Djinn Justice (The Collegium Book 2) Page 4

  “Mindless slaves or flesh-eating horror movie monsters?” Steve asked.

  Uncle stared at the holograph woman. The image changed to that of an older man, naked by a forested river, snow still melting on its banks. As they watched, he shifted into bear form. “Left alone, the people function, after a fashion. They run by instinct and habit, it seems. No initiative, though. No planning.”

  The image faded as the bear-were lumbered into the forest. The salmon weren’t spawning: no reason to sit by the river.

  Fay frowned at the stone wall. How could the weres be slaves if they were living their old lives? What did Uncle mean by dream essence? Was it a were thing? Could these weres be enslaved, waiting some master plan to activate them?

  She’d never sat through a mission briefing session quite like this one. The Collegium guardians were very logical. The case for action, and the action to be taken, were clearly laid out.

  Uncle wove a different story.

  “What is their dream essence?” Steve asked.

  So the concept of dream essence was new to him, too.

  Mr. Jekyll sighed. As a diplomat, or perhaps, more familiar with Uncle, he’d probably have been less direct in requesting information.

  “Dreams bind your souls to your bodies,” Uncle said. “Every day, you stretch your souls out, taking in so many sensory experiences, thoughts and actions. You interact with others and with your world. When you sleep, your dream essence pulls back into you what of that chaos is essential to maintaining you. Everything you encounter could become part of you, but not all of it should be. Not all of it can be.”

  The notion fascinated Fay. “Is it visible as a person’s aura?”

  Uncle dismissed her question with a flick of his hand. “Your dream essence renews you and pushes you forward. It is who you are becoming.”

  “And if it’s stolen…” Steve sounded as if he were thinking aloud.

  “Then who you are becoming vanishes, and who you are, gradually erodes. Your personality, gone.” Uncle flicked both hands open.

  Without the dream essence he described, a person’s life would fracture and dissipate. Life needed meaning and focus. She was aware of Steve, tense and unhappy beside her. Love gave you meaning and focus. “How are their essences being stolen?”

  Uncle leaned back. “As I said, I haven’t investigated.”

  Silence.

  Fay considered her options. Steve and his grandfather had to handle the djinn for whatever additional information they could get from him. But she had other options. Just because she’d never heard of a person’s dream essence, didn’t mean others at the Collegium were equally ignorant. Different language sometimes hid the same concept. She could ask there. The mages at the Collegium resented, feared and suspected her for her power and, likely, for her dad’s recent failures as president, but enough of them were disciplined scholars. They wouldn’t withhold information out of spite.

  They might withhold it for academic glory, but she’d never challenged anyone in the realm of scholarship. Her strength was out in the field.

  “I have heard of something similar.” Uncle broke the silence. “Millennia ago.” He smiled as he recaptured their full attention. “There should be a relevant inscription on a tomb in Luxor.”

  “Which tomb?” Steve asked flatly.

  “Shall we go and look?” Even before he finished the question, the room dropped away.

  Late afternoon sun beat down on their unprotected heads. Sand around them shimmered with the beginning of a heat wave. The desert didn’t wait for summer before it baked its visitors.

  Fay found herself standing beside Steve and was glad of his resolute presence. The immense power the djinn used so casually staggered her. Neither she, nor any mage she’d heard of, could translocate a person, let alone two.

  Mr. Jekyll had been left behind in the Suzerain’s fort.

  Uncle had changed clothes, though not his middle-aged European appearance. He wore shirt, trousers and boots much like hers and Steve’s: practical, expensive outdoor gear, not obviously new.

  The tomb was underground, of course. Someone had installed a door and locked it.

  “Fay?” Uncle invited her—or was it challenged?—to open it.

  It was the most minor of magic. A thought and the lock opened, the bolt slid back.

  Steve moved in front of her and pushed the door wide. Stale air rushed out at them.

  Something else, besides age and decay, carried on the grave’s breath.

  Fay halted Steve with a touch to his right shoulder blade. A light touch, fingertips only, till she flattened her hand, her palm pushing into his warmth and life. “There are the remnants of a ward.”

