For as long as the sultana had been dead. Before Baba had died. Before Umm went mad.
Who was this man?
“The Silver Witch,” she rasped. How did she factor into all of this?
“A most beautiful woman, no?” he said, sinking into his chair. “She was adamant in her quest, but she was bereft of love, alone in her work. I placed my traps and spun my words, and soon enough, my patience was rewarded. The sultan of Arawiya, on the other hand, once he was gifted the medallion he adores more than his own son, the rest was quite simple.”
Bereft of love. Realization pulsed in her blood.
She posed her next question. “Why—why do you need the Jawarat when you command an entire island?”
“Sharr burgeons out of control. Do you think I desire the Arz devouring Arawiya?” He slumped back in his chair. His tattoo shimmered.
He was lying. Sharr was land; it had no need to threaten them with an army of trees.
“I am not fool enough to desire destruction, azizi. I merely wish for order in all things, and great sacrifices must be made to achieve great feats.”
“So you’re just like any other criminal—you use dum sihr to get Sharr to do your bidding.”
He tilted his head, and something flashed in the amber of his eyes. “Did you not read of me in your texts? Of the one who commands magic without the use of blood? Tether yourself to the vessel, and it is yours without the price. I grow tired of borrowing, of the limits of one affinity, even if I may touch upon others. Why remain the wielder when you can be the vessel?”
Did you not read of me in your texts? Of the man who lay control to magic as no other had. Of the man who surpassed dum sihr, almost as powerful as the Sisters themselves.
Zafira knew who the Shadow was.
She knew why he had no heartbeat, why the sharp points of safin ears crept above the folds of his turban. Half ifrit, half safin.
The Lion of the Night.
CHAPTER 69
Eventually, the thing pulling Nasir stopped, but he had lost track of everything: time, location, the Huntress. If he doubted it before, he was well and truly lost now.
The vine around his leg slithered back into the shadows. Laa—this was darkness absolute. Fear clouded his vision.
He stood, straightening his clothing. He tried not to think of the ifrit wearing Kulsum’s face. He tried not to think of how Sharr was changing him. Weakening him.
She is no longer the guileless girl who set foot on this island.
“We feast upon lies when our hearts are ravenous.”
Nasir stilled at the solemn voice. What level of monster could live in such benighted grounds?
“Those who have hearts, perhaps,” he said, turning slowly. “Show yourself, creature.”
“You fear me, Prince,” the voice said again, edges steeped in amusement. It was decidedly feminine.
Nasir pulled back. “I fear nothing.”
It laughed, a wheezing, dying sound.
“What are you?” he asked.
“One of many trapped on this island,” the voice rasped. “Not all as wicked as you.”
Nasir did not refute his wickedness.
He felt the slither of the thing that had wrapped around his ankle and realized there were more than one of them. Tentacles? Before he could demand again, there was a scuttle to his right, and the heave of stone made him turn.
The dust settled and gray light poured from the world outside. A palace sprawled before him, a massive creation of shadow and stone. Domes of black glittered beneath a shrouded moon.
“Shift the imbalance. Bring us light. Destroy us so we may rest in peace.”
He stepped onto the stone pathway and slipped the compass back into his pocket. He turned back, slightly, and found he could now say a word more easily than before.
“Shukrun.”
CHAPTER 70
“You’re the Lion of the Night,” Zafira breathed, her will coming undone. She could no longer find the strength to hold herself and slumped, chains rattling.
He smiled, his amber eyes cool. The eyes of a lion, she realized.
This was the master Benyamin had been too cowardly to reveal. This was the creature to whom Sharr answered. This was the reason for the sultan’s change. Why wasn’t he dead?
Breathe. Assess.
If, by some miracle, she escaped the Shadow’s—the Lion’s—clutches, she had nowhere to go. If she found the Jawarat, he would take it from her. If she deliberately failed, he could send someone for her family.
