The Conjurer (The Vine Witch)

by Luanne G. Smith

  “Yanis?”

  The sorcerer swallowed. “No, and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever encountered.”

  “Is it friendly?” Jean-Paul asked as he scanned the room for a weapon just in case. He grabbed an umbrella from the stand by the door, where a janitor snored from the sleeping spell, and gripped it, ready to strike.

  Elena held her hand out to test the air with her shadow vision. She sensed no danger from the odd cloud of light, no spell magic, though it hovered ominously and deliberately above them. As she pondered what to make of it, a mumbled angry squeak escaped from the shop.

  The lock of blonde hair. Yvette. It had to be. She was in there too. He had them both.

  They were past the point of restraint. Jinn magic or not, they couldn’t abandon Sidra and Yvette to that lunatic. The cloud seemed to concur as it whispered in her mind: Ready your sorcery.

  Had Yanis heard the message too? He urgently searched his belongings for his chalk and talismans while Elena felt for the comfort of her grimoire in her satchel and whispered a protection spell.

  And then the world inside the parfumerie exploded.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Jamra’s temper no longer intimidated. He could make the wind howl. He could bury her under a mountain of sand. Sidra was done with his tantrums. She was done with their feud. Let the families fight among themselves until Jahannam swallowed them in the afterlife. A curse on them all. And a curse on Hariq for dying and leaving her alone to face this beetle-hearted brother of his alone.

  No, she took that back. Hariq had always tried to do the right thing. He had lived a good life and made her a part of his world. They may have had only a few brief centuries together, but it was enough to prove she had loved deeply at least once. Her life had been fully and completely intermingled with another’s. And soon they would reunite. With her death the dagger would fall forever from her enemy’s grasp and into the unwitting hands of its meek savior.

  Jamra smashed another perfume bottle on the floor in search of the dagger. He would not be put off again by false promises. It was time to fight or flee, but first she had to free the girl and balance the scales for entry into the next life. She stepped forward to offer her neck for Yvette’s when the air thrummed with the presence of another. Jamra sensed it too.

  “Who have you called?” he demanded, his eyes searching the dark corners of the shop.

  Sidra shook her head, as ignorant of the origin of the presence as he was, when the outline of a silver cloud shone on the ceiling. The sight filled her eyes with astonishment. “It is not jinn.”

  Jamra tracked the light as it swirled across the ceiling. “This foul magic is your doing.” He lurched threateningly toward Sidra, his face within a blade’s width of hers. “Because you keep company with witches and sorcerers.”

  “And who do you keep company with?” she asked. “Ifrit? Demons? What bond have you secured with blood and flame to carry out your fantasy of revenge against innocent people?”

  “Innocent?”

  She’d hit a nerve. Jamra’s jaw tightened, grinding his verdigris teeth.

  “Our people were humiliated. Degraded. We, the superior beings, were forced to do manual labor for a narcissist mortal king whose soft ass no longer fit on his throne from all his years of indulgence at our expense.” He pleaded his case before the ifrit restraining Yvette as if he were judge and jury, while bits of spittle clung to his lip from the emphatic tenor of his words. “But,” he warned, “his mortal descendants will feel the whip of retribution for attempting to stand too tall on their clay feet.”

  “And now you wish to wield one of the seven sigils so you can murder unwitting mortals? We’re thousands of years removed from this injustice you feel so keenly!” she said, shaking her head, her resolve building. “Your charred heart knows nothing but destruction. Without the dagger you’re nothing. Even with the sigil in your hand, you’d still be no greater than a worm in a camel’s intestine.”

  An explosion fueled by petty anger burst on Sidra’s right side. Shelves of perfume shattered. The windows burst. The shop door flew off its hinges. Shards of glass shot across the room, barely missing Yvette.

  Once the jinni’s outburst had been spent, Sidra lowered her scarf from her face. The wall between the shop and the lobby to the factory had crumbled. She blinked at the four dusty and shocked faces that met her gaze on the other side. She had hoped that part of her prognostication had been wrong, but curse the fools, they had come not only when the walls began to buckle but Jamra’s mind too.

