Release the Djinni Read online

  They whirled around her in a mad clamorous dance, striking, slicing, piercing her spirit.

  “Give me…I want…I order you…She is mine…I will command…Obey me. Obey.”

  Their selfish greed blistered her spirit. Her masters had been cruel, their lust for power brutal. The more they had, the more they demanded.

  The things she had seen…the things she had done. Solomon’s curse had been as hateful as a demon’s. Not until the curse was set had he understood that humans couldn’t safely command the immense power of the djinn. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

  She’d poisoned an oasis at the wish of a vengeful merchant, salting its water, killing its date palms. She’d destroyed homes, stolen treasures, broken relationships. So many had suffered from the wishes she’d fulfilled until she withdrew further and further into her prison. Finally, nudging fate till her bottle lay hidden in the Isfahan curio shop. Hidden, forgotten and safe.

  Now the whirlwind of memory, so powerful on the spiritual plane, caught and crushed her.

  “Farhoud,” she gasped. For a second his memory was there, with its wistful hope of healing that she’d ignored. “Farhoud.” She seized the memory and its tie to the flame of his spirit.

  She screamed as the clamor of the other memories intensified. They howled, spiraling faster, tighter and fiercer. Everywhere she turned, they rebuffed her. She was trapped in a vortex, pulled down one final time into the violence of Solomon’s curse, bound to human desires.

  A blue flame penetrated the vortex. It burned with such terrifying intensity that she turned instinctively from it. But in the vortex, there was nowhere to flee and the blue flame was implacable. It sought her and it struck deep.

  “Hugh!” Recognition pierced her despair. She flung herself at him, for the first time in centuries, no longer alone.

  The blue flame of his spirit flared at her acceptance. The vortex tore apart at their joining. The echoes of Solomon’s curse couldn’t hold against Hugh’s angelic power. The memory of human voices fell away.

  In their incorporeal state, they twined and merged, her violet flame and his blue.

  It was ecstasy.

  Every darting pulse of energy in her spirit found, matched and shattered against his. It was bliss beyond imagining, sherbet bursts of pleasure magnified to infinity, unending, inescapable, intimate to the nth degree. She kissed him a thousand times with every sparking point of her spirit.

  So this is angel loving. She exulted in the rush of union. A mind-blowing merging of energies. She’d heard of it, but never thought to experience the phenomenon. But now Hugh’s energy fed her own, their pleasure cascading through a feedback loop that intensified it to the point of pain.

  He’d sensed her struggle on the incorporeal plane and responded. As old as her, he knew the danger of curses. Their power lingered, distorting everything. She had plunged into the heart of the millennia-old binding and broken though it was, it knew her and snatched at her. Hugh had shifted form to help her. To save her. The sweet knowledge let her surrender and demand everything.

  She reveled in the fierceness of Hugh’s joy, lost in the sensuous delight of his hunger, flickering, darting, weaving in his energy.

  “Niki. Stop. Mercy, honey.” The words formed in her mind.

  “Hugh.” She threw herself at the dazzling white gold heart of their flame, burning in its heat.

  A shudder like a groan shivered through their energy. She felt Hugh gather himself and shift back to corporeal form. She followed him back, re-forming her own body.

  “Why?” She accused and sorrowed, finding herself on his lap, separate in her own clothes and form.

  “Much more and we’d have overloaded each other.” Muscles flexed around her. “Ecstasy would have sung us to oblivion.” He looked at her reproachful expression. “Have you forgotten the legend? The aurora are the dancing lights of angel lovers who didn’t step back in time. They lost form and died, leaving only the memory of their love.”

  Love? Oblivion was less scary.

  He ran his hand along her spine. “I’d rather live and explore our passion.”

  Passion was more acceptable than love. It was less vulnerable. But as the ecstasy faded, embarrassment grew. She’d been so wildly, greedily responsive.

  “I had to bring us back to our bodies to ground us,” he said

  Her hand stopped its restless caress of his chest. He hadn’t been lost in delight as she had. She withdrew a fraction. “Thank you for rescuing me.”

