Ten feet away, the frozen statue garden of Wardens and Djinn glowed steadily in my night vision. I caught a moving glow, much cooler than the others, blue instead of yellow or white.

Angelo darted into the middle of the standing figures. I switched back to regular sight, and saw him put his hands on one of the Djinn. One of Ashan’s, who snarled and struck back with invisible force that bounced off of Angelo’s body like the impact from a water balloon.

Angelo’s skin blackened, crisped, and flaked away, revealing the crystal underneath, as the Djinn fought him. I felt the ship lurch sharply downward as the Djinn’s attention was pulled away from the task of holding the opposing forces in balance.

The Djinn began to turn a soft ashy gray. Rotting from the outside in, the way the Djinn who’d died outside my room had ended her life.

I settled my back against the cold metal of the safe. If I was going to do anything at all, I didn’t want to worry about falling down while I was about it. If what Venna had said was right, this thing was the forerunner of something much bigger, something that devoured on a universal scale. I thought about all those lifeless planets spinning in space that our telescopes and probes had found. How many of them had once been like us? How many had fallen prey and been wiped clean of life?

Why fight it? It’s nature. You are all aberrations, a momentary mistake in the plan of the universe. Let go.

The ship bounced and settled deeper in the water. I heard the almost-human groan of the metal around me. It couldn’t withstand this strain, not for much longer.

And neither could I.

I closed my eyes, visualized the frequencies I needed, and began to set them up in a tightly enclosed ring around the skin and his Djinn victim.

Nothing happened.

The Djinn struggled now, no longer interested in maintaining the balance, but he’d waited too long. He couldn’t break free of the crystal claws that were digging into him, siphoning away his power and his life. He was losing.

I shifted frequencies.

The Djinn shrieked in unworldly agony as his body began to crumble away. The dark part of me met that with trembling eagerness, drinking in every agonized second of it.

I shifted frequencies again, blind to everything but the dance of molecules, the music of the energy being expended and absorbed.

Come on . . .

It wasn’t strong enough.

Venna had been able to blow her victim to kingdom come, but she was Venna, a power of the ages. I was just a wounded, exhausted Warden up against something I didn’t understand.

I was losing.

The Djinn who’d screamed was no longer recognizable as a Djinn at all. It was a pile of disintegrating ash and dust, sliding away from cohesion to scatter on the deck.

And I felt everything slipping away inside.

The ship groaned again, and I saw metal buckling, vast rivets ripping out of place, and the first jets of water blow through into the open space of the hold.

We started sinking again.

The skin turned to the next Djinn. Lyle.

I felt the shift of power in the room.The water stopped rushing in. The metal sealed and strengthened.

Where David walked, the world mended around him.

“No,” I whispered, but he wasn’t going to stop, not for me. Not this time.

He wasn’t going to allow Lyle to die.

Another watertight door opened on the other side of the hold, and a swarm of Wardens poured in, led by Lewis. In seconds, they had the skin surrounded.

But the skin had its claws buried in Lyle’s chest, like some giant parasitical tick.

I switched frequencies one more time. Lewis saw what I was doing, and joined me; the other Earth Wardens quickly supported us, creating a resonance that was so powerful it began to shatter glass and crystal stored in the crates. Someone’s eyeglasses broke under the strain.

I felt feedback—the exact frequency that this creature’s bones sang to. I began to focus harder, refining the sound until it was at a lethal intensity. I could seethe waves now, a standing well of ripples in the air around the creature, battering it from all sides.

“Jo, let go!” Lewis shouted. “Drop out!”

I couldn’t do that. Instead, I reached inside and came up with more power than I’d thought was hiding down in the empty storehouse of my gifts.

Because it felt so goodto kill.

The vibrations ramped up into a shriek of power, and instead of Lyle dissolving into ash, the skin that had been Angelo Marconi blew apart into glittering crystal dust.

Lyle sagged and hit the deck, too weak to continue, but David stepped into his place and froze, concentrating.

The ship leveled out—still fighting the downward force but no longer being pulled down.

As quickly as it had come, the extra power I’d found was gone. Vanished. I was just me again, frail and fragile and ready to drop. If Angelo hadn’t been a pile of ragged flesh and demonic parts on the metal floor, he’d have had an easy meal of me.

Lewis reached me a few seconds later, as I slid down to a sprawl against the safe. “I told you to step out!” he snapped, and touched my forehead. “Damn it. What the hell did you do?”

I struck out at him. I couldn’t help it; his anger woke the beast inside, the one that had patiently stalked and laughed and waited.

I couldn’t hold it back anymore.

I burned him.

If it had been anyone but Lewis, I’d have killed him; I wasn’t pulling punches, and the fire that boiled out of me onto him was thick, plasmatic, and clung like napalm. It flickered with a sickly green tint.

Lewis reacted instantly, stepping back from me and concentrating all his will on putting out the fire before it could eat him up. He succeeded, but my attack left him with nasty third-degree burns on his hands and arms.

I laughed.

David called another Djinn to take his place in the fragile power structure that held us above the waves, and flashed across the hold toward me. As he did, Lewis blocked him. “No,” he said. His voice was ragged with pain. “Don’t touch her.”

David looked like he was considering touching Lewis, in a very hostile manner, but he took the advice. He pulled in energy and ignited a small golden ball of light in the palm of his hand. It was cozy, warm, and gave me a false sense of security. The glow woke shades of orange and red in his eyes, made his face into the image of a classical bronze god.

Next to him, a faint mist formed in the air. It didn’t bother to take human form, and it didn’t need to; there was a feelingthat came with it, oppressive as the ocean depths, and just as cold.

The Air Oracle. She—or he?—was the Djinn equivalent of an archangel, both supremely powerful and unknowable. Even as Conduit for the Djinn, David couldn’t order an Oracle; he could only petition.

He’d obviously petitioned, and now the Air Oracle was here, looking at me out of a body that barely registered in the world at all. There was communication going on between David and the Oracle. It wasn’t civil, from the look on David’s face.

This was a perfect moment to see just what I could do with all this power.

As I summoned it up in a roiling boil inside me, thick and hot and dizzying, the Air Oracle’s attention focused on me with a snap, and I was driven to my knees.

The Oracle seemed surprised that I hadn’t been driven into tiny little fragments identifiable only by DNA. Verysurprised. You’re going to get a lot more shocks, bitch,I thought, and smiled.

David was far sneakier than I gave him credit for. Instead of coming at me directly, he used his link to me, sending a massive burst of power through the aetheric connection between us.

It blew me out of my body. I fell, stunned, and waited for the end. The Air Oracle was no friend of humans in general; I was no better than the slime at the edge of a pond to her. But she didn’t act.