Damn.I couldn’t hurt this thing, at least not with these weapons.

I retreated. I changed out ice for steel and tried again. This time, I sliced a piece out of the tongue, which fell to the floor and writhed like a slug in the sun. Whether that hurt the creature or not, it charged me, and I tried to make like a matador. That didn’t help. It had reach and speed, and what had been its fingers in human form were now claws, diamond-sharp and lightning fast.

I felt the slices like chilly tugs on my side, but there wasn’t any pain, not at first. I didn’t allow myself to look down, I kept moving, turning, keeping myself away from the razor-edged whirlwind that was hissing through the air in pursuit.

Then I hit a corner, and there was nowhere left to run. I slashed, trying to slow it down, but the creature was just too damn fast, and too damn powerful. It smashed through the shield I put up. I didn’t have time to try any Earth powers; fire wouldn’t work, and weather tricks wouldn’t buy me more than another fragile breath.

I was going to lose.

A small, white ball of light hit the thing from the side and plunged beneath the crystalline structure. It lit the creature up like an arc light from within. I couldn’t even estimate the heat; it felt like a nuclear bomb compressed to the size of a baseball, forces well beyond my ability to summon, much less command.

All I could do was duck and cover. Again.

The creature shrieked in that horrible, soul-destroying range again and became a photonegative blast of flame that cooked everything within a foot of it—but not an inch beyond. The inverse flame became white flame, then reversed itself into a tiny, glittering spark . . . and the creature was gone except for a shower of glittering crystalline powder.

A wave of intense pressure passed over me and shoved me hard into the corner.

The white ball of light expanded into a softer glow, and as the 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 Clarkis 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 inclined to think I could walk it all off until I’d walked about ten feet, and then priorities had shifted again, drastically.

Rest seemed like a very good idea. I accepted Cherise’s support, staggering the rest of the way to our new cabin.

“Ouch,” Cher sighed, as the door swung open on a cramped little room with two narrow beds facing each other. “Looks like we’ve been bumped to coach. Or maybe servants’quarters.”

“Don’t care.” I sank down on the closest flat surface—luckily, it had a mattress—and covered my eyes with my forearm. I needed to think. Howhad that creature gotten on the ship? And why? Was it just biding its time, waiting to kill as many Wardens as possible?

Had it killed the nameless Djinn we’d found in the hallway?

Most importantly—were there more?

David had sensed it, though not with any accuracy. Venna had been able to nuke it, though only at a drastic cost to herself.

We just couldn’t fight an army of these things, and I had the sense that these were just incidental players in Bad Bob’s upcoming melodrama.

Crap.Why did this keep happening to me?

“Jo?” The mattress dented on my left side as Cherise perched on the edge. “You crying?”

“No,” I lied. “Fuck.” I swallowed hard. “I can’t do this. Wecan’t do this. We’re sailing away into the middle of nowhere with a bunch of innocent people and we’re all going to die, Cher. I can’t stop it. God, we’ve screwed this up.”

“Hey.” She moved my arm away from my eyes and looked down at me with such gravity that she didn’t look like Cherise at all. “What’s going on?”

“Did you hear me? We just about got our asses kicked!”

“But you didn’t,” she said. “You told me before we got on this ship that it was going to be hard, and people were going to die, because you can’t go to war if you don’t expect casualties. You didn’t want me to come with, remember. You wussing out on me now, Rambette?”