The container hanging from my hip thumped once and the lid rattled. Fen eyed it up. “Did that just . . . move on its own?”
It was my turn to shrug. “Jinn in a bottle. Forgive me, but I have things I must attend to.”
And now I would deal with Vahab.
Time to strike a deal with a devil.
3
Here’s the thing, what I did know about Vahab was that he was a slippery as fuck, kind of shithead Jinn. What I didn’t know was that he’d been playing me.
Goddess damn me to the Witch’s Reign and back, he’d been playing me, and he was so slick I’d not even picked up on it—my bullshit meter had to be broken. He’d been biding his time. I should have bound him the second that Lilith made the offer, should have forced him to swear on her blade.
Should have, could have, would have.
The second I turned my back on Fen, the dragon was on me. I didn’t even have time to scream. His big taloned foot slammed me face first into the dirt and the container was ripped from my side.
“Sorry, he’s my boss,” Fen said with a legitimate sorrow to his voice. “I don’t actually want to do this.”
Okay, so maybe my instincts about people were shittier than I’d thought. Fuck me sideways with a cactus, this was not going to help the day start out on a good note.
“Lila!” I screamed for her as I thrashed, barely able to even flex my back, never mind reach for my weapon. I breathed in a mouthful of sand as I pushed with all I had—still to no avail.
A whoosh of wings, and then there was a grunt from the big dragon. His talons lifted off me just enough that I pulled free and yanked Lilith from my back. The blood lust surged through me as I scrambled up to my feet and took in the very new scene.
Vahab shook himself free of the container that was crushed under Fen’s left front foot. He was dressed all in black from his thin pants to his knee-high boots and long-sleeved shirt. Dark hair was shorn short at the edges and long at the top. The only color on him at all was the dark green of his eyes. The same green as Fen’s scales.
Scratch marks scored Fen’s face and from Lila’s small claws, there dripped blood. Not hers. His.
“They’re working together?” she screeched as she swung away from Fen and back toward me, fury rolling off her. Fen looked . . . uncomfortable.
“Looks like it.” I kept the blade pointed at Fen and my eyes on Vahab.
The blood lust was singing hot, and I gritted my teeth against the urges rushing through me. The ease at which Lilith would cut through sinew and bone had me trembling with the need to kill them both and chop them into tiny bits. Adrenaline coursed alongside the urges, and it took all I had to speak through the pulsing energies.
“Get. Back. In. There.” I snapped a finger, then pointed at the container at Fen’s feet. Broken it may be, but it would still hold him. It had to.
The Jinn . . . he just grinned at me.
“Saucy, aren’t you? Did you really think you stuffed me back in that container? That I’d cower before you?” He strolled over to Fen and patted him on the neck. “Good boy. Well done. I knew they’d fall for the injured pet. Women are so very predictable.”
Fen’s eyes closed a little and he winced. At least he had the grace to be uncomfortable around his boss’s sexism.
Vahab put his hands on his hips. “That little friend of mine, that pet of Mamitu’s, when he let me out there was no putting me back. But you intrigue me. Which, before you ask, is why I ‘let’,” he air quoted the word, “you put me back in the container.”
His eyes roved over me. I wasn’t even sure that it was sexual. Maybe like he said, he was just intrigued.
But then he smiled and lifted his eyebrows at me.
Fuck, it was sexual.
He didn’t want to kill me. With a trembling arm I put Lilith back into her sheath.
He will want you now. Let him chase you. Then kill him when he sleeps.
I let go of the handle and the shaking in my arm eased. I flexed my fingers. “So, you fooled me, both of you fooled me. Good job. Why don’t you go and kill Asag for revenge? That would be helpful.”
Lila backwinged until she sat on my shoulder. She was shaking too, but I had no doubt it was sheer anger and frustration. I could almost feel the emotions between her and me once more. But Asag had taken those too, that connection and bond that we’d made.
