by Sara King
“Enough, ‘Aqrab,” she finally whispered. “You defile me.”
She felt the djinni’s grip harden around her, and for a moment, she thought he would ignore her and try to continue the hold. Then, reluctantly, the djinni pulled away and wiped his face on a big arm. He caught her eyes for a moment, and there was pain etching the tears on his cheeks. “An embrace doesn’t defile, little wolf.”
“It does if it comes from a man,” she growled. “You know what I am, djinni. Respect that, for once.” As it was, she would have to spend hours in prayer to rid herself of his taint.
‘Aqrab continued to meet her eyes, his gaze fierce. “And you know what I am, little wolf. I am no ice maiden. I have gone three millennia craving the human touch. Humor me.”
She felt her lips twist to tell him she’d rather roll in the filth of swine, then, at the desperation in his face, hesitated. By gifting him her shadows, she had accepted his truce. Only now was she was learning the terms.
He couldn’t spear her, but he still wanted her. It was as clear as the color of the sun.
Kaashifah glanced down at his big black hands and considered whether she would ever be allowed inside the temples again. To allow him to continue to touch her… That she was even considering it left her in despair. Three thousand years truly had worn on her.
For a moment, there was nothing to break the silence except for the sound of her blood, dripping a near-black against the frosty stones. She watched the djinni look down at the deeper darkness of her blood against the pebbled beach. He frowned, thankfully twisting the conversation from its former direction. “Let me see,” he commanded, holding out a big hand.
Though Kaashifah would rather put her hand into Hephaestus’s furnace than into the djinni’s palm, she reluctantly did as she was asked. Knowing she could no longer cow him with shadows took much of her well-cultured disdain from her façade, while at the same time, his boon gave her the confidence to hold steady. While still unable to take her birthright form, she was once again a Fury in spirit. And a Fury feared no man.
‘Aqrab took her hand gently. Once she had opened her fist for him to see, the djinni tisked and stroked an ebony thumb across the wound. As he did, she felt the tear she had given herself with the Third Lander’s teeth sealing under his touch, the cool-prickly sensation leaving her with a ragged pink scar.
‘Aqrab held her hand much longer than necessary, and eventually Kaashifah raised her head to look at him.
“Three thousand years, mon Dhi’b.” Even in the dying light, she could see the tears brimming his eyes. “In three thousand years, you’ve never willingly held your hand out to me.” Uncomfortable all over again, Kaashifah tried to pull away, but ‘Aqrab held her firmly. In a whisper, he added, “Yet you do it twice in one night.”
“You said you need not touch me,” Kaashifah growled, trying not to imagine the taint that was even then seeping into her being.
“I’m a djinni, mon Dhi’b,” he offered softly, his gaze locked to hers. “Passion is in my blood.”
Unnerved by the sudden change in the conversation’s direction, she quickly growled, “Your self-made wishes are none of my affair. You cursed yourself to celibacy. It is not my responsibility to console you for your stupidity, when you so flagrantly use others’ words against them every chance you get. You said you could do without my touch. Then do so.” She jerked her arm in an attempt to free herself of the djinni’s grip, but he simply held fast.
“Mon Dhi’b,” ‘Aqrab said, softly, “…tell me you will let me touch you again?”
“Your healing is appreciated, djinni, now release my hand before I rip it off,” Kaashifah snapped. She twisted, intending to walk past him, but he failed to release her.
Behind her, the djinni moved on his knees to face her and whispered, “Mon Dhi’b…”
Realizing he wasn’t going to release her, Kaashifah’s heart started hammering with brutal force as she reluctantly turned back to once again meet his eyes. The djinni’s raw need was there, utterly exposed for her to see, his soul bared and vulnerable.
She knew she could have hurt him, then, could have scored him with her words until he never thought of defiling her body again, and forever kept his distance. Instead, however, she found herself lost in his gaze, wrenched to the very core by his inner fire.
“Please,” he whispered, still holding her.
