Words That Bind

by Ash Krafton

  She had been completely jarred out of the dreamy moment. “What?”

  “Off the bed. It must be in the mattress.” He pulled up the fitted sheet, shooing her.

  She scrambled off the other side of the bed, grabbing a pillow. “Don’t destroy my mattress. Excuse me.”

  Wearing a scowl, she slid off the bed and pattered past him, clutching the pillow to her chest.

  That itch. It followed her, trailed behind her like a glow.

  Dumbfounded, he followed her out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom. Standing in the doorway, he pressed the door open and watched her, slowly filling with a cold realization. Couldn’t be. What damnation had he deserved—

  “What?” She perched on the toilet, still holding the pillow. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen anyone pee before.”

  He swallowed, unwilling to concede to the truth. “Come here.”

  “I’m a little busy.”

  “Then hurry.” His voice squeezed out around a swelling of pain in his throat.

  “Out!” She tossed the pillow at him.

  It thumped into his chest, knocking him back a step. He retreated, unable to take his eyes from her face. He pulled the door shut and sank back against the opposite wall, feeling despair fill him like water in a well.

  A flush sounded, the open and close of the sliding closet door. She reappeared, adjusting the knot on her bathrobe belt.

  He leaned against the wall, watching. Waiting. He was no longer distracted. Now, he was fully focused on that itch, that glow, that bite of almost-pain.

  And it was her.

  He scrutinized her, trying to see past her outsides, the outsides that had lured him and tempted him. Her outsides meant very little to him at the moment. “I don’t believe this.”

  Her pretty mouth twisted in a scowl. “Is my bed still in one piece?”

  He shook his head, slowly, trying to muddle through a patch of foggy thought. “I don’t believe it. Water is in the jug, yet we’re wandering around with parched lips.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He pressed his palm flat against her chest, amazed that there was a heartbeat. She was human, he knew it. But—

  That wasn’t all.

  Helpless tears welled in his eyes, blurring her image. “All this time. It’s you.”

  “What?” Her voice was gentle, concerned. Was it an attempt at genuine comfort? Was it a psychoanalytic ruse? How could something so wretched sound so sweet?

  Hollowed, her voice came to him from a long way off. “What’s wrong, Burnsie?”

  “You.” He dropped his hand reluctantly. He paced backwards, every nerve in his body protesting and wailing a song of utter black despair. Millennia of torment, eons of searching, only to find his path end here at her pretty feet.

  “My talisman. Not a ring.” He could deny it no longer. It was time to lay things bare between them. “It’s you.”

  Chapter 21

  Tamarinda’s eyes were wide as she twisted her head toward him, perhaps unsure she heard right. “Your...talisman?”

  He crossed his arms, hugging his ribs, and turned to walk back into the bedroom. He knelt on the bed, knowing with frightening certainty that he was right. “There is something about me I haven’t told you.”

  “I’ve suspected.” If she tried not to sound sarcastic, she failed. She remained in the doorway, holding her robe shut at her throat.

  She was shutting down against him. He knew it. Even her posture, angled toward the hallway behind her, suggested she was ready to run.

  And he hadn’t even begun to tell her why she should be doing exactly that.

  He rubbed his palms down his thighs, unnaturally cold. “I am unaligned. Faithless. Neither good nor evil.”

  She jerked her shoulders in an abrupt shrug. “Yes. So?”

  He stared down at his hands, unable to look at her. “I am the only one.”

  “Who’s neutral?”

  He nodded. It stirred a sense of cowardice inside him, something he thought he’d dampened long ago. “Long ago, when the sands of your beaches still stood as towers of stone, there was a great meeting of all djinni. They called it the Great Choice. When Islam became widespread, the djinni decided that we could ignore it no longer. Half decided to accept God.”

  He rubbed his mouth, drumming his fingers against his lower lip. She stood so still, her expression so blank. Was she listening? Was she even breathing? “The other half...didn’t. They aligned themselves to more diabolical powers. Ifriti.”

