The Conjurer (The Vine Witch #3)(25)
The two emerged from a narrow lane that emptied onto a larger street. A building on the corner, with an iron railing and two Greco columns flanking the front door, presented itself as a parfumerie, though it was obvious enough from the overly saturated scents of bergamot, jasmine, and rose seeping through the walls and windows. The fragrance lured the girl in, so she followed.
Sidra hadn’t entered the shop before. Perhaps it was newly opened since her last days in the village a year earlier. The parfumerie was an upscale establishment, one specializing in “modern” scents created in a laboratory, as if there was anything wrong with the pure extracts derived from the distillation of centuries of knowledge.
“Isn’t it divine?” Yvette asked, accepting a dab of cologne on the back of her hand from the woman working behind the counter.
Sidra detected an underlying citric fragrance that reminded her of sitting by a fountain surrounded by an orange garden on the other side of the sea, but she was otherwise unimpressed with the more pungent scent of alcohol that evaporated off the girl’s skin almost immediately.
“Buy some if you like it. We have to go.”
“I spent my only coins on the spices back there,” Yvette said out of the side of her mouth.
The shopkeeper put the stopper back in the bottle. Her lips puckered as if drawn taut by a string of judgment. Sidra expected the woman to make a tsking sound next. If not for the tone of disapproval, she would have told the girl to leave without the perfume. Instead she waved her fingers behind her robe and produced several fat coins in her palm. She set them on the counter, and Yvette walked out with a box of perfume wrapped in a dainty blue ribbon.
Kindness toward lesser beings didn’t come naturally or often, but Sidra found it buoyed her spirits on this occasion as the girl radiated with happiness at being bought a present she couldn’t otherwise afford. The jinni smiled and covered her head with her scarf as they walked back to the apartment, happy in the knowledge she had collected the last of the outstanding talismans. Jamra’s job of finding her was just made that much more difficult, which meant it was a good effort. Confrontation would come, but not on this day. She tilted her face to the sun, letting its glow shine bright and hot against her skin.
Minutes later, her good mood vanished. The moment they entered the apartment she knew something was off. A scent of maleness that didn’t belong. The fringe on the rug out of alignment. Grains of rice scattered on the floor. And yet it could be no ordinary intruder. The apartment was kept inside an illusion inside an illusion.
Only a jinni could have found the room on their own. Or someone led there by one.
Yvette looked over Sidra’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“Give me light.”
The girl glowed bright like a lamp, illuminating the deep shadows of the room where the jinn liked to hide. Sidra sniffed the air again. Not Jamra. Nor any jinn she knew, but there was another scent hanging in the air above the male musk. The reek of nervous sweat and common market incense.
Yanis.
“Where did you hide the sorcerer’s talisman?” Sidra asked.
“In the rice jar like you said.”
Sidra rushed to the jar and dug her hand through the grains of rice, finding nothing.
The fourth medallion was gone again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The dog stood on the platform, watching the train trail off through the veil of smoke and vapor as it carried the witch to her destination. That one, he observed, was motivated by love. A shiver went through his body.
“Did she make it on?”
The dog twitched his ear. The creature standing at the edge of his ear canal tickled the fur there, making him want to scratch with his paw. He refrained and nodded.
The creature whispered, “All is well, though so much scheming to get the desired outcome is proving more challenging than first imagined. Like paddling a boat with one oar.”
The dog knew nothing of the water and so he yawned. The creature jumped off, disappearing into the station’s woodwork. Such a small, complicated being, that one. He scratched his ear, digging deep with the nails on his rear paw.
The alliance was an unusual pact but well worth the annoyance if the outcome was what they hoped. Events had taken longer than promised, but the original scheme churned toward its conclusion at last. The dog sniffed the air and caught a familiar scent full of char and destruction swirling in the ether one street over. So angry, that one. But he would be angrier still when he could not find the witch. The dog grinned, then sprang from the platform to lope after the train.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Once the locomotive had pulled sufficiently far enough away from the station for her to be certain Jamra hadn’t followed, Elena let herself relax. The train had been full of passengers when she got on. Some carrying shopping bags, some reading newspapers, others already leaning their heads against the windows for a quick nap between destinations. She’d finally ensconced herself inside a compartment at the rear of the train, one occupied by an elderly woman and a businessman who merely grumbled into his newspaper when she slid into the seat across from him. Her ticket stated the train was headed all the way to the coast, so she settled in for the hours-long journey. If her benefactor had other plans, she assumed they’d make their intentions known when they were ready.
And just who had been there with her in the corridor? Who knew she’d been taken by Jamra? She glanced out the window as she thought it over, and there, along the fallow fields and stalks of emerging sunflowers, where blooming apricot trees lined the road, was a dog running to keep pace with the passenger cars. She had no doubt now it was the very same quick-moving animal Jean-Paul had seen lurking around Chateau Renard for three days. And the one she had moments ago observed on the platform in town. So, which side did he fall on, ally or assailant in waiting?