"You want me to send David instead?" I glared at him. "Paul, there's not enough what the hell in the world for this!"
He clenched his fists, and I saw the muscles in his jaw tense and jump. He'd always looked a bit thuggish, but never more than when he was truly angry. "If we get David, it's over. It's done. No more bloodshed, " he said. "If we have to go through all the Djinn, how much suffering is that? Come on, Jo. You know they can't be trusted. You know!"
"Apparently I can trust them more than I can trust you," I said.
"Ah, reunions," Bad Bob said. He reached down and flipped open the lid on a black box on the floor, something like what Heather the scientist had used to carry her radioactive materials when she'd done her show-and-tell at Warden HQ. "Stop it, you two. You're making me all teary-eyed. Next thing you know we'll all be group-hugging and braiding each others' hair."
Nothing seemed very real to me, and yet was simultaneously very, very clear. I could see every single line of wood grain, every strand of Ortega's hair where it drifted in the subtle breezes of the hallway.
I could see everything.
A black spear rose of its own accord from the box that Bad Bob had opened. This was no shard; it must have been at least six feet long, glittering and lethal. It slowly turned, and I had the horrifying idea that it was aware, that it was seeking out its victim. It was nothing on the aetheric, an absence of all things around it, just a black hole that could never be filled.
"Too bad your boyfriend couldn't be persuaded to make an appearance," Bad Bob said. "I suppose we'll just have to perform a small demonstration instead with this unlucky fellow."
Paul caught sight of the hovering spear, and his face went an ugly, ragged shade of pale. "No," he said. "No, you agreed, only if we could get - "
The spear oriented itself and launched itself with sudden, horrific violence at Ortega.
I screamed and tried to form a shield in front of him, but the spear - the Unmaking - tore right through as if my power was completely meaningless to it, and buried itself in Ortega's chest.
The sound he made was like nothing I had ever heard, something I couldn't bear to hear. It was sheer torment, the sound of a Djinn being pulled apart and feeling every hard second of the process.
Oh God no no no.
I was watching Ortega, but I was picturing David writhing on the floor of that room amid the shattered crystal, and dying along with him.
The Unmaking was burrowing into him. I could feel it eating at him, could see the color leaching from his skin.
And as it ate him, it grew larger.
"Oh God," Kevin said, and I'd never heard him sound like that, so utterly blank and young. As if he'd never seen anything terrible in his life.
On the other side, Paul Giancarlo and most of the others winced and turned away. Some covered their ears. Some looked sick.
Bad Bob continued to smile, utterly unmoved, and all my hate focused to a red pinpoint, right between his crazy blue eyes.
My power wouldn't work against the Unmaking, but it would damn sure make a dent in him.
I called up everything, everything, and balled it into a single bright lance of light in my right hand, and slammed it toward Bad Bob Biringanine.
Who kept smiling.
Paul Giancarlo stepped in the way - no, not stepped. Lurched. I don't think he meant to; I don't think that it was his choice at all. Bad Bob owned the Sentinels, body and soul, and even they probably didn't understand just how much his creatures they'd become. They'd opened the door to hate and revenge, and the darkness had claimed them. Lee Antonelli had shown me that.
Bad Bob used him as a human shield, because he knew it would hurt me the worst of all.
I didn't scream, but the anguish must have shown in my face; Paul must have seen it, in that instant before the force I released hit him squarely in the chest.
It was fast, so fast he never blinked as the light hit him and blew out his nervous system, destroyed his brain stem, and dropped him lifeless to the floor.
I'd just killed my friend.
Kevin paused, just for a second, eyes wide, and then he attacked when he realized that I wasn't capable of doing anything else at that moment, too frozen in shock to move or even defend myself. The Sentinels were in confusion; Bad Bob was smiling at me, oblivious to anything but my horror, and the rest of them had no idea what they were supposed to do. Like the Ma'at, they were a collective mass of power, and without a guiding force, they fell apart.
Even so, if it had been just Kevin and me, we'd have been lost. Each of the Sentinels had more power than we did, drawn from that black well of energy the Unmaking created when it destroyed things; they'd have killed us on their own, given time.
