Release the Djinni Read online

  Niki moved involuntarily.

  He answered as if she’d spoken her protest and doubt aloud. “Hussein chose her.”

  And an angel couldn’t act against free will. “I’m sorry.”

  He nodded dismissively, intent on his story, his confession. “The demon was beautiful, like you. Cold and scornful. Oh, she was blonde to your darkness, but the perfection was the same.”

  “I’m not perfect.”

  His stern expression relaxed fractionally. “Nor would you laugh at a lost young boy. I know that, now. But when we met…I was seeing you through the lens of old pain and regret. I treated you unfairly.”

  “You were right to accuse me of not caring. I’ve tried not to for the longest time.”

  “When we’re hurt, we all have different strategies for protecting ourselves.” He reached out and caught her hand. “I get angry. I did with you and I apologize.”

  She stepped forward and raised her free hand to rest over his heart, the truth and power of which she’d experienced during their angel loving glowed in her. “Apology accepted.”

  His gaze dropped from her eyes to her lips, then lifted to her eyes again. “Kiss me, Niki.” He drew her closer.

  Her hand slid up to curve around his neck. Her body fit his so naturally. She trembled because the simple request for a kiss converted his confession from an ending to an invitation.

  Know me, he said.

  She might have been able to refuse the arrogant invader of two days past. But this man, strong, proud and waiting for her to choose, was irresistible. She stretched on tiptoe and touched her lips to his.

  The tender movement of mouths learning one another melted her tension. She leant into Hugh, trusting his strength to support her.

  He widened his stance and tucked her closer.

  The kiss became more intimate, open and heated. It recalled the compulsive ecstasy of angel loving: the more she had, the more she wanted. Her body craved the intimacy her mouth was enjoying. Hugh was inside her, his tongue a wicked enticement. She sucked on it and was rewarded with the hard thrust of his hips.

  He spun them so she stood against a wall, nudged her legs apart and bent his knees to grind his arousal against her sensitive flesh. They shuddered together as he repeated the explicit tease.

  “You feel so good.” The raw words vibrated against her ear.

  “I ought to be afraid.” She was lifting herself to meet his thrusts.

  “Why? I won’t hurt you. I promise.”

  “You won’t mean to.”

  “Niki.” He stopped.

  She hung poised against his body.

  “I don’t want a reluctant surrender,” he said. “I want a lover who’ll find joy in me. If you have doubts—”

  “You make me forget them.”

  He smiled wryly and eased her down, his touch changing subtly from sexual to comforting. “But they still exist.”

  She resented his control of the situation, but lacked the confidence to challenge him, despite the hard evidence of his arousal.

  “I can wait,” he said.

  “Huh.” She disentangled herself from him, sliding along the wall and out of reach.

  “You need to learn you can trust me.” He folded his arms.

  She straightened her shirt and checked the buttons. One had slipped loose. She refastened it and looked up into his heated gaze. “Stopping was your decision.”

  “And I deserve credit for it.”

  “Not from me.” Her breasts were tight and swollen, her skin hot and overly sensitive.

  “I should have ignored your fear?”

  She blushed painfully, caught out in her self-deception. She’d wanted him to control their loving, to seduce her each step, letting her enjoy it without confronting her doubts. If she chose to be intimate with him, she admitted his importance.

  “If you care about someone,” she began, stumbling over her words, her tongue thick and unwilling to reveal so much of her heart, but Hugh had revealed his deep hurt to apologize to her. She owed him her truth. “If you allow someone close, then what they do and say and feel can hurt you.”

  “Yes.”

  She glanced away from him, rattled by that uncompromising agreement. “I don’t want anyone to have that power over me again.”

  “Ah. Who hurt you, honey? Who was clumsy?”

  “Not clumsy.” She felt him shift closer, instinctively protective. “I was stupid. It wasn’t a lover. Lovers are…choose-able.” And she’d chosen not to indulge.

  “Hmm.” It wasn’t agreement.

  “I don’t need a lover.”

