Exquisite Captive (2 page)

“I
am
rich,” the client said.

He leaned close, his eyes peeling off her clothing. He reached out a hand and trailed it down the length of her arm. Nalia stiffened. He was at least thirty summers old, and yet he made no effort to hide his desire for her.
Disgusting wishmaker. They’re all the same.

Every atom in her body screamed to attack. Instead, she held her breath, as if the client were a bad smell that would soon go away.

He’s not worth it,
she thought. This touch, this too-close cloying scent of man, was nothing compared to Malek’s wrath. She’d endure it, if only to avoid the bottle.

“I want something money can’t buy,” he murmured.

He wasn’t the first who thought Nalia did more than grant wishes.

He drew closer, his body nearly pressed up against hers—this was what came of meeting in hotel rooms. Malek insisted they were some of the only places Nalia could guarantee there wouldn’t be any witnesses. He was right. Even she could imagine what the human newspapers would say if someone caught her granting on Hollywood Boulevard.

Privacy had its benefits; it would only take the tiniest movement of her fingers to have a noose around his neck.

Nalia took a step back. “I don’t know what Malek told you, but this is the deal: one wish. Exclusions include, but are not limited to: love wishes, death wishes—yours or someone else’s—world wars, changing the past, wishing for another jinni, and asking for more wishes.”

It had been clever of Malek to think of the granting loophole, a sneaky human way of garnering well above three wishes. There was nothing in the rule books that said a jinni couldn’t grant wishes on
behalf
of her master, as though
he
were the jinni and Nalia was simply the conduit through which the magic flowed. Malek’s second wish: that she grant wishes to his clients, associates, friends, mistresses—as many as he wanted, to as many people as he chose. She’d had no choice but to obey his request.

The client tilted his head to the side, studying Nalia as if she were a piece of avant-garde art that he didn’t quite understand. She guessed he’d been expecting a temptress in harem pants and a face veil that floated out of a lamp and said things like
your wish is my command.
Most of the wishmakers did.

“You have quite a lot of limitations,” he finally said.

He looked expensive, like he summered in Monte Carlo. Young, rich, and bored, these sons of new money were Malek’s favorite type of prey. He never told them the fine print ahead of time; no, he left those conversations to Nalia.

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” she said.

Nalia leaned against the wall, arms crossed. She didn’t know much about him—Malek rarely discussed the details of these cloak-and-dagger transactions—but the client had been in a position to give her master something valuable, something a power-hungry man like Malek needed. Sometimes it was money. Information. People. For Malek, everything—
everyone
—had a price.

Including Nalia.

She longed for the day when Malek would ask her to grant a wish for a homeless woman, a sick child. But the only people who earned his wishes were criminals—traitors, terrorists, liars, thieves. They all had blood on their hands, and this one, she could tell, was no exception.

The client crossed the plush carpet and poured himself a drink from the well-stocked bar. Beside it, a wall of windows framed the dusky Hollywood Hills, where mansions full of secrets hid behind bougainvillea and security cameras. Sunset Boulevard lay below the penthouse suite, a serpentine river of red and white headlights that flowed into the dark heart of Hollywood. The whole city was a prison, built on shattered dreams and lost souls.

He contemplated the view for a long moment, then swirled the amber liquid in his glass, knocking it back in one go.

“How old are you?” he asked, turning to her.

“Old enough to be unimpressed with your car, your money, or that ridiculous watch on your wrist,” she said, with a look at the solid gold monstrosity.

His answering grin was the kind a schoolboy might give when he’s thoroughly enjoyed his punishment. “Malek told me you were . . . what was the word he used?
Feisty.
He said not to take it personally.”

“No,” she said. “You should definitely take it personally.”

The client shook his head. “Aren’t you a piece of work? Bet Malek has all kinds of fun with his jinni.”

Nalia curled her fingers against her palm, willing the magic to stay put.
Not worth it,
she chanted.
Not worth it. Not worth it. Not worth it.