She found she could say nothing, could only stare at him like a rabbit caught in a hunter’s snare. A thousand things raced through her mind, but she could no more force them from her throat than she could wrench her hand from the djinni’s grasp. Still kneeling, the djinni leaned forward and reached up with his free hand, to touch the back of her head. She felt his body slide closer, like a warm cocoon to shelter her from the cold, and heard his heart hammering like thunder in his chest. Too late, Kaashifah saw the ardor in the djinni’s eyes, and realized his big, hot palm was slipping against her scalp, steadying her head as he brought his face to meet hers…
The tree beside her head exploded in a blast of bark and wood chips, followed by the booming retort of a high-powered rifle echoing across the river. Snapped from her paralysis, Kaashifah instinctively threw the Third Lander from his cage and used him to power her limbs as she shifted to wolf and ran. The djinni, likewise, twisted to the Fourth Lands.
On the river, a boat filled with black-clad men and women roared from its hidden niche across the water. Nearby, black shadows moved low and fast through the trees, murmuring orders into little microphones against their throats. More gunfire slammed into the cranberry and currant bushes as Kaashifah lunged the riverbank and bolted. She felt one hit her hip, felt the silver start paralyzing the Third Lander there, and surrounded it with her magic, forcing the corruptive heat of the silver back to the bullet.
“Silver’s not working!” she heard someone hiss from behind her. “The damn wolf is getting away!”
With her senses now receiving the full benefit of the Third Lander in her blood, she heard the strange, soft whisper of, “It’s the demon we’re after, Imelda. Figure out how the wolf is controlling it.”
There were too many of them, Kaashifah realized, veering suddenly to the left when she saw more of the black-clad soldiers moving through the brush ahead of her. Dozens. Maybe even hundreds. She banked hard and dove into the deeper forest between two startled black shapes.
“Yella-bellied bitch ain’t even fighting,” a man with a Texan accent laughed. “Runnin’ like a scared rabbit.” The sounds of gunfire followed his words, and little bursts of shredded moss exploded in little thumps around her feet.
Another bullet hit her, this time in the back leg. Kaashifah gasped and stumbled, rolling through the brush to slam into the base of a birch tree hard enough to knock the wind out of her.
They’ve got me, Kaashifah thought, too dazed to make her body move as the men came to a running halt behind her and raised their rifles.
Then, suddenly, a blast of fire between them lit up the darkness, half-blinding her with its intensity. Men screamed and backed away as a massive spruce tree burst into flames from the djinni’s heat, its resins lighting up the night for hundreds of yards.
The air was suddenly awash with a frenzied static of screams and orders. Nearby, someone shouted, “Got it in the open. Fire, fire!”
But the djinni had already slipped back to the Fourth Realm, leaving nothing but a roaring column of flames in his wake.
“He keeps slipping Realms,” a black-clad woman was saying. “He must be tied to something here.”
“Figure out what it is and bring it back, Imelda, or a report of your incompetence will reach the Inquisidor Grande,” the whisper replied.
“The wolf is wearing something around her neck,” one of the black-clad warriors said into the mic as she closed in on Kaashifah’s position. “A talisman of some sort.” It was the tall brunette in jeans, Kaashifah realized. The one who had thrown the dart to take down the wereverine. The Spaniard.
&nb
sp; Kill the wolf and bring back the talisman for the Great Commission to evaluate, the whisper snapped back. And be quick about it. This place is crawling with otherkin. Jacquot found another knot of them a few miles downriver.
Kaashifah was already crawling back to her feet, blotting out the pain, narrowing her attention to speed. Overhead, she heard an odd thrumming sound, and looked up just in time to see a helicopter—sleek, bullet-shaped, almost completely silent, unlike any helicopter she’d ever seen before—sliding overhead. Behind her, the women in black made no effort to follow.
“Got the wolf on infrared. Djinni is nearby, fifty feet south-southwest of your position. Fucker lights up like a flashlight. He’s circling to the wolf.”
“Ground crew clear,” Kaashifah heard the Spaniard say. “Make it rain.”
Make it…rain?
