Contents
Title
Copyright
Foreword
Chapter 1: A Breath of Wind
Chapter 2: Spinning a Web
Chapter 3: The Gathering Storm
Chapter 4: Constricting Coils
Chapter 5: Truth and Exploration
Chapter 6: Father's Words
Chapter 7: Ten Digits
Chapter 8: Maelstrom
Chapter 9: Wind-Borne
Chapter 10: Soliloquy
Chapter 11: Dreams and Visions
Chapter 12: The Calculus of a Moment
Chapter 13: Hunting for Truth
Chapter 14: Sitting in the Ashes
Chapter 15: The Old Ways
Chapter 16: Thunderheads Approaching
Chapter 17: Ibrahim's Plan
Chapter 18: The Wedding March
Chapter 19: Facing the Demon
Chapter 20: Words of Sealing
Sneak Peek
Also By
Djinn & Tonic
By
Jasinda Wilder
Copyright © 2015 by Jasinda Wilder
DJINN & TONIC
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover art by Sarah Hansen of Okay Creations. Cover art copyright © 2014 Sarah Hansen.
Djinn:
“Jinn or djinn (singular: jinnī, djinni, or genie; Arabic: الجن al-jinn, singular الجني al-jinnī) are supernatural creatures in Islamic mythology as well as pre-Islamic Arabian mythology. They are mentioned frequently in the Quran (the 72nd sura is titled Sūrat al-Jinn) and other Islamic texts and inhabit an unseen world in dimensions beyond the visible universe of humans. The Quran says that the jinn are made of a smokeless and "scorching fire", but are also physical in nature, being able to interfere physically with people and objects and likewise be acted upon. The jinn, humans, and angels make up the three sapient creations of God. Like human beings, the jinn can be good, evil, or neutrally benevolent and hence have free will like humans and unlike angels. The jinn are the analogue of demons in Christian tradition, but the jinn are not angels and the Quran draws a clear distinction between the two creations.” ~ Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinn)
Ifrit (say: “ih-freet”): “The Ifrits are in a class of infernal Jinn noted for their strength and cunning. An ifrit is an enormous winged creature of fire, either male or female, who lives underground and frequents ruins. Ifrits live in a society structured along ancient Arab tribal lines, complete with kings, tribes and clans. They generally marry one another, but they can also marry humans. While ordinary weapons and forces have no power over them, they are susceptible to magic, which humans can use to kill them or to capture and enslave them. As with the jinn, an ifrit may be either a believer or an unbeliever, good or evil, but it is most often depicted as a wicked and ruthless being.” ~ Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ifrit )
Chapter 1: A Breath of Wind
Carson
I’m not sure how I end up at The Old Shillelagh, a tumbler of gin and tonic in my hand, watching replay footage of the Tigers beating the Rockies. I left the station hours ago and finally ended up here because I hadn’t felt like going home. I’m watching the game, but I’m not really paying attention. It’s just something to stare at while I try to clear my mind, try not to think about the case. This is one I know I won’t forget any time soon. Miriam al-Mansour is just…stuck in my brain, somehow. It’s not like I’m attracted to her in a sexual way or anything. It’s definitely not that. I mean, she’s beautiful, sure, but it’s something else. And, anyway, she’s with Jack Byrne.
Yeah, it’s definitely something else. Something beyond the woman herself. Beyond the facts even. How am I supposed to just let it all go? Just write off the murder of a man as...what? Self-defense? Even Miriam herself has admitted that it wasn’t self-defense. She said she’d been defending Jack. She said she’d ended up killing Ben because he’d shot Jack—two bullets to the chest. You didn’t survive that kind of injury. You just didn’t. A sucking chest wound was, by all accounts, one of the most painful ways to die, next to being shot in the gut. But here’s the weirdest thing—the part I can’t figure out, and the reason I’ve been sitting in this bar for so many hours: Miriam had been shot in both the abdomen and the chest, yet somehow she walked away unscathed; four gunshot wounds and she’d survived…without any medical attention whatsoever.
Either she was inhumanly tough, or she healed like Wolverine.
There can be no other explanations.
I finish my first drink, raise the glass and clink the ice at the bartender, Leila. She approaches with a sway, a tumbler half-filled with ice in one hand, a bottle of Bombay Sapphire in the other. She smiles at me, a quick, flirting glance, and then pours a generous two fingers-worth of gin into the glass.
“Start a tab?” she asks.
“Yeah, sure,” I answer. “Thanks.”
“You seem preoccupied, Detective Hale.”
She’s leaning on the bar in front of me, toying with a book of matches. Her T-shirt has a low-cut V-neck, and when she leans over it’s hard to keep my gaze from straying to her generous cleavage. I’ve made a study of the various ways women bend over: there’s the absent-minded bend in which the woman is simply assuming a natural, comfortable position, neither realizing nor caring about how she looks. Then there’s the flirting bend where she is aware of what she is revealing, but isn’t necessarily trying to accentuate it. Lastly there is the overt seduction bend, where she squeezes her arms together and props them underneath her breasts as she leans over so her cleavage all but spills out.
