Tales of the Djinn: The Guardian (39 page)

“If Luna’s there, that would mean she knew
what he planned to do.”

Joseph didn’t look any happier about this
prospect than Arcadius.

“All right,” Arcadius said. “That’s the next
logical place to try.”

They proceeded down pretty stairways into
silent windowless halls. Elyse fought the urge to tiptoe, but the
men walked normally, even when skirting petrified palace staff. The
door to the treasure room resembled that of a bank vault—assuming a
person would construct one of thick etched gold and then stud it
with diamonds. The heavy barrier was ajar, allowing them to simply
step around it. Inside, the vault was octagonal. Shelves stuffed
with priceless objects lined the walls. A subtle flicker in the air
at the center told Elyse where the nexus was.

“Iksander’s here,” Joseph said, gesturing
toward a low folding screen carved of red jasper. The sultan’s
statue sat behind it in lotus posture on the floor. He was very
handsome—tall, she thought, with thick wavy hair that fell frozen
to broad shoulders. His eyes were closed and his face was calm.
Looking as he did, as if he were carved from the finest Carrara
marble, he fit right in with the room’s treasures. It must have
been strange for his friends to see him like this, but her
companions weren’t the sort to openly freak out.

“The portal has been used,” Arcadius
observed. “Iksander must have got away.”

Must have
seemed like overstating it,
but maybe the djinn had a way to tell. Bugged by something she
couldn’t put her finger on, Elyse wandered back to the hall
outside.

A single female servant had fallen to her
knees perhaps fifteen feet away. Had she been trying to reach the
portal and given up to pray? Not that Elyse relished the idea of
thousands of unmonitored djinn running around New York, but why
hadn’t they attempted to get more citizens out that way? Arcadius
claimed the portals here weren’t as hard to operate as the ones on
her plane. Once they’d found the door thingie in the brownstone,
she thought they’d gone through pretty easily.

Guessing this was another topic she had half
a picture of, she stepped closer to the statue. The servant’s robe
and veil covered most of her kneeling form. Her slippered feet
stuck out from the pool of her marble hem, giving Elyse a view of
their soles. They’d turned to stone as well. What struck Elyse was
that they were caked with dirt.

This servant hadn’t spent her last day
indoors.

“Guys,” she called to the others. “I think I
might have found Luna!”

Joseph and Arcadius came out to check.

“It
is
her,” Joseph said. “You can see
the shape of Philip’s bracelet beneath her sleeve.”

Arcadius had carried the pipe that smashed
the imposter inside with him. His hand tightened on it, but he
didn’t tell them to move back so he could smash her.

“What?” Joseph asked, seeing him
hesitate.

Arcadius looked at her. “Elyse and I need a
minute.”

“Ah,” Joseph said, seeming to understand what
she didn’t. “I’ll just . . . check the treasury for more
clues.”

~

Arcadius felt like his heart was going to
explode inside his chest. Walking through his city, seeing what
Luna had done to it, hadn’t agitated him the way what he had to
tell Elyse did. He breathed in and out but couldn’t calm
himself.

She put both hands on his arms. His sleeves
were rolled up. Her thumbs stroked the sensitive skin inside his
forearms. “What is it, Arcadius?”

“I have to warn you. If the continuation of
Luna’s curse depends on her statue, breaking it may awaken the
city.”

“I thought that was the point.”

“It is. I’m not saying this very well. My
original will awaken too.”

“Oh,” she said. “I forgot about that. Will
there be two of you? That would be weird.” She put one hand to her
mouth as something occurred to her. “Gosh, you aren’t going to go
poof, are you?”

He laughed, despite his rattled nerves. “No.
Joseph believes . . . that is, he and Philip designed the spell so
that when the doubles are once again together, they’ll meld back
into one person.”

“Okay,” she said slowly.

“I . . . won’t . . . be the same as I am now.
Not precisely. My experiences in your world have changed me.
Meeting you has changed me. I can’t predict who I’ll be after
recombining. I can’t predict what I’ll feel.”

She tilted her head slightly. “What are you
getting at?”

He tried to calm himself with one more deep
breath. “I’m in love with you.”

Her eyes went wide.