  “Curse this place. Free me of this human stench!” Jamra covered his nose with his sleeve and walked through the cloud of scent created from the explosion. He entered the lobby, where he spied Elena, Yanis the Mostly Honest, and the witch’s husband, who seemed to have recovered from his desert-walker spell. They crouched on the floor with their arms protecting their heads after the wall had crumbled. Camille was there, too, huddled under a shower of dust and broken glass. Jamra rounded on them, grinning like a hyena.

  “Jamra, wait.” Sidra put herself between him and the others. “Let us look for the dagger. In the rubble. You have no quarrel with them. Or with the girl.” She stabilized the wall with a flick of her wrist while he looked away, hoping the plaster would hold and the roof would stay propped over their heads. “You only make the task of finding the relic more difficult when you destroy the things around it. This way,” she said. “What you seek is here.”

  Jamra glared past her at the intruders. “Is this who you summoned? These witches and sorcerers you fraternize with?”

  “They are nothing. Flies in the ointment. Leave them be. I will help you search for the dagger.”

  Beside her, the perfume witch rose to her feet. A dazed look of disbelief filled her eyes as she surveyed the damage done to her shop. But her expression transformed to one of pure anger when she spotted Yvette restrained by the ifrit with an iron ring. Sidra watched as the rage traveled from the witch’s eyes to her lips. Camille whispered pungent, biting words under her breath. Jamra ordered her to be still, but she would not be silenced as she cast her spell, breathing in and closing her eyes.

  When the witch exhaled, a cloud gathered from the spilled perfume and blew toward the ifrit’s eyes. The perfume hit him full in the face. His eyes watered as he coughed and spewed phlegm, gagging on the scent of jasmine and musk. The beast smoldered into ash and vanished into the ether, leaving Yvette behind.

  “Filthy witch!” Jamra drew his hand up and clenched his fist until his knuckles whitened. Camille, as if stricken by a sudden headache, pressed her fingertips to her temples. A second later her nose bled and she dropped to the floor.

  Sidra calculated the risk. Iron was tricky, but the ifrit was no conjurer of sophisticated magic. The inferior metal would have disintegrated eventually. She snapped the ring from the girl’s neck with a nudge of her chin before Jamra looked away from the witch.

  Yvette gasped for air, checking her neck for damage. Glimmering as her body rebounded from the effect of the iron, she floated in between the witch and Jamra. “What have you done to her, you stupid cochon?”

  Fire and smoke, the girl couldn’t be subdued for one minute?

  Jamra appeared amused at first by Yvette’s bravado. Then his temper darkened again as she knelt to help her friend recover. “Stand away from her,” he said. When she refused, flicking her fingers under her chin at him, his eyes sparked with hatred.

  Sidra knew the deadly instinct that coiled inside him. “The girl is brash,” she said and waved her hand to downplay Yvette’s actions. “Forget her foolishness. She and the witch are nothing but smoke in your eyes.”

  A thread of tension tingled at her back. Elena and Yanis had both called their power to them. Their energy thrummed in the air, as did the kaleidoscope of odd swirling energy still hovering above. If Jamra didn’t feel it too, he was a fool. He formed a fist again as if to make Yvette suffer the same fate as Camille when Yanis shoved him hard with
a blocking spell to knock him off balance. “Prophets protect us,” she said, knowing the courage it took for him to confront Jamra.

  “Careful, sorcerer. One might think you wish to play with fire.” The jinni righted himself and hurled a stream of flame at Yanis’s wooden leg. The magus managed to deflect the worst of it with a defensive spell, yet the odd angle of the strike allowed a sliver of fire to find its mark. The air filled with the smell of burnt oak. Yanis beat the fire out with his worn taqiyah.

  Before Jamra could strike a second time, Sidra pushed her sleeves up, emboldened by the sorcerer’s courage. She conjured a cobra the length of a man. Unlike before, this one was no smoke-and-air illusion. With one spit in the eye, it could take down an elephant, but she would settle for a single angry jinni. She sent the cobra sidewinding toward Jamra’s feet with its hood up, hissing in a low growl. The serpent stood on its tail, ready to strike. She flicked her finger, directing the snake to lunge for an artery, but its prey was quicker. Damn Jamra. He shifted out of the way with cursed speed and sizzled the snake to ash before Sidra could send it in for a second bite. Thankfully the others had sensibly removed themselves from Jamra’s line of sight as soon as the snake appeared.

