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made it clear to me, in ways that nothing had ever been clear before. None of this mattered. None of this was real. I'd been living an illusion all this time, a sad little nightmare of a life that started nowhere and ended in darkness.

Beyond that portal lay the real world. The only world.

This was just a fiction, and it needed to end so that we could all go to a better place.

I took a firmer grip on the spear, and rose up into the aetheric, into the heart of the storm.

Chapter Twelve

At the center of the slowly rotating mass of energy was the portal to the other world. The real world.

It was like a drop of pure darkness, maybe a dozen feet across - space made liquid. I could feel a kind of pull coming from it - not gravity, not force, nothing so simple as that. It was aware, and awake. It was hungry and endlessly patient, and I realized that it was like the slow, vast intelligence of the planet below me... like, but so much more . The Earth was a virus, a microbe. What lay on the other side of the portal was God. Not ours, though. A jealous, angry, hungry God.

In the aetheric, the spear I was carrying was tremendously heavy, and the higher I tried to rise, the heavier it got. It was like swimming with an anvil.

Then a truck full of anvils.

Then the world in my arms.

I screamed in soundless frustration and gained another few feet.

Then another. I was so close. I could see the shimmering waves in the portal, feel its draw.

I could feel the answering vibration in the Unmaking, the key for the lock, and the lock that wanted to be turned.

My whole aetheric body was on fire. My senses had shifted, changed into a different spectrum, and I could finally see what was holding me back from completing my mission...

The Djinn.

They were all around me, grabbing on to me, pulling me down. So many of them. Between me darted human forms - Wardens, trying to stand between me and the destiny of everything.

It was the magical weight of the world, and it was all against me.

I snarled and surged forward, again. I tried stabbing at the Djinn with the spear, but they easily avoided me.

The Wardens did, too.

I was being dragged backward, and as I was pulled, I gouged bloody holes in the aetheric in my fury. The spear left a gaping black trail, a scar between worlds - not enough to open the door, though.

I reversed my efforts, and instead of trying to break free and go up, I charged down, arrowing through the unprepared Djinn line, and used a burst of hot black power to brake myself back into my body.

Bad Bob was on his back, trying to crab-walk away from the Djinn who was advancing on him - who had already hurt him, from the burns and scars on his face and arms. His hair was half burned off, and his eyes glittered with absolute insanity.

I didn't recognize the Djinn, because it was shining like a golden sun, power incarnate. It reached down and picked up the Ancestor Scriptures from where Bad Bob had dropped them.

The Djinn's back was to me. I didn't think, I just acted.

I raised the spear.

He turned.

It was David. David standing there, facing me. Facing his own death at my hands. I couldn't identify what I saw in his face, in his eyes, except that it was not anger, not at all.

I snarled and lunged for him. The Unmaking had me now, dark and cold and certain, and it was going to take us both.

He said, "Fides mihi , "and touched his hand to his chest, over where a human heart would be.

And suddenly, the world went quiet. Time stopped.

The Unmaking swallowed its unending shriek.

And I remembered.

I was an observer to the past.

The lifeboat, where Lewis had killed me.

I was dead on the floor, lying in David's arms. Pale and limp and open-eyed. Done, and yet still trapped inside the shell.

My old self took in a convulsive breath and tried to fight her way free. I knew this moment. I recognized the agony that rippled through her body as Bad Bob's torch fought her for control.

I watched her pass out, head lolling against David's body as he poured energy into her to seal off the mark and cut her off from the black influence of the thing, one last time.

I didn't