by Sara King
Kaashifah screamed and scrabbled away from the djinni, slamming into the wall of what looked like Hell with her hips and back. Roots clawed at her like fingers from the underworld, scraping at her spine and shoulders, and a rain of earth sprinkled down her neck and shoulders. “‘Aqrab,” she cried, her heart hammering, “what have you done?!”
His violet eyes anxious in the darkness, ‘Aqrab said, “Calm yourself, mon Dhi’b. I only warmed your flesh. Nothing more.”
He had ‘warmed her flesh.’ She felt her stomach churn. For a djinni who wove his words like thread, there were a thousand meanings for such a phrase. “Did you…” she began, but couldn’t finish. She looked away, feeling bile biting at the back of her throat.
He started to sit up, reaching for her. “Probably not the most brilliant—or comfortable—thing I’ve ever done—”
“Stay down,” she snarled, and she could have sworn she felt her Fury uncoiling within.
‘Aqrab must have seen that she was about to loose the wolf, for the djinni hesitated. Slowly, he lowered himself on an elbow, not disobeying, but not quite following her commands, either. Looking wary, he said, “You were on the verge of—”
“Silence!” She was so angry she couldn’t breathe. Her whole body was shaking with the feel of his filth, touching her in her sleep. “Speak again,” she whispered, “and I will find out what djinni tastes like.”
Instead of making a lewd retort, ‘Aqrab went silent, watching her with the wariness of a leopard facing a lion.
When she could find words again, Kaashifah managed, “Did you…” Her throat, however, clenched before she could finish her question, and she looked away before he saw her tears. She tried again, forcing the words from her lips, only to be stopped before she could make her meaning clear. “Did you…” Spear. Such a simple word, yet so impossible to force from her tongue. It took three more times before she gave up, beating a fist into the dirt wall beside her in wretched misery.
“I did not pierce you, mon Dhi’b.” The djinni’s voice was gentle.
She swiveled to face him, startled.
He had risen to a cross-legged position, looking as if he wanted to reach for her again. A certain agony was playing across his face, one which Kaashifah did not understand.
“You…didn’t?” she whispered.
“I did not spear you while you slept,” ‘Aqrab said softly, “Or any other time. You simply slept your wounds away in my arms, mon Dhi’b.”
Djinn could not lie. Kaashifah let out a relieved breath that came out as a wretched, nervous laugh. Wiping tears from her face, she quickly looked away, so that the djinni could not see the remnants of her fear. After all, a Fury feared no man.
…and was frightened of all men. For, on his person, every man carried that which could unmake a Fury, a tool that could cast her from the Sisterhood forever. An act that ‘Aqrab liked to taunt her with at every waking opportunity, gloating over the hardness of his flesh, the ways it could be put to use, the ‘pleasures’ gained from it, and, on his more vulgar days, describing the act itself in every repugnant detail, as if his tiny brain could think of nothing else.
…And he hadn’t done it. Why hadn’t he done it? It made no sense to her. After three thousand years, surely he had come to realize that the moment she gained her wings would be the same moment he finally lost his head. He’d had her at his mercy. Utterly helpless to stop him. He could have taken her wings forever, and irrevocably saved his neck from her sword. What kind of fool wouldn’t have snatched that opportunity when it was given?
Then she remembered the conversation before the blood-pact and she saw the djinni in a whole new light. “You couldn’t bed me,” she stammered, stunned. “Your curse.”
The djinni’s face twisted. “I am incapable of bedding women,” he muttered in reluctant agreement. “You were safe in my arms.”
“Safe?!” she blurted, looking down at herself in disgust. “I was naked. You defiled me, you monster.”
The djinni snorted and yanked her sweater from a root above his head. He tossed it to her. “Defiled, then.” He cocked his head at her and grinned with an impish intent that she recognized as his lecherous nature once more crawling to the surface. “Would you like for me to sing you a song about another such defilement, to ease your mind?” He yanked her undergarments and jeans from their similar hangers and threw them at her.
