Exquisite Captive (41 page)

“Nalia, go!” he yelled, turning to her.

“Raif!” she screamed, as the ghoul loomed behind him.

The gun went off, but Haran shot too wide and the bullet glanced off the rock behind Raif, who immediately launched himself at Haran. They wrestled one another, and the air echoed with the sound of their pounding blows. Raif grabbed Haran in a choke hold, but the ghoul swung back and bashed Raif over the head with the butt of the gun. Raif crumpled to the sand, unconscious. Forgetting the safety of the water, Nalia ran toward Haran, deadly violet lasers of
chiaan
shooting from her fingertips. But with the shackles on her arms draining her power, the magic was too weak and it fell around him like misfired arrows.

Haran muttered a few words in Kada, words Nalia herself had said over the bowed heads of misbehaving serfs the Ghan Aisouri had been sent to control.

“No!” she screamed, as the words flowed over her, accompanied by a burst of
chiaan
she was too weak to dodge. She felt the spell seep into her, binding her to its will.

“The Ghan Aisouri will stop doing magic, yes? If she doesn’t, Haran will kill this boy who wants to save her.”

A magical trace. If she so much as evanesced, Calar would know about it. There was no way Nalia could fend off an entire army. She’d have to fight Haran without magic. She prayed all her training, all those whacks from the gryphons’ wooden poles, would pay off.

She held up her hands, bare of
chiaan.
She knew Haran had every intention of killing Raif—he was just waiting until he’d eaten her to do it.

“Okay,” she said. “You win.”

The fog moved onto the shore, enveloping her in a thick, misty haze. It seemed as if the world had turned upside down, the clouds at her feet. As though she were already entering the godlands.

Haran raised the gun, the barrel now pointed at Nalia. She clenched her teeth to hide the fear a gun in this jinni’s hand brought on. Her mother’s words came back to her from long ago, that night she made Nalia prove her worth as a Ghan Aisouri. The night Nalia killed the boy.

Fear is your greatest enemy. Conquer fear and you conquer yourself. Conquer yourself and you conquer the world.

For the first time since the night of the coup, Nalia wasn’t afraid.

“Haran prefers to hunt with his teeth,” the ghoul said. “But sometimes, a more modern approach is necessary.”

He pulled the trigger.

It sounded like the end of the world.

Nalia tried to swerve out of the bullet’s path, but the metal bit into her stomach and she fell to the sand as thick, hot blood poured out of her. He’d used an iron bullet; her body began convulsing almost as soon as the poison touched her skin. The moon and stars shivered above her. Her body remembered this pain. The white-hot blaze of it. The sudden cold.

The sea sounded louder here, and Nalia realized she’d fallen onto the strip of sand the tide was just beginning to claim, the top of her head pointing at the ocean—like the burning biers the Ghan Aisouri created for their dead sisters, sending them on their journey to the godlands in smokeless fire.

“Hala shaktai mundeer,”
she gasped.
“Ashanai . . . sokha . . . vidim . . .”
The words for the dead trickled out of her lips, fading with her slowing heartbeat.

Freezing water licked her hair, then flowed over her face. She couldn’t breathe in the water as she had only moments before. She was too weak, too out of touch with all the elements, unable to access her
chiaan
. Nalia would drown soon, if she didn’t bleed to death or Haran didn’t eat her.

I am Ghan Aisouri,
she thought.
I am Ghan Aisouri.

She couldn’t give in to the sea’s call. Couldn’t be food in a ghoul’s belly. She had to fight Haran until her last breath and even after that, if it were possible.

Her hand reached down to where her jade dagger lay nestled inside her boot, each movement sending hot irons of pain through every part of her. One more chance. It was all she had. Nalia felt the familiar hilt in her hand and eased the blade out, masking her movement by rolling onto her side, further into the sea.

Haran’s voice murmured above her. “The Ghan Aisouri will not pretend to die this time.”

He grabbed her shoulder, digging his claws into the tender skin, and flipped Nalia onto her back. He cocked his head to the side, viewing her with an almost clinical detachment, then leaned down and dug into her bullet wound with a dirty claw. The world spun, pain threatening to throw her into a never-ending sleep. Haran took his finger out of the hole in her stomach and held it up to the light, red and glistening, then he ran it over his tongue, tasting her. A connoisseur of flesh.

