Djinn Justice (The Collegium Book 2) Read online

  Chapter 9

  Fay poured a thin line of salt to form a circle on the wooden floor of Victor’s house, in the empty space near the entry.

  The rogue mage watched from her position slightly further inside. She rubbed at her wrist where the gold thread of the magic manacle sat immovably. “What are you doing? Are you going to hurt me?”

  Victor answered. “Her? No. Me? If you try to escape, if you give me any excuse, yes. You came to my home with magic and evil intent. It is why the warding kept you out. I have the right to kill you.”

  Cold, of the emotional rather than physical kind, stiffened Fay’s spine. The menace in Victor’s voice sounded genuine, not assumed to frighten the rogue mage into compliance. If Fay wasn’t very careful, her witness would be taken from her—or rather, she’d have to fight the tiger-were for her.

  “All right.” She put the remaining half bag of salt against the wall. “Step into the circle, please.”

  The rogue mage stare wildly from Victor to Fay and back to Victor. The promise of death was in his eyes. Discretion won out. The woman stepped over the line of salt and into the circle. She cried out in shock.

  “Do you recognize the spell?” Fay asked. A trainee Collegium guardian would, but this woman’s magic was unstable, suggesting poor teaching underlying the added burden of the unnatural magic she’d attempted.

  “No. It pinches.”

  Fay nodded. As part of her training, she’d been ordered to lower her personal wards—too strong for her teachers to defeat—and experience the sensation of a truth spell. The exercise had been a semi-success. Fay had broken the truth spell when she’d refused to answer a question as to her personal relationships. Steve was her first lover, but she’d had a couple of typical teenage crushes and been asked out by a few mages. Basically, she’d objected to sharing her thoughts. So she’d broken the spell.

  Her training had gone up a notch after shattering the truth spell. They’d called it accelerated preparation for real world action. Her teachers had preferred to unleash her on the world rather than leave her inside the Collegium, threatening their authority by her greater power. The toxic mix of envy and ambition to use her power had isolated her within the guardians.

  Fay looked at the huddled woman in front of her. “What you feel is a truth spell.” Usually, Fay cast magic without props, but the salt, with its purifying properties, was a natural amplifier of a truth spell and enabled Fay to conserve her power. “You’re now locked inside the circle till I release you, and you’ll feel a compulsion to answer my questions, and answer them honestly.”

  “Please, no.” For the first time, the woman met Fay’s eyes directly. Her eyes were a dark brown, glistening with tears and terror.

  Fay steadied her own emotions. “You enslaved the weres, endlessly. Your suffering will be only a few minutes.” The woman didn’t have the strength to resist the spell. As quickly as Fay asked the questions, this would be over. “What is your name?”

  “Narelle Fletcher.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “I grew up in Sydney. I live…” A shrug. Her accent was Australian. “I’ve lived in many countries. India, most recently.”

  “Which city in India?”

  “Mumbai.”

  “What is the name of the jackal-were you are siphoning dream essences to?”

  Victor hissed.

  Fay ignored his shock at a fellow were’s involvement. She watched Narelle struggle a moment with the question. The truth spell overcame her resistance.

  “Tarik Joshi.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “Mumbai.”

  Interrogation had its own relentless tempo. “Where is he now?”

  A glare, a triumphant one. “I don’t know.”

  “Where was he the last time you did know his location?”

  “Uganda.”

  “Specifically?”

  “The mountains. In the Mountains of the Moon.”

  The Rwenzori Mountains.

  The more specific the question, the less an answer could hide. “How did you learn of the spell for stealing dream essences.”

  “Tarik showed it to me.”

  “What was it written on?”

  Narelle looked puzzled. “Paper.”

  “In what language?”

  “English.”

  So the jackal-were had acquired a translation of the spell or translated it himself. Perhaps they were all wrong and it was the were, rather than the mage, who’d both initiated and owned this situation. “What is your relationship with Tarik?”

  “He is my lover.” A proud straightening of her hunched posture.

  “And what else? Did he teach you magic?”

  “No.”

