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  Empty tea glasses were put aside and large maps unrolled. Yasmeen studied the first map a moment before pointing out the sorcerer’s location.

  Ty leaned forward, interested. A river was indicated, one of the smaller ones. A tributary. “Do you have a topographical map?”

  One appeared magically, overlying the first map.

  “Ty’s a hydrologist,” Yasmeen said. “I want him to break the river’s banks, flood the valley, and in the confusion, we can free the people. And reclaim your eye. Then the police can take out the sorcerer.” Her voice slowed. “Can the police handle a sorcerer?”

  “No,” Darek said bluntly.

  “But we can,” Laila added.

  The dragon and djinn stared at one another. Ty didn’t think he was a particularly sensitive man, but even he felt the tension and sexual chemistry in the air.

  Yasmeen widened her eyes at him. Wow, she mouthed.

  “Laila and I will handle the sorcerer,” Darek said. “He will have set up wards—powerful ones since he could hide my eye from me—so if we don’t want to warn him of our presence, we’ll need to approach without magic.”

  “I slipped in once,” Yasmeen said. “We can do so, again.”

  A cold shudder snaked down Ty’s spine at the thought of what she’d risked. He wanted to forbid her to go with them—as if she’d listen! Which gave him the clue to Laila and Darek’s frowning match. The dragon had wanted Laila to stay away from the sorcerer—and he’d lost that protective, silent battle. Ty bit back a frustrated, worried sigh. Focus on the mission. “I’ll need to study the riverbank first. Decide where to set the explosives.”

  “Nothing too dramatic,” Yasmeen warned. “We don’t want the sorcerer to guess what’s happening.”

  “What is his name?” Laila asked.

  “Solomon Omar.”

  Ty tensed at the name.

  Laila went absolutely still.

  But it was Darek who moved. He scooped Laila up, and they were gone.

  Yasmeen stared at Ty. “What did I say?”

  “Darek, I’m all right. It was just the shock of it. But a sorcerer would choose to call himself Solomon. It’s a name of magic and power. Perhaps I should even have expected it.”

  They stood in Darek’s tower bedroom, at the window with the wind swirling in, carrying the hot scents of the desert. Darek held her in his arms as if she was weightless.

  “The name hurt you.” His voice was a low growl.

  “A stab of memory. No more.” She reassured him with a gentle caress to his face, a caress that he turned his head into. His lips kissed her palm, and when she lowered her palm, he kissed her lips.

  Her dragon tasted of cinnamon and fire, and of the sweet mint tea they’d just drunk. “Stay here,” he said. “Your American soldier and I will go.”

  She laughed at him, softly. “You won’t get Yasmeen to stay behind. This is her quest.”

  “I’ll have Ty convince her.”

  “He has more sense than to try.”

  Darek’s head jerked up. “Are you saying I lack sense?” He was so arrogant and handsome. Sensitive; caring, although he tried to hide it.

  She kissed him briefly. “I’m saying that I’m going with you. This sorcerer—this Solomon—I will defeat.”

  The valley was one of those tricks of nature, possibly enhanced by magic, with its own temperate microclimate among the arid mountains. The river spilled into the valley from a higher one to the east. Laila had whooshed Yasmeen and Ty into the high valley, and Darek had joined them with the warning that there be no more magic till he’d regained his eye. “And the enslaved people are freed,” Yasmeen had added.

  Ty was proud of her courage—not many people would correct a dragon—but also worried for her. She had to take the lead to get them into the sorcerer’s compound; just visible from the river.

  The sorcerer had set up his home there. An odd house in its setting. Modern. It was white concrete and square walls, situated on a rise a half mile back from the river and a quarter mile from the people smugglers’ cluster of prefabricated buildings.

  “If I set the charge here and here, the river will pour into the valley.” Ty was accustomed to calculating the effects of gravity on water flow. Only the hard rock of the high valley wall had narrowed and slowed the river. Dislodge this one particular boulder, with its precariously twisting pine tree growing to the north side, and the water contained in the natural weir would spill over, catastrophically.