“The Ghan Aisouri tastes like her sisters and mothers,” he said. His tongue darted out to catch the drops of blood pooling in the corner of his lips. “Spicy and rich, like a good wine.”

I am Ghan Aisouri.

Haran leaned over Nalia, his mouth gaping, the teeth so unbearably sharp, dipping closer to her face. His body was heavy and he smelled like rotten meat and to look at him was to know death. With the last bit of strength remaining to her, Nalia drove the dagger into the exposed flesh on his arm. Haran shuddered once, then fell on top of her, his entire body paralyzed by the Ghan Aisouri blade.

She pulled the dagger out, then plunged the blade into his heart, twisting as his eyes bulged in silent agony. She killed him for Bashil, her mother, the entire race of Ghan Aisouri. She killed him for Leilan and, finally, for herself. She would die with him on this beach, but it was a good death. An honorable end. The only vengeance the gods would give her for the slaughter of her people.

As the jade dagger dug deeper into Haran, his body shimmered and changed. Dozens of faces and bodies flew over his skin, each of his victims memorialized in those last seconds of consciousness. At the end, it was Leilan staring back at her, the blue of her eyes dim and lifeless. Not Leilan—a distorted echo of her. Then the face and body transformed back into that of the ghoul who’d destroyed her life. The eyes remained open, but Nalia felt the life leave him, felt the moment his soiled
chiaan
bled through her and into the earth.

Nalia let go of the hilt, her hand falling into the sea. She screamed as his head tilted forward, the venomous teeth resting against her neck, sharp and wet with fetid saliva, a breath from puncturing her skin. Her nose filled with Haran’s putrid stench and she gagged. A wave crashed over them, filling her mouth with bloody seawater: his blood, her blood. The gray, dead flesh of the ghoul pressed Nalia into the wet sand, suffocating her. His ribs dug into the bullet wound in her stomach and she was cold, so cold. A wave crashed on top of them, and the water swarmed over their bodies, covering Nalia’s face completely. She couldn’t breathe and it was just like the palace, bodies on top of her, dying, dying, she was dying.

Bashil’s face. Dawn in the Qaf Mountains. The gryphons teaching
Sha’a Rho
. Malek’s black, black eyes. Her mother’s hands. The Ifrit girl she’d set free. Leilan’s laugh. Zanari’s quick smile. Raif’s lips.

The memories flowed through Nalia, fell over her like rain, and she didn’t even bother gasping for air when the water receded, because it was over, finally over—

Then the weight and the water were both gone. She heard her name, a dim shout:
Nalia! Nalia!

Her eyes fluttered open and she drank in the air, coughing up seawater. A shock of brown hair in the dense, impenetrable fog. A pair of emerald eyes looking down at her, wide with fear. Raif.

He was calling her name, she saw the shape of it on his lips. Then everything went black and she was back in the cold place, alone, until she felt a sting on her face. Another. She pulled her eyes open and Raif’s hand was inches from her face, ready to slap her again.

“You have to stay awake. Nalia, stay awake. Zanari’s coming with a healer. Stay awake.
Please.
”

“My brother,” she gasped.

“He’ll be okay, just keep your eyes open,” he said.

She realized she was in his arms and it was his body that trembled, not hers. “You’re not gonna die on me, you stupid
salfit
.”

Nalia tried to smile. “Love it when you . . . talk dirty.”

Raif shook his head. “I don’t even know what you’re saying.”

“Human . . . thing.”

She closed her eyes as a wave of pain washed through her.

“I’m here,” Raif whispered, his lips close to her ear. “Please. Please stay with me.
Nalia.
I choose you. Every time, you hear me? I choose
you
.”

“Go,” she said, through gritted teeth. “Get to the cave before you lose the map.”

As soon as she died, it would disappear from Raif’s arm and all of this would have been for nothing.

“Don’t . . . need me,” she said. “GO.”

“
I
need you,” he said. He brushed her hair out of her face. Blood covered his hands, but she didn’t know if it was hers or his. Probably hers. “Look at me,” he said, his voice high and panicked as her eyes started to close again.

He gently shook her and Nalia forced herself to stay awake, her world dwindling down to his eyes—dark and light swirls of green, more greens than she’d ever known existed. A sea of green. Sea. Green.

