Exquisite Captive

by Heather Demetrios

  As Nalia neared the water, its power called to her. Above the blustery wind and the deafening crash of waves, she could hear soft whispers, a siren’s song that wove itself into the froth at her feet. She dove into a cresting wave and as her skin made contact with the water, it too became a translucent aquamarine. Her chiaan knitted her essence together so that she could return to the land, but even so, she was only an outline of a body, just a shade darker than the waters that surrounded her. The sea claimed her, welcoming Nalia as a mother would her daughter. Its cold embrace drove away all thought until there was nothing left in her consciousness but a dim remembrance of death, despair, desire. Fish swam through the bottoms of her feet and the sun shone through her face as its rays pierced the water’s surface. Nalia spread her arms, opened her mouth, and gave herself over to Lathor, goddess of water.

  If she weren’t a slave, Nalia could stay here forever—dash herself against the rocks and kiss a surfer’s neck as he rode the waves of her, or bathe in creamy moonlight and dance with jellyfish. Sailors would look on her with longing, and lightning would strike through her heart, causing no pain, when storms raged above the sea. Here there was no Haran or Raif or Malek. No invisible humans or memories of the past. Just the endless rhythm of ancient waters and the low rumble of beasts in its blackened depths.

  She was the current that carried boats on its back and the foam that slept on sandcastles. She was the roar and the whisper and the stillness.

  She was nothing.

  She was everything.

  15

  RAIF LAY ON THE ROOF OF JORDIF’S LOFT, STARING UP at Earth’s cold stars. He was most homesick at night, when he’d normally be sitting around the campfire at headquarters, singing the old songs and passing a bottle around with his tavrai. He wondered what they were doing now, if they were okay. He’d tried to contact Shirin, but his second-in-command had been on an Ifrit ambush. Standard weapons collection, nothing serious, but he hated not being there in the thick of the fight. Right now, he was useless; it had been a long day on Earth, with nothing to do but wait for an Arjinnan princess—no, empress—to give him the key to everything he’d ever wanted. Freedom was so close, he could almost taste it, salty like sweat, rich like cream. A truly casteless Arjinna, where everyone was equal, regardless of their eye color.

  Metal scraped against concrete as the roof door opened and he sat up and turned around. Zanari was in the doorway, holding two glasses of the liquor Jordif had been drinking the night before. He took the glass she offered and drank down a large gulp. Jordif wasn’t kidding—the stuff did taste like unicorn piss.

  “Easy, little brother,” Zanari said.

  He set the glass down and rubbed his eyes. “I’m going insane, Zan.”

  She sat down beside him. “I know.”

  “Any idea what Nalia is up to?”

  “I checked in on her about an hour ago. She’s at some kind of party. Her master’s there, too.”

  “All these people do is party,” he muttered.

  Zanari frowned at him. “The Ifrit are after her and she’s a slave. Nalia might be at a party, but she’s not having fun, Raif. Whatever she’s doing, it’s to get the bottle.”

  She looked so much like their mother in that moment that he smiled a little. Would Zanari make it through the war and have children of her own to scold? If Raif had to die to make that happen, he would.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t kill you to be a little kinder to her.”

  He snorted. “Yeah it would.”

  They were quiet for a moment, just listening to Earth’s strange sounds. The endless grind of the freeways, the piercing wailings that Jordif had told him were called sirens. He looked up as another metal bird flew across the sky, groaning as it made its journey to a land beyond the ocean. He’d learned that, unlike the Arjinnan Sea, Earth’s oceans did not simply stop at the end of the sky. Earth kept going in a circle until new lands appeared on the horizon. If Raif weren’t leading a revolution, if he didn’t have the yoke—no, the privilege—of helping to usher in a new era for his realm, he could imagine himself on a great ship, sailing across the Earthen seas and exploring unknown forests and cities. He allowed his heart to imagine someone else standing beside him on that ship, but he put her out of his mind.

