Circle of Jinn (10 page)

“Shape-shift,” I say.

“So you did see him.” She latches onto my arm and pulls me back onto the couch next to her. “He thought so.” Her smile contrasts with the longing in her eyes. “He's a beautiful canine, isn't he?”

Shiny chestnut fur, thick, strong legs, my father's animal form would win him the first-place ribbon in any dog show. I've only seen him once, from a distance, on the night Nate's father died, the night I—correctly—thought I heard him tell my mother the Afrit would “come for me.”

My mother strokes my arm. “He was glad you saw him. You can't know how hard this has been on him.”

My instinct is to bristle at this, but the warmth of my mother's soft hand against my skin stops me. From this very room's two fireplaces to the wool sweaters in my dresser to the chocolate cakes on my plate to the hugs around my often-resistant body, my mother has kept me warm—inside and out. Safe and protected my entire life. While my father's been playing double agent. Of course this must be hard—harder—on him than it is on me. Even I'm not selfish enough to deny that.

My mother reaches for Zak's arm and settles him back on her other side. “The restriction meant I couldn't see Zakaria anymore. At least not in person. Thankfully, your father's abilities allowed him to play images in my mind.”

“Play?” If I were a fuse, I'd have blown by now.

“Truly amazing.” She presses her shoulder against Zak's. “I was able to see you make your marks. I watched you receive your silver necklace. I even saw you use your powers for the first time.”

“You mean you saw me apport myself directly into a pool of quicksand?” Zak's cheeks flush. “You saw that? Why would you want to see that?”

“I'm your mother, I want to see everything.”

Apporting right away? Impressive. “Apping was the first magic you used?” I ask.

“It's the first magic we all use. Janna is quite large. And we lack automobiles. Why, what was yours?”

“Conjuring.”

“Tools,” my mother adds. “She conjured tools to get her bangle off.”

I clink my bracelet against hers. “Didn't work.”

“But why would you want it to?” Zak says.

“You aren't asking me that with a straight face, are you?”

Zak's voice lowers. “For us, it's an honor. We have to earn our powers. We don't all just get them.”

My Zar sisters and I always wondered if the boys in Janna received the same injection at birth that we do, the one that blocks our magic. Why would they? As little girls, we might unwittingly reveal our magic to humans, but there aren't any humans for the boys in Janna to out themselves to. It didn't seem to make sense. But I'm learning the Afrit don't care about making sense.

They care about control. They dole out powers to the males like they're a reward. I sure hope I don't have to start deprogramming Zak from a bad case of Stockholm syndrome. Especially since I can't do so via hadi.

My mother sips her wine and looks over the uneven rim of the wineglass at me. “You know what's interesting? Me thinking I distinctly asked you never to use mind control again—”

“What's this?” Zak interrupts. “I thought you didn't know how to dragoon?”

“I didn't. I only used it once by mistake. Led to my probation. And Mom and Samara scared me so much, there was no way I was going to dip a toe in again and risk hurting anyone. Especially Megan and Nate.”

“But you didn't, right?” my mother says warily. “You said you used it to grant Megan's wish, but they're all okay?”

“Perfect. Better.”

“And you're okay?”

“As far as I know.”

A small bit of pride creeps onto her face. “You inherited your father's abilities to use it on humans, then.” She looks at Zak. “But you haven't?”

He shakes his head.

“Good.” She wipes the pride away and turns serious. “No matter how careful you are, it's still dangerous. Azra, you know you can't—”

“Can't use it. I know. Even though Xavier used it on all of us.”

“Your
father
,” she says with emphasis, “used it with great care. And only when absolutely necessary. Which happens to include him loving you so much that he couldn't stand never seeing you again.”

“And you,” I say.

The warmth in her gold eyes echoes the way she looked in the two pictures I found of her and “X”—the initial, along with her “K,” that was marked on the back of one of the photos. I should have known then that was a look reserved for those she loves.

She gives me that look now. “After it was forbidden for him to visit, I initially wanted him to stop sneaking back in. I was worried about his safety as much as ours if someone came around. Making us forget was the compromise. But each time your father returned, he had to unlock my mind. And every single time my memories flooded back to me, I'd go through the pain of losing him again. I couldn't take it anymore. Either Xavier had to let me keep my memories or that was it. I told him not to come again.” She takes a long sip of wine. “We tried. He didn't come for an entire year. Even though I didn't remember he had been visiting in the years since the Afrit ordered him not to, it was like a part of me knew he had. Something felt off. I was restless.”

“I remember,” I say. “That's when you left me with Lalla Samara for the whole summer?”