  “Not a curse?” he asked.

  “Someone else died of that centuries ago,” Uncle said casually.

  “The ward is a warning.” Fay kept her link to Steve’s strong presence as she attempted to read the tattered remnants of the ward spell. “It’s a bit like the symbols people have attached to nuclear waste dumps, trying to convey beware messages into the unknown far future. Someone here was saying we’re better off keeping away.”

  “Curiosity never killed the cat. Stupidity does that.” Uncle pushed them forward. “If the priest—you would call him a mage,” he said to Fay. “Had truly wanted to keep his knowledge safe, he’d have let it die with him. Instead, he took it to his grave. He couldn’t resist hugging his cleverness to him into the afterlife.”

  Uncle didn’t bother with a torch or lantern. He simply lit the tomb. Painted scenes and hieroglyphs showed bright and clear on white walls. Otherwise, the space was empty. Uncle ambled past scenes of river life, of farmers working and animals hunting the riverbank. “Here it is. Steve, take a photo.”

  Steve took out his phone and lined up the section of tomb wall Uncle indicated. “Is it a spell?”

  “Hmm?” Uncle appeared to be admiring a picture of a leopard, crouched near a palm tree.

  Steve took two more photos. “I know someone who can translate the hieroglyphs,” he said to Fay.

  “So do I,” Uncle said. “And my expert is much more fun.”

  The tomb vanished.

  Chapter 3

  Steve gritted his teeth as Uncle translocated him and Fay out of the ancient tomb and into a Range Rover moving fast. It was disconcerting to arrive without warning inside a car travelling at speed along a bad road and driven by a djinn. Steve found himself in the passenger seat and turned to check on Fay alone on the back seat.

  She raised an eyebrow at him, glancing once in question and commentary at Uncle.

  Steve shrugged minutely. He had no explanation or reassurance to offer.

  Uncle wasn’t usually so profligate with his magic—or so helpful.

  The change ruffled Steve’s fur even as Fay smiled ruefully and settled back against her seat, staring out the window.

  Uncle glanced at Steve, smirked, and switched on the radio. They were in Egypt, but the radio broadcast Japanese dance music.

  Steve fought back a snarl of dislike at the annoying half-buzz, half-whine backed by heavy beats and punctuated by sharp beeps. That was not music. Uncle was being annoying.

  The djinn had an agenda, that was nothing new, but bringing Fay into his games, that was the unpredictable factor. It strained credibility to imagine Uncle’s timing was unrelated to Steve bringing Fay to his home. Steve had had lovers before, but Uncle had known even before the mate-bond that Fay was different. How much of this test was directed at her?

  Or was the real test whether Steve could be distracted from Suzerainty responsibilities by concern for Fay? Divided loyalties. Fay would always be his first concern, but that didn’t mean he’d neglect his duties. Part of loving Fay meant leaving her free to fight her own battles, to serve as her Collegium heritage taught her. She’d kick his butt if he dropped his responsibilities to run after her.

  Steve closed his eyes, shutting out the glare of the desert and listening to the soft rush of air-condition
ed air over the noise of the radio and the car’s engine.

  Uncle would have considered all of those issues and more before deciding to test Steve now, but there was no evading the truth: Granddad had aged. He was not simply old, but weakening. As Suzerain, Tomy would serve the weres till his last breath, but why should he carry the Suzerainty when its weight was a burden?

  Perhaps Uncle was actually being kind. It would be rare for a djinn, but Uncle had shown through the years genuine liking and respect for Tomy.

  Pain and determination knotted in Steve’s chest. He had to pass this test so that Tomy could release a burden and enjoy the last years of his life. Grand-mère wouldn’t appreciate relegation to ordinary were status, but Tomy would, once he adjusted to retirement. Carrying responsibility for justice and peace among the weres hadn’t broken Tomy, but it had marked him.

  Less the diplomat, Steve thought the burden would weigh on him less. Where Tomy fretted and took the responsibility for others’ actions on himself, Steve knew himself more ruthless. He could handle the Suzerainty.

