I tried to imagine any of the security people being prepared to deal with even a middle-grade Warden, much less somebody like me or Lewis or the Djinn. I failed. “Okay,” I said, because Aldonza clearly was feeling more and more uncomfortable. “I suppose it’s a bad idea anyway. I’ll take the long way around.—But, just for future reference, what do the crew-area doors look like?”
Aldonza blinked. “I thought you knew.”
Huh? My confusion must have registered, because she looked behind me at a simple door with a swipe card lock labeled PRIVATE.
“Oh,” I said. “Right. Thanks.”
She clearly thought I was crazy, and she wasn’t about to get fired over it. From the glances she threw back at me as she moved down the hallway, she was trying to make sure I wouldn’t do anything wrong—at least not before she was safely away from the scene of the crime.
Couldn’t really blame her.
I pretended to read my map, waiting until she’d had plenty of escape time. I marked the location of the crew door on it and noted the locations of the surveillance cameras, too.
I could pop the door right open, with a relatively minor pulse of power. I could fritz out the cameras, too.
But the truth was, I could do that anytime I needed to, and right now it wasn’t my first choice. I just wanted to reach my soft, expensively appointed bed.
I looked up at the surveillance eyes focused on where I stood, sighed, and took the long way around.
I still got lost. This huge floating palace was like some creepily deserted amusement park—all the lights were on, but there seemed to be a faintly sinister edge to everything. It was made to be inhabited, to be full of life and fun and conversation, and instead there was just fear. The few people I spotted were staff (crew?) going about their business.
I somehow ended up on the Grand Promenade, or at least that was what I read on the map. It was the big railed expanse looking out over the ocean. Overhead, the sky was nail gray, and the water looked just as hard and unfriendly, with sharp-edged waves. The Grand Paradise was big and heavy enough to cleave its way through like a knife, even at the labored speed we were moving.
The promenade was deserted, too. I stood in the clammy wind for a while, watching the endless rolling of the waves, and then I yawned and felt my eyelids growing even heavier.
So tired.
At least, I was tired until I felt a hot, seductive tingle on my back, just over the shoulder blade. That jerked me back to full alert like a jab from a cattle prod.
I didn’t make any more stops on my way.
Safely in the bedroom—no sign of Cherise downstairs—I sat down, closed my eyes, and focused on David. I can’t really describe the connection between the two of us; the ceremony and the vows—even though our wedding had been interrupted by Bad Bob’s attack, and technically not really finished—had pulled us together, bound us in ways that even now I couldn’t understand, except that it made it easier to call him when I needed him.
When I opened my eyes, David was forming out of the air in a swirl of gray and gold. There was something blank in his eyes this time, as if I’d taken him away from something both terrible and important. He’d been with Lewis. I wondered how bad it was.
Then he took a deep breath and willed it away, whatever it was.
“The mark is burning,” I said, without any preamble at all. He took on human form and flesh and sat down next to me. He felt warm as summer, and he smelled faintly of spices and real, human sweat, deliciously male. His fingers unbuttoned my cotton camisole and pushed it down my arms, and then he unhooked my bra and slid it off. There was no seduction in it, or at least not as much as I’d have liked; he was very focused on the job at hand.
When his fingertips pressed on the black torch mark on my back, we both gasped. He spread his whole left hand over it, and the heat spread, increased to an agonizing burn that felt as if it should come with the sound of sizzling. His right arm went around me, holding me up, keeping me from fighting him to get away from the pain.
With shocking suddenness, the fire turned to ice, a chill that ripped all the way through me, and I shuddered. When I exhaled, my breath frosted the air in delicate feathers that vanished in seconds.
I couldn’t feel the mark on my back anymore, and that was a huge relief. But, as David trailed his fingers over it, I realized that I could feel less of the area around it, too. The numb spot was growing.
I turned to look at him, and caught the unguarded pain in his face before he could hide it from me. He was tired, and he was anguished. Worse, he was despairing.
“Stop that,” I said. “What’s happening?”
“It’s getting larger,” he said. “I had to expand the containment to keep it within the boundaries. You can’t push yourself this hard.”
“I know that, and yet I’m not seeing I have much of a choice. How’s Lewis?”
He didn’t want to tell me, but I think he knew I wasn’t about to let him slip away without an explanation.“Fighting his guilt,” David finally said. “He blames himself for the deaths. He feels he made a tactical error.”
That wasn’t unexpected. “He made the right choices at the time. We had to give it a try.”
“I know. He’s afraid that he rushed into it. He’s afraid that he allowed personal issues to color the decision.”
“That’ll be the day,” I said, and then wondered what that meant. “Personal, how?” Please, let it not be about me.
“Rahel,” David said softly. “He can feel her suffering, just as I can. Bad Bob is making sure we can feel it.”
Bad Bob had a Djinn named Rahel in his clutches—one of David’s New Djinn, and someone I could almost call a friend. He could do whatever he wanted to her—the curse of a Djinn being bound to a bottle, of having her will taken away. And she couldn’t fight back. The nightmare dimensions of that stretched on and on into the darkness, because I knew how sick Bad Bob’s imagination had been even years back. God only knew how much worse he was these days, with so much Demon in his body that I wasn’t even sure the old Bad Bob was still around in any form I would recognize.
Rahel had done me some very kind favors in the past. She was never to be trifled with, or underestimated, but unlike a lot of the Djinn, she did care, however remotely, about the fate of individual humans—and the fate of the human race.
David, as her connection to the power source of Mother Earth, would feel every injury done to her. I wasn’t sure, but I thought that her connection to Lewis was more about personal feelings than old-fashioned lines of fealty. She liked him. He liked her. Maybe it went deeper than that. He’d never felt the need to tell me, and I didn’t ask. I had thought their relationship was more of a hookup than love, but I could have been wrong.
I put my hand on David’s cheek and looked him full in the face for a long, long moment. “How bad is it with her?” I asked him. I didn’t want a kind evasion. I didn’t want anything but the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and he could sense that from me. “Is he going to destroy her?”
“Eventually,” he said, and gently took my wrist. “There’s nothing more I can do for Rahel just now. She would want me to focus on those I can help.”