Cape Storm

forces won’t balance. This deck will collapse. The ship will sink.”

Instead of merely being frozen, the Wardens were in danger of being smashed, because there was a force below us, rising up from the blackest, coldest depths of the ocean . . . and it was pulling us down.

That was why the ship was riding low in the water. It was caught in a downward suction, like a ball at the end of a vacuum hose.

If the Djinn let go, it wasn’t just the team of Wardens who were fatally screwed.

We all were.

Good. This time, the darkness pooled in my guts, warm and velvety, and I had to choke back a sob. It would be so easy to let go. So utterly easy.

There was a grating sound in the hold, something scraping over metal. I crouched down, making myself as small a target as possible, as the voice echoed off of metal, wood, and immobile bodies. I heard the shuffle of footsteps, and saw an odd shape moving among the stacked cargo and luggage. It had the outward shine of a human form, but it was like a superimposition—beneath it lay something dark and twisted.

The skin. It had created some kind of decoy, which was what the pile of glass was not far from Kevin, for the Wardens to chase while the rest of the plan had gone into motion.

Great. We might have killed the powerful one first, but this one was the clever one.

The skin ducked behind a parked, covered Porsche, then flitted around some hanging chains and weights, more like nightmare than human form.

It paused long enough in the glow of an emergency light for me to get a good look at it. The body it wore was one of those fresh-faced kids who looked like they’d be more at home in a television ad for soap than running around murdering people. He was almost as pretty as a Djinn.

“Angelo,” I said. “Angelo Marconi?”

It just looked at me. I could see now that Lyle was right—it was literally just skin, stretched like a Halloween mask over the darkness inside.

Like you, laughed my dark side. Like you are becoming. Not long now . . .

The skin flitted out of the light and into the darkness.

I had no idea what I was going to do if it came to power-on-power, because I was barely staying on my feet.

Ten feet away, the frozen statue garden of Wardens and Djinn glowed steadily in my night vision. I caught a moving glow, much cooler than the others, blue instead of yellow or white.

Angelo darted into the middle of the standing figures. I switched back to regular sight, and saw him put his hands on one of the Djinn. One of Ashan’s, who snarled and struck back with invisible force that bounced off of Angelo’s body like the impact from a water balloon.

Angelo’s skin blackened, crisped, and flaked away, revealing the crystal underneath, as the Djinn fought him. I felt the ship lurch sharply downward as the Djinn’s attention was pulled away from the task of holding the opposing forces in balance.

The Djinn began to turn a soft ashy gray. Rotting from the outside in, the way the Djinn who’d died outside my room had ended her life.

I settled my back against the cold metal of the safe. If I was going to do anything at all, I didn’t want to worry about falling down while I was about it. If what Venna had said was right, this thing was the forerunner of something much bigger, something that devoured on a universal scale. I thought about all those lifeless planets spinning in space that our telescopes and probes had found. How many of them had once been like us? How many had fallen prey and been wiped clean of life?

Why fight it? It’s nature. You are all aberrations, a momentary mistake in the plan of the universe. Let go.

The ship bounced and settled deeper in the water. I heard the almost-human groan of the metal around me. It couldn’t withstand this strain, not for much longer.

And neither could I.

I closed my eyes, visualized the frequencies I needed, and began to set them up in a tightly enclosed ring around the skin and his Djinn victim.

Nothing happened.

The Djinn struggled now, no longer interested in maintaining the balance, but he’d waited too long. He couldn’t break free of the crystal claws that were digging into him, siphoning away his power and his life. He was losing.

I shifted frequencies.

The Djinn shrieked in unworldly agony as his body began to crumble away. The dark part of me met that with trembling eagerness, drinking in every agonized second of it.

I shifted frequencies again, blind to everything but the dance of molecules, the music of the energy being expended and absorbed.

Come on . . .

It wasn’t strong enough.

Venna had been able to blow her victim to kingdom come, but she was Venna, a power of the ages. I was just a wounded, exhausted Warden up against something I didn’t understand.

I was losing.

The Djinn who’d screamed was no longer recognizable as a Djinn at all. It was a pile of disintegrating ash and dust, sliding away from cohesion to scatter on the deck.

And I felt everything slipping away inside.

The ship groaned again, and I saw metal buckling, vast rivets ripping out of place, and the first jets of water blow through into the open space of the hold.

We started sinking again.

The skin turned to the next Djinn. Lyle.

I felt the shift of power in the room.The water stopped rushing in. The metal sealed and strengthened.

Where David walked, the world mended around him.

“No,” I whispered, but he wasn’t going to stop, not for me. Not this time.

He wasn’t going to allow Lyle to die.

Another watertight door opened on the other side of the hold, and a swarm of Wardens poured in, led by Lewis. In seconds, they had the skin surrounded.

But the skin had its claws buried in Lyle’s chest, like some giant parasitical tick.

I switched frequencies one more time. Lewis saw what I was doing, and joined me; the other Earth Wardens quickly supported us, creating a resonance that was so powerful it began to shatter glass and crystal stored in the crates. Someone’s eyeglasses broke under the strain.

I felt feedback—the exact frequency that this creature’s bones sang to. I began to focus harder, refining the sound until it was at a lethal intensity. I could see the waves now, a standing well of ripples in the air around the creature, battering it from all sides.

“Jo, let go!” Lewis shouted. “Drop out!”

I couldn’t do that. Instead, I reached inside and came up with more power than I’d thought was hiding down in the empty storehouse of my gifts.

Because it felt so good to kill.

The vibrations ramped up into a shriek of power, and instead of Lyle dissolving into ash, the skin that had been Angelo Marconi blew apart into glittering crystal dust.

Lyle sagged and hit the deck, too weak to continue, but David stepped into his place and froze, concentrating.

The ship leveled out—still fighting the downward force but no longer being pulled down.

As quickly as it had come, the extra power I’d found was gone. Vanished. I was just me again, frail and fragile and ready to drop. If Angelo hadn’t been a pile of ragged flesh and demonic parts on the metal floor, he’d have had an easy meal of me.