“Tell her it’s Oz,” he said, his voice urgent. “From home.”
Loretta nodded. “No prob.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll stay here. For how long?”
“Probably a few hours,” Loretta said. “Dmitri tends to keep Tamina close, so I’ll have to wait till she’s alone. That could take a while. But you should be okay here. Nobody ever comes this way; it’s really boggy between here and the palace. Think you two can handle that?”
“We’ll be fine,” Oz said. “Stay safe. And thank you for helping us.”
“Whatever,” Loretta said. “At least I can do something good with the shambles you made of my hard work.”
And then the Exterminator was gone, disappearing into the undergrowth and leaving me and my Master alone to keep each other company for the next few hours.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Oz and I stood staring at one another after Loretta left, like teenagers on a first date.
“There’s a fallen log over there,” Oz said, pointing behind me. “We can sit.”
I turned to where he was pointing. “Okay.”
We went, and sat side by side, about a foot between us. We passed about a half hour like that, sitting awkwardly, each thinking his or her own thoughts.
“We’ve found Tamina,” he said, interrupting the silence. “If all goes well, you’ll be free soon.”
“And you’ll have discharged your debt.”
He nodded. “That will feel good.”
“So will being free.”
“I’ve been thinking…,” he began, and I felt my stomach knot. I feared what would come next. He was going to tell me he’d changed his mind. That he’d realized what we could do together (meaning he’d realized what he could do with me). That he was my Master, and I was his to command.
“… you’re going to need some help when your curse is lifted. And I don’t think any of your friends, as much as they love you, will be much use for this stuff. You need a human around, someone who can help you navigate. I took a year’s leave when I got back from Afghanistan, so I have the time. I could stick around, help you adjust.”
I stared at him like he’d grown another head. He coughed and looked at his feet.
“I mean, I don’t have to. I could go back to Chicago. But if you think you do need help…”
“You really are going to let me go?” I said. Two things were finally dawning on me: that Ozan was legit and that part of me had always counted on my belief he’d welsh on his part of the deal. Once he came along, I’d believed I’d be a jinni forever.
“Of course,” he said, looking confused. “I said I would.”
“Yeah, but…” I wanted to say so many things that would be stupid, under the circumstances. Maybe he hadn’t realized how much power he truly had over me?
“Look,” he said, “I get it. I get that you’re totally vulnerable. That you have this… condition, we’ll call it, that makes you an easy target for someone like me. But I’m not like that.”
He said that last line with such vehemence I was taken aback.
“Maybe I’d be different if I’d been raised as a Magi,” he continued, his silver eyes locked on mine. “Maybe I’d think of you as my property, and see you as my natural servant, or whatever. But I was raised human. By a woman who loved me and a man who loved her so much that when she died his light went out till the day he followed her to the grave. Neither one of my parents were perfect, but they taught me to value others and to fight for the underdog.
“Now, you’re not naturally an underdog,” he said, his hand reaching up to brush my dark bangs from my face. “And I wouldn’t want to get in a ring with you. Which is why I hate knowing that I’ve… caged you. I hate it. And I would never have done it if I hadn’t been desperate for your help, or if I didn’t know myself well enough to be confident I’d let you go when the time came.”
I blinked at him, feeling overwhelmed. I was supposed to hate Ozan. And chances were good I’d hate him again before all this was over. But the problem with living so long was that I’d heard a lot of bullshit over the years, and I’d learned to listen. As he looked straight at me, talking from his heart, all I could see was his father’s pugilistic Irish features, complete with battered nose and thin, wry lips, while his Turkish mother shone through his silver Magi eyes.
In that moment I heard him, and not just because of his ability to Call my Fire.
“You are really going to let me go,” I said.
He nodded. “Of course. And I’ll stay, if you’ll let me. Just to help you adjust. Nothing more, unless you want it.”
