Andy whimpered, set the stone basin on the floor and retreated a few steps. The Eritrean’s blood flowed into it and made small splashing sounds as it fell into the container, its drip, drip masked by the heavy breaths of whatever stood amidst the dark cloud.
Limbs pushed out of the haze. Three at each side, sinewy arms that moved asynchronously as if grasping for balance. Demons were always disoriented when they entered the physical realm.
The haze dissipated, revealing a hideous, broad-chested creature of nearly six feet in height. It stood panting above the hole in the ground. Large scales covered its mud-encrusted body. It stood on short, stubby legs, hunched low, its many clawed hands dangling close to the ground. A snout reminiscent of a carnivorous flower sniffed the air. Four large, black eyes set on a flat head outlined the hideous nose. Thick horns curled around the sides of an enormous head.
All four reflective eyes focused on Akeelah. She measured her magic to make sure she could keep the creature in check. Putting its disguise to the test, the creature growled and pounded its chest. Akeelah wrinkled her nose at the stench of sulfur from its mouth and waved a hand to dissipate it. The demon tried its antics again, this time making a clicking sound through its snout.
She looked down on the unsightly thing, her essence filling with disgust. She much preferred it when they didn’t go through this much trouble. Obviously, this particular demon had been summoned before and had figured out that scary disguises shortened the summoning ordeal.
Akeelah glanced at the Eritrean. His head lolled to one side, the color draining quickly from his face. She focused on his heart. It was weak, with only a few more beats left in it.
Time to begin the binding curse.
It turned out that Faris remembered his transformation vividly, including the spell necessary to bind the soul before its departure. He had experienced his human demise not only as the victim, but also as an audience, since his torturers had made sure to keep him awake through the entirety of the gruesome process. A choice she heartedly approved of.
“Oreh sannen.” Akeelah began the spell.
Faris watched her unblinking, his face tight in concentration.
The demon stomped and swung its arms wildly. An angry grunt escaped through its snout again. Akeelah looked away from Faris and strengthened her magical hold on the beast, containing its fury with some effort.
“Kambiah er astos sannen.”
Like wax under a heavy fire, the demon’s shape began to warp. First, its furious arms melded into one another, then the rest of its body coalesced until it became a plume of energy floating in mid-air, its natural form.
Andy, jaw unhinged, watched the demon disintegrate before his eyes and seemed to relax a bit. The idiot didn’t know he should be more afraid of this small, murky being than any horrendous physical shape it chose to project. Demons detested the physical world, but once summoned, they didn’t hesitate to absorb another being, dragging its essence with them to their cavernous realm. This was how they grew, how they became bigger and more powerful. Andy’s black essence—which was exactly the type they preferred—would be a nice little morsel for this imp, and the foolish human had not the slightest idea.
Too bad she couldn’t release a battalion of imps onto humanity. Properly conjured, they would be able to consume at least a third, if not half, of the Earth’s population, what with all the evil humans with souls as dark as coal. But she wasn’t strong enough to conjure that many imps. And, even if she were, she couldn’t order them to attack. After all, left to their own devices they were too erratic and needed their victims close by, else they retreated back to their realm, disoriented by the light, smells and sounds of the physical world.
The wisp of energy vibrated, agitated by the incomplete spell. Akeelah savored the last words as the Eritrean’s life slowly expired. When the last heartbeat came, in that moment when the man’s soul would leave the inert body to travel to purgatory, Barzakh, she spoke the final words.
“Athralem eo qym mehal.”
As she uttered the last syllable, the demon’s essence flew toward the stone basin and splashed into the pooled blood. The thick, crimson liquid swirled and swirled in the container, then shot upward into the air and hovered above the Eritrean’s body, undulating like a flying snake.
It hung there for a few beats, then plunged downward and entered the man’s body through the slash at his wrist. Like a vicious worm, the demon traveled up the Eritrean’s arm, its path fully visible as the skin bulged. The man twitched as the demon invaded every cell of his body, gathering his fleeing essence.
