Exquisite Captive

by Heather Demetrios

  Nalia looked away. She couldn’t stand the feeling in his eyes—she didn’t want his protection, she wanted her freedom.

  Malek cocked his head to the side, studying her. “You’re mad that I killed him—even though he was trying to murder you. Nalia, that’s absurd.”

  “I’m sorry,” she snapped. “I don’t think murder is the solution to the world’s problems.”

  “I’m sorry you don’t, either. You’d make a damn fine assassin.” He smiled, amused. “Where did you learn to fight like that?”

  Nalia’s stomach tightened. She’d been so careful to play the genius Shaitan jinni. But the Shaitan didn’t fight; they never wanted to get their hands dirty. She wasn’t sure what Malek would do if he knew she’d been lying to him all these years, pretending to be someone she wasn’t. Didn’t want to find out.

  “Where did you learn to hypersuade like that?” she asked, ignoring his question.

  He shrugged. “It comes naturally to me.”

  Nalia thought of the way Malek had held the client’s head underwater, calm and patient. He made killing look like breathing.

  “Would you do that to me?” she asked softly. “If I ever made you angry enough, would you tell me to go sit in front of the pool and wait for you to drown me?”

  “So that’s what this little fit of yours is really about.” Malek ran a hand through his hair, muttering under his breath in Arabic. “Nalia, you’re taking this much too far.”

  She stood. “Am I? You could make me do whatever you want. Just use the right tone of voice, make sure I look into your eyes when you tell me what you like.”

  This time, a look of revulsion crossed Malek’s face. “Do you really think I would do something like that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said evenly. “Doesn’t it come ‘naturally’ to you?”

  This was the real fear: what if his hypersuasion actually worked on Nalia and he told her she wanted to be with him? What if he told her that every day, for the rest of her life?

  Malek’s eyes blazed red. “My indulgence with regard to you only goes so far, Nalia. I’d rather you didn’t test the boundaries of my patience tonight.”

  Nalia bowed her head in mock deference. “Yes, Master.”

  He snorted. “Don’t play the subservient jinni with me. It doesn’t become you and I don’t buy it for a second.” Malek took a step closer to her. “That’s why I’ve never hypersuaded you. If I wanted to share my life with a zombie, I would,” he said.

  “You don’t share your life with me, Malek. You impose it on me. You’re kidding yourself if you think I have any choices when it comes to you.”

  His eyes settled on the lapis lazuli pendant around her neck. “The night I gave you that,” he said, pointing to it, “you made a choice, did you not?”

  Nalia’s face warmed. Tell me to stop and I will, he’d said. Malek didn’t know she had only let him kiss her because of Bashil. She leaned her head against the window, silent.

  He sighed. “I’m not perfect, I know that—you know that. I admit that last night got out of hand.”

  “Are you talking about the part where you nearly gave me a concussion?”

  “If you only knew how much control I exercise around you . . .” He crossed his arms. “When you came here, you were wild, a feral little thing. But I saw your potential—like a mare that needed to be broken. I knew how great we’d be together: you just hadn’t seen that yet.”

  “Did you just compare me to a horse?”

  Malek’s eyes flashed crimson. He looked away from her and took a deep breath. She could see the tension in his fingers as they gripped his waist, like he was trying to contain the rage that claimed him. After a moment, his eyes were once again their onyx hue. He ran a hand over his face as he turned to go.

  “I need a drink,” he muttered.

  No, this evening had not gone how Nalia had planned. Godsdammit, she thought. Me and my stupid mouth.

  She started toward the door. “I’ll get it.”

  Nalia could feel her plan to seduce Malek toppling around her like a house of cards—one more mistake and she could kiss her freedom good-bye.

  As she passed him, Malek reached out and grabbed her wrist. “Wait,” he said.

  Nalia stood with her back to him, afraid to turn around for fear of what she would see in his eyes. But, as so often happened these days, he surprised her.

  Malek brought her palm up to his lips and kissed it. His thumb pressed against her pulse, and Nalia could feel his smile against her skin as her heart sped up. Malek’s chiaan flowed into her, and even though it was wrong, even though she despised him, Nalia found herself letting him in. She turned toward him like a flower to the sun.

