“An agreement?” Charlie said, his voice layered with skepticism.
“Yes. An agreement. One I do not have to discuss with you. I want to begin. Now.”
Tamina moved toward Oz, pulling a slim dagger out of a sheath she had hidden in the folds of her long tunic. I hissed as she raised it to his neck, pressing its razor-sharp point against the pulse beating beneath the vulnerable skin of his neck.
“Do not assume that because I’ve been entertaining your questions, that I am distracted from my goal. I want Kouros. Tonight. And you’re going to get him for me.”
Charlie checked his watch and nodded. “Yes. It’s time.”
“Time?” Tamina asked, but we ignored her.
“Are you ready?” I asked, walking up to Oz. His eyes met mine, all questions. I gave him the slightest smile, hoping he’d understand we had a plan, but he still looked nervous.
“I’m going to need you to ground me,” I said to him. “You have to command me to use the power of the Node.”
“To free Kouros,” said Tamina.
“To free Kouros,” I echoed, using all the negative emotions I had in the hope that Oz would feel them and forget that part of the command. Oz’s eyes widened and his nostrils flared.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Ready,” he said.
“Ready?” I asked my friends. They all nodded, Trip and Trap drooling as copiously as the half-vamps surrounding us.
I turned to Oz. “Open me up,” I said. His lips twitched, but he did as I said.
“Use the Node,” he told me. “I command you.”
And like that, the power was there. It flooded my widened channels, its poisonous taint leaching into me. My jinni pulled more and more into me.
“Tell her to send the power to us,” hissed Tamina. “For Kouros.”
“More,” he commanded me instead. “More, Lyla. You can do this…”
And my channels opened even wider, pulling more power into me. When I was bursting with it, my jinni only just managing to keep it from exploding out of me, I turned beseeching eyes to Charlie.
“Tell her to do it!” Charlie shouted at Oz, who knew better than to ask what “it” was.
“Do it!” he shouted, just as Tamina’s knife flicked toward his throat. But it was caught by one of Yulia’s wisps, another wisp catching the sorcerer’s wrist as he reached toward his breast pocket. A third wisp plucked a brown-stained hunk of cloth out of said pocket, disappearing it into Yulia’s personal pocket of Sideways with practiced ease.
Meanwhile I reached, hard, pulling to the gate Dmitri had built in the room behind the throne, the one that led to the squat. But I didn’t pull anyone from the human plane. Instead I reversed the gate, setting it even farther Sideways…
And in rushed the cavalry, through the gate and into the room. Roiling black smoke figures that fell on Tamina’s minions. They tried to return the attack, but their claws and fangs slid through the red-eyed creatures, and then their hands found their own throats as the smoke slid into their mouths and noses, sliding down their gullets…
And now the eyes of Tamina’s army burned red, possessed by our allies, the jinn who hated Kouros even more than they hated me. They’d been willing to help us get Oz back, to end this madness.
Dmitri finally showed some sense, grabbing Tamina’s hand and heading for the door. They were stopped by a swarm of their own half-vamps, now possessed by jinn, whose red eyes burned at them hungrily from teenage faces. Tamina was immediately gagged with the trailing ends of her headscarf to keep her from binding anything, and I caught a glimpse of Loretta among another knot of captives against a far wall.
“Lyla, no more!” said Oz, and my knees buckled as the magic left me in a whoosh. But I was giggling as I hit the ground, and I was still giggling when Oz turned me over, ever so gently, and wiped the tears of relief from my eyes.
“I can free you now?” he asked.
I nodded, unable to speak. I raised a trembling hand to his lips, and he kissed my fingers with a gentleness that broke my heart.
He opened his mouth to say the words of unBinding, but he stopped when the knife blade found his throat. It wasn’t Tamina’s knife, it was a curved length of supernaturally charged silver, similar to my own beloved swords.
And it was held by one of our rescuing jinn, a female not occupying a child’s form.
