The Conjurer (The Vine Witch #3)(67)
“A curse on you all!” Jamra screamed and dissipated from the physical world into the ether.
Yanis hovered the paper over the fire, letting it catch. “You must follow him.”
As the smoke rose, coiling like a snare, Elena doused her fire and sank into a trancelike state to let her mind walk in the shadow world. She found him there, sensing his invisible energy thrashing about in anger. Somewhere in the physical world a mirror fell from a wall and broke. Ceiling plaster cracked and popped. A door came off its hinges. Elena refocused her mind and chased Jamra’s reckless energy. He was fleeing quickly. Before he could vanish to the farthest reach of her vision, she spoke his name, his true name, the one that would bind him. The smoke from Yanis’s spell floated beside her through the ether, following the projection of her voice until the name perched in the jinni’s ear. The spell-smoke found him, bound him, and held on.
Now Elena grasped the rope. She reeled herself back to consciousness, pulling the jinni with her. He attempted to resist, but the binding had rendered him weaker than a newborn lamb. Returned to the physical world, she opened her eyes. The smoke from Yanis’s spell twisted in the air before her. Jean-Paul held out an opaline glass perfume locket he’d taken from the lobby display. Cupping her hands over the miniature vessel, Elena directed the smoke to flow into the mouth of the locket. When the last wisp disappeared inside, Elena put the cap on and screwed it shut. The glass warmed from the heat of the jinni’s temper trapped inside, so she let it dangle from her fingers by its chain.
The jinni who wished to command chaos in the world now ruled an empty chamber scented with an old woman’s rosewater.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Warmth filled Sidra’s veins, not with the welcome heat of a crackling fire, but with the damp, muggy oppression of a humid day. Like a wet rag that needed wringing, her body was sluggish to respond to her thoughts.
At last her eyes opened, yet something still weighed heavily on her sight. A stone. On her forehead. She palmed the stone—oddly veined like a salamander’s skin—and sat up. Across the room, the witch, the one who made wine, held a tiny bottle on a chain as a trail of smoke poured into it. Where was Jamra? Where was the sorcerer? And the dagger?
Wasps took wing inside her head. She wasn’t seeing straight. Jamra stood only a few feet away, but his clothes had changed and he smelled of oud. Somehow the fairy queen had appeared too. She shimmered beside him, her eyes following the smoke into the bottle. Sidra checked her head for blood or a tender spot. She felt no lasting physical damage or pain—that is, until the girl shrieked in her ear.
“You’re all right! Look, everyone—she’s awake.” Yvette scrambled across the marble to squat beside her. “He’s gone. They got him. Jamra’s been trapped.”
Sidra knew she’d heard the girl correctly, yet she couldn’t reconcile her words with what she saw. Jamra stood clearly before her. His hair was longer and his beard fuller, but it was him. Who else could it be? His head turned to follow the girl’s words. He lunged toward Sidra. Must she die on the floor at the hands of this camel’s ass? But instead of attacking, he knelt and swept the hair back from her face.
“Habibti.”
His face came into focus. His skin-and-bone face like a mortal’s. The one that had met her every morning since they’d married. She used to run her hand through his long hair as the dawn light revealed the glints of red and gold strands in the ebony curls. But that man could not be here. Hariq was dead.
The man took her hand and bowed his head. “There is much I must explain,” he said. “And may I earn your forgiveness in the telling.”
“You’re alive?” She did not know until that moment that elation, confusion, and anger could be intimate bedfellows under one coverlet. “How are you here? Is this sorcery? Did Yanis do this? Has he made a deal with Mother Ghulah and the dead?”
“Sidra, listen to me,” Hariq implored, but she ignored him, her emotions too unsettled to even know how to look at him without becoming dizzy.
She backed away and rose to her feet. The wasps in her head swarmed. She pushed up her sleeves, needing to unleash a storm of magic. She didn’t know what kind or at whom; all she wanted was to cast pain back upon the confusing world she’d awoken to. Unable to hold it in, she shot the stone in her palm across the room as if by gunfire, shattering the terra-cotta planter with the potted palm in it. The tree toppled to the floor.
She marched across the floor to the pile of broken bottles, nudging the mess away with her toe. “Where is Jamra? He must be stopped.”
“We got him,” Yvette said. The girl pointed to the locket in Elena’s hands, the one that she wasn’t sure had been illusion or not.
Elena held the necklace up by the chain as proof. “Hariq gave us his true name. Yanis bound him inside.”
“We both did,” said the sorcerer.
Sidra held out her hand, supporting the perfume locket so it rested against her fingers. Prickling heat snapped against her skin through the glass. “And the dagger?” she asked, meeting the sorcerer’s eyes.
“As far as we know, it’s still safe.”
“Here it is.” Yvette reached in her endless pocket and drew out a perfume bottle with a pair of crystal birds for a stopper.
Elena balked. “You mean you really had it all along? I thought it was a bluff.”