Exquisite Captive (3 page)

A puff of blue smoke suddenly fills a side street, and the Marid jinni within its aqua plumes looks over her shoulder, then slips through the faded red doors of an abandoned
siheyuan—
one of the
hutong
’s courtyard residences. She darts into the shadows just inside the doors, hugging its brick wall and hardly daring to breathe. She twists her jade shackles around and around her wrists, a nervous habit she can’t help. Above the courtyard, Beijing’s bright lights block out the stars and its skyscrapers stretch beyond the soot-stained sky, their tops lost in the clouds. She stares at the swath of sky above her, waiting.

The Ifrit jinni pursuing her evanesces into the square of pale moonlight that shines into the center of the courtyard. Red smoke billows out around his massive body, filling the air with the scent of sulfur and a stench that reminds the Marid of Beijing’s overflowing trash bins. As the smoke clears, the Ifrit scans each darkened corner with eyes that blaze scarlet. When he spots the jinni cowering against the wall, he smiles.

“Hello, little mouse,” he says. “The cat has been looking for you.”

The Ifrit has just arrived from Arjinna and he’s hungry. His stomach rumbles.

“Please,” the jinni whispers. “I don’t know who you are or what you want, but I’m nobody. Just a slave on the dark caravan, that’s all.”

“Come into the light, little mouse,” the Ifrit coaxes. Moonlight glints off the sharp points of his blackened teeth.

The Marid jinni hugs the wall. She doesn’t understand why this Ifrit is chasing her. What has she done?

“Does the little mouse want to run to another hole?” The Ifrit takes a step toward her. “She knows the cat will catch her, yes? The mouse is tired, so tired, from running. Running from the palace, running from
me
.”

“The palace? I’m only a Marid—I’ve never been to the palace. Honest. I’ve been on Earth for six hundred summers.”

The Ifrit crooks his finger. “If the little mouse does not let me see her face, she will make the cat angry. He will have to use his claws.”

The jinni whimpers as she steps into the moonlight, silently crying out to the gods. Her body trembles as a gust of wind swoops through the courtyard. The rancid smell the Ifrit has brought with him gets stronger the closer she is to him, like rotting food or, no, more like . . . rotting flesh. And suddenly she knows this is no ordinary Ifrit, and the word, the horrible word for what he is, fills her with mindless terror.

Ghoul.

She gasps and tries to run, but the Ifrit reaches out and pulls her to him with one of his clawed hands. He yanks her hair back and she screams, the sound leaving her throat like a flock of startled birds.

“The mouse will shut up or the cat will tear off her face,” the Ifrit growls.

The Marid closes her eyes as the Ifrit ghoul leans into her. He runs his hands over every inch of skin on her face, looking, looking, looking for something. Then she feels a razor-sharp nail drag along the birthmark near the corner of her mouth. She can feel the blood drip down her face and she cries out as the ghoul licks it. His tongue burns.

He lets her go. “This mouse is the wrong mouse.”

The jinni stumbles as she backs away from him. She wants to evanesce, but her mind has gone blank—there is no picture of a safe harbor to concentrate her energy on. It’s as if she has forgotten how to breathe.

The ghoul smiles. “But the cat is still hungry.”

The Marid stands, horrified, as the ghoul’s smile stretches to his ears, then grows wider, splitting his face open to reveal dozens of eellike teeth. Her agonized shriek lasts only a moment as those teeth sink into her soft flesh. As soon as they break her skin, she can no longer speak. No longer move. Limbs frozen.

But she can feel everything.

When he finishes his meal, the ghoul licks his lips and sighs with satisfaction. Then his body shudders and the air around him warps as his limbs and face transform into those of his victim. The ghoul gazes at his reflection in a stagnant pool of water on the courtyard floor. As long as he stays out of the moonlight, his true form is hidden. He touches the birthmark beside his mouth and smiles. Next time, his quarry won’t see him coming.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

MALEK ALZAHABI LIVED IN A SPRAWLING SPANISH-STYLE
mansion in the Hollywood Hills, between an heiress and an Academy Award–winning producer. Palms bordered the expansive grounds, fountains splashed, and servants bustled in and out of rooms crammed with priceless antiques and several museums’ worth of art. His home was something of a legend, a story shared in halls of power, in the backs of limousines. The people who passed through the tall, wrought-iron gate that surrounded the property were the fault lines of society—the movers and shakers of the world. Foreign dignitaries. Journalists. CEOs and scientists. Black-market specialists and the kings of Earth’s underworld.

