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to any kind of possible outcome to this moment.

My daughter Imara was here. And she couldn't possibly be here. There was no way Bad Bob or any of his minions could have captured her, stolen her from her chapel in Sedona, without triggering an all-out war with the Djinn. They'd fight to the last of them for her, no matter whose daughter she'd been in the beginning. Not only that, but David would have known. There was no way that he and Ashan couldn't have known, if something happened to Imara. The Earth Herself would have fought back to protect an Oracle.

My daughter looked at me with desperate fear in her eyes, and I couldn't stop a pulse of maternal anguish from traveling like lightning through my body.

And then I pushed it away. "Nice try," I said. "But no sale. That's not my daughter." Moira gave her father a harassed look. " Toldyou she'd never buy that malarkey," she said, and grabbed the bottle back from him. The form of the Djinn shifted away from Imara's reflection of my face, took on darker shades and harsher angles. Long, cornrowed hair with gleaming bits of gold beaded in. This was a Djinn I knew.

Rahel.

The Djinn had fought to keep that part of her appearance the same - at what cost, I couldn't quite imagine - but she'd lost the war on clothing. Moira dressed her like a Barbie, and the effects were ridiculous. Rahel was wearing a wine-colored evening gown, sleeveless, with a plunging neckline and a slit up the side. White opera gloves. Dangling diamond earrings.

Rahel was a beautiful creature, but this looked wrong on her. Deeply, stupidly insane.

"Wait," Moira said, and giggled. She added a tiara on top of Rahel's head, a ridiculously ornate confection of chrome and fake diamonds. "Wave to the adoring crowds, Miss America."

Rahel's right hand came up and did a mechanical, empty wave.

Her eyes were locked on mine, and I hated what I saw in them, because it was a very close cousin to the madness that I'd recently seen in David, when he thought I was gone. A desire to crush and destroy and kill everything in her path. She'd been tormented, forced to do horrible things. And she, like David, was not inclined to forgive.

"Hey," I said to Moira. "Seriously, is that the best you can do? Because that's not even original. Honestly, I used to be a Djinn. I had a teenage boy for a master. Now, he had an imagination. You're just - sad. But then again, like father, like daughter..." I got that pulse of fury out of her again. "You shut your whore mouth!"

"Wow. Like I said. Sad. When you have to quote a MySpace graphic, you've just given up." I ignored Moira and looked at her father. "What's the point of having the kid here? Were you just lonely for somebody who had an extra helping of crazy in the veins?" The girl smirked at me, turned, and skinned up the edge of her thin white shirt.

She didn't have a torch mark. Instead, her back was a mass of writhing fire, moving just below the skin - worse than mine had ever gotten, even at its most painful. "I'm one of the chosen," she said, and dropped the fabric. "Like you used to be, before you gave it all up."

"Jesus," I said. "Just when I thought you'd hit rock bottom, Bob. Congratulations on tunneling down."

"It's the family business," he said. "Bringing an end to this travesty we call humanity." I checked the horizon. No ships breaking the smooth outline of the sea.

I was starting to sweat.

"So what now?" I asked. "Not that this isn't fun, but my leg's falling asleep. Can we move the end of the world along a little? Or at least work in a nap?" Moira laughed. Bad Bob shrugged. "Sure," he said. "For you, sweetness, I'll kick it into high gear. But you know that means you're going to suffer, don't you?"

"I figured," I said, and shrugged. "I'm already suffering. These rocks are really uncomfortable."

He laughed. "What a girl," he said, and elbowed his daughter. "Right?" By her expression, she found me a good deal less charming. "She's nothing," she said. "You never needed her, Da. You always had me." Oooooh, jealous. Very jealous. I could use it.

"That's true." He kissed her forehead, but his eyes never left me. "That's very true. I've been taking out her bones, one at a time. What do