The Conjurer (The Vine Witch #3)(34)

“There is a way,” she said. “Both of you take a medallion. You must grip it in your hand and ask me for help. Invoke my name. Only then can I try to help him.”

“Wait,” Yvette said, accepting one of the charms. “Won’t that alert Jamra to where you are?”

Elena looked up from the bronze talisman in her hand. “Is that true?”

The elements of Elena’s shop illusion disintegrated as the spell ran its course. The letters on the glass scattered with the breeze, and the sign of the two moons above the door faded into shadow. Change was coming for them all.

“It is true.” Sidra gathered her silk around her. “But it’s what the fire has shown us. Events cannot be altered. They must proceed. This is the fate we’ve been shown.”

“But can you fight him by yourself?”

“I don’t think I’m meant to,” Sidra said, daring to meet each woman’s eye.

“Right. We’re in this together,” Yvette affirmed. “Always have been, it seems.”

“But I can’t. You have to understand. I must return home to tend to Jean-Paul.”

“And how will you get there?”

“The train . . .” Elena searched her satchel. “Though I may have to borrow the fare.”

“This is not the city. The train has already left. The next one won’t depart until tomorrow.”

The jinni had briefly wondered what her odds of defeating Jamra would be without the vine witch to complete the bond between the three of them. But again, the fire didn’t lie. The witch wouldn’t be going anywhere despite her proclamations. They were meant to stand as one. Though nothing was without cost.

“Give me a chance to free your man’s mind of Jamra’s influence. We’ll use your shadow vision. It is the only way. Afterward you’ll see if he is restored. Ease your mind of this worry.”

“But the talisman. You’ll draw Jamra here like a beacon. He and his followers will find you.”

“It’s as it should be.”

Someone jiggled the door handle. All three startled and backed away, but it was only a curious tourist thinking the store might be open. Sidra waved her hand to obscure them from view behind a veil of darkness.

“Jamra will find me. The fire has spoken. But my life is not what he’s truly coming for, though he’ll try to claim it all the same.” Sidra lowered her voice as she approached the cusp of telling the entire truth for the first time since Hariq had died. “No, what that blackhearted one is after is the dagger of Zimbarra and the powerful sigil embedded in its handle.”

Yvette stubbed out her cigarette in the ash left in the scales. “Jiminy, that doesn’t sound good.”

“Zimbarra? But . . . but that isn’t real,” Elena said.

“I believe you once said the same about my kind.” Sidra attempted a smile, despite her cursed nerves.

“What’s Zimbarra?” Yvette glowed eerily, as if sensing something supernatural in the wake of speaking the word out loud.

“Not what—where.” Elena opened her satchel and removed her spell book to show the girl. She laid it on the counter and thumbed through the pages until she hit on an old love spell she claimed her grandmother had passed on to her when she was a teen. “Zimbarra,” she said to Yvette, “is a mythical floating island.”

“Not mythical,” Sidra corrected.

Yvette eagerly leaned over Elena’s shoulder to get a better look at the page for herself. “Here,” Elena said, her finger trailing under the words as she read. “A spell for conjuring commitment from a boy who ignores you one day and can’t stop staring at you the next. The directions for the incantation say to work the word ‘Zimbarra’ into the spell because it refers to the dynamic nature of the mythical island, said to float from one location to another, the way a young man’s attentions may at times fluctuate.”

“This is what they teach you?” Sidra’s bracelets rattled as she turned the book around to see for herself. She read half a page, which proved more than enough. “Just because someone wrote something down in a book doesn’t make a lie a truth, though it may reveal the depth of the author’s ignorance.”

The book snapped itself shut and turned its spine on the jinni. Elena opened her mouth to argue, then admitted her mentor had been wrong about a few things in the past.

The book shuddered and locked itself.

“What makes you so certain this Zimbarra place is real?” Yvette asked.

“Because I’ve seen it,” the jinni said. She conjured a sitting area in the back of the shop for the women to be comfortable. She provided coffee, dates, and flatbread. A small oasis created in the midst of looming danger.

“Your book was not wrong about the nature of the island,” she said as she sank onto a pouf. “It is a fickle place, moving from one coordinate to the next. Many a pilot in their dhow has sailed to his death looking for its shores over the centuries. The silhouette of the island rises, barely visible on the sea’s horizon, and then disappears the nearer one gets. Nothing more than a mirage for most.”

“But not you?”

Sidra shook her head.

“How’d you find the place if it’s always moving around like that?” Yvette asked.