Cape Storm Page 0,48

the rickety sticks of furniture in random fury. Lightning flashed like strobes, turning Bad Bob's pale hair and face into a fright mask.

He reached outside, and when his hand came back through the doorway, it was holding a spear. I recognized the thing - it was thick, and it sparkled with bursts of something that wasn't color, wasn't darkness, wasn't anything human senses could identify or codify. He'd refined his weapons, I saw. This spear had started out life as a small chunk, grown in the dying body of a Djinn, and Bad Bob had given it enough care and feeding to make it a seven-foot-long, wickedly pointed expression of his own appetite for destruction.

The Djinn called it the Unmaking. It was, as best I understood the physics of it, stable antimatter, capable of destroying anything he wanted to destroy.

Including removing Djinn from the fabric of the universe.

"Oh, Bob, that's just sad," I said. His grin broadened. "Seriously, why can't your type ever grow a discus for a weapon, or the world's largest potato? How come it's always so -

phallic?"

Bob ignored the opportunity to banter, and stepped out into the storm. He looked up at it, into the heart of it. I knew what he was seeing - the raging engine of destruction, the primitive mind forming behind it. This was a living thing, this storm - a predator, yes, but a natural one, like a tiger or a puma.

He ground the butt of his spear against the dirt, and a blinding pulse of something that wasn't light, wasn't heat, wasn't right went up from the pointed end of the spear into the storm.

Again.

Again.

With every thump of that weapon against the earth, I felt the world itself shudder. On the aetheric, muddy red waves spread like blood from a mortal wound.

The force emitted from the spear had a sickening feel to it, and the color - if you could call it a color - was a poisonous, pallid thing, like the glow given off by decay.

The storm's lightning suddenly flashed, but it wasn't light.

It was dark. Photonegative energy, but here on the real world. He'd infected the storm itself, made it a force for destruction far different from any natural predator.

And then it flashed that unearthly emerald green.

"Almost ready," Bad Bob said, and reversed his grip on the spear. Handling that much anti-energy couldn't have been pleasant, even for him; I could see the skin blackening and flaking away where his hand touched the surface. "Ready for the cherry on top?" He pointed the spear down at the ground, and drove it in. It went deep, even though he didn't use any real force - as if it tunneled greedily on its own.

I felt the earth shriek in real pain beneath my ghostly feet, and the whole building shook.

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