Chanel-painted lips whispered of a mysterious young woman who slipped in and out of Malek’s parties, a girl who defied the laws of physics and made dreams come true—if you could believe everything you heard. She moved with the grace of a Bollywood dancer, entrancing men and women alike with her strange golden eyes full of secrets and the tumbling dark hair that wound past her neck and over her shoulders like loving snakes.

Words swirled around Nalia whenever she walked into one of Malek’s soirées. She didn’t need to be a mind-reading jinni to know what they were:
lover
,
witch
,
demon
,
Saudi princess.
The words didn’t matter to her. Neither did the people.

Nalia gunned her Maserati, taking Mulholland’s curves with expert precision. The stars winked above the convertible as she sped past mansion after mansion. The wind shoved against her skin, waking Nalia up and taking the edge off the granting pain. By the time she got to her master’s mansion, she’d be good as new—by Earth’s standards, anyway. She hated how much she loved Malek’s most recent gift, but she couldn’t resist a tiny catlike grin as the engine’s power hummed through her. The thing had probably cost enough money to feed a small country for a year, but Malek had given it to Nalia as if it were an extra pack of cigarettes he’d had lying around. An afterthought.

Just take what you can get from the bastard,
her closest friend, Leilan, had told her after Malek gave Nalia the car. Even though Leilan was a free jinni who had never been on the dark caravan, she was born a Marid—one of the serf castes—so she knew what it was like to be a slave. It was why she’d escaped Arjinna in the first place.

When the car neared the mansion’s front gates, they swung open and the guards standing outside nodded to Nalia as she drove past them. Every light in the house burned—Malek was having another party, one of the rowdier ones judging by the sounds spilling out the open front door. There’d be too-thin women in low-cut dresses who watched themselves as they laughed and flirted, men in Italian suits who moved through the room like sharks. Champagne and caviar. Cocaine and Ecstasy.

“Perfect,” she muttered. “Just what I need.”

Malek’s business trip had lasted for two glorious weeks. She hadn’t asked or cared why he hadn’t brought her with him as he usually did; she’d been too busy reveling in his absence and the relative freedom that came with it. Waking up in the morning without a master to serve—priceless.

She knew one of the guards would inform Malek that she’d returned. Not like he didn’t already know. The thick gold cuffs on both of her wrists were nothing more than fancy shackles imbued with the magic of her peculiar institution. The instant the slave trader had received his payment from Malek three years ago, the shackles had appeared on Nalia’s wrists. She hadn’t seen this happen, of course. She’d been too drugged. There had been Malek’s face, shadows, whispering, and then, suddenly, the bracelets.

Not only did the shackles tell Malek her exact location, they allowed her master to easily summon her, any time of the day or night. He only had three wishes, but an endless amount of commands that had to be obeyed.
Get this. Go there. Do this. Do that.
As long as she didn’t manifest something, it wasn’t a wish. So tonight she’d be expected to join him at the party, to be all but handcuffed to his side while he made his deals with Earth’s devils.
Smile, smile, smile.

As she drove closer to the house, she felt his summons. It was as if Malek were tugging on a string attached to her belly button, pulling her toward him. Right now it was mildly uncomfortable, but the longer she waited, the more painful it would become. If she ignored it, the magic would take over. Her body would dissolve into a cloud of smoke and, seconds later, she’d be standing beside him. The people around him would simply blink and assume she had been there all along—the magic’s safety valve against human detection. The longest Nalia had ever held out against his summons was twenty minutes, and the effort had left her in bed for days. Then he’d put her in the bottle. The calendar had said May when Malek willed her inside it, July when he let her out.

Malek didn’t like to be kept waiting.

She steered down the long driveway, gripping the wheel as she fought against his call. There was a certain savage joy to making him wait. To saying
no.

Of course she’d go to him eventually—she had no choice. If she were smart, she’d be good. Play the exotic jinni, let him parade her around like a prize racehorse. Pretend not to notice the way he’d started looking at her when he thought she wasn’t paying attention. Her stunt with the client was enough for one night. If she didn’t find a way to escape from Malek, Nalia had a lifetime to piss him off.

