The Conjurer (The Vine Witch #3)(66)
No one answered as the light pulsed and sparked, though the dog padded toward it unafraid. The light continued to spin, and as the center dropped to form a twisting thread of glimmering filament, everyone else took a step back. The whirlwind lightly touched down on the marble floor, kicking up a cloud of silver dust. From it, a woman in an iridescent gown adorned with beetle shells and butterfly scales emerged. On her head sat a crown made from dragonfly wings held together with silver wire and tiny seed pearls.
“Titania!” Yvette cried.
“Nonsense,” she said. “Call me Grand-Mère, child.”
Yvette clawed at Jamra’s arm. “Let me go!”
Jamra tightened his elbow around Yvette’s throat. “Why does the witch queen stand before me? What business have you here?”
The queen of the Fée replied with a smile, then gestured to the dog.
The dog ruffled his fur and twitched his nose. Like a shimmering haze rising above the parched earth on a scalding day, the air blurred where he stood. The effect was momentary. A mirage that disappears after blinking to see more clearly. When the animal came back in focus, he stood as a man. He wore a sleeveless black robe with gold threading that exposed his broad shoulders and a pair of black-and-gold slippers that curled up slightly at the toe. A curved dagger, its hilt encrusted with rubies, decorated his belt. Restored to what Elena assumed was his natural being, his brown eyes telegraphed a warm sincerity, though perhaps weighted with a world of regret.
Except for the fuller face and healthier complexion, the man standing before them bore an uncanny resemblance to Jamra—the same dark, wavy hair, thin beard, flash of white teeth, and intimidating height.
“It cannot be.” Jamra blinked, disbelieving. “You’re dead.”
“Clearly I am not.” The jinni in black did not take his eyes off Jamra as he spoke over his shoulder. “Sorcerer, do you have your paper and chalk?”
“Stop. What are you doing?” Jamra wrapped his arms tighter around Yvette.
Yanis and Elena exchanged a look of disbelief before he replied, “Hariq, but how are you here?”
Hariq?
“Witch, do you have your spellfire?” Hariq asked.
“I said stop!” Jamra grew jittery, taking a step backward and pulling Yvette with him. “Why do you address them in such a manner?”
Elena snapped her fingers and a flame appeared in her palm. “I have my fire.”
Titania matched Jamra’s retreat, closing the distance with him as though she floated on the air. “Release my granddaughter,” she ordered.
Jamra blinked and looked from Hariq to Titania. “No.”
Behind them, Yanis drew his symbols on a square of paper. He nimbly made a mark on each corner, then drew a circle around them but left an open space in the middle.
Hariq had to know his brother’s true name. It was the only way. Elena mouthed to Jean-Paul to find her a bottle. Something small. While he skirted the broken glass in the shop to search for a container, the sorcerer slipped a blade of sweetgrass loose from his braided bundle and tied a knot in it.
Titania continued to stare down Jamra, outwardly unafraid of him or his magic. “Do you really wish to say no to me, little jinni?” She let mockery slip into her voice as her face contorted into a ghoulish mask of gray skin with black eyes and fangs dripping with red saliva. “I have walked in your dreams with this face when your heart yearned to be a purveyor of fear and destroyer of peace.”
“Get away from me, you hag!”
“But really just a little boy afraid of the creatures in the night,” she said, advancing. “Cowering under your covers. Crying out when the nightmares descended.”
“I’ll snap her fairy neck, I swear it!”
Titania let the mask fall away again and clapped her hands together sharply. “Concentrate, Yvette. A fool like this cannot hold a daughter of the Fée lands.”
Yvette, her eyes still wide with shock at what she’d seen her grandmother become, stopped struggling against the jinni. “Merde!” She closed her eyes and shimmered into a gold mist and slipped out of Jamra’s grasp, transmuting on the far side of the room.
The jinni pushed up his sleeves. He blew fire across his fingertips, and a pair of ifrit flew to the broken window as if summoned like a pair of hounds. Their eyes blazed as they stalked the fairy queen.
Hariq flinched, ready to fight, though Titania stood remarkably at ease even as the first of the fire demons prepared to lunge. With barely a finger twitch, the fairy queen flung the iron ring that had been around Yvette’s neck at the window. The band transformed in the air, becoming an iron bar that flew through the window and impaled the ifrit who’d tried to jump. The beast shrieked as the metal eviscerated his fiery core, his insides oozing onto the windowsill like lava, where it cooled and turned to lumps of stone. Outside, the second ifrit screamed in fury but did not cross the threshold, where the fairy queen’s magic still lingered.
Jamra crouched and backed away. Titania advanced, daring him to lash out at her.
Hariq called to the sorcerer. “He is called Shayik. Quickly!”
Yanis scratched the name in the center of the circle on the paper. He placed the knotted blade of grass on top, folded the paper, and nodded to Elena. She relit the flame in her hand and held it forward as he sang the words of a spell in his native tongue.