They didn't have time.
An explosion rattled the entire building from outside. I saw a flaming car roll by the doors at the far end of the hall.
The cavalry had arrived with a bang.
I felt the aetheric popping and crackling with the arrival of more Wardens - some on the scene, some pouring power in from remote locations. I heard the sound of fighting from outside, and then something massive crashed against the outer wall, smashing a hole the size of a Buick in the brick, and through it I saw . . . the Apocalypse, or at least, as much as could fit in the parking lot of a condemned motel.
A tornado skimmed past the opening, sucking and howling, sparking lightning against every metallic surface. Cars rolled and disintegrated under the assault, then caught fire as Weather Wardens clashed with Fire. I couldn't tell the good guys from the bad guys, at least until the rest of the wall came down with a heavy slam, and Lewis walked in over the rubble, leading a small but heavily kick-ass army, and joined me and Kevin.
"Surrender," he said flatly to the group of Sentinels at the end of the hall. "Do it now and we'll let you live to see a trial. Otherwise, you get buried today."
He meant exactly what he said. Lewis was giving no quarter today, if they pushed him into a showdown. There was no trace of hesitation in him at all.
Bad Bob must have known it. He winked, jolly as a leprechaun, and blew me a kiss. Then he went to Ortega and wrenched the black spear out of him with his bare hands.
As it came out, it grew, adding inches more to its length. With every death it was fed, it grew more malevolently, horribly powerful.
Ortega was a dessicated corpse. A husk.
Bad Bob reached down and yanked up a small female form that lay huddled at his feet, tied with glittering black ropes. Cherise's big blue eyes were wide under the confusion of blond hair, but the fury in her was all Rahel.
"You don't want to risk this one, do you?" Bad Bob asked, and yanked hard on her hair. "Come on, Lewis. I know you better than that. You're one of the good guys!"
Lewis's expression didn't alter by a flicker. "She's human. Humans get hurt when Wardens clash; you know that. It's on your head, not mine."
"My son, you've really learned how to operate in the subzero, haven't you? Well, very fine, but we both know that despite this very pretty shell, what's inside is no more human than that." He jerked his head toward Ortega's body. "Probably a whole lot less human, actually. She's a wild one, isn't she?"
Rahel was playing Cherise for all she was worth, and it broke my heart to see my friend so scared, shaking, and crying. "Please," she choked, "I don't know who you think I am, but I'm not - "
"You're a Djinn," Bad Bob cut in. "Show me. Show me now, or I use this." He still had the spear in his other hand, and he raised it, prepared to thrust it into her guts.
Lewis let out a low, almost inaudible moan.
Rahel flowed out of her disguise, dark and commanding and imperious, but still restrained by the black ropes. Her eyes snapped violent yellow sparks as she struggled to get free. She subsided, panting, dreadlocks wild around her hawk-sharp face.
"That's better," Bad Bob said. "Do tell David that we'll be in touch, Jo. If he wants to stop me from continuing to kill his people, he should consider giving himself up to us. Very soon."
The Sentinels crowded around him. Bad Bob grabbed Rahel, and each of them touched the black surface . . . and vanished. All of them together, Rahel included.
He'd taken her.
Kevin collapsed against one of the left-standing structural walls, gagging for breath. He looked terrible. I must have looked a hell of a lot worse, because Lewis took one look at me, gestured, and suddenly there were two Earth Wardens at my side, pouring warm, sticky power into me like syrup.
I felt a rush of presence around me as I started to fall, and David's arms caught me and held me close. "Oh God," he whispered against my hair. "Are you crazy? What were you trying to do?"
"Save you," I whispered back. "Always." I wanted to tell him that everything was all right here, too, in this warm, soft place I'd reached where nothing hurt. But I couldn't stay in that place, even though it was so tempting to just give up and let shock take over.
Instead, I forced my legs to stiffen, and I pulled away from him. David let me go. He saw what was in my face, and he let me go.