Vahab laughed. “Ah, well, I could do that. But what’s the fun of it? I’d rather see what you’re up to, Spicy. Follow you around. I’ve not been out of that container in what feels like forever. And I knew that if I went back into that container for a time, then I’d be with you.” He winked as if we had a secret between us already. “Spicy.”
Fuck. That had the feel of a nickname I was not going to like.
I looked past Fen’s coiled body. The ice had stopped falling and day had arrived. I gave a low whistle and Balder trotted up and out of the cavern, Dancer behind him. “Lila. I’m sorry. I should have listened to you.”
“Forgiven,” she muttered. “Let’s go.”
“Ahh, you have a mount for me even,” Vahab purred and reached for Balder.
Balder pinned his ears and snapped his teeth at the Jinn.
I stepped closer to Vahab and jammed a finger into his chest, forcing him to stumble back. “No. No touching me, no touching my friends.” Then I continued walking past him. Maybe I should have been afraid of him, I had every reason to be. He was the first Jinn. Dangerous enough that Asag stuck him in a container and dropped him at the bottom of a river.
Dancer caught up to me and I scooped up Reyhan, holding her on my hip as we stepped out into the open air.
The ice shards crunched under each step. There was no way we could go quiet, or fast. At least not until the day’s heat melted some of it off.
Here I thought I could just walk away from Vahab.
I didn’t think that he’d really follow me around like he’d said, and so I’d ignore him, and he’d just go away.
Wrong again, girl, wrong again.
“Walking? Excellent, I think I would look forward to a walk around the desert, it’s been so long since I’ve truly been able to stretch my legs.” Vahab moved as if to step up beside me. I sidestepped and put Balder between us.
I didn’t pull myself up onto Balder’s back. The ice across the ground was too thick to make it safe. Instead, I led the way on foot, just as Vahab had said.
Lila clutched my shoulder harder than usual. “I told you not to trust him.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t get a bad vibe off Fen, and even now he doesn’t seem all that pleased with helping Vahab.”
“Being on a first-name basis with the bad guys is a terrible idea and giving them excuses is even worse,” Lila snapped.
I raised one hand in surrender, still holding Reyhan in the other arm. “Yeah, I can see that.”
Reyhan pointed at Dancer, silently asking to get on her horse. I lifted her onto Dancer’s back where the little girl shifted to four legs and curled up in the saddle, changed her mind and went back to two legs, all in the matter of a few blinks. From behind us came a solid gasp.
“A shifter that keeps clothes between forms. How?” Vahab’s voice was awestruck.
I didn’t look back at Vahab. “A necklace in my case.” Not really the necklace that did the job, but he didn’t need to know that.
“Yes, but what bloodlines? This is amazing!”
I didn’t want to tell him and hadn’t planned on it. I also hadn’t planned on the five-year-old telling him.
“Jinns and shifters make it niftier,” Reyhan sang out.
I leapt up onto Balder’s back and turned him around. Vahab stood there with Fen. Only Fen wasn’t big Fen.
He was little Fen, and he was coiled around Vahab’s neck and shoulders. Kind of like Lila did with me.
I didn’t like the mirror image as Lila tightened her hold on my shoulders. “I don’t like that,” she hissed.
I didn’t
know what to make of this situation. Mamitu, guardian of the desert, had made it sound like Vahab would need to be contained. That he was dangerous. And despite not letting him out and negotiating with him, he didn’t actually seem all that pissed off.
I was curious about how Fen found us, and how they were tied together after all these years.
No. Bad. Curiosity killed the cat.
I didn’t want to be that cat.
“Goodbye, Vahab,” I said as I spun Balder and urged him forward.
Dancer leapt with us, Reyhan squealing with delight. Balder plunged and gave a few bucks in utter excitement.
What I didn’t expect was a third horse joining us. One with a dark black-green tint to his coat and a long white mane and tail. Or tiny golden horns between his ears.
“What the actual fuck—”
“Oh, don’t be crass, Spicy, I don’t like a foul mouth in my women.” Lilith let out a stream of insults one on top of the other so rapidly I could barely make sense of them even though they were inside my head. However, I did agree with the general vibe. He could take his self-righteous views and stuff them where the sun doesn’t shine.
