Circle of Jinn (5 page)

“Sent by the Afrit?”

“In a way.”

“Are you going to tell me exactly in what ways?”

“That's not really important.”

“And what is?”

“The reason you haven't granted your candidate's wish.”

“Megan.”

“A little girl.”

My hackles rise. “That doesn't mean her wish isn't important.”

“I didn't say it wasn't.” He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “You don't make it easy, do you?”

“What?”

“Helping you.”

“Who says I need help?”

He tugs me forward, out of range of Megan, and I yelp.

“Fine,” I grumble, “but it's not something you can help me with.”

“How do you know if you don't ask?”

My head's spinning from the pain of having my kidneys wrenched, not to mention from this entire conversation, and I almost blurt out what I need, because I do need help. Help my Zar sisters can't give because none of them are part Afrit; none of them have the ability to do mind control. And me telling them that I can, that I'm an Afrit, will reveal a secret my mother's been keeping my entire life—a secret that, though it's about me, doesn't quite feel like mine to share.

I can't ask my mother for help because she'll say the risk is too great and shut me down, force me to find some other way. But there is no other way. I need to ease Nate's and Megan's pain. And their need comes before mine.

But what are the odds of Zak actually being able to help me with this?

If he can, wouldn't that mean—since this is something only Afrit can do—that he's one of them?

If he's not, and I ask for help with this—something only Afrit can do—won't I be revealing something that might put me in danger?

Then again, if he's telling the truth, I'm already in danger. I have to give him a chance, but asking Zak for help isn't the same as trusting Zak. Not by a long shot.

My voice trembles despite my opposite intentions as I say, “Mind control. That's what I need help with.”

He doesn't flinch and simply taps his baby-smooth, hairless chin. “Aha, dragooning.”

“Dragons? I need to conjure a dragon to use mind control?”

Zak laughs that familiar laugh. “You Jinn girls really do lead sheltered lives, don't you?”

His know-it-all tone irks me, and I conjure a miniature cage. “Not so sheltered that we can't do this. And don't doubt that I can make one big enough for you. Bummer that you won't even be able to conjure the key…”

More amused than unnerved, he says, “Dragooning is the technique you refer to as mind control.”

Technique? As in there's a method I can learn?

“You can do it?” I ask.

His face tells me he can't, and the hope I didn't realize had built up inside me deflates like one of Samara's conjured soufflés. At least this means he's not an Afrit.

“But,” he says, “that doesn't mean I can't teach you. All I need from you is one thing.”

“What's that?” I ask tentatively.

“Jeans,” he says, plucking the fabric of his baggy pants. “I've felt like an idiot in these things all day.”

 

5

Not again.
My little Jinn butt's getting a massage worthy of a luxury spa.

Though they apparently don't have smartphones in Janna, Zak's a quick learner. He's particularly fond of texting. All. The. Time.

“Seriously?” I raise an eyebrow at Chelsea and the pink crocheted sweater she's holding up. “Let's try baby steps, okay?”

When Chelsea stopped by this morning with a basket of homemade apple-cinnamon muffins, it took less than three minutes of her and Megan being alone for them to concoct a plan to force me to come here, to the mall.

I now understand why my mother opted to conjure my back-to-school clothes instead of taking me shopping. The clomping of too-high wedge sandals against the marble floor, the double-digit lines (fitting and restroom), and the three tussles over the last size in a skirt or short or skort we've witnessed so far have me cursing out my circulus curse.

Megan shoves a mint-green cowboy hat on my head. “You could get away with wearing…” She scans my long-legged, curveless, A/B-cup body and scoffs at the shapeless black tee and white shorts I've put on it. “Well, that, and still have all the boys drooling, but aren't you sick of the black and white?”

“You're like a checkerboard,” Chelsea says, bouncing her head in agreement. She's traded in her summer ponytail for a sleek reverse bob that better suits her petite face. “A hot one, but still.”

