by Sara King
What did she do to receive their attention? he thought bitterly. He’d spent countless years in captivity and had never so much as heard a whisper, yet she had received warning twice in as many days. Reluctantly, he tore his eyes from the swirling winds and waited for their pursuer to show itself.
For long moments, nothing happened. Then, in almost utter silence, black shadow slipped in the gray sky overhead. ‘Aqrab frowned. Was it dipping to meet him?
Run! the winds screamed suddenly, shoving him away from his magus, pushing him into a jog. Twist to the Fourth Lands, fool!
…fool? Since when did the winds have the audacity to call a djinni a fool? ‘Aqrab stumbled to a halt and looked up at the iron beast. He could barely hear the thrumming its blades made as they cut the air. Then the sound of gunfire echoed around him, spitting up crystalline shards of obsidian at his feet. Seeing that, ‘Aqrab frowned. It was almost as if the skyborne beast was watching him. But that was impossible. Safely ensconced in the half-realm, he was but a mirage upon the cold face of the First Realm. He backed a few feet out of their range of fire, only to watch the iron beast twist in the sky to face him.
…twist in the sky?
Since when could anything but a dragon see a djinni in the half realm?
Unless…
‘Aqrab felt his throat go tight. If they were using a dragon’s eyes in the iron beast, they would see him even better at night. And he’d led them right to the wolf. He turned from his magus, then, horror lacing his veins, and ran, trying to get them to give chase. The iron monster turned in the sky and followed, its silent glass windows a deeper black against the darkness as it peppered the ground with metal.
Just before he hit the end of his tether, he twisted to the firerealm and prayed.
Imelda ordered the helicopter down on the frozen creekbank, beside the jagged hole in the ice.
“He must’ve tried to cross,” her scout, Jacquot, yelled as he ducked his head and met the helicopter. He still wore his wetsuit, his face steaming in the red glow of the helicopter interior. Chuckling, the Frenchman said, “Le démon gigantesque must have found he was not as light on his feet as he thought.” He shook his head amusedly. “Le connard.”
Her skull already pounding from the painful thrumming of the rotor blades, Imelda grunted and ducked out of the helicopter to walk to the creek’s edge. Her gut was still telling her there was more to the story. Light though he was, what kind of demon of the flame would chance walking across thin ice in the First Realm, when he could simply twist to the half-lands or the firelands to travel the same terrain, out of danger? When she grew close enough to see the cracked ice with her flashlight, she stopped and frowned.
A trail of water droplets led out from the break, though she could see no footprints in either direction. To Jacquot, who had followed her to the water’s edge, she said, “And the wolf was never seen?”
“La louve has not yet shown herself, Inquisitrice.”
Imelda frowned and shone the flashlight into the forest on the other side of the creek, back towards the Sleeping Lady and, beyond, Anchorage. That she had been correct in seeking the djinni to the north was a small victory, but one that she was sure would haunt her later, when Inquisidora Zenaida learned of her ‘disobedience.’ Imelda took a moment to study the swamp grasses lining the creek, then lifted her light to examine the forest beyond. While she could not be absolutely positive at this distance, she could not see a trail of melted footprints and frost-less leaves leading from the woods. The djinni ran an average temperature of 80 degrees Celsius—about 175 degrees Fahrenheit in this incomprehensible land of fools—and one of the things she’d noticed upon searching the wreckage of the gunbattle had been that, wherever the djinni went, he left melted frost in his wake.
She twisted, shining her light into the forest where the djinni had disappeared. She started following the now-frozen water spatters into the woods.
“You believe la louve was here, ma mie?”
Imelda hesitated at a clump of burned grass. Beside it, blood had congealed and frozen on the iced, silty ground. She crouched beside it, getting a better look.
“Tell me, Jacquot,” she said, picking up a crimson-stained leaf. “What color is the blood of a djinni?”
Jacquot frowned at the leaf. “Djinn do not bleed, Inquisitrice.” Once they’d discovered they were dealing with a Fourth Lander, he had spent hours with Imelda in the library, pouring through every article the Order had on flame-demons, finally helping her to narrow it down to a djinni.
