"I'm not your pet psycho." I flinched, because Kevin could have been reading my mind. "But yeah, I'll find Lyle and do this. Just don't put me on speed dial the next time you have to push a school bus off a cliff or something. So. What's our approved monster-killing technique?"
I pulled the tissue-wrapped crystal tooth out of my pocket. "Let's find out." The thing glittered like a diamond in the dull light.
We took the fragment with us, found a crew member to open up the gym for us, and moved equipment to get clear floor space for our experiments. Kevin took to the scientific method with enthusiasm, because there's nothing a teenage kid likes better than trying to destroy something that's indestructible. Kevin tried so many kinds of fire that even I was impressed with the variety and breadth of control he had over it, especially since he didn't kill us in the process.
Except that nothing worked, and eventually Kevin tried stomping on the thing in frustration. That didn't work so well, either.
"Let me," I said, and crouched down across from where the glittering crystal shard lay between us. Kevin mimicked me from about four feet away.
"No fair using Earth powers," he said. "I'll call bullshit."
"You'll be working with an Earth warden, idiot," I said. "Watch and learn. I'm going to start with super-low frequencies and work my way up. You watch the structure with me. If you see any response at all, tell me."
"If I'd known this favor of yours would mean sitting around watching you use a vibrator, I would've said hell yeah earlier - "
"Bite me," I said. He flipped me off. I ignored him - mostly - and paid attention to the structure of the crystal.
It took the better part of an hour, but we pinpointed the frequency range that had the greatest effect on the thing. I couldn't get to Venna's epic pulverizing effect, but I figured that anything that cracked and shattered the bone would do. At the very least, it would distract the holy living hell out of the enemy.
"Yeah, that's great," Kevin said, as I wrote down the numbers. "Big problem. I can't do that, genius. It takes a tree hugger."
"And I'll get one for you," I said. "But I wouldn't call her a tree hugger if I was you. She'll make your face grow backwards if you piss her off." I wrote down the name - Maida Manning. Three hundred pounds of extremely sarcastic Earth Warden who wouldn't take any of Kevin's bullshit. Maida also had a vicious sense of humor. I could see a beautiful friendship developing, unless of course they managed to kill each other first.
I'm so public-spirited.
"Give her this," I said, and handed him the written instructions. "Tell her I'll give her a raise if she manages to not kill you before you kill the bad guys. But whatever you do, wait for Lyle to give a signal to move. Got it?"
"Of course I've got it. I've got an IQ above your dress size." He paused. "Then again, it might be the other way around. I mean, do they even make dress sizes in the hundred and fifties?"
Cherise was having a terrible influence on the kid. I decided that one of us really needed to stay focused on professional dignity, and so I settled for a rude gesture instead of a comeback.
"Score," he said. He walked away, just another bad-attitude teen from his messy, uncombed hair to his dragging, world-weary sneakers.
It takes a special kind of courage to know your own darkness,I thought. I wished he didn't have to be such an expert, but as long as he was, I had no choice but to take advantage of his skills.
Lewis was going to take my head off for it, too.
Chapter Six
Passengers - even me - weren't allowed on the bridge. Apparently, that only happens in the movies, or to Cherise. I helped Lewis get through the rest of the passenger and crew interviews in neutral, nonsecure locations. No real surprises: a couple of drug smugglers, some embezzlers, and a few people who had raided the cabin steward's closet for illegally obtained soaps and pillow mints. Other than that, we were clear of evil influences...
except for the two we already knew about.
And me, of course. I was acutely aware that the tingles from the numb area on my back were coming with more and more frequency.
By late evening, I was feeling exhausted and even more sore than I'd anticipated. Cherise forced sandwiches on me, and then a glass of scotch, and I dozed off curled up in the corner of a sofa in the first-class-lounge area, listening to half a dozen Wardens debate the logistics of creating a clear course for us to follow. I was wishing that David would drop in, but I knew all too well that Lewis had other plans in motion - plans that specifically excluded me, thanks to the Bad Bob mark on my back. Need to know, and all that.
