Cape Storm (27 page)

Kevin blinked. “You don’t want me to let him go?”

“Not yet,” I said. “You can’t take the risk. If anything happens to me—Well, you saw. I don’t want you guys to pay for it.” I was condemning David to life imprisonment, if—as was very probable—I died. Not exactly the happy ending I’d been hoping for, but it could have been worse.

I’d seen how bad it could get. Our devotion to each other had a horrible dark side. I’d been willing to call fire, burn twenty innocent people alive to make my point. David had been willing to destroy millions to avenge me.

It wasn’t David’s fault that he could never, ever forgive; it was just his Djinn nature. Now I had to protect him from his own worst impulses.

I blinked away tears and focused on Kevin, with the bottle in his hand—and Cherise, clinging to Kevin and crying. “Keep David safe for me,” I said. “I love all of you. I won’t forget.”

And then I turned and dived off the boat, into the water.

Chapter Nine

So.

It was just me and the sharks. I was acutely aware of the vast, complicated landscape of predator and prey beneath me as I floated; I’d drawn a whole lot of sharks here, and the Great Whites in particular alarmed me, because I’d seen
Jaws
.

I couldn’t feel my back at all, but the rest of my body was chilled from the water. Still, I wasn’t likely to die of exposure, or even hunger or thirst. I could maintain my body’s electrolyte levels, heat, and general health; I could desalinate water to drink. I could eat raw fish that I could call into my hands, if I wasn’t especially fussy. Wasn’t looking forward to that part; sushi prepared by a brilliant Japanese chef is a far cry from munching on something fresh out of the sea and spitting out the scales and bones.

I floated and watched the rescue craft fleet sail away. The hatch remained open on the lifeboat I’d left, and I heard arguments pouring out of it until the wind carried it away. Cherise had tried to jump out, twice. I could still hear her screaming at the top of her lungs long after other sounds had faded.

“Bye, sweetie,” I whispered, and bobbed in the waves for a while, until the boats were just dazed smudges on the horizon.

I wasn’t a good enough Earth Warden to control several hundred sharks, all operating under their natural instinctive programming. What I
could
do—and did—was create conditions that made it less fun for the sharks to come near me, basically administering electrical shocks to anything that came closer than ten feet.

It was terrifying. Eventually, though, the sharks lost interest or found other prey to follow. A few continued to circle, but I couldn’t wait; the longer I delayed, the less likely it would be that David’s containment of Bad Bob’s torch would hold for me. I started to swim. It was fun at first, and then boring, and then difficult. The human body is designed for only so much wear and tear without periods of rest, and my Earth Warden powers could maintain it, but repairing overly stressed muscles took time.

Time I wasn’t going to have.

I kept swimming. After a while, pain took on a lulling sort of normality. You really can get used to just about anything, especially if you don’t have any alternatives.

The sun began to dip toward the horizon, and I thought about being out here at night, with a sky full of stars. It was oddly peaceful. I was still myself—rescued from the abyss into which Bad Bob had dragged me, though he hadn’t exactly dragged me there kicking and screaming, to be perfectly honest about it. I had a wide streak of darkness inside, all my own, and it wasn’t just the scars left over from my earlier Demon Mark; I’d always been ambitious. I’d always pursued power.

I guess I wasn’t so different from Bad Bob after all, except that I knew all that was both a strength and a weakness. And I knew it had to have limits.

I felt none of the power or fury that had thundered through me when the torch had been active, but sooner or later, David’s containment field would fail, and without him here to renew it, the torch would burn hotter than ever. I was a Warden. I wouldn’t be that easy to kill, even stranded out here on the ocean.

I’m working too hard,
I thought.
If I swim all the way to him, I’ll have nothing left when I get there.

Depression set in. It does that when your friends sail off and abandon you, and when you have to say a probably permanent good-bye to the one man in the world you’d not only die for, but live with
. Maybe it’s not worth it. Maybe I should just take myself out of the game. That’d throw a curl in Bad Bob’s tail.

It had a seductive, petulant sort of sense to it. If I died, his plans were screwed, at least the ones I’d seen. He wanted me. He might even need me to make his small-A apocalypse come true. Without me, he had his Sentinels, but they were second-raters, and we’d already taken out the real threats.

Then again . . . if I died, that left David snapped into that state of frenzy and rage, and I couldn’t count on him staying imprisoned.

I didn’t
want
him to stay imprisoned.

But I didn’t want to stay apart. Or go back to the cold, evil bitch I’d become.

I considered all the ways I could make my marriage work while my burning, screaming muscles stroked away at the endless ocean. Nothing solved itself, but I hadn’t really expected it to. Eventually, the effort whited out my problems more efficiently than anything else could have. They weren’t gone, they were just . . . under the surface.

The sun went down. It was a beautiful sight, unbounded by the rules of land—nothing but waves and sea, and an endless bowl of sky. I had to stop more and more frequently and just let myself float. My body hurt so much I cried involuntary, hiccuping tears. Every deliberate movement felt as if my nerves had grown cutting edges and were slicing themselves right out of my skin. My skin felt rubbery and ice-cold, except for my back, which just felt like it wasn’t there at all.

I tried, but my efforts came slower, my rests more frequent. I just couldn’t keep moving. My energy reserves were gone, and although the world was rich in it all around me, I couldn’t tap it like a Djinn could.

I’m going to die out here.
Except that I couldn’t die, not without breaking the tie to David.

Not without setting him on a path of destruction that would annihilate everything.

The stars came out in thick white veils of light, and I floated on my back in the bobbing waves, too tired to keep moving at any cost.

I slept for a while. I floated.

