Ghostland (44 page)

“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.”

The driver hurried toward her. “Time to get out of here,” he said, and Aisling relaxed, felt almost faint with relief.

At the car he opened the door for her. But before she could get in, pain screamed through her as the club struck her head. Blackness overtook her before she could speak a name on the spirit winds.

 

 

ZURAEL let a prince’s training serve him. Irial might enjoy baiting him, but his arrival at the gate wouldn’t be for that sole purpose.

“Did you know she summoned me?” Irial asked.

“Yes.”

“I would have killed her. I tried to get to her but her circle held.”

“Aisling told me as much. She told me you chose to help her.”

“Yes.” Irial cocked his head. This time his smile was masculine and appreciative. “She is alluring. In more ways than one. I can see how you came to ignore my advice. You continued to couple with the little shamaness. You shared breath and spirit. Now she’s like a potent drug coursing through your bloodstream and commanding your cock. And if I’m correct, she’ll soon cost you a kingdom. But you were meant to be enslaved by her. And what we stand to gain—Did she tell you her pet showed himself to me?”

At the mention of the ferret, Zurael gave up trying to parse through Irial’s other words. A fist tightened on his heart at Aisling’s loss and her grief. “She told me you saw Aziel.”

“Is that the name you know him by?”

Zurael stilled. “You know him by another?”

“I know him for what he is.” Irial moved closer, as if afraid to speak the word too loudly. “
Ifrit.
”

Cold fear blossomed in Zurael’s chest. Horror made worse by having so recently been bound to Javier. “You’re sure?”

Irial stroked the stylized raven on his cheek. “I’m sure. It’s the work of my house to keep the books bearing the names of those who’ve been lost, to grieve over each Djinn whose spirit we will never guide back for rebirth. He was once of my house, that much I know. And if I were to guess? For some, a father’s love never dies.”

Zurael heard the ring of truth in Irial’s words, remembered feeling like he was ensnared, caught in a spider’s web with Aisling, by powerful, unseen forces. “You see your father’s hand in this?”

“Not only his hand, but The Prince’s and Malahel’s.”

Unbidden, Zurael saw himself standing in the Hall of History with The Prince, the two of them in front of the mural of Jetrel—the son whose loss was a deep scar on his father’s heart. “What game do they play?”

Irial laughed. “A good question. And since I am as much a pawn as you, I’ll make the move expected of me. Did you know there is a way for the Djinn to willingly bind themselves to a human? To join souls so that both are equally enslaved and neither becomes the other’s familiar?”

Zurael’s heart beat so loudly that the only words he could form in the midst of its roar were “Tell me.”

“Your desperation doesn’t bode well for my own chances of avoiding an entanglement. If you do this thing, Zurael, I doubt you’ll be able to pass through the gate and return to this place. It
will
cost you a kingdom. Do you really want the shamaness enough to pay such a high price?”

“Yes.”

Irial touched the stylized raven on his cheek again, one that took on significance as he seldom wore it, just as Zurael rarely displayed the mark of his house and the nature of his spirit when he was in the Kingdom of the Djinn. There was no need to. Its appearance was optional—unlike when he was in the world now held by humans.

“Share breath and will your soul into her keeping,” Irial said. “And now I’ll tell you how I came to learn it was possible. Then you’ll know why I believe The Prince and Malahel have their hands in this game, too.”

Zurael felt hope rise in his chest. “I’m listening.”

Irial said, “When I told my father about the figurine you’d seen in the occult shop, he sent me to the library of our house to research the matter further. Oddly enough, a book I’d thought there couldn’t be found, and so he arranged for me to use the library in the House of the Spider.

“While I was in the Spider’s library, I was shown a collection of books that might hold the information I was after, then left unattended. A Spider’s account of history is not the same as a Raven’s or Serpent’s. I was curious, as I imagined they knew I would be, and so I browsed those in the section I’d been given free rein to explore.”

Green eyes grew somber. “There was a tale of The Prince’s first son, the one whose name is no longer found in The Book of the Djinn. By the Spider’s account, he came to their house seeking a way to bind himself to the human woman he loved above all others. He wanted to extend her life beyond the few years the children of mud possess, even if it meant shortening his own.

“There was no summoning in those days. There were no incantations forcing us to a human’s will. The Djinn who could be taken alive were fitted with spelled bands and given to the children of mud as if they were animals. No knowledge existed of what it meant to be
ifrit
because no one had yet experienced the horror the Prince’s first son would soon know.” Irial shook his head. “The Prince’s words were law then, just as they are now. His thoughts aren’t written in the Spider’s account of history. What is written is that The Prince forbade them from sharing the knowledge of how a Djinn could bind himself to a human. And in the end his son was lost in a way none of us could have conceived—and in a way that could have been avoided if he’d already been bound to the woman.”

Zurael’s mind raced with the implications. It was no coincidence that Irial stumbled upon the story of Jetrel—and played the part of pawn by sharing it. It was no coincidence he himself had been sent for the tablet.

His thoughts spun to his visit to the House of the Spider, to the words he’d spoken and Malahel’s response.

The House of the Scorpion is full of assassins capable of doing what you ask.

What you say is true, but none of them was summoned as you were. None of them was brought to the House of the Spider by their destinies.

