Clark's trainer and maid busied themselves in another part of the room. I barely registered them as background noise, because La Clark simply drew every bit of attention to herself just by sitting there.
"Thank you for seeing us, Miss Clark," I said. "My name is - "
"Joanne Baldwin, yes, I know," she said. She had a contralto voice, and she used it the way a master musician uses a violin, conveying all shades of meaning in one brilliant stroke. "You represent these Wardens I've been hearing so much about. And your companion?"
"David Prince," he said.
"You're one of the... Djinn?" She tried the taste of the word, and I could tell she liked it.
When he nodded, Clark's eyes drifted half closed, and she sat back against the cushions, studying him. "Extraordinary. I thought there were no surprises left in the world, but here you are. Like something straight out of a fairy tale. The old kind, of course. The frightening ones."
She offered us coffee, tea, drinks. Neither of us felt thirsty, but I accepted a delicate little teacup steaming with French Roast, just to make this more of a social call. Being able to say I had coffee with Cynthia Clark didn't factor into that decision at all. Well, not much.
Clark blew on the surface of her own brew and studied us both with X-ray eyes that had reportedly once made Steve McQueen swoon. "How can I help you?" she asked.
"Just a few questions, and then, I promise, we'll certainly be out of your way," I said.
"First, can you tell me why you didn't leave the ship before departure, as you were asked to do?"
"Well, you're direct," she murmured. "How very refreshing. It's all a bit embarrassing, I suppose, and it's going to make me seem like a horrible tyrant. I was terribly tired, and I left strict instructions not to be disturbed for any reason prior to departure. I'm afraid my employees might have taken those instructions a bit too literally. When I finally rose for breakfast, I was informed of the evacuation order, but it was too late for us to make our arrangements and leave."
There was something odd about Clark's aura. It seemed very calm, swirling with neutral blues and soft golds, but it also felt artificial. "What kind of arrangements? I'd think you'd want to get out as quickly as possible."
"I really can't go into details," she said. "But it was entirely accidental that we ended up staying here, on the ship. We won't be any trouble to you. I'm quite content to stay in the cabin." She gave me a cool smile. "It's so difficult to find privacy these days out in the real world."
I wondered, because a curl of hot magenta drifted over her aura. Resentment, maybe. She wasn't the It Girl anymore when it came to the paparazzi, and she knew it. It probably took a great deal of effort to get herself photographed at all, except in retirement magazines talking about how she was "still young at sixty-five."
"Routine questions, Miss Clark. We just want to be sure we're aware of any problems that might come up," I said.
"Such as?"
"Oh, I don't know...Trouble between you and another passenger, maybe a stalker?
Business disagreements?"
"Alas, I don't have that many enemies, Miss Baldwin. I'm sure I'd feel much more important if I did. No, I have no fears, and I'm sure that none of my little party represents any sort of difficulty for you."
I wished I could figure out what was bothering me. She just didn't seem... right. Was she scared? No, not really, but when I concentrated on her aura, I saw flecks like floating ice.
I wasn't sure what it meant, but I was sure that it wasn't normal.
I let the silence go on too long. "Is that all?" Clark asked, suddenly a good deal less welcoming. "I have a strict meditation schedule. Yoga. It keeps me toned and flexible. I highly recommend it."
"May I speak with your employees?" I asked her.
"No," Cynthia Clark said. Just the one word, cold and final. I blinked and glanced at David, who was staring at Clark with very dark eyes. I didn't know what he was seeing, but it wasn't good. Not good at all.
Then he looked from Clark to where her two employees stood at the other end of the room.
"Jo," he said, and touched my shoulder. "You should go."
"I - What?"
"Now." The touch turned into a painful squeeze. "Now." I stood up, but it was too late. I barely sensed the snap of power coming before it hit me like a pile driver to the chest - not just on the physical plane but on the aetheric, too. I knew this sensation.
It had hit me before. It had killed a whole lot of my friends.