  “Stop dancing around it,” he ordered. “Who taught you to fear love? Stupid!” His fist thumped the wall. “I’m stupid. Your demon father.”

  “It was centuries ago. I was so lonely. I have seventy six half-brothers and sisters, the other djinn. We weren’t close, but we were there for one another. Until Solomon’s curse separated us. We were locked in our bottles, locked away. Some became angry, so angry. Others sad. We grieved for our freedom, but we grieved alone. After a while, my father noticed. He found it…interesting.”

  “Hell blast him.”

  “It took me too long to realize he was amusing himself, playing with me like I was a human, a stranger. He was intrigued how I reacted, how the humans’ wishes tore me up, and then, he decided to see if he could teach me to hate.” She swallowed painfully, hearing the echo of screams and demon laughter. “He failed—just. But my agony was almost as entertaining.”

  Hugh pulled her into his arms, holding her tightly as she shivered. He waited in silence till the shivers ceased. Then he bent till his mouth was against her ear. “If you refuse to love, your father wins.”

  She couldn’t find an answer.

  After a moment, he sighed and his arms relaxed. “You’ve ordered me away twice and I’ve gone. You won’t get rid of me so easily a third time.”

  “I don’t know what you’re telling me.”

  He shrugged, half smiling. “That I’m here? That we all have second chances? That you don’t have to fight alone?”

  “That I can trust you?”

  He froze for a second. “Do you have to ask?”

  “No.” She touched his face lightly before stepping back. “I have to believe.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Before anything else, I have to find Farhoud,” Niki said.

  “I don’t like the idea of you using the Rubbiyat Mandala.” Hugh frowned. “You found a tie to Farhoud’s spirit in the stopper of your old bottle. There must be another way to trace him from it.”

  “Through a cloud of dark magic? You know there isn’t.” She drew a deep breath, hoping for courage. “I have to do this. I’ve hated being a djinni for a long time, knowing that my father’s blood runs in me.”

  “Heritage isn’t destiny.” His hand fisted against his thigh. “You are you. Passionate, alive, generous. I should cut out my tongue for calling you demon spawn. Honey, you don’t have to prove anything.”

  “But this is my chance to use who I am—the darkness in my blood—to do something good. I can find Farhoud even through the obscurity of the magic hiding him. The Mandala searches for those who are lost.”

  “It’s not that simple. You’re the searcher. The mandala is only a path, and a maze at that. The further you search, the thinner you become. If you lose your center, your sense of self, you’ll join the wailing winds.”

  “Which will be an interesting experience for Oxford.” She tried a smile. “They’ll think I’m a banshee.”

  “I will worry.” He cupped the back of her head and bent to kiss her. “I hate being helpless.”

  Her lips parted to take in his softly breathed words.

  “Let me at least search for Farhoud one more time.” His thumb smoothed over her cheekbone. He kissed the “yes” from her mouth.

  They separated slowly, reluctantly. Each time she kissed him it was sweeter and more painful. He cared what happened to her.
r />   “You have ten minutes,” she said. “While I study the pattern of the mandala.” She called it up in her memory, concentrating on the intricate swirls and false paths.

  Hugh retreated to a sofa and closed his eyes.

  With the pattern clear to her, she stamped it onto the smooth sand tray that dominated the living room.

  “I still can’t sense Farhoud.” Hugh opened his eyes. “I’d hoped—”

  “That I wouldn’t have to use the mandala?” She smiled wryly at him.

  He nodded, jaw tense. Awareness of each other hummed beneath their concentration. “The cloud of dark magic that hides the boy seems thicker than ever.”

  “I can find my way through it,” she said.

  “At what cost?”

  Dark magic always exacted its price. Being djinn, neither completely human nor demon, she’d pay in pain. But Hugh couldn’t pierce it at all. As an angel, he was antithetical to the operation of dark magic. They both knew she was Farhoud’s last hope.

  And she saw what it cost Hugh to let her bear the risk.

