Exquisite Captive

by Heather Demetrios

  “Your turn, Nalia,” her mother says. “It’s time you grew up.”

  Her mother leaves the cell and Nalia stands against the wall, staring at the prisoner. The Ifrit girl looks up from the chair. It has been days of cutting and hitting and suffocating, and still she hasn’t said a word. Nalia crosses the small cell and kneels in front of her.

  “Do you want to go home?”

  The girl nods.

  How was Nalia to know that the prisoner had been a mind reader? Yes, the Ghan Aisouri had trained in shielding their minds, but Nalia had never bothered to do the arduous practice. At the time, she’d thought it was pointless. But it was only a few weeks later, when the Ifrit entered the palace through a secret entrance—the same one Nalia had led the girl through with a blindfold—that Nalia discovered what her mercy and lack of discipline had cost the realm.

  A glass shattered somewhere in the house and Nalia jumped, the memory dissolving in the cool California night. Malek wouldn’t be up to her room yet—she could still hear the string quartet playing. A good sign: her master always made a point of seeing the last guest out of his home. Still, she had to hurry.

  “I don’t have much time,” she said. “Can you really free me from my mas—from Malek?”

  The evidence was right in front of her, but it still seemed impossible.

  Raif’s eyes narrowed. “Is it so difficult for you to believe that a commoner could do something a royal can’t?”

  “Yes,” she said flatly. Most of them couldn’t even read, let alone manifest at the level of the Ghan Aisouri and Shaitan. It didn’t matter that his sister was a seer—she wouldn’t be able to break Malek’s shackles with her mind.

  Raif threw an evil glare in her direction. Fire and blood, she thought. Now I’ve pissed him off and he won’t help me.

  “Well,” he said evenly, “I’m here to prove you wrong. Despite my better judgment.”

  “Is it against your better judgment to help me because of my race or because you’re afraid I’ll kill you once I’m free?” she asked.

  Raif grinned. “Both, actually. But I’m not known for playing it safe.” That was true. She’d heard the stories—they were a favorite among expatriate jinn: how he led ambushes with nothing more than a dagger and a handful of chiaan or his refusal to leave his soldiers behind, even if it meant risking his life to bring a body home for the ritual burning.

  “So you’ve freed jinn on the dark caravan before?”

  He shrugged. “No, but slavery is slavery, whether it’s in Earth or Arjinna.”

  Nalia shook her head. “The bind between Malek and me is different than the bind between a serf and an overlord.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Our masters get three wishes. As soon as they make them, we’re free,” she said. “The problem is, Malek won’t make his third wish. And I know you haven’t been on Earth very long, so I’ll spell it out for you: if he doesn’t make a third wish, I’m his slave until he does. That’s how it works. The only other way is if he dies and, trust me, that’s never going to happen.”

  “Well, I’m not going to teach you the magic, if that’s what you’re angling for, My Empress.”

  Nalia bristled. “I don’t angle for things.” I used to demand them. Now I beg.

  Raif stepped closer to her and lowered his voice. He smelled like the earth after it rains. “Trust me, salfit, I can break your bond with your master, even though you haven’t granted a third wish.”

  “What about the bottle?”

  “What bottle?”

  Nalia snorted. No wonder the resistance is so bloody awful at strategizing.

  “All jinn on the dark caravan have a bottle—it’s how the traders get us through the portal. Our masters keep them for summoning us and . . . other things.” She wasn’t going to lay the shame of her torturous stints in the bottle before him.

  “Whoever has the bottle has the power,” she said. “If my master lost the bottle, he wouldn’t be able to summon me. If he can’t summon me, he can’t command me or get his wishes. If another human gains possession of the bottle, they become my master and the whole thing starts over.”

  Nearly every day, Nalia heard stories from the other jinn on the dark caravan about what she’d come to think of as “bottle drama”: jinn who’d succeeded in stealing their bottles, assassins hired to murder masters, family feuds over bottle ownership, bottles thrown into the sea. Jinn ownership was not for the faint of heart. If Nalia had had a different kind of master, she might have found a way to escape. But she had Malek.