The blitz attack sent me into the air in a tumbling, twisting heap. I flew across the cabin and slammed into the solid wall with a wood-cracking thump. I hardly had time to process the shock of pain before pressure closed around me, deep as the black depths of the ocean, and drove all the air from my lungs. I felt my entire nervous system flickering, overloading, on the verge of burnout. There was an unearthly shrieking roar in my ears, like a mental institution on fire, and everything felt wrong , so wrong.
I fought. I flailed, trying to throw it off, but I couldn't, because there was nothing to grab hold of. I blinked away darkness and saw David moving like a streak of light toward the two at the far end of the room, but he was too far. It was happening too fast, unbelievably fast....
I was going to die, and he wouldn't be able to stop it.
You can stop it, Joanne. All you have to do is let go.
The thought bubbled up on some black, greasy tide from the depths of my soul. It was solid as a life preserver in a storm, and I grabbed it, desperate to stop the pain, the shrieking, the sickening and inevitable feeling of every cell in my body being crushed into slime .
You have to let go,it told me. Let go, Joanne. You can save yourself if you choose.
With the weight of mountains on my chest, with my entire body screaming for release, with my bones turning to powder inside and my nervous system frying like a burned-out bulb, I believed it was the only choice.
Then I felt the eager, hot twinge of the black mark on my back, and I knew where that thought was coming from.
No.
Time had proceeded only a tiny fraction of a second. David hadn't even reached the far end of the room yet, although the Djinn could move at the speed of thought. I was being crushed into greasy paste by a force so vast it felt like Earth herself had landed on me, and the idea of waiting an instant, a single breath, for help was almost impossible.
Save yourself. You can. It's easy.
Yes. All I had to do was shatter the containment that David had put around the black torch, and it would burn away all my problems.
Forever.
I held on. I don't know how; it wasn't inner strength, it wasn't courage, and it wasn't anything I could be proud of. Maybe it was just paralyzing terror. The instant passed, and even though I felt death's breath on my lips, the taste was all that lingered; David reached Cynthia's personal trainer, and that man - whoever, whatever he was - had no more time for killing me.
I gagged in a trembling breath, rolled on my side, and sobbed in agony. My nerves continued to burn, and the entire circuit board of my brain seemed on the verge of overload. I hadn't been hurt that suddenly, that deeply , in a long time. The taste of mortality is ash and blood, and I coughed until I could stop gagging on it.
Getting up was like free-climbing the Empire State Building in a hurricane, but I used an overturned table for support until I could feel my legs. They weren't quite right, somehow.
Most of me wasn't, at that moment. This was going to hurt later. A lot. For a long time.
I forgot all of that when David screamed, "Jo! Cover! " Fire rolled out from him, blistering white, and I lunged for the sofa, where Cynthia Clark still sat frozen in shock by the explosion of violence. I shoved her down into the cushions and threw myself on top of her. I couldn't reach the other innocent in the room - her personal assistant - but I extended the fastest, hardest shield of interlocked molecules I could over the woman's prone body. She'd sensibly dropped to the floor and curled into a ball on the rug.
No time for any other defenses. Whether David had called the fire, or his enemy had, it filled the room like an airburst of napalm. I felt the back of my clothes and my hair smolder, and smelled instant, toxic charring of plastics and carpet and furniture. The flame would have incinerated all three of us if I hadn't shielded us; mortal flesh would have burned off like flash paper.
It had burned the flesh off of David's opponent.
The blast flamed out, leaving a thick swirl of smoke, and I raised my head to see my Djinn lover facing a skeletal, blackened thing that was certainly not human, never human -
something that should be dead, and yet was still standing. It wasn't a Demon, though it had some characteristics that reminded me of the way a Demon's bones curved and spiked.
It looked like it was made of glass. In fact, only the smudges and soot that clung to it made it visible at all. I blinked and clicked into Oversight.
It was invisible on the aetheric.
Ghosts,Venna had named them.
The forerunners of the end of all things.
David let out a wordless roar of fury and fastened his hands around the creature's throat.