I think I went a little insane, as the endless, isolated hours passed. Then I swam again, and then I slept.

Eventually, I dreamed I heard a ship’s horn.

My ride’s here,
I thought. It was crazy, but somehow it all made sense, the way dreams sometimes do when you’re stuck in the middle—life was an ocean, death was a ship to take me away to lands unknown. I’d bought the ticket, right? So why not take the ride?

I heard the blast of noise again, mournful and musical at the same time.

A spotlight appeared out of nowhere and hit the water, so bright I yelled and covered my eyes.

“We’ve caught ourselves a mermaid,” someone said, from behind the blaze of light. “Fish her out. Let’s see what we’ve landed.”

 

I didn’t realize how much of the sea I’d swallowed until I was out of the ocean. I promptly fell to my hands and knees and vomited up enough foamy water to fill a goldfish bowl or two. I rolled onto my side, and continued hacking up frothing mouthfuls. My lungs were on fire from the inside, and my throat felt like I’d gargled with Clorox.

My head throbbed like thunder. My skin felt rubbery and soft, and I was incredibly dizzy.

“Huh,” somebody said, and I threw up clots of white foam on a pair of sturdy-looking black paramilitary boots. “She don’t look like much, Josue.”

The hot searchlight was still beaming down on me from a stubby upper deck. In comparison to the majestic cruise ship, this looked like a stunted dwarf—a working ship, some kind of smallish freighter. Not very well kept. The metal deck around me was spotted with rust, there were careless piles of rope and haphazardly stacked boxes, and the men standing over me didn’t look like the shipshape type, either. There were four of them, all in filthy, grease-stained T-shirts, cargo-type pants or shorts, and nonskid work boots.

And they all carried knives and guns. Two of them had their firearms shoved casually into waistbands; the other two had what looked like automatic machine pistols slung on bandoliers across their chests.

I was pretty sure those weren’t standard issue for guys on board most cargo ships.

I coughed some more. I tried to sit up. I was, instead, yanked all the way to my feet, where I wavered and nearly went down again. Gravity seemed like a very strange concept to me, after all that time in the water.

I tried my voice, which came out as rusty as the ship I was standing on. “Thanks for the rescue.”

One of them laughed. He was the one who’d declared me alive, I thought, a big, muscular guy the color of mahogany. He looked like he could bite a metal bar and spit bullets. As rescuers went, not exactly comforting.

But I couldn’t help but be relieved that the whole survival thing had been taken out of my hands.

“Hola,”
the big guy—apparently, Josue—said, and aimed his machine pistol somewhere in the direction of a number of my more important internal organs. “Is your name Joanne Baldwin?”

I frankly stared at him.
“What?”

“Yes or no, mermaid. Joanne Baldwin?” He had an interesting accent to his English—thick, not quite Spanish, more lyrical and unpredictable. Close cousins, though. Portuguese, maybe. “If you’re not, I throw you back. I don’t have room for pets.”

“In that case I’m definitely Joanne.” I swallowed another cough. “Somebody told you to look for me. Who?”

“Why? Enemies would have left you sucking water, eh? Must have been friends.”

He had a point. I couldn’t imagine these guys doing anything without a profit motive, and I hadn’t pissed off anyone bad enough to make them spend a lot of money to kill me. Easy enough to just let me drown.

Wait . . . that meant it was someone who’d known I would be in the water.

“You didn’t come all the way out here to find me,” I said. Josue raised his eyebrows and smiled, not in a comforting sort of way.

“Came for the salvage on the ship that went down,” he said. “Stayed for the profits. You’re worth a lot of money, mermaid.”

“Alive, I guess.”

He shrugged. “Apparently.”

This ship was far from an honest sort of vessel. They’d picked up the maritime distress calls from the
Grand Paradise
—I assumed the captain had sent them—and of course the lifeboats would have transponders on them, probably sending out automated rescue calls. And in these waters, that would draw two kinds of vessels: well-meaning Good Samaritans, and the kind of ship I’d just been fished onto.

In other words, pirates. And somebody had co-opted them to search specifically for me.

“Look!” said one of the crew, stationed at the railing. He called for light, and the beam burned out into the water, turning it from black to a muddy, sullen blue. At first I didn’t see what he was looking at, and then I caught a glimpse of bobbing wood. A few bits of debris from the ship had followed the same currents I’d used. There was plenty of small, buoyant wreckage still around, though the debris cloud had long since dissipated and spread itself out over dozens of miles of open water. Not much of a grave for such an enormous vessel.

“Everybody get off?” the pirate captain asked me, and shoved me with the barrel of his gun when I delayed my answer. “Everybody in those little boats, yes?”

“You bet,” I said. “Everybody’s been rescued. Well, everybody but me, obviously.”

He seemed disappointed. I guessed he’d been hoping to fish out some rich Americans he could ransom back at a significant profit. I didn’t blame him; I didn’t look like a rich payday, regardless of what his patron had told him.

“How come you didn’t end up on a rescue boat, mermaid? You not fresh enough?”

A couple of his crewmates offered helpful commentary about how yummy I looked. Charming. I was starting to feel like today’s catch, still wiggling on the line.

I took a deep breath. That was a mistake; it resulted in more lung-wrenching coughing, and I spat up some more foam and mucus. “Let’s just say I missed my boat,” I said.

“What makes a woman stay behind when a boat is sinking?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question; he was showing off for his crew. “You have a kid on the ship?”

“No.”

“Money, then.” He flashed me a vulpine grin. “Always money.”

“Speaking of money, who hired you to find me?”

The laughter died out on the man’s face, and left it watchful and dangerous. “Don’t think I want to tell you that,” he said. “Not yet.”