Gale Force Page 0,118

my face up to the rain, and laughed, and for the first time, I understood why he was as he was, what about this was so intoxicating. No ties. No worries. No burdens. Just power, as pure as it came. People didn't matter. All that mattered was winning.

I didn't care about David, or Lewis, or any miserable little collection of cells walking the planet. They were all just meat and fuel for the engine.

And it was so . . . beautiful.

Then Bad Bob let me go, once he'd shown me the world as he saw it, a landscape where flesh and blood were as meaningless and desolate as sand and rock. I felt the fire gutter and die on my back, and my whole body jerked and folded in on itself.

Mourning for what I'd just lost.

I felt tears burning in my eyes and knew that the worst thing of all this was that I couldn't be sure anymore that if he offered me the choice to feel that again, of my own free will, that I wouldn't take it.

So who's the bad guy now?

The circle of people around me waited tensely. I lifted my face again, and said, "He's gone." My words were almost lost in a blast of wind flying in from the ocean, blowing dust and debris and tattered palm leaves into the air. "I have to go after him."

The Wardens shifted, looking at each other, at Lewis. He slowly shook his head. "We're not doing that," he said. "Christ, Jo. What just happened to you?"

David knew. He reached around and pulled the back of my shirt down, and I saw Lewis's face turn a sick shade of white. "Oh God," he said. "We need to get it off you."

"I don't think laser removal is going to cut it," I said. I felt hollow, cored out. Beyond anything but gallows humor. "It's deep. I don't know how to shut him out."

"Then you can't go," Lewis said. "We need to keep you safe. If he can use you - "

"He can use me here. Against you. I need to - I need to finish this." I swallowed hard. "He's still got a Djinn. Rahel. And he's going to use her to make that thing he has even stronger. The next time he puts the Unmaking into the Earth, do you really think any of us is going to survive it?"

I turned and looked at the night sky. Impossible to see how much damage had been done, but I saw fires, heard sirens in the distance.

"I can block him," David said. "If you'll let me. But it will hurt."

He hadn't said a word about being bound, about my almost killing him in the beach house; I supposed there would be plenty of time for that later. But for now, I nodded.

David put his hand flat against my bare skin on my back, and I felt power surge up from beneath me, racing through my body, concentrating in a red-hot ball around the torch tattoo. Burning. I trembled and felt David's other hand close around mine, sending me strength and support.

"I'm here," he whispered. "I'm here, my love."

I stood it for as long as I could, and then turned with a cry and threw myself into his arms. The white-hot pain in my back faded slowly, but it didn't go away. I couldn't see what he'd done, but it felt as if the mark had been overlaid by something else. Contained.

Masked.

"It won't last," David said, and stroked my hair. "I'll have to renew the block when it weakens."

Joy. "How often?"

"That depends on how hard he's trying to reach you." His arms tightened around me. "I'm so sorry."

That covered . . . everything. For now. I took a deep breath and stepped back, smiling despite the continuing low sizzle of pain. "Can you stay?"

"I'll try," he said. "You're right. My people have to try to stop him. We don't have a choice. He's hurting the Mother directly now. We're her only defense."

"Not the only one," Ashan said, striding out of the darkness. Behind him stretched all of the Old Djinn, hundreds of them. The mightiest Djinn force I'd ever seen in one place - maybe the mightiest ever assembled.

On David's side, the New Djinn began to take shape out of the shadows - maybe just out of self-defense. The Wardens, caught in the middle, looked understandably worried. These two clans had been in cold-war status for ages, but the war had