When the job was done, there was a quiet, still moment that seemed to stretch forever. Akeelah quivered within her makeshift body, waiting, craving, lusting. When a large ball of energy erupted through the man’s mouth, she felt ecstasy for the first time in her timeless existence.
She lifted her hands toward her creation. This new essence was bigger than what had gone in. It was the demon and the Eritrean’s soul combined. It pulsated, its once smoky surface now dark and sleek, reflecting the light.
“Blood to bind,” Akeelah chanted and held the tear-shaped bottle in front of her. Each word she spoke etched itself into the surface of the blue glass. “Never human again. Bound by my command. Free only by my wish.”
The dark ball of energy lingered over the Eritrean’s wasted body, fighting the spell. Akeelah could sense its desire to flee through the hole in the ground, to go back to its realm more powerful than it had arrived. But the binding words were strong, and they slowly pulled the combined essences toward the vessel in her hand.
As it approached, Akeelah spared a glance Faris’s way. He stood transfixed, a mixture of surprise and realization on his face. His odd expression registered for a split second, then Akeelah turned her attention back to the moment, to the only thing that mattered: the first member of her Djinn army.
The demon and its captive descended toward the bottle and seeped in through the glass, igniting the etched words of the spell in fiery red. The letters glowed brightly, then grew dim just as an inky cloud swerved inside. After a moment, a tendril of smoke rose through the bottle’s opening and made its way to the hole in the floor. There, the demon’s lone essence disappeared. Then the broken concrete put itself back together like a living jigsaw puzzle, leaving no trace of what had taken place.
25
Marielle
I pulled the Bugatti into the long-term parking deck at the New Orleans International Airport. I shut off the engine and lay my head on the steering wheel. For the first time since I’d laid eyes on Biker Dude, I was breathing with relative ease. But still, my heart felt like it belonged to a frightened rabbit or a lost child.
The sting of tears prickled in my eyes. The attack had left me confused and scared. I shook my head and exhaled, brushing away the desperation that taunted me like some sort of ugly ghoul.
I’m not alone. I’m not alone. The thought rang in my head over and over.
True, I’d left Dad behind, running away in a tangle of lies and promises. True, I’d lost Faris to a deranged, evil Djinn, and had no idea where to find him. But I was not alone. I had Abby and Maven, and a plan to find the answers needed to foil Akeelah’s plans.
I threw the parking stub in the glove compartment. For an instant, I wondered how long I’d be gone and how staggering the parking fee would be in the end. Then I realized it didn’t matter. I was rich now. And, considering that I had criminals on my trail, I’d be lucky to make it back alive to pay the outrageous fee anyway.
Backpack tight around my shoulders, I speed-walked out of the parking lot through the walkway that connected to the terminal. I hurried down the packed corridors, looking for my friends. A small brunette with short hair standing next to a taller blond boy caught my eye. I shuffled past several luggage-toting travelers and called out their name.
The brunette turned around. “Elle!” Abby rushed in my direction. “What happened? You’re late.”
“Long
story. Have you gotten your boarding passes?” I asked, exchanging a quick glance with Maven, who seemed to breathe a sigh of relief at my sight.
They shook their heads.
“Why not?” I’d paid for all their tickets online. They could have checked in without me to save time.
“We wouldn’t go anywhere without you,” Maven said.
“All right.” I pulled out a passport and driver’s license from my backpack. Faced with presenting fake IDs to a Homeland Security officer, my heart sped up again. Faris’s IDs had to be foolproof, but still, having my own documents would have felt better. Straightening my shoulders, I walked up to the first class counter. There was no line.
“Ready to check in?” The clerk gave me a huge smile.
“Uh, yes. Hi.” I lamely smiled back. “Yes, ready.”
“Good. Destination?” She placed both hands on the keyboard of her computer.
“Barcelona.”
“Name?”
I hesitated for a second and took a quick glance at the driver’s license in my hand. “Sol Palomo.”
The clerk tapped the keyboard confidently, her eyes flying over whatever her monitor displayed. “May I have your passport?”