  When his father died, Raif had stopped believing in his own dreams. What he wanted was irrelevant; all that mattered was the resistance.

  “Jordif said the humans sit in the metal birds because they can’t evanesce,” he said. “Can you imagine being chained to the earth like that?”

  Zanari shook her head. “Remember when Papa took us to the temple on Qaf Zhiqui?”

  “Yes,” he said softly. He could almost feel the mountaintop’s freezing gales of wind.

  He tried to imitate their father’s gravelly voice: “If you can evanesce home from here, you’re truly a man, my son.”

  Zanari laughed. “And then—”

  He groaned. “Don’t remind me.”

  But Zanari was laughing so hard tears were streaming down her cheeks. “The look on your face when you evanesced and then appeared on the mountain next to us!”

  Raif smiled at the memory. His father hadn’t shamed him, as so many fathers would have done. Instead, Dthar Djan’Urbi had laughed his great belly laugh and promised Raif a piece of honeycomb when they returned home after the day’s work was done on their overlord’s property. This was before his father had begun performing the unbindings on Arjinna’s serfs, an exhausting ritual he’d had to repeat several times a day. There was no way to break binds en masse and, though the Djan’Urbi family shared their knowledge, only a few serfs were ever able to master the complex magic. That was why it had taken so long to build the resistance in the first place—it was no simple matter, releasing slaves from their chains. Though Raif’s grandfather had been the one to perfect the spell, his father had waited to use it until he was sure he had a resistance in place. After he received his own freedom, Raif often longed for those days on the overlord’s farm—not because he wanted to be a slave, but because his father still belonged to him.

  Now, Dthar Djan’Urbi was becoming a thing of legend, even though he’d only been dead a few years. The resistance had painted his memory in the dark colors of war: red, black, and the gray of ashes. But the truth was quite different. His father was the kindest jinni Raif had ever known.

  I’ll never be able to lead as he did, Raif thought. He was already learning that it took far more than strategic insight and passion to command thousands of jinn.

  “You’re doing the best you can, Raif.” Zanari’s voice was soft, a caress. He pushed it aside.

  Was it that obvious that he was in way over his head?

  “I know.” His voice had a defensive edge. “What? Stop looking at me like that.”

  “I’m just worried about you, okay? You’ve got that I’ll-never-be-as-great-as-my-father look. Imagine what Papa was like when he was nineteen! Just trying to make Mama fall in love with him, not worrying about revolution and sigils.” She squeezed his hand. “You’ve defeated countless Ifrit, shaken up the whole realm—”

  He frowned. “It’s not enough.” Raif took another long sip of his drink. “I think Jordif’s helping the Ifrit.”

  He’d been thinking about it ever since his conversation the night before with his magnanimous host. The growth of the dark caravan—that there was even a dark caravan at all—didn’t make sense. And how had Haran made it through the portal without so much as a peep from Jordif’s guards? If they’d been killed, Raif could believe that Haran had fought his way through. But no, it was all a big mystery.

  “Hundreds of jinn are being brought through for the caravan,” he said, “and nobody knows how? I don’t buy it.”

  Zanari nodded. “I agree, it’s not adding up. But why would Jordif be involved with the slave trade? What’s in it for him?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, he seems to genuinely care about the refugees.
You’ve seen him—he works like a dog for them, never resting. But he’s not telling us the truth, not by a long shot.”

  “I agree.” Zanari took a sip of her drink and wrinkled her nose in disgust before swallowing. “Do you think we should stay somewhere else?”

  Raif shook his head. “Where would we go? It’d just make him suspicious and we can only fight so many enemies at once. For now, all we can do is look sharp.”

  Zanari took a breath. “We have a bigger problem, anyway.” Raif tensed beside her, waiting. “My readings of Haran are . . . confusing. Really confusing. I’ve never experienced anything like it. That’s what I came up here to tell you.”

  “What’d you see?” he asked quietly.

