you then, the Human Torch out there? Face it, without tagging along to somebody better, you're nothing, peach. You used to be entourage . Now you're not even that." The color faded out of Cherise's face, leaving the tan like some eerie overlay, and I saw a real spark of fear in her clear blue eyes.
It turned hot.
"Why'd you just call me peach ?"
Of all the things she could have said, that was the one that stopped me in my tracks.
Peach. Sweetness. Bad Bob liked expressions like those, mockingly sentimental, used to wound. He'd used them on me all the time.
I took a step back. My hands locked into fists, and I felt the fire from the torch on my back flare hotter. It didn't like me doubting myself.
It didn't like me thinking.
"It's just another kind of Demon Mark," Cherise said. "Remember? Remember how that felt? You told me about it, how it made you feel so powerful, so free - "
"Shut up." My voice didn't have much force to it.
"He's using it to destroy you. You've got to stop. You're going to destroy everyone and everything you love."
I closed my eyes. Images flashed across the darkness - David, the first time I'd seen him, a dusty stranger on the road. David, naked in morning light, looking at me as if I was the most glorious thing he had ever seen.
Lewis, standing against the storm, and compromising himself and his beliefs to find the strength. Not asking for my praise or my applause. Knowing I might kill him for it.
Cherise, without the power to light a match, signing on because it was the right thing to do.
Everything I loved was right here, on this ship, and I was destroying it.
And I still couldn't care.
"You understand," said a little-girl voice from behind me. "That's good. I wouldn't want you to die without understanding that it had to be done." Venna stood behind me in her Alice pinafore, perfect and shining and eerie. I looked from her to Cherise.
"How the hell did you hook up with the Djinn?"
She shrugged. "Diplomacy. Ain't it a bitch?"
"And so am I." But I didn't strike at either one of them. Instead, I sat down on the bed and crossed my legs into the lotus position. It was a bit of a tight fit, in the jeans.
I stared idly at the far side of the cabin - Cherise's side - where she had beauty products lined up in thick clusters on the shelf. All kinds of things - tubes of makeup, lipsticks, eye shadow compacts.
Bottles of expensive perfume, just the right size to hold a Djinn.
Venna smiled. "I'd kill you first," she said, and there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that she meant it. "There wouldn't be enough of you to summon the sharks." I held up my hands. "Can't blame me for thinking about it."
"Oh, I can," she said. "I most certainly can. But it would be amusing to see you make the attempt. Your vows with David gave humans access to the New Djinn, not my kind." She was studying me with alien, utterly cold intensity. "But I think I understand you. If someone offered you poisoned water in the desert, would you rather die of thirst, or take longer to die of poison?"
She really did understand. "If I hadn't taken the poison, I'd be dead already. None of you were offering anything else," I said. "Alive, I can always turn myself around, right? Go to rehab, some twelve-step thing?"
Venna's eyes turned black. "I've heard this excuse from others," she said. "Most recently from Lewis, as he violated our most basic trust. There will be an accounting, when this is done. No Djinn - not even our younger cousins - will be imprisoned by your kind again.
Expedience is not excuse."
I shrugged. "So? Are we throwing down, MiniMe, or are we done now? Because I don't really think even you can stop me now. Or that you're allowed to try." Venna's presence was waking a kind of utterly unsettling hunger inside me; she had so much power, and I had a bottomless appetite for it. If she fought me, she'd expend power.
If she lost, I could take it all.
Venna said, "There is only one person who can save this ship. You, Joanne. If you wish."
"Well, I don't. I'm taking it to meet Bad Bob, and what happens from there doesn't really concern me."
Cherise covered her mouth with both hands, appalled and shocked. That was