Today was apparently a day of revelations. Tamina’s whereabouts, the fact Oz really wasn’t a dick, that I would really be free of the curse that had bound me for centuries, and—much to my startlement—the fact I was pretty sure I did want “it,” whatever form “it” would come in.
Also the fact that, as intent as I’d always been on my curse, I’d not really thought about what its being lifted would mean. I’d not considered the fact that I’d been a jinni for nearly a thousand years and that I had no idea how to be anything else anymore.
“I’ll be human,” I said. “Totally, absolutely human.”
A wave of panic rose, making my stomach roil and my skin grow clammy. I felt sweat bead on my forehead. I wanted to not be a jinni so badly I’d never really thought through what it would mean to be human again.
Oz’s eyes widened. “It’ll be okay, Lyla. It’ll be good. You’ll be fine.”
My breathing was ragged. He put his hand behind my head, pushing it toward my knees.
“Breathe, honey. Just breathe.”
I tried to do as he said, realizing I was hyperventilating. His warm hand stroked down my back soothingly as I tried to wrestle control from my lungs, which were apparently determined to keep spasming on me.
“It’ll be fine,” he murmured. “I’ve made a list of things you’ll need. And we’ll get them. Starting with a Social Security number. Once you have that, we’ll get you everything else…”
He had a list, I thought. While I was sitting around thinking of ways to escape his clutches, he had been making lists of ways to help me once I became human again.
I sat up abruptly, too quickly, and I almost fell backward off the tree trunk. His arm caught me, strong and warm, and on impulse I leaned forward and kissed him. I was still panting from panic, but his lips were firm and hot and they met mine like he was hungry for me. I pulled back almost immediately, drawing in a deep breath, but a second later he followed me, claiming my lips with his.
I’m not sure what would have happened if we hadn’t heard an awkward throat-clearing from in front of us.
Loretta stood there, peering at us with a smirk draped languidly across her pink lips.
Oz shot up off the trunk and I looked down at my feet, a perfect tableau of teens caught necking, even though I was well over a millennium old and Oz was about as grown-up a man as I’d met in those thousand years.
“I found Tamina,” Loretta said. “She’s in her rooms. Are you ready?”
Oz held out his hand to me and I took it, letting him pull me to my feet. But he didn’t let go, giving my hand a firm squeeze instead.
“We’re ready,” he said, speaking for both of us.
And just like that, I knew everything was going to be all right.
I was ready.
We followed, Oz first and me taking the rear. I was keeping an eye on Loretta as well as guarding our backs.
Then she raised her hand before pushing it down, indicating we should hide. We lowered ourselves behind the dense brush at the side of the path we were about to cross.
“Quiet,” Loretta said, indicating with a little wave the path we waited near. “We have to take this all the way to a Bridge that crosses over a ley line—it’s the only way over. And then we’re almost at the palace. Ready?”
We nodded, and spent a tense fifteen minutes skittering toward and over a smooth stone brid
ge under which a river of magic flowed, its shining white power dulled by a dark stain on top, the steel polluting Pittsburgh’s potent juice.
“Shhh,” she whispered at one point, stopping us and pulling us off the road. Sure enough, a few minutes later a patrol passed by, consisting of a gaggle of what looked like seventh graders. One had a bloody mouth, however, and another was casually chewing on what I think must have been a fodden’s clawed arm.
After the patrol passed, we were off again. A few minutes down the road, however, we veered off onto a small dirt path. A few twists and turns later, we could see, rising above the massive trees framing our heads, the spires of the palace warehousing Tamina and all the other taken children.
“There’s a few entrances,” Loretta said. “And a few extra places we can get in, that aren’t exactly entrances.” She gave us a vicious grin and was off, skittering through the trees like a squirrel with gills.
We followed her gleaming hair until it stopped in front of a round, dark hole in one of the stained white walls of the palace. It was huge, big enough that we could walk two abreast, and I could walk without even stooping, although Oz would have to duck.