  She frowned when he said the word ifriti. Unaligned as he was, he wanted to frown, too. The word itself had a bitter flavor, ugly enough to scald the tongue. Their selfishness and their lack of restraint went against the very values he held deep at heart, values his mother had instilled in him at an early age.

  She frowned because she most likely didn’t understand the word. He frowned because he knew it all too well.

  “So?” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “How did you avoid choosing?”

  He hung his head again, unable to meet her gaze. “I did not attend the council. I was...occupied.”

  “With some chick, no doubt.” She snorted, a most unladylike sound, rolling her eyes like an adolescent.

  This was not the time for pettiness. He quelled her with a stern look. “Solomon died before I’d fulfilled my service to him. I’d been bound, with many others, to his ring. His talisman. When he died, I alone remained bound. The council did not permit me to attend.”

  “But why not? You’re djinni. If all the others—”

  “What part of ‘The Great Choice’ do you not understand?” Old anger, sluggish and futile, bubbled up through the layers of his core, resurfacing, sullen and scorching. Hot emotion. He fisted his hands. “I could not attend because I could not choose. My will is not my own.”

  He pulled his knees to his chest and huddled. “As long as the talisman exists, I am bound.”

  She sat beside him, her slight weight barely shifting the bed beneath them. Her touch on his arm was as gentle as her voice. “Bound?”

  “Yes.” The gentleness should have eased his anguish, but the depth and the solidity of his despair was too great to dispel with a single touch or a kind tone. Shame had a way of turning a man’s entire being to stone. He dropped his forehead and hid his face. “I am still a slave.”

  “All this time?”

  “All this time.” He shrugged away from her touch and rolled off the bed onto his feet. The movement was quicksilver and fluid. Inhuman.

  She recoiled and tightened her arms around her torso. She still thought of him as a man, when he was anything but.

  Why hide it? He had already spoken his deepest shame. There was nothing left of consequence to hide, least of all his ability to move like smoke.

  “I spent the better of the last three millennia looking for that talisman. Looking for the chance to break my servitude. I tracked that infernal ring around the world countless times. Every time I would get close, it would vanish and reappear on a different continent, and I’d have to start all over. I didn’t know it had become a person.” He rubbed his face in his hands and paced away. “I have come so close to madness. Ironic that, now, my talisman specializes in the madness of others.”

  “How can that be? I’m a person, not some magic charm.”

  “Not any old magic charm.” How could she trivialize this? An educated woman, a student of the so-called human condition. It curdled his nerves to hear such triteness. “You are the Ring of Solomon. My talisman. My prison. My warden. My treasure. My greatest fear.”

  She scooted away, hands held out in front to ward him off. “Stop it. Just—stop. This is ridiculous.”

  “This is not ridiculous. It’s not a game, a trinket. You are the vice grip on my destiny. You.” He cast a baleful glare at his jacket and the old ring hidden inside its pocket. “Not some misshapen chunk of rust.”

  “Wait. That ring.” She pointed at his jacket,
still lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. “You thought that was your talisman? Why didn’t you just ask for it? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because people kill for that kind of power.”

  She shook her head, hair tumbling into her widened eyes. “Not me—”

  “Because you had no idea that you wanted it.”

  “I don’t.”

  Her voice had an odd quality, like silver striking stone. It rang through him, pure and truthful. Any other time, it would have been enough.

  “No. You didn’t.” He tried to mimic her gentle tone. And failed. It just came out on the live edge of everything he’d pent up for so damnably long. Hot emotions. And in their wake, a chilly shadow that wound its way throughout him, binding him tighter than any geas.

  Fear.

  Never in his wildest imaginings did he expect to feel the cold grip of fear, here in her presence. “But you know now. The question is…what are you going to do?”

  “My God.” She let her head sink into her hands, hunching over. “Why me?”

