Cape Storm

My hands were shaking. I pressed them down on my thighs. “I’m listening.”

“I need you to get off the boat,” he said. “I need you to let us leave you behind.”

In the open water.

With the sharks.

I swallowed hard and didn’t answer. I was too busy reliving what that had felt like—the teeth hot in my flesh, pieces of me coming off.

Blood.

Lewis didn’t blink. “I’m taking everyone else to landfall. I need you to go on, alone.”

“Alone,” I repeated, because I could nothave heard him right. “You want me to go after Bad Bob all by myself. Swimming. Through shark-infested seas. Are you fucking insane?”

He hated himself. I could see the loathing, but I could also see the cold steel underneath it. He knew what he had to do, and he wasn’t afraid to do it.

He never was. I loved that about him, and I hated it, too.

“I can’t keep you here,” he said. “You’re a bomb. Sooner or later, you’re going to go off, and I can’t risk what you’re going to do. If you want to save yourself, you need to do it alone.”

“Don’t feed me crap and tell me it’s chocolate,” I said. “I’m, what? A Trojan horse? Bait? Your own personal suicide bomber?”

“You’re what you need to be. The way you always are.” He reached over and smoothed a hand down my tangled, damp hair. His long fingers felt cool and strange on my skin. “The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was kill you. Don’t make me do it again. I’m already going to die for it; we both know that. He’s never going to forget.”

I leaned into the comfort of his touch, closed my eyes, and said, “David will forgive you. Eventually.”

“No, I really don’t think so.” He kissed my forehead. “Especially after I do this.”

I felt his emotion spill into me, Earth Warden to Earth Warden—complicated waves of painful guilt, staggering responsibility, and love. So much love it hurt. He shouldn’t love me so much. He knew I couldn’t love him in the same way.

I started to tell him that, once and for all, but he touched my lips with his thumb. “I know,” he murmured. “I just wanted you to remember it. One way or another, this is good-bye, Jo. We’re not going to step in the same river twice.”

Lewis stood up and spun the hatch. It was a sliding door at the top of the craft, and climbing the steps to get up to it seemed like the march to the gallows.

Lewis held my hand to keep me steady.

I emerged into bright sunlight, blinded by the glitter of the whitecaps and the endless roll of the ocean. By the reflective yellow surface of the fiberglass hull. The storm hung sullenly in the distance, a vast black curtain rippling with wind and power and fury. It couldn’t reach me now, but it would follow.

It had to. It was still keyed to the power locked into Bad Bob’s mark.

I looked back down as I stripped off the blanket and handed it to Lewis. “Thanks for the apple juice,” I said. “The beer’s on you if I live.”

He didn’t smile. There was darkness as thick as the storm hanging around him; his aura was shot through with it.

“Tell David—” I said, and couldn’t think of anything to say that David wouldn’t already know. “Tell him I’ll see him soon.” I looked past Lewis’s hard face and saw Kevin hovering behind him. “Don’t treat David like your slave. If you do, I’ll make sure you regret it. Just—leave him in the bottle. Promise me.”

Kevin blinked. “You don’t want me to let him go?”

“Not yet,” I said. “You can’t take the risk. If anything happens to me—Well, you saw. I don’t want you guys to pay for it.” I was condemning David to life imprisonment, if—as was very probable—I died. Not exactly the happy ending I’d been hoping for, but it could have been worse.

I’d seen how bad it could get. Our devotion to each other had a horrible dark side. I’d been willing to call fire, burn twenty i

It wasn’t David’s fault that he could never, ever forgive; it was just his Dji

I blinked away tears and focused on Kevin, with the bottle in his hand—and Cherise, clinging to Kevin and crying. “Keep David safe for me,” I said. “I love all of you. I won’t forget.”

And then I turned and dived off the boat, into the water.

Chapter Nine

So.

It was just me and the sharks. I was acutely aware of the vast, complicated landscape of predator and prey beneath me as I floated; I’d drawn a whole lot of sharks here, and the Great Whites in particular alarmed me, because I’d seen Jaws.

I couldn’t feel my back at all, but the rest of my body was chilled from the water. Still, I wasn’t likely to die of exposure, or even hunger or thirst. I could maintain my body’s electrolyte levels, heat, and general health; I could desalinate water to drink. I could eat raw fish that I could call into my hands, if I wasn’t especially fussy. Wasn’t looking forward to that part; sushi prepared by a brilliant Japanese chef is a far cry from munching on something fresh out of the sea and spitting out the scales and bones.

I floated and watched the rescue craft fleet sail away. The hatch remained open on the lifeboat I’d left, and I heard arguments pouring out of it until the wind carried it away. Cherise had tried to jump out, twice. I could still hear her screaming at the top of her lungs long after other sounds had faded.

“Bye, sweetie,” I whispered, and bobbed in the waves for a while, until the boats were just dazed smudges on the horizon.

I wasn’t a good enough Earth Warden to control several hundred sharks, all operating under their natural instinctive programming. What I coulddo—and did—was create conditions that made it less fun for the sharks to come near me, basically administering electrical shocks to anything that came closer than ten feet.

It was terrifying. Eventually, though, the sharks lost interest or found other prey to follow. A few continued to circle, but I couldn’t wait; the longer I delayed, the less likely it would be that David’s containment of Bad Bob’s torch would hold for me. I started to swim. It was fun at first, and then boring, and then difficult. The human body is designed for only so much wear and tear without periods of rest, and my Earth Warden powers could maintain it, but repairing overly stressed muscles took time.

Time I wasn’t going to have.

I kept swimming. After a while, pain took on a lulling sort of normality. You really can get used to just about anything, especially if you don’t have any alternatives.

The sun began to dip toward the horizon, and I thought about being out here at night, with a sky full of stars. It was oddly peaceful. I was still myself—rescued from the abyss into which Bad Bob had dragged me, though he hadn’t exactly dragged me there kicking and screaming, to be perfectly honest about it. I had a wide streak of darkness inside, all my own, and it wasn’t just the scars left over from my earlier Demon Mark; I’d always been ambitious. I’d always pursued power.

I guess I wasn’t so different from Bad Bob after all, except that I knew all that was both a strength and a weakness. And I knew it had to have limits.

I felt none of the power or fury that had thundered through me when the torch had been active, but sooner or later, David’s containment field would fail, and without him here to renew it, the torch would burn hotter than ever. I was a Warden. I wouldn’t be that easy to kill, even stranded out here on the ocean.

I’m working too hard,I thought. If I swim all the way to him, I’ll have nothing left when I get there.

Depression set in. It does that when your friends sail off and abandon you, and when you have to say a probably permanent good-bye to the one man in the world you’d not only die for, but live with . Maybe it’s not worth it. Maybe I should just take myself out of the game. That’d throw a curl in Bad Bob’s tail.