A raven and a spider, a serpent and an
ifrit
? What game did they play?

Unbidden, the image of Aisling’s circle of fetishes came to him—a raven, a spider, a serpent and a bear linked by her blood. Why would the Djinn seek an alliance with a human who could summon by speaking a name on the spirit winds? One whose spirit guardian was
ifrit
?

The answer came in a rush that left him breathless. Excitement rose and crested, fell sharply when he thought he must be wrong. And yet he couldn’t stop himself from saying, “If Aisling can summon an
ifrit
, what is to say another couldn’t decipher the tablet and undo the curse creating one? That in working together, a shamaness and a sorceress couldn’t find and free those whose names we can no longer speak?”

“Your thoughts mirror mine—and why I suspect a child of mud will be my fate. Such a plan would appeal to my father, and yours, as well as to Malahel—though whether or not they thought we would stop to figure it out will remain an unanswered question until this plays out.”

Pain and worry slid through Zurael. He rubbed at the place over his heart. “She has an enemy still alive. If we’re right, why have I been forbidden to return to her?”

“Unless summoned. Weren’t those the words I overheard Miizan say?”

Hope flared in Zurael then died as quickly. How well he remembered Aisling’s fear-shadowed eyes when he warned her against summoning him. How easily he remembered the guilt and anguish he’d read in them when Javier had bound him. “She won’t call my name on the spirit winds.”

“Perhaps not,” Irial said. “Or perhaps she’ll be given a choice as you’ve been given.”

Zurael looked at the gate separating his world from Aisling’s and saw a test instead of a barrier—a delicate weave of threads leading up to this moment in time. A son who dishonored his father couldn’t be trusted. A love that wasn’t strong enough to bridge the gap between Djinn and child of mud couldn’t be fostered. She would summon him or there would be no future for the two of them.

 

 

CONSCIOUSNESS returned slowly, with a disorienting swirl of sensation and vision. Nausea threatened. It washed over Aisling and brought a wild panic that she’d choke on her own vomit and die before she could force it down.

She was bound to a chair, hands and feet made useless. Gagged tightly, savagely, as if whoever had tied her was terrified she might speak.

A small, heavy table was placed in front of the chair. The hammer resting on top of it seemed out of place, sinister, threatening.

Slowly the tiny piles of crushed bone came into focus, the broken onyx pentacle, the shattered stone—her fetish pouch tossed to the floor. Too late she realized Elena’s chauffeured car probably belonged to Luther Germaine, and the driver, by association, was Peter’s as well.

As if thinking about Peter Germaine had conjured him, he claimed the chair on the other side of the table. “I’ve gone to quite a bit of trouble to arrange for your death, but you’ve managed to avoid it. The man I spared from the fate of a third strike and hasty execution in exchange for paying you a visit, was found dead. The guardsmen, who tend to get carried away and turn searches into hunts, failed to find you in The Barrens, after Father Ursu was made aware of your failure to catch the bus and return home.

“The Church is wrong in compromising. My brother and the rest of them are mistaken if they think by forcing the humans who’ve been touched by the devil into one area of town they can limit their influence and keep them from taking over and turning God’s attention away from us once and for all. Your kind is a disease that will spread until no place on Earth is free of it. You’re a filthy perversion of what God intended when he created us.”

Peter reached into his pocket. When his hand emerged, it held a familiar, casketlike container. His eyes filled with rapture as he stroked the thin metal. “I don’t understand why you’ve been chosen to serve a higher power, but you have been. It’s not my place to question the divine. If you’re to be the tool that will open the gates of hell and flood this world with demons in order to bring about the apocalypse and Final Judgment, then so be it.”

He opened the container and dipped his fingers into the gray substance. A malevolent presence swept in, this one more powerful than any Aisling had ever encountered in the spiritlands.

She recoiled when Peter leaned across the table, hand outstretched. She mentally summoned the only being not limited by the boundaries of the ghostlands—her father, though the price for calling his name would be high.

He arrived like a bolt of lightning, illuminating the room with blinding white and filling it with mindless, instinctive terror. Angel wings extended in full glory, his sword lifted and fell, meting out swift, uncompromising justice marked by a scream that continued long past Peter’s death, as if vengeance followed the Ghost pathway deep into the spiritlands where it originated.

When he turned and looked at her, it took all of Aisling’s courage not to tremble and cower in his presence. Her breath came hard and fast. Her heart raced and memories of the angel in The Barrens crowded in, merged with the vision of the being that stood before her.

His sword arm extended toward her and a whimper escaped despite her resolve to show only bravery. She jerked when the sword’s tip touched the ropes, and cold lashed at her wrists before her bindings fell away, shattered as though the fibers were made of thin strands of ice.

He freed her ankles the same way, then knelt before she could stand, trapping her in the chair with the sheer force of his presence.

The sword disappeared from his hand and he leaned forward, gently untied the gag and pulled it away. Their eyes met, held. And Aisling was lost in a silent, endless darkness filled with a glittering galaxy of stars.

He called her back from the place that held her transfixed by saying, “You’ve done well. You’ve accomplished all I hoped you would. You’ve become what I dreamed you might be when your mother met my price.”