Total Eclipse Read Free Page B

Ever.
    Cherise stared at him with a wounded expression. “That’s a joke, right? Please tell me you are joking, because if you’re not joking, that is just tragic, and I’m going to have to stage an intervention.”
    David munched bacon and explored the rest of the buffet she’d delivered as I got up from my chair. “Strippers. Poles. I understand.”
    “Thank God. Because if a hottie like you had never seen a stripper, my faith in God was going to . . .” Cherise suddenly clammed up, which wasn’t like her at all. She looked down, then around at the silent, still Djinn. “Yeah,” she finished very quietly. “Guess that ship has sailed. And, oh look, we’re on it.”
    It wasn’t like Cherise to fail to find the sunny side of the cloud, but then again, we’d been under clouds for what seemed like years at this point. I guessed that even the eternal optimist had to reevaluate, given the circumstances.
    “How is everyone else?” David asked. I reached over him to take a slice of bacon as he poured coffee from the small thermal pot.
    “The Wardens are all freaking out because they’re Joe Normals,” Cherise said. “For me, it’s just another sunny day in paradise, really. Not that I’m in the mood to tan or anything.”
    She really was depressed. Well, I could see why. . . . She was probably the only person on the entire ship, other than the hired crew, who couldn’t feel anything odd about the area through which we sailed. The Wardens were reduced to shakes and panic, feeling suffocated by their isolation, and they probably resented her for her lack of suffering.
    I was starting to actually get used to it. A little.
    The food helped steady me, and I could see David’s body language easing a little as well. He hadn’t needed to pay careful attention to his metabolism in, oh, about five thousand years or so, and since he’d originally been killed and reborn as a Djinn at the tender age of what was probably his early twenties, if that, it wasn’t too likely he’d ever experienced the kind of human trials I was already starting to put up with.
    My mother used to say that getting old isn’t for sissies. Neither is being human, for that matter. And the fact that David had managed to pull himself together so fast, and so gracefully, was humbling. I hadn’t functioned nearly so well when I’d, in turn, been pulled over to the Djinn side. That should have been a lot more fun than it turned out to be.
    The ship’s motion had increased a little—difficult to tell, in a ship this big, but I could feel the pitch and yaw deep in my guts. If I’d still been a Weather Warden, I’d have been able to tell a whole lot more—how the air was moving, the tides, the deep and complex breathing between the water and the air above. Two kinds of fluids, moving as one. Symbiotic.
    Now all I could tell was that my stomach was rolling with the motion. Great.
    “The captain says we should be able to dock in a couple of days,” Cherise said. “I don’t know about you guys, but I could dig my toes in some sand. I’m starting to feel like I’m lost on Gilligan’s Island . And I can’t even be Ginger, because I don’t have any evening gowns.”
    David stopped in the act of lifting a grape to his mouth. Just . . . froze. And I thought maybe he was confused about the pop culture reference, but that wasn’t like him, and anyway, he didn’t usually just . . .
    Every Djinn lying in the beds suddenly sat straight up and screamed .
    It was an eerie, tormented, unearthly wailing sound, and shockingly loud. I staggered, dropping my glass, pressing both hands to my ears, and setting my back against the wall for primal protection. There was something wrong with that sound, deeply and horribly wrong . Cherise crouched, covering her head; if she was screaming I couldn’t hear her over the incredible, deafening sound of raw pain coming from every one of the Djinn.
    Every one of them but David, who was pale, standing frozen in