The Fire Wish (21 page)

My skin was starting to tingle, which meant I had only a
few minutes before my wish faded. What would he think if he saw me sitting up in a window, in the House of Wisdom?

I bolted down the stairs and ran, not caring now if anyone felt the gust of wind. I made it to the curtains behind the harem door before my
shahtabi
wish was gone, and by then being invisible would not have made a difference, because my pulse was loud enough that one of the peacocks tilted his head at me.

I took a breath and stepped into the harem’s garden, and that was when I realized I still had the Memory Crystal in my hand. How had anyone not seen it?

HE CAME BACK. I was crying and crawling on my hands and knees when a glow came from down the tunnel. Then I saw his face. He still looked angry, but he crouched down and swooped me into his arms as if I were a child.

My throat burned, and I tried to stop crying, hiccupping with my temple against his chest. His arms were warm, and finally I relaxed into him.

He had come back.

“Everything I know tells me I should just walk away,” he said. “But I can’t. I don’t want to.”

I nodded, unable to speak. He had come back. He knew what I was now. He knew I’d been lying and what I’d done to Najwa. But he didn’t know why. He didn’t know about Yashar, or the barge I’d been locked in with Rahela, or how empty I’d been in the tunnel’s darkness. He didn’t know that I had nowhere to go.

He carried me out of the tunnel, moving swiftly. We emerged behind the waterfall, and he stopped. Mist billowed
around, making the hairs on my arms slick. I dug my fingers into his vest, afraid I’d slip off and tumble down into the water. He tightened his grip on me.

“Honestly, I don’t know where to go. I can’t take you to Faisal or Laira. And I can’t take you home.”

He was betraying himself for me. I couldn’t understand it. I sobbed again.

“I know,” he said. “Shirin.”

“She’ll be so mad.”

He nodded once. “No madder than I am. She wasn’t …” He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he carried me out from behind the waterfall and took a path to a house near a tree-lined avenue. Behind the house, Shirin was painting on an easel as if it was the most natural thing in the world. She flicked the paint into the air from her brush and, with a nod, sent it flying. It smacked onto the paper as hard as hail. The picture was a series of overlying dots and drips—a stark contrast to the precise weaving I’d grown up learning. And strangely enough, it made me think of Rahela. She was afraid of jinn, and I’d left her with one.

When Shirin lifted her brush the second time, Atish cleared his throat. She looked up, her jaw slackened, and she ran to us.

“What happened?” she shrieked. Atish shushed her. I looked away. I couldn’t watch her face. “What happened?” she repeated.

Atish nodded at the house. “Is your mother home?” She shook her head. “Then let’s go in.”

She led the way, opening the door. Her face was scrunched up in concern. “Najwa, what happened?”

Atish laid me on one of the beds and sat on another one. “Her ankle’s broken.”

“Let me see.” Shirin reached for my ankle and I rasped in pain, pulling it away from her.

“It really hurts,” I croaked.

“You’ve been crying.” She looked at Atish. “Where did you find her?”

“In the tunnel.” He could not have made his voice any darker.

“Why did you go there?” She shook her head at me. “Never mind. Let me fix you. Then we’ll talk.” Her hands hovered over my ankle and she whispered something. The air between her hands and my ankle glowed green. In seconds, the pain was gone. I tested my ankle by squeezing it.

“How did you do that?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

Atish grumbled, “She’s not Najwa. She’s not even
jinni.
”

Shirin’s eyes narrowed and she studied me. “Of course she’s Najwa.” She waited for me to say something, but I didn’t, and when the silence had gone on too long, she frowned. “Aren’t you?”

I could not answer her. Not with words.

“She’s human,” Atish said. “She was on her way to Baghdad when she ran into Najwa—”

Shirin twisted around to face him. “What was Najwa doing—”

“I don’t know. But she caught Najwa and wished on her,” he explained.

Shirin’s hands started to shake and she backed away from
me. “You have to explain yourself. What have you done to our friend? When did you take her?”

“The vizier came to our village,” I said, then explained how I had been chosen to go to Baghdad. “The day we were supposed to arrive in the city, a jinni appeared at my window. I didn’t even think. I just reached out and caught her.”

Shirin gasped. “You forced a wish from her?”

“Yes. I needed to get back home. And she looked just like me. I thought it was a sign, a way for me to get out of there. I mean, I was desperate, and there she was! With my own face! So I wished that she take my place and send me home.”

Shirin’s voice rose. “And you came
here
?”

“Obviously,” Atish said. Shirin ignored him.

“It doesn’t make any sense!” she exclaimed. “It’s one thing—a horrible thing—to force a jinni to grant a wish for you, but it’s quite another to force her to take your life. And look at you! You’re a mirror image of Najwa.”

“I know,” Atish said. “If it weren’t for the missing tattoo, I would have just thought Najwa had lost her mind.”

“At the time, I thought it was a disguise,” I explained, “or some effect of a jinni being so close to me.” They weren’t yelling at me anymore. Shirin sat beside Atish on the bed, staring at me. Atish was fiddling with the latch on his dagger’s sheath.

“It’s eerie,” Shirin said. She reached over to the table between the beds, pulled open the drawer, and removed a hand mirror. She held it out to me. “You’ve always looked like this?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s not part of the wish.” She took the mirror back
and dropped it in the drawer, then slammed the drawer shut. “Atish, you’re not going to turn her in, are you?”