“I think this used to be a poop hole, or something,” she said. “But it’s clean now. Mostly.”
Loretta gave a laissez-faire shrug, then popped through the hole. I groaned inwardly, wondering what I’d done in a past life to deserve shimmying up a supernatural poop chute in this one, but followed gamely.
The tunnel was indeed mostly clean. We walked up a steep grade until we came to a fancy-looking grille big enough for us to fit through.
“This way,” Loretta said, popping out the grille with practiced ease. She gestured us through into what had to be an abandoned hallway, thick with glowing flakes of magical dust.
She led us down a short corridor, then to another fancy grille. “We’re almost there,” she said, popping that one open as well. This tunnel was narrower and far lower, and we needed to crawl to get through. But after only a few minutes, Loretta came to a halt.
“Here,” she said, scootching back so Oz and I could crawl forward, peering through the grille in front of us.
Below us, in a small if luxurious room, lay a girl. She was lying in the cool dark, a cloth over her eyes.
Her headscarf was gone, but she was wearing a modestly cut tunic over baggy jeans, and there was a pile of scarves draped over a side chair.
As if sensing someone was there, the girl removed the cloth from her eyes. When she opened them, they were still the multicolored eyes of an immature Magi, not the glowing silver eyes of a mature one. She hadn’t yet been Initiated.
But she also wasn’t the plump-cheeked thirteen-year-old in Oz’s picture from when he’d first met her, at the beginning of his time overseas. At seventeen, she was a young woman, much prettier and older looking than we could see when we’d sighted her earlier, through our binoculars.
“Tamina,” Oz said, sounding utterly grateful.
“Tamina,” I repeated, surprised to find myself equally grateful to see my ticket out of jinnihood.
Maybe I was ready to be human again after all.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Who’s there?” Tamina whispered, sitting bolt upright in her luxuriant bed.
“It’s Marissa,” hissed Loretta, obviously sticking to her cover.
Tamina looked relieved. “Marissa, I was worried. What took you so long?” The girl’s voice was soft, thickly accented but totally fluent.
“There were some patrols,” Loretta said. “But I brought your friend.”
“Oz?” Tamina sat bolt upright, looking toward the grille with avid eyes.
“Yeah,” said Oz, his eyes glistening. “It’s me, kid.”
Fat tears rolled down Tamina’s cheeks. “No. You lie. This cannot be true.”
“It’s no lie,” Oz said, his voice gentle. “Your family sent me to look for you.”
“And you found me.” The girl was sobbing now and I felt my own eyes itching. When I sniffled, Oz took my hand. I gave his a squeeze.
“Yeah, I found you,” Oz said. “And we’ll take you home.”
“Home,” Tamina whispered, grinning through her tears.
Loretta hissed from behind us and I scootched back to let her crawl forward.
“Where should we go?” said the siren.
“Meet me in the blue bedroom,” Tamina said. “I will be there in ten minutes.”
“Be careful,” Loretta replied.
We scuttled together back down to the abandoned hallway we’d walked down earlier, only this time we didn’t take another tunnel, or vent, or whatever they were. Instead we walked, bold as could be, down the empty hallways.
“Quiet,” Loretta said, sneaking us through a series of corridors, the smooth, magically formed stone of the palace walls winding around itself. It’d been almost a century since I was in such a building, and I’d forgotten how nonsensical magical architecture could be.
We wound up in a long, narrow corridor off of which many sealed doors stood—sealed by vines, or blocks of ice, or cold blue fire.
Who knows what they contained, if anything, or by whose whim? Perhaps that of the building itself.
“In here,” Loretta said, holding open the normal, unblocked door to a room at the end of the hallway.
Inside stood Tamina, headscarved and rigid-backed. Oz beamed a smile when he saw her. She modestly dropped her gaze, glowing faintly at my own Bound presence.
Loretta approached the girl, pointing her webbed fingers at us.
“You know the dude,” Loretta said. “And that is Lyla.”