If Zafira died, no one would miss her. No one would be able to find the Jawarat, either. Her death would be a sacrifice.
“You never could keep your thoughts to yourself.” The Lion of the Night breathed a laugh. “Azizi, I would miss you.”
She spat at his feet.
“He would miss you.”
The latch of a door clicked in the silence, and Zafira looked beyond the lattice screen, past the rug and pillows blanketing the ground, to a man. His footsteps swept the copper ground, and Zafira knew the toe of his right sock was torn. He set his beloved tabar against the wall and smiled.
Deen.
“Showing me the same dead man twice? You’ll need to try harder,” Zafira drawled, hoping he wouldn’t notice her erratic pulse.
“Zafira?”
That voice. Ifrit couldn’t borrow voices.
She could feel the brush of the frigid Demenhur air, the steady comfort of her cloak, the warmth of his smile, the thrill of Yasmine’s laugh. The sun in his curls and the reassurance of a pinkie around hers.
“Why can’t you stay dead?” she whispered.
“I’m not deaf, you know,” he—it—pointed out. Her resolve was being skinned from her body.
“You’re not real, either.”
She stared at the Lion, unable to muster the strength to look away as he read her face. As he saw how close she was to losing her sanity, despite her bold words.
“We will see how real he is.”
* * *
A wrought-iron door with a pointed arch marked the palace entrance. Nasir ducked behind the underbrush to the structure’s side and scanned the area. Though he saw no guards, he heard the unmistakable sweep of sandals—patrols making the rounds.
On the base floor were several large windows, all latched. He lifted his gaze—there. A window was open on the second floor, another on the third, gossamer curtains of crimson rippling in the dry breeze.
He swept past the foliage and crossed the paved ground, pausing before the dark wall of the palace. The scent of bakhour carried on the slight breeze, heady and sensuous. He set his jaw and scanned the wall, eyes snagging on the stones that jutted and dipped, noting where his footing was likely to slip.
A scratch of sandals broke his thoughts as a guard turned the corner.
Alarm crossed the guard’s eyes before Nasir slashed his gauntlet blade across his neck. He croaked and slumped to the ground, blackened blood oozing. Not a him. An ifrit.
Nasir hooked his arms beneath the ifrit’s and began dragging the corpse to the underbrush, but a scream stopped him. Knifed his chest.
Her scream.
Kharra. Nasir left the body where it was—stealth be damned—and rushed to the wall. His foot slipped twice as he scaled the old stone. He barely breathed as he pulled himself to the window ledge and vaulted into the black hole of the second story. Fear prickled his insides.
A palatial rug sank beneath his boots, the air intoxicating with alluring oud, saffron, and sandalwood. A bedroom. Though he saw nothing, the combination made him think of the rustle of clothes and hushed murmurs. It heated his neck.
The Huntress—Zafira—screamed again.
He followed the sound of her whimpers through the room. Whatever was compelling her to make such a sound was no easy overpowerment, for she was not weak.
He eased the door open and entered a balcony overlooking a foyer void of life. A majlis sprawled in shades of crimson and violet. Two qahwa
cups sat on its center ottoman, one littered with rinds, the other full and long since cooled.
The staircase leading from the balcony ended at the majlis, which was in direct view of a darkened corridor where the screams and whimpers crawled from. That way’s moot. With a quick inhale, Nasir leaped off the balcony railing and landed in a crouch beside the corridor entrance, the impact a bolt of force against his jaw.
He paused before the shadowed entrance. His exhale quivered.
A cry spurred him forward, boxing him in, a slip of nightmares. His fear was instant. Hushed whispers bombarded his senses, and he gritted his teeth against their pleas. They were the very whispers he’d heard when he once touched the medallion around Ghameq’s neck. The ones that called to him from the crevices of Sharr.
Rimaal. Were they connected?
He was going to meet the master of Sharr. The one Benyamin claimed controlled his father.
