The crease in Neyvn's brow eased as Danu put some of her own energy into the task. Azar tore her gaze away for a moment to watch a wave of light chase away the oily blackness of the Fae's binding. Her gaze whipped back to the ball of luminescence that was Danu, because it hurt to look away in her presence. Danu removed her hand and Azar felt an acute sense of loss. She wanted to weep. Danu leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her forehead, and then another to Neyvn's. The little boy was crying uncontrollably. Azar wanted to reach out and console him.
Danu sent her an image of Neyvn, with a crown on top of his head, surrounded by flames that didn't burn him, but kept the shadows away. Azar nodded earnestly; she got the message loud and clear. He was the crown from her premonition, and she was meant to protect him. It was a duty she'd already undertaken willingly.
Just as suddenly as the Mother had arrived, she winked out of existence again. The sense of loss stole Azar's breath, and tore a cry from her chest. She blinked a couple of times to recenter herself, then she took Neyvn's hands and the little boy shook with sobs.
She stood and pulled the boy into her arms. It wasn’t until then that she noticed the crowd around them. Their expressions ranged from awe and horror, concern and disgust.
“The binding is gone. You should be able to move the debris,” Azar said shakily. Still the crowd hesitated, until Donovan ordered the Weres in his employ to start moving chunks of sandstone and steel. That seemed to shake the rest of the crowd from their stupor and everyone started grabbing rubble and moving it to a pile away from the wreckage. Keeley came over and hugged Azar tightly. Then she looked at the boy, and hugged him too.
“Thank you,” she repeated over and over.
A call went up from one of the Weres, “I can hear someone!”
Azar grabbed Neyvn's hand, and took off across the debris with speed and agility that would have showcased their otherworldliness to any humans who had sneaked past the barriers, but she didn’t care. She felt the breeze pick up, and knew that Bast was rushing ahead of her. She pushed her way through the crowd around the Were that had called out, Keeley in front of her and Neyvn sandwiched between them.
Everyone hushed to listen as a voice, barely more than a hoarse shout, reached the surface.
“Down here!” croaked out a voice she recognized, and her knees went weak.
Killian. Thank Danu.
Keeley knelt on the ground, the jagged steel cutting her knees as she wept. It was a small hope, but Azar knew that the probability of them getting many survivors was slim.
Her father, Mira, Joia, dozens of other Adel, all the Council members were all in the building when it had exploded, and the ones who hadn’t died in the initial assault had been trapped below the earth for almost forty-eight hours. But she took this one little ray of hope, and started to dig with the others. She could only hope and pray, and she did both fervently. No matter what the outcome was, she knew that the world would never be the same.
Rage and Ruin
Book Three
Chapter 1
Strangers surrounded her. Some were her kin, half-siblings she’d only just met, and some were just nameless faces that blurred together. Every person in attendance was an Ifrit; a malevolent form of Djinn with the ability to transform into a beast of fire, able to bend the flames to their will. But instead of flaming, cloven-hooved devils, today everyone was in their human forms. The crowd circled around a single point. An urn that contained the ashes of her father, Saraf.
Her eyes began to sting as tears pushed against the lids. Azar stood at the back of the crowd by herself. She’d given her condolences to the family, and his numerous ex-wives that seemed to have reappeared for the event. They had all known and loved her father for hundreds of years. She’d known the man less than six months and met him only a handful of times. But for reasons she couldn’t comprehend, her heart was still breaking for the parent she'd barely known.
An official looking man strode in and stood over the urn. Without further ado, he started shouting something in the ancient tongue. No matter what the language, funeral rites sounded the same; mournful. He pinched some dust, sand maybe, and threw it to the four corners of the urn, wishing Saraf safe passage to the afterlife. Or maybe he was wishing upon a star that her father didn’t come back as a fire ant. Azar didn’t understand the old language. She shifted her focus to the people around the holy man.