I tug on the end of the messy side braid Megan wound my hair in this morning and resist the urge to magically fling the cowboy hat in their direction. “I don't want all the boys drooling.” Snorts from both of them. “I mean, any of the boys drooling.”

Chelsea reapplies her cherry-red lip gloss using the store mirror. “Except for Nate. And he already does.”

Megan wrinkles her freckled nose. “Gross, that's my brother.”

Her brother, who asked Mrs. Pucher for her recipe and then made me the most lumpy, gritty, even-too-sweet-for-me batch of chocolate–peanut butter fudge that if I didn't know better I'd say was laced with truth serum. Because once I managed to unstick it from the roof of my mouth, all I wanted to do was confess to what happened with Henry. Not to mention stop lying to him about what I've been doing for the past three nights. I stifle a yawn.

From the very first day that Zak arrived, the urgency with which he insists I master mind control has worked as well as caffeine to keep me and my magic burning the very real and magically, unnaturally bright candle.

Practicing mind control
with a male Jinn from Janna
, a place I wasn't even sure actually existed for most of my life, has taken a backseat to the fact that I'm
practicing mind control
. There's only so much one's brain can take in without exploding. Zak being so … normal makes it easy to accept the former while I adjust to the latter.

My mouth grows wide in another yawn. Megan shoves her finger in between my lips, making me gag. I shoot her the eye roll I've perfected by watching her.

Not that I can blame her, but it is technically her fault that the only time I have to practice
dragooning
undisturbed is after dark, when everyone else is asleep. When I should be asleep.

The few moments Zak and I have been able to steal during the day are, surprisingly, thanks to Chelsea. Though Megan still refuses to step even a pinky toe inside the hospital, she's come around to Chelsea's idea of writing letters to her mom. This way, when Mrs. Reese returns home, she'll feel less like she missed out on weeks or months (hopefully just weeks) of Nate's and Megan's lives. Lately, Nate's lacrosse practice consumes him, and George and Goldie spend their days at the hospital and their evenings walking the beach.

Still, it's only at night, when Megan is asleep, that I'm fully free (well, as free as one hundred and fifty feet allows me to be) to slip into the woods and practice with Zak.

Zak, who reminds me of myself when he marvels at the abundance of ice cream flavors in the local shop. Zak, who makes me feel guilty when he tells me he's never had a crush let alone a girlfriend. Zak, who has somehow managed to acquire a menagerie of animals to serve as my test subjects.

I didn't question the rabbit. I didn't want to go near let alone question the snake. But the pig? Apparently since this power
should
work on nonhumans—save for fellow Jinn—Zak's hoping size may be the key.

If it is, I'm still turning it the wrong way. I've never been good with locks.

In exchange for him helping me with mind control, I've been teaching him to conjure. Turns out, it's not that he can't—it's that he can't in Janna. Like me, he's a natural. Unlike me, he's a clotheshorse. I keep catching him fabricating new pieces. Ones not even in his size. When he returns to Janna, he's going to go into conjuring withdrawal.

The ricocheting in my veins at the thought of Zak leaving doesn't surprise me. Even though it's only been three days, the rhythm Zak and I have fallen into has been almost effortless. Easier than anything I've had since Jenny.

Unfortunately, Zak's not exactly a fountain of information about the Afrit's underground world. It seems if the Afrit do
come for me
, he'd be punished for revealing secrets about Janna. So I haven't pushed him—much. I know Jinn there live with their family members much like we do here. Except for the Jinn locked away in tortura cavea for some infringement against the Afrit, but he won't talk about that.

What he won't stop talking about are the smartphones, apps, music, movies, and TV shows we have here. They occupy him during the day while I'm tied to Megan. His phone's going to meld into his hand by the time he leaves.

I've dropped hints about the uprising, but he hasn't picked up a single one. I have yet to figure out if he truly knows nothing or he's just as good at pretending as the rest of us Jinn.

“I'm so not ready for fall,” Chelsea says, turning her nose up at a stack of turtleneck sweaters. “You know what that means, chickies. Clearance rack!”