  “We’re definitely right about the birthmark thing. When I focus on Haran there’s always a jinni with a birthmark on her face. But I never see Haran.” She twisted her fingers around her braids and they stuck up, giving her the appearance of a water sprite, one of the trickster Marid jinn who lived in lakes and wells.

  “Yeah, but that’s not unusual. I mean, you don’t always see your target.”

  Zanari frowned. “I guess. But something doesn’t feel right.”

  “Well, he’s a sadistic skag—of course it doesn’t feel right.” Jordif had told Raif that the human equivalent of skag was a particularly vile reference to fornicating with one’s own mother. He’d have to try that one out on Haran, whenever he saw him.

  “Whatever he’s doing, Haran changes location a lot, so I know he must be getting closer because there are only so many places that jinn congregate on Earth. Clubs like Habibi tend to be in big cities. It’s only a matter of time before he comes here. Do you think he has a dark power?”

  Raif shrugged. “He’s a top-ranking Ifrit. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “What did Nalia say when you told her about the birthmarks last night?”

  “She won’t cover her mark.”

  “What?”

  “She evanesced before I could explain that Haran’s attacking other jinn with marks, but I don’t think that would have changed her mind. She’s worried about offending the gods—you know the type.”

  “Fire and blood,” she cursed. “I’m sure in this case the gods would understand.”

  Raif rubbed his eyes, weary. “I don’t think the gods care one way or the other.”

  It wasn’t that Raif didn’t honor the deities of his realm; he just wasn’t sure they were all that concerned about the day-to-day affairs of the jinn. He’d always imagined them as distant figures who watched Arjinna from a great height. He kept a small shrine to Tirgan, the god of Earth, in his home, of course. He prayed on occasion, especially when he thought he might die. And he always thanked the gods for his power when he replenished his chiaan. But he suspected that wasn’t enough for Nalia. The Ghan Aisouri were known for their devotion to the gods who controlled the land. In breaking her vow to protect the sigil, Nalia believed she had committed a grave offense. Asking her to hide the mark of a god’s favor was suggesting the height of sacrilege.

  “Zan, honestly, even if Nalia glamoured her mark, all he’d have to do is ask around. It’s not like every jinni she knows in LA is going to suddenly forget she’s had a mark the past three years. I shielded her house with a bisahm, and that’s pretty much all we can do until he arrives. Let’s just hope that by the time Haran gets here, Nalia has already stolen the bottle and we’re on our way to getting the sigil.”

  “What if she needs more time?” Zan asked quietly.

  Raif stood and paced the length of the roof. “I guess we try to fend him off.”

  “Two Djan against the Ifrit who murdered all the Ghan Aisouri? He’ll kill us in a second.”

  “Doesn’t really matter, if we don’t have the sigil. He’ll kill us here or back in Arjinna. We can’t keep things going much longer, you know that. Especially not now that the Ifrit have launched a new offensive.”

  Zanari sighed. “I’m not going to let you go off on some crazy suicide mission. She’s the only jinni on Earth capable of defeating Haran, and you know it. If you try to help her fight him, you’re just going to get yourself killed. And then where will we be?”

  “Pretty much where we’ll be if she dies, Zan. The gods aren’t gonna swoop down and save us from the Ifrit.”

  She shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Like what?”

  Zanari arched an eyebrow. “Like you being kind of sweet on a Ghan Aisouri. If you fight Haran you’re just playing Rahim to her Jandessa.”

  “What? I’m not—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Raif turned away, his face warm in the darkness. “Like I have time for that,” he muttered.

  His sister was losing her godsdamned mind. How could he feel anything but hatred for a Ghan Aisouri? It was absurd, what Zanari was suggesting. As though he were anything like that fool Rahim.

