off. I kicked, gritted my teeth, and lunged up out of the water as far as I could.
My rib cage thumped down painfully on the smooth surface, and I started to slip back, but more kicking and clawing paid off. I found a handhold, at the cost of the last memory of my French manicure, and hauled myself out of the pounding surf to lie exhausted and dripping, draped like Josue's proverbial drowned mermaid over extremely uncomfortable terrain.
"Damn," I whispered. "Why am I doing this again?" Oh yeah - because I was probably the only one who could, with anything like certainty.
And because sometimes I just had to face my own demons - and Demons - head-on.
I spent several moments just letting my muscles shake and cry out in relief, and then rolled up to a sitting position to take a look around. It wasn't much of a garden spot - lots of black basalt and granite. This place wasn't more than a few dozen millennia away from the lava flows that had built it in the first place. It still had most of its sharp edges.
That wasn't great for me, of course. I'd worn heavy boots, but my battered shorts probably weren't going to protect me from gathering some new and interesting scars as I scrambled across the edgy landscape.
I climbed up on the tallest boulder I could find and did a quick survey. The island was bigger than I'd expected - maybe a solid mile across - and toward the middle there was an unlikely small collection of jagged palms, all dying now. Whatever fresh water had nourished them was long gone.
This island was a rotting hulk, and I wondered uneasily how Bad Bob had kept sixty Sentinels - that I knew about - alive on such a bare span of rock. I supposed he'd laid in supplies, but he didn't seem to be a logistical kind of guy.
Maybe they were eating each other. It wouldn't surprise me, given the level of devotion he inspired in people.
This was not the place I'd have picked as my home away from home if I had to choose a portable island paradise, that was for damn sure. No beaches, no living trees, no water, no shade. Just razor-edged rock and the odd crab scuttling by. The surface of Mars, only at least fifty percent less hospitable.
If I hadn't been doing such a careful survey of the island, I might have missed the first attack that came at me. There was nothing to give it away but a faint shimmer against the rocks, like a reflection of waves - but it didn't move with the waves.
It was bending light, and it was moving fast, heading my direction.
I'd never seen one in full daylight before. That was a crystalline skeleton, barely visible without the human disguise its kind had adopted back on the Grand Paradise . I knew now why it had gone for the skins; the creature made a vibration on the aetheric as it moved, a kind of ringing like a finger tapping an ice-cold crystal glass.
The skins had muted the vibrations, hidden them in the natural noise of human existence.
The crystal shimmer disappeared, lost in the glare of the sun for a second, and then I saw the blur of it against the piles of rocks only about three feet away from me.
I didn't have time for fancy moves, just dived out of the way. It was fast, but the rocks were just as hazardous to its footing as to mine, and I saw it stumble and try to catch its balance as it checked its momentum. Instead, it tumbled off into the water.
It sank below the surface in seconds, pulled down by the density of its bones.
Well, that was great news, but as I looked up, I counted three more shimmers against the rocks, heading in my direction. I calculated frequencies. I didn't have time to try very many, but the good news was that I'd already killed one of these things on my own. Well, with help, but close enough. I knew the theory, and even without the direct access to the aetheric that I'd have had with David free, I wasn't starved for power. I was almost shining with what had spilled into me at our wedding ceremony.
The next creature lunged for me, and I opened my mouth and picked a note. Nerves forced the amplitude of the sound too high, and the creature just kept coming.