I deposited the small blue booklet on the clerk’s extended hand, telling myself there was no reason to be nervous. Still, I felt as if someone would pop out of nowhere and say, “Wait! Her name is Marielle Iris, not Sol Palomo.”
“Do you have any bags you’d like to check in today, Ms. Palomo?” The clerk asked.
I shook my head and, faster that I could have thought possible, I was handed a boarding pass with a pleasant smile and directions to my gate. Relieved, I turned to Abby and Maven and gave them a thumbs up, then retreated to wait for them as they checked in.
A few minutes later, I was in a cold sweat again, walking through the security checkpoint and hoping that wearing fake identities didn’t give me a heart attack one day. Again, I worried in vain, because soon we were inside the terminal buying magazines, snacks and drinks at one of the convenience stores.
“You think we’ll find Doctor Leopardo?” Abby asked as we stood in front of a rack full of magazines.
“Doctor Gallardo,” both Maven and I corrected in unison.
“Sure, whatever.” She turned and faced the opposite display. “Ooh, I think I’ll get one of these.” She picked up a magenta neck-support pillow and looked at the price tag. “Sixty-five bucks! What are they? On crack?”
Maven snatched the pillow from Abby’s hands. “But it’s filled with buckwheat. Oh so environmentally friendly.”
“You’d think it was stuffed with dollar bills.” Abby snatched it back.
“Who cares if we find the guy?!” Maven said nonchalantly. “We’re going to Spain. Ole!”
Abby swung the buckwheat pillow and conked Maven on the side of the head. “Insensitive much?” She meaningfully flicked her eyes in my direction.
“Um, sorry,” Maven apologized. “I do hope we find him. If anyone has the answers, it would be, um, the world’s foremost expert on Middle Eastern Mythology.” He tried to sound chipper about it, but I felt my hope deflate a little.
“I wish we could have gotten in touch with him,” I said, suddenly feeling as if leaving New Orleans was a terrible idea. What if Faris came back looking for me while we were gone? What if Doctor Gallardo—which several internet searches had cited as the most knowledgeable Islam studies man in the world—wasn’t such an expert after all and couldn’t really help?
I’d found him on the web, listed as an Oxford University faculty member, so he was probably all about academic textbooks and lectures. Most likely, he would laugh in my face when I asked him about Djinn and told him I actually knew a couple of them.
This morning, I had called the number listed on the directory and asked to talk him. But he had recently resigned and was no longer associated with the university. When I insisted I needed to get in touch with him, I was transferred to his ex-assistant, a snobbish British guy, whom I had to practically beg for contact information.
I told him I had a Sumerian stone tablet in my possession, one I was sure the doctor would love to see. I had to plead my butt off for the guy to finally give me the doctor’s phone number. I pleaded for his address too, but that’s where the assistant drew the line, saying Gallardo was a very private man, and I was lucky to get his number—of course, in the end, that was all I needed to find him. I guessed the assistant had never heard of reverse look-up.
I called the number ten times, but the phone just rang and rang. No answering machine. Nothing. When that proved fruitless, I scoured the net for an email address, but apparently, in the small town where he lived (a place called Besalú, some eighty miles outside of Barcelona), there was no internet. Great! Doctor Gallardo, being the private man that he was, had chosen to live somewhere out in the sticks where civilization couldn’t bother him.
So that’s where we were headed now, to the middle of nowhere. With nothing more than an address pulled from the web with the help of a phone number which, considering its source, might be as fake as my passport.
“We already went over this, Elle,” Abby reminded me. “The guy didn’t answer his phone. He’s probably an old fart with his head deep in some moldy, ancient scrolls. He goes to his villa, or whatever, so he can get away from the real world and study all that Persian and Islamic mumbo-jumbo. He probably never answers his phone. He doesn’t even have email, for Pete’s sake. So what we have to do is find him, ask him all the questions we want, and then we come back home. It’ll take only a few days. The worst that can happen is jet lag, right?”