The inner ring around the urn were all members of Saraf’s family. Her family. Three of her brothers, Casper, Cy and Darius were protectively buffeting their mother, a small Ifrit woman who looked a hundred years older than she had less than three weeks ago. Her half-sister, Malee was huddled next to Casper's wife, sobbing gently into the other woman’s shoulder.
There were the siblings she’d never met; Ashtoreth, who’d come to return her father’s ashes to his seat of power in the Middle East. Yasmin and Roxx, who Azar had met in passing right before the funeral, who were pressed so tightly together it was hard to see where one ended and the other began. If meeting your long-lost siblings wasn’t awkward enough, doing it at a funeral increased the bizarreness seven-fold.
Talia stood beside them, another sibling she had only met in passing. Even in the close confines of the circle, she managed to seem apart from the rest. Talia was the headmistress of a boarding school in Turkey. She’d flown in for the funeral, and was flying out again as soon as possible, unwilling to leave her vulnerable charges under the care of anyone else for an extended period of time. She was stern, her features sharper and more pinched than the others, but there was a sadness that dragged down her face and her eyes were red-rimmed with shed tears.
Finally, the twins, Keely and Killian stood side by side, stiff and regal. They both contained the aura of power, even though Killian was still recovering from the attack that killed hundreds of her kind, including her father. Guilt was etched all over Killian’s face, and she felt his pain. She liked and respected Killian, even though she hadn’t known him long. He had taken her into his life, and under his wing, without resentment or prejudice. To see him brought low with such heavy emotions hurt her heart. He was wracked with survivor’s guilt, you could see it in the tenseness in his shoulders, the dullness of his eyes. So many had died, including every member of the Djinn Council, and Killian had laid the blame for their deaths at his own feet.
“Would the blood of Saraf come forward and pay their respects to the Leader of their House?” Her siblings took a step forward and held hands.
Cy looked from side to side, and then around at the crowd. Catching her eye, he leant over and whispered something to Darius, and then stepped out of the circle. She shrank back to the edges of the crowd, but it parted for him. Cy was the sibling she was closest with. A week of forced cohabitation in the Amazon would do that.
He looked at Azar sternly and put out his hand. Sighing, she took it and followed him back through the crowd. There was a general muttering in the room, and her face flushed hotly. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to pay her respects to her father. She was here, wasn’t she? But she didn’t belong up there, with people who had known and loved the man.
Cy placed her between himself and Darius. She had only met Darius the once, and was surprised when his calloused hand curled around hers.
“He loved you. You deserve to be here,” Darius whispered in her ear and just like that, the sadness she’d been trying to trap deep in her chest, poured out over her cheeks in waves of hot tears. The holy man started to speak in the old language again, and everyone began to chant along with him.
Cy leaned in to whisper in her other ear. “Just mime along. That’s what I do.” He gave her a reassuring smile. Pressed between the solid warmth of her kin, she could almost believe everything would be okay.
Later, after the formalities were done and people stood around reminiscing about the greatness of her father, Azar realized that she’d had enough. Enough of the forced smiles, and politely ignoring the pointed conversations of people who
were sharing every detail of her life as if she weren’t in the room.
Feigning a headache, Azar left the wake early and ensconced herself in one of the guest bedrooms in Saraf’s Central Park mansion. Or was it Killian’s now?
The room was lavish, decorated like the interior of Aladdin’s lamp. Two walls were painted an emerald green, and the furniture was antique polished wood with heavy brass fixtures. Even the four-poster bed sported green curtains, shot through with gold thread.
She lay back on the large bed, wrapping herself in a goose down comforter, desperately tired but unable to sleep. She just kept going over and over the events of the past week, a chorus of what-ifs and endless questions that hurt her brain.
It all started with the goddamn Fae. The Djinn had always been a self-sufficient race, barely operating in the supernatural community. They paid no mind to the Fae, who they thought were safely tethered to the soil of the old country.
