Cape Storm

twice.”

Lewis stood up and spun the hatch. It was a sliding door at the top of the craft, and climbing the steps to get up to it seemed like the march to the gallows.

Lewis held my hand to keep me steady.

I emerged into bright sunlight, blinded by the glitter of the whitecaps and the endless roll of the ocean. By the reflective yellow surface of the fiberglass hull. The storm hung sullenly in the distance, a vast black curtain rippling with wind and power and fury. It couldn’t reach me now, but it would follow.

It had to. It was still keyed to the power locked into Bad Bob’s mark.

I looked back down as I stripped off the blanket and handed it to Lewis. “Thanks for the apple juice,” I said. “The beer’s on you if I live.”

He didn’t smile. There was darkness as thick as the storm hanging around him; his aura was shot through with it.

“Tell David—” I said, and couldn’t think of anything to say that David wouldn’t already know. “Tell him I’ll see him soon.” I looked past Lewis’s hard face and saw Kevin hovering behind him. “Don’t treat David like your slave. If you do, I’ll make sure you regret it. Just—leave him in the bottle. Promise me.”

Kevin blinked. “You don’t want me to let him go?”

“Not yet,” I said. “You can’t take the risk. If anything happens to me—Well, you saw. I don’t want you guys to pay for it.” I was condemning David to life imprisonment, if—as was very probable—I died. Not exactly the happy ending I’d been hoping for, but it could have been worse.

I’d seen how bad it could get. Our devotion to each other had a horrible dark side. I’d been willing to call fire, burn twenty innocent people alive to make my point. David had been willing to destroy millions to avenge me.

It wasn’t David’s fault that he could never, ever forgive; it was just his Djinn nature. Now I had to protect him from his own worst impulses.

I blinked away tears and focused on Kevin, with the bottle in his hand—and Cherise, clinging to Kevin and crying. “Keep David safe for me,” I said. “I love all of you. I won’t forget.”

And then I turned and dived off the boat, into the water.

Chapter Nine

So.

It was just me and the sharks. I was acutely aware of the vast, complicated landscape of predator and prey beneath me as I floated; I’d drawn a whole lot of sharks here, and the Great Whites in particular alarmed me, because I’d seen Jaws.

I couldn’t feel my back at all, but the rest of my body was chilled from the water. Still, I wasn’t likely to die of exposure, or even hunger or thirst. I could maintain my body’s electrolyte levels, heat, and general health; I could desalinate water to drink. I could eat raw fish that I could call into my hands, if I wasn’t especially fussy. Wasn’t looking forward to that part; sushi prepared by a brilliant Japanese chef is a far cry from munching on something fresh out of the sea and spitting out the scales and bones.

I floated and watched the rescue craft fleet sail away. The hatch remained open on the lifeboat I’d left, and I heard arguments pouring out of it until the wind carried it away. Cherise had tried to jump out, twice. I could still hear her screaming at the top of her lungs long after other sounds had faded.

“Bye, sweetie,” I whispered, and bobbed in the waves for a while, until the boats were just dazed smudges on the horizon.

I wasn’t a good enough Earth Warden to control several hundred sharks, all operating under their natural instinctive programming. What I could do—and did—was create conditions that made it less fun for the sharks to come near me, basically administering electrical shocks to anything that came closer than ten feet.

It was terrifying. Eventually, though, the sharks lost interest or found other prey to follow. A few continued to circle, but I couldn’t wait; the longer I delayed, the less likely it would be that David’s containment of Bad Bob’s torch would hold for me. I started to swim. It was fun at first, and then boring, and then difficult. The human body is designed for only so much wear and tear without periods of rest, and my Earth Warden powers could maintain it, but repairing overly stressed muscles took time.

Time I wasn’t going to have.

I kept swimming. After a while, pain took on a lulling sort of normality. You really can get used to just about anything, especially if you don’t have any alternatives.

The sun began to dip toward the horizon, and I thought about being out here at night, with a sky full of stars. It was oddly peaceful. I was still myself—rescued from the abyss into which Bad Bob had dragged me, though he hadn’t exactly dragged me there kicking and screaming, to be perfectly honest about it. I had a wide streak of darkness inside, all my own, and it wasn’t just the scars left over from my earlier Demon Mark; I’d always been ambitious. I’d always pursued power.

I guess I wasn’t so different from Bad Bob after all, except that I knew all that was both a strength and a weakness. And I knew it had to have limits.

I felt none of the power or fury that had thundered through me when the torch had been active, but sooner or later, David’s containment field would fail, and without him here to renew it, the torch would burn hotter than ever. I was a Warden. I wouldn’t be that easy to kill, even stranded out here on the ocean.

I’m working too hard, I thought. If I swim all the way to him, I’ll have nothing left when I get there.

Depression set in. It does that when your friends sail off and abandon you, and when you have to say a probably permanent good-bye to the one man in the world you’d not only die for, but live with. Maybe it’s not worth it. Maybe I should just take myself out of the game. That’d throw a curl in Bad Bob’s tail.

It had a seductive, petulant sort of sense to it. If I died, his plans were screwed, at least the ones I’d seen. He wanted me. He might even need me to make his small-A apocalypse come true. Without me, he had his Sentinels, but they were second-raters, and we’d already taken out the real threats.

Then again . . . if I died, that left David snapped into that state of frenzy and rage, and I couldn’t count on him staying imprisoned.

I didn’t want him to stay imprisoned.

But I didn’t want to stay apart. Or go back to the cold, evil bitch I’d become.

I considered all the ways I could make my marriage work while my burning, screaming muscles stroked away at the endless ocean. Nothing solved itself, but I hadn’t really expected it to. Eventually, the effort whited out my problems more efficiently than anything else could have. They weren’t gone, they were just . . . under the surface.

The sun went down. It was a beautiful sight, unbounded by the rules of land—nothing but waves and sea, and an endless bowl of sky. I had to stop more and more frequently and just let myself float. My body hurt so much I cried involuntary, hiccuping tears. Every deliberate movement felt as if my nerves had grown cutting edges and were slicing themselves right out of my skin. My skin felt rubbery and ice-cold, except for my back, which just felt like it wasn’t there at all.

Keep going.

I tried, but my efforts came slower, my rests more frequent. I just couldn’t keep moving. My energy reserves were gone, and although the world was rich in it all around me, I couldn’t tap it like a Djinn could.

I’m going to die out here. Except that I couldn’t die, not without breaking the tie to David.

Not without setting him on a path of destruction that would annihilate everything.

The stars came out in thick white veils of light, and I floated on my back in the bobbing waves, too tired to keep moving at any cost.

I slept for a while. I floated.

I think I went a little insane, as the endless, isolated hours passed. Then I swam again, and then I