jinn 01 - ember

by Schulte, Liz

  There was a flash from the living room that caught everyone’s attention except Holden’s. He was still brooding.

  “She went to see Selene,” he said and rolled his eyes. “Because we don’t have our own problems to deal with.”

  “Cheer up, chuckles. Your irritation now will be nothing compared to what it will be when she finds a way to play their game and leaves you here.” Femi flashed him a toothy smile. “Might as well let a little chat with Selene go.”

  Holden let out a long-suffering sigh while Quintus laughed. I stayed the hell out of it. His anger might not have been directed at me, but I wasn’t going to goose that chicken. I wasn’t a flat tire. Survival instincts, thy name is Baker.

  Femi directed her cat eyes to me with a devious glint in them. “So you’ve been banging the boss’s daughter.” I choked on my sandwich. She raised an eyebrow. “That’s pretty gutsy, Baker.”

  Holden pinched the bridge of his nose and an angry vein popped out on his forehead. Quintus looked dutifully uncomfortable, but he wasn’t offering a distraction.

  I forced my own grin. If I had figured anything out about Femi in the time I’d known her, it was that if she found a spot that made you wiggle when she poked it, she would never stop. “It’s not quite like that.”

  “So you haven’t slept with her?”

  I continued to watch Holden out of the corner of my eye so I could dodge if he decided to take another whack at me. He hit like he was holding a fucking brick. Not something I relished to have done twice in one day. “I don’t kiss and tell, doll.”

  Holden stared blankly at his untouched plate like he was listening to something far away from us. My money was on whatever Olivia was doing. She calmed him. No matter what happened, he always kept tabs on her as if he was sending a part of himself he couldn’t live without into the world. I didn’t understand that sort of obsessive worry over another person. I cared for Maggie, but her hold on me was nothing like Olivia’s on Holden. Sure, there were plenty of things I would rather do than break up with her, including taking a beating from Holden, but I wasn’t going to do anything as dramatic as die without her. That just wasn’t my style. However, I sympathized more with him now that I understood a little bit better. Once the right woman got you all balled up, it was damn hard to go back. He smiled slightly and his face softened for a moment before he realized what had happened and went back to his usual façade.

  “So what are we going to do about her?” Femi asked.

  Both Holden and I looked up.

  “What do you mean?” Holden asked. “Why do we have to do anything?”

  “Protect her,” I said at the same time.

  Femi brought one foot up on her chair and slung an arm around her leg. “Yeah, obviously. But she’s human. They’re pretty breakable. So are you bowing out of this, Baker, to watch her 24/7? Does she have a job? Family—besides him? She was possessed. What does she know about us? What sort of information could she have given them? Has she retained anything from the possession? Can she help us?” Femi took another bite. “Why am I the only one asking these questions?” she said around a mouthful of food.

  I ran my hand over my hair. She couldn’t come with us, and I couldn’t stay behind to babysit. I glanced toward Holden, who looked like he was waiting for me to say something. I shrugged.

  He blinked, breaking his icy glare. “I told you to stay away from her,” he said. “I didn’t think any of this would happen. I sure as fuck don’t have a plan. You made this mess. Deal with it.”

  “I know.” I did know. I’d known the whole time I was with her that it was a risk. Now I was left with two options and a tomato of a choice. “Any thoughts on what we should do? Are you leaning more in one direction?”

  Holden cracked his neck on either side. “She obviously can’t help, so you will have to stay with her. Get her out of town. Try not to mess things up more than they already are.”

  There had to be another way. I wasn’t going to run away before the fight even started. “Maybe Olivia will have an idea.”

  Holden looked at me like I had finally descended into madness. “You want to go with Olivia’s idea?”

  “I sometimes have good ideas, Holden.” Olivia walked into the room, looking happier than when she’d left.

  Holden looked at her, his face again softening. “You have risky ideas.” He had lost the edge in his voice. Those two should be chained together.

  Olivia smiled. “She can’t be possessed again. I took care of that. Even if she can’t remember a lot from being possessed, she might know something. I think she should tag along. What’s the harm?”

  “Death. Death is the harm.” Holden looked at me as if to say, “That’s the kind of ideas you get from her.”

  Olivia chose to ignore him. “But ultimately this is her decision, not ours. And we aren’t going to force her to do anything. She’s an adult.”

  “I’ll take her,” Quintus said. “If you guys need another option. I don’t know how much help I can be with most of what you are going to do, but I can hide her and watch over her until it is safe.”

  Olivia smiled. “We will present her with that choice too.”

  Holden frowned. “I think Baker should decide.”

  Olivia narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

  “Because he’s the one who ‘loves’ her and introduced her to this world. She doesn’t know anything about the Abyss or what we are dealing with. What qualifies her to make this decision?”

  “It’s her life. That’s all the qualification she needs.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I held up my hands before they could really get going. “I didn’t say I wanted to decide for her. Not really my way of doing things.”

  Olivia tilted her chin up with a smug smile.

  “But I also agree that she doesn’t know enough about this world to make a good decision.”

  Holden didn’t react.