  “Do it,” Darek said. The dragon’s attention was on Laila.

  Laila wore hiking gear and a preoccupied attention. She’d agreed to the no-magic rule, but said she was preparing a spell for when that changed. Apparently, that spell took quite some preparation.

  Perhaps they should have waited for tomorrow, but none of them could bear the thought of leaving people enslaved a moment longer than they had to. And Darek had wanted his eye back.

  Ty set the explosives Darek had provided. As long as his calculations were accurate, the minor explosion wouldn’t be felt by anyone in the sorcerer’s valley. The river’s sudden breaking of its high banks as it fell from one valley to the next would appear normal, something that happened in a geologically active region: a new waterfall.

  “Thirty minutes,” Ty said.

  Keeping to the cover of the trees, they ran into the valley and towards the sorcerer’s house. The closer they came to it, the more the land cleared and became fertile farmland. There they split off. Ty and Yasmeen would wait for the distraction of the flood waters, then tackle the people smugglers.

  Ty counted three men, not obviously armed. But then, cowed people didn’t need an obvious weapon to keep them slaving. Darek had provided Ty and Yasmeen with semi-automatic pistols. They were a last resort. Better to do as he’d done at the village yesterday and attack with stealth and a silent tree branch as a club. Then they’d get the imprisoned workforce onto the two trucks and drive them out.

  Meantime, Laila and Darek would go on to the sorcerer’s house to constrain his magic and retrieve Darek’s eye. If they failed, then Yasmeen and Ty would face the full force of the sorcerer’s power.

  “Good luck,” Yasmeen whispered.

  Laila smiled, and it was an otherworldly expression. Terrifying.

  Ty recalled her story. Laila was the daughter of Lilith and a demon. Just now, that demonic paternity lent an eldritch element to the djinni.

  “We’ll meet you at the trucks,” Darek said. He took Laila’s hand, and the dragon and djinni ran off.

  Yasmeen leaned close and whispered in Ty’s ear. “I could almost pity the sorcerer.”

  Ty looked towards the modernist house and the wealth it represented, extracted from the labor of the enslaved people. He remembered Laila’s centuries of imprisonment and his own family’s history of slavery. “Solomon Omar will get what he deserves.”

  Chapter Nine

  Laila loved the strength in Darek’s hand as he clasped hers. For the first time in centuries she was running into battle as a free djinni, and she had an ally. Allies! if she counted the two humans, and she did. Ty and Yasmeen would do their part in this fight.

  “The riverbank has given way,” Darek said. With his dragon nature he could sense every change in the land. A scowl of concentration and determination drew his black eyebrows together making him appear nearly as fierce as she knew him to be.

  She stretched her hearing, but without magic, couldn’t detect any cries of discovery or danger from the people smugglers’ camp.

  Then she and Darek were at the sorcerer’s house. They circled around it, following Yasmeen’s information and advice, and entered from the kitchen door that faced the hill-side.

  Two women looked up.

  Darek growled, a low rumble in his chest.

  Laila squeezed his hand to remind him not to scare the women. They wouldn’t know he was angry for them, not at them. “Run,” she whispered. “Back to camp. Quietly, to the trucks. Someone is there to drive you
to freedom.”

  The two women, nearer forty than twenty, sensible, wiped their hands down the faded trousers they wore beneath long tunics. They glanced at one another. “Freedom? Where would we go?” one questioned. Her black hair was graying beneath a yellow headscarf.

  “Wherever you want.” The promise was Darek’s.

  The women stared at him for a long moment, then ran.

  “Thank God,” Laila breathed. Sometimes enslavement stole a person’s ability to choose freedom. But these two women hadn’t been destroyed, not in their souls.

