Exquisite Captive Read online

  “Your finger, please.”

  He held out his hand. “I’m guessing I can’t have my lawyer look this over.”

  “You guessed right.”

  She whispered over the dagger until it was only a dagger, taking the enchantment off so that this one little scrape wouldn’t paralyze him. Then she brought the blade to his skin. She cut him deeper than she needed to and his sharp intake of breath filled her with more satisfaction than it should have. She’d been with Malek too long.

  Nalia pressed his finger against the paper, then rolled it up. As soon as she let go of the contract, it disappeared.

  The client’s eyes widened, his casual cool replaced with wonder. “What’d you do with it?”

  “I put it away.” She wasn’t about to give him a lesson in rudimentary magic. “Ready?”

  He leaned back in his chair, slipping his nonchalance on like an old overcoat. “Are you?”

  She held out her hand. “Payment.”

  His fingers searched an inside pocket of his suit coat while keeping his eyes on her the whole time, as though she were some kind of monkey that would suddenly begin performing magic tricks once he looked away. He tossed a thumb drive in her direction and she plucked it out of the air, then slid it into the front pocket of her jeans. Anything could be on it—nuclear codes, scandalous photographs, an eighth Harry Potter book. Whatever was on that thumb drive now belonged to Malek: just one more rung in his ladder to the sky. At this point, what power didn’t he have? He’d be ruling the planet in no time. Practically did already.

  “Now don’t move,” she said.

  “You’d be a great dominatrix, you know that?”

  He was making it far too easy to ruin his life.

  Nalia ignored him and closed her eyes, focusing on the magic within her. She wouldn’t have to wait long. The chiaan was close, as if it were stored in some small compartment wedged between her ribs. It stirred, a creature awakening from a deep sleep, stretching and yawning. Nalia’s blood warmed as the chiaan flowed through her veins, tumbled over joints, and clawed its way into her lungs, her heart. Her fingers tingled, every inch of skin humming with energy and intention as she drew on the strongest elements in the room—air, and the fire from the candles she’d lit earlier. She focused her mind on erasing the client’s features until nothing was left of him. The calculating eyes: gone. The smirk: a memory. The hands: clear as water. She waited until she could stand it no longer, waited until she thought her bones might break under the impatient pressure of the wild, thrashing thing inside her. Then she lifted her hands, palms facing the client.

  The magic shot out of her, leaving Nalia cold and dizzy. When she opened her eyes, the room was empty.

  “Holy shit,” she heard a moment later, near the corner of the room where a floor-length mirror stood.

  Nalia started for the door. Like a criminal, she ached to sprint from the scene of her crime, but she moved calmly forward. He was just a wishmaker—the client didn’t deserve her fear.

  “Wait.” She felt a hand close around her arm, but she shook it off.

  “Do. Not. Touch me.”

  “How do I change back?” he asked. She couldn’t see it, but Nalia knew the client’s cool, lecherous facade was cracking into a thousand pieces.

  She threw open the door. “You don’t.” The corners of Nalia’s lips turned up, ever so slightly. Once granted, a wish could not be unmade. “Be careful what you wish for.”

  She felt the darkness of his energy as it pushed against her own. She had no idea where he was, but she heard his breath go ragged. Close. Too close.

  “Listen, you little bitch—”

  She was there, and then she was not. An image of the alley behind the hotel flashed through her mind, then the familiar smoke surrounded her, enveloping Nalia in its honey-scented cloud. Seconds later, she was in the alley, her breath coming out in short, choking gasps. In Arjinna, evanescing had been like snapping her fingers. On Earth, it was like pushing a boulder up a mountain. So much in this land was backward and upside down. The iron all over the planet didn’t help, either. It sapped her power so that simple acts took more chiaan than they should.

  Nalia hunched her shoulders against the cool night air as she made her way toward the parking lot beneath the hotel. Tourists and young human girls with fake brown skin and yellow hair crowded Sunset’s sidewalks, pushing past her as they talked on their cell phones and laughed with their friends. Men walked up to them with postcards advertising new clubs or bars, and everywhere there was music and bright lights. Electronic billboards advertised new films, and neon signs flashed against the blackened sky. A man held a hand-painted sign that said Jesus loved her, and a woman with dirty brown hair and overlarge clothes sat on the corner, begging for change. A little boy stood with his mother, his mouth open as he gazed at the sights around him. For a moment Nalia stared—the child wasn’t her brother, she knew that, but he looked so much like Bashil that the constant ache for him that lived deep in her bones became a sharp pain that radiated through her. His eyes slid to hers and Nalia looked away, her vision blurring.