  “I might be an hour, seven hours, I’m not sure how long.” She took the stopper of her bottle from the mantelpiece and concentrated on her tie to the boy. It seemed fainter, as if the dark magic eroded even the remnants of Solomon’s powerful magic.

  She had to act now before the fragile thread frayed to uselessness.

  “Peace, my heart.” The ancient leave-taking came instinctively because this was old magic, the desert magic of her brothers and sisters and of the old Silk Road kingdoms.

  “Peace and safe journey,” he responded. “May we meet again with joy.”

  She levitated and centered herself knee height above the mandala, at the heart of its intricate pattern. She breathed in and shifted into her incorporeal state, sinking into the navel of her world. It was here that she’d keep her sense of self, the pillar of identity, from which point she could search the sands for Farhoud.

  After decades in her corporeal form, her mind automatically translated sensations into bodily perception. So as she thinned out, pushing like mist through the shining paths of the mandala’s labyrinth, the resistance of dark magic stung like sand against her skin. And the cloud of it darkened, growing bigger and more ominous.

  But cutting through the cloud was a cobweb-fine line of light—the flame of Farhoud’s spirit. Even if the dark magic scoured her skin, she’d follow that light. She wasn’t leaving the mandala until she’d found the boy.

  She gathered her spirit from mist form to flame. Her flame stuttered and smoked in the winds that blew from all directions and the cloud of dark magic was a fog that strove to choke it. None of that mattered. As long as she kept her sense of self—her knowledge that she, Niki, had value—she could continue the search. And always before her ran the line of light.

  The cloud thinned and she gasped thankfully.

  Salt water. It gave her a breathing space. Wherever it was she travelled in the corresponding physical world, she now skimmed over a sea. Salt water cleansed the taint of dark magic. She breathed in the cleaner air in great gulps, aware that this corporeal sensation was her mind’s way of informing her of the extent of her exertion. She was struggling for life as the fight to pierce the cloud of dark magic consumed her power.

  Suddenly, the light line of Farhoud’s flame flickered and vanished.

  Niki slammed into dark magic thickened to tar-like resistance. The sea no longer flowed beneath her, but nor could she sense land. This was a place without history, a lost place. She hung, suspended in nothingness.

  Farhoud, where are you? To find him again, she abandoned the strength of her flame image and dispersed again as mist. She searched frantically, aware of time running out.

  The dense cloud of dark magic saturated her thinly stretched spirit. She was tissue paper in an acid fog. It was eating her, etching patterns of hate.

  Farhoud?

  If she stretched herself thinner, further from her center in the mandala and in this dark cloud, she could lose her sense of self.

  “I won’t.” She was a djinni, a scholar, Hugh’s lover. She was stronger than a dark mage. She was a djinni who had protected herself for centuries. “I am Niki.”

  She called her spirit back into the form of a flame.

  No human wizard was keeping her from finding Farhoud.

  She inhaled, gathering her spirit, then blew at the cloud. For an instant she pierced it and saw Farhoud’s light, tiny and vibrant.

  Here. He’s here.

  Then the dark cloud hammered her and beneath the violence of the blow, her spirit guttered. She shrank back along the paths of the mandala, streaming back like candle smoke to her own strength and into her body.

  She landed with a thump on the sand in her living room, every muscle aching and her breathing harsh. She rolled on her back and looked up at Hugh.

  “I found him. I found Farhoud.”

  Hugh wasn’t listening. He lifted her off the sand and sat with her cradled in his lap on the sofa, running his hands over her body. “An hour ago, I felt your spirit stutter. Do you know how helpless I felt, knowing I had to wait for you to find your way back?”

  “I’m okay.” And she was now, surrounded by his strength. But a whole hour to come back to herself? She nuzzled his throat, inhaling the male and salt scent of him. She had been in danger of losing herself. That last blow of dark magic had been brutal.

  She looked up, wanting to tell him of the experience and what she’d found. The words caught in her throat, frozen by his taut expression.

