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I sed hard and didn’t answer I was too busy reliving what that had felt like - the teeth hot inoff

Blood

Lewis didn’t blink "I’o on, alone"

"Alone," I repeated, because I could not have heard hio after Bad Bob all byinsane ?" He hated hi, but I could also see the cold steel underneath it He knehat 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 boo 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 sers felt cool and strange onI’ve ever had to do was kill you Don’tto die for it; we both know that He’s never going to forget" I leaned into the coive 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 - co 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 reood-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 cliallows

Lewis held ht 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 stor ind 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 s around hih 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 ret it

Just - leave him in the bottle Promise me"

Kevin blinked "You don’t want o?"

"Not yet," I said "You can’t take the risk If anything happens to uys to pay for it" I was conde 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 toto destroy e 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 oorst impulses

I blinked away tears and focused on Kevin, with the bottle in his hand - and Cherise, clinging to Kevin and crying "Keep David safe for et"

And then I turned and dived off the boat, into the water

Chapter Nine

So

It was just me and the sharks I was acutely aware of the vast, complicated landscape of predator and prey beneath me as I floated; I’d drahole lot of sharks here, and the Great Whites in particular alarmed me, because I’d seen Jaws

I couldn’t feel my back at all, but the rest of my body was chilled from the water Still, I wasn’t likely to die of exposure, or even hunger or thirst I could eneral health; I could desalinate water to drink I could eat raw fish that I could call intoforward to that part; sushi prepared by a brilliant Japanese chef is a far cry fro out the scales and bones

I floated and watched the rescue craft fleet sail away The hatch reu out of it until the wind carried it away

Cherise had tried to ju at the top of her lungs long after other sounds had faded

"Bye, sweetie," I whispered, and bobbed in the waves for a while, until the boats were just dazed sh Earth Warden to control several hundred sharks, all operating under their natural instinctive progra What I could do - and did - was create conditions that made it less fun for the sharks to co electrical shocks to anything that ca Eventually, though, the sharks lost interest or found other prey to follow A few continued to circle, but I couldn’t wait; the longer I delayed, the less likely it would be that David’s containment of Bad Bob’s torch would hold for me I started to swi, and then difficult The huned for only so much wear and tear without periods of rest, andoverly stressedto have

I kept swi sort of nor, especially if you don’t have any alternatives

The sun began to dip toward the horizon, and I thought about being out here at night, with a sky full of stars It was oddly peaceful I was still edand screa, to be perfectly honest about it I had a wide streak of darkness inside, all my own, and it wasn’t just the scars left over from my earlier Demon Mark; I’d always been auess I wasn’t so different from Bad Bob after all, except that I knew all that was both a strength and a weakness And I knew it had to have limits

I felt none of the power or fury that had thundered through me when the torch had been active, but sooner or later, David’s containment field would fail, and without him here to renew it, the torch would burn hotter than ever I was a Warden I wouldn’t be that easy to kill, even stranded out here on the ocean

I’ht If I swiet there

Depression set in It does that when your friends sail off and abandon you, and when you have to say a probably perood-bye to the one man in the world you’d not only die for, but live withMaybe it’s not worth it Maybe I should just take ame That’d throw a curl in Bad Bob’s tail

It had a seductive, petulant sort of sense to it If I died, his plans were screwed, at least the ones I’d seen He wanted ht even need me to make his small-A apocalypse come true Without me, he had his Sentinels, but they were second-raters, and we’d already taken out the real threats

Then again if I died, that left David snapped into that state of frenzy and rage, and I couldn’t count on hi imprisoned

I didn’t want him to stay imprisoned