  “And your shackles—”

  “—are bound to the bottle. They’re inseparable.”

  Raif frowned for a moment, hands on his hips. After a moment, he nodded and said, “Get me the bottle you’re bound to. As long as I have that, I can give you your freedom.”

  She was afraid he was going to say that. “What if I can’t get it?”

  Nalia’s attempts to steal her bottle had played out like a saga. The first and only time she had stolen it was just after Malek had bought her.

  Malek summons her, and in seconds she’s standing before him.

  “Yes?” she asks.

  He points to the bottle lying on his desk. “The chain seems to have broken. I need you to repair—”

  It takes less than three seconds for her to grab the chain the bottle’s attached to and evanesce. For once, her Ghan Aisouri training has helped her on Earth.

  It had seemed too good to be true, that Nalia had somehow gotten away with it. It was. Only a few hours later, several of Malek’s sinister security guards broke into the hotel she was hiding in. Her magic was no match for their loaded guns and needles full of liquid iron. Nalia still didn’t know how Malek had been able to find her. Before her capture in the hotel, she’d studied the bottle in the short time she’d had it—carefully, because her bare skin couldn’t touch its surface. It was the one thing the slave trader had told Nalia before he’d sold her: touch her bottle, and she’d wind up inside it, trapped until a human master let her out. There hadn’t been any unfamiliar energy surrounding the bottle, and yet Malek knew something she didn’t.

  There were a million reasons why she wouldn’t be able to steal it again. For one, her master wore the bottle around his neck, even when he was sleeping. She’d learned the hard way that it was impossible to even touch the chain the bottle was attached to while he wore it. One night, a few years ago, she’d snuck into his room and tried to grab it while he slept. It had felt as if there were a thin, invisible wall between her fingers and the necklace he wore. He’d woken up and just lain there on his silk sheets, the jewels and gold of her miniature prison glinting on his bare chest, staring at her until she noticed he’d awakened.

  You know, I really hate sleeping alone, he’d said, just before he put her in the bottle.

  “Your master’s a human,” Raif now said, his voice contemptuous. “You’re a Ghan Aisouri. Surely you can get a necklace off him?”

  Nalia raised her chin. “Our bind makes it almost impossible for me to overpower him, the same as if a serf in Arjinna tried to attack her overlord. Even if I were able to somehow steal the bottle, he’d find me. He’s done it before.”

  Raif flicked at one of the roses on the bush beside him. Its magenta petals fluttered to the stone path in defeat. “All right. I’ll do it. Tonight while he’s sleeping. If he wakes up, I’ll kill him.” He was so matter-of-fact, as though Malek were simply an obstacle that had to be removed. “Just tell me where his room is and—”

  “Malek isn’t like most masters. He’s different.”

  “He’s human. How different can he—”

  “He doesn’t age,” she said. “He was born over a hundred summers ago, but you saw him at the party—he hardly looks older than you or me.” Nalia shrugged at the question in Raif’s eyes. “I have no idea how this is possible. His whole life is one big secret; I know more about the baristas at the Starbucks on Sunset than I do about Malek.”

&
nbsp; Raif furrowed his brow. “I have no idea what you just said.”

  I’ve become far too human.

  “Starbucks is this place where humans get coffee.” Raif cocked his head to the side. “Which,” she continued, “is this drink that makes you . . . happy? It gives you energy and—oh, never mind.” Nalia shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. If he wasn’t immortal before, he is now.”

  Raif furrowed his brow. “I’m not following.”

  “I had to carve Draega’s Amulet onto his chest. It was his second wish.”

  The amulet was one of the most powerful wishes any jinni could grant; those with it could only die by their own hand or own choosing. Though not impervious to pain, nothing they underwent would be fatal unless they wanted it to be. Nalia had studied for years to master the alchemy involved, a dark magic that required drops of the granter’s blood in each of the four elements and a sacrifice from the wishmaker of the thing they loved best in the world. Now that all the Ghan Aisouri were gone, Nalia was perhaps the only jinni capable of granting immortality, unless a few of the Shaitan mages had survived the Ifrit reign of terror.