  She reached the famous upside-down sign near the hotel’s entrance and gave her ticket to the parking attendant, nervously fingering the thumb drive as she waited for the valet to bring her car around. At least Malek would have whatever he’d sent her here for. She shivered, imagining the look on his face when he found out what she’d done. Destroying this client’s life had been the highlight of her three years as Malek’s slave—she’d almost forgotten what it felt like to have power, to have a whole nation bend its knees when they saw you. But as the shadows of the night closed around her, all Nalia could think of was the impenetrable darkness of the bottle.

  BEIJING, CHINA

  Present Day

  THE HUTONG IS EMPTY. NARROW STREETS SNAKE PAST rusted rickshaws abandoned beside buildings with broken windows and peeling paint. The ancient houses lean against one another like fallen dominoes. Most of the residents are home, their bicycles parked alongside crumbling brick walls or locked up beneath dusty red flags that hang from poles over the potholed streets. Cooking sounds and animated conversation spill out of closed double doors. The scent of frying meat and hot peppers fills the air. There is no evidence of the small card tables where the neighborhood’s grandmothers play mah-jongg during the afternoon, and the flea-market stalls sit empty of their wares. Here and there a bright fluorescent light hangs above a doorway next to a red silk lantern, beaming into the ghostly streets, but otherwise a thick darkness shrouds the neighborhood. The only movement outside the shuttered homes is the slink of thin dogs poking their noses in the trash.

  A puff of blue smoke fills a side street, and the Marid jinni within its aqua plumes looks over her shoulder, then slips through the faded red doors of an abandoned siheyuan—one of the hutong’s courtyard residences. She darts into the shadows just inside the doors, hugging its brick wall and hardly daring to breathe. She twists her jade shackles around and around her wrists, a nervous habit she can’t help. Above the courtyard, Beijing’s bright lights block out the stars and its skyscrapers stretch beyond the soot-stained sky, their tops lost in the clouds of pollution. She stares at the swath of sky above her, waiting.

  The Ifrit jinni pursuing her evanesces just outside the square of pale moonlight that shines into the center of the courtyard. Red smoke billows out around his massive body, filling the air with the scent of sulfur and a stench that reminds the Marid of Beijing’s overflowing trash bins. As the smoke clears, the Ifrit scans each darkened corner with eyes that blaze scarlet. When he spots the jinni cowering against the wall, he smiles.

  “Hello, little mouse,” he says. “The cat has been looking for you.”

  The Ifrit has just arrived from Arjinna, and he’s hungry from the journey. His stomach rumbles.

  “Please,” the jinni whispers. “I don’t know who you are or what you want, but I’m nobody. Just a slave on the dark caravan, that’s all.”

 
; “Come into the light, little mouse,” the Ifrit coaxes.

  The Marid jinni presses against the wall. She doesn’t understand why this Ifrit is stalking her. What has she done?

  “Does the little mouse want to run to another hole?” The Ifrit takes a step toward her. “She knows the cat will catch her, yes? The mouse is tired, so tired, from running. Running from the palace, running from me.”

  “The palace? I’m only a Marid—I’ve never been to the palace. Honest. I’ve been on Earth for six hundred summers.”

  The Ifrit crooks his finger. “If the little mouse does not let me see her face, she will make the cat angry. He will have to use his claws.”

  The jinni whimpers as she steps into the moonlight, silently crying out to the gods. Her body trembles as a gust of wind swoops through the courtyard. The rancid smell of the Ifrit gets stronger the closer she is to him, like rotting food or, no, more like . . . rotting flesh. And suddenly she knows this is no ordinary Ifrit, and the word, the horrible word for what he is, fills her with mindless terror.

  Ghoul.

  She gasps and tries to run, but the Ifrit reaches out and pulls her to him with one of his clawed hands. He yanks her hair back and she screams, the sound leaving her throat like a flock of startled birds.