“It’s too late, and we need her to get Najwa back.” He pulled the dagger out of the sheath and rolled it between his hands. Then he looked at me, which he hadn’t done since we’d gotten to Shirin’s house. “You’re going to help us.”

“How?” I said.

Shirin rubbed her hands together. “We will solve this, somehow. First, where are you from?”

“Zab, near the mountains.”

She turned to Atish. “Wasn’t that where the murders happened?” When he nodded, she continued, “This is making my head spin. You look like Najwa, and you always have. Then, at a time when you’re most troubled, you come upon her. You switch places—against her will—and end up here, of all places, after you wished to go home.” She paused, and a smile spread across her face. “I don’t think you’re really from Zab,” she said. When I started to protest, she held up her hand to silence me. “Just a minute. Atish, you didn’t turn her over to the Shaitan. Why not?”

“It didn’t feel like the right thing to do,” he said. “Although I wanted to.”

“You wanted to tell them about me?”

“Shh,” Shirin said. “You aren’t Najwa. I understand that, and it makes what happened earlier with Irina make sense. Najwa is always too polite with her because she doesn’t want to upset her mother. But I have this feeling. Maybe it’s the same one Atish has—”

“It’s not,” he cut in.

She rolled her eyes at him, then told me, “Well, I don’t think Najwa can come back unless you go to her. You’re the only one who can undo the wish, and if you die, she might be stuck in your place forever.”

I drew my knees up to my chin and covered my face with my hands. Hot tears pooled in the spaces between my fingers.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but not to them. The words barely made it past the lump in my throat. “Just tell me how to fix it. What do I wish to get her back here?”

“You have to go there,” Atish said. He stopped fiddling with his dagger and put it away. “But we can’t get in there, because of the wards. I have no idea how Najwa got in there in the first place.”

“She
what
?” Shirin asked.

“That’s what Zayele said,” Atish said, gesturing at me. “Najwa had gotten into the palace, and Faisal was asking her, Zayele, to go back.”

“I knew something big had happened,” Shirin said. “And something made Najwa seek you out, Zayele.”

I looked up from my knees and wiped the tears off my face. “What?”

“I don’t know, but there’s someone who does. Atish, we have to tell Faisal.”

“Absolutely not.”

“He will kill me!” I said.

“No, he won’t. He’s too wise to make such rash decisions, and he will want Najwa back as much as we do.” She got up and paced between the beds, turning around every two steps. “Let me go talk to him. I’ll tell him I know where Najwa is, and
when I’ve got his attention, I’ll explain everything to him as gently as I can.”

“I should do that,” Atish said.

“No. You’re too involved emotionally.”

“I am not!”

“Atish,” she warned. “Stay here with Zayele. I will be right back. Don’t let anyone in.”

She leaned forward and hugged me. “It will be all right.” Then she whirled around and slipped out the door, shutting it with a nod.

After she was gone, it was just Atish and me, alone in the house. He reached down to his dagger’s sheath.

“Please,” I said, “don’t play with that anymore. I keep thinking you’re going to throw it at me.”

He looked genuinely surprised. “I would never. Besides, like Shirin said, we need you to get Najwa back.”

A moment passed, and neither of us said anything. I didn’t like the silence and the waiting. Shirin was on her way to tell one of the most important jinn in the Cavern what I had done to Najwa, and I didn’t have as much faith in him as she did.

I watched Atish, who kept avoiding my gaze. His lips were pressed tightly together, like he was trying to keep something inside.

“Why didn’t you leave me there, in the tunnel?”

“I already told you, I don’t know. I just couldn’t, all right?”

“But I hurt the girl you love.”

He shook his head. “I don’t love her. I tried to, but there wasn’t … I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

Whatever had prompted him to kiss me had never happened
with Najwa. Only with me. Suddenly, a prickle spread down from my neck. I looked up at him and saw that his eyes were on me, questioning. He shifted so that we sat across from each other, knees to knees, and although the space between us appeared empty, it was full of something living, something very much like what had just spread down my shoulders.

I could not look away, and I didn’t want to. He was seeing me now for who I really was, and although I knew he would find me lacking in whatever trait only jinni girls could have, I didn’t want to be lacking. In that moment, alone with him in the tiny space that was Shirin’s house, I felt a closeness I’d never felt with anyone. Not even with Yashar. And with each beat of my heart and each blink of my lashes, I wanted him closer still.

He was about to say something else when the door burst open and hit the wall. A throng of guards rushed in, their Shaitan shields and daggers blazing. Atish stood up and tried to get between them and me, but they brushed him aside without a word. One of the men bound my wrists behind my back and dragged me out the door, careful not to let me touch him with my hands.

Irina stood outside with her arms crossed. She wore a shawl in the Baghdad style, but her eyes were glowing jinni-bright, her irises red as lava.

“Irina!” Atish shouted behind me. “You did this?”

She huffed. “Of course I did. As you should have.” She took two steps toward me. The guard thrust me forward until she was only a few inches from me. “I knew you couldn’t be her. Najwa wouldn’t have dared to do half the things you did.”

She turned her head and I saw that Shirin was behind her, also held by guards. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

“She was spying on us!” she shouted. “She called the guards before I even left the house.”

The guards lifted me off my feet and carried me behind Irina. Shirin continued to shout until one of the guards released her. Atish was being held back by two other guards. His face was dark, but his eyes stared straight into mine. I knew without doubt he would find me.