“She’s gone,” Lewis repeated again dully, with a hitch of agony in his voice. He thought I was dead, I could feel that. Whatever was anchoring me here, in this dying shell, was something he couldn’t touch. “We have to let David say good-bye.”
“You can’t do that, man. He’ll kill you,” Kevin said. He sounded absolutely sure of it. “No. I’m not letting David anywhere near this. There’s no way he won’t rip us all into meat for doing this to her.”
“Give me the bottle.”
“No.”
“I’m not going to ask again. Give it to me.”
“No!”
There was some kind of struggle, and then Kevin cursed in an unsteady whisper. Cherise was weeping as if her heart was breaking. From everyone else in the small boat came silence, rapid breathing, waves of distress and fear.
God, please, let me go, I begged. My brain should have been off by now, letting me escape into the comfortable dark, but instead I could feel my nerves slowly dying, my cells screaming for oxygen. Nothing I could do to stop it, either.
I was feeling my body die on a cellular level. God, would I be around for the rest of it? Feeling the dead cells turn into sludge and soup? Decomposing?
I didn’t want to be trapped in this body as it slowly decayed, with no hope of release or rescue.
I realized, very slowly, that what was binding me here was one tiny thread of silver, stretching through the navel of my body and out through the aetheric.
David was holding me here, but he couldn’t save me. His power wasn’t mine to touch, and it wasn’t his, either, not as long as someone else held his bottle and he was trapped inside it.
“Lewis—don’t do this, man,” Kevin said. I’d never heard that tone in his voice before, so pleading. “I’m begging you. Don’t. It’s not fucking fair.”
“I’m not doing it because it’s fair,” Lewis said. “I have to do it because it’s right. It doesn’t matter how long we wait; when we let him out of that bottle, his grief will be exactly the same. So let him out now. Please.”
The darkness that Bad Bob had put inside of me battered at the prison of my dead body, fighting to reactivate it. To stay alive.
Without the energy of my body sustaining the darkness, it was growing weaker. Dying along with me.
I felt a whisper of power scent the air as the cap came off of David’s prison. I felt him battering furiously at the glass, trying to shatter his way free.
Oh, you fool, Lewis. He’ll destroy you.
“David,” Lewis said. “Come out.”
Wind blasted through the boat, pinning people against the walls, and a wild-eyed angel dropped out of heaven to gather me in his arms.
The sound that came out of him was some horrible cross between a scream and a growl—inhuman, furious, insane with grief. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t control my eyes to focus on his face, so his expression was mercifully blurred.
Suddenly, I felt the pressure of darkness inside me ease. Bad Bob had lost interest in me. Dead, I was of no use to him, none at all. The thick, toxic sludge of power inside me began to bleed away.
But it wasn’t gone. Not yet.
Lewis said, “David, please understand. You can’t bring her back. Not this time.”
David’s voice was a raw, bloody scream. “She’s not gone!”
He could touch me. See me. Feel my ghostly presence. He hugged my limp form to his chest and rocked back and forth, his face hidden in my hair.
“Let me save her,” he whispered. “Order me to save her.”
I felt Lewis shudder. “No. David, you have to let her go. She’s damaged. She can’t fight him off anymore. It’s time to let her go.” He paused, and then said, with absolute precision, “I’m ordering you to let her die, David.”
The silence in the boat was as deep as the ocean. So was the sense of pressure. Even my dead flesh could feel it.
“I’ll kill you for this,” David said. There was nothing in his voice—no emotion, no hate, no grief. Nothing but simple declaration of intent. “I’ll rip you apart one cell at a time, and you’ll live a thousand years through the pain. I might even let you scream, if you beg me.”
He was utterly serious. He would torture Lewis. He’d do it with the kind of cold distance that the Djinn reserved for those they truly, deeply, madly hated.
He’d do it for me.
“Listen to me,” Lewis said, and if he was afraid, it didn’t show in his voice. “I’m ordering you not to save her. I’m ordering you to cut the cord and let her go.”
“Well, that’s a paradox,” David said. He still sounded eerily calm, almost relaxed. “Because if I let her go, it destroys the vow that binds me to the bottle, and that means I’m free. Free to pull you apart, Lewis. Free to order the brutal, screaming death of every last one of your kind. Do you really think I won’t?” There was madness in him, I realized. Terrible, burning madness, and Kevin was right—letting David free was a death sentence for Lewis. Not just for him, though. For the Wardens. For everyone.
In this moment, David was a bigger threat to humanity than anything Bad Bob had ever dreamed.
I didn’t want to linger like this. I wanted to tell him it was all right, that Lewis had done it for a reason, a good one, and I didn’t really mind. The darkness was dripping out of me in an invisible stain on the deck. I felt . . . clear, at last. Finally, myself again.
I couldn’t bring myself back to life; it violated all the laws of the universe. All I could do, now that I was clear of Bad Bob’s influence again, was choose to die. But if I did that, if I severed the cord holding me and David together, the result would be the same; he’d be lost, and alone, and mad with fury and grief.
I could feel Lewis working all of that out, and realizing that he was in a trap he couldn’t escape.
Just like David.
“Let me have her,” David said. “Let me have her and I swear I will not harm you.”
Lewis’s voice came back stripped raw. Bloody. “You think I’m afraid of that?” He stopped and took a deep breath. “She’s too dangerous. You know that.”
“No,” David said softly. “I don’t know it. You fear it. There’s a difference. Let me have her, or I will teach you fear. All of you. You think you’ve suffered at the hands of the Djinn? You have no concept of how much I can do to you.”
Lewis knew the minutes were ticking away, and after a certain point, life wouldn’t return to the decomposing tissues of my body. Not any kind of life I’d want to have, anyway.
He also knew that forcing David to kill me was even worse.
“Do it,” Lewis said. “Save her.”
Before the words were out of his mouth, David acted. A silver cascade of power flooded me, pounded on my heart, drowned my brain. This was the pure white light of the Djinn, bathing me from the inside out. And where it met the fading black tangle of Bad Bob’s tattoo . . .
. . . the silver light went out.
There was still a deadly core there, hiding inside me. Under the skin. Not even death had taken it away.
I took in a convulsive breath and sat bolt upright, still held in David’s arms, and then I relaxed against him, even through the pain. My eyes spilled over with tears of agony, liquid screams that were the only thing I had to give voice to what was raging inside.
If I couldn’t come back all the way, come back clean, I didn’t want to come back at all.
I shuddered, and my eyes rolled back in my head, and for a precious moment I blacked out as my nervous system simply refused to conduct any more pain.
I returned to consciousness slowly, with the distant awareness of pain but unable to feel it directly. My back was numb again, all the way down to midway on my thighs. I couldn’t feel the back of my head, either. Or the tops of my shoulders.