Ghostland (ghostland)

by Jory Strong

  A shaky breath escaped from Aisling when Zurael’s deadly talons dropped away from her neck. She took an unsteady step forward, kept her head down and tried not to broadcast her intentions.

  Javier backed away from the altar. The athame remained in his hand, as if, like Aubrey, he felt vulnerable without a hostage in front of him.

  Aisling blinked away tears and tried to appear as if her only focus were her dead pet. She was small and Javier was armed, confident not only in his personal strength but at having Zurael under his command. He never expected a physical attack, hadn’t thought to command Zurael to prevent anything but a cry for help.

  With each step Aisling reinforced the desire for Javier’s death, just as with each swing of the owl fetish in her workroom, she’d desperately wanted her assailant to perish.

  When she was close enough she lunged forward, and felt the slash of the athame blade across her palm as he instinctively defended himself. But if anything, the gift of her blood only ensured that his soul was delivered to those whose names she called upon in the spiritlands.

  As soon as she touched him, his eyes widened in disbelief. They filled with horror in the instant she felt his soul part from his body, cut through cleanly like a scythe through wheat.

  Raw emotion surged through Zurael as the entrapment spell dispersed. He reached Aisling before Javier’s corpse hit the floor, took her in his arms and held her as she gave in to the anguish of losing Aziel.

  “Aisling,” he whispered, eyes burning as he pressed kisses to her wet cheeks, her lips, to the places on her neck where his talons had pierced her skin.

  Fear for her, the fury and terror of being enslaved and forced to hurt her, to watch helplessly as she was hurt-all of it paled in comparison to the wrenching agony of witnessing her heartbreak and knowing he had to leave her.

  He had to take the tablet and return to his father’s kingdom. It wasn’t just his honor at stake, but a future with her.

  His chest grew tight with worry and fear. The task she’d accepted in the spiritlands wasn’t complete. Peter Germaine still lived.

  Against his chest her sobs gave way to tremors of pain, to shuddering gasps. He rubbed his cheek against her hair, told himself she was safe at the moment and he wouldn’t be gone long.

  “Aziel will come back,” Aisling whispered against his chest, repeating it several more times, each time with more certainty, as if saying it would make it so. She pulled away then, lifted a face ravaged by sorrow, and Zurael found her exquisitely beautiful, utterly compelling in her vulnerability.

  He brought her hands to his mouth, pressed a kiss to her palms in silent acknowledgment of what she’d done, saved them both. He understood now her silence since returning from the spiritlands after taking Felipe and Ilka there, could guess what had happened, what terrible price she’d paid for a gift she wouldn’t welcome.

  “I need to leave, Aisling,” he said, and was barely able to endure the pain slicing through his heart when tears formed in her eyes.

  She exhaled a ragged breath and gave a slight nod of understanding. “You want the tablet.”

  He leaned in, kissed the tears away. “I want you, Aisling, only you. If I hadn’t promised to return to the Djinn as soon as I gained possession of the tablet, then I wouldn’t leave you, not even for a moment.”

  His lips took possession of hers. His tongue sought hers, spoke of the things he hadn’t yet put into words, the emotions she elicited, what she’d come to mean to him.

  “I’ll return to you,” he said when the kiss ended.

  Every instinct fought leaving her. But honor and duty demanded it.

  He pulled away, turned to the altar where Aziel’s lifeless body lay and felt a renewed surge of fury. The sting of failure.

  Zurael gathered the tablet pieces. And when it was done, he kissed Aisling again, promised again, “I’ll return to you,” then gave up his physical form and went back to a place that was no longer home.

  Silence settled around Aisling, heavy and thick, like the numbness making it hard to think, to know what to do next. Slowly she became aware of the metallic smell of blood clinging to the air, the death stench of voided bodies.

  Elena. Aubrey. Javier.

  Aziel.

  The tears started flowing again. She wouldn’t leave him here with the others.