  He crouched next to her, lifting her chin. Would he see something, now that he knew what she was? Would there be a truth etched into the curves and lines of her face, some hard evidence he’d earlier overlooked? Something he could berate and punish himself for having ignored?

  He’d been so hell-bent on pursuing her for more than just his talisman. What new wretchedness had his impulsive nature dragged him into now?

  “Why, indeed?” He stroked her jaw with his thumb, unable to keep from caressing her. “Why not some bumbling old archaeologist, one I could scare into giving up the ring? Why not some scum bag of a thief, one I could trick into making the forbidden wish just so that I could justifiably destroy him? But it’s you. I can’t trick you out of your soul any more than I can kill you.”

  She craned her head away from him, clearly uncomfortable with his words. “Forbidden wish? Destroy?”

  He shrugged. “By nature I lead a rather violent existence.”

  She tapped her foot, gaze unfocused, looking deep in thought. “Wait. This is a good thing, isn’t it? You know I wouldn’t turn on you.”

  “It’s not you I have to worry about. You’re a talisman.” He lifted her chin again, holding it firmly so she couldn’t look away. “And a talisman can be used.”

  “So that’s it?” Jerking her head, she backed out of his grip. “I’m not real?”

  “You’re as real as anyone else.” Bitterness made his words sharp. Typical human, wasn’t she? She had her will, her freedom intact, and yet she complained. People who enjoyed freedom seldom knew what it was like to live without it.

  “But I’m not,” she said. “I don’t feel anything. I know emotion is real or else I couldn’t have studied it. But I don’t feel anything, and I can’t even get mad about it.”

  He chuffed out a derisive breath. “That’s a pity. You’re really missing out.”

  “Yes, I am. What bullshit this is. I’m a talisman? Great. All this time I thought I was a dysfunctional jerk who covered up her own inability to cope with emotion by fixing those who had no control over their own.”

  She’d never spoken so forcefully before. He gaped at her when she shoved off the bed and stomped an angry line to the door before spinning on her heel.

  “You want to know what my life is like?” She rewrapped her robe, cinching the sash tighter. “I live in a snow globe. I spent my life trapped behind glass, watching the world go through things I’d never experience. You want to know the real irony? Even the snow is fake. It swirls around with every shake and I don’t feel it.”

  “Glass breaks, you know.” Funny she would make such a comparison. Yet another parallel between their lives. Despite the sinkhole that had opened somewhere above his heart, he wanted to smile at her choice of words. This weight, however, was too heavy to allow it. “Give it a good whack and it shatters.”

  “And what about this talisman thing? Can it break? Can it release me? I mean, the me I’m supposed to be?”

  Burns furrowed his brow, forcibly dampening the light in his eyes. “Do you even know who that me is?”

  “I’m human,” she said. “You said it yourself. This talisman must be whatever is keeping me from being real.”

  “Talismans are not ordinary things.” He regretted his sharp tone, but she had to be warned. This woman had no idea of the forces that ruled him from the moment Solomon’s angel appeared, cuffs in hand. “You can’t think of it as a separate entity that can be removed.”

  She looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. “Or destroyed?”

  He sucked a whistling breath. Flames sprouted along his ears, pricking across his skin, and he raised his hands to smooth them out. “Talismans should not be destroyed. The consequences—”

  “Consequences be damned, Burns.” She thumped her fist against her open hand with a smack. “I want to be free. I want to feel something. I want to look into your eyes as we make love and feel a connection. I see something in your eyes. I hear it in your voice, that tremor that makes it sound like so much more than just words. I know you feel something for me.”

  He looked away and crossed his arms. “You are an attractive woman who is adventurous and a good sport with, hopefully, a high tolerance for exertion. I appreciate your body. Nothing more.”

  “You love me, Burnsie.” Her eyes, so wide, so dark, so pleading.

  It was difficult not to respond to that plea. Scratching his head, he made his voice gruff. “You wish.”