  Fay had so many questions. Questions like who had trained Narelle, because that person had to be stopped. Poorly trained, damaged mages were a danger to themselves and others. But for now, Fay’s focus had to be the enslavement of the weres. “When Tarik gave you the spell for stealing dream essences, what did he ask you to do with it?”

  “He asked if I could use it.”

  “Did you test it on him?”

  “No! We tried it on a…” Her gaze slid sideways to Victor. “On an old lion-were.”

  “What happened to him?”

  For nearly ten seconds Narelle withheld her answer. Then it burst out. “He died.”

  “Do you know the spell is unstable?”

  “It works.” That the truth-compulsion allowed her to avoid a yes or no answer suggested that much of her magic was unstable.

  “Why on earth did Tarik get you to do this magic?”

  “He trusts me.”

  “Controls her,” Victor growled.

  “Would you do anything Tarik asked of you?”

  Narelle collapsed. She bounced off the invisible boundaries of the containment circle to slump in an untidy heap on the floor. “He is wonderful. He is clever and brave. I am incredibly lucky to be able to help him. So, yes, I would do anything he asked of me. I have.”

  “What do you know of Tarik’s intentions? Why does he want the weres’ dream essences siphoned to him?”

  Narelle put her head on her knees. “This hurts. It hurts.”

  “Tell the truth and it will stop.”

  Narelle glared at her. “You won’t let me go.” She stared up at the amulet suspended near the ceiling. “I hate it. It’s evil.”

  “Then why did you make it, stupid girl?” Victor exclaimed.

  “Tarik asked me.” And finally, answering Fay’s question. “He wants to challenge Steve Jekyll. Your lover.” A poisonous glare at Fay. “He is not the rightful heir to the Suzerainty. My Tarik should rule.”

  “Bah.” Victor stalked away.

  Even Fay, recently introduced to the complexities of were politics, understood more than Narelle’s naive answers. She knew why the tiger-were was so disgusted, and she knew Steve. “Steve won’t rule the weres. No one does.” The Suzerain didn’t rule, he judged, which was in its way, another form of saying, he served the weres.

  “My Tarik will rule. And I’ll be beside him.”

  Victor rattled pots and ran water in his kitchen.

  Fay hoped he was making coffee. She needed a cup or three. Delusions, or dreams Tarik had fed this pathetic woman. Did Tarik believe that a djinn like Uncle would compliantly hand over magic to a bully? Or did Tarik not know of the djinn?

  She looked at Victor in the kitchen. But no, if the djinn was a secret of Steve’s family, Fay couldn’t reveal it by asking Victor what he knew of Uncle’s existence.

  But that brought to mind another interesting question. How much did Uncle know of this situation? He’d sent her and Steve in blind, claiming he hadn’t investigated, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know all of this and more.

  Fay pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. She had to focus and extract what information she could from Narelle. Later, she could contemplate Uncle’s machinations. “How does Tarik i
ntend to use the weres’ stolen dream essences to claim this ruling power?”

  “Weres can’t use magic. They disrupt it, which is why spells don’t work on them.” Narelle looked up at the amulet where it hung. “Except this one. Tarik found something special. The dream essence is a person’s potential. It isn’t magic. It’s energy, possibilities, raw force.”

  Victor returned with two mugs of coffee.

  Fay accepted hers with a nod of thanks and inhaled the dark aroma. She sipped, finding it both scalding and bitter, restorative.

  “Harvesting dream essences gives Tarik two sets of power. The first is the simplest, but he isn’t much interested in it, not yet. A person becomes susceptible to direction, like a zombie. So he could command slaves.”

  Victor stood ninety degrees from Fay at the turn of the salt circle. Narelle’s gaze followed him, and she wasn’t wishing for a cup of coffee. She shrank into herself as she huddled on the ground. Victor was all too obviously ready to strike her. Possibly making coffee and holding a hot mug were attempts to control his urge to gut her. Narelle spoke so casually of enslaving people.

  Yet, despite her fear of the tiger-were, the truth spell forced her to continue. “Tarik is more interested in the second power. The energy of dream essences isn’t magic, so it can affect weres. He will use it as a weapon against Steve Jekyll.”