  “The sigil is near, jinniyah, I can sense it. Close enough to find on my own, which means you are nothing but ash to me.”

  The jinni whispered into the hollow space inside his fist. A whip made of fire appeared in his hand. He snapped the end so that it crackled and smoked in the air, threatening ungodly pain. Sidra shrank back as he flicked the whip, touching the fiery end to the set of powder-blue drapes framing the broken window at her side. Taunting her. Teasing her with his near miss. The drapes caught fire, sending smoke wafting through the main floor of the factory.

  Fire was nothing. “Child’s play,” she said and stood by the flames, calling them to her, drawing them off the curtains. They clung to the hem of her robe, climbed up her sleeves, crowned her head in a blaze of orange. She blew on her fingertips, creating an intense blue blaze, then shook the flames from her body until they turned to smoke and went out.

  “You can do better than that.” She faced Jamra, turning with him as they circled each other.

  “Don’t do this, Sidra!” Yvette cried from the other side of the room. “Just poof off!”

  The girl didn’t know the power of seeing one’s destiny in flickering fire and the omens of birds. From her periphery, Sidra spied the silvery light on the ceiling rotate with purpose. Everything seemed to be turning, spinning, coiling tighter. Fate was winding itself up, ready to spring its control on her. Chaos or calm? Life or death?

  “Go,” she said to her comrades as Jamra lashed his whip. The fiery tip wrapped around her neck. The fire bit. The rope clinched. The room spun as she twisted off her feet.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Sidra had been caught by Jamra’s fiery whip and yanked off her feet so that she spun across the room. Elena lunged but was helpless to stop the attack. She waited for her friend to get up, to fight back with her fiery temper, but the jinni remained motionless in a heap on the floor.

  Elena reached in her satchel, but a few sprigs of rosemary and a pouch of leftover salt weren’t going to be powerful enough to counter Jamra’s magic. No illusion she could summon would stop him from destroying everything and everyone inside the building to get what he wanted. Yanis shook his head, as befuddled as she was for a way to stop the jinni with their paltry tokens. Still, the bloodstone she’d tossed in her bag as an afterthought during her abduction called to her, so she slipped it into her palm.

  Jamra waited a half beat to see if Sidra would rise. When she didn’t, he stood over her, nudging her with his boot as his lip curled over his eyetooth. Breath still moved through her lungs as her chest rose and fell under her robes, yet she did not awaken.

  “Hey!” Yvette waved her hand to get Jamra’s attention. “I have it. I have that stupid dagger you’re looking for. Leave her alone and maybe I’ll show you.”

  “When the jinniyah is dead, I will take my prize.” He drew the whip through his hands, as if savoring the feel of the flame.

  The heat in his eye, the hate in his heart—Elena knew he would strike the life out of Sidra with his next blow. “You can’t do this!” she said, hoping to appeal to some sense of decency still residing inside the jinni. “She doesn’t deserve this.”

  He took three steps to his right, deciding the best angle to deliver the final lash. “Deserve? She is a murderer. A thief. And now she will die for choosing to defy me.”

  Jean-Paul put his arm in front of Elena and forced her back against the wall with the others. They huddled, helpless to interfere. The jinni played the tyrant, brandishing the whip over his head, winding it up, readying to unleash death. The whip drew back for the third time. The arm came forward. A trail of fire arced over the jinni’s head. Elena held her breath, cringing in anticipation of the terrible moment, but the sound she braced for didn’t come.

  Before the whip made the journey to Sidra’s body, a window smashed in the lobby. The dog, whom she’d given up for dead, crashed through the glass, bounding inside the shop. Leaping off his powerful haunches, he sprang with lightning-quick speed just as the jinni snapped the fiery whip. The dog caught the rope of flame in his teeth and tugged until it came free of Jamra’s grip. He gave it a violent shake, as if it were a rabbit in his jaws, and the whip disintegrated into smoke.

  “Jiminy, where’d he come from?” Yvette said. She and Elena used the distraction to inch closer to Sidra.

