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"So what a to ask?"

"He’s not stupid He grabbed all the Djinn he could find and bottled them My folks back on the ot theo full of bottles How’s that? Make you feel any better?" Not really But I didn’t believe for a second that Leould trade one Djinn for me, much less a boatload Besides, rescue was on its way

Right?

It had been maybe ten minutes since my arrival on the island The Grand Horizon was supposed to be visible by now, but I couldn’t see its distinctive outline anywhere on the open seas around us, and it ay too big to ed to sink the second ship, too?

Was I all alone here, at the end?

Well, if I was, I was going to go down fighting

God, please, don’t let him kill

Chapter Eleven

Bad Bob talked He loved to talk, and I let him, because I learned a lot

Bad Bob, I was starting to realize, really didn’t have , juicy target, he’d been conducting a multifront war Those never work; ask Napoleon He’d had operatives back ho Wardens, on the theory that if they were any daot hile person, or any Djinn

The Sentinels, ere getting increasingly desperate, had been taken down not by the Wardens themselves but by Hoovernment men

That was kind of rich

What remained of Bad Bob’s threat to the Wardens was here, on this island, which s with the aetheric equivalent of a nuclear device

Not great, but at least isolated

I couldn’t move much, thanks to my mutated octopus friend, but I could pay attention to Bob’suseful to be learned I didn’t know if the thing inside had driven him mad, but it certainly didn’t kno to flip the OFF switch

Eventually, Bad Bob got impatient He’d expected my rescue to heave over the horizon, but if it was out there, it was sood

It just wasn’t good for e?" I asked I’don the stones, with ht out I didn’t want to look too closely at as happening tointo"Maybe your ransom demand went to voice mail Sucks when that happens"

"Oh, they know I have you They just need some incentive, that’s all," Bad Bob said cheerfully The sun was beating down on et delirious from the heat, or the lack of water, it wasn’t the most comfortable I’d ever been

And I didn’t like the sound of incentive

I liked it a whole lot less when Bad Bob got out of his chair and walked toward me, because as he did, he reached into eht out the Djinn Ancestor Scriptures

I stared at it wearily It wasn’t of hu; as far as I knew, it wasn’t of Djinn , either The Ancestor Scriptures probably wasn’t even a book, in the strictest sense, although it certainly had that appearance here in this plane - leather binding, wrinkled ancient pages, metal flaps to lock it shut

What it really was I couldn’t say, but I was pretty sure that it had been written by a higher power than the Oracles, and the Oracles of the Djinn had been entrusted with its care and feeding

Whether this was one of the three originals or a copy, I couldn’t say - the copies were just as deadly, if maybe not iet your hands on that?" I asked Bad Bob as he opened the es "Garage sale at the Villain Supply Company?"

"I took it from an Oracle," he said, but absently, as if it really didn’t o"

That, I could believe The Air Oracle had always struck eneral and huotten little to no love from him/her/it

That kind of iven bipeds a bad nae, considered it, and shook his head "No, too subtle This - too o I’ll just turn on old DNA inside you, see e get Maybe you’ll grow a tail, shark teeth, chicken skin" Well, I definitely wasn’t waiting around for that

I stole Petrie’s specialty, and for it with a burst of silvery power out of my special Djinn reserve It burned hot blue, and where it slithered over the rocks, it left melted trails behind

I snapped it toward Bad Bob

He caught it in one hand, wrapped it around his fist, and yanked I slid forward on the stones; the tentacle wrapped aroundunder the strain

Dauttered out, leaving just a trail of greasy se, didn’t say anything He walked over to where I was pinned in place, blood streaking down over the tentacle anchoring me

"You just don’t lie down, do you?" he said "I always said you ay too good for the Wardens You made the rest of us look bad" He turned and yelled toward his watching followers There were a lot fewer than I remembered - maybe twenty, if that Granted, I’d taken sorounded quite that many He’d probably lost some to incursions and his own craziness - like Petrie - plus I figured that those who could think logically enough to escape had grabbed transportation and taken their chances

That probably meant they were dead, out there on the ocean, but at least they’d died cleanly, off this black hunk of stone