  Darek didn’t answer. He moved towards the front of the house, the glass-enclosed riverside rooms. Yasmeen had said they’d have to pass them to reach the sorcerer’s study on the far side of the house, the furthest distance from the people smugglers’ camp.

  Laila ran after him, ignoring the surprisingly light and feminine furnishings of the large living space. She did pause for a fraction of an instant when, through the floor-length windows, she saw the road that snaked beside the river. Water was already lapping towards it. If Ty and Yasmeen were to drive the two trucks along it, they had to hurry.

  As did she!

  Darek’s roar shattered the silence of the sorcerer’s house, and even as it spat sparks and fury, other magic rushed to meet it.

  They’d found the sorcerer.

  Darek shuddered as the sorcerer’s magic crashed into him. His big body, lean and powerful, flinched with the magical blow.

  Laila shoved him out of the doorway to the sorcerer’s study. She’d had centuries to think of the treacherous way the original Solomon had enslaved her brothers and sisters and her. Now, here was this modern-day Solomon trading in people and hurting Darek. But the big difference this time was that she wasn’t an innocent, nor unprepared.

  Solomon Omar had stolen a dragon’s eye and prepared to fight a dragon to keep it. But he wouldn’t have dreamed that he’d also face a djinni.

  The spell she’d prepared was a measure of justice.

  Fire rose, Darek had called her, and he’d spoken more truly than he knew. She was a desert djinni, one who’d danced in the open tar pits of the empty sands where crude oil bubbled naturally to the surface and a lightning strike could ignite it. She knew the shadow of the terror and punishment of her father’s demonic home. All of this, and her own suffering enslavement of centuries, formed her spell.

  She flung a gold ring at the sorcerer. Molten gold, heated with hell’s own flames, it tore through the sorcerer’s personal protective wards, opened and closed around his throat.

  He screamed. Screamed and screamed as his magic shut off, strangled forever, leaving him an impotent old man, faded and gray, skinny and raging. “Nooooo!!”

  Darek strode around the ex-sorcerer and scooped up the massive sapphire balanced in the middle of a pentacle drawn in salt on a large ebony table.

  “No!” Solomon Omar lunged for Darek.

  The sapphire shrank in Darek’s hand to human eye-sized, and he took off his eyepatch and slipped it into the empty eye socket, ignoring how Solomon pounded ineffectually on his muscled back. Then, eye restored, he lifted Solomon by his shirtfront.

  The short, skinny ex-sorcerer kicked and swore. “You murdering bastard.”

  “Me?” Darek threw Solomon against a wall. “You traded in people. How many died?”

  “None. None by my hand,” Solomon panted as he scrambled up. “You have killed Ruth.”

  “Who?”

  “Me.”

  “Any other guards?” Ty demanded of a boy, perhaps seventeen years old, who watched him with wonder and the beginnings of hope.

  And thank God, the boy knew English because Ty couldn’t speak anything else.

  “No. Only three.” The kid held up three fingers.

  “Good. Then get in the trucks. Get everyone in. We’re moving out.”

  As the boy shouted and got everyone moving, urging them impatiently—as rude as only teenagers could be—into action, Ty glanced across at Yasmeen.

  She was talking with two women who’d come running down the path from the house. She gave him a small thumbs-up, and he had to hope that Laila and Darek were okay because the river was rising and he and Yasmeen couldn’t linger. The trucks had to go now before the road flooded.

  What worried him was how easily the people smugglers had been defeated. There’d been only three guards, none of whom were on alert. Either the guards had believed the people were too cowed to challenge them, or else, they trusted in some magic of the sorcerer’s to keep everyone locked in. If that was the case…

  Ty glanced at the sorcerer’s house. He and Yasmeen had to trust that Laila and Darek could defeat the sorcerer and unwind his magic. They had no choice. They were committed, now.

  “Ruth,” Solomon wailed.

  Laila stared at the ghost who was changing as they watched her. From an elderly, frail and obviously pain-wracked woman, she grew younger and healthier. Beautiful.