  “Why’d you give him the best godsdamned amulet known to jinn?”

  “He asked for it by name. I had to.”

  How Malek had known one of the jinn’s best-kept magical secrets, she couldn’t guess. What Malek had given in exchange for the amulet remained a mystery as well: that was a contract between the wishmaker and the gods. With Malek, there were always more questions than answers.

  “Well, it doesn’t change anything. Get the bottle or end up hanging from the palace gate like all the other Ghan Aisouri.”

  Nalia wouldn’t let herself picture it. Those proud, beautiful warriors nothing more than skeletons swaying in the wind, denied the pyres that would send them to the godlands and thus condemned to an eternity as spirits wandering the edges of existence. If she imagined those skeletons, the memories would crash over her, an incapacitating wave of sorrow. She had to focus. Freedom meant she could save her brother. That’s all that mattered now. Bashil.

  But there was a catch. There was always a catch.

  “What’s your price, Raif Djan’Urbi? What does it cost to be free?”

  A car door slammed and Nalia stood still, listening. All that was left of the raucous night was a slight hum. Malek would be coming to her room at any minute. He might even be there now.

  “Fire and blood,” she whispered. “I have to go.”

  No price was too high for her freedom—she’d find out what Raif wanted later. Tufts of golden smoke began swirling at her feet.

  “Do you know Habibi?” Raif asked.

  It was the center of expatriate jinn life, an underground club where Earth’s exiled jinn smoked hookahs, traded news and information, and sang the old songs of their land.

  She nodded.

  “Go there when you have the bottle.” He pressed a piece of paper into her palm.

  When Nalia looked at it, she couldn’t help but laugh. “You have a cell phone?”

  A corner of his mouth turned up. “It’s like magic without all the strings attached.”

  The lights illuminating the back porch went out. It was time to go, past time to go. She pictured Malek ascending the marble staircase, walking down the thickly carpeted hall. She shoved the phone number in her pocket and willed her body to begin evanescing. The smoke whipped strands of hair into her face and Raif stepped back, watching her.

  “Good luck,” he said. His eyes held a desperate hopefulness, but the rest of him was a puzzle she’d have to put together later.

  Nalia kept her eyes on him until the smoke unraveled her, throwing her into the night sky in a burst of perfumed evanescence. She was cloud and wind and moon, fragmented, yet suddenly whole. For just that brief moment, all she knew was the feel of the cool night on her skin and the closeness of the stars. Then she was gone.

  6

  SHE WAS JUST IN TIME.

  As Nalia evanesced into her room, she heard Malek’s steps outside her door and then his soft knock a second later. She hurriedly kicked off her shoes and threw a robe over her clothes, then pulled back the covers of her bed. She crossed to the door and opened it.

  “Did I wake you?” Malek asked, his voice hushed.

  “Would it matter if you had?”

  Malek frowned. “Hayati . . .”

  She left the door open for him and crossed the room, putting as much distance between them as possible. Rather than irritating him, it seemed that these days, the more Nalia pushed the boundary of acceptable slave-master behavior, the harder he tried to please her. Which didn’t make any sense at all.

  Dying shadows stretched across the dark room, painting the walls in swaths of purple and midnight blue. Nalia wished she’d thought to turn on the light. The room felt dangerous. Malek closed the door behind him, his eyes lingering on her. Even though he’d been hosting a party for hours, he didn’t look the least bit tired. The only indication that he was through entertaining for the night was the open collar and rolled-up sleeves of his crisp white shirt.

  Malek’s eyes fell on Nalia’s dress, crumpled on the floor. “You hate my parties, don’t you?” he asked, a smile in his voice.

  She leaned against the thick, carved bedpost at the end of her bed. Like everything in the room, the furniture was old and expensive.

  “Yes,” she said. “But you’ve always known that.”

  He laughed, soft and low. “You’ve never made a secret of it, that’s true.”