I couldn’t help but resent Abby and Maven’s attitude. They were treating this trip like some sort of vacation or game. Even though they seemed to believe my story, it was obvious they didn’t feel the same urgency. Not that I could blame them. They hadn’t lived through what I had. They hadn’t experienced Akeelah’s hatred first hand. I let that thought sink in and realized that was a good thing. I didn’t want anyone to have to go through all the pain and fear I’d suffered at the hands of Zet and Akeelah. What good would it do if all three of us were shaking in our shoes?
“Stop second guessing yourself, Marielle,” Maven said. “Like Abby said,” he paused and looked sheepishly in her direction. “We’ll find out what we can from the guy and be right back. I left a note for Mom. She’ll call your dad, and also Abby’s, so they’ll know we’re okay. If anything, all we’re doing is blowing a few thousand bucks, and, with Faris’s fortune, that’s not even an issue, right?”
“Yes, you’re right,” I said, snatching the buckwheat pillow from Abby’s hand and a Popular Mechanics magazine from under Maven’s arm. I walked to the cashier and paid for their items, feeling reassured once more by their presence and support.
I needed to stop worrying. This was the right thing to do. I couldn’t just sit here in New Orleans waiting for Doctor Gallardo to answer his telephone. Or for Faris to come back. Or for Akeelah to accomplish her goal.
I had to act.
Five minutes later, we boarded the plane on a direct flight to Barcelona. I took the window seat, Abby the middle one and Maven the aisle. To pass the time, I read an eBook on Faris’s phone, the first of a popular trilogy I’d wanted to check out for a while. We took off, and soon, found ourselves over the Atlantic ocean.
I stared out the window for a while, my mind a turmoil of questions without answers. Tired from the merry-go-round of my thoughts as much as the lack of proper sleep, I rested my head on the window and let my heavy eyelids droop closed. An odd state of half sleep and half wakefulness overtook me for a few minutes. In my semi-dreams, I heard the engines droning and became aware of a nagging ache in my neck. I started to straighten, but the hushed tones of Abby and Maven’s conversation made me stop.
“It’s definitely something,” Maven was saying “I should have been able to break that stone or at least crack it. But a Djinn? I’m not so sure about that one.”
> “Well, I believe her,” Abby defended.
You tell him.
“You haven’t known Elle as long as I have,” she continued. “She’s too down-to-earth to make up something like that.”
“Maybe it’s Faris’s fault. Maybe he’s been filling her head with garbage.”
“Faris is a great guy and you know it,” she said. “He loves Elle to no end. Haven’t you seen the way he looks at her? I wish someone would look at me like that. This is just your jealousy talking,” she added, an underlying current of resentment crackling with her voice.
“Maybe it is jealousy,” Maven admitted, surprising me.
There was a long pause that made me think the conversation was over.
“About time you admitted it,” Abby said. There was bitterness in her voice, but I doubted Maven would catch it. Guys could be so dense.
“I never liked the dude, and I still don’t,” Maven grumbled, sounding as if he wanted to take his admission back.
“Well of course you don’t like him. He’s hot, rich and tan. All the things you are not!”
Ouch. This was probably Abby’s own jealousy talking. Still, Maven deserved it. He was being such an ass about Faris, not to mention a myopic fool about Abby.
Can’t he see she likes him?! True, she told him she’d rather eat live snakes than date him, but any blind person could see that was just her injured pride making her say that.
I thought I’d been clear when we talked about her, but apparently he needed someone to spell it out in block, neon letters. Maybe he was acting dense on purpose. Or maybe he hadn’t believed me.
Maven just grunted to show how little he cared about Abby’s comment.
“Regardless,” Abby said. I imagined her raising a cool eyebrow, trying to look as if Maven’s indifference toward her had rolled off her shoulders. “Elle seems pretty scared, and she’s not the impressionable kind. That riverboat did blow up. It was all over the news. That’s terrorist type stuff, at least. It doesn’t give me a good vibe, Maven. I try to play it cool with Marielle, but to be honest . . . I’m pretty spooked. This Akeelah witch sounds horrible. Just the idea of her gives me the chills. I know you’re not convinced, but suppose for a minute, only for a minute, that she does exist.”
One Wish Away: Djinn Empire Complete Series Page 42