At the moment, I’m pretty sure Leila is somewhere between the first two. Between the way she’s looking at me and her body language there is a definite hint of flirtation, not to be confused with seduction. I’m kind of glad about that, actually; I’ve been seduced on a number of occasions, mostly by women trying to get out of a ticket or DUI arrest. Occasionally, I might encounter a witness hoping to sway the outcome of an investigation, or sometimes I’m being pursued by a drunk badge-chaser. I’ve found that the ones who try to seduce me are not the kind of girls I’m interested in—at least not long term.
I realize I never responded to Leila’s comment. “Sorry, yeah,” I say. “I guess I am a bit preoccupied.”
Leila laughs. “Delayed reaction, much? I was starting to wonder if you’d even heard me.”
“No, I heard you, I was just...”
“Lost in la-la land?” Leila teases. “It’s okay. I imagine your job takes up a lot of brain space.”
“You have no idea,” I say. “Today especially.”
The bar is dead and I’m only one of three patrons in the place, so Leila has time to chat. I don’t mind; she’s a beautiful girl, tall and willowy with thick black hair tied back in a neat ponytail and wide, dark, expressive eyes. She seems to like me, and that makes it even better.
I could use a distraction.
Leila wipes at an invisible spot on the counter. “So, I’ve been meaning to ask…how long have you been a detective?”
I shrug. “Six years on homicide.” I feel my phone vibrate in my hip pocket, but I ignore it.
“Homicide, huh?” She grimaces, somehow making the expression look attractive. “You must see a lot of unpleasant stuff.”
I finish
my drink, and Leila pours me a third without me asking. “Yeah,” I tell her. “Part of the job, I guess. Most of it I can forget, but some I can’t. Some things people just…aren’t meant to see.”
“I can’t even imagine. So, is that what’s preoccupying you tonight? A bad case?” She folds the towel without taking her gaze from mine. “I hope I’m not being too nosy.”
“No, you’re not being nosy,” I sip at my gin, and then crunch an ice cube. “It’s not one of those gruesome cases that’ll give you nightmares or anything, it’s just...confusing. I’m not sure what to believe, you know?”
Leila just nods, her attention fully focused on me. She has her chin propped on a palm, listening. I find myself wanting to talk about the case, which I know I shouldn’t do, especially with some girl I’ve known a matter of months. But Leila seems…different somehow.
Trustworthy, for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint. Maybe the gin is beginning to cloud my judgment. She’s pouring them stiff, more gin than tonic or ice, and I’m not protesting.
“You mentioned before that this case is tricky, that there’s some element to it that you’re having a hard time believing.”
I nod. “Yeah, and it’s only gotten more unbelievable since then.”
“Unbelievable how?” Leila asks, unloading glasses from a dishwasher underneath the bar and stacking them to dry.
I swirl the thin black straw around the tumbler, causing ice to clink on the walls. “God, I don’t even know where to start. The whole thing is crazy.”
“Can you tell me about the case?”
“You have to promise not to tell anyone about this,” I say, meeting her warm, friendly brown eyes. “I really shouldn’t be talking about this with you. Technically, it’s still an open case.”
“I won’t tell anyone. Promise,” Leila says, smiling.
“Okay, well, you better not. I would normally never break protocol like this, but I just don’t know who to turn to, what to think, what to believe. I’m so mixed up I can’t tell if I’m coming or going, you know? It’s just…if something goes against everything you know to be true, what are you supposed to do then?” I’m slurring a little.
I should slow down on the drinks, I know I should. I just don’t want to. I like the warm muzziness, the gentle floating of my mind. Leila’s easy to talk to, and even easier on the eyes. It’s past two in the morning at this point, and the last customer is weaving out the door.
“Well, what does the evidence say?” Leila asks.
I shake my head. “That’s the issue. The evidence is part of what’s so unlikely.”
“Unlikely, or impossible?” Leila says. “Didn’t we talk about impossibilities before? If it’s several elements too big to ignore, or pretend they’re not what they look like, then you can’t just refuse to acknowledge the truth.”
I nod. “Yeah, that’s what part of me says too.” I duck my head, chastising myself internally.
Leila considers for a long moment before answering, which I appreciate. “There’s so much about this world and about life that we can’t see, you know? Just because we haven’t seen something before doesn’t make it impossible, does it?” Leila comes out from behind the bar and starts lifting chairs onto tables.
I stand up to help her, a little more unstable on my feet than I’d expected to be. Leila rolls her eyes, pushing me back onto my stool, forcing me to sit down. Her hands on my back are warm, the feeling of her touch electric, sending thrills through me.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I say. “But that doesn’t make it any easier to accept what you always thought was impossible.”
She shrugs, then places the last stool on the counter beside me. “Changing your worldview, changing your impression of what is true or possible, I don’t think that’s ever easy.”
“Yeah, but this is…extra weird on top of crazy impossible.”
“Explain.” She’s back behind the bar, turning off the TV and wiping down liquor bottles with a bar cloth. I watch her move, admiring the easy grace of her motions. She’s so light on her feet, every step smooth, every twist of her body flowing into the next motion.
There’s something air-like about her. It’s an odd idea, even for me, but it sticks in my head. She moves as if blown by a secret wind, as if she were a leaf. She has a dancer’s body; maybe that explains it.