  As the story went, Rahim was a young jinni in ancient days who was in love with his overlord’s daughter, Jandessa. But she, being a Shaitan, did not consider a Djan serf worthy of her affection. In order to win her heart, Rahim undertook daring exploits to prove his love: hunting monsters in the depths of the Arjinnan Sea, battling dragons in the Qaf Mountains, venturing to the Eye of Iblis to bring back the head of a ghoul from Arjinna’s deadly desert. Jandessa saw that his love was true and begged her father to let her marry Rahim. But her father, a cruel jinni, had Rahim cut up into little pieces and scattered across the sky. The gods, taking pity, transformed what was left of Rahim into the green stars that dot Arjinna’s celestial sphere. Jandessa ran away to the Forest of Sighs, where she cried so much that her tears became a sweet, rushing river. It was a story Raif often thought about—the river Sorrow was now the resistance’s main water source. He had always thought it fitting that his fighters nourished their bodies with tears from a broken heart.

  “Is she gonna be able to pull this off?” he said, still not looking at his sister.

  When she was silent too long, he turned to face her. “Zan? The entire revolution depends on this, you know that.”

  Zanari chewed her lower lip, a nervous habit she’d had for years. “I’ve been watching Nalia a bit, but she’s hard to read from a distance. I think the Ghan Aisouri must have trained themselves to permanently shield their minds, so I get general things about her, but nothing personal. I’m not exactly sure what her plan is for getting the bottle, but I keep seeing water. I hear the word hayati a lot. Do you know what it means?”

  “No.”

  “There’re a few other images I’ve gotten that make me feel like . . . I mean, it’s nothing certain, but—well, I don’t envy Nalia, is all I’m saying. I think getting the bottle from her master might be harder than you think.”

  “What? Why?”

  Zanari shook her head. “It’s not my place to say. She’ll tell you if she wants.”

  “Fire and blood!” Raif cursed. “Does she think she has time? Like we can just sit back and relax while she tries to get a necklace from a human?”

  “Raif.”

  “What?” he snapped.

  “You’re missing a sensitivity chip.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s a human expression Jordif taught me. Look it up in their word book.”

  Raif was silent a moment. “It’s not a good thing, missing this sensitivity chip, is it?”

  “No, little brother, I’m afraid it’s not.”

  16

  “I LOVE YOUR SHOES! I DIDN’T KNOW LOUBOUTINS CAME in that color.”

  Nalia turned away from the Renoir she’d been looking at and tried to smile at the woman who’d come to stand beside her.

  “Neither did I,” Nalia said.

  The shoes had been sitting on her bed when she evanesced home from the beach, dripping salt water all over Malek’s waxed floors. They perfectly matched the Dior dress that she’d found hanging from her bedpost, a gown the color of gardenias with opals sewn all
over the shimmering fabric.

  “Did you buy them in Paris? I was there just last weekend, but I didn’t have time to get to the boutique.”

  Nalia guessed the woman was around thirty summers old, the picture of a rich Angelino with perfect just-got-out-of-bed hair and sun-kissed skin. Like everyone at the Getty Museum tonight, she glittered with jewels and walked around in a fog of expensive perfume.

  Nalia gave an apologetic shrug. “My . . . boyfriend bought them for me.” The word brought equal parts fear and nausea. Is that what Malek was, now that things had changed? She knew he’d be pleased she’d used the term. Maybe it would get back to him somehow.

  “Honestly,” she continued, “I have no idea where he found them. I came home and they were just sitting on my bed.”

  She hated being dolled up for these parties, and it annoyed Nalia that Malek thought he was somehow making up for last night by forcing her into small talk with a bunch of humans she couldn’t stand to be around.

  “I should have your guy talk to mine—give him some pointers. New shoes are my little reward for coming to boring stuff like this, too, but I have to buy them myself.”

  Nalia laughed politely. She couldn’t believe she was standing here talking about shoes while a highly trained killer prowled Earth’s streets for her.

  “Let me guess: you got dragged here by the FPA, right?” the woman said.

  The Future Patrons of the Arts was a group that had been invited to the event—high school seniors who were eligible for prestigious scholarships.

  Nalia shook her head. “No, I’m . . . not in school anymore. My boyfriend wanted to come.”