  What had him ruffled was Uncle’s fascination with Fay.

  “Warrior-princess,” the djinn had called her.

  Fay had barely survived her break from the Collegium. No other mage had ever had the strength to break his or her oath ties to it. She was unique. Unique and vulnerable in ways she’d never acknowledge.

  She was so alone.

  He might be a leopard, comfortable to go his solitary way, but he’d grown up as one of his mom’s Beo wolf pack. He knew to his very soul that in times of trouble the whole snarling, fighting clan would back him up. His dad’s leopard family were more detached, but no less loyal.

  Fay was only just building a relationship with her mom after losing her as a toddler. As for Fay’s father…

  The prick of claws threatening to change on his hands warned Steve how close his emotions were to controlling him. Thoughts of Richard Owen had that effect. The arrogant bastard had treated his own daughter as a weapon. Richard had honed Fay to be a lethal mage and fighter, and her power had cemented his position as president of the Collegium—until Fay herself revealed the demon who’d possessed Richard’s secretary and lover, and sent tentacles throughout the institution.

  Richard was no longer president. To do the man credit, he’d at least understood that his position was untenable. He’d resigned and disappeared.

  Or tried to disappear. Steve knew Richard hid on an island in the San Juans, off the coast of Seattle. Steve bet the new president of the Collegium, Lewis Bennett, also knew Richard’s whereabouts.

  The car slowed, bumped over ground even rougher than the bad road, and stopped. Without a word, Uncle got out.

  As his door slammed shut, Steve twisted around in the passenger seat to speak with Fay.

  Her gaze tracked Uncle as he strode across the sand to a canvas shelter. “What is he up to?”

  “That I don’t know. The thing to remember in dealing with Uncle is that you always have a choice, even if he presents things as a fait accompli.”

  Uncle stopped a few feet from the canvas shelter with tents pegged some distance behind it. A spoil heap rose up to the right of him, taking his shadow. They were at an archaeological dig, one of hundreds that littered Egypt, both active and abandoned. The djinn gestured imperatively.

  “How do we stop him translocating us?” Fay asked under her breath as they climbed out of the car. She was so controlled that even more than him, she’d hate her powerlessness in the face of Uncle’s djinn whims.

  Steve grimaced, knowing his answer wouldn’t help. “He doesn’t usually translocate anyone. We struggle along and then he pops into existence when we finally arrive wherever.”

  She glanced at him. “Does that mean this is urgent?”

  “Or Uncle is playing some other game. He’ll have multiple reasons for every action.”

  The djinn cast a wicked smile in their direction and ducked into the shelter. He was definitely playing games.

  Behind the canvas screen, four people worked at a hole in the ground. One sketched and scribbled notes, a camera beside him, two scraped with trowels, and the fourth stared at Uncle’s sudden appearance. Her eyes widened further at the sight of Fay and Steve.

  “Uh, Susie?”

  The shoulders of the woman excavating in the hole twitched. Otherwise she ignored the uncertain question. She couldn’t ignore Uncle.

  “Professor Adams, how delightful to see you.”

  The tanned hand holding the trowel tightened. Very, very slowly her head rose, turned, and dark blue eyes focused on him. “Monsieur Maneval.”

  The young woman who’d first seen them edged backwards. The two young men abandoned their note-taking and digging to frankly stare. It seemed Uncle was known here, at least, in one of his personas.

  The djinn extended his hand.

  After a second, Professor Adams accepted it and stepped up and out of the hole.

  “The dig is going well?” Uncle inquired courteously.

  “We’re progressing steadily, as my reports will have shown.”

  “Reports are so dull.”

  Professor Adams reclaimed her hand.

  Uncle made introductions, concluding. “My friends, Steve and Fay. They require some assistance with reading hieroglyphs.”

  “There are courses for that.” Professor Adams unscrewed a water bottle and drank. Her greetings to Fay and Steve were perfunctory, but friendly enough. Her suspicion was reserved for Uncle.