  “The mouse will shut up or the cat will tear off her face,” the Ifrit growls.

  The Marid closes her eyes as the Ifrit ghoul leans into her. He runs his hands over every inch of skin on her face, looking, looking, looking for something. A razor-sharp nail drags along the birthmark near the corner of her mouth. Blood drips down her face and she cries out as the ghoul licks it. His tongue burns.

  He lets her go. “This mouse is the wrong mouse.”

  The jinni stumbles as she backs away from him. She wants to evanesce, but her mind has gone blank—there is no picture of a safe harbor to concentrate her energy on. It’s as if she has forgotten how to breathe.

  The ghoul smiles. “But the cat is still hungry.”

  The Marid stands, horrified, as the ghoul’s smile stretches to his ears, then grows wider, splitting his face open to reveal dozens of eellike teeth. Her agonized shriek lasts only a moment. Once those teeth sink into her soft flesh and break her skin, she can no longer speak. No longer move. Limbs frozen.

  But she can feel everything.

  The ghoul finishes his meal, then licks his lips and sighs with satisfaction. He shudders and the air around him warps as his body and face transform into those of his victim. The ghoul gazes at his reflection in a stagnant pool of water on the courtyard floor. As long as he stays out of the moonlight, his true form is hidden. He touches the birthmark beside his mouth and smiles. Next time, his quarry won’t see him coming.

  2

  MALEK ALZAHABI LIVED IN A SPRAWLING SPANISH-STYLE mansion in the Hollywood Hills, between an heiress and an Academy Award–winning producer. Palms bordered the expansive grounds, fountains splashed, and servants bustled in and out of rooms crammed with priceless antiques and several museums’ worth of art. His home was something of a legend, a story shared in halls of power, in the backs of limousines. The people who passed through the tall, wrought-iron gate that surrounded the property were the fault lines of society—the movers and shakers of the world. Foreign dignitaries. Journalists. CEOs and scientists. Black-market specialists and the kings of Earth’s underworld.

  Chanel-painted lips whispered of a mysterious young woman who slipped in and out of Malek’s parties, a girl who defied the laws of physics and made dreams come true—if you could believe everything you heard. She moved with the grace of a belly dancer, entrancing men and women alike with her strange golden eyes full of secrets and the tumbling dark hair that wound past her neck and over her shoulders like loving snakes.

  Words swirled around Nalia whenever she walked into one of Malek’s soirées. She didn’t need to be a mind-reading jinni to know what they were: lover, witch, demon, Saudi princess. The words didn’t matter to her. Neither did the people.

  Nalia gunned her Maserati, taking Mulholland’s curves with expert precision. The stars winked above the convertible as she sped past mansion after mansion. The wind shoved against her skin, waking Nalia up and taking the edge off the granting pain. By the time she got to her master’s mansion, she’d be good as new—by Earth’s standards, anyway. She hated how much she loved Malek’s most recent gift, but she couldn’t resist a tiny catlike grin as the engine’s power hummed through her. The thing had probably cost enough money to feed a small country for a year, but Malek had given it to Nalia as if it were an extra pack of cigarettes he’d had lying around. An afterthought.

  Just take what you can get from the bastard, her closest friend, Leilan, had told her after Malek gave Nalia the car. Even though Leilan was a free jinni who had never been on the dark caravan, she was born a Marid—one of the serf castes—so she knew what it was like to be a slave. It was why she’d escaped Arjinna in the first place.

  When the car neared the mansion’s front gates, they swung open. The guards standing outside nodded to Nalia as she drove past them. Every light in the house burned—Malek was having another party, one of the rowdier ones judging by the sounds spilling out the open front door. There’d be too-thin women in low-cut dresses who watched themselves as they laughed and flirted, men in Italian suits who moved through the room like sharks. Champagne and caviar. Cocaine and Ecstasy.

  “Perfect,” she muttered. “Just what I need.”

  Malek’s business trip had lasted for two glorious weeks. She hadn’t asked or cared why he hadn’t brought her with him as he usually did; she’d been too busy reveling in his absence and the relative freedom that came with it. Waking up in the morning without a master to serve—priceless.

