He smiled, opened his mouth, and his jaws gaped hideously wide, like a snake’s. If this was a nightmare, it was a first-class effort out of my very darkest subconscious.
I stepped back from him.
His jaws re-formed and closed. The Cheshire Cat smile remained. “Don’t look so scared,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff I can do with my tongue. Bet I could make you forget all about that wimpy little Djinn boy you’re so taken with. Give me a chance—No? All right, then. I guess I’ll just have to settle for something else. Thanks for being so accommodating and wandering on over here, by the way. I figured you might, sooner or later. The torch has that effect on people. It just draws people to me, whether they like it or not.”
He took two steps forward, thrust out his hand, and put it all the way through my ghostly, insubstantial chest. Unsettling, and a little uncomfortable, but I actually felt a little spurt of triumph. Not as easy as you thought it would be, I was about to say, when I realized that he’d reached to a very specific place.
To the ghostly mark on my back. The black torch. His fingertips brushed against it beneath my translucent skin—I could feel it, even if I couldn’t see it happening.
All of a sudden the room was far too small, like a trap, and I wanted to leave this place, now, before something happened.
Too late.
I felt my physical body, still far away on board the ship, writhing in its sleep. I felt the hot tingle of the black torch begin to spread across my shoulder blade.
I’d lost David’s containment, and because I was asleep, he might not know it.
Bad Bob removed his hand from my chest, shook it as if he was flicking something nasty off his fingers, gave me a feral grin, and walked away. I struggled to figure out what was holding me here, in this place, pinned like a bug to a board. The mark. He was right. Until I figured out how to turn it off—if I could—he could keep me here, out of my body. I knew that the longer I stayed out, the worse it was going to be when I got back.
I remembered the Wardens, lost in the storm. If my spirit was shredded, my body would just . . . stop. And they would never know why.
Outside, a truly ferocious storm raged. I felt the hot, damp blast of hair burst into the room, stirring grit and pushing the rickety sticks of furniture in random fury. Lightning flashed like strobes, turning Bad Bob’s pale hair and face into a fright mask.
He reached outside, and when his hand came back through the doorway, it was holding a spear. I recognized the thing—it was thick, and it sparkled with bursts of something that wasn’t color, wasn’t darkness, wasn’t anything human senses could identify or codify. He’d refined his weapons, I saw. This spear had started out life as a small chunk, grown in the dying body of a Djinn, and Bad Bob had given it enough care and feeding to make it a seven-foot-long, wickedly pointed expression of his own appetite for destruction.
The Djinn called it the Unmaking. It was, as best I understood the physics of it, stable antimatter, capable of destroying anything he wanted to destroy.
Including removing Djinn from the fabric of the universe.
“Oh, Bob, that’s just sad,” I said. His grin broadened. “Seriously, why can’t your type ever grow a discus for a weapon, or the world’s largest potato? How come it’s always so—phallic?”
Bob ignored the opportunity to banter, and stepped out into the storm. He looked up at it, into the heart of it. I knew what he was seeing—the raging engine of destruction, the primitive mind forming behind it. This was a living thing, this storm—a predator, yes, but a natural one, like a tiger or a puma.
He ground the butt of his spear against the dirt, and a blinding pulse of something that wasn’t light, wasn’t heat, wasn’t right went up from the pointed end of the spear into the storm.
Again.
Again.
With every thump of that weapon against the earth, I felt the world itself shudder. On the aetheric, muddy red waves spread like blood from a mortal wound.
The force emitted from the spear had a sickening feel to it, and the color—if you could call it a color—was a poisonous, pallid thing, like the glow given off by decay.
The storm’s lightning suddenly flashed, but it wasn’t light.
It was dark. Photonegative energy, but here on the real world. He’d infected the storm itself, made it a force for destruction far different from any natural predator.
And then it flashed that unearthly emerald green.
“Almost ready,” Bad Bob said, and reversed his grip on the spear. Handling that much anti-energy couldn’t have been pleasant, even for him; I could see the skin blackening and flaking away where his hand touched the surface. “Ready for the cherry on top?”
He pointed the spear down at the ground, and drove it in. It went deep, even though he didn’t use any real force—as if it tunneled greedily on its own.
I felt the earth shriek in real pain beneath my ghostly feet, and the whole building shook. Grit filtered down in feathery whispers, and then the real lurch came.
The building exploded as force traveled up through the ground, pulverizing layers of granite into dust. The cinder blocks of the walls buckled, ground themselves into powder against each other, and the ceiling crashed in a twisting, tearing mass of wood and metal that was snatched away by the wind.
Nothing touched me.
I stood exactly where I had as the building disintegrated around me, ripped away by the howling Category 5 winds. The ground lurched like pounding surf underneath me.
Bad Bob rose up into the air, holding to the end of his spear. He kept rising.
The spear grew, and grew, like some poisonous tree with its roots sunk deep.
He broke it off at ground level. It shattered at the stress point with a musical, glassy sound I heard even above the shriek of the storm.
A palm tree toppled and rolled toward me. Through me. Bad Bob landed on the rippling earth in front of me, appallingly normal in this terribly destroyed setting, and used the remaining part of his spear as a walking stick. Thump. Thump. Thump. It echoed through me like the beating of Poe’s telltale heart.
Around us formed a little circle of clear air, stable ground, like the eye of the hurricane. It expanded, and other people appeared out of the chaos. Wardens, once upon a time. I recognized many of them, at least by face if not by name. His pets, his converts to his righteous war against the Djinn—not that Bad Bob cared a bean about killing the Djinn to benefit humanity. Oh no. Bad Bob cared only, and always, about his own ends, and whatever these pathetic, deluded people thought they were getting out of fighting on his side, they were bound to be disillusioned.
I assessed numbers. Might as well, since I was stuck here. It did occur to me that Bad Bob was showing me only what he wanted to show me, of course, but for all that, the guy who keeps showing off will eventually show you something he doesn’t intend to.
Bad Bob was one hell of a chatterbox.
Sixty of them. My spirits sank, which was no doubt what he’d counted on. He had numbers. Of course, we had more, but add to that Bad Bob’s Demon-derived powers and the neat trick of handheld antimatter that the Djinn could neither recognize nor defend against, and we were well on the train to Screwsville.
“You still think you can win?” he asked me. I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t sure I dared tell a lie right now, and a lie was all I really had. “Scared little Jo. It was always going to end like this, you know. You against me, and you never could take me.”