Imelda lowered the leaf back to the ground and considered the blood. It, combined with the blood she had seen spattered across the span of over a mile, left little for the wolf, if any. She shone her light around the area, found the spot where the djinni had knelt, his knee-impressions two melted divots in the jagged crystals of the hard-frozen mud of the creekbank.
So the djinni had attempted to save the wolf. Imelda shone the light once more on the cracked surface of the slow-moving creek. The wolf, being heavier than the djinni, had fallen through the ice. Had he been carrying her across the creek? It made no sense, because aside from the area directly around the blood, there were no massive footprints melted into the ice. So how had a wolf walked across ice that thin, only to fall in halfway? Then, once immersed, how did she get out again without breaking the rest of the ice?
Leveling her light once more on the djinni’s footprints, she got up and followed them into the forest.
They stopped beside a man-sized mound of torn-up mosses, branches, and dead leaves.
“Weapons!” Imelda cried, drawing her pistol. She fired three shots into the pile, then hesitated when it didn’t move. Beside her, Jacquot had his rifle up, the barrel leveled on the mound of debris. “Guard,” Imelda told him, slipping to a crouch and picking up a nearby stick. Using it at a distance, she pried mosses and debris from where the djinni had piled it around the wolf’s body.
And it was a body. She straightened slowly, eying the pale visage of death beneath the forest detritus. So that was why the wolf hadn’t shown up on radar. It was dead. The wounds she had given it were ragged holes in the meat, not even bleeding. Imelda nudged it with a foot, then tucked her gun back into its holster. Squatting beside it, she shone the light into the corpse’s face. As she had noted back at the Sleeping Lady, the dead woman appeared to come from one of the purer lines of Arabic descent.
Carefully, Imelda leaned forward and put her fingers to the wolf’s neck, just to be sure. She counted a full minute with no pulse. She waited three, just to be sure. As she moved away, her light flickered off of a bit of silver clinging to the woman’s neck, mostly hidden by her frozen sweater. Frowning, Imelda considered it, but made no motion to reach for it.
“Shall we take the body back with us?” Jacquot asked. He had not lifted the muzzle of his rifle from the corpse’s face.
“Our Order has no use for a dead wolf,” Imelda said. She gestured at the chopper. “Go radio Inquisidora Zenaida. Tell her the wolf is dead.”
Jacquot made a courteous bow and jogged off through the woods, toward the creek. Imelda waited until her scout was out of sight to retrieve the pendant from around the wolf’s neck. Though crude and worn, the silver symbol almost reminded her of an elaborate, winged sword. The emblem nagged at her somehow, tickling the furthest corners of her mind. She had seen something similar before, she was sure. But where? It wasn’t a djinni symbol. The djinni loathed metal weapons of any sort, and instead did battle with their words. She rolled the symbol in her hands, considering. It felt old. Ancient, even. She spent minutes staring at it, wishing desperately that she could wrench that knowledge from whatever cubby she had tucked it, however many years ago.
Behind her, she heard Jacquot returning at a jog and, on instinct, tucked the symbol into a pocket, to be analyzed later.
“La Inquisitrice wants to know of the wolf’s symbol, ma mie,” Jacquot said, slowing beside her. He handed a radio out to her.
“W
hat did you tell her?” Imelda asked, taking it.
“I said I was unsure—I left before we searched the body.”
Imelda nodded and depressed the SEND button. Eyes on Jacquot, she said, “It looks as if the djinni took the symbol, Segunda Inquisidora. There was nothing on her body.”
Above her, she thought she saw Jacquot stiffen ever-so-slightly. So he had seen. Damn. Fortunately, Imelda knew that man had the good sense to keep his mouth shut. He was a bright soul. He knew Imelda bore no responsibility to report to the Segunda Inquisidora out of anything more than courtesy, and he knew better than to stick his foot into Order politics.
Inquisidora Zenaida cursed on the other end of the radio. “We needed that talisman, Imelda. He could have escaped to the firelands by now. Did you get a good look at it, at least?”