Nasir extended his gauntlet blade with a soft click. Perspiration dampened the back of his neck, his scalp, the facets of his resolve.
Silly boy, you fear the dark.
What do you fear? Kulsum had once asked him, days after his mother’s death. He had no answer then. He didn’t even fear his father, who had taken everything but the life Nasir never valued: his own.
He feared the dark, for he could not see. For here, the ever-alert hashashin was blind to his surroundings, and fear stifled his other senses in turn.
Her sobs and the wan light at the end of the hall drew him onward, until he stood at the entrance of a room shrouded by whispers and shadows.
He saw her first. Zafira.
Her long body was chained to the gray wall. She stared at an ifrit at her feet and yanked at her chains, pleading to stop. Qif, qif, qif.
His eyes locked on her face. Torn and helpless. He knew the weight of anguish that could drown a city in sand. He knew that look, that feeling. To watch a loved one suffer. To know one could have done so much but can now do nothing at all.
It was the feeling that made him stop feeling.
Every rational thought vanished. Rage rippled through him, pulsed at his fingers. Rage that she was suffering as he had. Rage that she was in pain.
“Leave her be,” the Prince of Death said, a single level above a whisper, and the room froze.
She lifted her head, eyes darting in and out of focus. Gone was her iciness, her resolve. That wild gleam he had come to love. A sound—a shout—emanated from him and out of him at once.
His vision darkened as shadows swarmed around him.
Laa. As the shadows swarmed from him.
CHAPTER 71
A slow clap shattered the silence.
Nasir choked a breath and the shadows receded, the world spinning back into focus.
“Ah, Prince. Fitting for the boy accustomed to the darkness, no?” the man before him said.
His face spoke of aristocratic beauty and youth, but his eyes were ancient—and oddly familiar.
Nasir did not understand a word he’d said.
“What have you done?” he rasped. He was on his knees like a common peasant.
“I’ve done nothing.”
Nasir stared at his hands, at the wisps of black swirling out of and into his palms. Like the ones he knew existed around his benighted heart. Something rushed beneath his skin, surged through his veins. He quelled it.
He had been quelling it ever since he set foot on Sharr. He had just been too cowardly to admit it.
“Nasir!” Zafira shouted.
He lifted his head. Her first time addressing him by name and she wasn’t even looking at him.
Shackles of steel clamped around his wrists. He was lifted as if he were no more than a sack. Something told him he should struggle. Fight. Try to break free. But the darkness, the shadows. The very thing he feared.
He
had
become it.
This was his affinity. The reason for his vision darkening every time he lost control of himself. He could wield the dark as if it belonged to him. His arms were wrenched upward. The click of a lock echoed in his ears, and then he was hanging on the wall beside her, shadows dripping from him.
Darkness is my destiny. His father was right.
It leaked like smoke from his fingers, from his lips when he exhaled, from him.
His eyes fell to the ifrit on the ground, stunned he could see a face, a form. Almost as if the creature were wholly human. It was the Demenhune. Deen. His torso was riddled with her white arrows, and black blood oozed from the wounds, the only sign he was an ifrit. Nasir knew blood and torture as well as his own name, but as Zafira pulled at her chains and begged them to stop, he felt a helplessness bordering on insanity.
“There’s been a change of plan,” the man said as he studied Nasir. He gestured to the bloodied ifrit. “Clean him up. I may still have need of him.”
Against the backdrop of her screams and the creature’s moans, two other ifrit pulled him—it—away.
“Fear becomes you, Prince,” the man said.
Nasir stared numbly. He had failed. Failed like the mutt that he was. Failed like the brainless boy his father claimed him to be. His father, who might be controlled by the man before him but was right about many things.
Her dark crown was coming undone, a snake coiling around her. Her arms were chafed in red, and the ring swayed with her labored breathing.
“Huntress,” he said, and something cracked in that pit where his heart should be. “It’s not real.”
