He sat by my side on the sofa. “Are you hungry? There should be food in the fridge. Also if you’d like to shower and change, we have clean clothes in the back.”
“No. I’m fine.” I was too nervous to hold anything in my stomach and too worried to postpone this conversation any longer. “Please, don’t say I told you so.” My phone in my back pocket poked me uncomfortably. I took it out and set it on the side table.
“I told you so.” Faris smiled his devilishly handsome grin. I mock-punched him on the shoulder.
“I didn’t want to believe she would come back.” I shook my head. “I guess that was just wishful thinking. But it’s just never made sense to me. None of it. Not her arrangement with Zet or how we fit into whatever scheme they’d concocted.”
“I’ve been giving that a lot of thought.” He focused on something over my shoulder as his expression grew pensive.
My eyes swiveled around the apartment in a demonstrative fashion. “Yeah, apparently you have. What’s with this place? And you said there are others?”
“Yes. I did fear something like this would happen.”
“So clearly she found some crooked person to do her dirty work.”
“Yes, it’s the only logical explanation. Money and unscrupulous people are a bad combination.”
“Well, then maybe we can go to the police. Whoever she’s found, they’re simply human. They can be put in jail.”
Faris raised his eyebrows and gave me an “are you serious?” look.
“Sorry. Yeah, I guess that wouldn’t work. Akeelah would just erase all the evidence.” I felt the weight of helplessness growing heavier and heavier. We would never get the police to believe us, even if Faris used his own magic to put the evidence back. The cops would get so confused, they’d spend the whole time scratching their heads.
“So what do we do?” My question sounded tired and hopeless.
“Our best bet,” Faris spoke cautiously, “is to stay away and hide our identities.”
“For how long?”
“Well . . . indefinitely.”
“You mean we should become permanent fugitives?” I found myself shifting from hopeless to indignant. Faris’s expression remained serious in the face of my question, which gave me the answer I didn’t want to hear. “So we never go back to New Orleans, and I never use my real name and I never see my friends again and Dad and . . .”
“We could arrange for your dad to come with us. We would have to explain everything, of course. He might eventually understand.” With every word, Faris’s voice grew more animated. “You love to travel. We could do that. We could live in a different city every year. You could learn the language and choose a new name to suit the location. I would make sure you don’t ever miss New Orleans. You could . . . make new friends. Maybe call Maven and Abby every once in a while.” He said this last part averting his eyes and much less enthusiastically.
“You can’t be serious!” What he was suggesting meant giving up my entire life.
“I have a feeling Akeelah won’t relent.” The statement rang as clear and true as a brand new bell.
“There has to be something else we can do.” I rifled through my thoughts, but none of them looked like viable options. They all had the blunt shape of obstacles and impossibilities.
“Maybe you should sleep on it,” Faris suggested. “It might not seem so bad once you get used to the idea. We could become invisible to Akeelah within the folds of any city you’d like. New York, Paris, Barcelona, London. You name the place.”
I couldn’t understand why he was trying to sound so upbeat about it. Did he realize what he was asking me to give up?
“I would lose everything,” I said in a whisper.
“We would still have each other, and I could . . . finally tell you how I feel about you. And maybe we could get—”
I feared what his next words might be. If he was about to hint at a proposal, I wasn’t ready for that. I hurried to interrupt. “But what if she found us afterward? Then she could do whatever she wanted and there’d be nothing we could do to stop her because you would be human.”
“I would make it extremely difficult for her to find us.”
“Extremely difficult, but not impossible. One little mistake and it could all be over.”
Faris’s mood changed abruptly to something dark. He tried to disguise it, but I knew him well and could still tell the difference. Behind his gaze, I could sense something growing, something that I couldn’t decipher, something that scared me.
“What do you suggest we do then?” he asked. The question was handed over as if on a platter, a nasty-looking offering, unpalatable and ill-intentioned. He knew his suggestion was the most logical, if not the only feasible one. What else could I say? What else was there to do?
“I—I don’t know,” I said.
“As I said before, maybe you should sleep on it. We don’t have to decide this right now.” He spoke in a clipped manner now. He was angry. He thought I was being unreasonable and he was at the end of his patience.
“Can’t we fight back somehow?” I pushed the words forward, struggling for air.
Faris stood and walked behind an armchair across the room. He placed both hands on the headrest and looked down on me. Suddenly he felt miles away, the armchair a mountain range separating us.
“Please take some time to think it over.” He put a lot of emphasis on the word “please,” the way a father might when talking to his cross five-year-old. “Maybe in the morning you’ll have a better idea than mine. Or maybe you’ll come to terms with what I’m suggesting.”
“Damn it, Faris! I don’t need to do that,” I burst out, letting my temper get the best of me. “You’re asking me to give up my life. And if I do, who’s to say Akeelah won’t go after Maven or Abby once we disappear? She’s just as crazy as your brother. No, she’s worse. We can’t all leave everything behind.”
“I suppose she could try to do that, but I don’t think she will. It wouldn’t serve her purpose. She wants to get to me.”