“As I’ve told you before,” Kaashifah snapped, tugging the bloodstained garments gratefully over her nakedness. “I hear you sing one more of those bawdy disgraces and I’ll douse you so deep in shadow you won’t feel your tongue for a week.”
The djinni cocked his head and gave her a long, hard look.
Too late, Kaashifah realized she didn’t have the shadows to use against him anymore. Her breath caught, and she suddenly felt her face heating.
“I am a bard amongst my people,” ‘Aqrab said, conversationally. “Actually, a rather famous sand-singer. I’ve memorized thousands of songs in my lifetime, can recount for you hundreds of ballads of heroes, love, and folklore. How many of those have you heard me sing, mon Dhi’b?”
“Too many,” she growled, bristling.
“You’ve let me begin four, that I can remember,” ‘Aqrab replied. “I never got more than halfway before you stopped me, threatening your poisons.”
Four was actually more than she would have guessed. She could only remember two. And both times, the djinni had looked shattered when she’d stopped him. Shaking herself of a sudden pang of guilt, she demanded, “When did this become a conversation about my wrongdoings to you? You just had me spread out naked upon your body, you despicable ogre.”
“True,” the djinni said, “and you’ve forced me to spend every night alone, singing myself to sleep amidst the dunes for the last three thousand years.”
Kaashifah glared. “Because I kept catching you spying on me in my sleep.”
“Because you aren’t a hot-headed, ill-tempered qybah when you’re asleep,” he bellowed back. “It’s a pleasant change to see you sleeping. Forgive me for alarming you. If you weren’t so damned agitated all the time—hells, if maybe you’d let me sing you to sleep—I wouldn’t have needed that reassurance. You’re like one of those small Northlander dogs, mon Dhi’b. Small and restless and ready to piss on everything under the sun. Learn to relax, and Life will treat you better.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, still stunned by his original insult. “I am not a qybah.”
“Mon Dhi’b,” ‘Aqrab chuckled, “after three millennia, I beg to differ.”
The casual way he said it stunned her. “You actually think of me as such?” she blurted, utterly disbelieving the sincerity in his face.
He peered at her, his violet eyes curious. “After three thousand years of you dousing me in shadow for the most minor infractions, of you telling me I’m impure, that I’m filthy on merit of my birth, that I’m corrupting you with my touch, my eyes, my voice, my smell…” He cocked his head at her. “Did you really think I thought any differently?”
The knowledge dismayed her. In three thousand years, for better or worse, ‘Aqrab had been her constant companion. He knew her better than even her Sisters, before her Fall. He knew every little aspect of her, from how much she needed to eat, to how long she slept, to when her yearly menses would start, even going so far as to bring her teas to ease the pain…
…and he thought she was a bitch.
“I am not a qybah,” she growled. “And put on your sirwal. You disgust me with the sight of your flesh.” Too late, she realized what she had said, so automatic was her response to the sight of his filth.
Still naked, ‘Aqrab raised a brow. Making no movement to reach for his wad of silk, he said, “Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you could remind me of one moment, excluding the last two days, when you have given me a single kind word, a single boon or benevolence that was unasked for, a single gesture of gentleness towards me.”
She stared at him for so long she fel
t her jaw slide open. “Since when is it my job to be kind to a criminal?” she blurted.
He shrugged. “We were debating whether or not you were a qybah, not the veracity of my alleged criminality.” He cocked his head at her. “So, little wolf. Can you think of anything?” And then, still refusing to put on his sirwal, he folded his arms over his chest and waited, cross-legged in that regal pose that the Djinn had perfected, eyes flat with challenge.
Spurred by the arrogant look he was giving her, Kaashifah thought back to the last three thousand years of her existence, scrabbling to find some fact to wrench from history and throw in his smug face, to prove him wrong.
…And kept thinking. She scrambled to come up with some kind thing she had done for him, some benevolence to counter the outright surety in his face.
At the increasing smugness of his visage, she blurted, “I offered you a share of my meal, outside the Ajanta Caves.” She cocked her head at him in triumph. “As I recall, you refused.”