“Not so fast,” she said in paradoxically sultry voice, her red eyes burning into mine. “We’re not done with you, abomination.”
I glared over at Charlie, who shrugged.
So much for keeping our enemies closer.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
We’d expected to be betrayed, anticipating a dozen scenarios—most involving the jinn finally getting their long-awaited vengeance on me for the crime of existing. We’d created two dozen plans in response. We’d thought we were ready.
But nothing could have prepared us for what the jinn wanted.
“You will Call Kouros forth,” the jinni explained, keeping her knife at Oz’s throat. “And your Master will Bind him.”
“Have you lost your damned minds?” Rachel asked, waving her shotgun for emphasis. She turned to Charlie. “Have they lost their damned minds?”
“Quiet the human,” the jinni said to another of her smoky brethren who hadn’t possessed one of Tamina’s minions. Obligingly it whooshed through the air at Rachel’s face. Yulia and I shouted as Charlie struggled against his bonds. Rachel got a shot off that caught in the jinni’s smoke and fell to the ground like a handful of harmless bird feed. Then it was on her, entering through her nose and mouth till she, too, was possessed.
Rachel stood up straight, her mouth shut, but it wasn’t her. When I looked at Rachel, I’d never before seen a man in a dress till right then, and I hated the jinn for that more than I’d ever hated them for anything.
“Release her!” I shouted, rounding on the jinni that held Oz.
“No,” she said calmly. “We hold all of the cards, as you humans say. You will do as we say and maybe, just maybe, we will let you live.”
“Step down, Lyla. Let’s hear the jinni out,” said Charlie, his voice cordial. If you didn’t know my friend, you’d have thought he was calm. But I could see the vein throbbing in his temple that let me know he was feeling about as murderous as he’d ever felt. And yet he was right. We were outnumbered.
“Why do you want me to Call Kouros?” I asked the spokeswoman for our captors. “Because it really does sound like you’ve gone nuts.”
The jinni raised herself to her full height, towering above us in her smoky glory. My sort-of people can be beautiful, I had to admit. But her red eyes were too malevolent to be anything but ugly.
“I owe you no explanation, abomination,” she said. “You will Call Kouros.”
“Actually, you do owe us an explanation,” Oz interrupted. “Because if you don’t give us one, I’m not doing shit. And if you kill me, Lyla won’t have the power to access the Node. So…”
I knew that was only a little true, since they didn’t have to kill Oz. If they hurt him, I’d cooperate.
I felt a tickle as Charlie accessed the Node again. His eyes were cast inward, but from the wrinkle in his forehead I knew he wasn’t Seeing anything. He needed concentration and preparation to really See. Being held captive for the second time in one day, this time by our supposed allies, was hardly an ideal circumstance.
The leader of the jinn shrugged. “Fine. It is no matter to us what you do or do not know. Our elders wanted you dead; they sent an assassin after you.”
Charlie and I exchanged glances. That explained the Blood Sect death squad.
“They wanted you off the field of play because they fear Kouros,” she continued. “This fear has made them weak. They have compromised long-term security for a short-term solution. We will remedy their mistakes.
“You will Call Kouros, and free him, so that we may kill him.”
“Why can’t you just let him rot in his cage?�
�� I asked, trying to buy us some time.
The jinni snorted, red tendrils of flame licking out of her nose. “Child, you have no idea who created you, do you?”
I raised my hands in a “not my fault” gesture. “You jinn never talked to me, except to warn me you were about to try to kill me. So all I know about Kouros is what my family told me. We knew he was powerful, so powerful that we used the term Bound loosely. He was more an ally…”
“Kouros is no one’s ally,” the jinni said, firmly, “as you should know.”
I nodded, accepting the comment. I’d learned the hard way not to trust that particular jinni.
“So what makes him so powerful?” Oz asked, cutting to the chase. The jinni paced over to where her brethren held Tamina and Dmitri. They had pushed the trailing ends of the girl’s headscarf into her mouth to keep her from Binding any of them, but her blazing eyes spoke eloquently of what she wanted to do to them.
