The Conjurer (The Vine Witch #3)(28)

“Figured,” Yvette said and crushed the cigarette under the sole of her shoe. “Where to now?”

For a moment Sidra was stumped. Indecision and fretting seemed to have seeped into her psyche like smoke through a sieve. What was happening to her? She shook her head even as a new panic began to rise. If her apartment wasn’t safe, what if the dagger wasn’t safe either? Everything would have been for nothing if the relic was discovered. But where to fly with so many ill omens coalescing at once?

“The old one,” she said as the thought flitted through her mind like a bird dipping its wings against the wind. Yes, that would settle her. His logic always did that for her. “But first, enough of these games. We need to pay another visit to Yanis the Dishonest.”

“To get your talisman back?”

“To get everything back.”

Yvette brightened at the thought of another excursion to the town’s center. She slipped a borrowed shawl around her shoulders, then stuffed her cigarettes and new perfume in her bottomless pockets. “Lead on,” she said, and they shut the door to the apartment.

When the two arrived at the market, the sorcerer wasn’t at his stall. Another witch, gray-haired and knock-kneed, stood behind the counter grinding herbs with a mortar and pestle.

“Where’s the hyena who owns this stall?”

The witch sprinkled a generous portion of dried marjoram and thyme into the mortar. He looked up at Sidra and gave a shrug. “Stall was abandoned, near as I could tell. Seemed a shame to let such a good location go to waste on a busy market day.”

Did he take her for a fool? Sidra set fire to the witch’s herbs with a hard glint from her eye, sending them up in a cloud of smoke that singed his beard.

The man fiddled his fingers against his whiskers, snuffing out the fire before it reached his chin. “There’s no cause for that.” He double-checked his eyebrows for damage. “He warned someone was looking for him. Didn’t say you were a jinni.”

“Tell me where to find Yanis or see your day’s profits go up in flame.” The twigs of lavender atop the stall began to smoke.

“All right, all right,” the witch said, patting down the stems. “He lives that way. A few doors from the top.” He pointed toward the crooked lane that wound up the hillside. Sidra followed the trail with her eyes, remembering the times she’d seen Yanis walk that way with his wooden leg thumping the sidewalk while she lurked in the shadows of the adjacent loggia to watch the people come and go.

“Come,” she said to Yvette. “And do not waste a smile on that one.”

They headed in the direction the witch pointed, and at the end of the winding pathway, where the buildings closed in overhead and stubborn shrubbery grew in the loose mortar between stones, Sidra caught the whiff of fear. Trembling, sweating, hormone-rich fear. Behind a door painted blue.

“He’s in there.”

“What are you going to do to him?” Yvette asked.

Murder generally came to mind when dealing with Yanis, but she always grappled with the balance of deeds in this world against the consequences met in the next. “Convince him to tell me the truth,” Sidra said and grinned at all the ways she knew how to get someone to talk just short of death.

She tapped lightly and pressed her ear to the door. The sound of a rat scurrying inside its cage came from the other side. She tried the doorknob. Locked, naturally. Perhaps even secured with a dead bolt. Sidra would have blown the door down with the heat of a thousand fires, but a woman and child approached from the top of the lane, eyeing her and the fair one with suspicion.

“Allow me,” Yvette said and nudged the jinni aside once the woman and child passed. She uttered her burglar’s charm, and the locks ticked open one at a time. “You don’t always have to burn the place down, you know.”

Sidra stood in rare, brief awe before pushing the door open.

Inside, Yanis didn’t even have the decency to look abashed when she confronted him. Instead he hobbled to a table and turned it over as if he could hide behind the solid oak top and be safe.

“It wasn’t my idea,” he pleaded.

“Which part?”

The sorcerer blinked. “The talisman. I knew you took mine yesterday at the market. Figured you ought to have it again after what happened. But then the lady told me I had to get it back. Didn’t give me a choice.”

“What lady? Who was she?”

“I don’t know. I swear it. She was wearing a hood so I couldn’t see her face. But she was, I don’t know, forceful.”

“Jinn like me?”

The rat wrung his hands together and nodded. “Could be. She magicked us to the apartment. One minute we were talking under the loggia at the market, the next I was standing among your things. She whispered that the talisman was buried in the rice, and then as soon as I dug it out, she was gone. So I ran.” He reached in his pocket. “Here, have it back. It’s yours. Keep the damn thing.”

Sidra took the medallion from him and held it up to the light coming through the window. But it wasn’t her talisman. She threw the cheap brass counterfeit at the man. “Do you toy with me?”

“What? No.” He scrambled on the floor to retrieve the medallion, seemingly confused at what he found instead. “But I had your talisman in my pocket.”