  “Solomon’s curse had powerful echoes.” He hadn’t noticed her withdrawal. Strong fingers stroked over her hip, pressing into her thigh, claiming privileges.

  She realized he was aroused—and so was she. Desire had followed them back from angel loving.

  “It’s not usual, is it?” she said. “To experience an angel loving before knowing one another physically?”

  “Everything about you is unusual,” he said whimsically.

  But the words caught at her vulnerabilities. She scrambled off his lap.

  His smile died.

  “I don’t like being this person. Half-demon, half-human.”

  “That was not what I meant.”

  “But you don’t forget, not really. My demon heritage.”

  “There is a power of love in you.” He evaded the question. “That’s something no demon has.”

  “What if I’m too scared to set it free?”

  He stood. “It’s your choice. It always is.”

  She shook her head. Fear wasn’t a choice. It was a monster. It strangled her now. If she let loose of all the constraints she lived by, she didn’t know who she’d be. What she’d do. Her father’s laughter lurked in her memory. Wanting love made you vulnerable. “I’d like you to leave.”

  Hugh’s face settled into lines of control that were as bitter as cynicism. “I have nothing to stay for, do I?”

  They were both sliding back behind their protective barriers. The angel loving hadn’t broken their defenses, only let them evade them.

  “Good-bye, Hugh.” Exhaustion from her struggles on the incorporeal plane suddenly weighed her body. Her accidental lover had to leave before she collapsed. His pity would be the final devastation. “I’ll let you know when I find Farhoud.”

  Chapter Six

  Guilt ate at Hugh. The emotion was unfamiliar and it itched like poison ivy and ran like acid through his veins.

  He’d made love to Niki, been as intimate as two spirits could be, and failed her. It was that damn Yelena and the boy she’d stolen from him decades ago. He couldn’t forget or forgive—himself. The demon had defeated him.

  His fists clenched. He wouldn’t lose Farhoud.

  But his anger and fear made him volatile and unfair. Niki had done nothing to earn his distrust—only tried to protect herself.

  And aren’t I trying to do the same? With less reason. His mouth twisted. Here he was, hiding, skulking. He would have to go back. He owed Niki an explanation.

  Later, when she’s slept. She looked so fragile, eyes huge in her pale face. Warthogs eat Solomon’s wretched curse. It had taken courage for her to confront it and she’d done it to save Farhoud. A demon would never have suffered to save a human. No, Niki was herself, a djinni. It was only his preconceptions that had blinded him. His heart had known the truth.

  Their angel loving had been incredible. His blood was still thick with arousal.

  He looked around, suddenly aware of where he’d translocated. Not heaven or a place of duty, but Antarctica. He laughed, unwillingly amused. Apparently his subconscious thought he needed cooling off. He scooped up a handful of snow and ate a mouthful, enjoying the cold burn as he considered his next move.

  Duty seemed safest. Although given the mess he’d made of his fragile relationship with Niki, who was he to guide anyone?

  He dusted the snow off his hand. Even he was feeling the Antarctic chill now. The wind whispered of frozen desolation, endless time without life. He consulted his mental a
wareness of his charges’ situations and found cause for immediate action. People got themselves into the craziest tangles when it came to love.

  The heat of India wrapped around Hugh as he watched the drama playing out in the two room home, kept scrupulously clean by the widow, Lekha Das. She squatted on the kitchen floor that doubled as living space and her bedroom, preparing dinner. In the tiny second room, her eighteen year old son, Sudip, prepared to go out.

  Lekha sweated and muttered. She added spice to the dhal. She knew her son planned to meet pretty Chameli Sengupta. The girl was only seventeen and already husband hunting. Sudip would be a good catch. Thanks to his uncle, he had a job in the civil service.

  But if Sudip married, his wage would have to feed three, not two. Chameli would move in. She had expensive tastes. New clothes every month. And there would be children.

  Lekha hesitated. She liked children. But no, Sudip was too young.

  She stopped cooking and put a hand to her heart. Perhaps, perhaps she would be ill. Again. Sudip was a good son. He would stay home.