  With reason, Steve felt. Apparently, in his guise as the Frenchman Maneval, Uncle was funding Professor Adams’ dig. He was also, quite blatantly, interested in the professor as a woman.

  She was making it clear his interest was not returned.

  “They have pictures of the inscription that requires translation.” Uncle opened the satchel slung over one shoulder and extracted a computer.

  “I’m sorry we’re interrupting your work, professor,” Fay said. “We could wait till evening.” She sounded uncomfortable, as aware as everyone in the group that experts on hieroglyphs could easily have been found elsewhere and without interrupting the dig.

  Professor Adams looked at her, and her frown eased. “Call me Susie. Since Baptiste has brought you out here…” She led the way to a large tent that was evidently the dig’s headquarters, empty at the moment.

  They sat on camp chairs while Susie Adams put Uncle’s computer on a table and studied it.

  Uncle extracted a flask from the satchel. He opened it and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee filled the air.

  “Baptiste.” Susie inhaled deeply. “I accept the bribe.”

  He laughed, filling four stainless steel cups.

  Susie gave her attention to the text on the screen. She had a notepad beside her and began scribbling. “What tomb is this from?”

  “A priest’s tomb in Luxor.”

  Steve looked a question at Uncle, surprised that he’d given a straight answer.

  “That makes sense.” Susie sipped her coffee. “It’s magical mumbo-jumbo. A spell.”

  “Not a prayer?” Uncle queried innocently. Innocence and Uncle, in any of his guises, did not go together.

  “You know it’s not.” Susie gave him a sharp look. She was an attractive woman. Perhaps in her late forties, fit, with curly brown hair. “Your interest in the occult makes no sense, Baptiste. You’re an educated man. You know the idea of magic is foolishness.”

  The mage and the leopard-were sat silent, while the djinn nodded sly, false agreement.

  Susie sighed. “Do you have more coffee?”

  “But of course.” The magical flask enabled everyone to receive a refill.

  “It is not a long spell, although there seems to be a warning attached to the end of it.” She returned to translating. “You seem sensible people. Why do you want this translated?”

  Fay hastily swallowed coffee. Too busy, can’t answer.

  Steve stretched out his legs. Camp chairs were never comfort
able, but people expected you to use them rather than sitting on the ground. “We’re working for someone else,” he said, honestly if misleadingly as the djinn they “worked for” sat smiling beside them. “He thinks the hieroglyphs may help with the quest he’s on.”

  “Quest?” The archaeologist snorted. “Another damn treasure hunter. Given that Baptiste brought you to me, can I at least assume you’re not engaged in illegal digging?”

  “No, that would be too much work.” Steve grinned.

  Susie glanced up from the screen, saw the grin and snorted again. “He’s definitely your friend, Baptiste.”

  “He is not as charming as me.”

  Susie tore off the page she’d written and handed it to Fay. “Good luck,” she said.

  Fay smiled. “I think I’ll need it.”

  As amusing as it had been to see Uncle shot down in his attempt to flirt with Susie Adams—and the entertaining irony of a djinn courting a woman who determinedly rejected the idea of magic—all humor left Fay as she read the translation of the hieroglyphic text. Susie had been right. There was definitely a warning attached.

  Leave-taking didn’t take long, and they returned to the car. Fay read the translation aloud as Uncle started the engine.

  “The toad that eats the lion’s spit swells and swells. His toad heart shrivels. The poison on his claws kills. He dies forever.”

  “Now, read the spell,” Uncle said.

  Fay passed the page to Steve. “I don’t know what my magic would do.” Steve was a were, he had no magic, other than his were-nature. It was safer that he read the words. She was trained, her magic under control, but this was magic so old it was no longer taught.

  Except, Uncle had known where to find the spell. The djinn had started the Suzerainty millennia before. How old was he? Or did djinn live and age in a different dimension?

  In the passenger seat, Steve frowned at the torn page of translation. The road from the archaeological site was little more than a track through sand. They bounced along it.

  “Take the path between the five stars. The spider’s web is thrown—or cast, Susie’s written in parentheses. Pull in the eyes and ears, cut the tongue, open the heart to me.”