  And that, perhaps, was the most terrifying thing that had happened the entire night.

  “How much more of me do you want, Malek?” Nalia’s voice was a whisper, but the question felt like a shout.

  What was happening—right now, in this room—it wasn’t hypersuasion. Malek wasn’t making her feel this. It was real, this magnetic response.

  “All of you,” he said, gently tugging on her hand until she was in front of him.

  “I want this,” he murmured, brushing a thumb over her lips. She sucked in her breath.

  “And this,” he said, resting a hand against her heart. It pounded a frantic beat against his palm.

  I hate you. But the words stayed in her throat, choking her. Malek kept his eyes on Nalia’s golden ones, holding her gaze in the sudden softness of his own. Then he stepped away from her.

  “But I already told you, hayati—I won’t take it from you.” A faint, sad smile pulled on his lips. “Good night, Nalia.”

  She fell against the bedpost, gripping the wood as she watched him go, adrift in a sea of confusion. She craved the anger and hate that had filled her earlier—it was solid, something she could hold on to. Something she understood. But it was gone, carved out of her by her master’s dogged pursuit of her heart. The anger would be back soon enough, but for now, she just felt empty.

  Nalia’s life with Malek had begun to resemble the labyrinth in the Getty’s garden, all twists and turns where nothing before or behind brought her any closer to the place she wanted to be. She had to find her way out before she got lost in it forever.

  After Malek left, Nalia took a long, hot shower then threw on a short, sleeveless nightgown. She put her jade dagger underneath her pillow, then curled into a ball in the center of her bed, her eyes wide open despite the heavy fatigue that had settled over her the moment she saw the client stop moving. Nalia’s mind ran like a gazelle with a predator nipping at its heels. She’d wasted the day. Nearly twenty-four hours that Haran had spent getting closer to her and that her brother had spent toiling in the camps. She came up with insane escape plans and useless protection spells to hold off Haran until she could figure out what to do. She considered going to Malek in the middle of the night and crawling into bed with him, begging his forgiveness for her behavior in her room, but knew she couldn’t, not for fear of what would happen but because she had no idea what to do if he welcomed her. For the Ghan Aisouri, sex was a duty performed for the empire, with the hope of bearing more of their sacred line. There was no time for pleasure when the Ifrit were aching to tear their world to pieces. All Nalia knew of the night’s dark mysteries she’d learned in the Ghan Aisouri dormitories. Just a few fumbling experiments with bodies so like her own. She knew nothing of men—jinn or human—and the way Malek made Nalia feel terrified her.

  More time, she needed more time. If Malek hadn’t wished for Draega’s Amulet, Raif could have killed him long ago—slipped her master a poison or used Nalia’s jade dagger to paralyze him. But neither Nalia nor anyone else could harm him. The client’s attempt to shoot Malek was proof of that. She longed for another way out of her bind with her master, but she kept coming back to what she knew had to be done. Telling him about Bashil wouldn’t help—she’d tried so many times over the years. Once, she’d even s
hown him an image of Bashil in smoke, but Malek had been impervious to her pain. Nalia, I’m not letting you go to Arjinna to attempt a prison break. You’ll get yourself killed and I don’t want that on my conscience. To which she’d replied, I thought you didn’t have one.

  Nalia tossed and turned, throwing off the covers one moment, then gathering them up to her chin the next. She had spent so many nights stranded on this unfamiliar shore. Nearly a thousand sunsets. It never became easier, knowing yet another day had passed in exile. Every night was a hopeless reckoning. Nalia thought she might burst with longing for the music of Antharoe Falls tumbling into the Infinite Lake. The waterfall had been just beneath her bedroom window in the palace. She craved Bashil’s tiny hands around her waist and the taste of freshly harvested fruits from Arjinna’s emerald valleys. She wanted the soft, supple Ghan Aisouri leathers on her body, wanted to be surrounded by the easy camaraderie of her sisters-in-arms.

