Exquisite Captive Read online

  Dedication

  For my grandma Rita Weeks,

  who makes wishes come true

  Contents

  Dedication

  Map

  The Arjinnan Castes

  The Jinn Gods and Goddesses

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Beijing, China

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  St. Petersburg, Russia

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Pushkar, India

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Outside Siem Reap, Cambodia

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Barcelona, Spain

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Venice Beach, California

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Special Thanks to the Blogger Caravan

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  The Arjinnan Castes

  THE GHAN AISOURI: Once the highest caste and beloved of the gods. All but annihilated, the members of this female race have violet eyes and smoke. They are the only jinn who can access the power of all four elements: air, earth, water, and fire.

  THE SHAITAN: The Shaitan gain power from air and have golden eyes and smoke. They are scholars, mages, artists, and the overlords who once controlled the provinces.

  THE DJAN: The largest caste and the peasant serfs of Arjinna’s valleys. They have emerald eyes and smoke, and their power comes from earth—the sacred soil of Arjinnan land. They are manual laborers, denied education or advancement.

  THE MARID: Caretakers of the Arjinnan Sea and fishing folk, these serfs draw their power from water. Their eyes and smoke are blue. They are the peasants of the coast, as uneducated as the Djan and subjected to equally brutal labor.

  THE IFRIT: Long despised throughout the realm, the Ifrit have crimson eyes and smoke. Their power comes from fire, and they use its energy for dark magic. They are soldiers and sorcerers.

  The Jinn Gods and Goddesses*

  GRATHALI: Goddess of air, worshipped by the Shaitan

  TIRGAN: God of earth, worshipped by the Djan

  LATHOR: Goddess of water, worshipped by the Marid

  RAVNIR: God of fire, worshipped by the Ifrit

  Prologue

  He’d buried her alive.

  The surrounding darkness was a black, writhing worm—hungry. It twisted around her body, tightening its grip. What little air remained reeked of iron; it would be a slow death. She could already feel the poisonous metal bleeding into her skin, infecting her blood. Nalia inhaled anyway: a trickle slipped past her parched lips, then dripped down her throat and slowly seeped into her crushed lungs. Not enough.

  The bottle was a vault.

  She’d been drifting in and out of sleep, floating on a foggy sea that seemed to have no beginning, no end. Time here was an elastic thing, bending and shifting at will.

  For so long now, she’d been living in prisons within prisons within prisons, like a nesting doll. Earth; Malek’s compound; the bottle. If he let her out, she’d still be a slave. Just one with a little more room to breathe. She’d never forgive Malek for the ripping, tearing, choking sensation of being stuffed into a bottle the size of her pinkie. It had been designed to punish, nothing more.

  Officially, she was in the bottle because she’d run away again. Unofficially, she’d kicked her master’s ass. How many times had she tried to escape? He always knew when she left, as if some sixth sense had nudged him, then whispered her name in his ear. Her sentences in the bottle followed a predictable pattern: Nalia ran away. Her master summoned her back. She spit in his face. Called forth the wind to wreak havoc in his perfectly organized study or willed a storm to rain upon his priceless treasures. He put her in the bottle. After a time—long or short, depending on his mood or what he needed from her—he let her out. The pattern would resume again as her master tried to tame the wildness within her.

  This time was different. This time, Nalia had wanted him to hurt too.

  She’d expected Malek’s usual raving—he hated when his jinni wasn’t right where he wanted her to be—but what he did instead was far worse. He’d looked at her, standing there in the doorway of his study, then returned to his reading, waving her away as though Nalia were nothing more than a dog. Before she knew what her hands were doing, Nalia had thrown Malek through a wall. The look on his face. The way the plaster had crumbled all around him, like powdery snow. Of course, her revenge had had its price: whatever pain she inflicted on her master ricocheted back to her. Punch her master, she punched herself. Her defiance had been worth the sudden pain jolting up her spine and the two ribs that cracked as soon as her master hit the wall. It was almost worth the punishment of this endless suffocation. Almost.

  “Hell, Nalia, you’re seventeen,” Malek had said, just before he put her in the bottle. “When I was your age, I was running a multinational corporation, not pulling childish disappearing acts.”

  He had been sitting at his desk, near the window that overlooked the rose garden, sipping his absinthe with that faraway look in his eye—like he was examining the fabric of the universe, peeking through holes the gods had forgotten to sew up. Malek didn’t appear much older than she was, yet he’d been living far longer. Whether it was due to a wish from another jinni or a human mage’s skillful ministrations, Nalia didn’t know—Malek’s enduring youth was just another one of his secrets.

  “This running around the planet as soon as I have my back turned, and your little violent outbursts . . .” His voice had trailed off. Then, “I can’t allow it to continue.”