He was glowing like liquid gold, dripping with living fire.
But where he touched this thing, his fire went out. And darkness began to creep up his arms. No, not darkness - oh God , I knew what that was.
Ash, and dust.
He was being destroyed, just like the Djinn who'd died in the hallway. The touch of this thing was toxic to them. That Djinn must have come across it somehow, maybe even been sent by Ashan to warn us of the danger - and it had killed her.
It had erased her.
Just as it was trying to do to David.
"Let go!" I shouted, and rolled over the top of the couch to land on my feet. I staggered, but I didn't have time for weakness. "David, back off!" David didn't want to, but he did, breaking away and lunging to his left as I strode forward, gathering up raw power in both hands. As I moved, a silver sword formed in my grip - not metal but ice. Hard as steel, reinforced with a binding that left the cutting edge as thin as a whisper.
If this thing could survive David's heat, I wanted to see how it felt about chills.
The blade hit, bit, and cut, slicing through fragments of muscle and cooked skin, through crystalline bones that glowed blue where the ice slashed.
I chopped right through its neck. I paused, holding in my follow-through, to see what would happen.
The creature's head stayed on. As I watched, it wobbled a bit on the skeletal column of glassy vertebrae, then settled back into place.
It smiled with needle-sharp crystal teeth. If it had ever been human, other than a casual disguise, it certainly wasn't playing at it now. This was something out of a big-budget nightmare, and I took a step back from it, fast.
"David, get everybody out!" I yelled. I could sense this thing orienting on me, predator to prey. The last thing I needed right now was mortal trip hazards and speed bumps; it was going to be all I could do to protect myself, much less Cynthia Clark and her employee.
I sensed David grabbing up the noncombatants and hustling them to the door.
The creature facing me opened its mouth and flicked a tongue like a whip at me. It was more like an icicle than living tissue, but it moved like a cobra. The end was as sharp as a needle, and I barely avoided the stabbing turn of it in midair. A return stroke with my ice-knife passed through the tongue without any effect at all.
Damn.I couldn't hurt this thing, at least not with these weapons.
I retreated. I changed out ice for steel and tried again. This time, I sliced a piece out of the tongue, which fell to the floor and writhed like a slug in the sun. Whether that hurt the creature or not, it charged me, and I tried to make like a matador. That didn't help. It had reach and speed, and what had been its fingers in human form were now claws, diamond-sharp and lightning fast.
I felt the slices like chilly tugs on my side, but there wasn't any pain, not at first. I didn't allow myself to look down, I kept moving, turning, keeping myself away from the razor-edged whirlwind that was hissing through the air in pursuit.
Then I hit a corner, and there was nowhere left to run. I slashed, trying to slow it down, but the creature was just too damn fast, and too damn powerful. It smashed through the shield I put up. I didn't have time to try any Earth powers; fire wouldn't work, and weather tricks wouldn't buy me more than another fragile breath.
I was going to lose.
A small, white ball of light hit the thing from the side and plunged beneath the crystalline structure. It lit the creature up like an arc light from within. I couldn't even estimate the heat; it felt like a nuclear bomb compressed to the size of a baseball, forces well beyond my ability to summon, much less command.
All I could do was duck and cover. Again.
The creature shrieked in that horrible, soul-destroying range again and became a photonegative blast of flame that cooked everything within a foot of it - but not an inch beyond. The inverse flame became white flame, then reversed itself into a tiny, glittering spark... and the creature was gone except for a shower of glittering crystalline powder.
A wave of intense pressure passed over me and shoved me hard into the corner.
The white ball of light expanded into a softer glow, and as the wave passed over me I squinted into it and saw the Djinn Venna standing where the creature had been, her pink HELLO KITTY sneakers buried in half an inch of crystal powder.
She looked worse than I had ever seen her: pallid, trembling, afraid. She sank down into a crouch, just a frightened little girl, and I couldn't help but move toward her. I picked her up in my arms, and she shuddered and buried her face in my chest.