Cape Storm Page 0,79

you know I can't let that stand."

My hands were shaking. I pressed them down on my thighs. "I'm listening."

"I need you to get off the boat," he said. "I need you to let us leave you behind." In the open water.

With the sharks.

I swallowed hard and didn't answer. I was too busy reliving what that had felt like - the teeth hot in my flesh, pieces of me coming off.

Blood.

Lewis didn't blink. "I'm taking everyone else to landfall. I need you to go on, alone."

"Alone," I repeated, because I could not have heard him right. "You want me to go after Bad Bob all by myself. Swimming. Through shark-infested seas. Are you fucking insane ?" He hated himself. I could see the loathing, but I could also see the cold steel underneath it. He knew what he had to do, and he wasn't afraid to do it.

He never was. I loved that about him, and I hated it, too.

"I can't keep you here," he said. "You're a bomb. Sooner or later, you're going to go off, and I can't risk what you're going to do. If you want to save yourself, you need to do it alone."

"Don't feed me crap and tell me it's chocolate," I said. "I'm, what? A Trojan horse? Bait?

Your own personal suicide bomber?"

"You're what you need to be. The way you always are." He reached over and smoothed a hand down my tangled, damp hair. His long fingers felt cool and strange on my skin. "The hardest thing I've ever had to do was kill you. Don't make me do it again. I'm already going to die for it; we both know that. He's never going to forget." I leaned into the comfort of his touch, closed my eyes, and said, "David will forgive you.

Eventually."

"No, I really don't think so." He kissed my forehead. "Especially after I do this." I felt his emotion spill into me, Earth Warden to Earth Warden - complicated waves of painful guilt, staggering responsibility, and love. So much love it hurt. He shouldn't love me so much. He knew I couldn't love him in the same way.

I started to tell him that, once and for all, but he touched my lips with his thumb. "I know," he murmured. "I just wanted you to remember it. One way or another, this is good-bye, Jo. We're not going to step in the same river twice." Lewis stood up and spun the hatch. It was a sliding door at the top of the craft, and climbing the steps to get up to it seemed like the march to the gallows.

Lewis held my hand to keep me steady.

I emerged into bright sunlight, blinded by the glitter of the whitecaps and the endless roll of the ocean. By the reflective yellow surface of the fiberglass hull. The storm hung sullenly in the distance, a vast black curtain rippling with wind and power and fury. It couldn't reach me now, but it would follow.

It had to. It was still keyed to the power locked into Bad Bob's mark.

I looked back down as I stripped off the blanket and handed it to Lewis. "Thanks for the apple juice," I said. "The beer's on you if I live." He didn't smile. There was darkness as thick as the storm hanging around him; his aura was shot through with it.

"Tell David - " I said, and couldn't think of anything to say that David wouldn't already know. "Tell him I'll see him soon." I looked past Lewis's hard face and saw Kevin hovering behind him. "Don't treat David like your slave. If you do, I'll make sure you regret it.

Just - leave him in the bottle. Promise me."

Kevin blinked. "You don't want me to let him go?"

"Not yet," I said. "You can't take the risk. If anything happens to me - Well, you saw. I don't want you guys to pay for it." I was condemning David to life imprisonment, if - as was very probable - I died. Not exactly the happy ending I'd been hoping for, but it could have been worse.

I'd seen how bad it could get. Our devotion to each other had a horrible dark side. I'd been willing to call fire, burn twenty innocent people alive to make my point. David had been willing to destroy millions to avenge me.

It wasn't David's fault that he could never, ever forgive; it was just his Djinn nature. Now I had to protect him from his own worst