  Aisling picked him up, intending to escape the house. But as she stepped past Elena, she felt the phantom prick of Aziel’s claws in her shoulder, the warm imagined brush of his tail against her cheek, as if even in death he served as her guide-reminding her of the promise she’d made to Sinead in exchange for being led to where Nicholas was bound to the altar.

  It wouldn’t wait. As dangerous as it was to travel to the spiritlands in this house where magic had been raised by human sacrifice, Aisling knew the longer she waited, the more treacherous it would become to locate Elena and reunite her with Sinead. Even so, she might have delayed performing the task, convinced herself that with no one to stand guard over her physical shell, it would be better to wait, perhaps seek shelter with the Wainwright witches until Zurael returned and Peter Germaine was dead. But the heavy feel of the crystal amulet in her fetish pouch, the cold still radiating from it-so different than Zurael’s heat-made her feel as if the being it represented was aware of her plight and stood ready to protect her.

  She left the room where the corpses lay as they’d fallen. The house had the quiet, empty feel of abandonment.

  It was in the red zone. She wondered if that would protect her from being arrested or if she should step forward and claim to be a victim before the bodies were discovered. Elena’s driver could testify she hadn’t come willingly.

  Aisling pushed her worries aside for later, for after she’d paid her debt. She slipped into a small room, an office with a door that locked. She knelt on the floor without ceremony and fixed the name of her most powerful protector in her mind, though she didn’t summon him as she slipped into the gray world of the spiritlands.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE elaborately carved door to the House of the Spider opened. The same male Djinn wearing the simple white trousers of a student bowed low and stepped back, out of the way. “Welcome, Prince Zurael en Caym of the House of the Serpent. You honor us with your presence.”

  Zurael entered and found Malahel en Raum waiting for him. She was once again dressed in the gray concealing robes of a desert traveler, with little showing except for eyes so dark they appeared black.

  “You were successful, I see.”

  He gave her the tablet, anxious to be rid of it, anxious to leave. Despite all the arguments he’d fashioned and his plans for making Malahel en Raum and Iyar en Batrael his allies, he felt a desperate, urgent need to return to Aisling.

  “The human female who summoned you is dead?” Malahel asked.

  Even the question sent a spasm of pain through his heart. “No. She isn’t an enemy to the Djinn. I won’t allow her to be harmed.”

  Spider black eyes bore into him. “She’s enslaved you.”

  He stiffened, glanced away, and saw again the wall tapestries with their carnal depictions of intertwined humans, angels and Djinn. And rather than deny Malahel’s claim, he said, “I am not bound to her in the way you imply.”

  The arrival of Iyar en Batrael forestalled whatever Malahel might say. He stepped into the room from one of the many hallways leading off it, his golden eyes gleaming against his dark face.

  “Did the female have a chance to learn what was written on the tablet?”

  Every muscle in Zurael’s body tensed. In his mind’s eye he saw Aisling kneeling in the dirt after they’d left the occult shop, easily duplicating the Djinn text he’d written in the dirt. He saw her standing next to Javier’s altar, scanning the tablet, effortlessly committing it to memory.

  “She saw the tablet but killed the human who possessed it. She freed me from his demon spell and made no effort to stop me from returning home with it in my possession.”

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sp; Zurael met their eyes, let them read his determination, his intentions, reminded them with the force of his will that he was a prince of the House of the Serpent. “She isn’t an enemy to the Djinn. I won’t allow her to be harmed.”

  They offered him nothing. Neither alliance nor open disagreement, and he didn’t linger.

  Aisling was alone. Unprotected. Physically weakened and suffering emotionally over the loss of Aziel.

  Zurael sought out The Prince. But when his father wouldn’t grant him an audience, he turned away from his father’s house and hurried toward the sigil-covered gate that led to the world once belonging to the Djinn.

  Few could pass through it without The Prince’s permission. Zurael would have preferred to gain it, to warn his father that he would lose a son if he sent an assassin to Aisling.

  Miizan en Rumjal, his father’s advisor, stood at the gate. He wore the scorpion of his house on his neck, though in the Djinn’s prison kingdom it wasn’t necessary.

