Cape Storm (33 page)

“Why?” I blurted. He knew what I was asking, so I didn’t even look at Petrie.

“Thought I’d give you a helping hand, since you seemed to be having some crisis of conscience. Tell me, why is that, anyway? I figured you’d be well on down the road to not caring about anyone but yourself by now.”

I tried slow, even breaths. The burn on my arm was getting worse, and shock was setting in. I needed to heal myself, and I had the power to do it; I just didn’t dare spare the concentration it would take to build the matrix of energy and direct the healing.

Bad Bob didn’t blink. “Oh, where are my manners? Have a seat, kid. You look just about done in.”

And with a wave of his hand, there was another beach chair, this one shaded by a ruffling yellow awning fringed in white. There was even a little side table, and a fruity cocktail with a blue folding umbrella.

“No, thanks,” I said. It was only three steps to the chair, but I wasn’t at all sure the chair wouldn’t turn out to be a spring-loaded bear trap. Messy, and undignified, as a way to exit stage left. “I think I’ll just stand. It’s great for the calf muscles.”

“Suit yourself, but your calf muscles have always been top flight, especially in those heels you like to wear.” He smacked his lips, just another leering old geezer. “Come here all by yourself, did you?”

“Sure. Why not? You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”

“Never in a million years, sweetness.”

Oh sure. I remembered being forced down on my back, and Bad Bob handing a bottle to his Djinn, and a Demon sliding its black tentacles down my throat.

No, he’d never hurt me at all.

“Turn around,” he said. “Let me see the progress.”

He meant let him see the black torch.

Moment of truth. I’d spent time in the water forming an illusion, one that had all the weight of reality to it. The twisting shadow on my back looked and felt like the real thing.

I hoped Bad Bob couldn’t tell the difference at this range.

My shirt was knit, and sleeveless. I pulled it up so that my back was revealed. “Satisfied?” I didn’t wait for an answer, just dropped it back down again. “I’m still on your team, Bob. You saw to that, whether I like it or not. I was your first-round draft pick.”

Had he bought it? I couldn’t be sure. He sat there looking at me, nothing in particular showing in his expression, and then nodded. “Just wanted to be sure,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe all the crazy crap people pull trying to get into the VIP section these days. Some Djinn came in here about three hours ago, pretending to be you, if you can believe that. Talk about your Trojan horses. That was a dumb idea. They think I can’t tell the difference?”

I felt my throat go tight and my guts clench. “Who was it?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t ask. She looked just like you, though, right down to the sassy attitude. Good copy. If I hadn’t known that tattoo was a fake, I might have just let my guard down for her.”

Was he taunting me? I was afraid that he was, but I didn’t want to force things until I knew for sure. “So where is she now?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not on great terms with them anymore.” That was almost true.

He lit a cigar, a big Cuban thing, and puffed until he was satisfied with the draw. “What do you think happened? I’ve got dependents, you know. People got to eat.”

Whatever I’d expected, it wasn’t that. “What?”

He gave me more of that horrible grin. “Sweetheart, you ever order a Djinn to become a pot roast for dinner? Unbelievable, the things you can do when you’ve got power over them. It’s a real education.”

I felt an actual wave of sickness travel through me, like the blast from a bomb of nausea. And he kept on smiling.

I couldn’t stop the words that rolled out of my mouth. “You fucking sick awful evil—”

“Ah, that’s the old Jo,” he said, and winked at me. “You know what’s wrong with all my old friends, the ones I talked out here to the middle of Buttcrack, Nowhere, with me? I tell them how to humiliate and mutilate a Djinn, and they dive right in. They think it’s payback. I hate to say it, but the human race is starting to completely disgust me, sweet pea, and that’s why I’m so glad you’re here. You, I can still shock. You restore my faith in humanity.”

That logic was so twisted it ought to be served salted, with a side of mustard. “You just killed your own guy,” I said. “That can’t be good for morale.”

Bob dismissed it with a shrug. “Petrie was nuts. Everybody knew it. But I’ll tell you what, sugar, I was really amazed at how many Wardens I got to turn their coats. I didn’t even work that hard at it. Talk about morale, you guys need some team-building retreats or something. Then again, you’ll all be dead, so that problem solves itself, really.”

This sounded so much like Bad Bob that it lulled me into believing that he’d keep on talking, forever . . . and then a thick black tentacle burst up out of the rocks beneath my feet and writhed its way up my ankle, my calf, my thigh.

“Oh, damn,” he said, and sipped his drink. “Try not to move. It’ll take your skin clean off if you struggle.”

The thing was like an octopus tentacle, and I could feel the obscene, cold suction of hundreds of tiny cups against my skin. I froze. It didn’t read as alive on the aetheric, and it wouldn’t respond to any kind of Earth power that I could wield.

“Let me go,” I said. Bad Bob tilted his head, eyes burning an incandescent, almost Djinn shade of blue.

“Nope,” he said. “Did you really think I wouldn’t know you slipped the leash? Nice trick, by the way. I can always try it again, but I have the feeling you won’t be all that easy to screw with again—Hold still or you’ll lose that leg, you know.”

I gave up struggling. “Fine. So what are you going to do with me? I don’t make a very good pot roast, I’m just telling you right now.”

Bob sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, like I’d given him a monster headache. “What the hell am I gonna
do with you
?” he repeated. “You’re kidding. This isn’t remedial school for half-assed criminals. I’m going to kill the holy hell out of you, but first, you get to help me get what I need out of the Wardens.”

I winced as my boot slipped against the rocks, and the tentacle wrapping my leg gained a couple more inches and got very, very friendly. “Lewis won’t deal.”

“Of course he’ll deal. That boy loves you, always has. I know him. I picked him for the Wardens.” Bad Bob looked positively malevolent for a second. “Lewis never did want responsibility. He isn’t going to step up to it now, with your life on the line.”