And suddenly the world began to flare and explode with heavy gunfire. Kaashifah threw up a defensive wall around her just at the last moment, stopping liquid-oozing bullets in a hazy bubble of shield-magic. She threw energy to her wounds, sealing off the silver to the best of her ability, and then bolted. She knew that she would quickly outpace the djinni, but his soul-bond would not allow him to be more than five hundred cubits distant, so he would simply be dragged by their link until she slowed enough for him to walk. She hoped he had the good sense to flip back to the Fourth Realm, though she wasn’t about to slow down long enough to find out. She ran, weaving a barrier of invisibility through the layer protecting her from the bullets, until it was difficult to see through the shimmery blur that she had created.
“What the fuck just happened?” someone snapped, with a French accent. “The wolf vanished off the sensors.”
“You missed, you fucktard,” a man with a German accent snapped. “She just bolted. Beeline through the trees. No way we’re going to catch her now.”
“That was a direct hit. No freakin’ way we missed that. She’s not even showing up on our cameras…” And then Kaashifah wrapped herself in a capsule of magic and shunted herself to a stream she remembered fishing at several miles upriver from the Sleeping Lady, where salmon settled to rest on their long journey up the Yentna. ‘Aqrab would not like it—he never did enjoy the way the bond wrenched him around during her ‘void-walks’—but she was pretty sure that this time, he was not going to object.
Blackness swallowed her suddenly, yanking her out of range of her enemies’ whispers and heartbeats, leaving her hearing nothing but the sound of her own breath in her lungs. The blackness was complete except for a blinding blue-white electric cable between her and her destination. There were other cables—if she looked too closely, billions of cables, all bending and twisting, threatening to tangle her thoughts and trap her if she examined them for long—but the one she needed was close at hand. It was also one of the few she could actually reach, as exhausted and injured as she was. Saying a mental prayer, she grabbed it and yanked.
A few minutes later, she spilled out onto the cold, half-frozen surface of Carboy Creek, then, with the sudden, unpleasant sound of breaking glass, fell through the ice, into the creek itself.
The frigid water hit her body in a sudden wave of shocking cold, and Kaashifah sucked in a huge gasp of air, struggling to get a hold on the wafer-thin sheet that had held her. Chunks of ice broke off easily in her fingers, giving her no purchase to pull herself from the water. As she panicked at the center of the creek, her body slipping almost instantly into a numb paralysis, the wolf within screamed and ranted against its cage, chipping at the walls she had used to confine it.
Can’t use the wolf, she thought, desperate, now. She had already used it too much that day, and she knew the more she let it from its cage, the stronger it became. She conceded to weave the spell of levitation around her legs, as she clung to the ice, feeling her body go numb as she concocted the platform to lift herself from the icy water. With the energy she had expended and the wounds she had endured, it took several minutes longer than it should have, and by the time she buoyed herself out of the creek and slumped to the ground on the opposite side, her body was numb with cold, and it convulsed with feral shivers. Have to light a fire, she thought, realizing that the numbness spreading into her mind was being aided along by the icy fall air. She twisted slowly, looking at the nearby shore, seeking a likely source of fuel.
Clumps of frozen marsh grasses were all that stood nearby.
Deciding they would have to do, she crawled towards them and focused on them with her mind, narrowing what remained of her energy to a tight ball, heating the likeliest clump of frozen green grass into a timid flame.
…A timid flame which quickly went out.
While immortal, given the right conditions, a Fury could die a violent death just as any other denizen of the First realm. And Kaashifah had been shot, her lifesblood was even then spilling out upon the ground beneath her, dark against the frozen silt of the riverbed. Deciding she needed to use the last of her reserves to stop the flow, she concentrated on sealing the wounds that the Inquisitors had given her and left the fire for later.
It took much too long to gain enough focus to fuse the flesh over the bullets, and by the time she was finished, the cold air had sapped the rest of her strength, leaving her with the odd feeling of numb, pleasant warmth. Groaning, Kaashifah slumped to the frozen silt of the creek’s swampy bank, in a bed of frosty grass. After a few minutes of lying there, she saw the air shimmer near her head.
“Did you have to walk the Void?” the djinni demanded. “I’ve told you I despise being dragged through that tangled—” He stopped, peering down at her oddly. “Why are you wet?” Immediately, his eyes lifted to the jagged hole in the ice of Carboy Creek, following the trail of water back to where she lay.
