Bad Bob wasn’t on an island, after all. Well, to be accurate, he was on an island—but the island was floating and he was moving it wherever he wanted.
Neat trick. First, most islands aren’t all that prone to float, since they’re really the tops of underwater mountains. This one was able to drift, withstand the full force of a Category 5 hurricane, and navigate at will.
It also explained why he was so crazy hard to track down. I wasted time and frustration until I figured out that I was heading not for a specific spot in the ocean but a mobile spot. I found it as the sunrise spilled over the long, rocky key of the island, which was moving away from me at a fairly rapid speed. I had an embarrassment of choices for first impressions, but you’ve got to be kidding me was certainly in the hunt for first place.
The entire island was turning, the mirror image of the mouth of a black-and-green hurricane that was hovering above it, just . . . spinning.
Not even Bad Bob—I hoped—had the power to do this alone. No, he had to be augmenting it somehow . . . And then it occurred to me. I was filled with silvery aetheric light now, thanks to my connection to David; Bad Bob had a Djinn, too. Rahel. He’d taken her by force, and that explained the negative energy in what I saw hovering over the island.
Of course, Bad Bob himself was no Prince of Positive Thinking, either.
The scary thing was that with that much power, he could do almost anything he liked, and this floating fortress was just demented enough to amuse him.
I kept swimming. I’d been at it for hours, and I was very, very tired, but I also wasn’t about to give up. Besides, I was building up some fierce quadriceps.
Jo, a voice whispered in my ear. I gasped, startled, and sucked down a lungful of water. I paused, treading water. Jo, can you hear me?
It was Lewis’s voice. I shook my head and bopped myself in the ear, hoping I was just having a hallucination.
Stop hitting yourself. Yes, it’s me.
“How do you know I’m hitting myself?”
I can hear the pops in your eardrum. It’s an old Earth Warden trick. Works great for covert ops. Lewis was making an effort to sound like nothing had passed between us the past few days. Like it was all just the same old. How’s the swim?
“Long,” I said. My teeth were chattering. “You didn’t dial me up on the ear-phone to chat.”
He paused for a few seconds. With Lewis, that was weighty. Did David agree? Is he in the bottle?
“Yes.” Better not to overshare on that, I decided. “Could we speed this up? Water cold. Body tired.”
Can you do this? Are you sure?
What a dumb-ass question. “No, I’m not sure,” I snapped. “Of course I’m not sure. Why? Second thoughts?”
Yes. We’ve got one shot at this. He may not even let you get close. He may kill you before you get anywhere near him.
Cheery thought. “If he does, you’ve still got a shipful of Wardens and Djinn ready to bring the wrath of God down on him and—” It occurred to me suddenly why Lewis was taking the trouble to say these things. “David.”
You and I know that he’d stop at nothing to destroy what killed you.
Oh Christ. “You cannot be serious with this. Lewis. Please, tell me you’re not asking me to go and deliberately get my ass killed so that it will trigger David into a homicidal rampage against your enemies?”
It would work.
Sure it would. It would leave Bad Bob and whoever was around him radioactive dust. Including, probably, the cruise ship, which would become collateral damage.
The hideous thing was that as a nuclear option, it was not bad. So long as you accepted that the pile of bodies would be unthinkable, but at the end of the day, the enemy would be gone. . . .
No. “Not happening, Lewis,” I said. “If I get killed anyway, fine, all bets are off. But I’m fighting all the way down. Get me?”
Yes. You understand that I had to ask.
Not really. But I was starting to think that in some ways David was right—I never would truly know Lewis. Not at his core.
“I’m signing off, Lewis,” I said, and spit salt water as a wave slapped me. “Hey. Thanks.”
For what?
“Letting me say no.”
I got a dry, tinny chuckle in my ear. How could I ever stop you?
“See you on the other side, then.”
Yes.
That was it. Our big good-bye. As romantic scenes went, it lacked, but that was all right. We were past all that now.
After a good half hour of chasing down the floating island, my flailing hand finally slapped a boulder on the island’s rocky shore—whatever sand there once was had long ago been scoured away, so there was nothing left to this beast but slick, water-smoothed stone. I grabbed at the rock, but my hand slid off. I kicked, gritted my teeth, and lunged up out of the water as far as I could.
My rib cage thumped down painfully on the smooth surface, and I started to slip back, but more kicking and clawing paid off. I found a handhold, at the cost of the last memory of my French manicure, and hauled myself out of the pounding surf to lie exhausted and dripping, draped like Josue’s proverbial drowned mermaid over extremely uncomfortable terrain.
“Damn,” I whispered. “Why am I doing this again?” Oh yeah—because I was probably the only one who could, with anything like certainty.
And because sometimes I just had to face my own demons—and Demons—head-on.
I spent several moments just letting my muscles shake and cry out in relief, and then rolled up to a sitting position to take a look around. It wasn’t much of a garden spot—lots of black basalt and granite. This place wasn’t more than a few dozen millennia away from the lava flows that had built it in the first place. It still had most of its sharp edges.
That wasn’t great for me, of course. I’d worn heavy boots, but my battered shorts probably weren’t going to protect me from gathering some new and interesting scars as I scrambled across the edgy landscape.
I climbed up on the tallest boulder I could find and did a quick survey. The island was bigger than I’d expected—maybe a solid mile across—and toward the middle there was an unlikely small collection of jagged palms, all dying now. Whatever fresh water had nourished them was long gone.
This island was a rotting hulk, and I wondered uneasily how Bad Bob had kept sixty Sentinels—that I knew about—alive on such a bare span of rock. I supposed he’d laid in supplies, but he didn’t seem to be a logistical kind of guy.
Maybe they were eating each other. It wouldn’t surprise me, given the level of devotion he inspired in people.
This was not the place I’d have picked as my home away from home if I had to choose a portable island paradise, that was for damn sure. No beaches, no living trees, no water, no shade. Just razor-edged rock and the odd crab scuttling by. The surface of Mars, only at least fifty percent less hospitable.
If I hadn’t been doing such a careful survey of the island, I might have missed the first attack that came at me. There was nothing to give it away but a faint shimmer against the rocks, like a reflection of waves—but it didn’t move with the waves.
It was bending light, and it was moving fast, heading my direction.
I’d never seen one in full daylight before. That was a crystalline skeleton, barely visible without the human disguise its kind had adopted back on the Grand Paradise . I knew now why it had gone for the skins; the creature made a vibration on the aetheric as it moved, a kind of ringing like a finger tapping an ice-cold crystal glass.