the same, trying to save me.
We collided at the center, and the black drop came crashing down on us.
I wrapped my arms around David, felt his go around me, and power flared silver through and around us.
Then the darkness hit us, and the world ended.
I never expected to wake up, and I was really sorry I did. I must have been lying on the rocks for hours, cold and wet and cramped; my muscles were so stiff and strained that I whimpered even before trying to shift my position.
Overhead was a clear night sky, thick with constellations, and a bright yellow moon, three-quarters full.
Wind rustled over the island.
"David?"
No answer. I pushed myself up to a painful, staggering walk. In the moonlight, I saw nothing but black rock and sea spray.
"David?"
There was a body lying a few feet away, half hidden behind a boulder.
Bad Bob, not David. He'd died hard and ugly. Something had blown his torso in two, dividing him neatly in half from the crown of his head to somewhere around his navel. He'd been dead for hours. The blood was mostly dried on the stones around him, and he smelled lightly of decay.
More dead Sentinels littered the landscape. Moira was still draped over the stones where Rahel had left her. Lars Petrie's severed head rocked gently in the tropical wind.
There was a cruise ship standing off the island, all its lights ablaze, but it was too far to swim, feeling as cramped and cold as I already was. God, I felt awful.
It was a mystery to me how I was still alive, or why.
"David?" I fumbled around, trying to find that silvery cord that connected us on the aetheric.
I couldn't find it. Or the aetheric.
I'd gone completely headblind; I was unable to feel anything beyond my own normal human senses.
I'd lost my access to power.
"David!" I screamed it in panic this time, desperate to find him. I felt like I was suffocating, trapped inside my own skin.
So alone. I scrambled over rocks and bodies, looking for him with single-minded intensity, getting more and more panicked with every silent second.
I found him sitting on a boulder at the very tip of the island. He was naked and shivering.
"David? Oh God - honey - "
He was different. Very different.
When he raised his head, I saw that his eyes had gone plain brown.
Human brown.
I crouched down beside him and wrapped him in my arms. He tried to speak, but nothing came out. "My God. What happened to us?"
He couldn't tell me.
I needed to signal the ship anchored out there, let them know we were still alive, but when I reached out for a spark of power, I found nothing. Nothing at all. Not a single tingle of energy that wasn't fueled by the rapidly diminishing level of my own blood sugar.
I had no supernatural power at all.
Neither did David, as far as I could tell.
He got over a little bit of his violent shivering - enough to talk again. "B-b-black corner," he whispered.
I knew what that meant. There'd been damage to the Earth Herself - damage that had destroyed the ability of the planet to channel energy to this part of the world. Most black corners were small; a few measured as much as a city block, but those were rare.
This one... there was no way to know how far it extended, but inside it Wardens wouldn't have power, and Djinn wouldn't be anything more than human - helpless, and ultimately dying as their stored energy ran out.
We had to get off the island. Now .
I gathered up dried palm husks and whatever I could scavenge from the bodies and ripped tents of the Sentinels that was burnable. I found some waterproof matches in a backpack and got a signal fire going. It wouldn't burn for long, but it didn't need to, and while it was burning, I wrapped David in the cast-off clothes of dead men and sat with him at the fire, trying to get him warm enough to stop shaking.
It seemed to take forever for a boat to arrive. When it did, it was full of Wardens, and Lewis was the first to step off the craft and onto the rocks.
He didn't exactly rush to our aid. He looked ill, and almost fell as he made his slow, careful way over the rocks. He wasn't the only one. All the rest of the Wardens looked just as bad.
"What's happened?" I asked. "Lewis?"
He coughed, as if something was broken inside. He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth and leaned his weight against a boulder as if he was too weak to keep standing.