  She knew one of the guards would inform Malek that she’d returned. Not like he didn’t already know. The thick gold cuffs on both of her wrists were nothing more than fancy shackles imbued with the magic of her peculiar institution. The instant the slave trader had received his payment from Malek three years ago, the shackles had appeared on Nalia’s wrists. She hadn’t seen this happen, of course. She’d been too drugged. There had been Malek’s face, shadows, whispering, and then, suddenly, the bracelets.

  Not only did the shackles tell Malek her exact location, they allowed her master to easily summon her, any time of the day or night. He only had three wishes, but an endless number of commands that had to be obeyed. Get this. Go there. Do this. Do that. As long as she didn’t manifest something, it wasn’t a wish. So tonight she’d be expected to join him at the party, to be all but handcuffed to his side while he made his deals with Earth’s devils. Smile, smile, smile.

  As she drove closer to the house, she felt his summons. It was as if Malek were tugging on a string attached to her belly button, pulling her toward him. Right now it was mildly uncomfortable, but the longer she waited, the more painful it would become. If she ignored it, the magic would take over. Her body would dissolve into a cloud of smoke and, seconds later, she’d be standing beside him. The people around him would simply blink and assume she had been there all along—the magic’s safety valve against human detection. The longest Nalia had ever held out against his summons was twenty minutes, an excruciating effort. Then he’d put her in the bottle. The calendar had said May when Malek willed her inside it, July when he let her out.

  Malek didn’t like to be kept waiting.

  She steered down the long driveway, gripping the wheel as she fought against his call. There was a certain savage joy to making him wait. To saying no.

  Of course she’d go to him eventually—she had no choice. If she were smart, she’d be good. Play the exotic jinni, let him parade her around like a prize racehorse. Pretend not to notice the way he’d started looking at her when he thought she wasn’t paying attention. Her stunt with the client was enough for one night. If she didn’t find a way to escape from Malek, Nalia had a lifetime to piss him off.

  She turned into the garage and parked her Ma
serati next to the Lotus Malek had recently acquired from a Russian arms dealer. The metal garage door clanged shut behind her as Nalia cut the engine and jumped out—all she wanted to do was sleep. A sharp pain had begun to radiate from the base of her skull, the beginnings of a migraine. Granting hangover.

  Off in the distance, a cacophony of drunken laughter and shouting spilled out of the house. It was the time for secret longings to become exposed, when masks slipped off after too many glasses of this, too many pills of that. Time for Malek to get what he wanted from his guests.

  Nalia was almost to the garage door when she stopped. Her adrenaline spiked and she whipped around, eyes scanning the darkness. She wasn’t alone.

  A jinni: she could feel its presence, a manic energy that pulsed everywhere at once. Goose bumps scattered across her skin and she held her breath, straining for a sound that would tell her where the intruder was. It was stupid to think she was finally safe, that maybe everyone back in Arjinna really did believe she was dead. Of course it was only a matter of time before the Ifrit jinn who’d taken over her homeland realized they were short a body. During the coup, the Ifrit soldiers had used human weapons to massacre her caste—the empress and her royal knights, the Ghan Aisouri. Nalia could still feel the bullets tearing into her flesh. The formidable Ghan Aisouri magic had been powerless against Earth’s lightning-speed technology combined with Ifrit dark magic. Yet, somehow, Nalia had survived.

  She was the last of the Ghan Aisouri.

  “Show yourself,” Nalia demanded.

  Nothing. Was he invisible? The irony wasn’t lost on her. She felt the jinni’s menace, lurking in the dark. Wisps of golden chiaan sparked at her fingertips. The Ifrit were evil, violent jinn who’d long been outcasts due to their love of dark magic. She had no idea what to expect from her opponent.

  “You’re here to kill me, so let’s get on with it,” she said.

  A low male voice answered. “Am I?”

  Nalia called up her reserves of chiaan, centering her energy so that the heat of defensive magic could begin coursing through her. She directed the yellow light emanating from her fingers toward the voice, but she was out of practice, and the magic that was supposed to reveal the jinni only succeeded in breaking the window of Malek’s new Aston Martin. Her stomach twisted—her master’s summons was getting harder to ignore.