I remembered vividly how Akeelah had tried to persuade Faris to join her cause. When he refused, she tried to use her magic to force him, but her powers were useless against him. She’d been able to control Zet, so being unable to control his brother had puzzled her terribly.
Why her magic hadn’t worked was unclear even to Faris. His best guess was that his immunity had something to do with the human-to-Djinn transformation process. One hypothesis was that maybe the curse the magi had used on him was unlike the one used on Zet. On purpose or by accident, their curses could have been different. Another hypothesis was that maybe genetic make-up or personality played a role in the traits of the resulting Djinn. He and his brother were like water and oil, so maybe their traits as Djinn depended on who they’d been as humans. Whatever the reason, the brothers’ abilities as Djinn were not the same. Faris was immune to Akeelah’s magic, while Zet was not. Zet could hurt humans, and Faris couldn’t. He had tried, at my insistence. We experimented with bruising my pinky, but he’d been unable to even do that.
It was all very confusing. None of it made sense, especially the fact that Faris didn’t think Akeelah would hurt my friends to get what she wanted. He, out of anybody, knew the evil creature was capable of anything.
I stared in disbelief. “Already, she almost got Dad killed. I realize she’s just trying to get to you, but . . . she’s doing it through me.” I was again caught in the middle of two dueling Djinn, and the realization froze my insides. “When the same plan failed for Zet, he went after Maven. What makes you think Akeelah won’t do the same?”
Faris threw his hands up in the air. “Wishful thinking, I guess.”
“I think I already proved that wishful thinking doesn’t work. Akeelah’s back, even though I’ve tried to wish her out of existence plenty of times.”
“You’re right.” Faris began tracing a path on the taupe carpet. Back and forth he walked, staring at the tips of his polished shoes, han
ds in his pockets.
I asked again. “Isn’t there any way we can fight back?”
“That would only put you in further danger.” He stopped and stood in that rigid way that was so unnerving. It made me think of those movies where they make a character sit still in one place, while the rest of the world keeps moving around them at an accelerated pace.
“They got too close this time, Marielle.” Only his mouth moved while the rest of his body remained a still frame. “If I had been one millisecond slower, if I had hesitated in any way, you would have been shot. And if you . . . if she . . . I don’t know what I would do. This is my fault. There really is only one solution.”
My heart tightened with apprehension. His tone had acquired a frightening quality I didn’t like in the least. I stood, walked up to him and, lifting his chin, forced our eyes to meet.
“We’re in this together. Okay?”
Again. That heavy sadness in his eyes. It made my breath catch and my heart shrink.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“It’s me she wants.”
My insides turned to stone as realization washed over me. “No!” I exclaimed.
“It’s selfish to ask you to come away with me and abandon everything you know.”
I shook my head. “No no no!” Why hadn’t I foreseen he would go there?
“Please, don’t think I asked you out of cowardice.” He caressed the side of my face. “I didn’t. It’s only selfishness. To be with you, to be happy forever at your side. But I seem to have forgotten that happiness has never been in the stars for me.” He smiled a phantom smile. “I know what I must do.”
My lungs seized, then pumped and pumped, squeezing air out as soon as it made it in. I tried to say “no” again to stop him from uttering his next words, but only a small gasp came out.
This isn’t happening.
I never imagined he would take my refusal to go with him and turn it into this.
It was wrong. All wrong.
Abruptly, Faris became two inches taller, his spine stretching to capacity. He spoke with a clear, determined voice.
“I will go to her.”
9
Akeelah
Andy worked, hunched over a long wooden table. It took up the entire length of the wall opposite his twin size bed. Two lamps illuminated the otherwise gloomy room. The first on a small bedside table. The other, a long-arm, fluorescent one, right above the work area.
A radio played, strident sounds accompanied by a deep, guttural voice that sang in German. Andy’s head bobbed in time with the beat, his fingers moving dexterously, snipping cables and straps.
Akeelah observed, still in The Blink, a place unknown to humans, a parallel, immaterial dimension occupied only by her kind.
Her worthless kind.
Every time she thought about the hordes of complaisant Djinn, who saw nothing wrong with the Creator’s arrangement, fury invaded her. Why should Dross be given more when they were so insignificant? And why did her kind not rebel against the injustice? She had tried countless times, millennia after millennia, to rouse them, to make them see. They had the power to change things. Humans were worthless creatures who they’d have no trouble overtaking, if only they joined forces and figured out a way.
Most dismissed her as an abhorrent creature who didn’t know her place and went back to their insignificant existences, wandering their ephemeral wastelands and toying with their human pets when boredom struck them. The few that agreed with her didn’t manage to keep their focus long enough to do anything productive. They soon got distracted with a new pet, the shade of a flower, the roar of high tide in a wild ocean. The physical world overwhelmed them. Most—if not all—became easily distracted, awed by the most irrelevant and stupid things. This complacency, she suspected, was perhaps a trait that allowed her kind to cope with immortality.
Worthless!