  “The Prince sent me,” Miizan said. “I am to remind you that his words are still law here and he hasn’t changed the ones he spoke to you last. Unless summoned, you may leave the Kingdom of the Djinn only once.

  “He gave me no further instructions, but I will issue a warning. The House of the Scorpion is aware of your return. We are aware of the threat posed by the female who summoned you. We know she still lives and you wish her to remain alive. None from my house has yet been sent to her. But if you break The Prince’s law and return to her, we will finish what you did not.”

  Miizan glanced at the gate, then transported away without saying anything more, leaving the pathway back to Aisling unguarded.

  Zurael wanted to rage. He wanted to gather the sand around him in a seething mass and roar through the desert. The raw helplessness and fury filling him equaled what he’d felt when he was trapped and bound by Javier’s spell.

  Aisling. He ached for her, feared for her. Hated being away from her.

  Zurael turned from the gate. Fresh determination surged through him. He would force his way in to see his father if necessary.

  A swirl of air preceded the energy signature that was Irial. The Raven prince took form. His teeth flashed white in a savage smile. Green eyes burned with intensity. “So the game plays out. A prince of Serpents becomes the pawn to be sacrificed for a child of mud. I’d find the situation more amusing if I didn’t suspect a similar fate waited for me.”

  AISLING felt changed, different. Whether it was gaining her birthright on her last visit or the culmination of her experiences since being brought to Oakland, she didn’t know. But as the spirit winds swirled around her in greeting, whispered to her, she felt a confidence she’d never experienced before, and knew that as long as Elena hadn’t entered one of the places of power in the spiritlands, then she could easily find her.

  But it wasn’t Elena’s name Aisling spoke. It was Aziel’s. She dared what she wouldn’t have before, and the gray nothingness parted to reveal a man.

  Confusion crowded in with her first glimpse of him. He was Irial and yet he wasn’t. Instead of a stylized raven tattooed on his cheek, black wings and outstretched claws spread across his chest. And unlike the demon image she’d seen when she summoned Irial, Aziel was naked save for sheer trousers like the ones Zurael appeared in when Javier’s spell forced him to take a form.

  Understanding dawned. “You’re Djinn,” she said, feeling awkward, strangely shy now that Aziel was a man.

  Aziel smiled and it flooded her with warmth and familiar comfort. He closed the distance between them and took her face in his hands, pressed a kiss to her forehead-touched her in the spiritlands, where few ever did.

  His thumbs brushed away tears she didn’t realize were falling. “You’ve always loved me well, Aisling. And because of you there’s hope for others of my kind. A final lesson.”

  He stepped back. In the blink of an eye a robed stranger stood where Aziel had been, a black-haired man with sharp, unfamiliar features. She tried to see him as she’d seen the dead circling Felipe and Ilka, expected to see him as a pure spirit, transparent and nearly formless, perhaps bound by silken threads to unseen beings. Instead she saw a knotted mass, two entities tangled together so thoroughly their physical forms fluctuated between robed stranger and Djinn image.

  “The Djinn are the children of Earth,” Aziel said. “We existed long before the alien god arrived with his army of angels. He thought to enslave us, to give us over to his children of mud as familiars. I killed the sorcerer who bound me and now our spirits are joined. This is what it means to become ifrit. It is a Djinn’s worst nightmare, what we fear even more than being bound, to become ifrit, soul-tainted, to have our names no longer spoken, to know we will never step foot in the kingdom carved out deep in the spiritlands where the Djinn wait for a chance to reclaim what was once ours.

  “In the beginning, as humans mark it, the alien god tried to make an example of one of us. He forced The Prince into the image both Zurael and Irial have shown you, then named him demon. We were the first to be called by that name, but the beings to come after, the ones created by the children of the mud, they are the true demons.”

  “And my father?”

  Aziel leaned in and pressed another kiss to her forehead. A love that had existed from her earliest memory flowed down the bond they shared, came with his thoughts. Elena waits. I’ll see her to Sinead. Leave this place. And Aisling was given no choice as the spirit winds swept in.