  Solomon had managed to stand, leaning against the wall, but now he dropped to his knees. “Ruth,” he pleaded.

  The ghost regarded him with anger and repulsion. With the old hurt of betrayal. “Husband, I am free. Your chains on me are gone. Dragon.” She looked at Darek. “Thank you for reclaiming your eye. Solomon used its power to bind my soul to my body after I died. The life force he’d been stealing from the poor people smuggled through here was no longer enough to keep me alive. How I fought it! The ugliness of that theft.”

  She glared at Solomon. “You are evil. You smothered me in that evil.”

  “I did it for you.”

  Darek snorted.

  Laila didn’t believe it, either.

  Ruth drifted forward and loomed over her husband. “You believed you owned me. You wouldn’t even let me escape in death.” She drifted back. “But I am free.”

  She vanished.

  Heaven would take her.

  Solomon pounded the floor. “No! No. You are mine.”

  It would be so easy for Laila to tighten the gold ring around his throat.

  Darek intertwined his fingers with hers. Such a small gesture. Innocent and hopeful. He smiled faintly down at her, his blue eyes blazing with love and trust.

  Laila reined in her magic. He was right. She would not return hatred with hatred, horror with horror. She was free and refused to smear her soul with evil.

  “Run, now,” Darek said quietly to Solomon, and his tone cut through the ex-sorcerer’s ranting. Her dragon’s tone promised death.

  Solomon lurched up, edged around Darek and ran.

  Darek put an arm around Laila. “Ty and Yasmeen have driven the trucks out of the valley.”

  “Thank God.” She slumped against him in relief.

  In the same instant, he translocated them out of the house, away from the sorcerer’s den and Ruth’s cage-grave. A second after that, he set the house on fire. Whatever magical objects and texts Solomon had acquired would burn.

  And the human authorities who came to investigate would assume that one of the fleeing, former prisoners had set the house alight as a parting gift.

  “Come home with me,” Darek invited.

  Laila stretched up on tiptoes to kiss him. “Yes.”

  They went the long way home. They danced through fire and played in the wind. She rode her dragon as he soared on thermal updrafts, and then, he was human again, so was she, and his big bed welcomed them. She fell on top of him, naked. He teased her breasts, kissed her mouth, and waited for her to choose.

  She took him inside her, inch by glorious inch, watching how his eyes blazed with passion, feeling how he completed her. “This is freedom,” she whispered.

  He lifted her hands from his shoulders, kissing each palm, before replacing them on his chest, her right hand over his heart. “This is love.”

  She trembled at that powerful truth. They were making love, trusting each other with their whole beings. She rocked forward and felt pleasure surge in her at Darek’s instinctive thrust. They were
one. She let go of old hurts and fears, staring into the passionate blue of his eyes. “I love you, my dragon.”

  “Fire rose.” His power enveloped her. “Burn for me.”

  Pleasure sang through her veins. “With you.”

  Forever.

  Note From The Author

  Did you enjoy Fire Rose? I hope so! I love writing about the djinn, and have an angel and djinn story in both the steampunk and fantasy collection, Indulge, and in Dare, Sensual Fantasy and Suspense.

  Fire Rose is a bonus story in 2016. This year I’m concentrating on my Collegium paranormal romance series, which doesn’t include Fire Rose; although Djinn Justice does have a tricky, meddlesome djinn. If you’re interested in reading about shifters, demons, magic and more, the Collegium series is for you!

  Reading order (not that it matters):

  Demon Hunter

  Djinn Justice

  Dragon Knight

  Doctor Wolf

  Plague Cult (June 27, 2016)

  Hollywood Demon (August 2016)

  I’d like to say a special thank you to those of you reviewing my books on Amazon and Goodreads. This “social proof” is so important in helping new readers find the Collegium series—especially in coaxing Amazon to show the books to people like you who’ll enjoy them.

  Thank you so much, and happy reading!

  Jenny