  Suddenly, Victor wasn’t the most dangerous predator in the room.

  “How?” Fay set aside her mug of coffee on a windowsill.

  Narelle tried to scramble away and the salt circle held her. She pushed against the invisible barrier. “Tarik didn’t tell me. Not specifics. He gave me the task of gathering the energy and feeding it to him.”

  “How many more weres do you need to drain of their dream essences?” Fay asked.

  “I have five more on my list.” She clamped her mouth shut.

  Fay waited.

  The words exploded out of Narelle. “I think Tarik has enough already. I think. He seems different. Edgier. Angry.”

  Fay recalled the warning of the Ancient Egyptian spell, the toad’s heart shrivels. “Nastier? Unkind to you?”

  The rogue mage shivered. “Yes.”

  Fay looked up at the amulet, wrapped in its containing mesh of magic. Dream essences still dripped from it. If she destroyed the amulet, the dream essences that Tarik harvested for their energy, would no longer feed him. But would the enslaved weres lose their dream essences, their selves, forever?

  She needed to phone Steve. She had to warn him. This wasn’t simply a djinn-given test. It was personal.

  “Car,” Victor said. “Someone’s coming.”

  “Do you know who this visitor is?” Fay asked Narelle.

  “No.”

  “Would anyone try to retrieve you?”

  Narelle ducked her head. “No.”

  Now, Fay heard the noise of an engine that Victor’s sharper hearing had already caught.

  With a glance at her, he put his mug on the windowsill beside hers and walked out.

  “We’re alike,” Narelle whispered. “You and I. We’re both blessed to serve powerful men. But mine is stronger.”

  Fay stared at her. There could be no comparison. “Steve would die to protect the vulnerable. Tarik is a monster who enslaves and would kill them. You have said, yourself, that he won’t rescue you.”

  “He loves me.”

  Tarik preyed on the vulnerable. How vulnerable was Narelle? Even as Fay shuddered at the intrusion, at the wrongness of using the truth spell to invade Narelle’s life, she had to know. “Have men hit you, abused you, in the past?”

  “Yes.” Narelle scrambled up. “Don’t ask me. Don’t!”

  “Has Tarik hit you?”

  Narelle flung herself at the circle’s barrier. It held. “Yes. Damn you. Yes, but he loves me.”

  Fay looked away, out the window.

  The driver of the just-arrived car emerged from it: the bear-were who’d driven her from Magadan spoke in a rumble to Victor. Both looked towards the house, to where she stood at the window. The bear squared his shoulders and started up the path to the house.

  Fay left Narelle standing in the circle, her hands covering her face, her sobs silent. Fay walked out, onto the narrow porch.

  “I had a phone call from the Suzerain,” the bear said. “Your phone’s coverage failed, here. He has a message for you. Steve Jekyll has vanished.”

  Silence. The world stopped.

  Fay would have said she didn’t move, but the bear took a step back. Maybe it was her expression that changed.

  He spoke hurriedly. “The message I received is that Steve stepped into the Alexandrian portal and…someone snatched him away from the porter, Faroud.”

  Fay turned on her heel and strode inside.

  Porters, the gatekeepers and navigators of the in-between, the directionless space between portals, were incalculable. All wanted a personal portal, but not all won one. Most were inherited, conscientiously passed down through the generations as the Alexandrian one was. This left unanchored porters to roam the in-between. Some might be willing to snatch a person.

  Why would any sane person snatch Steve? The whole were world and Fay—and she was the scarier proposition—would come after them.

  But Tarik wasn’t sane. That knowledge pushed at Fay. A madman could do anything. A madman with poisoned claws and a shrunken heart could torture and kill.

  Fay needed help. She needed to know where Steve had been taken, and fortunately, she had a porter she could trust to help her: her stepfather, Jim. She just had to get to the nearest portal, in Vladivostok, fast.

  She crossed the line of salt, breaking the truth spell, and seized Narelle’s wrist. The woman wasn’t a hostage, but she could still be a source of information. Fay wasn’t leaving her behind.