She turned in to the garage and parked her Maserati next to the Lotus Malek had recently acquired from a Russian arms dealer. The metal garage door clanged shut behind her as Nalia cut the engine and jumped out—all she wanted to do was sleep. A sharp pain had begun to radiate from the base of her skull, the beginnings of a migraine. Granting hangover.

Off in the distance, a cacophony of drunken laughter and shouting spilled out of the house. It was the time for secret longings to become exposed, when masks slipped off after too many glasses of this, too many pills of that. Time for Malek to get what he wanted from his guests.

Nalia was almost to the door when she stopped. Her adrenaline spiked and she whipped around; she wasn’t alone.

A jinni: she could feel its presence, a manic energy that pulsed throughout the room. Goose bumps scattered across her skin and she held her breath, straining for a sound that would tell her where the intruder was. It was stupid to think she was finally safe, that maybe everyone back in Arjinna really
did
believe she was dead.
Of course
it was only a matter of time before the Ifrit jinn who’d taken over her homeland realized they were short a body. During the coup, the Ifrit soldiers had used human weapons to massacre her caste—the empress and her royal knights, the Ghan Aisouri. Nalia could still feel the bullets tearing into her flesh. The formidable Ghan Aisouri magic had been powerless against Earth’s lightning-speed technology combined with Ifrit dark magic. Yet, somehow, Nalia had survived.

She was the last of the Ghan Aisouri.

“Show yourself,” Nalia demanded.

Nothing. Was he invisible? The irony wasn’t lost on her. She felt the jinni’s menace, lurking in the dark. Wisps of golden
chiaan
sparked at her fingertips. The Ifrit were evil, violent jinn who’d long been outcasts due to their love of dark magic. She had no idea what to expect from her opponent.

“You’re here to kill me, so let’s get on with it,” she said.

A low, male voice answered. “Am I?”

Nalia called up her reserves of
chiaan
, centering her energy so that the heat of defensive magic could begin coursing through her. She directed the yellow light emanating from her fingers toward the voice, but she was out of practice, and the magic that was supposed to reveal the jinni only succeeded in breaking the window of Malek’s new Aston Martin. Her stomach twisted—her master’s summons was getting harder to ignore.

“You’ve come a long way to hide in a corner, Ifrit pig,” she snarled.

The jinni’s tone was withering. “You confuse hiding with being entertained,
salfit
.”

Nalia bristled at the slur. It was what Arjinna’s lower castes called her race, a snide nod to the Ghan Aisouri’s palace high up in the Qaf Mountains, so steep that only goats could manage the climb.
Salfit
: goat fucker.

“I’ve always found that term of endearment so evocative of our beautiful mountain territory,” she said.

She’d heard the slur before, many times—the lower castes were serfs, forced to obey Shaitan overlords who controlled the serfs’ lives, owning them in much the same way Malek owned Nalia.

But it hadn’t always been that way.

In ancient days—thousands of summers ago—Arjinna had been nothing more than a wild land upon which tribes of jinn roamed, fighting for control of the realm’s resources. After a time, one race proved to be the most powerful—the all-female Ghan Aisouri, the only jinn who could control all four elements. So great were their powers, many considered the Aisouri to be daughters of the gods—and indeed the violet-eyed females were born randomly into the families of other castes, like blessings scattered from above. Jealous, the fiery-tempered Ifrit tried to wrest control of the realm from the Aisouri. But with the help of the Shaitan, known throughout the realm for their wisdom and innate magical ability, the Aisouri pushed the Ifrit into Ithkar, a barren, volcanic region cut off from the rest of Arjinna by the Qaf Mountain range. Fearful of future uprisings, the Aisouri chose an empress from among their ranks and then divided Arjinna into regions assigned to the jinn races: the Djan in the valley, best for their earth element; the Marid near the sea, ideal for their water magic; and the Shaitan in the mountains, where they could draw upon their element: air. As a reward for aligning themselves with the Aisouri against the Ifrit, the Shaitan were given control over the Djan and Marid—a control they quickly began to abuse. Until recently, the Ifrit had remained on their side of the mountains, happily keeping the realm in chaos by providing serf rebels with dark magic and weapons to fight their Shaitan overlords. Little did anyone know that the Ifrit were planning a bloody revolution of their own.