  Hugh frowned. Tonight, Lekha had to choose. She could ruin Sudip’s life with her fears of the future, her jealousy and manipulation of his love, and in doing so, she’d ruin her own life. She’d be locked into the prison of selfishness.

  He blinked through the wall of the house into the adjoining home. Here, Ganesh Tagore kept his homing pigeons. Hugh unlatched the door of their cage and chased them out. They exploded out the window in a loud flutter of wings.

  The noise caught Lekha’s attention. She watched the birds escape, wheel on the humid evening air and return.

  “Mom?” Sudip entered the room. His hair was wet where he’d plastered it down.

  Maternal love and apprehension welled in her heart. If I set him free, will he return?

  She began serving dinner. This was the hardest thing she’d ever done, granting him freedom. “Where are you going, tonight? I have some money put aside from the marketing if you need—”

  “Thank you, mom. I have money enough. Spend it on yourself.”

  Her reward was his smile and his love.

  Hugh smiled, too, glad for Lekha’s happiness.

  “When we’ve eaten,” she said. “I will take the crumbs to Mr. Tagore’s birds.”

  “Mr. Tagore is a widower,” Sudip insinuated.

  “Behave.”

  Jack Taylor was less satisfactory to his guardian angel. In fact, he was a near-to-damned nuisance. The boy just refused to grow. He had immense potential in the form of intelligence, determination and, most importantly, passion. When he decided on a goal, he’d achieve it. Unfortunately, at sixteen, still at school and resenting it, all Jack chased was trouble.

  Hugh leaned against a wall in the western suburbs of Sydney and watched his charge spray-paint a very bad picture of a pig.

  The Guardian Council frowned on violence against humans—even in their best interest. Hugh disagreed with the Council. The boy needed a shock to wake him up to life and he needed the humiliation of being knocked down. Basic communication, on the instinctive level of a wolf mother biting the nose of her cub to teach danger. If the boy’s arrogance went unchecked, he’d face worse dangers than a punch to the jaw.

  Hugh’s own jaw tightened. Demons treasured human arrogance. It made them so easy to pervert.

  The spray-can of paint hissed emptily and Jack tossed it aside. He ambled out into the crowds on the high street and watched an elderly man who peered with worried uncertainty at a bus timetable. He picked the man’s pocket and walked on.

  Hugh straightened from the wall, lifted the wallet from Jack’s hands and returned it to the old man’s pocket just as the bus arrived.

  “What the f—”

  Hugh made sure he was emphatically visible on the Sydney street. He raised an eyebrow.

  Jack reconsidered his next words and the desire to challenge a man a good foot taller and wider than himself. He took to his heels.

  “Running is good.” Running meant Jack had sense enough to fear consequences. The boy merged with the crowds. But one day it won’t be enough. One day everyone had to stop running, fighting, hiding and decide what was important to them. And I’ll be there. I’ll always be there when you need me, Jack.

  As he’d failed to be for Farhoud.

  As he’d almost failed Niki, projecting his own emotions, his memories and frustration, onto her. Niki, beautiful, passionate and so scared of that passion, pure fire in angel loving. It was time to tell her the truth of who he was, of his past.

  Niki scowled at a vase of roses in the center of the kitchen table. She was not thinking of that peace-stealing angel. She absolutely refused to allow him to invade all of her life.

  Her body, exhausted from her incorporeal struggles with the echoes of Solomon’s curse, had insisted on sleep, but her dreams had been vivid and arousing. In them, she hadn’t retreated from the physical desire that had followed them out of angel loving. She’d embraced it and Hugh.

  She flushed at how intimately her dream self had touched him. The bold, prowling sensuality and confident sharing of her own needs were alien to her experience. That didn’t stop her aching for satisfaction—or trying to deny it.

  “I don’t want him.” The tiny, cozy kitchen of her Oxford tower remained unmoved by the lie. The smug clock continued to tick. Steam swirled up from her mug of coffee. “I don’t.”

  She crunched breakfast cereal.

  If she continued on this path, she’d soon break the habits of a lifetime and start believing that the pleasures of intimacy outweighed its risks.