That’s what they were. Undeserving of their talents, the ease to travel between realms, to take any shape, to fly, and to wield magic in the physical world. It was only her, Akeelah, who deserved these virtues, only she who possessed a clear mind to see the errors in the Creator’s design. Like Lucifer, she understood things could change, and change to her advantage and exaltation.
Humans would soon bow down to her, and they would realize they were not the Creator’s favorites, as they seemed to think. They would find out that, unlike their Creator, the laws of nature had no favorites, that the world revolved at its own pace, undisturbed and unattended, and that things were as they’ve always been.
They would be reminded that the fittest, the fiercest, always take the prize.
By the mere desire to do so, Akeelah transported herself to the physical realm. She remained insubstantial, her being intangible, yet powerful.
Andy’s back straightened, and he shook himself. Unlike Frank, he was one of those humans who, at some level, could sense a Djinn’s presence.
From the dust, the light, the air, Akeelah fashioned herself a body. It was the same body she’d chosen the very first time she gave her essence limbs, a torso and a head. Black skin, long legs, white hair down to her knees, a prominent chin and nose.
Pliers in hand, Andy turned. He didn’t startle. He simply smiled, showing his yellowed teeth.
“Dark Lady,” he said, looking up reverently.
Akeelah walked to his table and looked down at his work.
“He got in the way of my bullet,” Andy said, resuming his task. “Then they just puffed.”
“I know. Everything is as I intend it.”
She watched as Andy secured a small clock to two rectangular objects the size of gold bars. They had the letter “C” and the number “4” written on them. The clock had a small screen and three buttons. Different colored cables sprung from the bottom. Andy stuck their speared tips into the thick blocks.
“They’re gone for now,” Akeelah said, “but they will return. You are doing very well.”
Andy beamed at the praise.
“What do you have in mind next, my pet?” Akeelah asked.
Andy’s lazy eye shone with pleasure. “Fireworks,” he said. “Fireworks in a big boat.”
10
Marielle
I would forever hate Quebec, its name another word for pain.
This can’t be happening. It can’t be!
The next morning, I was still in denial. “Don’t you understand? I take it back,” I said for the nth time. “Everything I told you, I take it back. I’ll go with you wherever you want to go.”
After a full night of arguing, pleading, reasoning, I was at it again. I’d hoped “sleeping on it” would help him change his mind, but he was still bent on going to Akeelah.
My eyes felt hot and dry from crying all night, hoping to soften Faris’s stubborn stance. But it had been in vain, and now there were no more tears, just the sound of my splintering voice, which was doing nothing to change his mind.
Now, back at the storage unit where we appeared last night, Faris pressed a button by the side of the garage door. The door lowered like a wooden sheet, squeezing Quebec’s Monday morning down toward the ground, its rectangular brightness growing smaller and smaller until it flattened into nothing with a decisive thunk.
Faris walked to my side and gave me the same sullen eyes he’d been wearing since last night. “Ready?”
“No.” I leaned against the car. “Why didn’t we just leave from the apartment?” I hadn’t thought to ask this before. I’d been too busy pleading my head off to think of anything else. “If you’re just going to waltz right into her trap, why do we need to take all these precautions?” If crying and begging didn’t work, maybe sarcasm would.
“It took a great amount of human effort to set up all the safe houses. I think the exact location of this particular one wasn’t compromised, so it could still be used in the future, if needed.” He leaned against the car next to me.
We stared at a scuffed wall in front of us. His arm s
tretched alongside mine. Tentatively, his fingers brushed the back of my hand. I pulled away and crossed my arms over my new halter top and stared at its embroidered front. I had found it among the clothes Faris had stashed for me in the apartment. I’d paired it with a pair of ripped skinny jeans. It was an outfit I would have bought.
“It sounds like it’ll be a lot of wasted human effort.” My words fell forward, gliding on impotence and sarcasm. “No one’s going to need a hiding place after you join efforts with Akeelah.”
He sighed, his shoulders collapsing onto themselves. We had been over this last night. I knew it wasn’t fair to treat him like this, but I didn’t know what else to say to make him see reason.
“Don’t be unfair. I do not intend to join her. I won’t help her. I just want to protect you. And . . . maybe convince her that, whatever she’s after, I can’t aid her.”
“What if she doesn’t believe you and goes after me anyway? We would end up back at square one.”
At this, he clutched his forehead and cringed, as if his head hurt. I didn’t think he could get headaches, at least he’d never mentioned any, but it certainly looked as if one was about to split him in two.
I thought of saying more, of forcing this new argument in front of him and molding it into a big, logical obstacle that he couldn’t refute, but I was afraid to push too hard. Instead, I held my breath, hoping I’d finally found the right words.
After a moment, his hand dropped to the side and his face relaxed. The creases on his forehead disappeared. “I have to go. I have to try.”
I had only enough time to blink before I found myself transported to a different location. I staggered, disoriented. One second I was staring into a wall inside a claustrophobic garage, and the next I was . . . my eyes danced around . . . I was back in Faris’s home in New Orleans.
All traces of the shattered window were gone. Everything looked normal and harmless.
One Wish Away: Djinn Empire Complete Series Page 32