I blinked. Bad Bob, the all-knowing and all-powerful, was talking like an old man, set in his ways, reciting out-of-date facts. Lewis certainly had once been like that, but like Bad Bob himself, he’d changed. Bad Bob hadn’t bothered to find out how much.

“So what am I worth?” I asked. “What are you going to ask?”

“He’s not stupid. He grabbed all the Djinn he could find and bottled them. My folks back on the mainland couldn’t find much, and what they did find got them killed. So I’ll trade you for a cargo full of bottles. How’s that? Make you feel any better?”

Not really. But I didn’t believe for a second that Lewis would trade
one
Djinn for me, much less a boatload. Besides, rescue was on its way.

Right?

It had been maybe ten minutes since my arrival on the island. The
Grand Horizon
was supposed to be visible by now, but I couldn’t see its distinctive outline anywhere on the open seas around us, and it was way too big to miss. Had something happened? Had Bad Bob managed to sink the second ship, too?

Was I all alone here, at the end?

Well, if I was, I was going to go down fighting.

Because David really would destroy everything.

Chapter Eleven

Bad Bob talked. He loved to talk, and I let him, because I learned a lot.

Bad Bob, I was starting to realize, really didn’t have much. While we’d been sailing around the Atlantic as a big, juicy target, he’d been conducting a multifront war. Those never work; ask Napoleon. He’d had operatives back home who’d gone after the remaining Wardens, on the theory that if they were any damn good, Lewis wouldn’t have left them behind. That got him a big fat score of fail. The Wardens didn’t lose a single person, or any Djinn.

The Sentinels, who were getting increasingly desperate, had been taken down not by the Wardens themselves but by Homeland Security. They couldn’t even defeat a bunch of
government
men.

That was kind of rich.

What remained of Bad Bob’s threat to the Wardens was here, on this island, which meant a bunch of fanatics in rags with the aetheric equivalent of a nuclear device.

Not great, but at least isolated.

I couldn’t move much, thanks to my mutated octopus friend, but I could pay attention to Bob’s manic ram blings, in case there was something useful to be learned. I didn’t know if the thing inside had driven him mad, but it certainly didn’t know how to flip the OFF switch.

Eventually, Bad Bob got impatient. He’d expected my rescue to heave over the horizon, but if it was out there, it was smart and very patient.

That was good.

It just wasn’t good for me.

“You’re sure they got the message?” I asked. I’d managed to find a position sitting on the stones, with my pinned leg carefully held straight out. I didn’t want to look too closely at what was happening to me; it felt very much like that tentacle was sinking into my leg, and I’d really had enough of that kind of thing. “Maybe your ransom demand went to voice mail. Sucks when that happens.”

“Oh, they know I have you. They just need some incentive, that’s all,” Bad Bob said cheerfully. The sun was beating down on my unprotected head, and while I wasn’t going to get delirious from the heat, or the lack of water, it wasn’t the most comfortable I’d ever been.

And I didn’t like the sound of
incentive.

I liked it a whole lot less when Bad Bob got out of his chair and walked toward me, because as he did, he reached into empty space at his side and brought out the Djinn Ancestor Scriptures.

I stared at it wearily. It wasn’t of human origin, this thing; as far as I knew, it wasn’t of Djinn making, either. The Ancestor Scriptures probably wasn’t even a book, in the strictest sense, although it certainly had that appearance here in this plane—leather binding, wrinkled ancient pages, metal flaps to lock it shut.

What it really was I couldn’t say, but I was pretty sure that it had been written by a higher power than the Oracles, and the Oracles of the Djinn had been entrusted with its care and feeding.

Whether this was one of the three originals or a copy, I couldn’t say—the copies were just as deadly, if maybe not imbued with as much power.

“How’d you get your hands on that?” I asked Bad Bob as he opened the metal latches and began to flip crackling, translucent pages. “Garage sale at the Villain Supply Company?”

“I took it from an Oracle,” he said, but absently, as if it really didn’t matter. He wasn’t bragging. “Air Oracle. Years ago.”

That, I could believe. The Air Oracle had always struck me as hostile, guarded, angry at the world in general and humans in particular. I’d certainly gotten little to no love from him/her/it.

That kind of made sense, if Bad Bob had gotten there first. He’d given bipeds a bad name.

“Hmmmmm.” Bad Bob looked down at a page, considered it, and shook his head. “No, too subtle. This—too messy. Ah, here we go. I’ll just turn on old DNA inside you, see what we get. Maybe you’ll grow a tail, shark teeth, chicken skin . . .”

Well, I definitely wasn’t waiting around for
that.

I stole Petrie’s specialty, and formed a whip of pure plasma out of the air, igniting it with a burst of silvery power out of my special Djinn reserve. It burned hot blue, and where it slithered over the rocks, it left melted trails behind.

I snapped it toward Bad Bob.

He caught it in one hand, wrapped it around his fist, and yanked. I slid forward on the stones; the tentacle wrapped around my left leg tightened, and I felt flesh tearing under the strain.

I let go of the whip, and the fire guttered out, leaving just a trail of greasy smoke between us. Bad Bob, for a change, didn’t say anything. He walked over to where I was pinned in place, blood streaking down over the tentacle anchoring me.

“You just don’t lie down, do you?” he said. “I always said you were way too good for the Wardens. You made the rest of us look bad.” He turned and yelled toward his watching followers. There were a lot fewer than I remembered—maybe twenty, if that. Granted, I’d taken some down earlier, but I didn’t think I’d grounded quite that many. He’d probably lost some to incursions and his own craziness—like Petrie—plus I figured that those who could think logically enough to escape had grabbed transportation and taken their chances.