hold was massive, a cave of treasures that would have taken months to map and explore. Cargo containers were stacked in neat, symmetrical rows that glowed cool greens and blues in my night vision.
And I saw the bright red and yellow flicker of bodies up ahead.
None of them were moving.
I struggled with a fiery hot pulse of primal satisfaction, of pleasure. I pushed it back.
I limped ahead, stopping for breath when I had to, and the scene slowly came into focus.
There, near the center of the hold, were cages where I supposed duty-free items like liquor and expensive perfumes were kept. There was a massive freestanding safe, too, which no doubt held all those precious goodies the rich passengers had been so loath to leave behind. I wondered how much of it was drugs.
Standing, sitting, or lying in a circle near the safe were bodies. Some had the white-hot glow of Djinn, some the merely warm spectrum of human flesh, but none of them were moving by so much as a breath.
Still alive, though.
Not for long,the darkness inside me whispered, and purred. I felt it stretch its claws.
I limped as close as I dared before I felt something tingling along the edges of my nerves.
There was some kind of energy field here that I really didn't want to encounter directly.
This was the team, Wardens and Djinn, that had come here to fight the skin. I didn't sense the signature of the one they'd been hunting at all, though. Instead, I saw a broken heap of crystal, and some slagged flesh.
Score one for the good guys. So what had gone wrong?
Kevin was standing only a few feet from me, frozen in midstep. Up on the aetheric, I could see his fury boiling like lava, so he was aware, if unable to move.
"Hey!" I yelled. One of the Djinn - Lyle, with his lead gray skin and rust-colored eyes - was closer to me than the others. "Lyle, can you hear me?"
"Yes," he said. He couldn't move, but he could speak.
"What's happening?"
"We are all that's holding the ship out of the water," he said. "We have to hold our concentration, or the forces won't balance. This deck will collapse. The ship will sink." Instead of merely being frozen, the Wardens were in danger of being smashed, because there was a force below us, rising up from the blackest, coldest depths of the ocean...
and it was pulling us down.
That was why the ship was riding low in the water. It was caught in a downward suction, like a ball at the end of a vacuum hose.
If the Djinn let go, it wasn't just the team of Wardens who were fatally screwed.
We all were.
Good.This time, the darkness pooled in my guts, warm and velvety, and I had to choke back a sob. It would be so easy to let go. So utterly easy.
There was a grating sound in the hold, something scraping over metal. I crouched down, making myself as small a target as possible, as the voice echoed off of metal, wood, and immobile bodies. I heard the shuffle of footsteps, and saw an odd shape moving among the stacked cargo and luggage. It had the outward shine of a human form, but it was like a superimposition - beneath it lay something dark and twisted.
The skin. It had created some kind of decoy, which was what the pile of glass was not far from Kevin, for the Wardens to chase while the rest of the plan had gone into motion.
Great. We might have killed the powerful one first, but this one was the clever one.
The skin ducked behind a parked, covered Porsche, then flitted around some hanging chains and weights, more like nightmare than human form.
It paused long enough in the glow of an emergency light for me to get a good look at it.
The body it wore was one of those fresh-faced kids who looked like they'd be more at home in a television ad for soap than running around murdering people. He was almost as pretty as a Djinn.
"Angelo," I said. "Angelo Marconi?"
It just looked at me. I could see now that Lyle was right - it was literally just skin, stretched like a Halloween mask over the darkness inside.
Like you,laughed my dark side. Like you are becoming. Not long now...
The skin flitted out of the light and into the darkness.
I had no idea what I was going to do if it came to power-on-power, because I was barely staying