“Fen can take a few different forms,” Vahab continued on, oblivious to Lilith’s rant. He rode alongside me for a few strides from the back of the horse that had been a dragon only a few moments before. Fen galloped alongside Balder and Dancer, his body still kind of sinewy even though he was technically a horse, which made for an undulating movement that was rather mesmerizing. I shook it off and stared at Vahab. There was no way he’d be able to keep up if I loosened my hold on Balder. If I urged my hornless unicorn forward.
Which I did.
I kissed at Balder, and he took off, Dancer only a half-step behind. Our speed increased with each stride the horses took and Reyhan was squealing with delight as we raced along.
“Faster, faster!” she squealed as the horses stretched out, eating up the ground.
I closed my eyes and breathed in the desert, doing what I could to put the night behind us, and focusing on what was ahead.
Maks. We would find Maks, take him back from the Storm Queen and then figure out the next step toward Asag.
The wind already warmed my face as the heat of the day rose with each passing minute and the last of the ice and water was evaporating. That was the desert for you, water and cold just didn’t last. I hoped that the Storm Queen choked on the dust.
I glanced over my shoulder to see Fen fading in the distance, struggling to even keep within sight.
“You really going to just set the first Jinn ever back on the world?” Lila shouted to be heard over the horses’ hoofbeats and the whip of wind around us.
“I have enough problems,” I shouted back. “So, if he wants to dick around in the desert, thinking he can keep up with us, he is welcome to go ahead and try.”
Lila’s claws clutched at me. “What if Asag catches him? What if he becomes a weapon against us? I hate to say it, but he seems to kind of like you. I mean . . . maybe we could use that? You could string him along . . ..”
I groaned and pulled lightly on Balder’s reins, slowing him. Hating that Lila was speaking with some serious reason. “What about Fen? You hate him. Maybe you should string him along then, huh?”
“Well of course I hate him, that won’t change,” she huffed. “But you’re right, we have enough problems. Adding the Jinn to it . . . well, at least if they are with us then they aren’t against us? Right?”
That last bit was a tough one for me to swallow. Betrayal was something we’d both known. The two horses slowed to a walk and Fen’s hoofbeats could be heard as he approached full speed.
We could outrun them and be done with them. There was no way they’d catch us. But Lila wasn’t wrong. I lifted a hand to my back and touched one finger to Lilith’s handle, wondering if she had anything to say about the situation.
If he’s interested in bedding you, then he will stick around. Don’t let him know you have a mate and he’ll be good to you. The minute he knows you are not reachable, that’s when he’ll become dangerous.
Awesome.
“We stay on our toes. No trusting them. We can’t slip up for even a second,” I said quietly, with half an eye on Reyhan. Not that I didn’t trust her, but the kid was sharp as they came, and I realized that speaking freely in front of her could, and had, gotten me into trouble.
Balder came to a halt and pawed at the ground, immediately irritated that we’d stopped. I patted his neck. “What do you think, friend? We good to trust them?”
He flipped his head once and snorted. No emotions or words came through him either as they once had. Damn it all.
Asag had really crimped our style, stealing all our mojo.
“Say nothing about Maks,” I murmured to Lila, turning slightly away from Reyhan. “That will send him into a rage.”
“Okay.” She gripped the edge of my ear as Fen and Vahab rode up beside us. Fen was breathing hard and Vahab was laughing.
“I knew you couldn’t resist. Curiosity, am I right?” He patted his chest. “You wonder what beats here, under my breastbone, is it a heart made for you?”
I rolled my eyes and struggled not to scoff out loud. Instead, I gave him as much truth as I dared. “I don’t want Asag getting a hold of you. And as far as I know, he and his cronies are following us.”
Vahab looked over his shoulder. “Hmm. Is he still trying to rule the east?”
“Rules the east,” I corrected him, then clucked to Balder, who picked up a quick trot.