I walked toward Ortega. When Lewis tried to stop me, I shook him off. When he tried again, I hit him with a lightning bolt. I was insane, but not quite that insane; I pulled the charge at the last moment, feeding just enough through him to knock him back a step.
Ortega was dead. His eyes had gone black, burned and lifeless, and his skin was a dull, dusty gray, as if he'd turned to stone. David joined me, standing close but not touching.
"It's not your fault," I told David. I could only imagine that he was thinking about ordering Ortega to come here, because he'd known there was a chance. . . .
But that wasn't what he was thinking at all. David cocked his head slowly to one side, staring at the dead Djinn, and asked, very quietly, "Who is he?"
Chapter Twelve
None of the Djinn knew him, not even Venna, when I insisted that she be summoned from whatever beach resort Ashan had decided to take his people to for the duration of the crisis. I wasn't sure that Venna would come, but she'd always been her own master, and that hadn't changed just because Ashan thought it had. He might be her Conduit, but he'd never own her.
Venna, dressed in her vintage Alice outfit, paced slowly in front of the wall and Ortega's body, studying him closely. It was eerie, seeing that kind of detachment packaged in the body of a little girl who almost radiated innocence.
She and David were the only ones allowed near the body at all. The entire room had been cordoned off in space-age-looking shielding, and all of the rest of us were being thoroughly checked out by a radiation team. Not surprisingly, we'd all gotten a dose. "Not that it's as unusual as people think it is," said the Chatty Cathy in the hazmat suit who was drawing my blood. "The average American gets about three hundred fifty millirems a year, just from the environment. Hey, want to know the weird part? Forty millirems of that comes out of our own bodies. We're little fusion reactors, you know. Potassium-40 in the brain, Carbon-14 in the liver." She was chatty because she was scared, though her hands were steady enough. She must have realized it, because she sent me an apologetic glance through the plastic visor of her space suit. "Sorry. I jabber when I'm nervous. This is just - well. They don't exactly train you for this at NEST school."
I wondered what the government had been told, or was telling them; the whole thing was founded on need-to-know, and I doubted even this woman had a clue. There were some FBI agents stalking the scene in their trademark dark windbreakers, talking into cell phones. Lots of cops. Fire department.
And reporters. Lots of reporters, a cresting wave of them held back by a sandbar of uniformed police around the perimeter. I could hear the dull thud of news helicopters overhead. No doubt we were in heavy rotation on all the news channels.
In the shielded room, Alice finished her inspection of Ortega and came out. The NEST doctor working on me muttered something under her breath, but she kept her eyes down and focused on what she was doing. Keep on living in denial, I thought. Safer that way, lady.
Venna came up to my side and stared at the needle in my arm. "What is she doing?"
"Taking blood."
"Is she going to give it back?"
"Venna, what did you sense in there?"
"He is not a Djinn," she said. There was no doubt in her voice at all. "I don't know what he is. Or was."
"He was a Djinn," I said. Venna slowly shook her head. "Venna, that was Ortega. You know Ortega; you remember him - "
Another slow shake of her head. It was exactly the same response I'd gotten from David, and from two other Djinn he'd summoned. None of them recognized Ortega at all. They didn't classify him as human; they didn't classify him as anything. Certainly, not anyone.
I thought with a sudden hot pang of the Miami estate, all that fascinating, rich chaos that Ortega had surrounded himself with. I'd barely met him, but I was the only one who could mourn him.
"Never mind. Thanks for the help," I sighed to Venna, who cut her eyes sharply toward the doctor, who was withdrawing the needle and applying a bandage to the bend of my arm. "You know about Rahel?"
"That your enemies have her? Yes." Venna continued to stare at the doctor, to the extent that the poor woman fumbled the tube she was holding, but caught it on the way to the floor. "I do care, you know. But this is a mess humans made, and humans must correct. Ashan won't interfere. He won't want me to interfere, either."
"Venna," I said, "that's Bad Bob Biringanine in charge of the Sentinels. You know what he did to Djinn before. You think he's going to be any better now? Any kinder? You can't stick your heads in the sand and pretend like you don't live here, too, as if you're not at risk. Rahel's proof of that."