Just as Chelsea slides her hand into mine to drag me to the back corner of the store, I spy someone who looks like Laila walking out of the frozen yogurt shop. But it can't be, because Laila doesn't live anywhere near here. Neither does Yasmin … but there she is too.

Which means, that someone doesn't just look like Laila.
It is Laila.
Laila, after her sixteenth birthday—the day she became a Jinn, received her own silver bangle, and magically reached the full maturity that amps us up to
va-va-vooms-ville
. The day I missed because I was still on probation, unable to apport to her. The day I missed because I broke her heart.

She disappears down another spoke in the mall, and I fight the ache that's causing tears to pool in my eyes. I can't go to her. She's too far away. Even if I could, what would I say besides, “I miss you. I'm sorry. And you're every bit as gorgeous as I knew you would be.”

Standing beside Chelsea, I reach for a pair of aviator sunglasses stacked on the clearance table in front of us and hide my eyes behind them. Which only serves to elicit more moisture, for they're the same style of sunglasses that Laila wears.

Stealing her locket was wrong. I knew it when the gold chain coiled itself against the seam inside my pocket. But when I took it all those months ago, I was bitter, well, more bitter, about being Jinn. Being Jinn meant a life defined not by me but by the Afrit, and the picture of Laila's Jinn father inside the locket represented everything I wanted but couldn't have.

Back then, I didn't know how much my mother loved my father, that the Afrit ripping Jinn families apart as punishment for the last failed uprising scarred her as much, if not more, as it did me.

I didn't know the lengths my mother—and father—had gone to in order to protect me. I closed myself off from love, from life, all the while blaming magic, blaming being Jinn, for what I didn't have. Maybe it played a role. But I played a bigger one.

The irony is, I was just starting to figure all this out when Laila found the locket tucked away in my nightstand. It was the night of our official Zar initiation, just a single day before the Reeses' car accident.

The six of us—Laila, Yasmin, Hana, Mina, Farrah, and I—grew up thinking the Zar our mothers were in was nothing more than a declaration of lifelong friendship. We knew it was tradition for female Jinn to belong to a Zar.

We also knew their friendship was to become ours—whether we, which was mostly me, wanted it to or not. As Hana's red hair deepened, so did her obsession with Coco Chanel and Diane von Furstenberg and Tim Gunn. Take every fashion trend Hana studied like a scholar, sub in “teen heartthrob,” and you have Mina's academic—theoretical and real-world—pursuits. Her delicate features, mahogany hair, and soft pink lips are a front, camouflaging the inner party girl she was born to be. Lately, Farrah's caramel-colored bangs, sticking out of the headband she uses to hold back the rest of her pin-straight hair, flirt with her eyelashes as she bounces to the music she's constantly listening to, thinking about listening to, or talking about listening to when what she should be doing is practicing her magic. She's the least magically gifted of my Zar sisters. The opposite of Yasmin.

I used to think Yasmin and I were simply oil and water—actually, more gasoline and a lighter; one false move and we'd explode. She was bold, I was reserved. She was aggressive, I was indifferent. She hated humans, my best friend for nine years was a human. Psychotherapy moment: I now know that's the root of our problems. For her, magic is everything. That it never was for me made me the target of her bold aggression.

Through it all, Laila stood (heads shorter) by my side.

For all their differences, they've always shared one thing: They've always wanted to become Jinn. The thing that unites them is what separates me. But not anymore.

Over the course of the sixteen years we've known one another, we've been close, not so close, and then, maybe, on the way to being close again. The Zar initiation was to cement our bond, but not in the way we thought.

That night, to our surprise, the six of us became magically linked, able to draw on one another to bolster our powers, able to feel one another's emotions, able to live and work as one if we so choose. But because of me, because of the locket I stole all those months ago, our Zar merged and then fractured within minutes of each other.

I've been trying to tap into each of my sisters since with no luck. I don't know if they're choosing sides between me and Laila. If they are, of course they'll choose Laila. I would.