  Blood dripped from two puncture wounds in the dog’s side. Elena would have hugged his furry mane and used her herbs to heal him, but the dog was still on the hunt. He growled and turned on Jamra. The dog’s powerful shoulders rolled forward as he set one paw down in front of the other, stalking the jinni.

  Jamra backed away, inching closer to where Sidra still lay unconscious. “Who are you? This is not your fight. Leave us!”

  The dog pressed forward, his growl rumbling into a hair-raising, vicious snarl as Jamra nearly stumbled over the pile of broken perfume bottles. Elena had witnessed fear in the jinni once before when the strange vision of Titania had briefly flashed in her shadow vision. That same look of alarm overtook his face now as the dog advanced, his teeth bared and ready to pounce. Soon there would be nowhere for Jamra to go but the ether, though Elena’s instinct told her he would be followed and hunted even there.

  “What did he do to her?” Yvette glowed softly as she stroked Sidra’s forehead. “She’s not waking up.”

  Obeying her intuition, Elena placed the bloodstone on Sidra’s third eye. Known for its restorative power, the stone could invigorate the circulatory system, cure a broken heart, or rid the body of toxins when matched with the correct spell. At least in humans. Because jinn were made of fire rather than true flesh, she reasoned the psychic gateway was the best position to apply the stone for maximum healing of her spirit.

  The dog stopped his advance, tipping his ears toward Elena’s efforts. Jamra seemed to interpret the pause as a gesture of carelessness by his attacker. He stuck his hand out and grabbed Yvette by her hair, hauling her to her feet. She twisted in his grip and screamed until he put his arm around her neck, securing her in a choke hold. He pressed his lips close to her ear. “If this one means anything to any of you,” he warned, “the jinn mongrel will back away.” Jamra waited for the dog to decide. He tightened his grip on Yvette’s neck until her eyes squeezed shut in desperation. At last, the dog reversed his step. “Now,” Jamra whispered in Yvette’s ear, “give me that dagger.”

  Yvette opened her eyes and searched everyone’s faces for what to do.

  “Now!” Jamra jerked Yvette off her feet.

  Elena drew her athame from her satchel. It was sacred to her. A tool for ritual work. But it also had a very sharp blade. She did not know for certain if jinn bled, but if he made one more threatening move, she would find out.

  Suddenly, the silver light that had been ho
vering overhead began to flash and spin. Jamra halted his assault long enough to let his attention shift to the ceiling. “Who called this magic?” he bellowed.

  No one answered as the light pulsed and sparked, though the dog padded toward it unafraid. The light continued to spin, and as the center dropped to form a twisting thread of glimmering filament, everyone else took a step back. The whirlwind lightly touched down on the marble floor, kicking up a cloud of silver dust. From it, a woman in an iridescent gown adorned with beetle shells and butterfly scales emerged. On her head sat a crown made from dragonfly wings held together with silver wire and tiny seed pearls.

  “Titania!” Yvette cried.

  “Nonsense,” she said. “Call me Grand-Mère, child.”

  Yvette clawed at Jamra’s arm. “Let me go!”

  Jamra tightened his elbow around Yvette’s throat. “Why does the witch queen stand before me? What business have you here?”

  The queen of the Fée replied with a smile, then gestured to the dog.

  The dog ruffled his fur and twitched his nose. Like a shimmering haze rising above the parched earth on a scalding day, the air blurred where he stood. The effect was momentary. A mirage that disappears after blinking to see more clearly. When the animal came back in focus, he stood as a man. He wore a sleeveless black robe with gold threading that exposed his broad shoulders and a pair of black-and-gold slippers that curled up slightly at the toe. A curved dagger, its hilt encrusted with rubies, decorated his belt. Restored to what Elena assumed was his natural being, his brown eyes telegraphed a warm sincerity, though perhaps weighted with a world of regret.

  Except for the fuller face and healthier complexion, the man standing before them bore an uncanny resemblance to Jamra—the same dark, wavy hair, thin beard, flash of white teeth, and intimidating height.

  “It cannot be.” Jamra blinked, disbelieving. “You’re dead.”

  “Clearly I am not.” The jinni in black did not take his eyes off Jamra as he spoke over his shoulder. “Sorcerer, do you have your paper and chalk?”