Fen could keep pace now, though I doubted his stamina would be as good as the horses’.
“I suppose you have many questions?” Vahab asked. “I have many answers but let me guess at what you’d like to know.”
Lila spun around and gave me wide eyes. This was . . . unusual. I’d really expected him to be more of a pain in my ass, to be honest.
I shouldn’t have been so sure he wouldn’t become a pain in my ass. He was, after all, a Jinn.
4
Maks
“Your mate did not survive the ice storm I swept through the desert. Now you can let her memory go and fuck me as you should.”
The words rebounded in his head; they wouldn’t absorb into him because it wasn’t possible that Zam was not in this world anymore. He would have felt her loss. Maks held perfectly still, barely breathing as the Storm Queen paced in front of him.
“The ice storm destroyed the entire southern range of the desert.” She smirked. “So now there is no reason for your loyalty to waver. You are free of her. Then perhaps you can find your passion for my body and give me the child I desire.”
His heart thumped hard inside his chest, as if it would climb out and make its way to wherever Zam was, dead or alive. He gritted his teeth. “My loyalty to my mate does not end on her death.”
She patted him on the head. “I think you are foolish. Do you know that I have been kind to you thus far?”
He didn’t dare look down at the marks on his body, the welts from the whips, the blood streaking his wrists and ankles. All because he couldn’t get it up around her. Because if anything, she made him recoil in horror, killing any natural instinct of his dick to twitch around a beautiful, naked woman. There was no lust from him even for her lithe and willing body.
Her sigh filled the bedroom. “I will be kinder yet. I think you are perhaps the strongest Jinn I’ve met, and I will have your child. Which means perhaps I need to employ a . . . different tactic.”
Her fingers traced along the underside of his jaw, scratching her nails until they dug into the soft spot under his chin. She tipped his head up with one hand and snapped her fingers with the other. “Bring it to me and be quick about it.”
It. What was this now? He dared a look around, without moving his head.
Movement from the corner of the room, and Maks fully expected it to be one of her thugs come to beat him again and then throw him into a new cell. Maybe one with hot lava or spikes. As
if that would make a man aroused.
But it was not one of the usual thugs. A slim, aged woman shuffled forward. Her silvery white hair was wild, as if she’d been caught in the wind, and her limbs were thin like old sticks broken from a dying tree. Her eyes were sharp, though, and full of intelligence that hovered on the edge of madness.
“My queen,” she whispered with a lisp, while she bent at the waist, something in her hands offered up. “A potion of the rabisu’s song. He will see only the one he loves when he looks on you.”
Fuck.
He clamped his mouth shut and the Storm Queen laughed softly. “Oh, as if closing your mouth will stop me from forcing this into you. Foolish boy.”
She tipped his head back further and he tightened his jaw. Of course, he didn’t expect her to give up easily, but neither would he. She clamped a hand on the back of his head, so he was arched hard and as far as his back would allow against the bonds that held him, and then she jammed the thin tube into his nostril, tipping it so the potion was in him in a matter of seconds.
Coughing and spluttering, he choked as it ran down the back of his throat. Coppery, it tasted of blood and the faint tang of sharp herbs. His eyes watered and his body spasmed, dancing and jerking as the potion took hold of him, flooding through his veins and sinking deep into his bones.
Her hands left him as he struggled to breathe, still coughing, spitting to the side. The bindings came off him and he slid down until he lay belly first on the cold tile floor. Vision fuzzing, he didn’t move as he tried to figure out if he could fight this potion.
She didn’t care if she killed him, not really. If he’d died right there, choking on the fluid she herself had shoved into him, it wouldn’t have mattered to her. And that was the danger of this one. If he died, she’d be upset for about half a minute and then she would hunt for another male Jinn.
His life was nothing to her, he was replaceable.
You need to fool her, boy. You need to placate her long enough to escape. Zam will understand that you had no choice. Survival is the key here. Survive.
Kingdom of Storms (The Desert Cursed Series Book 8) Page 3