I watched her pass out, head lolling against David’s body as he poured energy into her to seal off the mark and cut her off from the black influence of the thing, one last time.
I didn’t remember anything else, but the scene played on, a bare few seconds that changed everything.
“The containment won’t last,” Lewis said. “You know it won’t. I used one fail-safe on her. We can put in a second one while she’s out.”
“Not without her consent.”
“She already gave consent.” That was lawyering the point, but David allowed it to slip past. “We can’t kill her. We can’t save her. The best we can do now is to make sure that she can be controlled if this goes bad.”
David bared his teeth like a wild thing, and I thought for a second that he really would lunge right for Lewis’s throat. “ You’renot deciding when she lives or dies,” he said. “Not you.”
Lewis closed his eyes in what looked like gratitude and relief. “I don’t want to,” he said. “I never wanted to. You have to be the one, David. You’re the only one she trusts enough to get close at the last moment. If it’s Joanne or the world, you have to choose.”
David froze, and the people clustered around the edges of the tableau shuffled. Cherise was the one who finally spoke.
“She’d want it to be you,” she said. “She really would.”
There were tears shining in my friend’s eyes.
“I’ll put the fail-safe in place,” Lewis said. “You choose the codes.”
It was a combination, of course. Words, and deeds.
Fides mihi.Trust me.
And his hand, giving me his heart.
Fides mihi.
David’s use of the fail-safe should have killed me. If I’d been myself, only myself, it would have turned me off like a light, gone forever.
The Unmaking deflected it from shutting down my body, but it couldn’t stop the memory from returning, and the memory brought its own clarity. Its own powerful, unstoppable force.
In the second that passed, the terrible certainties that had filled me since Bad Bob put the Unmaking in my hand began to unravel. No. This is wrong. This is all wrong. I can’t do this.
David wasn’t the enemy.
This life wasn’t a fiction. It was the only reality I had. The only one I wanted, no matter what the creature beyond that portal promised me.
But even though my brain caught up with the realities and horror of being taken over, I couldn’t stop the physics of what was already in motion—me. I was already lunging for him, and I was too close to miss him.
David put the Ancestor Scriptures between us.
The Unmaking hit the book, and for a second it pushed deep into the pages, tunneling through toward David’s chest. Then it stopped moving, as if it had hit an impenetrable wall.
Then it began to shake in my hands. Not vibrate. Shake.
And then it exploded.
Shards of it flew everywhere—powdery bits, larger fragments. Some hit the rocks around us and gouged out massive craters as they skidded. The powder whipped away on the wind, a radioactive cloud that glowed hot green in the aetheric.
And one fragment—the largest one—flew straight up, into the eye of the storm.
It shrieked its way through the portal in our world, then the aetheric, and then through every plane stacked above it, ripping a hole just large enough for a single drop of darkness to squeeze through.
It trembled pendulously, then fell from the portal—a dozen feet across, maybe.
Directly above us.
I lunged toward David, trying to push him out of the way. He did the same, trying to save me.
We collided at the center, and the black drop came crashing down on us.
I wrapped my arms around David, felt his go around me, and power flared silver through and around us.
Then the darkness hit us, and the world ended.
I never expected to wake up, and I was really sorry I did. I must have been lying on the rocks for hours, cold and wet and cramped; my muscles were so stiff and strained that I whimpered even before trying to shift my position.
Overhead was a clear night sky, thick with constellations, and a bright yellow moon, three-quarters full.
Wind rustled over the island.
“David?”
No answer. I pushed myself up to a painful, staggering walk. In the moonlight, I saw nothing but black rock and sea spray.
“David?”
There was a body lying a few feet away, half hidden behind a boulder.
Bad Bob, not David. He’d died hard and ugly. Something had blown his torso in two, dividing him neatly in half from the crown of his head to somewhere around his navel. He’d been dead for hours. The blood was mostly dried on the stones around him, and he smelled lightly of decay.
More dead Sentinels littered the landscape. Moira was still draped over the stones where Rahel had left her. Lars Petrie’s severed head rocked gently in the tropical wind.
There was a cruise ship standing off the island, all its lights ablaze, but it was too far to swim, feeling as cramped and cold as I already was. God, I felt awful.
It was a mystery to me how I was still alive, or why.
“David?” I fumbled around, trying to find that silvery cord that connected us on the aetheric.
I couldn’t find it.Or the aetheric.
I’d gone completely headblind; I was unable to feel anything beyond my own normal human senses.
I’d lost my access to power.
“David!” I screamed it in panic this time, desperate to find him. I felt like I was suffocating, trapped inside my own skin.
So alone.I scrambled over rocks and bodies, looking for him with single-minded intensity, getting more and more panicked with every silent second.
I found him sitting on a boulder at the very tip of the island. He was naked and shivering.
“David? Oh God—honey—”
He was different. Very different.
When he raised his head, I saw that his eyes had gone plain brown.
Human brown.
I crouched down beside him and wrapped him in my arms. He tried to speak, but nothing came out. “My God. What happened to us?”
He couldn’t tell me.
I needed to signal the ship anchored out there, let them know we were still alive, but when I reached out for a spark of power, I found nothing. Nothing at all. Not a single tingle of energy that wasn’t fueled by the rapidly diminishing level of my own blood sugar.
I had no supernatural power at all.
Neither did David, as far as I could tell.
He got over a little bit of his violent shivering—enough to talk again. “B-b-black corner,” he whispered.
I knew what that meant. There’d been damage to the Earth Herself—damage that had destroyed the ability of the planet to channel energy to this part of the world. Most black corners were small; a few measured as much as a city block, but those were rare.
This one . . . there was no way to know how far it extended, but inside it Wardens wouldn’t have power, and Djinn wouldn’t be anything more than human—helpless, and ultimately dying as their stored energy ran out.
We had to get off the island. Now.
I gathered up dried palm husks and whatever I could scavenge from the bodies and ripped tents of the Sentinels that was burnable. I found some waterproof matches in a backpack and got a signal fire going. It wouldn’t burn for long, but it didn’t need to, and while it was burning, I wrapped David in the cast-off clothes of dead men and sat with him at the fire, trying to get him warm enough to stop shaking.
It seemed to take forever for a boat to arrive. When it did, it was full of Wardens, and Lewis was the first to step off the craft and onto the rocks.
He didn’t exactly rush to our aid. He looked ill, and almost fell as he made his slow, careful way over the rocks. He wasn’t the only one. All the rest of the Wardens looked just as bad.