  Finally, when the homesickness became too much to bear, Nalia closed her eyes and pictured the palace garden, her refuge when the duties of a Ghan Aisouri became too much. She hardly breathed as she re-created it from memory, rendering each detail with painstaking precision. Then she opened her eyes and slipped out of bed.

  Slowly, the antique furnishings of her room on Earth faded away. In their place rose the royal garden. Vines clung to the wallpaper, soft grass carpeted the wooden floor. The ceiling dissolved until it became the open sky itself, the layers of paint and plaster peeling back as rays of sunlight streamed over her. Nalia spun in a slow circle, grinning.

  She could feel the heat of the Arjinnan sun on her face and the gentle caress of the breeze. A tinge of salt lacing the fragrant air told her the wind blew from the distant east, where the Arjinnan Sea licked the edge of the Qaf Mountain range. Nalia sat on the ground and brushed her hand over the tufts of soft grass that pillowed her aching body. Her bones whispered home home home.

  It was so real.

  She lay on her back and gazed at the shimmering silver leaves of the large widr tree that had been her closest friend and confidante throughout her childhood, even more so than her gryphon, Thatur. On the hardest days—the days of blood and sick-making magical training—Nalia would throw herself upon its ancient roots and pour out her misgivings and fears, all those moments of indecision and shame. The tree took her mangled heart and made it new, harboring her confessions in its thick sap, entombing them forever.

  Now Nalia placed the tips of her fingers against the smooth bark and brought her lips close to it. The tree didn’t feel like an illusion—her skin remembered the velvety wood and the spicy scent of the leaves.

  “I’m a coward,” she whispered.

  The tree sighed beneath her words.

  “I’m a killer.”

  She’d never forget the look in the revolutionary’s eyes as the light dimmed in them. Her hand had pressed against his heart, squeezing until the beats grew faint and finally stopped altogether. Kir. That was his name. Her mother had been so proud.

  “Arjinna’s suffering is my fault.”

  Why had she had the courage to save the Ifrit prisoner and not Kir? Maybe her remorse over the dead revolutionary was what had given Nalia a courage she’d never had before. Courage, but not wisdom.

  “Malek.”

  She wasn’t sure what she was confessing as she said his name; she knew there was something undeniably wrong blooming in their relationship, and acknowledging that seemed like confession enough. He had woken up some part of her that had, she suspected, always been sleeping. She abhorred the bits of her that clung to him, that found comfort in his arms.

  She wondered if she should confess the same about Raif, about how touching him felt like the most intimate thing she had ever done. She opened her mouth, ready to renounce him, but then realized, no. Whatever she’d felt with Raif hadn’t been wrong. Just unexpected.

  The tree took in her words and left her blissfully empty. Not happy, no, never. But absolved, if only for a few forgetful moments. None of it was real—the tree or the feeling of suspended condemnation—but Nalia had done this so many times that she could pretend it was.

  “Shundai,” she whispered. Thank you.

  She pushed away from the trunk and lay back on her bed—now a soft tuft of grass—drinking in the sight above her.

  Sunlight glinted off the widr leaves so that all Nalia saw was their diamond light and the sapphire sky peeking through them. She clutched long blades of grass in her fists and let the widr’s calming magic wash the death of this night off her.

  A gust of wind brought the heady scent of a nearby bush bursting with vixen roses, so named because of their sumptuous, large petals and the hypnotic sway of their thin stems that hid minuscule, deadly thorns. Nalia turned her head: where her dresser had been, there was now a large bush of blood-red roses. The blossoms beckoned to her and she smiled. Behind them rose long purple grasses, home of trysts and other clandestine meetings that usually took place under the iridescent glow of Arjinna’s moons.

  The garden was a riot of color, with flowers and vines covering the walls and twining around a gate made of pure gold. The air carried their rich aroma—honeysuckle and calia nocturne, rose and frangipani. Nalia stared at a patch of grass and willed her memory of Antharoe’s fountain into reality. The statue that stood in the center of the fountain was a perfect likeness of the famed Ghan Aisouri. Carved from a single slab of pink marble, the fountain’s base depicted the writhing forms of dozens of vanquished ghouls, so lifelike that Nalia could almost hear their guttural screams of agony. Antharoe stood above them, fierce and lovely, holding a sword that plunged into the heart of a ghoul at her feet. Water spewed from the monster’s wounded chest, filling the fountain’s shallow base. Though Nalia knew Antharoe’s heroics were somewhat exaggerated, not the least of which because she’d apparently battled the monsters of children’s stories, Nalia still looked upon her with deep admiration.