Kaashifah’s body now only suffered mild shivers, and she felt the nagging urge to close her eyes, exhaustion finally setting in. She had expended much of her energy just trying to survive the jaunt through the Fourth Lands, and after a blood-rite with the djinni and exhausting herself controlling the Third Lander in her blood, followed by a void-walk, she was teetering on the edge of consciousness. And now she carried two lumps of silver like cysts under the skin, weeping poison into her system in hot waves, aggravating the Third Lander, making him even more frenzied at the back of her mind.
…Yet through it all, it had never even occurred to her to use the djinni’s boon to kill.
Too long had she been bound by the djinni’s curse, she realized in tired disgust. Running, it seemed, had become second nature to her.
‘Aqrab fell into a kneeling position beside her, a black mountain in the darkness, and the heat intensified, suddenly warming her face and side. “I see blood, but no wounds, mon Dhi’b,” he said, concern in his violet eyes. “How many times did they hit you?”
Kaashifah tried to tell him, but her words must not have been loud enough, for the djinni grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her violently. “Mon Dhi’b.” His voice was a warning, but there was panic in his eyes. “How many times, and where?”
“Just let me sleep,” Kaashifah said. And closed her eyes again. This time, she was blessedly lost to the void before he could wake her again.
Chapter 5: By the Blood of the Wolf
Imelda Nieve squatted over the blood-spatters marring the pebbled beach. The bare footprint of a flame demon stood out as clear as day beside the tiny child-sized boot-prints of the wolf. They’d searched entire hours away for the two beasts, but both had eluded them as if they’d simply disappeared. The djinni, she could understand. He could simply twist to the firelands and be gone. But the wolf? Imelda picked up a blood-covered stone and twisted it in the glare of her flashlight.
A blood rite. She would have bet her job on it.
What kind of moon-cursed demonkin dealt in djinni and blood-rites?
And how could a wolf simply vanish? They’d had every instrument available trained on the beast—six entire acquisition teams converging at once—and the monster had simply vanished, leavi
ng only a spattering of blood behind to taunt them.
Had it used a wish, then? A wish to escape? Imelda had been one of the closest at hand when the sniper had botched his first shot, and she personally didn’t think that the wolf had been given enough time to make a wish. The beast had simply changed…and run.
That also bothered her. Why would a wolf run? Every possessed soul she’d ever encountered went on the attack the moment the Third Lander took control. It was their natures. The malicious, ravenous beasts of the Third Realm simply did not have the mental restraint to work out such things as plans and strategy. They were vicious predators, crafted into cruel and brutal killers by the cold and violence of the frostlands. They didn’t understand retreat.
Something wasn’t adding up. Imelda’s co-leader of this mission, Segunda Inquisidora Zenaida, thought that the djinni was bound to the possessed woman’s pendant, but Imelda couldn’t understand how a wolf could have disappeared. Even with a djinni’s help. Wolves were bottom-tier. Barely more than savages. Certainly that would have taken a wish, for the Fourth Lander magics to have enough sway to change the tides of history in such a way. The wolf had been theirs. Imelda had reviewed the video footage repeatedly. The djinni had lit up like a flare on the screen, as opposed to the warm reds and oranges of the wolf and her pursuers. The wolf had disappeared first, and the djinni had begun moving at horrendous speeds through the forest before he had simply vanished with her.
The vibrating buzz of her phone interrupted her thoughts. Switching hands on her flashlight, Imelda pulled the slim instrument from her front chest pocket. Flipping it open, she put it to her ear. “Diga.”
On the other end, Inquisitor Zenaida’s deceptively soft voice said, “Have you found the djinni and its pendant yet, Imelda?” As always, the Segunda Inquisidora used Imelda’s common name, instead of her rightful ‘Segunda Inquisidora Nieve’. The same rank, on paper, as Zenaida, though Zenaida maintained several decades of seniority. Zenaida, Imelda knew, didn’t like the fact that there was only time-in-service between her own job and Imelda’s, and the woman took every opportunity to try and increase the distance.