  “No.” Tamarinda walked to the window and pushed the curtain aside. Moonlight, silver and shallow, glinted off the windows of nearby buildings, reflections of a reflection, a watered down, third-hand version of the sun’s brilliance. “What I wish for is to be free.”

  “Well, join the club, mortal.”

  She turned sharply to him, her plea whittling into demand. “Quit making jokes.”

  “I’m not.” He sat on the bed again, staring at the floor. Three thousand years, he’d lived. In all that time, he’d never had a more difficult conversation with someone. Perhaps because he never had planned ahead for it. “You wish to be free? Oh, how easy life would be for all of us if we could gain our freedom with a simple wish.”

  “I have to have hope.”

  “There is none.” He gritted his teeth. “You can’t wish for freedom. You have to fight for it.”

  “Then I guess I fight for it.” She dropped her hand, and the curtains fell back into place. “I just want to know one thing. Are you on my side?”

  On her side.

  His talisman, the chains that had bound him for over two thousand years. Did he have a choice?

  Burns stared down at his hands.

  He just didn’t know.

  Chapter 22

  Tam didn’t want him to stay the night.

  It wasn’t merely the fact that the intense desire she’d experienced had been so thoroughly doused beyond the point of rekindling. That desire was unlike anything she’d ever felt before. It was heat, it was pressure, it was longing to the point of ache. The physical disappointment of the aftermath would have been enough for her to turn him away.

  She had allowed him to carry her to bed and there hadn’t been a single thought of protest, not a drop of remorse or regret. She wanted to—

  She’d really wanted to. And he just flipped a switch on her and stalled the whole thing. It was tough, physically and mentally, to come down from that peak.

  But that wasn’t why she wanted to be alone. It had been what he didn’t say.

  When she asked him if he was on her side, he said nothing. That meant one thing.

  No.

  She’d dressed and showed him out, without as much as a goodbye. Why bother? A goodbye at that moment would have carried so much more than a simple parting of ways. Bad enough the unspoken no carried with it an impossible overcasting of betrayal.

  That betrayal was wounding, even for someone who didn’t have real feelings to get hurt.
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br />   He’d left without protest, without a single flicker of regret. He simply skulked past on his way out. Not a wink, not a look, not a word. Just more nothing. And it was all too much.

  She crawled into bed and stared at the shadows on the ceiling, trying not to think about the scent of his skin, which lingered on the pillow. It laced every breath she took. He was still there.

  Finally, she sat up and turned on the lamp. Enough was enough. There was only one way to get through the night. She had to approach the whole mess in a logical Kerish kind of way, the way she’d handled every other event in her life. No emotions. Facts only.

  He was a genie. Bound to a talisman, a slave to its magic. Being a slave was an undesirable condition. It had been his personal hell for several thousand years.

  She was his talisman. She was his living hell. She represented everything that was abhorrent to him. He had no reason to be on her side for anything.

  She flipped her pillow over and flopped back down onto it. All that made her sound as violently negative as Beth sometimes did. Yet, she knew it was impossible to resist. There was no way to not approach it emotionally. Burns was the epitome of emotion and everything he said, every gesture, every expression, was ladened with feeling. And whenever she was with him, she was ladened with it, too.

  If she kept thinking about their quandary, it would spiral, bigger and bigger and completely out of control.

  That was definitely not the Kerish way.

  How could this have ever gotten as far as it did? How could it even be possible? A magic charm? Really? That’s why she’d lived her entire life like a paper doll? Flat and two-dimensional—

  Except when he was near.

  So. She scrubbed her face with her hands. She and he. Woman and man. Talisman and genie. Forever and intrinsically bound together.

  The realization didn’t frighten her. She always knew she was odd, somewhat off-center, even if she didn’t understand where center was. Talisman or not, she was still who she’d always been. She was intrigued by him, right from the start; she enjoyed his company, his grandiose way of proving his points, and she cared for his feelings. She wanted him to be happy and would do whatever she could to help him get there. And lately, she had been falling in love with him.