So I napped.
Lightning flared, startling me, and when I opened my eyes, I was somewhere else.
No... I realized that I wasn't somewhere else. My body was still huddled on the sofa, still watched over by Wardens and Djinn alike. Protected.
But I was also standing in a small concrete room with bare, dusty floors and a few battered old chairs held together with wire and tape, and it was nowhere near the ship that still held my physical form.
It's not real,I thought, but it felt damned convincing.
The door opened on howling darkness, and I could feel the blast of sea-salted air that rolled through the room to stir up debris.
When the door closed, a bandy-legged old white- haired man moved into the pallid circle of overhead light.
Bad Bob, in the flesh. At least, I presumed it was flesh. I was starting to wonder how real the real world actually was, in relation to what my former boss could accomplish these days.
"Look who dropped in for a visit," Bob said, and pulled up a rickety chair. He flopped into it - risking total collapse of the ancient wood - and sat there smiling at me as if I were a favorite niece come for the holidays. Honestly, that was the worst thing about him. You couldn't really tell how crazy he was at a glance.
Or how vile.
I could hear the wind howling and it grated on me, and I wanted to lift my hands to cover my ears - only my ears weren't physical. I wasn't physical. I was a spirit in the aetheric, and there was simply no way that Bad Bob could see me, or that my spirit could walk around like this in the real world. Surely this was a dream. No, a nightmare. Except it felt real, from the gritty concrete floor under my feet to the demented shrieking of the storm winds outside.
"I thought I'd give you guys a chance to surrender," I said. My voice sounded distant and disembodied, and I wasn't sure he could hear it until his smile widened. He was an evil old man, but he still had a charming smile. It went well with his apple red cheeks and blunt little nose. "I'd hate to skip the niceties. Courtesy is so important."
"You're playing my song, sugar," he said. "You're also playing my game. I wonder why?" I smiled to match him. "Guess."
"If I have to. Well, you found my little friend on board your ship - I felt him shuffle off this mortal coil. Good for you. Bet you can't do that again, though." He studied me with those fluorescent eyes - almost Djinn eyes, these days, brighter and more intense than they'd been in the old days when he'd been my boss, a genuine Warden hero. "I have to hand it to you, I figured you guys would argue until doomsday about what to do about me," he continued. "Seriously now, a cruise ship ? I didn't see that coming. Beautiful. I thought maybe a yacht, or a freighter. But putting all those people in the line of fire? You're growing a pair, sweetness. I like that."
I waited. Bad Bob always had liked to hear his own voice more than anyone else's.
"But you know what I think?" he continued, right on cue. "I think it's so showy that it's desperate. Like dressing up in neon and waving look-at-me flags while blaring Tchaikovsky's Fifth. You really should study magicians. Misdirection, that's the key to a good trick."
"You think I'm tricking you?"
"You're not that subtle," he said, which stung because it was true, mostly. "But there's somebody else on board that ship who is."
We both knew that he was talking about Lewis. "You've still got a chance to end this peacefully," I said. "Let Rahel go. Give up. It doesn't have to be Armageddon: Atlantic Edition. We can find a way to make this work, Bob. Or whatever you are."
"I'm still Bob," he said, and winked at me, just the way Bad Bob would have back in the old days. "I'm just Bob plus. And I don't think we're going to come to any nice, peaceful settlement, princess. This isn't about dividing up territory or setting boundaries. This is about me, wiping all of you off the face of the earth, and then my friends coming in to take everything else. It's nature's way, you know. The strong eat the weak. The many eat the few. And I am about to eat you ."
He smiled, opened his mouth, and his jaws gaped hideously wide, like a snake's. If this was a nightmare, it was a first-class effort out of my very darkest subconscious.
I stepped back from him.