  If Antharoe had been wronged as Nalia had, witness to the massacre of her people and sold into slavery, would she have been willing to do what Nalia must in order to save the one person she loved? Nalia looked into the face of her ancestor for a long time. As her eyes grew heavy, the garden shivered and slowly faded away, like the last rays of a sunset. Soon, all that remained of the illusion was the faint scent of the widr tree and then, that too, disappeared.

  18

  THE DREAM BEGAN, AS IT ALWAYS DID, RIGHT IN THE middle of hell.

  Ghan Aisouri blood is everywhere.

  Thick pools of it soak into Nalia’s clothes, coat her lips, drip into her ears. Her blood, their blood.

  Nalia lies beneath the bodies, their weight pressing against her, still warm but growing cooler. The panic grows in her until she thinks she might scream—the weight of bones and flesh is crushing her.

  She holds her breath, afraid that Haran and the other soldiers who tower over the bodies will see her chest rise and fall. They think she’s dead, and dead she will be unless she finds a way to escape the palace. It doesn’t matter that she can barely stay conscious or that the pain is whispering to her, telling Nalia to let her spirit go. She has to find Bashil. The image of her brother being whipped by the Ifrit soldiers pushes against her heart until she thinks it might burst.

  She takes a breath. The air stinks of last words and meat left to rot in the sun.

  “What should we do with them?” A gruff, Ifritian bark.

  “Burn the bitches,” says a high, thin voice somewhere to Nalia’s left.

  “No. The soldiers will not burn the bodies. They do not deserve eternity in the godlands.” Haran—she knows it is the Ifrit captain because he doesn’t speak, he commands. “They will hang the bodies above the castle gate. Let Arjinna know it has new masters.”

  There is shuffling, cursing, spitting.

  The pain cuts into her—how is she still alive?

  If she has to die, she wants to go down fighting. She doesn’t want it to be from those fire rocks that have a
lready ravaged her body and killed the other Ghan Aisouri. Guns—that’s what they are called. Human weapons. She learned about them from books but never thought she would see them in real life. They are a human invention, beneath the jinn. Not magical. Not from the gods.

  “Too bad we didn’t save some live ones, if you know what I mean,” says a voice over her. Bile rises in Nalia’s throat.

  The body above her shifts. “This one would have been fun.” The sound of ripping fabric. “Look at the tits on her.”

  A snort from across the pile of bodies. “Wouldn’t want what’s between her legs, now it’s cold as a fish.”

  Her chiaan sparks, only a tiny flame, but maybe it’s enough to kill one of them—wrestle its spirit into the depths of the underworld.

  The weight above her lightens and she hears a thump as the body joins a different pile. Light suddenly burns behind her eyelids. She doesn’t breathe. This isn’t real—she and Bashil are playing the game in which one of them pretends to be dead while the other must use magic to bring the “dead” companion to life. Bashil loves this game because he won’t open his eyes until Nalia manifests his favorite sweetmeats. The game only works if you really seem dead.

  There is a sharp intake of breath. Strong hands grab Nalia’s shoulders, shake her until her eyes fly open. Nalia screams as the face of her family’s killer smiles down at her. Haran. Suddenly, Nalia knows she is dreaming. But she can’t wake up. WAKE UP. She can’t, she can’t.

  This isn’t how it happens, Nalia thinks as she struggles in Haran’s grip. But somehow past and present are colliding and the dream is beginning to warp. Instead of being discovered by the slave trader before she can be strung up with the rest of the Aisouri, Nalia realizes that Haran knows she is not dead. This time, she cannot trick him. You lose the game if you open your eyes and take a breath.

  “So here is Haran’s little mouse,” he says. The Ifrit cocks his head to the side, as though he is listening to a far-off, whispered conversation. “Somewhere in America, yes?”