“There is nothing here to suggest that anything was actually keeping him here in the first place, Inquisidora,” Imelda growled. “Perhaps this djinni was simply friends with the wolf.”
Zenaida cackled into the radio. “Have you ever even met a djinni, you camel-toed bitch? Not only do they hate the First Lands, but the only ones who can stand their word-weavings are their own kind. It’s like oil and water. A djinni would throw a wolf into a rage simply by opening his mouth.”
Imelda found herself prickling all over again. “This is an open band, Inquisidora. Mind your tongue or I will cut it off.” Every member of the Order within range would have heard the woman’s disrespect—and Imelda’s reply.
For a long moment, there was utter silence on the other end of the radio. Then, softly, Zenaida said, “You will remain tasked to the djinni until you bring him home.” The transmission ended with static.
Imelda grunted and returned the radio to Jacquot, who was giving her an odd look. “Is there a reason why we lied to La Inquisitrice?”
“She’s a power-hungry concha,” Imelda said, grateful to her Paraguayan friends for the perfect word to describe the cunt she worked with. “That, and I’d bet my pistol it isn’t what is binding the djinni.”
Jacquot raised both eyebrows, but nodded. “As you say, Madame.”
She sighed. “Still, we must test it.” Dragging the symbol from her pocket, she held it up between them. “Would you like to do the honors, Jacquot, or shall I?”
The Frenchman eyed the talisman as if it were the head of a viper. Crossing himself, he said, “The ‘honor’ is all yours, ma mie.”
Imelda grinned at the Frenchman’s reaction. While she herself found magic despicable, Jacquot would rather die by fire than touch an article crafted with it. Of all the twenty-one members of her team, Jacquot was one of three who refused all ‘augmented’ gear. He would get into a helicopter, if given no other alternative, but he always made certain no part of it contacted his skin.
“Very well,” Imelda said. Gripping the symbol in a fist, she said, “Djinni of this talisman, I claim your service and I call upon you to grant my wish.”
She thought perhaps the breezes increased in the branches above, but it could have been her imagination. Imelda tried again, in Arabic this time. She tried three more languages, then sighed and dropped the talisman back into a pocket.
“It did not work.” She could not tell if Jacquot was grateful or disappointed with the result.
Imelda shrugged. “Perhaps there is something else the wolf carries with her that we’ve not yet seen.”
Because Jacquot would not touch the body—he belonged to one of the stricter sects of the Order who would not even profane their skin with the flesh of the cursed—Imelda told him to go looking for traces of the djinni as she began to roll the already-stiffening corpse onto its back alone. Imelda spent a good several minutes searching the wolf’s body, looking for some sign of how she had simply vanished. She found nothing. The woman’s pockets were completely empty, and she had carried no backpack that they had been able to find.
That bothered Imelda. How had the wolf planned to survive the trek through the forest? She had been back to the Sleeping Lady, of that Imelda was sure. The generator had been shut off, and the clothes the wolf now wore were identical to the ones that were now missing from a precautionary photograph she’d taken of the cabin after she’d ransacked it.
So where had the wolf been planning to go without food, gear, and matches? She had to have had some sort of safe haven in mind, somewhere to the north. A cabin or a lodge, somewhere between here and Denali National Park? …Or beyond it? Encompassing over nine thousand square miles of federally-owned wilderness, no private dwellings were allowed within the boundaries of the vast park itself. It was possible that demons had created a safe-haven somewhere within, but not probable. As one of Alaska’s greatest tourist destinations, the entire park was carefully patrolled by overzealous rangers who were known to stop their helicopters to pick up a single piece of trash that had blown off of the park’s only two-lane roadside.
The djinni’s goal had to be before the park…didn’t it? They couldn’t possibly have been planning to go over the Alaska Range. After all, there were literally dozens of fishing lodges, hunting retreats, and recreational cabins between Carboy Creek and the Alaska Range. But which one had they been aiming for? The tiny woman’s blood-drenched clothes left no indication of their destination.