“I know you don’t feel that way,” he said
before she could interrupt. “I mean, I know you said you love me,
but that isn’t quite the same. You probably love Joseph too.
Actually, you probably still love your duplicitous husband.”

“My ‘duplicitous’ husband.” She was fighting
a smile. He felt his mouth begin to frown. “Sorry,” she said,
giving his arms an apologetic squeeze. “I shouldn’t joke. Just tell
me, exactly how is it that you know I’m not in love with you?”

He didn’t want to get into this. He gritted
his teeth and explained anyway. “I know because of what I tried to
do at the portal in your brownstone. Traveling back and forth
between planes takes a lot of magic. The nexuses we used to leave
this city are fed energy over time. Since our sort of djinn don’t
perform blood sacrifices, it takes months for them to accumulate a
sufficient charge for a single trip.”

“I wondered about that,” she said and then
waved her hand. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

“When a nexus located on your plane isn’t
properly pre-keyed—as was the case with the one in your cellar—a
sacrifice is required. If a pure heart can be broken, it releases a
great deal of energy. When I told you I wasn’t in love with you,
that’s what I was attempting.”

Elyse’s brows drew together. “You were trying
to break my heart.”

“Yes.”

He waited while she processed this. “And I
laughed at you.”

“Yes,” he said, irritated anew at the
memory.

“So you ‘knew’ I wasn’t in love with
you.”

“Correct.”

“But the portal worked anyway.”

“Because you broke
my
heart,” he said
gruffly. “I didn’t recognize what I felt until then. I’d never been
in love before.”

To his amazement, she smiled. “That’s the
sweetest thing I’ve ever heard!”

“I assure you, I’m not trying to be sweet.
I’m trying to warn you, I might not love you after I’m . . .
reunited with the real me. Not that you necessarily mind.”

She laughed, which caused him to cross his
arms. “Shit. Sorry. I’m not laughing at you. You just look so
grumpy.” She stroked his shoulders and then his face. “I don’t know
the difference between
love
and
in love
, but I really
do love you.” Her voice dropped a bit on the words, as if she were
self-conscious. “Love that lasts takes time—at least in my
experience, it does. I promise, though, I definitely could come to
love you that way.”

“You’re not angry I tried to manipulate your
emotions for my own ends?”

She considered this, which made him regret
asking. “I could be angry if I think about it, but you did get your
comeuppance so maybe in a while, I’ll let you off the hook.”

He looked into her wonderful face. Her
expression was teasing and worried and tender at the same time.
“God, I love you,” he said.

Her speaking green eyes welled up. She went
onto tiptoe and kissed him.

Her lips molding over his set off a slow
fusillade of sparklers along his nerves. He wrapped her in his
arms, holding her even tighter than she held him. She clung to his
shoulders as his tongue slid into her mouth. When she let out a
sigh of pleasure, he wanted to record it. Everything they did felt
worth memorizing: her firm little body moving beneath his hands,
her breath rushing on his cheek, the fierce rise of his arousal as
she pressed back at him. This had to be the most affecting kiss of
his life, breaking him apart and putting him back together so
perfectly he felt reborn.

The kiss’s only flaw was that it didn’t last
long enough.

All too soon, she dropped back onto her feet.
“Really?” she asked breathlessly. “You might not love me after
this?”

“At this moment, that’s hard for me to
conceive, but I’m afraid it’s true.”

“Well, that sucks.” He watched her struggle,
finding every flicker of emotion miraculous. Finally, she hunched
her shoulders in surrender. “You have to smash Luna anyway. A whole
city worth of people depends on this.”

He clasped her face gently between his hands.
“You make me think well of who I’ve become with you. Part of me
will always love Elyse Solomon.”

She wagged her finger. “Don’t you forget
it.”

She wasn’t quite teasing.

~

Arcadius had dropped too many bombshells on
Elyse at once. He was in love with her? And thought he might fall
out of it when the other him woke up? Was his belief that he loved
her more than she loved him reasonable? Did it even matter?
Certainly, what she felt for him wasn’t casual. She
wanted
him to love her. The idea that his affection would go away made her
stomach clench—and she’d only just learned of it! Seriously, where
was the “stop” button on the world when she needed one?

