Cape Storm

Click.

Lights going out. A burst of pain, of surprise, of knowledge . . .

Fail-safe. He’d put a fail-safe in my brain and he’d made me forget about it and now I’d forced him to trigger it, at long last.

“You’re not taking the ship,” Lewis whispered. I could hear him, and I could feel the fading sensation of his lips against mine. A benediction into the dark. “Good-bye, Jo. God, I loved you.”

Pain exploded through my nerves like flares. I couldn’t move, couldn’t blink, couldn’t take a breath. Not fair, this shouldn’t hurt, death should be quick . . . The fire sank deeper, bone-deep, as if my internal organs were charring and baking.

All the pain was on the inside, shimmering like lava. On the outside, I remained limp. Apparently, already gone.

What was keeping me here?

Lewis lowered me to the deck. I could sense what he was feeling. He was full of horror and guilt for what he’d done to me, even though he’d known that it was necessary. It was toxic in its intensity, truly shocking. I didn’t know how he could live with it.

Or if he could.

In the breathless silence, Cherise’s voice sounded very small. “What did you do to her?”

“I killed her,” Lewis said, and closed my eyes. I felt tears slide down my temples as he did—could the dead cry?—and felt his fingertips brush across my forehead in the old familiar gesture. “I had to kill her.” It sounded like he was trying to convince himself of that.

Nobody spoke. Cherise pulled in a deep, trembling breath, then let it out in a rush. “You’re lying. She’s not dead. No way. Not Jo.”

One of the Earth Wardens who’d just wasted all that time and effort on healing me knelt down and pressed cool fingers to my neck, then bent over to listen to my chest. He checked my eyes, which were fixed and out of focus.

“She’s gone,” he said. “Christ, Lewis.”

“She’s not gone,” Cherise insisted. There was a rising tide of alarm in her voice. The river Denial, flooding its banks. “She can’t be gone. Check her again.”

“Cherise—” Kevin tried to head her off.

“No! Check her again!”

They did. One of the other Wardens even tried reviving me—pumping my chest, breathing for me.

My body was an inert lump of clay, and inside it my mind was shrieking, trapped and unable to get free.

“She’s gone,” Lewis repeated again dully, with a hitch of agony in his voice. He thought I was dead, I could feel that. Whatever was anchoring me here, in this dying shell, was something he couldn’t touch. “We have to let David say good-bye.”

“You can’t do that, man. He’ll kill you,” Kevin said. He sounded absolutely sure of it. “No. I’m not letting David anywhere near this. There’s no way he won’t rip us all into meat for doing this to her.”

“Give me the bottle.”

“No.”

“I’m not going to ask again. Give it to me.”

“No!”

There was some kind of struggle, and then Kevin cursed in an unsteady whisper. Cherise was weeping as if her heart was breaking. From everyone else in the small boat came silence, rapid breathing, waves of distress and fear.

God, please, let me go, I begged. My brain should have been off by now, letting me escape into the comfortable dark, but instead I could feel my nerves slowly dying, my cells screaming for oxygen. Nothing I could do to stop it, either.

I was feeling my body die on a cellular level. God, would I be around for the rest of it? Feeling the dead cells turn into sludge and soup? Decomposing?

I didn’t want to be trapped in this body as it slowly decayed, with no hope of release or rescue.

I realized, very slowly, that what was binding me here was one tiny thread of silver, stretching through the navel of my body and out through the aetheric.

David was holding me here, but he couldn’t save me. His power wasn’t mine to touch, and it wasn’t his, either, not as long as someone else held his bottle and he was trapped inside it.

“Lewis—don’t do this, man,” Kevin said. I’d never heard that tone in his voice before, so pleading. “I’m begging you. Don’t. It’s not fucking fair.”

“I’m not doing it because it’s fair,” Lewis said. “I have to do it because it’s right. It doesn’t matter how long we wait; when we let him out of that bottle, his grief will be exactly the same. So let him out now. Please.”

The darkness that Bad Bob had put inside of me battered at the prison of my dead body, fighting to reactivate it. To stay alive.

Without the energy of my body sustaining the darkness, it was growing weaker. Dying along with me.

I felt a whisper of power scent the air as the cap came off of David’s prison. I felt him battering furiously at the glass, trying to shatter his way free.

Oh, you fool, Lewis. He’ll destroy you.

“David,” Lewis said. “Come out.”

Wind blasted through the boat, pinning people against the walls, and a wild-eyed angel dropped out of heaven to gather me in his arms.

The sound that came out of him was some horrible cross between a scream and a growl—inhuman, furious, insane with grief. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t control my eyes to focus on his face, so his expression was mercifully blurred.

Suddenly, I felt the pressure of darkness inside me ease. Bad Bob had lost interest in me. Dead, I was of no use to him, none at all. The thick, toxic sludge of power inside me began to bleed away.

But it wasn’t gone. Not yet.

Lewis said, “David, please understand. You can’t bring her back. Not this time.”

David’s voice was a raw, bloody scream. “She’s not gone!”

He could touch me. See me. Feel my ghostly presence. He hugged my limp form to his chest and rocked back and forth, his face hidden in my hair.

“Let me save her,” he whispered. “Order me to save her.”

I felt Lewis shudder. “No. David, you have to let her go. She’s damaged. She can’t fight him off anymore. It’s time to let her go.” He paused, and then said, with absolute precision, “I’m ordering you to let her die, David.”

The silence in the boat was as deep as the ocean. So was the sense of pressure. Even my dead flesh could feel it.

“I’ll kill you for this,” David said. There was nothing in his voice—no emotion, no hate, no grief. Nothing but simple declaration of intent. “I’ll rip you apart one cell at a time, and you’ll live a thousand years through the pain. I might even let you scream, if you beg me.”

He was utterly serious. He would torture Lewis. He’d do it with the kind of cold distance that the Djinn reserved for those they truly, deeply, madly hated.

He’d do it for me.

“Listen to me,” Lewis said, and if he was afraid, it didn’t show in his voice. “I’m ordering you not to save her. I’m ordering you to cut the cord and let her go.”

“Well, that’s a paradox,” David said. He still sounded eerily calm, almost relaxed. “Because if I let her go, it destroys the vow that binds me to the bottle, and that means I’m free. Free to pull you apart, Lewis. Free to order the brutal, screaming death of every last one of your kind. Do you really think I won’t?” There was madness in him, I realized. Terrible, burning madness, and Kevin was right—letting David free was a death sentence for Lewis. Not just for him, though. For the Wardens. For everyone.

In this moment, David was a bigger threat to humanity than anything Bad Bob had ever dreamed.

I didn’t want to linger like this. I wanted to tell him it was all right, that Lewis had done it for a reason, a good one, and I didn’t really mind. The darkness was dripping out of me in an invisible stain on the deck. I felt . . . clear, at last. Finally, myself again.