  She rose from where she knelt in the small locked office, still cradling what had been Aziel but no longer was. The sight of the ferret brought a fresh wave of sadness, not for his death this time, but for his loss from her life.

  A final lesson.

  He wouldn’t come to her again.

  Aisling swallowed hard. She wondered if Zurael would return-or if once he was among his own kind, free from the horror of being bound by Javier, he would decide against coming back.

  Child of mud. He’d called her that more than once. He’d made no secret of what he thought about humans.

  Not all humans, a small internal voice whispered in her mind.

  She felt his absence acutely. Had expected him to be back by now.

  Aisling unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway. Movement had her turning. Her breath caught in fear when she saw Elena’s driver come out of the room at the end of the hall. He was crossing himself, mumbling to himself, his fingers tight around a short club.

  His eyes widened when he saw her. He stopped and took a step backward then quickly recovered. “I knew Elena was bad news the first time I drove her. You look like you’ve lived through a nightmare, but that’s not surprising. The red zone is the devil’s playground.”

  The driver hurried toward her. “Time to get out of here,” he said, and Aisling relaxed, felt almost faint with relief.

  At the car he opened the door for her. But before she could get in, pain screamed through her as the club struck her head. Blackness overtook her before she could speak a name on the spirit winds.

  ZURAEL let a prince’s training serve him. Irial might enjoy baiting him, but his arrival at the gate wouldn’t be for that sole purpose.

  “Did you know she summoned me?” Irial asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I would have killed her. I tried to get to her but her circle held.”

  “Aisling told me as much. She told me you chose to help her.”

  “Yes.” Irial cocked his head. This time his smile was masculine and appreciative. “She is alluring. In more ways than one. I can see how you came to ignore my advice. You continued to couple with the little shamaness. You shared breath and spirit. Now she’s like a potent drug coursing through your bloodstream and commanding your cock. And if I’m correct, she’ll soon cost you a kingdom. But you were meant to be enslaved by her. And what we stand to gain-Did she tell you her pet showed himself to me?”

  At the mention of the ferret, Zurael gave up trying to parse through Irial’s oth
er words. A fist tightened on his heart at Aisling’s loss and her grief. “She told me you saw Aziel.”

  “Is that the name you know him by?”

  Zurael stilled. “You know him by another?”

  “I know him for what he is.” Irial moved closer, as if afraid to speak the word too loudly. “Ifrit.”

  Cold fear blossomed in Zurael’s chest. Horror made worse by having so recently been bound to Javier. “You’re sure?”

  Irial stroked the stylized raven on his cheek. “I’m sure. It’s the work of my house to keep the books bearing the names of those who’ve been lost, to grieve over each Djinn whose spirit we will never guide back for rebirth. He was once of my house, that much I know. And if I were to guess? For some, a father’s love never dies.”

  Zurael heard the ring of truth in Irial’s words, remembered feeling like he was ensnared, caught in a spider’s web with Aisling, by powerful, unseen forces. “You see your father’s hand in this?”

  “Not only his hand, but The Prince’s and Malahel’s.”

  Unbidden, Zurael saw himself standing in the Hall of History with The Prince, the two of them in front of the mural of Jetrel-the son whose loss was a deep scar on his father’s heart. “What game do they play?”

  Irial laughed. “A good question. And since I am as much a pawn as you, I’ll make the move expected of me. Did you know there is a way for the Djinn to willingly bind themselves to a human? To join souls so that both are equally enslaved and neither becomes the other’s familiar?”

  Zurael’s heart beat so loudly that the only words he could form in the midst of its roar were “Tell me.”

  “Your desperation doesn’t bode well for my own chances of avoiding an entanglement. If you do this thing, Zurael, I doubt you’ll be able to pass through the gate and return to this place. It will cost you a kingdom. Do you really want the shamaness enough to pay such a high price?”

  “Yes.”

  Irial touched the stylized raven on his cheek again, one that took on significance as he seldom wore it, just as Zurael rarely displayed the mark of his house and the nature of his spirit when he was in the Kingdom of the Djinn. There was no need to. Its appearance was optional-unlike when he was in the world now held by humans.