  Nalia shouldn’t have tried to run. How silly, to think she could go where Malek wouldn’t find her. She was his property, bought and paid for long ago, just another jinni on the dark caravan, the slave trade that had claimed thousands of jinn before her. Ghan Aisouri, Shaitan, Ifrit, Djan, Marid: the caravan wasn’t picky—it would take jinn from any of the five castes. Nalia’s last hours as a free jinni were filled with flames and death, the palace overrun with Ifrit vermin and their poisonous dark magic. Civil war. A coup. Revolution. The whole realm in shambles, its powerful Ghan Aisouri protectors slain in one night of carnage. Locked out of that world, Nalia could do nothing but remember. And hope.

  When she tried to distract herself from the airless void of the bottle by imagining Arjinna, her homeland, Nalia’s good memories were like photographs that had been handled by too many dirty hands. Frayed, faded, falling apart. Soon, they would be gone. And the other memories, the ones that followed her around like lonely ghosts—they were the only things worse than this bottle.

  She could feel it coming, the panic. Creeping up on her, a nearby echo. She’d tried so hard to tame it, but the memory of Malek’s voice, his presence, fed her terror. Her heart clenched and she struggled to fill her lungs.

  “Please,” she whispered. To Malek. To her dead mother. To the gods of this wasted planet. “Please.”

  The bottle was a tiny, bejeweled thing attached to a thick gold chain. Indestructible and protected by magic. Malek wore it around his neck at al
l times, a constant reminder that she was his. If Nalia listened closely, she could hear the slow, steady rhythm of his heart: buh bump buh bump buh bump. She’d give anything to reach through the walls and tear it out with her bare hands. Feel it beating against her palm.

  Suddenly, the walls began to contract, as though she were in the belly of a tiny, panting beast. In. Out. In. Out. She knew what was coming next—hope and relief washed through her just before the nausea set in, a vertigo of epic proportions.

  The bottle began to spin like a whirling dervish, faster and faster, and her body slammed against the bottle’s side. Nalia screamed as the now scorching iron walls of the bottle burned her skin. She threw her arms up to protect her face. A tiny pinprick of light appeared above her and then it was just gravity and smoke and heat until she shot through the opening in a cloud of golden incense, landing hard on the floor of Malek’s study.

  She crouched on the ground, shuddering as a tidal wave of chiaan—magic—washed over her, so much of it that she had to clamp her hands over her mouth to keep from vomiting all over Malek’s Persian rug. She was a dam holding back an ocean of unused energy that would burst any second. Nalia flung her hands toward the fireplace, desperate to release the magic without burning down the mansion. The chiaan flowed past her fingertips, bright yellow flames that seared the air.

  She laid her head on the floor, weary and feverish.

  Malek crouched in front of Nalia, his beautifully cruel face inches from her own. Though human, he had the ageless glamour of a young demigod.

  “You see now, don’t you?” he whispered, his voice tender, but his onyx eyes hard. “We need to be together, you and I. This fighting—it only brings us sadness, no?”

  He lifted her chin. His fingers smelled of clove cigarettes, and his breath carried the faint scent of the absinthe’s anise.

  “Nalia?”

  He tightened his grip, his thumbs digging painfully into her jaw. She nodded her head, numb. Finished. There was only one response that would keep her out of the bottle now.

  “Yes, Master.”

  1

  ONE YEAR LATER

  Present Day

  GRANTING WISHES IS A BITCH.

  Nalia did her best not to glare at the client as he outlined his absurd request.

  What is with these humans? They find out they’ve got a jinni to do their bidding and they suddenly think it’s Aladdin, like I could snap my fingers and shazam!—instant gratification.

  It didn’t work that way. Granting was a science, an art of exactitude. Earth was a glass sphere balancing on the point of a needle, and one errant wish could shatter it against the cold hardness of the universe. And though Nalia was one of the most gifted among her race, some things were impossible. Case in point: here was this corrupt stockbroker, telling her he wanted to be the president of the United States.

  “Look,” Nalia said. “I don’t have that kind of power. I’d have to brainwash the entire world, which is . . . beyond difficult. My recommendation is to wish for stock—loads of it. Then you’ll be rich, and money is power—”

  “I am rich,” the client said.

  He leaned close, his eyes peeling off her clothing. He reached out a hand and trailed it down the length of her arm. Nalia stiffened. Disgusting wishmaker. They’re all the same.

  Every atom in her body screamed to attack. Instead, she held her breath, as if the client were a bad smell that would soon go away.

  He’s not worth it, she thought. This touch, this too-close cloying scent of man, was nothing compared to Malek’s wrath. She’d endure it, if only to avoid the bottle.

  “I want something money can’t buy,” he murmured.

  He wasn’t the first who thought Nalia did more than grant wishes.

  The client drew closer, his body nearly pressed up against hers—this was what came of meeting in hotel rooms. But they were some of the only places Nalia could guarantee there wouldn’t be any witnesses. She could imagine what the human newspapers would say if someone caught her granting on Hollywood Boulevard.

  Privacy had its benefits; it would only take the tiniest movement of her fingers to have a noose around his neck. If it came to that.

