Cape Storm (34 page)

That probably meant they were dead, out there on the ocean, but at least they’d died cleanly, off this black hunk of stone.

His remaining troops scrambled to assemble at his silent wave of command. They were terrified, and they were realizing—all too late—that the savior they’d imagined him to be was all in their heads. He’d used their fears against them.

I imagined he would continue to do that, right up to the end. They had to follow him now. Where else was there to go?

“Get over here!” he yelled. “Bring our friend along!”

The Sentinels began crossing the distance. Some of them were old, some were wounded, none of them looked entirely compos mentis.

They all looked at me like I was dinner—which, considering Bad Bob’s earlier pot roast revelation, was a truly sickening thought.

“Moira,” Bob said, and held out his hand. A spritely little pixie of a young woman stepped out from the others and came forward to lock fingers with him. In her left hand, she carried an old green wine bottle with an equally ancient cork stuffed in the top.

I didn’t know her. She was younger than I was, which surprised me—a lovely young girl with fair skin and full lips and a head of thick, lustrous red hair that glinted gold in its highlights.

She held the bottle up to Bad Bob as if seeking his approval on a choice to serve with dinner. He nodded.

Her eyes were the same blue as Bad Bob’s. “Hey, Da,” she said. “What can I do to help?”

He pecked a kiss onto her perfect milkmaid’s cheek. “Oh, just stand there and look pretty.”

I felt a step or two behind the curve.
“Da?”
I said. “Unless she’s speaking Russian, you’ve got to be kidding me. You’ve got a
kid
? Wait—more importantly, some woman actually slept with you? Without a condom?”

“Shut up,” the girl said, and temper blazed up in her like magma. That, more than anything else, convinced me of the paternal bloodline.

“Wow,” I said. “I don’t know whether to say congratulations or condolences. That probably goes for both of you.”

“Moira, meet Joanne,” Bob said. “Moira’s my pride and joy, the fruit of my powerful loins. Isn’t she beautiful?”

Moira, like daughters everywhere, looked annoyed. “Oh, can it, Da.”

“I’m very proud of her. But you know how that feels, don’t you, Jo? You’re a mother. More or less.”

That made me flinch, as he’d known it would. I wanted to demand that he leave my own child out of this—a half-human/half-Djinn hybrid who’d become one of the three Djinn Oracles. The Earth Oracle, in fact, which was how I’d gained access to that particular set of powers—through her.

Imara had been born full-grown, and she was a lot like me—she could, and did, take care of herself. Besides, the Djinn would have closed ranks around their Oracles, protecting them at all costs.

Imara was safe. I was the one at risk. He wanted me to fear for her, but I just stared him down.

“Nothing?” Bad Bob watched my face. “Huh. Well, okay then. Cross that one off my list.” And he pulled the cork on the bottle. “Oh, wait. Let’s revisit that.”

A ghost misted out of the air. My own body, mirrored. My own dark hair. Everything the same, except her golden eyes, and the brick-red layered dress that swirled around her body like smoke.

“Damn,” Bad Bob said, and turned to Moira. “I thought I told you to bring the
white.
”

She smirked. “Sorry.”

I didn’t pay any attention to their playacting. My brain seemed stuck, unable to move past the word
No
to any kind of possible outcome to this moment.

My daughter Imara was
here.
And she couldn’t possibly be here. There was no way Bad Bob or any of his minions could have captured her, stolen her from her chapel in Sedona, without triggering an all-out war with the Djinn. They’d fight to the last of them for her, no matter whose daughter she’d been in the beginning. Not only that, but David would have known. There was no way that he and Ashan
couldn’t
have known, if something happened to Imara. The Earth Herself would have fought back to protect an Oracle.

My daughter looked at me with desperate fear in her eyes, and I couldn’t stop a pulse of maternal anguish from traveling like lightning through my body.

And then I pushed it away. “Nice try,” I said. “But no sale. That’s not my daughter.”

Moira gave her father a harassed look. “
Told
you she’d never buy that malarkey,” she said, and grabbed the bottle back from him. The form of the Djinn shifted away from Imara’s reflection of my face, took on darker shades and harsher angles. Long, cornrowed hair with gleaming bits of gold beaded in. This was a Djinn I knew.