  “Oh lord.” She’d spent so long alone, afraid to care about anyone for fear of the hurt they’d cause her, she’d forgotten that the vulnerability cut both ways. She could hurt him.

  He was hurting. The sweat on his skin was from worry for her.

  She scrambled off his lap, stumbled over the box and landed in the sand.

  “What on earth?” He stood, gaze flicking from her to the room, looking for the threat that had freaked her.

  “Sorry, sorry.” She pressed her hands to her face, ashamed of her reaction. Tiny sand grains clung to her skin. She brushed them away and wished it was as easy to dismiss the realization that she could hurt this powerful angel.

  “What’s wrong?” He stretched out his hand to help her up.

  She pretended she didn’t see it, concentrating on brushing away non-existent sand. Then she stood up, putting the sand box between them. When she thought she could meet his gaze, she looked up.

  His eyes were narrowed, assessing.

  “I found Farhoud.” She put the knowledge between them like a barrier, knowing it would distract him. “I hadn’t expected that last violence in the mandala. The person holding Farhoud threw me out. But I found Farhoud first. He’s on one of the man-made islands off Dubai.”

  “Man-made. A land without guardians.”

  “Much easier to hide the ripples of dark magic where there are no dragons with the sense of the land in their bones,” she agreed. “The mage hid Farhoud every way he knew.”

  “On an artificial island, in an enclave of wealth. There are a few off Dubai. Which one?”

  “I’ll recognize it when we get there.”

  “No.”

  “Hugh, of course I’m going with you.”

  “You need to eat and rest—”

  “I’ll survive.”

  “You barely made it out of the mandala.”

  I came back to you. She almost said the words aloud. Their truth rattled her so much that she blurted her real objection. “Stop trying to protect me. You’re not my guardian angel. Going after Farhoud is my decision.”

  He studied her. “You don’t want me to care about you.”

  The sandbox annoyed her. She used a flick of magic to vanish it. Another flick of magic dealt with the spilled sand.

  He strode across the empty space. “First you wouldn’t believe I could care what happened to you. Now you’re scared I do. What an endless array of fears you live wi
th.”

  The sarcasm scalded.

  “Don’t worry,” he continued. “I can’t rescue you from them.”

  She remembered his earlier words, that fear is a choice. She hadn’t believed him then. Now…

  “I’m going with you to find Farhoud,” she said. “And maybe I am afraid that if you care for me, I’ll hurt you. I’m not experienced with relationships. But you have your own problems. You’d prefer to believe you can save the world alone. You’re looking for a relationship where you are the carer, the savior, the hero. I’m inexperienced, but not stupid enough to fall into something so unequal.”

  His mouth thinned. “Are you finished? Are we going to find Farhoud or would you like to continue your character assassination?”

  “Let’s go.”

  He held out his hand.

  She accepted because it was the easiest way to stay together when they translocated, but she frowned fiercely at the warm, familiar feel of his skin against hers, the slight roughness of a working man’s hand.

  “We’ll start at the Dubai air control tower.” He translocated them to its roof. The heat was dying out of the day, but enough remained that the roof and surrounding tarmac shimmered with it. The evening sun danced over endless sand and painted shades of glowing reds and pinks over grandiose buildings and construction sites alike. The sea was an intense and reviving blue. A painter of stark, surreal landscapes would stand in awe.

  Niki focused on the islands that stretched out from the land in overly-organized patterns of human design.

  “Over there.” She pointed, following her instincts. She had found Farhoud near here and now that tiny dot of land resonated with familiarity. She tugged Hugh onto it, landing in front of a gleaming luxury hotel. “Somewhere in here.”

  “It stinks of dark magic,” he said.

  “Can you sense Farhoud?”

  He shook his head.

  Rats. She slitted her eyes against the glare of sunset. There was another way to tackle this. The dark mage could reveal himself despite his precautions—or because of them. The violence that thrust her away from Farhoud had to have left its own mark. “We need to go where the dark magic seems thickest to you.”