Cape Storm Page 0,107

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.

I couldn't help them. Worse: I didn't want to help them.

Here at the end of the world, we were all going to have to settle up our debts.

"They're parasites," Bad Bob said. "Like dust mites. Bugs crawling through a crack in the wall. Vicious little things, though."

He slammed the Unmaking down onto the rocks, and a ringing vibration rippled out from its quivering length - the same frequency I'd used before, but a thousand times more powerful. Every crystalline skeleton exploded into powder.

Another glass ball fell, but it exploded well before contact with the ground when he slammed the point down again and woke that awful sound.

I'd clapped my hands over my ears. I couldn't help it.

"I thought you'd welcome their help," I said. I kept watching Rahel, hoping that she'd be able to somehow break out of her paralysis, but she was as still as the rocks around me, and just about as lifeless. My only ally was completely out of commission. "Since it looks like it's just the two of us."

"What would they be good for? You can kill them. I've seen you do it." He shook his head.

"We're on to bigger things. You feel the lines of force under us? This is a nexus point, Jo.

It's the thinnest space between the planes, and between the worlds." The island hadn't come to this place by accident. I could feel the humming power underneath my feet, and in the air around me. He'd been very careful about his choice of location for this. A born manipulator.

Like Lewis. Where are you, Lewis?

"Basic principles of magic, Jo," he said softly. "Like calls to like. And sacrifices have special weight here."

He threw the Unmaking to me - not at me, but to me, a low underhanded pitch.

I dodged it easily, but it didn't fall; it turned and hovered in midair, pointing at me. Menace radiated off of it like black light. I backed up, carefully, not taking my eyes off it.

It darted straight for my chest. It was too fast, and I had no room to maneuver.

My body reacted instinctively, and wrongly.

I put out my hands and grabbed it to hold it back from my exposed chest.

It was like plunging my hands into a vat of dry ice - instant, agonizing cold.

The pool of Djinn power inside of me turned toxic and black, poisoned at its source, and I felt myself begin to rot from the inside out. I was just enough Djinn to be vulnerable, and just enough human to be corruptible.

He'd counted on that. And on my survival instincts.

The spear felt hot and heavy in my hands. It had burned me, before, but now its touch felt different - almost like flesh. I could hear it singing to me, a fascinating whisper of noise that had nothing in common with the music of our world, any of our worlds.

It made me sick and dizzy at first. I tried to drop it. I gagged and tried to throw up the darkness inside, but it wasn't the kind that sat heavy in the stomach. This darkness filled me to the brim.

It took me over, completely.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw things differently. Literally. Holding the Unmaking made colors shift and burn, the whole structure of matter and light twist around me. It was beautifully destructive.

"We need more," Bad Bob said. He was a pillar of blazing darkness in front of me, alien and somehow not alien at all. "You know how to make more of it, Joanne." I knew. I'd seen the process at work. The antimatter incubated inside the body