Exquisite Captive (10 page)

“It’s . . . cold,” Zanari suddenly said, her voice far away and searching. Raif always imagined her in a dark labyrinth, weaving her way through the sensory clues her target left behind as he dodged her curious mind.

“The air smells like snow.”

“Can you see any buildings?” Raif asked quietly.

“Um . . . .not yet. There’s an ocean, no—a river. In a city? I can’t . . . black stones underfoot . . . I feel . . . hunger.”

“Who do you see?”

Zanari’s hands twitched and her face screwed up with concentration.

“There’s . . . a jinni . . . white hair. I feel . . . rushing. No time.”

“The jinni with the white hair—is he or she looking for Nalia?”

“No . . .” She scrunched up her nose. “It smells bad. Sour.”

This was the kind of thing that wasn’t extremely helpful to Raif unless they were in Arjinna and a smell could be traced to a location they were familiar with—the salt mines or the wharf, something like that.

Zanari bit her lip and raised her hands, as though she were trying to push something aside. “Dark street. I hear—” Her voice lowered.
“The . . . Ghan Aisouri has . . . been running from the Ifrit . . . for a long time.”

Her eyes flew open. “Haran. It’s Haran.”

The head of Calar’s personal guard, Haran was the most vicious of all the Ifrit soldiers. For him, killing was a hobby.

“Those were his words, what you just said?” Raif asked.

Zanari nodded. Her eyes were unfocused, dazed. She seemed to be looking past him, at some invisible thing behind him.

“Great, just what we need right now,” Raif muttered, running a hand through his hair. He’d rather face a squad of Ifrit soldiers than go head to head with Haran. “Calar must have sent him alone. To keep this quick and quiet. She doesn’t want it getting out that there’s a Ghan Aisouri alive.”

Zanari let out a deep breath. “Okay, not gonna lie,” she said, “that wiped me out.” She rubbed her eyes as the
chiaan
around the circle evaporated, leaving behind dark, dry earth.

“You’re sure it was him—you saw his face?” Raif asked.

“I couldn’t see his face, but the voice—and that strange way he talks. He never says ‘I,’ you know, always ‘the Ifrit’ or ‘the jinni.’ Remember with Jakar how . . .” Zanari shuddered and looked away. Her hands gripped her knees, the knuckles white.

She didn’t need to finish her sentence. Raif knew exactly what she was talking about. It was one of Zanari’s most disturbing visions; it had happened almost a year ago, but the memory was painfully sharp. One of their messengers, a young jinni named Jakar—too young to fight, but old enough to run fast and hide—had been collecting a message from one of Raif’s spies in the palace. He’d been caught. There was no question that Raif would attempt a rescue. He wasn’t going to leave a kid that was only eleven summers old to rot in the palace’s dungeons. Zanari had used her
voiqhif
to locate him. Since her gift worked only in the present, she happened to be watching right when Haran was torturing the boy. It was bad. Zanari was catatonic afterward, a psychic rupture Raif and his mother feared she’d never come back from. All she’d been able to say was that Jakar wasn’t a jinni anymore—Haran had rendered him unrecognizable. Raif closed his eyes for a moment, the despair of all that he’d seen suddenly overwhelming.

This has to stop. It must.
This was why he’d come so far, risked everything. If Nalia didn’t help them, Raif didn’t know what he would do.

He stepped into the circle and grabbed Zanari in a fierce hug. “I swear to the gods, I’ll never let him come near you.” She shook like the last leaf on a
widr
tree in autumn and he held her tighter. “I’m so sorry I have to put you through this. If there was any other way . . .”

“I’m glad I can do it. Maybe your Ghan Aisouri will kill him—wouldn’t that be something?”

Raif nodded. “It would.”

Zanari pulled away. “It’s just him going after her, I think. He’s the only consciousness with its will bent entirely on finding a Ghan Aisouri. No one else on Earth is looking for her.” She sighed. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get more. I think I overdid it today.”

Raif stood up. “You did good.” He frowned, watching as his sister massaged her temples. “Is it a bad one?”

Zanari’s
voiqhif
gave her excruciating headaches. Some magic was like that.

“I’ll be fine.”

“You said it was cold. Any idea where Haran might be?”