Wherever it was, she wouldn’t get a chance to
use it. Joseph came back into the hall carrying a large shiny
candlestick he must have found in the vault. He gave it a Babe Ruth
swing to test its balance.

“Titanium,” he said, pretending not to notice
she and Arcadius had had a moment. “There’s another in the stores
if you want one.”

“I suck at baseball,” she said absently, her
brain rolling in a new direction. “Is you shattering Luna’s statue
really okay? It’s like killing her, right? Because if that will
turn you ifrit, maybe I
should
try to break it instead.”

“She went to war with us,” Arcadius said.
“And committed atrocious acts. By djinn code, this is a justifiable
homicide.”

“What about Luna’s army? Won’t they wake up
too if you break the curse?”

Arcadius squeezed her tense shoulder. Maybe
he sensed part of her was stalling. “They will but I have many
trained men within these walls. And I briefed my captains about
this possibility. They’ll handle any threat the empress’s soldiers
are able to muster. Without their leader, I expect her forces will
cut and run.”

“Okay.” Elyse tried to calm her nerves by
blowing out a breath. “I’ll just step back and let you two have at
it.”

Arcadius kissed her forehead and Joseph
smiled at her. She realized she might lose him too. No doubt he’d
also changed from who he’d originally been. Crap. She wasn’t ready
for this to happen.

Ready or not, Joseph and Arcadius went ahead.
No more than a dozen swings of their muscular arms bashed Luna’s
statue to rubble. Both men stepped back. Panting, they contemplated
the destruction on the floor.

Elyse shivered. Suddenly, the air in the hall
was cold.

“Luna’s life force,” Joseph murmured. “It’s
been severed from the stone.” He turned his head as if he could see
something. “It’s dissipating.”

The men fell silent so Elyse did as well. The
only sound was their breathing and her too loud heartbeat.

“Do you hear that?” Arcadius asked. He cocked
his head to listen.

Joseph broke into a beatific smile. “The
palace staff is waking up.”

Then Elyse heard the noises too. On the floor
above them, people were calling to each other.

The same idea turned their heads toward the
vault door in unison. No noises came from there. Arcadius marched
back first, followed by Joseph and Elyse. The sultan’s statue sat
unchanged—still marble, still preternaturally serene.

“I was afraid of this,” Joseph said.

“Afraid of what?” Arcadius and Elyse asked
simultaneously.

“We thought Luna went ahead with her plan
because she was too bent on revenge to exercise good sense. But
maybe she wasn’t crazy. Maybe she had a secret out. Luna’s
departing life force seemed less than it should be. I suspect no
more than half her spirit was inside that statue.”

“Are you implying only half our people will
wake up?”

Joseph hitched his shoulders and looked
unhappy.

“Where’s the rest of her spirit?” Elyse
asked, fighting an impulse to glance around for it. “Could she have
copied herself like you did?”

Joseph rubbed one finger across his lips.
“I’m afraid she might have done something simpler.”

“Simpler?” Elyse asked.

“She could have sent her spirit through the
portal with Iksander—the part she didn’t leave here to sustain the
curse. We have strict prohibitions against possessing humans, but
dark djinn don’t obey them. If Luna’s consciousness made it
through, she could be inside anyone.”

“She could be riding Iksander,” Arcadius
blurted in dismay.

“That might explain why he never contacted
us.”

“Fuck,” Arcadius cursed with heartfelt
vehemence. “That would be bad.” He squeezed his temples for a
moment and shook himself. “We’ll look into Iksander’s situation
when we can. For now, we need to handle what’s happening here.” He
turned his gaze upward, toward the sounds of people stirring
overhead. “Let’s lock the vault. If Iksander is simply taking
longer to wake up, he’ll still be able to get out. I don’t want to
leave the portal or his statue unsecured.”

“Right,” Joseph said, already moving to the
door.

As they left, Arcadius’s hand fell to Elyse’s
shoulder. She had a feeling he was steadying himself with the
contact as much as he was steadying her.

Their journey into the upper areas of the
palace was punctuated by staff catching sight of Arcadius,
exclaiming ‘Commander!’ and looking as if they very much wanted to
fling their arms around him.