Gale Force

had to deal with himself. No platitude was going to help, no matter how sincere.

“Kevin.” I took one of his hands and drew it out of its tight ball; it stayed tense in mine, trembling, ready to yank away at a second’s notice. “Before Paul showed up, they may have told you some things. Something that could help us.”

He was already shaking his head. “I’d have said if they spilled their guts, okay? But they didn’t. They just talked about what a bitch you were, and how you were willing to fuck over the Wardens for your boyfriend. . . .”

“Finally, someone you could agree with,” I said. He shot me a covert look, almost hidden by his dangling, shaggy hair.

“No,” he said, “I don’t. Not after I saw what they wanted to do.”

I felt a shiver crawl hand-over-hand up the bones of my spine. “What did you see?”

“They were going to torture him,” Kevin said, glancing up at David, then away. “Make him tell everything about the Djinn. About the Oracles. About how to destroy them.”

“They really are crazy,” Lewis said grimly. “Destroying the Djinn and the Oracles would destroy us. There’s no way humanity, or anything else alive on this planet, would survive a catastrophe like that.”

We thought of it at the same time, our gazes locking over the top of Kevin’s bowed head. David must have as well, because he spun toward us.

“He knows that,” I said. “Bad Bob knows that. He’s not stupid enough to assume anything else. So why would he want to destroy the human race?”

“You know,” David said.

“It’s not Bad Bob,” I said. “Is it?”

“No,” Lewis agreed. “I think it’s a Demon wearing his skin.”

Unfortunately, I had way too much personal experience with Demons. Most recently, I’d seen the damage they could do once they took on a human form. I thought the Wardens had been pretty successful about purging anyone from their ranks who carried a Demon Mark—a larval form of a Demon that granted the carrier more-than- normal strength and energy, almost like having a secret Djinn under your control. But you could carry a Demon Mark only so long before it began to corrupt you from within, and if you wanted to survive, you had to get rid of it by passing it to someone else.

Someone else more powerful, because the Demon Mark was only attracted to power. It traded up.

I’d been the unfortunate recipient of such a thing, at Bad Bob’s hands. I hadn’t understood, at the time, that he’d been paying me a kind of backhanded compliment. . . . I hadn’t known, then, how really strong I was.

He had. He’d chosen me for just that reason.

It had killed him in leaving his body—he’d waited too long, hung on to his power until it was nested deep inside. I thought about his cold body lying in a grave somewhere, and wondered if his flesh was still there, peaceful and empty. Maybe what was walking around right now was Bad Bob reanimated; maybe it was just a semblance, like the one Rahel had worn to play Cherise. Either way, it wasn’t Bad Bob on the inside. Couldn’t be. But if it was a full-grown, fully formed Demon, it had powers I couldn’t begin to understand.

“The antimatter,” I said. “The Demon produces it, secretes it, something like that. That’s why there’s no machinery, no plant they’ve had to set up. That’s why we couldn’t find any kind of permanent base for the Sentinels—they don’t need a plant, not even a hidden one. Because he just . . . makes it.” Like sweat, or blood, or other bodily fluids. It was the very essence of why the Demon didn’t belong here; it literally destroyed the world around it, just by being. The human shell kept it contained, like a space suit insulating an astronaut from the cold of space.

If it left that shell . . .

I remembered what Jerome Silverton had said about the black shard we’d found embedded in the dead Djinn. One kilogram of antimatter annihilating itself is supposed to produce about 180 petajoules of energy. The spear I’d seen Bad Bob use to kill Ortega had been at least five times the size of the shard we’d originally found. Catastrophic would be charitable.

The Demon was hunting us. Hunting Djinn, using the Djinn to power the growth of the antimatter weapon. Once it was strong enough, what would he do with it? Where would he—

“The Oracles,” I said. “What if he goes after the Oracles?”

David was already gone when I turned toward him; a blurred motion was all that was left. Imara. My daughter was in Sedona, locked for all time in one location. Unable to flee.

I sat with Lewis, holding Kevin’s shaking hand, and waiting for the end of the world.

The end of the world didn’t come before dinner, anyway.

As the hours went by, the FBI decided they’d have a better chance of containing the situation—ha!—if they ejected those of us not wearing three letters or badges on our outfits. That went for the Wardens, the Ma’at, and would have gone for the Djinn, had any been present. I’d stood witness to the FBI forensic team taking Ortega down from the wall, then interring him in a metal casket that was marked with all kinds of warning signs. Somehow, I felt someone should watch. He’d been a kind man, a peculiar sort of Djinn, and he hadn’t deserved this kind of ending.

Lewis, Kevin, and I were bundled into an FBI helicopter—not my favorite form of transportation— and flown to the Miami field office, where we were left in a severe-looking room for a few more hours.

Dinner was served, and apart from its being warm and edible, I don’t remember much about it. We barely talked. There didn’t seem to be all that much to say.

When David reappeared, he came with reinforcements—six Djinn. One of them was Venna, which made me smile in relief; one was the tough-looking specimen David had identified to me as Roy, when we’d seen him earlier—he’d been Rahel’s hypothetical backup. I wondered where he’d been when he was needed the most.

Zenaya was the third. I didn’t know the other three, but they all had the otherworldly grace and glitter that I associated with the most powerful of the Djinn, Old or New.

“The Oracles are protected,” David said. “Ashan’s taking care of it, and Wardens we trust have been assigned alongside them as backup.”

“He won’t like that,” I noted.

“He doesn’t have to like it. I’ve explained the necessity. ” There was a cold, angry shimmer in David’s eyes, and I wondered exactly how civil that discussion had been. “We intend to go and get Rahel.”

“You can’t,” I said. I was calm about it, and authoritative, but all too aware that David might not be in any mood to listen to reason. “She’s bait. You go charging in there, that’s exactly what they want— especially you, Conduit Boy.”

He didn’t answer me, but he didn’t argue, either. He was biding his time. I knew I couldn’t get him to just stand by and risk Rahel’s life, not under these circumstances. Time was running out. If I wanted to avoid watching David throw his life away, I needed a plan, and a damn good one.

And all of a sudden, looking at him, I had one. Granted, I was operating on little sleep, too much adrenaline, and next to coma-levels of caffeine imbalance,but it sounded good. I bit my lip, running it over in my head, and made a hold on gesture to David as I beckoned Lewis toward a convenient corner of the room.

“What is it?” he asked. He sounded just as stressed as I felt.

“I think I know what will bring them out in the open. We need to get the Sentinels to come after us again, not the other way around. If we allow them to choose the ground—”

“Yeah, I get it. The Djinn don’t even know how much of a disadvantage they have.” Lewis leaned closer. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? Your idea?”

“Pretty damn crazy.”

“Tell.”

I did. Crazy didn’t really exactly cover it, as I listened to the words tumble out of my mouth. Insane, that was closer. Also, stupidly suicidal, but that was par for the course with me. At least it would be consistent.

Lewis stared at me as if he couldn’t quite believe what I’d said, and in truth, I wasn’t sure if I was believing