Grit filtered down in feathery whispers, and then the real lurch came.
The building exploded as force traveled up through the ground, pulverizing layers of granite into dust. The cinder blocks of the walls buckled, ground themselves into powder against each other, and the ceiling crashed in a twisting, tearing mass of wood and metal that was snatched away by the wind.
Nothing touched me.
I stood exactly where I had as the building disintegrated around me, ripped away by the howling Category 5 winds. The ground lurched like pounding surf underneath me.
Bad Bob rose up into the air, holding to the end of his spear. He kept rising.
The spear grew, and grew, like some poisonous tree with its roots sunk deep.
He broke it off at ground level. It shattered at the stress point with a musical, glassy sound I heard even above the shriek of the storm.
A palm tree toppled and rolled toward me. Through me. Bad Bob landed on the rippling earth in front of me, appallingly normal in this terribly destroyed setting, and used the remaining part of his spear as a walking stick. Thump. Thump. Thump. It echoed through me like the beating of Poe's telltale heart.
Around us formed a little circle of clear air, stable ground, like the eye of the hurricane.
It expanded, and other people appeared out of the chaos. Wardens, once upon a time. I recognized many of them, at least by face if not by name. His pets, his converts to his righteous war against the Djinn - not that Bad Bob cared a bean about killing the Djinn to benefit humanity. Oh no. Bad Bob cared only, and always, about his own ends, and whatever these pathetic, deluded people thought they were getting out of fighting on his side, they were bound to be disillusioned.
I assessed numbers. Might as well, since I was stuck here. It did occur to me that Bad Bob was showing me only what he wanted to show me, of course, but for all that, the guy who keeps showing off will eventually show you something he doesn't intend to.
Bad Bob was one hell of a chatterbox.
Sixty of them.My spirits sank, which was no doubt what he'd counted on. He had numbers.
Of course, we had more, but add to that Bad Bob's Demon-derived powers and the neat trick of handheld antimatter that the Djinn could neither recognize nor defend against, and we were well on the train to Screwsville.
"You still think you can win?" he asked me. I didn't answer, because I wasn't sure I dared tell a lie right now, and a lie was all I really had. "Scared little Jo. It was always going to end like this, you know. You against me, and you never could take me."
"I did take you," I said. "You sadistic old bastard." He lost his smile and pointed the spear at me. "Wonder what happens if I give it a taste of you in your aetheric form?" he said. "Bet it'll hurt like fuck."
"Bet you don't want to be around when I survive it and come to kick your sorry ass off the face of the planet."
He laughed and grounded the butt of the spear again. "I always did like that about you. You got sand, I'll give you that." He leaned forward, eyes avid and wet. "Fight me, Jo. I love it when you fight me. It won't matter in the end, but it'll be damn fun. You thought by dragging the Wardens away from all those innocent people on shore you'd save lives, but I think you just made my job a whole lot easier. See? You were already working for me. And now you're going to really draw your paycheck, peach."
"Like hell," I said.
He blew me a kiss. Back on the ship's sofa, my body continued to twitch and writhe. Cherise sat down next to me, putting a hand on my forehead, then calling for help.
The sensation of her hand against my skin was just enough to form a link - a way back. I pulled. The black mark felt like Velcro, sticking me here to this spot, but I ripped and tore at it, struggling, and with a hissing snap I came free.
I called lightning.
A white blast of energy erupted out of the clouds overhead - clean, pale energy, not the poisoned kind he'd poured into the storm - and struck me squarely in the top of my insubstantial head, flooding through my form in a splintered glowing ladderwork, then blasting out into the ground.
It shattered the remaining connection that held me at Bad Bob's command, and I flew backward through the screaming darkness, whipping past pitch-black writhing ocean, over half-seen bits of island, into calmer seas.
Into the massive, smugly sailing bulk of the Grand Paradise.
Into my body, with a lurch like a slap.
I came awake with a gasp that felt like a shriek. My back was burning, on fire, and I tried to lunge to my feet. It felt like my entire nervous system cut out, faulty wiring shorting and sparking.
I pitched off the sofa to the carpet and got a taste of rug.
Cherise was instantly on her knees beside me, trying to cradle me in her arms. I couldn't let her touch me. Everything felt wrong, strange, bad, vile... and I wasn't sure that it wasn't contagious.
"No," I panted, and crab-crawled back to jam myself against the bottom of the sofa. "No, leave me alone!"
"Help!" Cherise shouted. That got the attention of some passing crew members. A passing steward - I still didn't know his name, but he was the one who'd been trying to manage the First-Class rebellion before we'd set sail - shoved aside the coffee table and reached down for me. "Miss, are you all right? Should I get medical help?" I wrapped my hand convulsively around the white lapel of his jacket, and where my fingers gripped the fabric, it started to smoke and hiss.
He exclaimed and tried to claw his way free. I couldn't let go. My hand didn't seem to be mine, exactly; it was moving, and I could feel what it was doing, but it was holding him in place.
Part of me wanted to destroy him. A big part of me, and it was growing larger as the broken containment on my back allowed the poison from the torch mark to flood into me.
The dam was breached.
I was being swept away.
The steward struggled, panted, yelled for help, and finally managed to slip out of his jacket, which remained clutched in my fist as it burst into full smoking flame. I heard other voices - Wardens? - in a rising babble. Somebody tried to tamp down the fire that was bubbling up from my fingers, but I couldn't stop it. All my nerves were fried, useless; all my control had gone with them.
The jacket caught the rug on fire.
Someone hit me with a good old-fashioned fire extinguisher, but as soon as the icy foam stopped blasting, fire erupted from both my hands, crawling up my arms like snakes, twining around my body in living veils of flame.
I could feel other things happening inside me now - fire was always the easiest of powers to call, because it was virtually unstoppable even in natural form, but now I could feel my other abilities stirring, too. Something inside me was rifling through my mind, my soul, shuffling aside unwanted things to find the most devastating things on offer.