I winced as my boot slipped against the rocks, and the tentacle wrapping my leg gained a couple more inches and got very, very friendly. “Lewis won’t deal.”
“Of course he’ll deal. That boy loves you, always has. I know him. I picked him for the Wardens.” Bad Bob looked positively malevolent for a second. “Lewis never did want responsibility. He isn’t going to step up to it now, with your life on the line.”
I blinked. Bad Bob, the all-knowing and all-powerful, was talking like an old man, set in his ways, reciting out-of-date facts. Lewis certainly had once been like that, but like Bad Bob himself, he’d changed. Bad Bob hadn’t bothered to find out how much.
“So what am I worth?” I asked. “What are you going to ask?”
“He’s not stupid. He grabbed all the Djinn he could find and bottled them. My folks back on the mainland couldn’t find much, and what they did find got them killed. So I’ll trade you for a cargo full of bottles. How’s that? Make you feel any better?”
Not really. But I didn’t believe for a second that Lewis would trade one Djinn for me, much less a boatload. Besides, rescue was on its way.
Right?
It had been maybe ten minutes since my arrival on the island. The Grand Horizon was supposed to be visible by now, but I couldn’t see its distinctive outline anywhere on the open seas around us, and it was way too big to miss. Had something happened? Had Bad Bob managed to sink the second ship, too?
Was I all alone here, at the end?
Well, if I was, I was going to go down fighting.
God, please, don’t let him kill me.
Because David really would destroy everything.
Chapter Eleven
Bad Bob talked. He loved to talk, and I let him, because I learned a lot.
Bad Bob, I was starting to realize, really didn’t have much. While we’d been sailing around the Atlantic as a big, juicy target, he’d been conducting a multifront war. Those never work; ask Napoleon. He’d had operatives back home who’d gone after the remaining Wardens, on the theory that if they were any damn good, Lewis wouldn’t have left them behind. That got him a big fat score of fail. The Wardens didn’t lose a single person, or any Djinn.
The Sentinels, who were getting increasingly desperate, had been taken down not by the Wardens themselves but by Homeland Security. They couldn’t even defeat a bunch of government men.
That was kind of rich.
What remained of Bad Bob’s threat to the Wardens was here, on this island, which meant a bunch of fanatics in rags with the aetheric equivalent of a nuclear device.
Not great, but at least isolated.
I couldn’t move much, thanks to my mutated octopus friend, but I could pay attention to Bob’s manic ram blings, in case there was something useful to be learned. I didn’t know if the thing inside had driven him mad, but it certainly didn’t know how to flip the OFF switch.
Eventually, Bad Bob got impatient. He’d expected my rescue to heave over the horizon, but if it was out there, it was smart and very patient.
That was good.
It just wasn’t good for me.
“You’re sure they got the message?” I asked. I’d managed to find a position sitting on the stones, with my pinned leg carefully held straight out. I didn’t want to look too closely at what was happening to me; it felt very much like that tentacle was sinking into my leg, and I’d really had enough of that kind of thing. “Maybe your ransom demand went to voice mail. Sucks when that happens.”
“Oh, they know I have you. They just need some incentive, that’s all,” Bad Bob said cheerfully. The sun was beating down on my unprotected head, and while I wasn’t going to get delirious from the heat, or the lack of water, it wasn’t the most comfortable I’d ever been.
And I didn’t like the sound of incentive.
I liked it a whole lot less when Bad Bob got out of his chair and walked toward me, because as he did, he reached into empty space at his side and brought out the Djinn Ancestor Scriptures.
I stared at it wearily. It wasn’t of human origin, this thing; as far as I knew, it wasn’t of Djinn making, either. The Ancestor Scriptures probably wasn’t even a book, in the strictest sense, although it certainly had that appearance here in this plane—leather binding, wrinkled ancient pages, metal flaps to lock it shut.
What it really was I couldn’t say, but I was pretty sure that it had been written by a higher power than the Oracles, and the Oracles of the Djinn had been entrusted with its care and feeding.
Whether this was one of the three originals or a copy, I couldn’t say—the copies were just as deadly, if maybe not imbued with as much power.
“How’d you get your hands on that?” I asked Bad Bob as he opened the metal latches and began to flip crackling, translucent pages. “Garage sale at the Villain Supply Company?”
“I took it from an Oracle,” he said, but absently, as if it really didn’t matter. He wasn’t bragging. “Air Oracle. Years ago.”
That, I could believe. The Air Oracle had always struck me as hostile, guarded, angry at the world in general and humans in particular. I’d certainly gotten little to no love from him/her/it.
That kind of made sense, if Bad Bob had gotten there first. He’d given bipeds a bad name.
“Hmmmmm.” Bad Bob looked down at a page, considered it, and shook his head. “No, too subtle. This—too messy. Ah, here we go. I’ll just turn on old DNA inside you, see what we get. Maybe you’ll grow a tail, shark teeth, chicken skin . . .”
Well, I definitely wasn’t waiting around for that.
I stole Petrie’s specialty, and formed a whip of pure plasma out of the air, igniting it with a burst of silvery power out of my special Djinn reserve. It burned hot blue, and where it slithered over the rocks, it left melted trails behind.
I snapped it toward Bad Bob.
He caught it in one hand, wrapped it around his fist, and yanked. I slid forward on the stones; the tentacle wrapped around my left leg tightened, and I felt flesh tearing under the strain.
Dammit.
I let go of the whip, and the fire guttered out, leaving just a trail of greasy smoke between us. Bad Bob, for a change, didn’t say anything. He walked over to where I was pinned in place, blood streaking down over the tentacle anchoring me.
“You just don’t lie down, do you?” he said. “I always said you were way too good for the Wardens. You made the rest of us look bad.” He turned and yelled toward his watching followers. There were a lot fewer than I remembered—maybe twenty, if that. Granted, I’d taken some down earlier, but I didn’t think I’d grounded quite that many. He’d probably lost some to incursions and his own craziness—like Petrie—plus I figured that those who could think logically enough to escape had grabbed transportation and taken their chances.
That probably meant they were dead, out there on the ocean, but at least they’d died cleanly, off this black hunk of stone.
His remaining troops scrambled to assemble at his silent wave of command. They were terrified, and they were realizing—all too late—that the savior they’d imagined him to be was all in their heads. He’d used their fears against them.
I imagined he would continue to do that, right up to the end. They had to follow him now. Where else was there to go?
“Get over here!” he yelled. “Bring our friend along!”
The Sentinels began crossing the distance. Some of them were old, some were wounded, none of them looked entirely compos mentis.
They all looked at me like I was dinner—which, considering Bad Bob’s earlier pot roast revelation, was a truly sickening thought.
“Moira,” Bob said, and held out his hand. A spritely little pixie of a young woman stepped out from the others and came forward to lock fingers with him. In her left hand, she carried an old green wine bottle with an equally ancient cork stuffed in the top.