“It felt far. I had to wait a long time before I could sense him. If he’d been nearby, the vision would have come right away.”

“So Haran’s not
here
, at least. That’s good. Do you think later you might be able to work on what you saw a bit more, come up with an approximate location?”

Zanari shrugged. “It’s Earth. Maybe if we were home, the details would be enough, but we don’t know this place at all. He could be anywhere.” Zanari sighed. “Gods, sometimes I feel so
close
, you know? Like if I could just maintain the connection a little longer . . .”

“Yeah.” He knew how frustrating it was to constantly come up against the border of your magic, knowing that even with the slightest bit of help, of guidance, you could go so much further. Raif sank into Jordif’s sumptuous leather couch and groaned. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was until he’d stopped moving.

Zanari sank back into the armchair outside the circle and pulled a blanket around her as she searched her brother’s worn face. “So what’s she like?”

He pictured the bewitching birthmark next to Nalia’s right ear and her secretive golden eyes. The look on her face when she thought no one was watching—a piercing lonesomeness that replaced her ferocity with a vulnerability that would shame her, if she knew he’d seen it.

“Arrogant,” he said. “Looks like a
ghoul
.”

The ghouls were mythical monsters who took on the appearance of their jinn or human prey once they’d eaten their victim’s heart. When they hadn’t fed in a long time, it was said they looked like emaciated corpses. Of course, everyone knew they didn’t actually exist; ghouls were the jinn’s cautionary tale against the use of dark magic—tainted energy released through suffering and pain, used for the express purpose of causing more suffering and pain. In order to keep their young jinn from experimenting with the forbidden arts, grandmothers and parents would tell stories near the hearth late at night, after the day’s backbreaking work in their overlord’s fields. It was said that thousands and thousands of summers ago, the first ghouls had once been normal jinn, but that they’d trafficked with dark gods who’d stolen their souls. That was why the ghouls ate their victims—they were always searching for a soul to replace the ones they had lost. There was an old tale—
The Jinni and the Ghoul
—that told the story of a jinni who enslaved a ghoul and made it carry out dark deeds. It used to keep Raif up at night, imagining all the things the ghoul in the story had done.

“A
ghoul
?” Zanari looked at her brother, eyes narrowing. He knew she was thinking of the book they’d had as children, with horrifying illustrations that jumped off the pages. “She’s gorgeous, isn’t she?”

Raif swatted at the air, as though she were a pesky fly. “Does it matter? She’s the enemy. Goes on and on about how hard her life is, living in a fancy mansion with a master who’s obviously in love with her.” He kicked off his shoes. “Disgusting
salfit
.”

“Hating her won’t bring them back,” Zanari said quietly.

And even though they’d both lost so many in the past few years, he knew who she was talking about—their father and Kir. This war had been so much easier to fight, with his father and best friend at his side.

“Liking her won’t, either,” he said. “I choose the lesser of two evils.”

Raif started toward the kitchen, but Zanari’s voice stopped him. “What’d she say about the sigil ring?”

“We didn’t get into it.” He’d been grateful there hadn’t been time to tell Nalia what he was asking in exchange for her freedom. He wasn’t looking forward to that conversation. Or maybe he was. He wanted to see the look on her face when he told Nalia what the resistance required of her.

“What do you mean, you didn’t get into it?”

He shrugged. “It never came up. I think she’d do anything to get out and I’m the only person who can help her. She’ll pay the price, I’m not worried about that.”

Zanari stood, her blanket dropping to the floor. “Don’t be so sure. The Ghan Aisouri take their vows seriously. You’re asking her to break the biggest one.”

A ghost of a smile played on Raif’s face. “That’s what makes this all the more sweet.”

Zanari took off her slipper and threw it at him. Raif dodged it, but gave her an injured look. “What was that for?”

“I think you know.” Her voice grew soft. “Don’t turn into them, Raif. You’re better than that. We should fight on our own terms, not the enemy’s.”

She didn’t understand. The part of him that thought there could be honest, peaceful dialogue between all the peoples of Arjinna had died with his father and Kir.

“If we did it your way,” he said, “we’d still be in Arjinna, trying to pick off the Ifrit one by one.”