  “Maggie and I will discuss it when she wakes up, and we’ll decide then. But no matter what happens, I’m not leaving. Not to get all mushy on you, but as long as you’ll have me, I’ll be here. I meant it when I said you guys are my family.”

  Olivia took Holden’s hand. A second later, she froze, her head tilting to the left. “I have to go.”

  Holden tugged on her hard enough to get her attention. “Where?”

  “Uriel.”

  He nodded and released her. Once again, she blinked away with a flash of light.

  Maggie’s voice came from behind me. “Whoa. Where did that lady go?”

  We all looked back at her. I immediately stood up, gave her my chair, and swiped Holden’s plate for her before Femi took it.

  “Can she see us?” Femi whispered to Quintus. Quintus tilted his head and watched her.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked her.

  “Uncomfortable.” She smiled weakly, her stare flittering passed me to Holden, whose expression was even more guarded than usual. “Have we met?” she asked.

  He finally looked at her. “No.”

  “So it’s just the two of you here? Where did the girl go?”

  “You only see two of us?” I asked.

  She frowned, glancing around the room. “Are there more?”

  I had hoped that opening her mind to the fact that there was the Abyss would let her see it—or at least see as much as a witch could. Apparently not. “It’s not important.”

  Femi threw her wadded-up napkin at me. “I am the most important.”

  I pressed my lips together to keep from smiling.

  Maggie gasped. “Where did you come from?” I followed her eyes to Quintus.

  “I was here the whole time. Quintus.” He held out a hand to her. Her face relaxed as soon as she touched him. It figured the guardian would be good at this.

  He stood and walked around the table. “May I?”

  I moved out of his way, and he took both of Maggie’s hands. “Close your eyes.” She did so without questioning him.

  Hold
en moved to stand next to me, and Femi propped her feet up on the table, texting.

  “If she starts dating him”—he nodded to Quintus—“I will hold you personally responsible.”

  I couldn’t even laugh at that while he held her hands and she looked so at ease. The urge to knock his hands aside puzzled me.

  “Open,” he said after a few minutes.

  She blinked and smiled up at him. “I don’t feel different.”

  He released her hands. “Look around again. Has anything in the room changed?”

  Her eyes flickered over the table and passed over Femi, but they widened slightly as she slowly looked back.

  Femi winked at her and went back to her phone. Maggie just stared with her mouth gaping. After several attempts, she finally said, “What are you?”

  Femi set her phone to the side and turned those catlike eyes to Maggie. She assessed her for a moment before leaning back in her chair, balancing it perfectly on two legs. “I’m your typical bounty-hunting descendent of the warrior goddess who kicks ass and makes no apologies for a living.” She flipped her long golden ponytail and the chair landed with a thump that made Maggie jump. Femi stabbed the last bit of food on her plate with her claw-like fingernail and held it up to inspect it before plopping it into her mouth, clearly enjoying this. “Feel free to bow, puny human.”

  Maggie’s jaw dropped open.

  “Thanks, Femi,” I said.

  “No problem, champ.” She flashed a grin at us then looked back to Holden. “What’s our next move? We sit here any longer and I’m going to take a nap.”

  “We need to figure out what a Balit is and where they are looking for it. Hopefully they don’t have it yet.”

  “I think we need Olivia for that,” Femi said.

  “Not necessarily,” I said, and everyone looked at me. “I know people.”

  “What people exactly?” Holden asked.

  I just smiled. You didn’t live this long without being privy to one or two secret organizations. They might not even recognize this ugly mug anymore. If it meant saving the angel’s skin, then I would at least give it a shot.

  “You know what? I don’t even care. I’m coming with you,” Holden said. “Femi, see if you can find their new headquarters. I imagine they will abandon the church. Quintus, check with your guardian. Make sure Liv’s mom is okay and see if you can figure out where this game is going to take place.”

  Everyone stood up except Maggie. “What about me?” she asked.

  Holden looked down at her as if he had forgotten she was here. “What do you want to do?”

  She shrugged. “Help, I guess, though I have no idea what’s going on or who you people are.”

  He looked at me.

  “She can’t come with us,” I said to Holden before shifting to her. “Sorry, doll, but it’s not the place for someone like you.”

  “Someone like me?”

  “Frail,” Femi said, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed.

  “So I am just supposed to go home and pretend like none of this happened?”

  “No. You can’t go home.” Holden rubbed his hand over his forehead. “The warehouse. She can go there.”

  That was a good idea. One I wished I’d thought of. Nothing should get through those wards, and if it did, one step in the wrong room and it was trapped until we got back.

  “What’s the warehouse? What am I going to do there?”

  “Wait for Olivia,” he said. Then he started for the door, not really giving her a choice. We all filed out of the apartment behind him. Holden was definitely happiest with the angel, but whether or not he liked doing it, he was good at being the leader.

  BAKER LED ME through a maze of dark freight tunnels beneath the city. Rats scurried beneath our feet as we silently moved through. Baker’s knowledge of the city and really all things supernatural was useful, but it also made me suspicious. We turned down a narrower and crumbling tunnel I hadn’t even seen until he’d disappeared into it. He came to a stop in front of a door made out of heavy wooden planks. A faint line glowed from the bottom of it.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  He started to gesture like he was going to speak. Then he stopped and started up again. “You see, boss, I used to be a…member here.”

