Jory Strong: Ghostland

Spider black eyes bore into him. “She’s enslaved you.”

He stiffened, glanced away, and saw again the wall tapestries with their carnal depictions of intertwined humans, angels and Djinn. And rather than deny Malahel’s claim, he said, “I am not bound to her in the way you imply.”

The arrival of Iyar en Batrael forestalled whatever Malahel might say. He stepped into the room from one of the many hallways leading off it, his golden eyes gleaming against his dark face.

“Did the female have a chance to learn what was written on the tablet?”

Every muscle in Zurael’s body tensed. In his mind’s eye he saw Aisling kneeling in the dirt after they’d left the occult shop, easily duplicating the Djinn text he’d written in the dirt. He saw her standing next to Javier’s altar, scanning the tablet, effortlessly committing it to memory.

“She saw the tablet but killed the human who possessed it. She freed me from his demon spell and made no effort to stop me from returning home with it in my possession.”

Zurael met their eyes, let them read his determination, his intentions, reminded them with the force of his will that he was a prince of the House of the Serpent. “She isn’t an enemy to the Djinn. I won’t allow her to be harmed.”

They offered him nothing. Neither alliance nor open disagreement, and he didn’t linger.

Aisling was alone. Unprotected. Physically weakened and suffering emotionally over the loss of Aziel.

Zurael sought out The Prince. But when his father wouldn’t grant him an audience, he turned away from his father’s house and hurried toward the sigil-covered gate that led to the world once belonging to the Djinn.

Few could pass through it without The Prince’s permission. Zurael would have preferred to gain it, to warn his father that he would lose a son if he sent an assassin to Aisling.

Miizan en Rumjal, his father’s advisor, stood at the gate. He wore the scorpion of his house on his neck, though in the Djinn’s prison kingdom it wasn’t necessary.

“The Prince sent me,” Miizan said. “I am to remind you that his words are still law here and he hasn’t changed the ones he spoke to you last. Unless summoned, you may leave the Kingdom of the Djinn only once.

“He gave me no further instructions, but I will issue a warning. The House of the Scorpion is aware of your return. We are aware of the threat posed by the female who summoned you. We know she still lives and you wish her to remain alive. None from my house has yet been sent to her. But if you break The Prince’s law and return to her, we will finish what you did not.”

Miizan glanced at the gate, then transported away without saying anything more, leaving the pathway back to Aisling unguarded.

Zurael wanted to rage. He wanted to gather the sand around him in a seething mass and roar through the desert. The raw helplessness and fury filling him equaled what he’d felt when he was trapped and bound by Javier’s spell.

Aisling. He ached for her, feared for her. Hated being away from her.

Zurael turned from the gate. Fresh determination surged through him. He would force his way in to see his father if necessary.

A swirl of air preceded the energy signature that was Irial. The Raven prince took form. His teeth flashed white in a savage smile. Green eyes burned with intensity. “So the game plays out. A prince of Serpents becomes the pawn to be sacrificed for a child of mud. I’d find the situation more amusing if I didn’t suspect a similar fate waited for me.”

AISLING felt changed, different. Whether it was gaining her birthright on her last visit or the culmination of her experiences since being brought to Oakland, she didn’t know. But as the spirit winds swirled around her in greeting, whispered to her, she felt a confidence she’d never experienced before, and knew that as long as Elena hadn’t entered one of the places of power in the spiritlands, then she could easily find her.

But it wasn’t Elena’s name Aisling spoke. It was Aziel’s. She dared what she wouldn’t have before, and the gray nothingness parted to reveal a man.

Confusion crowded in with her first glimpse of him. He was Irial and yet he wasn’t. Instead of a stylized raven tattooed on his cheek, black wings and outstretched claws spread across his chest. And unlike the demon image she’d seen when she summoned Irial, Aziel was naked save for sheer trousers like the ones Zurael appeared in when Javier’s spell forced him to take a form.

Understanding dawned. “You’re Djinn,” she said, feeling awkward, strangely shy now that Aziel was a man.

Aziel smiled and it flooded her with warmth and familiar comfort. He closed the distance between them and took her face in his hands, pressed a kiss to her forehead-touched her in the spiritlands, where few ever did.

His thumbs brushed away tears she didn’t realize were falling. “You’ve always loved me well, Aisling. And because of you there’s hope for others of my kind. A final lesson.”

He stepped back. In the blink of an eye a robed stranger stood where Aziel had been, a black-haired man with sharp, unfamiliar features. She tried to see him as she’d seen the dead circling Felipe and Ilka, expected to see him as a pure spirit, transparent and nearly formless, perhaps bound by silken threads to unseen beings. Instead she saw a knotted mass, two entities tangled together so thoroughly their physical forms fluctuated between robed stranger and Djinn image.

“The Djinn are the children of Earth,” Aziel said. “We existed long before the alien god arrived with his army of angels. He thought to enslave us, to give us over to his children of mud as familiars. I killed the sorcerer who bound me and now our spirits are joined. This is what it means to become ifrit. It is a Djinn’s worst nightmare, what we fear even more than being bound, to become ifrit, soul-tainted, to have our names no longer spoken, to know we will never step foot in the kingdom carved out deep in the spiritlands where the Djinn wait for a chance to reclaim what was once ours.

“In the beginning, as humans mark it, the alien god tried to make an example of one of us. He forced The Prince into the image both Zurael and Irial have shown you, then named him demon. We were the first to be called by that name, but the beings to come after, the ones created by the children of the mud, they are the true demons.”

“And my father?”

Aziel leaned in and pressed another kiss to her forehead. A love that had existed from her earliest memory flowed down the bond they shared, came with his thoughts. Elena waits. I’ll see her to Sinead. Leave this place. And Aisling was given no choice as the spirit winds swept in.

She rose from where she knelt in the small locked office, still cradling what had been Aziel but no longer was. The sight of the ferret brought a fresh wave of sadness, not for his death this time, but for his loss from her life.

A final lesson.

He wouldn’t come to her again.

Aisling swallowed hard. She wondered if Zurael would return-or if once he was among his own kind, free from the horror of being bound by Javier, he would decide against coming back.

Child of mud. He’d called her that more than once. He’d made no secret of what he thought about humans.

Not all humans, a small internal voice whispered in her mind.

She felt his absence acutely. Had expected him to be back by now.

Aisling unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway. Movement had her turning. Her breath caught in fear when she saw Elena’s driver come out of the room at the end of the hall. He was crossing himself, mumbling to himself, his fingers tight around a short club.

His eyes widened when he saw her. He stopped and took a step backward then quickly recovered. “I knew Elena was bad news the first time I drove her. You look like you’ve lived through a nightmare, but that’s not surprising. The red zone is the devil’s playground.”