Zanari’s eyes flashed. “We might not even make it
back
to do that much. Raif, this plan is insane. If Haran catches up to us before you free this Ghan Aisouri . . . there’s no way we’d make it home alive. You know that.”

“And what do we have to go back to? We’re failing, Zan. This is it—the Ifrit have already rooted out half our cells. Even if I get hundreds of new recruits while we’re here on Earth, that’ll only buy us a little time before the Ifrit cut every last one of us down. If we don’t get the sigil. . . then all the death and blood—it would have meant
nothing
.”

“Gods, Raif, I’m on your side. You know I always am. But this sigil—it’s an evil thing. No good can come of using it.”

Raif sighed. “Let’s just get the godsdamn thing and then we can decide what to do with it, okay?”

Raif turned on his heel and stormed into the kitchen, not waiting for an answer. He needed a beer. It was one of the first human things Jordif had introduced him, to and Raif enjoyed the strange beverage’s heavy taste and the bubbles that slid across his tongue. He tipped the bottle back, staring out the window over the kitchen sink.

What a miserable realm,
he thought.

Just after dawn, downtown LA was a ghost town, apocalyptic. Bright, early-morning sun glinted off skyscrapers that glared at the freeway snaking over the empty streets. Its rays streamed over the carved stone buildings, so different from the rest of the city’s squat pastel-colored apartments and strip malls. The shops below were still closed, heavy metal shutters pulled over their windows and doors. Strange paint covered the metal—letters that looked vaguely English. Graffiti—it was the same in Arjinna, but in his land the letters glowed and shifted according to the spell of the jinni who’d written them. Ever since the beginning of the Discords, Raif’s fellow revolutionaries had relied on these secret messages to the serfs, carved in rocks and the trunks of trees.

The homeless still owned downtown’s streets at this hour, holding court on empty corners and front stoops. He could hear the clink of bottles as an old man in rags pushed an overflowing cart up the sidewalk. The only other sound was the lonely rumble of a transportation machine filled with garbage several blocks away and an industrious entrepreneur who drove slowly by in a smaller version of the transportation machine shouting,
Tamales, Tamales!

Earth was not as menacing as the stories from his childhood made it seem, but he could understand why the jinn had been afraid to come to this land of dirty skies and trash-filled streets. He wondered what the humans would think of Arjinna, if they could see it as it had been before the coup. They’d probably think it was a paradise.

He felt Zanari’s arms around him. She rested her head on his back, between his shoulder blades. “Sorry, okay? I’m just worried, that’s all. I can’t lose anyone else.”

He squeezed her hands, where they pressed against his heart. “Everything’s gonna be fine, Zan. Just trust me. This is the only way we can win.”

He wanted to believe his words, but all he felt was a deep heaviness in his chest. Nothing was certain. Even now, Haran was out there, intent on destroying the only hope Arjinna had of ever being free.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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“ZDRAVSTVUYTYE! HELLO, HELLO! PRETTY LADY, BUY
one of Valentine’s pictures. Is art! Is most fantastic art in all of Russia, no?”

Black-and-white photographs pasted into paper-collaged frames cover the stall, but the real item of note is the artist himself. His thick gray beard frames a wide, almost manic smile, while his clothing is a jumble of vintage items—an old Soviet cap, a thick wool sweater, a pair of purple bell-bottom pants.

The Djan jinni flashes a demure smile and hurries away from the artist’s stall, pushing past the locals and tourists strolling along the banks of the Neva. Her hair, the glittering white of Russian snow, waves behind her like the ends of a scarf.

“
Dasvidanya
, pretty lady!” he shouts after her, waving good-bye. “Some other time, yes?”

It’s early still, but the sky has already darkened. There’s a chill in the air, and the Djan looks longingly at the warm restaurants she passes where plates of bliny and bowls of borscht cover marble-topped tables. No time. If she’s not back at her master’s flat to serve him his evening glass of vodka, he’ll get angry.

She shoves her hands in the deep pockets of her coat, her fingers frozen despite the wool-lined leather gloves she wears. As she passes the familiar sunrise-colored buildings, she stops for a moment to look at her favorite—an apartment with a stone arch held up by two bare-chested stone men who grimace at the street. She smiles at them, two thieves who had tried to accost her late one winter night, years ago. She thought this a fitting punishment.