Cape Storm

Rahel might not have normally been able to take the tentacle from my left leg, but she’d just been ordered to do something that allowed her to freely interpret method, and in one lightning-fast move, she reached down, plunged her fingers deep into the base of the tentacle, and ripped.

Oh Christthat hurt. The tentacle fought back, clamping down on my leg with all its muscular strength, and I felt things pop and move that really shouldn’t be shifting around inside. Rahel ripped at it again, digging her sharp fingernails into dark flesh and ichor, and tore the thing loose from its roots deep in the rocks.

I rolled free, still wrapped in the black coil.

“What the hell are you doing?” Moira screamed. “Rahel, stop!”

Rahel froze, still crouched over the thrashing remains of the tentacle. I had seconds, at most, to make this happen, and I knew it.

Strangely, Bad Bob hadn’t reacted at all. I saw his face in a blur as I rolled behind the shelter of more stones, and it was impassive and watchful.

Assessing.

I didn’t have time to try to remove the tentacle, but I didn’t need to; cut off from its body, the thing was already dissolving into slime. When it drained away, it left my skin pallid, wrinkled, and torn, like old paper soaked for too long. I was losing blood, too much of it. I slammed Earth power through my nerves and pinched off broken capillaries, set up a healing matrix, and shut off the pain.

I couldn’t afford it right now.

“Hey, Moira!” I yelled. “How old are you? Maybe nineteen? Twenty? I was about your age the first time your dad tried to screw me!”

No girl wants to hear that about her father, especially when it comes from the daughter-rival that Daddy loves more.

Like I said, I could push that button anytime I wanted.

“Rahel!” Moira’s voice was a raw, vicious snarl. “Kill that bitch now!”

Again with the lack of specificity.

I felt the energy shift, darken, and as I peered around the edge of the boulder, I saw Rahel streak straight for Moira.

It’s possible that Moira might have recovered in time to order her to stop, although Rahel’s attack clearly caught her totally by surprise.

To make damn sure it wouldn’t fail, I reached out with a burst of power and filled Moira’s mouth with seawater. She choked, gagged, and then it was too late. As the water rippled down from Moira’s open lips, Rahel’s claws sank deep into her throat.

In her thrashing, Moira let go of the wine bottle, and it rolled toward the edge of the boulder.

Bad Bob calmly reached over and caught it as it fell.

Shit.

Moira was sputtering blood, and her face was shockingly pale, her eyes desperate. Rahel remained where she was, claws in the girl’s neck, and I saw her flash a look at Bad Bob.

He didn’t react at all.

I was gripping the edge of the rock too hard, but I needed the sharp reminder of where I was, what the stakes had become.

Rahel ripped her claws free in a contemptuous gesture, and blood misted and spattered in an arc around her. She willed away the Miss America costume in favor of her more usual tailored pantsuit—in bloodred, not neon.

She turned her back before Moira’s pallid, dying body toppled.

Bad Bob was holding her bottle, and unlike Moira, that evil old bastard knew every trick. “Freeze until I tell you to move again, Rahel,” he said. “That was a goddamn stupid waste.” There was no genuine emotion left in him, not even for his own child. He saw it as a waste, all right—because Moira hadn’t measured up, in the crisis. “Jo. Come out.”

“Yeah, not likely!” I yelled. I tried to slow down my breathing, order my thoughts. “This isn’t going well for you, Bob. Maybe you should just give up now.”

He laughed. “No.”

He still had the book, and even though he hadn’t bothered to bring it out yet, he also had the spear, the Unmaking. I hadn’t even managed to free Rahel, dammit, and if his daughter’s bloody end hadn’t been enough to distract him, I couldn’t think of much else to try.

“Fair enough,” I said. “Want to call it a draw? Lose/lose?”

“I want to call the game,” he said. “On account of the death of the world.”

I’d have liked to think he was just being grandiose, but there was a dark undertone to his voice now. Seeing Moira die had destroyed his fun, apparently; he was ready to just skip right to the end, which in his book was and then the universe blew up. The end.

“That really what you want?” I slowly got up, hopping on my good right leg, and braced myself on the boulder I’d been using for sparse cover. “Come on, Bob. If the world ends, so do you. I thought you wanted to destroy the Wardens and savor your victory first.”

“As long as we all go out together, I’m fine with it,” he said. I expected him to reach for the Ancestor Scriptures, but instead, he stretched out his hand, which disappeared in a tingle of blue sparks and reemerged holding a thick, matte-black cylinder like a spear, sharp on both ends.

The Unmaking. Its presence set up a horrible crawling repulsion in me, an itching all up and down my nervous system. I wasn’t sure if the scientists were right, and it was stable antimatter, or if it was something even more exotic, like dark matter. Whatever it was, it did not have a place here, not in this world.

It was wrong.

It was also radioactive as hell, and it had almost destroyed me the last time I’d come anywhere near it. Now I was so closely co

Bad Bob rested one end of the shaft against the stones at his feet and leaned on it. The thing was a little taller than his head now, wickedly pointed. “You really bamboozled me, you know. I never thought you’d come alone. Never thought David would let you.”

“He didn’t,” I said. “Nobody lets me do anything. You know that.”

He nodded, but the look in his eyes was far, far away. “I liked you,” he said. “Back in the day. Before things went wrong.”

“I liked you, too.” I hadn’t, exactly, but I’d admired him. We’d all admired him. “I know you took the Demon Mark on for the right reasons—you wanted to save lives. You just weren’t strong enough, in the end.”

“Neither were you,” he said. We weren’t accusing each other now; there wasn’t any heat to this exchange at all, just simple fact. “You’d have hatched out a Demon in the end, if you hadn’t gotten all tangled up with the Dji

He wanted my approval.

I felt a hot breath of wind, then a gust off the ocean. Something was stirring out there. It blew my hair into a writhing cloud, and waves crashed the rocks at my back, dousing me in spray.

“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” I said. “And whatever doeskill you—”

“Makes you invincible, if you’re lucky,” Bad Bob said, and smiled. I sensed a kind of good-bye in that smile, because it was real. Not a manic stretch of his lips, but a genuine expression of feeling and warmth. “You’ll always be my kid, Jo. My crazy, brave, stupid kid.”

And he’d always, in some sense, be my father. My mentor. The man who’d pushed me over the edge and made me grow wings to survive. The most abusive bastard father in the world.

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

“Here it comes,” Bad Bob said, and looked up.

Something fell out of the eye of the hurricane. It was like a glass ball, soap-bubble thin, and it hit the rocks of the island and smashed into smaller spheres, each of which bounced and rolled over the rocks, uncoiled, and stood on two or four legs.

Crystalline skeletons, creatures out of drug dreams, that vanished like ghosts against the sunlight.

The Sentinels—those still standing—were unprepared. A few of them defended themselves, but most died, ripped apart on the rocks. My old colleagues, who’d lost their way and followed a false messiah.