“Your little friend here,” said the jinni, very inaccurately cataloguing our relationship to Tamina, “not only wanted to Call and Bind one of the most powerful jinni in existence, but she wanted to Call the first ever to exist.”
My eyes widened. I’d been expecting a lot of possibilities, but that was not one of them.
“What? The first? How?”
“Our legends say he Called himself into existence, before the dawn of time. Where there was nothing, suddenly there he was, seeking other life to entertain him. Eventually, after searching the cosmos, he found Man.”
“That’d be news even to Neil deGrasse Tyson,” Oz said. The jinni ignored him, turning to me instead.
“So your maker was the first jinni. He is our Adam.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. “That does not make me his Eve.”
The jinni’s eyes blazed. “Not if we have anything to do with it.”
“So why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why not just let Oz unBind me? I go back to being human in…” I looked at Charlie, who looked at his watch.
“In an hour and a half,” said my friend.
“Then I’ll be mortal, and I won’t be able to touch the Node, let alone do anything with it. Kouros stays in his cage for eternity, out of our hair, easy peasy lemon squeezy.”
“Not good enough,” said the jinni, jerking her smoky chin at Tamina. “He’s been able to contact this one, despite his imprisonment. His cage must be crumbling.”
“So go shore it up. But leave us out of it.”
“Impossible,” the jinni said, impassively. “We don’t know where the cage is hidden. We didn’t capture him, and his location is kept secret.”
“Convenient,” Yulia muttered.
“But why risk freeing him totally, if all he’s doing is chatting up strangers?” I asked.
“That’s simple. We want him destroyed, once and for all. Our ancestors made a mistake in caging him; they should have killed him. He is more dangerous than you can ever know, with no sense of allegiance to anyone besides himself. And do not think he merely seeks his freedom. Kouros is plotting chaos—we are not sure exactly what that plot is, but we know it bodes as badly for us as it does for humanity.
“We should be united in this cause.”
The jinni got down off her soapbox, looking as if she expected applause.
“What makes you think you can destroy him?” asked Charlie, who was always a fan of the obvious question.
“Because he’s weak. He’s been imprisoned as long as she’s been cursed, with no access to any real power. And in this room are the strongest of at least twenty tribes; some of the greatest jinn currently in existence will fight this day.” The jinni sounded proud, a pride answered by the straightening up of the various jinn around the room, whether they were currently possessing a body or not.
“We are many, and we are powerful, and we will destroy him, as our ancestors could not. We will no longer have to try to stay one step ahead of him, or root out his conspiracies. We will be free.”
“I hear ya,” I said, dryly. I looked at Oz, and then Charlie. Both looked as torn as I felt.
“Do we have any choice?” I asked the jinni.
She shook her head. “If you do not help us, we will kill all of your friends and your Master, but only after the deadline for your curse has passed with you Bound to him. You will remain a jinni, your friends will be dead, and we will put you in a cage just like the one made for Kouros, and we will leave you as far Sideways as we can put you.
“I don’t know if you’ll die like that. Kouros didn’t, but your essence is primarily human. Maybe you would starve, eventually. Or maybe your jinni would somehow sustain you, for another thousand years of torment before your curse finally lifted and your spark was snuffed.”
I shuddered, but the jinni wasn’t finished.
“The whole time you’ll know that your stubbornness killed your friends. And we will kill them slowly, so that you remember every scream as you rot in that cage. And speaking of rot, maybe we’ll put them in with you, to keep you company.”
“And to think I was beginning to like you,” I said, my voice soft. It was my dangerous voice. Every atom in my being said this was a terrible idea, that the arrogant young jinn standing before us had no idea what they were really up against. That Kouros would make mincemeat of them in seconds.
But did I really have any choice?
I looked around, and my friends looked back. Their eyes shone with worry and anger and a little fear, but they looked alive. I needed to keep them that way for as long as possible.