But no. Merely being a dancer doesn’t explain the way her hair floats and flutters as if blown by a breeze. Only…there are no open doors, no cracked windows, no fans whirring.
But her hair is definitely fluttering.
There’s no other way to put it, and even though I’m pretty loaded by this point, I know I’m not hallucinating.
Am I?
I stare at her, blinking, closing one eye and then the other, watching every motion she makes. And yes, her hair is definitely fluttering. The tips wave and blow from side to side; a strand drifts across her face and she brushes it absently back behind her ear. I can’t explain it, yet I can’t ignore the truth of what I’m seeing.
Apropos, I suppose.
I watch as she stands at the bar, counting out the register drawer, taking her hair out of its ponytail and shaking it to fall in glimmering black waves around her shoulders. Her hands peel bills from the stack in her hand in quick, sure motions that speak of years of practice. She’s standing still, but her hair is moving—most definitely moving. I’m watching her, mesmerized, and I can’t deny what I’m seeing. I peer surreptitiously around the bar. The entrance door is closed and locked, and the back door, visible through the double-hinged kitchen doors, is closed as well. There are no windows at all and no A/C. So where the fuck is the wind coming from?
There’s no way to ask her about it without sounding absolutely drunkenly idiotic so I keep quiet, but I can’t stop staring at her, can’t stop watching the gentle, subtle fluttering of her hair in the stillness and silence of the dimly lit bar.
I finish my drink and hand my credit card to Leila, who processes the bill. I sign the slip with a sloppy signature, adding a generous tip. Then I accept one last drink. My fourth? Fifth? I don’t even know; I’ve lost count, and I don’t really give a shit.
“Okay, so it’s like this,” I say. “A DPD patrol officer responds to a call from the MGM, they found a dead body in the parking garage. The responding officer shows up on the scene, takes one look, and calls for a detective. So I roll up, thinking it’ll be just another dead body with few or no leads. Easy enough, either you find evidence and make the collar, or you don’t, and it goes cold. Get a lot of both. Only, what I find when I get on scene is like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. It’s not a dead body, it’s…just bones. Charred bones, like very literally burnt to a goddamned crisp. Blackened almost to ashes. No weapon on the scene, and no cameras in that part of the garage. Nothing to go on. No way to even identify the body, I thought at first. But it turns out the vic was ex-military, and the teeth were intact enough to get an ID based on dental records. Poor dead fucker was a guy named Ben. So we have an ID on the vic, but that’s it. Because there’s no other evidence of any kind, except a pool of blood a few feet away, and four shell casings from a nine-millimeter pistol. Not much to go on. No eyewitnesses, no other calls that could be connected.”
“So what did you do?”
The room is wobbling a little as Leila shuts off the lights in the kitchen, locks the register drawer in the office, and sits down next to me with a plastic cup of Coke. She’s sitting pretty close to me, her shoulder brushing mine, her thigh nudging mine as she absently bounces her knee. I can smell rum in the Coke and on her breath. I’m aware of every point of contact between us. Her presence grounds me in some undefinable way, keeping my spinning world centered.
“I investigated the victim, Ben. Ex-Marine, nothing big on his military record, no commendations but no demerits either. Just an average guy. But then I find out that he’s got a girlfriend, a girl named Miriam. And she’s nowhere to be found. Further conversations with those who knew Be
n revealed that he had a mean streak, liked to knock Miriam around a good bit, and that Miriam in turn had a history with dating abusive assholes. That gives me motive for Miriam as the killer, but shit, I still got nothing whatsoever on cause of death.”
“I thought you said the body was burned?” Leila asks, then sips at her rum and Coke.
“Yeah, but how was the body burned? House fire? Car fire? Set on fire intentionally? None of those fit the evidence, not even setting the guy on fire with accelerant. Because there is no evidence. No physical clues of any kind. No weapon, no sign of struggle, no sign of fire anywhere else, no reports of someone on fire anywhere within, shit, hundreds of miles. Nothing. The garage itself is clean, too. No scorch marks on the ceiling or walls or the floor or any of the surrounding cars. Nothing.
“But wait, it gets weirder. The ME tells me that in order to burn a human body to the point this one was, so there’s nothing left but bones, and even those were toasted to ash—to burn a human body, flesh, muscles, skeleton, hair, clothes, personal effects, you need the kind of heat used to cremate a body. That’s fourteen, fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Insane heat. Flame throwers don’t give off that kind of heat. And even if it could have been a flame thrower—which isn’t something you can just go out and buy, even on the black market—or an accelerant like charcoal grill starter fluid or gasoline, a dude gets set on fire, he freaks out. It’s a slow, horrible way to die. I know, I’ve seen it. They run around screaming, roll on the ground, bump into cars, jump out of the fucking window, anything. But forensics told me the body died where it fell, the way the bones were arranged. It looked, according to the evidence, that the vic was somehow exposed to unnaturally extreme temperatures and was dead within seconds. But…that’s not possible. There is no weapon, no technology, nothing in nature short of the fucking sun that can produce that kind of heat. It’s just not possible.”
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