She only wheezed. He made sense of the word she chanted over and over and over. Deen. Deen. Deen.
“Zafira,” he said gently, unable to savor this moment of whispering her name aloud for the first time.
She stilled and looked at him. Twin scythes of weeping ice.
“It’s not real,” he repeated, the words faltering on his tongue. The spirals of black escaping him were very, very real.
“Who are you to claim what is real and what is not?” the man asked. Nasir dragged his gaze to him. He was cloaked in darkness. His very words dripped with it. Darkness incarnate. “When your own mother holds enough secrets to bring you to your knees?”
Nasir only understood half of what the man said. The other half was obscured by the black bleeding from him.
Some semblance of the Huntress returned when she groaned, “Stop with the riddles, Lion.”
“For you, azizi,” he simpered.
Nasir went very, very still. The man shifted his amber eyes to him.
He’s alive. That was his first thought. He’s been alive all this time. He remembered Benyamin’s claim of a darkness festering in Ghameq, and Nasir understood the familiarity in those eyes.
He had looked into them every time he looked at his father.
No wonder Ghameq knew of Benyamin and Kifah.
“Bring me a knife,” the Lion of the Night murmured. But when he studied Nasir’s unflinching gaze, he smiled, and the shadows stirred in excitement. “Laa, bring me the poker. The Huntress must know I am not lax with my promises.”
CHAPTER 72
As much as she had wished he wouldn’t come, Zafira couldn’t quell a small echo of elation when the prince arrived. She was a little less alone now, a little less lost. Even if he was strung up beside her. Exhaling shadows.
“Will you bring me the Jawarat, azizi?” the Lion asked her in his soft murmur.
She clenched her jaw, and he read her clearly enough.
An ifrit brought him the poker, the steel rod black and unassuming. The Lion gripped it in his palm and set his cool gaze on Nasir.
And Zafira watched as the aloof prince came undone. Fissures in his wide gray eyes, a tremor across his parted lips. The shadows wept from his form, and a sound tore from his mouth.
A cry.
A cry.
She didn’t understand. Not even when the Lion pressed the poker into the fire and drawled a word. “Pathetic.”
Nasir flinched. The crown prince, who washed blood from
his hands like soot from a fire, flinched. His breathing grew labored and he shrank back at the sound of the metal swooping across the dry air.
The scars on his back.
That senseless torture. The ridiculing word.
“Don’t,” Zafira said. She choked on the word, and the Lion canted his head at her. The prince stilled. “Please.”
“Touching,” the Lion purred. “Did you expect me to stop because you were polite?”
She felt the heat of the poker as he drew close, Nasir’s ragged breathing harsh in her ears. Her desperation burned, and she gave in. “I’ll bring you the Jawarat.”
Anything to make the prince stop shaking.
“Ah, but I would be loath to place my trust in a mortal. Let me propose something else: Until you bring me the Jawarat, I will keep him here. Continuing the rows of scars his father placed for him.” He furrowed his brow, looking at the prince. “Or was it I who did that? Pity, I’ve lost track.”
He was cruel. He was—
“Some villain you are, toying with the shackled,” Zafira said, gritting her teeth.
The Lion laughed softly, raising a hand to trail down her cheek, searing her calm when he swept his thumb across her skin. Nasir watched, stiff beside her. “What a mouth you’ve developed, azizi. Let me teach you to tame it.”
And then the Lion of the Night pulled aside the collar of Nasir’s robes and pressed the poker to his skin.
* * *
Nasir
fell apart
at the seams.
He gritted his teeth against a cry, the sound clambering up his throat from a time that existed years ago in a palace far beyond.
Shock became pain became anguish. Pain was nothing. A reaction to an incursion, an emotion instinct begged him to act upon.
But he was the Prince of Death.
Pain, for him, was always confined to the enclosures of his heart. In memory, and what each infliction uncovered. Forty-eight times.
We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya) Page 32