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll Call Kouros. But these are my conditions…”
At first the inky darkness dribbled from Rachel’s lips slowly, but then it surged out like she’d been hit with a particularly bad bout of stomach flu. And had been eating smoke for the last twenty-four hours.
When the jinni possessing her was out and safely across the room, her hands immediately flew to her hair. No longer a puppet, she was Rachel again, a gorgeous dame who was all sass.
“Normally a man buys me a drink before he takes such liberties!” she yelled at her assailant, who actually hid a bit behind one of the jinni-possessed half-vamps.
I couldn’t help but wince. These were the fierce warriors, the best of the best, who were going to take down Kouros?
But I’d made the deal: my friends’ lives for my cooperation. Once they were out of the way, I could figure out how to free myself and Oz.
I’d tried to get them to allow my Master to command me from the human plane, but the jinn weren’t having it, for about ninety-seven obvious reasons. They were desperate and, realistically, a little dumb, but not that dumb.
Oz and I watched as a few jinn herded our friends to the room behind the throne, where they were shoved unceremoniously through the gate there. We weren’t allowed to talk to them, despite their various attempts. Only Trip and Trap had gone willingly, undoubtedly realizing they weren’t going to get to kill anything they could actually eat on this mission. Surprisingly Charlie had also cooperated, his eyes so turned inward he looked actually blind. Rachel had to lead him out of the room.
Tamina and Dmitri were staying. I figured that whatever happened, they deserved to be a part of it. But that left their minions.
On the one hand, they looked young. But many of them were also creepy little killers who preyed on unsuspecting humans.
“Lock them up,” Oz said. “There are enough rooms in this palace. Lock them up somewhere safe this side of Sideways, till everything’s over. We can figure out what to do with them later.”
The jinn, eager to be rid of their limiting skin suits, agreed without an argument. They marched Tamina’s army into one of the many windowless rooms of the palace and we barred it from the outside. I’d lost track of Loretta by then, but I had bigger fish to fry than our turncoat Exterminator. After the room was sealed, a thick tidal wave of black smoke flowed underneath the lintel, separating into individual jinn once they were entirely present.
From within the room the children started howling, but we ignored them. They were safer where they were, and besides—they only wanted to eat us.
“And now you will Call Kouros,” said the leader, after we’d been herded back into the throne room.
“Look, are you really sure about this?” I asked. “I know you think you can handle him, but you already told us he’s not normal…”
“We are strong,” the jinni said, calmly. “We will do what our ancestors could not.”
And then I got it. This was less about addressing any threat Kouros might pose and more about a pissing contest with their ancestors.
These jinn were like the kids we’d just herded to safety. Powerful, supernatural teenagers, only these ones were made of fire and smoke. Teenagers who were probably all hundreds of years old, but shitty teenagers nonetheless—out to prove themselves through feats of strength, not caring how many they hurt in their attempt and not realizing their own smoky mortality.
This was going to be a disaster.
“We can’t do this,” Oz hissed at me as we were led toward the center of the throne room, where a lone jinni poured salt and coal dust onto the floor in a large, perfect circle.
“We have no choice,” I said. “I can’t let them hurt you. My jinni couldn’t.” I took a deep breath, preparing to admit the real truth. “But even if she could… I couldn’t.”
I looked down at my shoes, feeling like an idiot. I felt Oz’s hand on my jaw as he raised my eyes to his.
“That feeling’s mutual,” he said, softly. Then he bent to graze his lips against mine, setting the beings around us to tittering.
Master/jinni fraternization was looked down upon by both species. Masters could use their jinni, but weren’t supposed to feel the sort of care toward them that Oz had just demonstrated for me. And jinni were supposed to avoid any such use with the creative deployment of cantaloupes, pillows, or, in a pinch, something like a shoe.
We weren’t supposed to fall in love; that was verboten.
“The circle is ready,” said the jinni that had poured out the circle.
Jinn and Juice Page 26