He gave her a long look. “As I recall, mon Dhi’b, the offering came with the words, ‘perhaps this will silence that twisted loom you call a tongue.’ And you threw it at me. To eat it, I would have had to swallow sand.”
Kaashifah felt her face flushing. She scrambled to think of something else. Everything she could come up with had been tainted with her frustration, her despair. Yet, ever since her fateful meeting with the djinni at Tafilat, her life had been a living hell of anxiety and hopelessness. She, in fact, could not think of a time when she had been kind to him. For centuries, all she had wanted, at times more than life itself, was for him to disappear, to twist back to the firelands, never to return. She could remember no gift, no concession, no sympathetic words that she had ever given to him, under the constant threat of his goading words, his mocking jibes, his verbal abuse.
“You were taunting me!” she finally snapped. “You spent three thousand years taunting me. Of course I was not kind to you.”
For a long moment, he said nothing, only watched her over his massive, crossed arms. “I taunted you, little wolf, because you refused to see me as anything other than a beast to whom you had the misfortune of being chained.”
“Then as now!” Kaashifah snapped.
Utterly placid, he said, “You sit there, call me a beast to my face after I have twice rescued you from the brink of death these last two days, as well as countless times before that, and you somehow find it incomprehensible that I, in turn, find you to be a qybah?”
She felt her face heating. “The only reason you ‘saved’ me is because you don’t want to be tied to a bag of bones. You’ve said as much a thousand times already.”
The djinni scanned her face impassively for several minutes. “I saved you, mon Dhi’b, because I still harbor the hope—miniscule that it has become, considering its wretched and chronic failure in the past—that I may one day teach you how to love.”
Kaashifah’s heart shuddered and she reflexively reached for her Lord’s pendant. When her fingers came back empty, she froze.
“It was missing when I undressed you,” ‘Aqrab said. “I suspect the Inquisitors had a chance to take it. They’d shot you and disturbed the debris I piled around you.”
Kaashifah felt a wretched moan escape her lips. The thought of an Inquisitor holding her Lord’s talisman was too much to bear. “No,” she whispered, through a throat that suddenly no longer wanted to work. “I must have it back.”
“Is that your wish?” the djinni said, giving her a sharp look.
“No, damn you!” Kaashifah snapped, though her insides were screaming ‘yes.’ Her conduit to her Lord, a connection she had maintained from the moment she’d been accepted by her Sisters, lost. She lowered her head to compose herself before her gut could wrench control of her tongue and give the djinni his final wish, and in doing so, his freedom.
Now, feeling the nakedness of her bare neck, more than anything else in her life, she wanted to make that wish. Slowly, she took a shuddering breath. Touched by a man’s…filth…and losing her pendant to the Inquisition, in one day. She’d never felt so thoroughly despoiled in her life. She avoided looking at the deeper blackness of the djinni’s groin, which he had still refused to cover, and fought tears as she painstakingly studied the ragged root system twisting into the walls of whatever hole the djinni had tucked them into, trying to regain control of her inner turmoil.
“Where are we?” she finally managed, her eyes burning with loss.
“Your guess is as good as mine, mon Dhi’b,” the djinni said. “I took us north and east. More east than north, in places, because I was avoiding the creeks. I couldn’t cross them with you slung over my back. Water drains my strength, and with the Third Lander in your veins, you are…heavy.”
She took a breath meant to stabilize her, but it came out as a sob. The djinni had saved her. Slung her, a Fury, over his back and carried her around like a sack of grain pilfered from an enemy storehouse. It was yet another humiliation to shatter her this wretched day, and she felt as if she were desperately grabbing at dissolving wisps of herself, carried away by the horrors of the past two days.
She’d lost her Lord’s symbol. The last thing that she had of being a Fury. Her entire being, everything she had once been, was now just a memory. She hunched inward as her shoulders began to quiver, trying to protect what was left.