  “And what is here?”

  He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “The Abyss isn’t as autonomous as one might believe.” Discomfort poured off of him. “I’m not exactly their favorite person, but just follow my lead.”

  I gestured toward the door. Baker took a deep breath and knocked three times in the center of the door, paused, and knocked three more times to the left. The door opened and we walked through. Gas lamps lit the cool, damp room. No one appeared to be in the room. It was no bigger than an eight-by-twelve cell with no furniture or dark corners to hide in, just an old-fashioned phone hanging on the wall. I hung back, watching as he moved toward the phone. It was a rectangular oak box with two bells at the top, a long, protruding mouthpiece, and a black, handheld speaker attached with an ancient cord on one side and a crank on the other. Baker lifted the speaker to his ear and began to crank. He stopped and hung up the phone.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now we wait,” he said.

  Moments later, the bells on the phone began to jingle. He lifted the earpiece again. “Hello,” he said into the mouthpiece. “I know…I understand that, but—I have information you might be interested in.”

  He smiled and gave me a thumbs up.

  “The jinn are going to be freed.”

  My jaw stiffened. Who in the fuck was he talking to?

  “I’ll tell you more when you tell me what I want to know.” He listened a moment. “What is a Balit? And where can I find one?” He waited. “That’s it? That’s all you have?” He shook his head. “No, I’m not telling you anything else until you have something useful for me.” He hung up the phone and walked back across the room. “It’s a whip of fire. That’s all they know.”

  I took a deep breath. “Baker, you don’t get me information by telling my affairs to other people, do you? Who are these people?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Well I wouldn’t say I do that exactly. Sometimes you have to give a little to get what you want though.”

  “And who is on the other end of that phone?”

  “Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the heebie-jeebies.” Back in the tunnels, he began speaking again. “You see, the Abyss is large, and while the different factions do rule themselves, there has to be someone who keeps tabs on everything that is happening here or we would have been exposed a long time ago.”

  “And who are they?”

  “I can’t tell ya, boss. Look, they’re immortal and there are only a few. Their existence has to remain secret or there would be chaos, squabbling, and power struggles everywhere you looked.”

  I nodded. I could believe that. Why should only a few act as puppeteers for the rest of us? How did they control all the different races without anyone knowing about them? I also could understand the need to keep our world on lockdown from the human world. We had too much crossover as it was. Any more and they would have to be blind not to see it. “How do you know about them?” I asked.

  He shrugged one shoulder. “I know my onions.”

  Christ I hated slang. I gave him a look.

  “You know, like you hear things, meet people, if you live long enough. Who do you think Sy works for?”

  I hadn’t thought about it. That made a little more sense. They were using the bounty hunters to police the Abyss. Interesting, but not really relevant to what we were doing now. A whip of fire—that was what we needed to focus on. Since Baker and I had come up empty-handed, we really had no choice but to ask Olivia. Better yet, we had to ask the angel, which meant we needed her to come forward and talk to us. In my experience, the angel hadn’t been all that forthcoming with information and only revealed herself when she wanted to. There was only one way I knew of to get
her to come out and play. “We need to find a jinni.”

  “Why?” Baker asked.

  “To tempt Olivia’s angel into helping.”

  Baker nodded. We walked in silence for a while, but he kept glancing back at me.

  “What?”

  “Sorry about the whole Maggie thing, boss.”

  There were too many more important issues weighing on my mind to devote any energy into caring about what he’d done or the type of danger he had put her in. Maggie might have been blood, but that didn’t make her family—meeting her had proved that. Olivia and Marge were my family. Their pain was my pain. She was no more than a stranger. I hadn’t see my brother when I looked at her. I hadn’t felt anything toward her. The idea of Maggie was far more sacred than her life would ever be. I liked knowing a piece of my family could live on apart from me, but beyond that, that person was on her own. “Just don’t let it get in the way of what we need to do.”

  “Not a chance. I’m not about to handcuff myself to her.”

  My thoughts immediately went back to Olivia. She was wrong. Baker wasn’t in love. I may not have known as much about love as she did, but from nearly the moment I met Liv, I would have and pretty much did, as Baker would say, handcuff myself to her. Olivia saw love wherever she looked because that was what she wanted to see. Temptation, however, was something I knew all about. Baker liked Maggie, and he probably liked her more because he knew she was supposed to be off-limits. Either way, none of it really mattered. Liv should have been back by now, but she was still absent from my mind.

  When we were back above ground, I sent Baker to the warehouse and transported into Phoenix’s office at Xavier, where he was talking to a young jinni in a tight shirt and skinny jeans. He sighed when he saw me. “I thought we agreed you would call,” he said.

  The kid turned to look at me and his eyeliner-covered eyes grew larger in his hipster head.

  “Is he important to you?”

  Phoenix shrugged.

  “Good. I need him. Meet me around back.”

  The jinni looked back at Phoenix, who nodded to him to go. “Holden,” he said before I could transport. I looked at him. “Will he be back?”