  A thought, and the amulet in its mesh containment, floated behind Fay like a bobbing, obedient balloon. The bear- and tiger-weres waited on the porch. “Can you drive me back to Magadan, fast?” she asked the bear.

  He nodded and threw a set of keys to Victor. “I borrowed the car from Katya.”

  From Magadan a flight to Vladivostok, and then, portal to Fremantle, her stepfather’s home.

  “Human travel is so tedious.”

  Fay’s head snapped around, snake-fast, at the sound of the drawling male voice.

  Warning growls rumbled from Victor and the bear, indicating that they, too, were shocked at the suddenly-appearing visitor.

  But then, it was of the visitor’s nature, that no one would expect him.

  He strolled forward, elegant but neither Japanese nor French. His accent was Iranian and his features matched. He wore summer-weight clothes, but didn’t shiver.

  “Uncle,” Fay said.

  The djinn strolled from the stand of trees that sheltered Victor’s house. “Must you really travel as humans do, my Fay?”

  “Not if I have help,” she answered his challenge, keeping back her anger and fear for Steve. Whatever game the djinn played, she had to learn its rules. “Narelle comes with me.”

  “And her bundle of tricks?” Uncle looked at the amulet, floating over Fay’s left shoulder.

  “Until I can release the dream essences safely, yes.”

  “Very well.”

  The blizzard came out of nowhere. It howled and blinded and tried to scour the flesh from their bones with ice pellets and cyclonic winds. But when Fay opened ice-encrusted eyelids, Siberia was a melting memory.

  She stood in a clearing in a cloud forest, a high altitude rainforest. Birds called, monkeys hooted and the wind carried the rich, earthy scent of trees and leaf mulch. “The Mountains of the Moon?”

  Disembodied laughter answered her.

  Uncle had interfered; for good or ill, she was yet to discover.

  If he had translocated her here, here she’d find Steve.

  Or, would she?

  She felt sun on her arms and looked down at herself. Uncle had done more than merely translocate her. H
er cold weather gear was gone and she wore clothing suitable for the new environment.

  Not so Narelle. The woman was still in her coat and heavy clothes, and sweating. Fay released her arm and Narelle tore out of her coat. “What was that? What brought us here?” Perhaps some of the sweat was caused by fear, rather than heat.

  “A djinn.” Fay stared up the slope. There seemed almost a path. No point questioning Narelle. The woman was no longer compelled to answer truthfully. It seemed Fay had to take just as big a risk and trust Uncle. Where the path vanished above the tree line, there seemed to be a shadow on the snow-covered ground, a shadow that could be the entrance to a cave.

  Disregarding the unpleasantness of it, Fay grasped the amulet and stuffed it into a pocket of her combat trousers. She had to find Steve.

  He found her.

  Whether Uncle meddled or simply timed his intervention impeccably, Steve burst from the high shadows of the mountain and raced down it. He was in his leopard form, far larger than a true leopard. More the size of a Clydesdale horse, but sleek and agile. He ran, silent, lethal and unstoppable towards Fay.

  Narelle screamed and fled, blundering down mountain.

  Somehow, still running, Steve changed to human. “Run, Fay!”

  He’d fought demons with her. If he wanted her to run, this was beyond bad.

  Knowing he’d catch up with her, she turned and ran, finding a faint path through the thick undergrowth of the rainforest that Narelle—in her panic—hadn’t followed. Still, the path was narrow, more suggestion than thoroughfare, and Fay had to concentrate not to trip or careen into twisting branches or moss-encrusted tree trunks.

  A feral leopard snarl indicated Steve had returned to leopard form. Why? He’d struggle to fit the narrow path.

  An answering howl answered her. A wolf-were, a call to hunt.

  “Oh, hell no.” Fay put out a hand, grabbing a branch and halting her flight. Moss and lichen squidged green. Her hold slipped, but she was already pushing away.

  If Steve and she were being hunted by the weres Tarik had enslaved, Steve couldn’t fight them all alone. And she wouldn’t allow him to be captured. He’d rescued himself once. But Uncle had brought her here for a reason.