But his words had brushed up against the truth, a painful reminder of this newest horror in her life. Malek, two weeks ago, saying good-bye to her before his business trip: his lips close to her ear, the heat of him.
We’re meant to be together, you and I. You’ll see that soon enough, Nalia.

The client’s soft laughter brought her back to the hotel room and its cold, sharp lines, all black and white and so humanly modern. He smiled to himself, as if at a private joke, while he poured another drink. He sipped it, then threw himself into a black leather chair and crossed his legs, the relaxed posture belying the excitement that flitted around the edges of his voice.

“You said no death wishes. What about pain wishes? A brink-of-death sort of thing,” he asked.

Nalia looked out the window. Instead of Hollywood’s bright lights, she saw the palace dungeons of Arjinna, her homeland. Her mother’s command she’d been too cowardly to refuse. The boy who had died. His blood on her hands. She could never take it back, that first lesson in the abuse of power.

She gave the client a frozen look. “No.”

Other than the soft whir of the air conditioner and the muffled car horns below, the room was swathed in silence.

“Well, doesn’t hurt to try.” He steepled his fingers and gazed at the ceiling. After a moment, he clapped his hands, rubbing them together. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll take a magical power. Invisibility. Think you can rustle that up?”

So casual. He spoke as though her stolen childhood and the years of training to grant, to
manifest
, to coax wishes out of the universe’s tightly closed fist was the equivalent of flipping a burger. All that pain, sacrifice, and loss—
gods, so much loss—
it all came down to one man-boy’s whim.

Nalia pulled a scroll from her back pocket and tapped it once with her finger so that words suddenly spilled across it. Words that would make the client
think
he was getting what he asked for. Her insides screamed,
the bottle! the bottle!
, and for a moment Nalia faltered as she imagined the look on Malek’s face when he found out what she’d done. She’d been so good. After those first two rebellious years with Malek, she’d spent the past year obeying his every command until the bottle was only a throbbing memory in her gut.

But the bottle was preferable to being trapped in his bed. His anger over this transgression would buy her more time.

She handed Malek’s client the contract. “Sign on the dotted line.”

“Got a pen?”

She smiled and held up the jade dagger she kept inside her boot. “We use a different kind of ink.”

“Kinky.”

“Your finger, please.”

He held out his hand. “I’m guessing I can’t have my lawyer look this over.”

“You guessed right.”

She whispered over the dagger until it was only a dagger, taking the enchantment off so that this one little scrape wouldn’t paralyze him. Then she brought the blade to his skin. She cut him deeper than she needed to and his sharp intake of breath filled her with more satisfaction than it should have. She’d been with Malek too long.

Nalia pressed his finger against the paper, then rolled it up. As soon as she let go of the contract, it disappeared.

The client’s eyes widened, his casual cool replaced with wonder. “What’d you do with it?”

“I put it away.” She wasn’t about to give him a lesson in rudimentary magic. “Ready?”

He leaned back in his chair, slipping his nonchalance on like an old overcoat. “Are
you
?”

She held out her hand. “Payment.”

His fingers searched an inside pocket of his suit coat while keeping his eyes on her the whole time, as though she were some kind of monkey that would suddenly begin performing magic tricks once he looked away. He tossed a thumb drive in her direction and she plucked it out of the air, then slid it into the front pocket of her jeans. Anything could be on it—nuclear codes, scandalous photographs, an eighth Harry Potter book. Whatever was on that thumb drive now belonged to Malek: just one more rung in his ladder to the sky. At this point, what power
didn’t
he have? He’d be ruling the planet in no time. Practically did already.

“Now don’t move,” she said.

“You’d be a great dominatrix, you know that?”

He was making it far too easy to ruin his life.

Nalia ignored him and closed her eyes, focusing on the magic within her. She wouldn’t have to wait long. The
chiaan
was close, as if it were stored in some small compartment wedged between her ribs. It stirred, a creature awakening from a deep sleep, stretching and yawning. Nalia’s blood warmed as the
chiaan
flowed through her veins, tumbled over joints, and clawed its way into her lungs, her heart. Her fingers tingled, every inch of skin humming with energy and intention as she drew on the strongest elements in the room—air, and the fire from the candles she’d lit earlier. She focused her mind on erasing the client’s features until nothing was left of him. The calculating eyes: gone. The smirk: a memory. The hands: clear as water. She waited until she could stand it no longer, waited until she thought her bones might break under the impatient pressure of the wild, thrashing thing inside her. Then she lifted her hands, palms facing the client.