  She could see the outline of her bottle under his shirt. She wanted to throw her hands out and yank it off him, but the bottle’s magic made it physically impossible to touch the chain when he wore it. Then there was their bond. The magic that tied Nalia to Malek would protect him from her—it had every time she’d tried to hurt him. And Draega’s Amulet just made him that much more impervious to real harm. Pain, yes. But if Nalia inflicted it, she would be doing it to herself—of course, she had a high tolerance for pain. That was one of the first things she’d developed as a Ghan Aisouri.

  Even if she somehow managed to get the bottle, he’d find her, just like he had last time. After his security team brought her back, Malek had put her in the bottle for months, so long that she could hardly get out when he finally set her free. The iron walls had poisoned Nalia almost to the point of breaking. Convincing Malek to take the chain off his neck and then forget about it would be a delicate maneuver. How? How was she going to manage this before the Ifrit came to finish her off?

  Malek crossed to her window and looked out over the lawn and rose garden that lay silent in the coming dawn. Nalia prayed Raif had already evanesced, or at least had the sense to glamour himself to appear invisible.

  “I’m sorry I can’t have that lecherous client from this evening killed,” Malek said. “Would have been easy enough, but you’ve made it rather impossible for me to track him down.”

  Here was the man who ran a vast criminal empire with an iron fist. Bringing up the client made her nervous—had he decided he wanted to punish Nalia for her trick after all?

  “That’s all right,” she managed. She despised the client and all the wishmakers just like him, but that didn’t mean she wanted him dead. There was enough blood on her hands. “I think lifelong invisibility is punishment enough.”

  He frowned. “For now, anyway.”

  Malek pulled a thin velvet box out of his pocket, then walked toward her, holding it out. She looked at it, uncertain.

  “Go ahead—open it.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  An expensive trinket she could have manifested on her own in the first place could never make up for the humiliation and horror of being a slave. But Malek seemed to think it could.

  “Just.” He stepped closer, his voice soft. Expectant. “Open it.”

  She took the box and slowly lifted the lid. Inside, lying on a bed of blackest velvet, was a thin gold chain holding a piece of polished lapis lazuli nestled
in a gold pendent. She gasped, tears pricking at her eyes. It was the stone that made up the entire Qaf Mountain range in Arjinna, from which the palace was carved. She’d had no idea the same stone was on Earth.

  “Nalia-jai, come on! We don’t have time to gawk at sunsets.”

  Nalia looks at the group of Ghan Aisouri she has traveled to the mountaintop with. They’ve been there since dawn, patrolling the border between Arjinna and the Ifrit-controlled wastelands of Ithkar. Like her sisters-in-arms, she is eager to return to the warmth and comfort of the palace. But she can’t take her eyes off the way the sunlight dances over the smooth surface of the azure rock. Walking the mountain paths is like strolling across a sun-soaked ocean.

  “There’s always time for sunsets,” Nalia whispers.

  “Tell that to the Djan’Urbi rat who’s giving us so much trouble,” laughs Wardi, one of the older girls. “I’m sure that’ll keep the serflings in line.”

  “Oh, don’t give her such a hard time,” Japhara says. She throws an arm around Nalia’s shoulder. “We’re Ghan Aisouri—surely we have time enough to look at sunsets and kill a few serfling rats. Right, Nal?”

  Nalia tenses. “Right.”

  But the color of blood doesn’t look beautiful in the sun. Why can’t anyone else see that?

  Now, Nalia stared at the pendent. She’d never be free of the memories, not as long as she lived. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be—they were her only link to Arjinna. The memories, and now this necklace.

  “Do you like it?” Malek asked. He sounded . . . nervous. Like it really mattered how she felt.

  She looked up. The moonlight softened the lines of his face, brought out the feeling in his eyes. How could he look at her like that, after all those times he’d put her in the bottle?

  She nodded, unable to speak.

  “Here, allow me,” he said.

  He took the box from her shaking hands. She lifted up her hair and turned around, every inch of her aware of his presence. The Santa Anas swirled through the open window. Nalia shivered. She felt the stone settle just under her collarbone, cool and heavy. Malek’s fingers gently slid down her neck and then his lips were on her skin. He was so close she could feel the bottle between her shoulder blades, and suddenly Nalia knew that there was really only one way she could ever hope to get him to take the bottle off in her presence, then forget all about it.