He killed your family, Qadir said.
“Everything that’s happened—it’s his fault!” cried Imad.
He destroyed your tribe.
The fire glowed with such an intensity it burned dark spots into her vision. And in those patches of darkness, she saw the nightmare. Her campsite on fire. Her family, dead.
“Midnight Merchant!” The title startled her from the memories. She looked up, past Imad and Qadir, and saw the prince. He sat atop the dune, holding his bloodied arm and yelling her name. Loulie. Midnight Merchant.
She gripped the dagger. She was not Layla. She was not weak. Not anymore.
It didn’t matter that she couldn’t walk. She could crawl. And so she did, clawing her way through the sand until she could slash at Imad’s legs. He retaliated by kicking dust into her face. Loulie blinked back tears and aimed for his bad leg. She plunged her dagger into his foot.
The fire coating the blade was a living thing. It spread up Imad’s leg, coated his clothing. And then it began to burn through his skin. Imad stumbled away with a scream, wildly tearing at his attire. Loulie reached for his ankle. The fire curved away from her fingers just long enough for her to pull Imad down. For her to pin him to the ground. When he tried to defend himself, she deflected his strike and buried her knife in his chest.
Not enough. She stabbed him again.
His skin burned. Not enough. Crumbled to charcoal. Not enough. She slashed and stabbed and screamed and sobbed, and it was strange, so strange that no matter how many times she cut him, there was no blood. Just that strange ink that kept seeping out of him, and Why won’t he bleed? He deserves to bleed; he deserves to HURT.
She was sobbing so hard by the end of it that she dropped the dagger. She felt warmth at her back, arms around her shoulders. “Don’t look,” Qadir whispered as he picked her and the fallen blade up. And she didn’t. Not until they mounted the dune and Imad was nothing but a distant blot of ash.
Then: sunlight. She had to blink back tears to see. And when she could, she saw Qadir’s fading face above her. His red eyes had lightened to their shade of human brown, but they were barely an impression.
Loulie grabbed at his chest. “Qadir,” she said, willing him to solidify with the name.
He smiled at her weakly. “You did it. You avenged your family.”
His smile faded first, followed by the rest of his body. He lowered her to the ground as he vanished, as he went from man to smoke to dust.
The prince grabbed her before she collapsed, and carefully lowered her to the ground. The two of them sat side by side, watching the ruins sink into the Sandsea. The prince grasped his injured arm and prayed. Loulie stared resolutely ahead, trying not to cry and failing.
She had her vengeance, but it was an empty triumph.
47
AISHA
Aisha was dying.
Or maybe she was already dead. It was hard to tell.
The pain was a current of agony, coursing through her veins and making the world go black. She was too busy focusing on it to feel anything else. Thus, she did not realize the world had shattered beneath her until her body slammed into the ground.
She didn’t scream. She couldn’t. Her throat was torn, and the last of her words had spilled onto the sand with her blood.
To live is a matter of belief, Omar had once told her. The wicked live longer simply because they believe themselves to be invincible.
Her king had lied to her. All this time, she had believed. That she was the best. That she could not possibly die.
And yet here she lay. Broken.
Aisha opened her eye. It burned like hell, but she refused to die in darkness. At the very least, she would die staring daggers into her murderer.
But Imad was gone, and the prince and the merchant were nowhere to be seen. There were only endless hills of sand. When had she escaped the ruins? Maybe she was dead.
But then she saw it—a shadow standing amidst the dunes. A silhouette of smoke with gleaming red eyes, wearing a band of gold around its throat. Jinn. Aisha’s vision went foggy. Her body convulsed without her permission. Pain—pain so terrible it forced a soundless scream from her throat—racked her body.
When she could focus again, the jinn was standing before her.
Was it… the Midnight Merchant’s bodyguard?
The silhouette blinked at her. It said nothing. Did nothing. She was becoming convinced it was a hallucination, when it reached up and pulled the collar from its throat. The jinn grasped her hand—she could barely feel it, certainly couldn’t move it—and set the collar in it before walking away.
Aisha’s vision clouded. She blinked rapidly to clear it. A futile effort. When her sight stabilized, she was still hallucinating. This time, she saw a wraithlike woman who was all angles and bones. Her eyes were like wells of ink, and her plaited hair swung like a pendulum.
Aisha wondered if this was the god of death.
But then the woman’s lips broke into a disarmingly mischievous grin, and Aisha knew she was not some benevolent god. “Salaam,” said the woman. “Would you like to die?”
Aisha startled at the voice. It belonged to the undead queen who had mocked her in the desert. The same jinn who had possessed the wali of Dhyme. It was the voice that had whispered Find me, jinn killer in her mind. It seemed that in the end, the jinn had found her first.
The jinn king—queen—crouched down. She tilted her head. Her braid continued swinging on a phantom breeze. “Or perhaps you would like to make a deal?”
No deal. Aisha had not avoided falling prey to a jinn in life only to succumb to one in death. Jinn were monsters. Jinn were the reason she had made herself into a weapon.
The queen raised a brow. “Are you certain?” She leaned down and, before Aisha could pull away, laced their fingers together. Ice and fire and death and light and life crackled through Aisha’s veins, crashing through her with the potency of poison.
“I can fix you.”
Aisha shuddered. She could feel her body. She could breathe.
“Don’t you have things you still need to do?”
Aisha thought of Omar. Omar, turning to her in the darkness of her bedroom with a smile on his face. I can trust you to see this through to the end?
Of course.
You promise not to die?
She had scoffed. A thief steals lives. They do not have their life stolen from them.
“I will fill in the pieces of you that are broken,” the queen said. “But those pieces will belong to me as well. Do you understand? I will take one of your eyes. And…” She tapped Aisha’s chest. Her heart stuttered. “I will take your heart and share your body.”
Aisha shuddered. You took everything from the wali of Dhyme.
The queen narrowed her eyes. “That was possession. This is a deal.”
Why offer me a deal when I am one of the jinn killers you despise? When I despise you?
“Because it is beneficial to us both. The only way I can truly exist in your world is with a vessel. A mind. And for that, I require a deal.”
Aisha’s gaze locked on the landscape behind the jinn. It was nothing but a band of twinkling darkness. It reminded her of the night sky.
As a child, she had always wondered if the sky was endless. She knew that the one she was looking at now was endless. That there would be no coming back from it.
An image hung suspended before her: a dream encroaching on reality.
She was falling. Prince Omar watched her from a distance, eyes dark with disappointment. She was too ashamed to reach for him, so she let herself drop, let herself fade…
“I’m sorry.” The voice made her pause. It was not Omar’s.
When she looked up, Mazen stood before her, shame etched onto his face. Irritation bubbled in her chest. It was insulting. That he should apologize to her when he’d saved her.
She wanted to strangle him. She wanted to hug him.