  “As if.” Her empty cereal bowl clattered into the sink and she turned the water on with enough force that it splashed up and over the rim. “Rats.” She was reverting to adolescence, with all that age’s lack of control.

  Well, she had one surefire strategy for cooling the blood in her veins. Yesterday, she’d found the shadow of Farhoud’s spirit among the tatters of Solomon’s curse, and despite the violence swirling there on the incorporeal plane, she’d held onto the psychic “scent”. That meant today she could pursue the infinitely harder, infinitely more dangerous task of following that scent incorporeally.

  Now that she’d found it, she could feel the fragile tie between Farhoud and her, created by his destruction of the curse. It was such a fragile thread, made thinner by her ingratitude, but she was a djinni, half-demon, and not even dark magic could break it. If she was clever, patient and determined, she could find Farhoud—yes, even if her father held him.

  Father. There was a nightmare thought. She shuddered, strangling the dishcloth with which she’d been wiping up the splashed water. No, she reassured herself. It is a human dark mage, not a demon who holds Farhoud. Hugh would sense a demon.

  “I can do this.” She threw the cloth down. She wouldn’t let Farhoud die, a victim to her cowardice. “It’ll have to be the Rubbiyiat Mandala.”

  She walked into the living room and used a flicker of magic to clear furniture from the center of the room. Sofas sidled to hug a side wall and the coffee table tucked itself on end against them. The rug rolled itself and lay in front of the radiator.

  She measured the space with her eyes, concentrated, then nodded approval at the results. An inch-high box, two meters by three, and filled with desert sand now dominated the room. She kicked off her shoes, unbuttoned the cuffs of her linen shirt and rolled the sleeves to her elbows.

  In the old days she’d have gone to the desert to try this, but the desert was no longer her home. Solomon had stolen it from her. Now she felt safest within walls—a sign of her long imprisonment.

  “But my magic’s coming back.” Like any talent, magic required practice to keep it sharp. Her raw power and ability were still there. She’d have to reach for both, plus all her control, to find Farhoud. “I will do this.”

  Strong arms wrapped around her and hauled her back against an unyielding chest. “Like hell. What do you think you’re doing?”

  “The Rubbi
yiat Mandala.” From the outrage in Hugh’s voice, she guessed he already recognized her preparations. It was desert magic, the finding of secret paths in shifting sands. It was djinn magic.

  “Damn it.” He swung her round to glare at her. His hands stayed on her upper arms and he gave her a little shake. “I won’t let you do this.”

  “It’s not dark magic.”

  “I know that. But your sense of self…”

  “My sense of self?” She raised an eyebrow, challenging him even as part of her reveled in his concern. He’d come back to her. The knowledge thrummed, painfully sweet, through her veins.

  “I’ve heard the lost souls, their voices wailing over the dunes.”

  “They were humans. None of my brothers and sisters have ever lost themselves in the mandala.”

  “None of the other djinn have ever shut themselves away from the world and their own power as you have done.”

  “A scholar in an ivory tower. I remember.”

  “Damn it,” he repeated himself, raking a hand through his hair. “I came back to tell you—to explain my behavior..”

  She hesitated. “Is this about Farhoud?”

  “No. Partly.” Hugh turned away, went to pace and kicked the box of sand. He turned back. “It’s about me. Us.”

  An arm span separated them.

  “I should find Farhoud,” she said, but the emotions vivid in Hugh’s eyes held her in place: concern, regret, anger and a plea. Intimacy came in many forms. The exchange of confidences was one. It took courage, both to talk and to listen. She would have courage. “Tell me.”

  Tension bracketed lines at the corners of his mouth. “Thirty years ago I lost Hussein, one of my charges, to dark magic and a demon. He was seventeen and thought he knew everything. The demon knew more. She used a dark mage to call Hussein and to hide him. She knew she couldn’t hide the boy from me, hence the mage. While I tore Beirut apart looking for Hussein, she was seducing him—not sexually, but with power. She played on the boy’s pride and intelligence. The ironic part is I didn’t find Hussein by anything I did. I found him because the dark mage became jealous of the demon’s interest in the boy. The demon and I fought. She won.”