Lewis’s strength gave out, and he lost his grip on the railing. He fell to his knees. I could feel David’s agony rippling through the connection between us. This was tearing them both apart. Lewis’s body was surrendering under the strain.
I reached out and put my hand on his sweat-matted hair.
Finally, he turned his head and looked at me. Just one look, not very long. Bone-deep exhaustion in him, and just a tiny trace of regret.
“Jo, you have to stop yourself,” he said. “Please. Stop yourself.”
“Too late,” I told him, and took control of the bubble away from him.
It was a shock, how much power was involved. Even with the enormous flood pouring in from the storm, from Bad Bob himself, the force that hit me was staggering. A normal Warden, no matter how accomplished, would have been shredded in seconds.
Lewis collapsed limply on the deck, rolled away, and began to crawl slowly.
I rolled him faceup, and held him in place with a foot on his chest. I turned my face to the storm, looking into the abyss.
Nietzsche was right—it also looked into me.
“Stay put,” I said to Lewis. “I want you to see this. You used to be an altruist, but I watched you change. You turned into such a realist, with all your cold win/lose/ draw equations. You just never thought you’d acutally lose, did you?”
Lewis reached in his pocket and pulled out a small glass bottle. It was sturdy, one of those pocket travel samples of men’s cologne. Designed to be break-resistant, but still meeting all the glass-only requirements of a Djinn containment bottle. The cap, of course, was off, because Lewis had been accessing David’s powers.
I saw him struggle with the choice. That was a no-win scenario.
He eventually did the moral thing, and tried to smash it against the deck. It didn’t break.
“Where are the other Djinn?” I asked. Lewis shook his head and collapsed, panting. He was holding the bottle in a death grip. “Let me guess. I have a good idea of how you think. You ordered David to send them all away, to a place of safety. Maybe Jonathan’s house.”
Lewis nodded, eyes tightly closed. I wondered why he wouldn’t look at me. I wondered what he saw.
“I’ll bet you told yourself it was temporary,” I said, and took my foot off of Lewis’s back to crouch down next to him, staring at his face. “You’d let him go as soon as the emergency was over. But that’s not human nature, Lewis. We don’t work that way. We take power, and we keep it. We don’t give it up. Someone has to come along and take it from us, usually violently.” I smiled softly. “There’s always another goddamn crisis, baby. Don’t you get that?”
He didn’t want to look at me. I wondered what was so terrible about my face; I felt positively great. Better than I had for ages.
Finally, Lewis got up his strength to ask, “What are you going to do?”
“Take this ship where it was going anyway,” I said. “Directly to Bad Bob. The difference is, most of you will be dead by the time it arrives, I’m afraid.” I paused, waiting to feel some kind of regret. Nothing came. The last little bit of me was slipping under the waves, and I really couldn’t even care.
Lewis rolled over on his side and wiped blood from his nose and eyes, still avoiding my gaze. His pupils were huge, like those of a man who’d never left the darkness.
“Well?” I asked, and cocked my head. “What are you going to do about this little situation? Aren’t you going to stop me?”
He coughed. It sounded wet and deep, like something had broken deep inside him. “No.”
“Really.”
“You’re the one with the hero complex, not me.”
“And what are you?” He didn’t answer. “Oh, that’s right. You’re the one who doesn’t have to feel good about himself to know he did the right thing. Then live up to it, Lewis. You can stop me. You’ve got the answer in your hand.”
His fingers closed around the bottle.
David’s bottle.
“Come on,” I whispered. “Let him out. You know you want to. Wouldn’t it do your heart good to make him come after me? Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Stop.”
“Make me.”
The look on his face made fires ignite deep inside me. Tasty. “No.”
“It’s too late to get all noble on me now, Lewis. You put a Djinn in a bottle. Worse, you put a Conduit in a bottle. Don’t you think that’s going to piss the Djinn off? The last war was about them wanting their freedom. This one’s going to be pure revenge, and they won’t care about who’s innocent and who’s guilty. Congratulations. You’ve single-handedly destroyed the Wardens.”
“I’m not the one who made the Djinn . . . vulnerable to capture,” he said. He had to stop for breath. “You knew marrying David . . . would do this. Vows. You didn’t care.”
A wave washed over the bubble above us, leaving a thin, lacy film behind. It was like looking through my mother’s kitchen curtains. The storm outside raged on, but it was losing some of its fury. It knew I’d won.
We’d won. Me and the storm, together.
“I’m a selfish bitch,” I agreed. “I tried, okay? I did the good-girl thing. I fought the good fight, and where did it get me? My skin burned off, Lewis. Nobody was telling me so, but I was never going to get better, was I? I’m damned if I’m going to walk around with no fucking skin the rest of my life so that I can feel all good about adhering to my strict moral code.” I took a deep breath and tasted ozone from the storm’s whipping frenzy. “It’s just power. Doesn’t matter where it comes from, or where it goes.”
“And you can quit any time you want.”
My tone hardened. I still didn’t like being mocked. “Fuck your intervention. I’m the one still standing.”
Lewis’s fingers tightened around the bottle. The one holding the only thing that might stop me. I’d known from the moment I walked out on the promenade that it was going to come down to this.
I smiled.
And he surprised me. “No. I’m not calling David. Not just for his sake—for yours. If you live through it, I don’t want you having that on your conscience.”
“I’m not Bad Bob,” I said. “I love him.”
He coughed blood. “You kind of loved me, too. Look how that turned out.”
I slapped my hand down hard next to his head. Hard enough to split the wood. Overhead, the storm shrieked harmony to the howling rage inside me. “Call him!”
“No way in hell.”
All he had to do was get David out in the open. That was all I wanted. I slapped the deck again, and again, and again. Splinters jabbed deep, and I left primal bloody handprints behind.
It felt so good.
Lewis opened his eyes and locked stares with me at point-blank range. “No,” he said, very softly. “This isn’t going to happen the way you want.”
I looked up. There were other people out on the Promenade now—Wardens, arraying themselves against me.
Cherise, standing with them, like an actual person who mattered. They all wore identical tense, focused expressions . . . the look of soldiers just before the battle.
I looked down at Lewis and smiled a real, warm, sunny smile. “We’ll see,” I said, and stood up to put my hands on my hips. “We’ll see about that.”
Then I walked away to get some air.
Nobody stopped me as I walked.
In time, I felt the last whispers of power click into place, locking me into the storm. We were one now—a symbiotic dark engine, generating our own power. Our own reality. The storm and I were one.
Easy, I told it. Easy, for now.
And the winds began to slow. It could bide its time.
So could I.
I waited until the winds died a bit, then let go of the bubble of force that Lewis and David had built at such cost.