Eventually, Imelda stood up, disgusted, and retrieved her pistol from its belt. She slapped a new magazine of silver into its base and sighted down the barrel at the wolf’s head. Her research had suggested that a djinni had a meager supply of Fourthlander magic to use at whim, which meant a djinni had some ability to heal, even without use of a wish, and Imelda wasn’t about to take chances that the duo were somehow more friendly than Zenaida suspected. After all, not even a djinni could patch together someone’s skull, if it were properly blown apart.
She was tightening her finger upon the trigger when a sudden, icy breeze nudged her from behind, shoving her forward a step, tracing frigid fingers down her neck. The winds had picked up around her, and what Imelda had at first taken for rotor-wash she quickly discovered was something else entirely. Wind wrenched at the treetops overhead, slapping branches together in its force. Then, from behind, light seared the darkness suddenly, too bright to have come from any human source. Imelda twisted, gun in hand.
An angel was standing behind her, formed of wisps of frost and vapor.
“Our sister of vengeance,” the radiant entity whispered to her, words so deep and so powerful Imelda heard them in her soul.
Immediately, Imelda fell to her knees, making the sign of the cross upon her chest. “Mother of God,” she whispered, in awe of the angel before her. It looked to be not one, but a thousand of them, their faces fluctuating, moving, changing, but there was no mistaking the heavenly radiance searing from their wings and their sword. She crossed herself again and bowed her head and whispered the Prayer to Saint Michael. She was still finishing it when Jacquot came jogging up, panting. “What was that light, Inquisitrice?”
Imelda ignored him, finishing the final plea to the archangel, her fingers clutching the cross at her chest. “…O prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all the other evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.” When she looked up, the vision was gone.
“You summoned the demon?” Jacquot sounded wary, and he was keeping a distance, his rifle up, staring nervously at the frosty shrubbery in front of her.
Slowly getting back up from her knees, still in shock, Imelda shook her head, still awash in wonder. Our sister of vengeance. The angel had spoken to her. Given her a message.
“Madame Inquisitrice?”
Still silent, Imelda looked down at the corpse. Around them, the wind was whipping in the trees, tearing branches from above to come cascading down around them. Imelda barely heard it. Her heart was still pounding with the joy of meeting one of her Lord’s messengers. “I was just given a Sign, Jacquot.”
Jacquot eyed the treetops cautiously. “A Sign, Madame In
quisitrice?”
“An angel,” she whispered, her eyes still fixed to the place where the vision had disappeared. “It came to me.”
Now Jacquot was eyeing her with caution. Tentatively, the Frenchman said, “Messengers often appear to God’s Chosen, Inquisitrice.” Doubtless, she could see him thinking, a possible cause behind her spectacular rise through the ranks of the Order.
The thought that she was one of God’s Chosen left Imelda with a sudden wash of joy that she quickly squashed. Pride was the first step before the Fall. Taking a deep breath, she released the cross at her neck and replaced the gun to her hip. “This is to stay between the two of us, Jacquot.”
Jacquot nodded, and, with a wary glance at the forest around them, said, “Then if you do not mind, ma mie, I would retreat from under these trees.”
With the crash of a falling birch only a hundred feet distant, Imelda readily agreed. She jogged to follow Jacquot as he ducked through the creaking, howling stand of birch, and was already well out of the forest, on her way back to the helicopter, when she realized something was heating through the bulletproof lining of her chestplate. Frowning, she dug her fingers into her pocket and pulled out the wolf’s talisman.
It was hot to the touch.
She hesitated, turning back, glancing at the wind-whipped forest. Another birch tree fell with a massive crash, snapping limbs from a spruce and shearing a stand of willow in half.
She hadn’t shot the wolf.
Her bodyguard slammed a heavy hand on her shoulder, startling her. Gesturing to the cockpit and the German pilot who was even then struggling to keep the helicopter stable, Giuseppe, a former Italian mobster-turned-warrior-of-God, cried, “We need to get out of here, Inquisidora! If we don’t lift off now, the winds will tear us apart.” Even then, another massive birch—unstable, and without tap-roots in the six inches of loam that was the extent of Alaskan ‘topsoil’—came crashing down like a titan, this time landing in the creek only fifty feet from the helicopter’s rotors. Another quickly followed, on the other side of the creek.