"When the portal leaked, you and David took the hit. You absorbed it and stopped it from going any deeper into the earth. If you hadn't, we wouldn't be here right now." He stopped to cough again, and this time I wasn't sure he'd stop. When he finally did, his voice was scratchy and thin. "But because you were joined when you took the hit, the shock bounced both ways. Through the Djinn, and through the Wardens." Oh dear God."How bad is it?"
"It's turned this whole part of the ocean into a giant black corner," Lewis said. "We've got to get under way. If we run the engines hard, we might make it out of the dead zone before the Djinn start to die."
David raised his head for the first time. "Won't help us," he said. "You and me." He nodded to me, and I knelt next to him, my knees digging painfully into the edges of the stones.
"What are you talking about?" I asked. "What about us?"
"The blast - had to shift everything away to keep us alive - " Lewis was getting it now, that bad feeling. I saw it as he straightened and looked more intensely at the two of us. "What is he talking about?" David grabbed my arms. "Our powers are gone," he said. "Had to destroy them. Had to." I wasn't sure I could even dare to speak. I finally, slowly shook my head. I wanted to reject this. I wanted to believe that we were just wounded, maybe, temporarily stunned.
Something.
"You mean the impact left the two of you human," Lewis said. "No powers. Nothing but - human."
David nodded, relief flooding over his face. He hadn't been able to put enough words together, in his shattered state, to make sense out of it.
Human.
The two of us. Human.
I was suddenly aware of him in ways I'd never been before - of anxiety that I'd never felt before.
He was mortal. And I couldn't protect him, or myself, from anything that could fly at us - weather, fire, earth. Demons. I couldn't even bat away a simple tornado.
We were fragile.
"No," he whispered, and put the warmth of his palm against my face. "No, think it through, Jo."
It was hard to push past the fear, the knowledge that we were so much at risk, but I looked into his eyes for a long moment, and then I saw what he meant.
We were both human.
We could have a life together. A normal life.
We could have children of our own together.
"But - " My trembling fingers touched and traced his lips. The same lips, and different.
"But you used to be - "
"I used to be human," he said. "Long, long ago. And if I have to be human now, I can't imagine a better partner for my life."
He kissed me. It was a real, human kiss, intimate in ways that even our most amazing kisses hadn't been, somehow. Bordered by our own awareness of mortality.
"Hate to interrupt this tender moment," Lewis said, "but we're fucked if we stay here. And by the way, your powers aren't gone. They're still out there, somewhere. Basic conservation of energy."
We both looked at him. I saw a weary flash of utter hatred in David's face. No, being human hadn't taken away any of that antipathy. Definitely not. "Someone else inherited our powers."
"The problem is we don't know where they went," Lewis said. "Or who's got them. If we survive outrunning the black corner, we've still got to find out where your powers went.
Worst-case Warden scenario - someone just woke up with enough power to destroy half the world and hasn't got a clue what to do with it."
"And the Djinn?"
"Ashan," he said."Worst-case scenario is that Ashan is now the sole Conduit for all of the Djinn, and he's going to be very, very pissed off about Wardens in general." I pulled David to his feet, and realized that I could barely walk. My left leg and arm were covered with the scars that hadn't had time to heal since the battle. Nothing was bleeding, but everything hurt, and hurt badly. I fought back tears and braced David as he took careful, halting steps.
He stopped, breathing hard, shaking his head. Overwhelmed.
"Hey," I said, and grabbed his face in both my hands. "Don't you give up on me now. We're alive. We're together. Don't let him get to you. Our worst-case scenario is that we end up together. Human. Alive. That doesn't sound so bad, right?" He nodded, and a convulsive shudder went through him. He put his arms around me, and his head rested on my shoulder. The last of the Wardens boarded the rescue craft, and then it was our turn.
I didn't want to let go.
"Fides mihi,"he said. "I said that, didn't I? To get you back in time to save both of us?"
"I will always trust you." I kissed him gently on cheeks that tasted of sweat and sea. "And I will always bring you home, my love."
Fides mihi.
Now I had to make it count.