“Good. Just like that. Keep looking at me,” he whispered, as a jade cloud appeared behind him and a golden one behind that.

“My brother,” she said, once more. She gripped Raif’s arm. “Raif. My brother. Don’t leave . . . him there.”

“I know,” he said. “I won’t. I promise. Just stay with—
Nalia.
Nalia!”

His face blurred, and then the darkness obliterated everything until Nalia was nothing and it didn’t hurt anymore.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

DYING WAS THE EASIEST THING NALIA HAD EVER DONE
.

For once, she allowed herself to stop fighting. To stop caring about duty and honor and sacrifice. For once, she let herself be utterly selfish. She was tired, so she slept. She was in pain, so she cut herself off from her body. It was easy. The rope that tethered her to Earth was frayed, so weak all she had to do was tug a little and she was free, adrift in a place of nothing.

A heavy mist surrounded her, but she meandered through it, unconcerned. Content. No, not quite. What she was feeling was
absence
. Of want. Of fear. Of despair. But then suddenly her brother was there, his face worn and haggard. Something mattered again. As soon as Nalia caught sight of him, Bashil sprinted into the clouds of mist, hidden in its cool thick folds. Nalia screamed his name and chased him—over sand dunes high as mountains and through densely packed forests with trees that blocked her path and tangled her in their sharp branches. Once, she was able to touch him with her outstretched hand, but he dissolved into nothing, and she was left alone. Mist and ice and hard white rock surrounded her. She sat and waited. For what, she wasn’t sure. Other phantoms visited Nalia. Leilan, the paisley scarf Nalia had given her still in her hair. Kir, the boy they’d made her kill, his lifeless eyes full of reproach. The Ghan Aisouri walking in a long line, rope tied around their necks where the Ifrit had hung them over the palace gates. Her mother. Nalia tried to touch her, but her hand passed through her mother’s body, and Nalia watched as the line marched away and the mist closed over them.

Nalia didn’t know how long she hovered between the world of the living and the land of the dead. Sometimes she heard voices above and around her, felt the warmth of a body pressed against hers. Heard her name repeated over and over, like a chant to the gods. But there, at the in-between, she wandered, restless and uncertain. Drawn to the mercy of obliteration but pulled back into the hurt by that voice and those arms that wouldn’t let her go.

Waking up was like finding water after walking across the desert. Finding it, but not being able to drink. One minute, she was in the mist, the next, she was burning, her body consumed by flames.

“Give her more.” A voice—male. She knew him, she was sure of it.

“I’m not sure if it will help.” A female voice that Nalia didn’t recognize. “Her body is rejecting the herbs—”

“Give. Her. More.”

Nalia felt something cool against the burning and then someone was prying open her mouth, forcing a bitter tonic that tasted like death down her throat. She gagged, but when she thrashed, strong hands held her down. When it was over, the hands released her.

“That’s all I can do for her,” said the female voice. “It is up to the gods now.”

There was the sound of a door closing.

“You should get some sleep,” said another female voice, gentle and weary. Nalia couldn’t remember who it belonged to, but she liked her, she was certain of it.

“No.”

“All right, little brother. Wake me if you need help,” said the girl.

There was some murmuring, then the sound of a door closing again. She felt a hand close over her own.

Raif.

She recognized him in the warmth of his
chiaan
, the way it supplied the missing piece of her. She gripped his hand, hoped it would keep her out of the mist and the darkness.

There was a sharp intake of breath and then she felt his grip tighten. “Welcome back,” he whispered.

She felt something flutter against her cheeks, her eyes, her lips. Warm and soft. She leaned into the touch, then fell into a deep and untroubled sleep.

Sunlight streamed through Nalia’s window and stole over her bed, like a lover trying not to wake his beloved. She opened her eyes, squinting at the brightness. For one blissful moment, she felt nothing but its warmth. She took in the room and she was surprised, and not surprised, to be back in Malek’s mansion. The bedroom hadn’t suffered too badly from the earthquake, though the paintings had fallen to the floor, and her altar to the gods was nothing more than a mess of sand and water. New glass bottles sat on her bedside table, nearly empty of their liquids, beside a stack of soft, white bandages. She could still smell smoke and the charred remains of the neighborhood, though the window was closed.