But revolution had been brewing within the Courts of the Fae. Two Fae heralds had popped into the Adel headquarters without an invitation, proclaiming that the Fae intended to subjugate the Djinn, peacefully if they could or by force if necessary. Then the Djinn had gotten upset. They'd been given a seven-day deadline to reconcile themselves with the inevitability before they were brought to heel by force.
The lying bastards had given them five days, thirteen hours and six minutes before they had attacked the New York headquarters. They’d razed the building to the ground, killing nearly everyone. Only Killian and Mira, who were both in the vaults at the lowest subterranean level of the building, survived. Mira, who was also rescued, was still in a coma that had to be magically induced. It seemed to be blocking her supernatural healing abilities.
The story of what happened exactly hadn’t come out until Killian had recovered enough to speak.
Mira had called Killian from the vaults, with vague ill feelings. This had been the first sign that something was wrong. Mira was a senior member of the Adel, the Djinn equivalent to the army’s Special Forces, and she wasn’t prone to hysteria. Killian had left a strategy meeting with the Councilors to head to the vaults. ‘The Vaults’, which was a misnomer for the state-of-the-art floor with extremely high-tech biometric security, held the greatest treasures of the Djinn of this region. Centuries old texts and manuscripts, relics of a time long gone, artifacts so priceless that they made the Vatican look like a junk store. But the most important thing that was held within those magically fortified walls was the recently recovered Great Weapons. The Great Weapons were magically imbued weapons. A single cut from one of these weapons, even if it was no bigger than a papercut, could cause a painful and irreversible death.
Azar shook her head. She’d soon see about the irreversible part. When Killian had arrived at the seventh subterranean level, he’d found Mira in a puddle of blood and a Fae standing above her, a sword ready to swoop down on her head like a guillotine.
Then, from what Azar could piece together from the destruction that was left behind, everything happened at once.
A group of Fae soldiers flashed into the Council boardroom, killing most of the members before they could even rise from their chairs. Azar had seen the carnage; the Sila and Marid Councilors slumped forward on the desk, their heads lopped from their bodies. The Jann Councilor had swung around towards his attackers and his head had been cleaved through the middle. The Ghul Councilor had been sliced through the torso as he ran for the door, and then been executed as he lie dying on the floor.
Christos, the Councilor for the Shaitan, had also been run through from behind but he was next to a dead Fae soldier, who was haloed in a small pool of goop that had leaked from his ears. Christos wasn’t the type to go down without a fight.
Her father Saraf, Councilor for the Ifrit, had done the most damage. Azar felt bile rise in her throat as she remembered the scene. She'd swept through the room looking for survivors with the rest of the Adel. There were three incinerated Fae scattered around, their mouths open in screams of anguish. Saraf’s body had been shredded by a sword. A dozen or so large stab wounds ribboned his body, and his head hung from his shoulders at an unnatural angle. The memory of that room would never fade, locked away in her mind’s eye like a photograph. In a building of horrifying scenes, that was the one that would haunt her forever.
She shook her head, trying to clear the image from her mind so she could sleep. She tried to close her eyes and count sheep, and then puppies, and then kittens. She hadn’t slept in a week. She could feel the exhaustion right down to her toes. She wanted to go home, but she didn’t really have one anymore. She’d given up her apartment when she’d joined the Adel, and her tiny dorm room had exploded during the Fae raids.
She was staying at Bast’s apartment in Coney Island, but that settled a whole other set of worries onto her shoulders. What to do about Bast? She slapped her forehead to chase away the bad thoughts.
She needed to get out of here, preferably without meeting any well-meaning mourners who wanted to poke at her wounds for their own curiosity.
She straightened the bed, and then snuck out into the hallway. Poking her head around the doorjamb, she let out a relieved sigh to see it was empty. She crept toward the old cage elevator and cringed when the door screeched open, but no one came to investigate.
