Rachel Caine: Gale Force

“Ashan never did like this one,” he said. “Figures on appointing a new Earth Oracle in short order. Nice friends you have. Maybe you ought to reconsider which side of this you’re on, girl; what do you think?”

I lunged for Imara and slammed into a barrier, one that blew me back across the room to slam full force into the glass tiles of the bar. I saw stars and darkness, and sank to an awkward sitting position on the floor, surrounded by fallen shards of mirror.

“Oh, don’t fuss. She’s not really here. Just thought I’d give you fair warning, because it’s going to hurt you a whole lot worse than it hurts me when I do get around to taking your kid.”

“Stop,” I said. I felt light-headed, sick, hot. I no longer felt in the least invulnerable. “What do you want?”

“I want to make a deal,” Bad Bob said. “Your daughter’s life for David’s. Fair trade.”

“No.” I snarled it. “You don’t even have her, you bastard; you already said so!”

“I said I don’t have her now . Not that I wouldn’t have her by the time your little rescue party fails to take me out. Sorry, kid,” he said to Imara’s image. “Mommy doesn’t love you all that well, looks like. Too bad, you’re a cutie.”

He showed me what he was going to do to her, to my child, and I didn’t look away. I wanted to, desperately,but something in me that was far colder, far wiser than my heart made me stay strong.

“When I’m finished,” he said, in a whisper as black as the Unmaking itself, “then I’ll reach through her to destroy you. But not before. I want you to feel every moment of it, Joanne. Every . . . single . . . moment.”

The Wardens and the Djinn had finally arrived, no doubt summoned by Kevin and Cherise. I felt the flare of power outside the doors; they were out there, but Bad Bob was keeping them shut out. He could do that. He had power to burn . . . but he wasn’t doing it alone. I recognized the signature behind it.

Ashan. Ashan was still interfering, throwing up barriers, trying to get me killed. He’d consider his problems solved, if I just disappeared from the face of the earth. After all, the vows David and I had exchanged had elevated the New Djinn in power—made them, I suspected, a match for the Old Djinn. Maybe even more than a match.

“You don’t have my daughter, and you’re not going to have her,” I said, with an icy calm that I was far from feeling. “The Djinn would be all over you right now if you’d harmed a hair on an Oracle’s head. You’re a fool if you think anything else—and that includes Ashan, by the way. He might be using you, but he’ll never stand with you.”

Bad Bob stared at me for a second. The grisly vision of Imara vanished into mist. Gone. He lifted the tequila bottle to his lips and drank. Drank it dry. Then he tossed the bottle back to me, and I snatched it out of the air.

“You come on, princess,” he said. “You find out what I’ve got. Call my bluff.”

I didn’t blink. “All right,” I said. “I call.” Anything, anything to buy time. My backup didn’t dare come at him unprepared, any more than I dared a direct assault against him; they had to be sure he was cut off from his support, and that they could get to him before he got me. Bad Bob had it in him to slaughter me, right here, right now. I felt it in the air. David needed to counter Ashan’s influence first.

We’d wanted this. We’d asked for it. I only hoped that we were prepared to actually deal with it, now that the moment was staring us in the face.

“Good girl.” That smile, that evil, dark smile, grew wider still. “So give me your expert opinion: Do you think this is just another illusion?” He reached aside, into the shadows, and this time he pulled out a book: the book, a twin to the one, bound in leather and wrapped in iron, that I’d last seen in the vault in Ortega’s Miami mansion.

I felt the pull of it from here, and the whisper of power. Nope, that was not an illusion. And our time was running out. I reached through the golden thread that welded me fast to David and whispered, It’s here; he has it here, and felt the Djinn surge in response.

They slammed hard into a black shell of crackling power that Bad Bob threw up so fast it made me shudder. The Wardens backed off, and the Djinn melted away, circling, looking for weakness.

I was trapped.

Bad Bob took the iron peg out of the latch with a flick of his finger, opened the book, and flipped pages. “You have any idea what’s in here, sweetheart?” he asked. “What kind of havoc I can wreak? Ah, here’s a good one. . . .” Words spilled out of his mouth, strange and liquid, and something in my brain trembled and screamed an alarm.

I froze as the last syllable left his lips, and felt something seize control of me, and a burning sensation high on my right shoulder blade, like a brand being pressed deep into the flesh. I couldn’t flinch. Couldn’t scream. I smelled my own skin burning, and couldn’t so much as cry.

This shouldn’t happen. This can’t happen!

“Hush,” Bob murmured. “Sooner done, soonest over. There. Now I own you, sweet little Jo. The way it was meant to be.” He snapped the book shut and dropped it; it vanished into mist before it hit the floor. He was storing it in a pocket universe, somewhere in the aetheric. No way to get to it without knowing exactly where, without having the keys he’d crafted to hide it.

I still couldn’t move. I stayed stiff and silent as Bad Bob walked toward me. He was a short, bandy-legged old man, but none of that mattered. I was looking at him on the aetheric, and he was no longer troubling to hide himself at all. He was a morass of boiling black, tentacles whipping and tangling, razor edges slashing at everything around him, and where he touched it, the aetheric bled .

I couldn’t even close my eyes. You son of a bitch, I thought. How dare you do this. How dare you. . . .

I felt the power of the Wardens and the Djinn beyond the room flare up into one white-hot unity, burning through the black shield he’d put up.

Not quickly enough.

“You know, you cost me,” Bad Bob said. “I spent a while cultivating all that hate, all that fear from the Sentinels. And you had to go put on a public show and get all the fanatics to wriggle out of the woodwork, whether I wanted them to or not.” He leaned very close to me, lips lover-close, and whispered, “That’s why I need you, Joanne. Be thou bound to my service.”

That made no sense. I was no Djinn. The Rule of Three didn’t work on me, and in any case the agreement between the Warden and the Djinn had ended; it was just words. It meant nothing.

It had to be a bluff.

And I couldn’t help a surge of pure fear, because there was so much visceral delight in his face.

“Be thou bound to my service.” His eyes were blood-shot, not entirely human anymore. His breath smelled foul and ancient, something ages in the ground.

Stop, I wanted to say. I couldn’t. He wasn’t even letting me breathe, and my lungs were crying out for air. I couldn’t even wield the power necessary to supply a trickle of oxygen. Stop this.

“Be . . . thou . . . bound . . . to . . . my . . .” He whispered each word separately, eyes drifting half closed in pleasure, and then smiled. “Service. Ahhhh.”

I felt the white-hot force of the united Wardens and Djinn break apart into a million spinning pieces. The thread between me and David held, but only barely. Things were changing, terribly changing, and I couldn’t see the edges of the wave that was rippling out from this moment. I didn’t know what he’d done, or how, but it was flooding the world, drowning everything.