His jaws re-formed and closed. The Cheshire Cat smile remained. "Don't look so scared," he said. "You wouldn't believe the stuff I can do with my tongue. Bet I could make you forget all about that wimpy little Djinn boy you're so taken with. Give me a chance - No? All right, then. I guess I'll just have to settle for something else. Thanks for being so accommodating and wandering on over here, by the way. I figured you might, sooner or later. The torch has that effect on people. It just draws people to me, whether they like it or not."
He took two steps forward, thrust out his hand, and put it all the way through my ghostly, insubstantial chest. Unsettling, and a little uncomfortable, but I actually felt a little spurt of triumph. Not as easy as you thought it would be, I was about to say, when I realized that he'd reached to a very specific place.
To the ghostly mark on my back. The black torch. His fingertips brushed against it beneath my translucent skin - I could feel it, even if I couldn't see it happening.
All of a sudden the room was far too small, like a trap, and I wanted to leave this place, now, before something happened.
Too late.
I felt my physical body, still far away on board the ship, writhing in its sleep. I felt the hot tingle of the black torch begin to spread across my shoulder blade.
I'd lost David's containment, and because I was asleep, he might not know it.
Bad Bob removed his hand from my chest, shook it as if he was flicking something nasty off his fingers, gave me a feral grin, and walked away. I struggled to figure out what was holding me here, in this place, pinned like a bug to a board. The mark. He was right. Until I figured out how to turn it off - if I could - he could keep me here, out of my body. I knew that the longer I stayed out, the worse it was going to be when I got back.
I remembered the Wardens, lost in the storm. If my spirit was shredded, my body would just... stop. And they would never know why.
Outside, a truly ferocious storm raged. I felt the hot, damp blast of hair burst into the room, stirring grit and pushing the rickety sticks of furniture in random fury. Lightning flashed like strobes, turning Bad Bob's pale hair and face into a fright mask.
He reached outside, and when his hand came back through the doorway, it was holding a spear. I recognized the thing - it was thick, and it sparkled with bursts of something that wasn't color, wasn't darkness, wasn't anything human senses could identify or codify. He'd refined his weapons, I saw. This spear had started out life as a small chunk, grown in the dying body of a Djinn, and Bad Bob had given it enough care and feeding to make it a seven-foot-long, wickedly pointed expression of his own appetite for destruction.
The Djinn called it the Unmaking. It was, as best I understood the physics of it, stable antimatter, capable of destroying anything he wanted to destroy.
Including removing Djinn from the fabric of the universe.
"Oh, Bob, that's just sad," I said. His grin broadened. "Seriously, why can't your type ever grow a discus for a weapon, or the world's largest potato? How come it's always so -
phallic?"
Bob ignored the opportunity to banter, and stepped out into the storm. He looked up at it, into the heart of it. I knew what he was seeing - the raging engine of destruction, the primitive mind forming behind it. This was a living thing, this storm - a predator, yes, but a natural one, like a tiger or a puma.
He ground the butt of his spear against the dirt, and a blinding pulse of something that wasn't light, wasn't heat, wasn't right went up from the pointed end of the spear into the storm.
Again.
Again.
With every thump of that weapon against the earth, I felt the world itself shudder. On the aetheric, muddy red waves spread like blood from a mortal wound.
The force emitted from the spear had a sickening feel to it, and the color - if you could call it a color - was a poisonous, pallid thing, like the glow given off by decay.
The storm's lightning suddenly flashed, but it wasn't light.
It was dark. Photonegative energy, but here on the real world. He'd infected the storm itself, made it a force for destruction far different from any natural predator.
And then it flashed that unearthly emerald green.
"Almost ready," Bad Bob said, and reversed his grip on the spear. Handling that much anti-energy couldn't have been pleasant, even for him; I could see the skin blackening and flaking away where his hand touched the surface. "Ready for the cherry on top?" He pointed the spear down at the ground, and drove it in. It went deep, even though he didn't use any real force - as if it tunneled greedily on its own.
I felt the earth shriek in real pain beneath my ghostly feet, and the whole building shook.