The Djinn had fought to keep that part of her appearance the same—at what cost, I couldn’t quite imagine—but she’d lost the war on clothing. Moira dressed her like a Barbie, and the effects were ridiculous. Rahel was wearing a wine-colored evening gown, sleeveless, with a plunging neckline and a slit up the side. White opera gloves. Dangling diamond earrings.

Rahel was a beautiful creature, but this looked wrong on her. Deeply, stupidly insane.

“Wait,” Moira said, and giggled. She added a tiara on top of Rahel’s head, a ridiculously ornate confection of chrome and fake diamonds. “Wave to the adoring crowds, Miss America.”

Rahel’s right hand came up and did a mechanical, empty wave.

Her eyes were locked on mine, and I hated what I saw in them, because it was a very close cousin to the madness that I’d recently seen in David, when he thought I was gone. A desire to crush and destroy and kill everything in her path. She’d been tormented, forced to do horrible things. And she, like David, was not inclined to forgive.

“Hey,” I said to Moira. “Seriously, is that the best you can do? Because that’s not even original. Honestly, I used to be a Djinn. I had a teenage boy for a master. Now,
he
had an imagination. You’re just—sad. But then again, like father, like daughter . . .”

I got that pulse of fury out of her again. “You shut your whore mouth!”

“Wow. Like I said. Sad. When you have to quote a MySpace graphic, you’ve just given up.” I ignored Moira and looked at her father. “What’s the point of having the kid here? Were you just lonely for somebody who had an extra helping of crazy in the veins?”

The girl smirked at me, turned, and skinned up the edge of her thin white shirt.

She didn’t have a torch mark. Instead, her back was a mass of writhing fire, moving just below the skin—worse than mine had ever gotten, even at its most painful. “I’m one of the chosen,” she said, and dropped the fabric. “Like you used to be, before you gave it all up.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Just when I thought you’d hit rock bottom, Bob. Congratulations on tunneling down.”

“It’s the family business,” he said. “Bringing an end to this travesty we call humanity.”

I checked the horizon. No ships breaking the smooth outline of the sea.

I was starting to sweat.

“So what now?” I asked. “Not that this isn’t fun, but my leg’s falling asleep. Can we move the end of the world along a little? Or at least work in a nap?”

Moira laughed. Bad Bob shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “For you, sweetness, I’ll kick it into high gear. But you know that means you’re going to suffer, don’t you?”

“I figured,” I said, and shrugged. “I’m already suffering. These rocks are really uncomfortable.”

He laughed. “What a girl,” he said, and elbowed his daughter. “Right?”

By her expression, she found me a good deal less charming. “She’s nothing,” she said. “You never needed her, Da. You always had me.”
Oooooh, jealous. Very jealous.
I could use it.

“That’s true.” He kissed her forehead, but his eyes never left me. “That’s very true. I’ve been taking out her bones, one at a time. What do you think, princess?”

“Too boring.” She wasn’t even looking at me; she pulled free of Bad Bob and walked a slow circle around Rahel, inspecting her Miss America impersonation. “Make her work for it.”

“Hmmmm. There’s an idea. Two birds and one very big stone.” Bad Bob slammed the book closed and put it under his arm. “All right, then. Let’s see what you can do, my child. Impress me.”

Moira sat down on a handy boulder, open wine bottle in both hands on her lap, and tossed glossy red hair back over her shoulders. “Rahel,” she said. “I want you to break Joanne Baldwin’s right leg in two. Use your hands. Do it now.”

She knew the rules of commanding a Djinn—be specific about intent, method, and time frame. And I could see that they’d had plenty of practice with Rahel—she hadn’t gained that traumatized fury without cause.

“Do it slowly,” Moira said. “Make her feel every second of it.”

Rahel’s eyes focused on me, and she began walking across the stones toward where I sat. Not a hell of a lot I could do to stop her; if I tried to resist, my
other
leg was sure to be crushed, and maybe even pulled off by this tentacle thing Bad Bob was using for a tether. She still looked ridiculous in her getup, but I didn’t let that fool me for a second. I’d seen the Djinn in the grip of truly evil people, and they were no more to be reasoned with than the blade of a knife.

