The Conjurer (The Vine Witch #3)(63)
“Is this your magic, Camille?” Elena whispered.
The perfume witch shook her head.
“Yanis?”
The sorcerer swallowed. “No, and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever encountered.”
“Is it friendly?” Jean-Paul asked as he scanned the room for a weapon just in case. He grabbed an umbrella from the stand by the door, where a janitor snored from the sleeping spell, and gripped it, ready to strike.
Elena held her hand out to test the air with her shadow vision. She sensed no danger from the odd cloud of light, no spell magic, though it hovered ominously and deliberately above them. As she pondered what to make of it, a mumbled angry squeak escaped from the shop.
The lock of blonde hair. Yvette. It had to be. She was in there too. He had them both.
They were past the point of restraint. Jinn magic or not, they couldn’t abandon Sidra and Yvette to that lunatic. The cloud seemed to concur as it whispered in her mind: Ready your sorcery.
Had Yanis heard the message too? He urgently searched his belongings for his chalk and talismans while Elena felt for the comfort of her grimoire in her satchel and whispered a protection spell.
And then the world inside the parfumerie exploded.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Jamra’s temper no longer intimidated. He could make the wind howl. He could bury her under a mountain of sand. Sidra was done with his tantrums. She was done with their feud. Let the families fight among themselves until Jahannam swallowed them in the afterlife. A curse on them all. And a curse on Hariq for dying and leaving her alone to face this beetle-hearted brother of his alone.
No, she took that back. Hariq had always tried to do the right thing. He had lived a good life and made her a part of his world. They may have had only a few brief centuries together, but it was enough to prove she had loved deeply at least once. Her life had been fully and completely intermingled with another’s. And soon they would reunite. With her death the dagger would fall forever from her enemy’s grasp and into the unwitting hands of its meek savior.
Jamra smashed another perfume bottle on the floor in search of the dagger. He would not be put off again by false promises. It was time to fight or flee, but first she had to free the girl and balance the scales for entry into the next life. She stepped forward to offer her neck for Yvette’s when the air thrummed with the presence of another. Jamra sensed it too.
“Who have you called?” he demanded, his eyes searching the dark corners of the shop.
Sidra shook her head, as ignorant of the origin of the presence as he was, when the outline of a silver cloud shone on the ceiling. The sight filled her eyes with astonishment. “It is not jinn.”
Jamra tracked the light as it swirled across the ceiling. “This foul magic is your doing.” He lurched threateningly toward Sidra, his face within a blade’s width of hers. “Because you keep company with witches and sorcerers.”
“And who do you keep company with?” she asked. “Ifrit? Demons? What bond have you secured with blood and flame to carry out your fantasy of revenge against innocent people?”
“Innocent?”
She’d hit a nerve. Jamra’s jaw tightened, grinding his verdigris teeth.
“Our people were humiliated. Degraded. We, the superior beings, were forced to do manual labor for a narcissist mortal king whose soft ass no longer fit on his throne from all his years of indulgence at our expense.” He pleaded his case before the ifrit restraining Yvette as if he were judge and jury, while bits of spittle clung to his lip from the emphatic tenor of his words. “But,” he warned, “his mortal descendants will feel the whip of retribution for attempting to stand too tall on their clay feet.”
“And now you wish to wield one of the seven sigils so you can murder unwitting mortals? We’re thousands of years removed from this injustice you feel so keenly!” she said, shaking her head, her resolve building. “Your charred heart knows nothing but destruction. Without the dagger you’re nothing. Even with the sigil in your hand, you’d still be no greater than a worm in a camel’s intestine.”
An explosion fueled by petty anger burst on Sidra’s right side. Shelves of perfume shattered. The windows burst. The shop door flew off its hinges. Shards of glass shot across the room, barely missing Yvette.
Once the jinni’s outburst had been spent, Sidra lowered her scarf from her face. The wall between the shop and the lobby to the factory had crumbled. She blinked at the four dusty and shocked faces that met her gaze on the other side. She had hoped that part of her prognostication had been wrong, but curse the fools, they had come not only when the walls began to buckle but Jamra’s mind too.
“Curse this place. Free me of this human stench!” Jamra covered his nose with his sleeve and walked through the cloud of scent created from the explosion. He entered the lobby, where he spied Elena, Yanis the Mostly Honest, and the witch’s husband, who seemed to have recovered from his desert-walker spell. They crouched on the floor with their arms protecting their heads after the wall had crumbled. Camille was there, too, huddled under a shower of dust and broken glass. Jamra rounded on them, grinning like a hyena.
“Jamra, wait.” Sidra put herself between him and the others. “Let us look for the dagger. In the rubble. You have no quarrel with them. Or with the girl.” She stabilized the wall with a flick of her wrist while he looked away, hoping the plaster would hold and the roof would stay propped over their heads. “You only make the task of finding the relic more difficult when you destroy the things around it. This way,” she said. “What you seek is here.”