  Nalia took a step back. “I don’t know what Malek told you, but this is the deal: one wish. Exclusions include, but are not limited to: love wishes, death wishes—yours or someone else’s—world wars, changing the past, wishing for another jinni, and asking for more wishes.”

  It had been clever of Malek to think of the granting loophole, a sneaky human way of garnering well above three wishes. There was nothing in the rule books that said a jinni couldn’t grant wishes on behalf of her master, as though he were the jinni and Nalia was simply the conduit through which the magic flowed. Malek’s first wish: that she grant wishes to his clients, associates, friends, mistresses—as many as he wanted, to as many people as he chose. She’d had no choice but to obey his request.

  The client tilted his head to the side, studying Nalia as if she were a piece of avant-garde art that he didn’t quite understand. She guessed he’d been expecting a temptress in harem pants and a face veil that floated out of a lamp and said things like your wish is my command. Most of the wishmakers did.

  “You have quite a lot of limitations,” he finally said.

  He looked expensive, like he summered in Monte Carlo. Young, rich, and bored, these sons of new money were Malek’s favorite type of prey. He never told them the fine print ahead of time; no, he left those conversations to Nalia.

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” she said.

  Nalia leaned against the wall, arms crossed. She didn’t know much about him—Malek rarely discussed the details of these cloak-and-dagger transactions—but the client had been in a position to give her master something valuable, something a power-hungry man like Malek needed. Sometimes it was money. Information. People. For Malek, everything—everyone—had a price.

  Including Nalia.

  She longed for the day when Malek would ask her to grant a wish for a homeless woman, a sick child. But the only people who earned his wishes were criminals—traitors, terrorists, liars, thieves. They all had blood on their hands, and this one, she could tell, was no exception.

  The client crossed the plush carpet and poured himself a drink from the well-stocked bar. Beside it, a wall of windows framed the dusky Hollywood Hills, where mansions full of secrets hid behind bougainvillea and security cameras. Sunset Boulevard lay below the suite, a serpentine river of red and white headlights that flowed into the dark heart of Hollywood. The whole city was a prison, built on shattered dreams and lost souls.

  He contemplated the view for a long moment, then swirled the amber liquid in his glass, knocking it back in one go.

  “How old are you?” he asked, turning to her.

  “Old enough to be unimpressed with your car, your money, or that ridiculous watch on your wrist,” she said, with a look at the solid gold monstrosity.

  His answering grin was the kind a schoolboy might give when he’s thoroughly enjoyed his punishment. “Malek told me you were . . . what was the word he used? Feisty. He said not to take it personally.”

  “No,” she said. “You should definitely take it personally.”

  The client shook his head. “Aren’t you a piece of work? Bet Malek has all kinds of fun with his jinni.”

  Nalia curled her fingers against her palm, willing the magic to stay put. Not worth it, she chanted. Not worth it. Not worth it. Not worth it.

  But his words had brushed up against the truth, a painful reminder of this newest horror in her life. Malek, two weeks ago, saying good-bye to her before his business trip: his lips close to her ear, the heat of him. We’re meant to be together, you and I. You’ll see that soon enough, Nalia.

  The client’s soft laughter brought her back to the hotel room and its cold, sharp lines, all black and white and so humanly modern. He smiled to himself, as if at a private joke, while he poured another drink. He sipped it, t
hen threw himself into a black leather chair and crossed his legs, the relaxed posture belying the excitement that flitted around the edges of his voice.

  “You said no death wishes. What about pain wishes? A brink-of-death sort of thing,” he asked.

  Nalia looked out the window. Instead of Hollywood’s bright lights, she saw the palace dungeons of Arjinna, her homeland. Her mother’s command she’d been too cowardly to refuse. The boy who had died. His blood on her hands. She could never take it back, that first lesson in the abuse of power.

  She gave the client a frozen look. “No.”

  Other than the soft whir of the air conditioner and the muffled car horns below, the room was swathed in silence.

  “Well, doesn’t hurt to try.” He steepled his fingers and gazed at the ceiling. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll take a magical power. Invisibility. Think you can rustle that up?”

  So casual. He spoke as though her stolen childhood and the years of training to grant, to manifest, to coax wishes out of the universe’s tightly closed fist was the equivalent of flipping a burger. All that pain, sacrifice, and loss—gods, so much loss—it all came down to one man-boy’s whim.

  Nalia pulled a scroll from her back pocket and tapped it once with her finger so that words suddenly spilled across it. Words that would make the client think he was getting what he asked for. Her insides screamed, the bottle! the bottle!, and for a moment Nalia faltered as she imagined the look on Malek’s face when he found out what she’d done. She’d been so good. After those first two rebellious years with Malek, she’d spent the past year obeying his every command until the bottle was only a throbbing memory in her gut.

  But the bottle was preferable to being trapped in his bed. His anger over this transgression would buy her more time.

  She handed Malek’s client the contract. “Sign on the dotted line.”

  “Got a pen?”

  She smiled and held up the jade dagger she kept inside her boot. “We use a different kind of ink.”

  “Kinky.”