The third drawer yielded an almost empty bottle of Cutty Sark.
“Score,” I said. I unscrewed the cap, wiped the lip of the bottle with my shirt, and threw back the rest of the booze in one long, thirsty pull. When there were no more threads of amber snaking their way down the glass to my mouth, I lowered the bottle and set it on the desk.
“David?”
He opened the door.
It’s not that easy to catch a Djinn who’s alert for treachery, and David—even though he loved me—knew better. I’d just told him not to trust me.
But he gave me the benefit of the doubt, even with the empty bottle open on the desk in front of me.
I looked up at him and said, “We need to talk, honey.”
Lewis sent Brett Jones, Fire Warden, former Special Forces. He was bigger than Josue, and after a dick-measuring initial meeting, Josue evidently accepted that Brett was meaner as well. I didn’t know Brett that well, but Lewis did, and if Lewis sent him to take care of us, then we could trust him.
“Watch your back,” I whispered to Brett as I passed him. He’d come armed to the teeth, which made him fit right in with all my pirate crewmates; on him, though, it looked like professional accessories. He nodded to me. It seemed like a thousand years since we’d sat in the movie theater on the Grand Paradise, watching as our colleagues were carried off in body bags after that first clash with Bad Bob’s storm.
Brett looked as hard and tired as I felt. He also looked very alone, standing at the bow with his arms folded, watching the speedboat head back to the distant cruise ship. The weather was still foul over in that direction. The storm just wasn’t about to give up its prize, no matter how hopeless it was.
Standing in the filthy confines of Josue’s tiny captain’s cabin, I brushed the worst of the tangles out of my hair, and used a burst of power to clean my clothes and remove the worst of the grime from my skin. As accommodations went, even temporary accommodations, these earned zero stars; the bed was filthy, the floor was littered with toenail clippings, and the walls were pasted over with hard-core porn actresses in action shots.
David opened the cabin door and stepped in. He watched me in silence, not touching me. We’d talked about all this, but convincing him was another matter altogether. And even when he bowed to necessity, he did it grudgingly.
I wished I could really tell what he was thinking, but then, he probably was wishing the same thing.
“One good thing about this,” I said. “This time, we get to do it right.”
He shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, the first time was good enough for eternity.”
That made me smile. “You must be a romantic. I mean, what with all the mayhem and the chaos and the not finishing the ceremony—”
“If I wasn’t a romantic, I wouldn’t be here.”
He had an excellent point. I decided not to pursue it. Instead, I put down Josue’s comb and did another critical review. I looked . . . surprisingly good, actually. The sun and sea had given me a blush of bronze, and my eyes seemed clear and cool as the Caribbean waters. My hair had, for a change, taken its glossy curls to a style, instead of to a mess.
David slid his hands over my shoulders, and I looked up at him. “It’s time,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to keep the guests waiting.”
The guests were, of course, the assembled pirates of the ship I’d recently, and randomly, named the Sparrow. None of them had made any effort to change clothes, splash water on their faces, or brush their teeth, but they were seated cross-legged on the deck, clearly happy with slack-off time.
Josue had donned a ridiculous coat. A tuxedo jacket, obviously ripped off from some prior victim on a yacht. I hoped I wouldn’t notice any bloodstains.
“Hurry your asses up,” he said. “We don’t have long.”
Not exactly the wedding march, but it would do. I exchanged a look with David, and he gave me his hand, and we walked the short length of the deck to the bow, where Josue was standing. The sun was behind clouds again, and the air smelled heavy with brewing storms. David’s best man—and, I supposed, standing in for my maid of honor—was the Fire Warden, Brett Jones. Big and foreboding as a Djinn, only armed like a pirate and watching Josue and everybody else, including me, with smart, cold focus.
I felt both protected and unsettled.
“I don’t have no holy books,” Josue said. “So I make it up as I go along. You don’t like it, you go get married in hell.”
“As long as you get the important stuff right,” I said. “Go ahead.”
“I get paid first.”
There was a brief pause, and then David reached into his pocket and brought out a small handful of very large bills. Josue grabbed them and flashed a highly inappropriate smile, then asked, “What’s your name?”
“David Prince.”
“David Prince, you come here with this woman to be married. Right?”
I didn’t dare throw a glance at David, because there was something so weirdly hilarious about this that I was already choking on it. After a beat, he said, “Obviously.”
I coughed.
“You sure you want to do that?” Josue said. “Because you got to take care of her, love her, never look at another woman. Even if she’s sick or gets old and fat.”
My coughing turned into a full-fledged fit.
“If you mean will I stand by her in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for all the days of our lives—yes, I will,” David said, very quietly. The urge to laugh left me suddenly, and I squeezed his hand. “I vow that I will.”
I felt no corresponding surge from the aetheric, the way I had the first time we’d done this, but then, David had completed his side of the vows the last time we’d done this.
I hadn’t, not officially. Which was why Lewis and I had decided to go through with this. It was an experiment—probably doomed to failure—to see whether or not it would make any difference in the way Djinn and humans were bound together . . . if we were bound together by ritual, completely.
“You’re sure about this,” Josue said. He continued to stare at David. “I give you some time to think.”
David didn’t smile. “I’m sure. Move along.”
“Well, okay.” He turned to face me. “How about you?”
“You suck at this,” I told him. I got a slow leer in return. “Come on, at least make an effort!”
“You dump this guy, come back to my cabin, I’ll make an effort.”
“To clean up the toenails off the floor?” I asked sweetly. “Come on, Josue. Today.”
He clasped his hands, and tried for a pious expression. I doubted he’d ever seen one, except maybe in the DVD collection belowdecks. “Do you—what’s your name again?”
“Joanne Baldwin.”
“Joanne Balderwin, take this—uh, Prince David, to be your husband? Do you swear to honor and obey him, and to never look at another man, even if this one gets—”
“Sick, old, and fat, yes, I know.”
“What would that matter? He’s a man, yes? It is the prerogative of a man to get sick and old and fat.” The crew laughed raucously behind us. “Do you swear to honor and obey him, even if this one gets poor and lazy?”
I closed my eyes and fought a cage match with my temper. “Ask it right.” He heard the echo of darkness in my voice, and the laughter of the crew died away. “I mean it.”
Josue cleared his throat. When he spoke again, the mocking tone was gone. “Do you take this man as your husband, forsaking all others as long as you both live?”
Close enough. I felt something happening, a stirring in the aetheric like a soft breeze. It swirled around me, lazy and gentle, and then solidified into a silver mist.
“Yes,” I said. “I vow it.”
The mist fell like soft silver rain on the aetheric, and I felt it sliding over my skin in warm threads.
And then it hit the black torch, and all hell broke loose.
“Jo!” David grabbed me as my knees folded. “What—?”