Tamina’s eyes raked over me casually before she raised them shyly to Oz.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said softly, bowing her head to my Master.
Oz moved forward, but he didn’t touch the girl. “You too, kid. It is so good to see you. You’re a long way from home.”
“You said my family sent you?” she asked, her voice quavering. My heart broke again for her.
“Yes, yes they did,” said Oz. “They’re very worried about you.”
Her eyes flashed up to meet his, and for a second I saw rage and anguish in them, but they were gone as quickly as they had come. And then I doubted I’d ever seen them.
My mistake.
“I can’t believe…” Her voice caught, and it took Tamina a second to recover. “I can’t believe after everything that happened that they’ll have me back.”
“I know your culture has its own rules,” Oz said, choosing his words carefully. “But they love you. And they know it wasn’t your fault. They sent me here to find you.”
Tamina’s shining eyes met his. “This makes me very happy to hear,” she said softly. “Thank you.”
“Sorry to break this up,” I said, because I was. I had a gajillion questions of my own to ask the girl, but time was not on our side. “We should get going.”
Tamina cast me a dark look. “You haven’t been spoken to.”
Oz started, clearly taken aback by Tamina’s tone. I rolled my eyes, suddenly feeling less empathetic toward the girl.
“As the humans say, you ain’t the boss of me. And we really do have to get going.”
Tamina looked even more pissed, and she glared at Oz. He misunderstood her request to shut me up as a request for help.
“Lyla’s right,” Oz said. “We need to go. I want to hear everything that happened to you, but now isn’t the time. You guys are gonna have to lead us, sorry. We don’t know our way around.”
Tamina shot me a caustic look but Oz’s words did seem to get her head in the game. She glanced at Loretta, who nodded. “This way,” said the young woman we’d come all the way Sideways to find, before whisking out of the room.
Again, as we walked through the palace, the place was eerily empty. For all the kids we’d seen coming and going that day, none seemed to be in evidence at this moment.
Every once in a while we’d hear a faraway clatter, or Loret
ta or Tamina would claim to hear something and would pause. But we walked through the palace’s winding corridors in virtual silence, with Tamina’s captors apparently none the wiser.
Eventually we came to a wide, many-columned hallway leading to a large set of double doors. I was hoping that was an exit, but no such luck. “If we cut through the old throne room,” Tamina explained, “we can use the permanent portal that Dmitri set up in the old armory. It’ll spit us out right near the big fountain.”
She meant Point State Park, where both the rivers and, in this world, the ley lines converged.
“Are you sure it’s safe?” I asked Tamina, who pointedly ignored the question until Ozan, baffled by her behavior, repeated it.
“Everyone should be out foraging,” Tamina explained. “And Dmitri will be waiting in the human world to collect them, but not at this portal. This is our emergency portal; he created a foraging portal that opens from a house on the human plane.”
“That’s cautious of him,” I said, not telling her we already knew about the house across the river from the park. “This Dmitri is obviously good at self-preservation.”
Tamina didn’t respond, choosing instead to look at me like I’d pooped on her shoe. I sighed.
“Your jinni is talkative,” she said, making a slow loop around me. “And not a normal jinni.”
“Her name is Lyla.” Oz repeated what Loretta had already told the girl, arching an eyebrow at Tamina. “And she’s human, cursed to be a jinni.”
Tamina didn’t react with surprise at this last bit of information. An odd response, and I felt a bit disappointed—normally Magi discovered my true nature with the same shock a human might express wandering across a unicorn.
“And she can use Pittsburgh’s magic,” Oz said. At that Tamina raised an eyebrow. Maybe she didn’t believe Oz?
“That’s very good to hear,” Tamina said, her eyes narrowing briefly at me. Suddenly feeling like an animal at the zoo, I shuffled uncomfortably. “Yes, well, I’m just super-unique. Now can we get going? This place gives me the willies.”
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