I looked past Rahel at Moira. “I guess you hate me for being the daughter he never had. Daddy didn’t trust you, did he? That’s why he came after me in the first place. Because you weren’t measuring up. Either that, or he wanted to screw me. Your choice.”

Bad Bob’s face went very still, and I knew I’d guessed right.

So did Moira. She surged to her feet. “Rahel! When I tell you, you’re going to kill that bitch for me!”

One rule of commanding an embottled Djinn:
Never
give your orders angry. Moira had just forgotten to explicitly frame her order as to
whom
to kill.
Bitch
could apply to, oh, more than one of us standing here, and unless she caught that error later on, Moira was in for a nasty surprise.

I saw the light flare gold in Rahel’s eyes, and I took a deep breath.
Wait,
I mouthed. The desire to strike was almost primal in her, and she knew she was close, so close to having the freedom to exact her revenge.

I knew I could push that button anytime I wanted to—but first, I had to endure a little more. Moira would think of her mistake if I gave her the time.

I needed to keep her engaged.

Rahel bent down and put her hands on my outstretched right leg, the nontentacled one. Her opera gloves felt cool and smooth against my skin. “She did say to do this slowly,” she said, and I let out a slow breath, then nodded. Rahel was telling me, without wasting words, that she had identified the gaps in Moira’s original order. To a Djinn, the word
slowly
meant something entirely different than it did to a human. Their time-scales were vast, and that instruction was not nearly as specific as Moira might have believed it was.

Now it was up to us to hide that fact.

Rahel froze, with her hands on my leg. I waited. I didn’t feel anything—no increase in pressure, no pain, nothing. She’d taken the freedom Moira’s instructions offered to simply stretch this out so long that it might take a lifetime for her grip to increase its force enough to crack a bone, much less break it.

“Nice,” I murmured, and got a brief, cold parting of her lips. Her teeth were filed to points. “Don’t panic, whatever I do.”

Rahel raised one arched eyebrow, and I began to struggle against her grip, panting—selling the idea that she was hurting me, when in fact she was doing nothing but pinning my right leg to the stone.

As performances go, this one probably was a bit over the top even for high school melodrama, but Moira lapped it up like cream. I tossed in some begging and bargaining. She loved it. Pretty girl, but either Bad Bob’s genetics or Bad Bob’s black tattoo had rendered her broken and sick. I remembered someone else like her—Kevin’s stepmother, Yvette Prentiss. The avid shine in Moira’s blue eyes as I threw myself around and shrieked in simulated agony was almost exactly the same.

Then again, Bad Bob had been involved with Yvette, too. I had the feeling all the sickness came from one poisoned well.

Behind her, seated on his plastic throne, Bad Bob looked less focused on my performance. He scanned the horizons restlessly, frowning. His attention was on the effect, not the cause—he wanted my pain to draw my hypothetical rescue out from hiding.

I could have told him that it wasn’t coming. Lewis was too careful for that.

I wasn’t sure how long Rahel intended to carry on our little drama, but my voice was getting hoarse from all the screaming, and even Moira’s attention was starting to wander. When you’re losing your torturer’s focus, it’s probably time to wrap up the play.

I let out a heartrending shriek of utter agony, and went pitifully limp, weeping like my heart would break. I didn’t have to simulate being exhausted. Throwing yourself into something like that takes a sweaty, aching toll.

Ah, she liked that. I had Moira’s full attention once more. “Rahel, break Joanne Baldwin’s other leg,” Moira said, and her pale tongue came out to lick her lips. “Do it just as slowly.”

Really, you can’t spell sadist without the word
sad
. She’d just forgotten that my other leg was the one wrapped in Bad Bob’s tentacle tether.

Rahel might not have normally been able to take the tentacle from my left leg, but she’d just been ordered to do something that allowed her to freely interpret method, and in one lightning-fast move, she reached down, plunged her fingers deep into the base of the tentacle, and ripped.

Oh
Christ
that hurt. The tentacle fought back, clamping down on my leg with all its muscular strength, and I felt things pop and move that really shouldn’t be shifting around inside. Rahel ripped at it again, digging her sharp fingernails into dark flesh and ichor, and tore the thing loose from its roots deep in the rocks.