wave passed over me I squinted into it and saw the Djinn Venna standing where the creature had been, her pink HELLO KITTY sneakers buried in half an inch of crystal powder.
She looked worse than I had ever seen her: pallid, trembling, afraid. She sank down into a crouch, just a frightened little girl, and I couldn't help but move toward her. I picked her up in my arms, and she shuddered and buried her face in my chest.
Her warmth changed, cooled, became gentle against my skin. I felt my wounds starting to heal, though very slowly. My body began murmuring a shocked report of damages, but I told it to be quiet. Shock felt nice, at the moment. Soothing. I'd take whatever comfort I could get just now.
David reached us a second later, wrapping his arms around us both. "All right?" he asked, and looked into my eyes. He didn't like what he saw there, clearly, but he liked what he saw in Venna a whole lot less.
I didn't blame him.
"It's one of them," Venna said. "One of the ghosts. It didn't belong here. It can't be here. " The confidence of the Old Djinn in their well-ordered universe had just been shattered, and beings that had never feared much in their long, long lives looked into the abyss that humans faced every day - the dark chasm of uncertainty of the future.
"It's okay, Venna," I said, and smoothed her long blond hair. "You did great. Ghost or not, you completely kicked its ass."
"I can't do it again." Venna looked at David and took a deep breath. "It took part of my ass with it. And I don't think I can get any of that back. Maybe ever." Cynthia Clark hadn't boarded with a personal trainer, as it turned out. In fact, she didn't remember a thing about the entire incident. There didn't seem to be much point in trying to convince her that she'd been hypnotized into covering up for some otherworldly demonic glass monster. She wouldn't even believe that David and I hadn't set her room on fire deliberately, so I figured the whole monster thing was right off the table.
I staggered away to the nearest public lounge while David tried to settle things to everyone's satisfaction. I was checked out by a small army of Warden medics and Lewis himself - none of whom were happy with me, or my descriptions of events, come to think of it - and eventually was told that I was in no imminent danger of death or coma, but healing was a long way off.
I was still lying there, feet up, grateful to be breathing, when I spotted Aldonza hurrying past, rolling a luggage cart. She did a quick jerk of surprise when she saw me, and loitered.
"Are you okay, miss?" she asked, which told me just how terrible I looked. "Can I get you something?"
I didn't raise my head from the leather pillow. "I'm okay, Aldonza. Sorry about the cabin."
"The cabin?"
"Miss Clark's cabin. It's - ah - kind of a mess."
Aldonza got a blank, terrified look on her face and hurried on. I could hear her horrified cry all the way down the hallway.
A half hour later, a whole phalanx of stewards rolled by, carting La Clark's salvaged baggage and armloads of expensive clothes. They were moving her to a new cabin.
They moved her into mine, as it turned out. I didn't find that out until I struggled up from my temporary resting place and met Cherise in the hall, dragging her suitcase and looking half-mournful, half-impressed. "Did you know that Cynthia Clark is going to be sleeping in your bed?" she asked. "That's kind of awesome, in a sucky kind of way. Anyway, we're down the hall, and Moses on a motorcycle, what the hell happened to you, bitch?" I was better, really I was. I was limping - broken bones had been repaired into merely cracked and hurting bones - and I was singed and bloody and looked like some Halloween fright mask, but hey, I was breathing, upright, and thinking straight again. "You should see the other guy," I said, and coughed. It turned into a lung-bursting hack like a fifteen-pack-a-day smoker's. I could still taste that awful taint of death, even though I thought that it was all in my head now.
"Uh, thanks, I faint at the sight of gross anatomy. Come on, sweetie. You need a bunk." I didn't argue about it. I'd been