She didn’t realize the djinni had slid toward her until his hot arm slipped tentatively around her shoulders and he pulled her tenderly to his chest. “We’ll get it back, mon Dhi’b.”
And, so grateful was she to hear those words, to have another barrier between herself and the world that had stripped her bare, Kaashifah simply nodded and let him hold her.
Imelda shut off the television in disgust. Weather forecasters were backtracking, scrambling to make sense of the sudden appearance of one of the most violent Chinooks in Alaskan history, which was even then ripping pieces of the roof off of the local high school. The power had gone out six times in the last three hours, and the radio told her that the winds, while sudden, looked to be there to stay, at least for the foreseeable future.
“Those winds,” Jacquot said, having paused in the common room long enough to catch the last of the broadcast, “they seem to have originated around Skwentna?”
Imelda looked over her shoulder, giving her scout a guarded glance. The last thing she wanted was to give the highly-pious man another reason to look at her as a Chosen. She had enough trouble as it was organizing and operating the most multi-national conglomeration of customs, languages, and nationalities in the North American section of the Order.
A conglomeration that, she was sure, Inquisidora Zenaida had painstakingly pieced together for her from every spare loner, hothead, and misfit she could find. No, Imelda decided, she did not need an overly-excitable Jacquot babbling to every member of her team of angels and Signs of God. As Inquisidora, she already had enough trouble gaining their trust. The last thing she needed was for Zenaida to catch wind of it and start whispers of false signs and grasps for power.
“They started in the ocean, Jacquot,” she said, carefully laying the remote beside the television. “All Chinooks begin there.”
“I heard the forecaster say that they were rare at this time of the year,” Jacquot insisted, watching her closely.
Imelda gave her scout a long look. He was still dressed in his black combat gear, ever-ready to jump in a truck or onto a plane at a moment’s notice. “It’s more of a winter occurrence,” she admitted. “It is rare to hit in the fall, and with such force.”
Jacquot held her gaze a moment longer, then nodded. “Herr Drescher suggested you would need a driver to Eagle River, as he still cannot fly.”
Imelda winced, her eyes catching upon his all-black garb, knowing that it would not carry the inconspicuousness she needed. “Is Giuseppe unavailable?”
“Monsieur Rizzo joins Herr Drescher in confession and penance, Inquisidora. He felt he shared Herr Drescher’s…ardor…an
d seeks forgiveness for the act.”
Imelda sighed. Such was typical of her Italian copilot and bodyguard. Pious to the point of disability, he not only repented for his own sins, but for those of the people around him. “Very well,” she told the Frenchman. “Find something less striking to wear. I will meet you at the car in half an hour.”
Jacquot bowed low. “As you command, Inquisitrice.” Spinning, he strode off to his bedroom in the same long, loping stride that carried him silently through the forest when hunting the creatures invading their realm.
Four more pockets of them had been found to the north and west, before the winds had forced them to give up the search. Even now, over thirty bodies warmed the racks in the basement, so many that Zenaida had made an emergency call for another storage area to be built, while they were sorted and interrogated.
That the Segunda Inquisidora insisted on keeping them alive when it would be so much easier—and safer, considering the capabilities of some of their charges—to kill them now and complete their sacred mission to God rankled Imelda. She did not sign on with the Order so that she could watch sentient creatures writhe upon the rack as they were bled for their powers, beasts and demons though they were. Her mission was to cleanse the Realm, not to sully it with the spread of their magics. Even if they were used by the proper hands of the Church, it felt wrong.
And, if her Padre’s assertions were correct, that was exactly what Imelda was destined to do. Purify the Order. Remove the last of the creatures’ taint from its ranks. After all, while it may have been necessary to fight the demons’ magic with their own powers, back when their corruption reigned and the world was a horrifying place of death and darkness, the Church had been well on its way to finally winning the battle for centuries. That this final pocket in Alaska was proving to be so thickly-populated—unlike the claims of her fellow Inquisitors that the beasts’ influence was spreading—only suggested to Imelda that they had gotten more desperate, and were congregating en masse in the final lands still left available to them.