As it moved down slowly, she had a brief glimpse of the formal dining room, packed with mourners. People were dotted around like islands of grief, but there was a general tone of fear that made the knot in her stomach clench tighter.
Their fear was justified. They were a race with no leaders, and no plan. Killian had declared it a state of war, and he was currently in charge until a new Council could be elected, but he was still convalescing and the hysteria over the Fae attack was incendiary.
The cage shuddered to a stop in the entry foyer and she looked between the diamond shaped grate at the stern face of Cy. So much for sneaking out.
“I’ll walk you to your car.”
Azar shrugged but walked alongside him. He’d warned her earlier about going places alone, out of fear for her safety. Needless to say, she wasn’t the Djinn’s favorite person right now. Mainly because she’d adopted herself a Fae child in the Amazon Jungle. It was a long story.
“Where’s the kid?” Cy asked. She trusted Cy with her life on more than one occasion, but she was wary about revealing Nevyn’s whereabouts to anyone.
“He’s with Oliver.” She left it at that. While Oliver didn’t initially understand how she’d ended up as Nevyn’s guardian, he’d had her back from the very first moment. Now he liked the small Fae boy as much as she did, and willingly undertook his protection when Azar couldn’t be there to do it herself.
Oliver was her best friend, a Werejaguar who was sexy, and sweet and as devoted to Azar, as Azar was to him. Her feelings about Oliver were all muddled up, but she knew without a doubt she loved him. Sometimes her feelings were the platonic kind that Oliver inspired by his loyalty. And sometimes that love wasn’t platonic at all, it was burning hot and threatened to consume her. She pushed the thought away. She didn’t have time to have feelings for anyone. She loved Bast, and look what happened. She doomed him to an eternity of incorporeality.
“Azar…” Cy stopped her by placing a hand on her arm. “I just want you to know that if there is anything you need, I’m here for you.” He sighed and toed at the ground. “Your life is difficult right now with Bast and the kid. And Father.” He cleared his throat, but continued, “And I just wanted you to know that if you need anything, whatever it is, all you have to do is ask.”
Her eyes began to water again at his kindness and she blinked rapidly, staring down at her boots. But it was futile to fight it, as emotion swelled in her gut and she couldn’t hold them back. Big, fat tears dripped onto the marble tiles of the foyer and before she knew it, she was wrapped in Cy’s arms. She felt like she was playing a game, where everyone was out to get her and she didn’t understand the rules. She let herself be weak for a mom
ent, sheltered in the strength of her brother’s arms.
Embarrassed, she pulled away. Stepping through the ornate wood and brass door, she hurried to the curb and hailed down the cab that was turning onto the street. Cy was silent, giving her time to get herself under control and retain even a modicum of dignity. She gave him a thankful, tearstained smile.
“Thank you. You better go back up, they’ll be missing you.”
Cy opened the cab door for her, searching her face. “Take care, okay?”
Azar nodded, and he closed the door with a solid thump.
“Coney Island, please. The Boardwalk.”
She let her head lean back on the leather seat. Then she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep for the first time in days.
Chapter 2
The sound of children laughing halted Azar when she stepped through the door of Bast’s warehouse in Coney Island. Not that the sound of laughing children on the boardwalk was an unusual thing, but to hear it from within the warehouse was strange.
Walking double-time towards the office, she recognized one of the childish voices as Nevyn.
As she got closer, she finally recognized the other voice too, and frowned. Opening the door to the office, she wasn’t surprised to see Donovan standing there, Oliver close by. The whisper of Bast’s presence wrapped around her like a soothing warmth.
She strode across the floor to join them. The sign of the Djinn was still burned into the polished concrete, a permanent reminder of how she’d ended up in this position. Azar veered around it. It was pure superstition, but she refused to set foot on that mark. “What’s happened? Why isn’t Freya with the pack?”
The Azar Omnibus: The Complete Azar Trilogy (The Azar Trilogy Book 0) Page 45