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.
And when the flood receded, there was an ominous silence. The aetheric felt clean and very empty.
I drew in a whooping, gasping breath and sobbed it out, then breathed in again. Some of the black spots dancing in front of my eyes started to recede . . . not all, by any means. I felt one half step from unconscious, but I kept myself on my feet, facing Bad Bob.
“There,” he said. “That’s better.” He chucked me under the chin, as if I were his favorite niece who’d just performed a cute trick. Or a puppy. “Oh, you have questions, don’t you?”
I managed to get enough breath to gasp, “What— did—you—”
“You had a Demon Mark, once upon a time,” he said. “You may have gotten rid of the Mark, but it left you stained. Vulnerable. Mine.”
The Wardens burned through the shield and launched their assault, with or without the Djinn, and the doors of the penthouse blew off the hinges. Lewis strode in, surrounded by a barely visible nimbus of red light, and behind him came a grim-faced phalanx of my friends: Marion Bearheart, walking with a cane; Kevin, scared but determined; Luis Rocha, the Earth Warden I’d first met during the original Fort Lauderdale event. Dozens more, people I knew and liked, people I hadn’t even known would put themselves at risk for me.
David stepped out of the center of the group.
“Whoops, Daddy’s home,” Bob said. “Time for me to be leaving. You will come see me, won’t you? I’ll expect you around sunset. Love that bloody color on the water.”
My muscles were working again. I shakily reached for power and pulled it down, pulled it from all around me, every surface. The room lit up with miniature lightning strikes, all bleeding toward me.
“Bride of Frankenstein,” Bad Bob said. “All right, all right, I’m going. Don’t set your hair on fire.”
He crooked his little finger and vanished with an audible pop of air. I stared at the spot in the aetheric; the writhing black tentacles took longer to leave, finally slipping through a raw wound in the world.
I didn’t drop, though I’m sure everybody expected me to. Instead, I turned to David and asked in what seemed like a very normal tone of voice, “How badly are we screwed?”
He should have rushed to me, taken me in his arms. It was what he always did—what I expected him to do.
But he stayed where he was, watching me, and I no longer understood what I saw in his bright, burning-penny eyes.
He said, “Ashan was right. The vow we exchanged has made the New Djinn vulnerable again to the Rule of Three. My people are at risk now. From yours. We did this, the two of us.”
He sounded . . . distant. Almost cold. I couldn’t control a shiver. Go to him, I told myself, but I couldn’t seem to move. If I moved, I’d fall down.
“He’s already turned Rahel to his cause,” he continued. “She belongs to him. You can’t trust her anymore. Remember that.”
He sounded so alone. I got myself steadied, a little, and took a step toward him.
He stepped back. Keeping plenty of space between us.
“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry. I have to see to the safety of my people now.”
“David—”
For an instant, I saw the torment inside him, and it stopped whatever I was going to say dead in my throat. “I can’t,” he whispered. “He’s destroying her. He’s taking great pleasure in it. How many more of my people have to die, Jo? We’re not mortal. This shouldn’t be happening to us. It should never have happened.” He blinked, and the metallic shine came back in his eyes. “I’m sorry.”
The Djinn left. Just . . . left. All of the Djinn, gone without a sound, including David.
He hadn’t even said good-bye.
I collapsed to my knees. Someone—I didn’t even see who—helped me up. I told everyone to get out, but they wouldn’t. Understandable, I supposed.
I went into the bathroom, slammed and locked the door, and skinned down the fabric of the dress to get a look at my right shoulder blade.
Bad Bob had branded me, the same way he’d branded his Sentinels. It was a mark in the shape of a torch. The old stains left from the Demon Mark I’d once carried had given him a gateway . . . like a cut letting in bacteria. And now I was infected.