The magic shot out of her, leaving Nalia cold and dizzy. When she opened her eyes, the room was empty.

“Holy shit,” she heard a moment later, near the corner of the room where a floor-length mirror stood.

Nalia grabbed her purse and started for the door. Like a criminal, she ached to sprint from the scene of her crime, but she moved calmly forward. He was just a wishmaker—the client didn’t deserve her fear.

“Wait.” She felt the client’s hand close around her arm, but she shook him off.

“Do. Not. Touch me.”

“How do I change back?” he asked. If he weren’t invisible, she could imagine that cool, lecherous façade cracking into a thousand pieces.

She threw open the door. “You don’t.” The corners of Nalia’s lips turned up, ever so slightly. Once granted, a wish could not be unmade. “Be careful what you wish for.”

She felt the darkness of his energy as it pushed against her own. She had no idea where he was, but she heard his breath go ragged. Close. He was too close.

“Listen, you little bitch—”

She was there, and then she was not. An image of the alley behind the hotel flashed through her mind, then the familiar smoke surrounded her, enveloping Nalia in its honey-scented cloud. Seconds later, she was in the alley, her breath coming out in short, choking gasps. In Arjinna, things like evanescing and granting had been like snapping her fingers. On Earth, they were like pushing a boulder up a mountain. So much in this land was backward and upside down. The iron didn’t help, either. It sapped her power so that simple acts took more
chiaan
than they should.

Nalia hunched her shoulders against the cool night air as she made her way toward the parking lot beneath the hotel. Tourists and young, beautiful human girls with fake brown skin and yellow hair crowded Sunset’s sidewalks, pushing past her as they talked on their cell phones and laughed with their friends. Men walked up to them with postcards advertising new clubs or bars, and everywhere there was music and bright lights. Electronic billboards advertised new films, and neon signs flashed against the blackened sky. A man held a hand-painted sign that said Jesus loved her, and a woman with dirty brown hair and overlarge clothes sat on the corner, begging for change. A little boy stood with his mother, his mouth open as he gazed at the sights around him. For a moment Nalia stared—the child wasn’t her brother, she knew that, but he looked so much like Bashil that the constant ache for him that lived deep in her bones became a sharp pain that radiated through her. His eyes slid to her own and Nalia looked away, her vision blurring.

She reached the famous upside-down sign near the hotel’s entrance and gave her ticket to the parking attendant, nervously fingering the thumb drive as she waited for the valet to bring her car around. At least Malek would have whatever he’d sent her here for. She shivered, imagining the look on his face when he found out what she’d done. Destroying this client’s life had been the highlight of her three years as Malek’s slave—she’d almost forgotten what it felt like to have power, to have a whole nation bend its knees when they saw you. But as the shadows of the night closed around her, all Nalia could think of was the impenetrable darkness of the bottle.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Present Day

THE HUTONG IS EMPTY. NARROW STREETS SNAKE PAST
rusted rickshaws abandoned beside buildings with broken windows and peeling paint. The ancient houses stand side by side, leaning against one another like fallen dominoes. Most of the residents are home, their bicycles parked alongside crumbling brick walls or locked up beneath dusty red flags that hang from poles over the potholed streets. Cooking sounds and animated conversation spill out of closed double doors. The air is filled with the scent of frying meat and hot peppers. There is no evidence of the small card tables where the neighborhood’s grandmothers play mah-jongg during the afternoon, and the flea-market stalls sag into the ground, empty of their wares. Here and there a bright fluorescent light hangs above a doorway next to a red silk lantern, beaming into the ghostly streets, but the neighborhood is otherwise shrouded in thick darkness. The only movement outside the shuttered homes comes from the slink of thin dogs poking their noses in the trash.