“Cooperate and your man will get no worse. Find the jinniyah for me and I will take away the fever.” Jamra waved his hand as if to seal their agreement, then pointed his finger in Elena’s face, his breath hot like the steam from a winter cauldron. “But I will burn his brains from the inside out with the flame of a thousand fires if I discover you are lying to me.”
Elena nodded, relieved to have learned that it was possible for the fever to be reversed. She made the deal with the jinni while Brother Anselm crossed himself.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sidra never fidgeted, never bit her nails, never fretted over the things she couldn’t control. She believed one’s destiny marched forward on the single road it was meant to follow. Yet being back among her possessions, among his possessions, made the fire in her blood recede until she actually felt a chill on the back of her neck. Exposed. Vulnerable. As if still waiting for the sharpened edge of la demi-lune to fall.
Curse that Oberon! She didn’t wish to feel anything ever again, and yet here she was in a pit of emotions slithering over her skin like cool-bellied snakes.
“Are you going to tell me why Grand-Père sent us here of all places?” Yvette dropped on the sofa beside Sidra. “Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think? I mean, how did he even know?”
Sidra rubbed the back of her neck. The girl wasn’t as stupid as she usually took her to be. She’d known that before, seeing the way Yvette had survived the city streets in the throes of her wish without resorting to her thieving ways, but for once life would be easier if her assumptions were true. She wished, too, that the girl had a destiny disconnected from her own instead of being here tangled in the web of life at her side.
Sidra stared at the abandoned shoes by the door. “Your grandfather was right to return us here. This is where the path we must walk lies, no matter how painful the next steps we take.”
“Right. The two of you love your prophecies.” Yvette chewed her last orange slice. “So, who was he, the man you . . . you know?” She nudged her chin toward the shoes as she drew her finger across her neck.
Sidra turned away to stare at a cobweb dangling in the window, then closed her eyes. “My husband.”
There, she said it. And it didn’t kill her.
“You’re married? Or, well, were married, I suppose.” Yvette sat back, flabbergasted, as her eyes scanned the room a second time with the new information. “Merde.”
Sidra sprang up from the sofa. She wanted to dissipate. Disappear. Burn the apartment to the ground. Instead she gathered her scarf over her head and wrapped the ends tight around her arms.
“How long were you married?”
The faintest of smiles still found its way to her lips at the thought. “Three hundred years.”
“Oh là là. How’s that even possible?” Yvette poured herself a cup of coffee, admiring the gold inlay on the cup as she brought it to her lips.
“Three centuries is not long for my kind. We were still newlyweds.”
The scent of orange blossoms infiltrated the cracks in the window frame and under the door, filling the room with shadow memories. Sidra did not know before that a heart could shrivel to the size of a raisin and die and yet leave the rest of the body and spirit to live for centuries.
Yvette whistled low. “What happened?”
“We weren’t meant to fall in love, but we did. We tried to outrun the All Seeing’s plan for us, and we got snapped up in its teeth in the end.”
Yvette prodded her for more, but there was no reason to tell the details of her story. Spilling her heart like a common mortal who couldn’t control her emotions or mouth. And to a girl who knew nothing about love. Only the coarse, hard transaction of physical pleasure for money.
“I have to go out,” she said, suddenly unable to bear the antsy jitters in her blood. “Stay. Drink your coffee. Do not leave. You’ll be safe within these walls until I return. They’re safeguarded. But venture out and I cannot protect you.”
Yvette set her cup down. “Protect me against what?”
Sidra curled her lip and drew her finger across her neck. “Certain, torturous death.”
The breeze rustled the highest treetops, signifying an omen of change. Sidra sailed on the currents, a wisp of invisible smoke in a cloudless sky. The concealment spell she’d placed around the apartment was still as strong as the day she’d cast it, made of good, solid magic. The girl would be fine as long as she did as she was told and stayed inside. But with that one you never knew which impulse she would follow next. Was that why they’d been chained at the wrist on this journey? There was always a place for the unpredictable in life, but she didn’t like it. Not one bit.
She passed over a crop of budding roses, inhaling the fragrance of the flowers as she flew. Her mood improved from the floral perfume until she was more resolute than desperate. Had this been her life before, she would have stayed among those heavenly scents as long as her heart desired, but today she must relent and fly. She turned to the west and headed for the hills.
The opening to the cave, once so perfectly hidden in the rocky ground, was now marked by an atrocity of a stone monument and a wooden gate. Mortals disturbed everything they came across. Tours, they called it. And yet the old one refused to leave the place. He merely burrowed in deeper beyond the reach of idle curiosity.
The gate had been secured for the day. Such locks were made for clay-footed mortals, but if the light could get through, so could she. Sidra drifted through the cracks at the entrance where the wooden gate and stone wall didn’t quite meet. Inside, the cavern yawned before her. The great room echoed with cool, expansive emptiness. She reanimated on a stone ledge on the lip of darkness. Removing an oil lamp from the wall, she lit the wick and blew her fire magic inside the glass so it shone with the light of ten lanterns. In the illuminated space at her feet, a row of stalagmites with a pinkish hue stood waist-high like teeth inside a mythical beast that had swallowed the world. A great tongue of solid ground, newly carved with steps for goggle-eyed tourists, descended deeper into the cavern. To find her answers, she would need to go very deep into the abyss to find the old one, beyond the reach of mortals and their rudimentary tools.
Sidra crossed her legs and sat on a cushion of air. Steadily, she floated through the dark with her lantern held out before her, winding her way down through openings in the rock, large and small, brushing against the limestone walls with their mud-slick slime and coiled fossils embedded in time. She didn’t care for the damp. And though the lure of hiding in dark places was fitting for her kind, she had never personally been drawn to them. Not until she’d felt the tugging loss of her husband’s death pull her down. “Live long enough,” she’d been told by those older than she, “and one day you, too, will seek out a hollow place at the bottom of the world to bury your sorrows in.”
She was getting closer. The spicy scents of turmeric and cumin began to overtake the wet beach smell of the limestone. She sank deeper, past the garbage left behind by the tourists, past the dripping water from the aquifer, until she came to a cave within the cave, a sideways tunnel gleaming with the reddish color of iron oxide, the color a talisman for luck and courage.
The air stirred. A noise like small stones tumbling over a ledge reached her ears from deeper inside. Ah, good. He is already awake. Touching her feet down again to walk, she dimmed her lantern to a tolerable level. Even jinn needed time to adjust their eyes after so much time in shadow. Especially one as old as Rajul Hakim.