She nods. “I was trying to figure out what was wrong. I was in Morocco, walking through the crowds at a souk in Marrakesh. It's where I found our tagine.” She gestures to the glazed red conical dish perched on top of the cabinets in the kitchen that she uses to make my favorite meal, chicken tagine with tomatoes and sweet caramelized onions. “I was placing the money in the merchant's hand when I felt your father apport in. I bought him a dog bone, and he followed me back to the riad I was staying in. He never made me forget again.”

Lost in her memories, she plays with the crooked stem of her wineglass. Finally she sets it on the table, where it wobbles but remains upright. “It was dangerous and risky. We both knew that. But we couldn't survive otherwise.”

I want to be mad at her, and a part of me is, but a bigger part of me understands. I
am
selfish enough to understand wanting something you aren't supposed to have, even if it means that someone—or someone else—might get hurt.

“But what about him?” I jut my thumb at Zak. “Why did he get to remember?”

“Him?” Zak says. “I'm a ‘him'? After everything, I'm relegated to just a ‘him'?”

I conjure another lead rock. Zak laughs as he takes it from my hand and places it on the far side of the coffee table. “
Him
only had his memories unlocked right before Father sent me here.”

“He did send you, then?” my mother says. “I wasn't sure if—”

“If I'd learned to shape-shift? No, that's still for one hundred percent Afrit, same as using hadi. Except for Azra, it would appear. Father tried to teach me dragooning, for my protection, but I could never accomplish it on the creatures he had me try on.”

My heart beats faster as I realize what this means. Zak's my brother. But he can't do what I can do. “So you really can't? That wasn't a lie?”

“I have never lied to you.”

I cock my head.

“Did I ever say I wasn't your brother?”

“You never said you were.”

“Not the same thing.”

The delicate creases around my mother's gold eyes deepen as she smiles at our entirely normal sibling bickering. Entirely normal
sibling
bickering. Who would have thought?

Zak glances at her from under his long eyelashes and I can just see the little boy he used to be, desperate to please his mother. He refocuses on me. “I wonder if it's not opening yourself up to magic but you learning how to employ hadi that allowed your memories to return to you all on your own. Father had to use a spell to make mine return to me.”

But I had traces before I learned to use mind control.

“You never felt anything before?” I ask. “No thoughts or weird feelings?”

Zak shakes his head. “Did you?”

I pause, and my mother draws in a breath. “Azra, why didn't you tell me?”

“Because I didn't know
what
I was feeling. It only started recently. After my birthday.”

“It must be the release of your powers that triggered it, then,” Zak says. “That permitted the memories to begin to return to you.”

My powers that I've actually always had. This is the one thing that remains unsaid. My mother doesn't bring it up and neither do I.

My father's mind control left my mother feeling like something was off; it went a step further and left me with ghosts of my past. I hope it has something to do with my unfettered ability to do magic or even my Afrit heritage. Because I'd hate for this to happen to Nate or Megan or George or Goldie. For them to be left with perpetual déjà vu because of me.

Did I always know, deep down, that something was missing? Is that why I pushed so hard against everything Jinn, including my Zar sisters? The lies my mother told me made me who I am. What if I had known? Would I still be me?

Like cars on a Ferris wheel, my emotions go round and round. Hurt, anger, shock, joy, longing, fear. Just when I think one car has settled on the ground and off-loaded its passengers, it finds its way back to the tippy top. Right now, feeling left out is riding high.

I face my mother. “Did you ever want to tell me the truth?”

“Every morning, every afternoon, and every night,” she says.

“We could have shared it,” I say.

Zak pours himself more wine. “She shared everything else with you, Azra. She shared herself, which she didn't have to do.”

“What do you mean?” I say. Zak's lips flatten into a thin line. I ask my mother. “What does he mean?”

She ignores me and kneels in front of Zak. “Your father told you?”

Zak takes a swig of wine and nods.

“I'm sorry,” she says softly. “It … it was an impossible choice.”

I bend down and cram my face so close to my mother's that our noses touch. “What choice? What are you talking about?”

My mother swats me away. “The only thing I couldn't bring myself to put in writing. And don't think we won't talk about you using spells and reading my diary, Azra.” Then, with a deep breath, she begins to speak slowly, unable to look directly at me or Zak. “Your father being an Afrit came with some advantages. He and Zak did have to leave here. There was no way around that. But…”

“But what?” I prod.

“She could have left too,” Zak says briskly. “She could have left here and lived in Janna with our father and—”

“You,” I say.

“Or remain in this world with—”

“Me.” Suddenly I feel like I'm two inches tall.

My mother chose me. Over my brother. Over my father. She chose me. Every time I lashed out at her, blamed her, made her hurt, made her angry, made her cry, did she regret it?

Though he speaks to me, Zak's eyes are focused on the glass he has just placed on the table. “Her choice came with lying to you in order to keep you safe. You can't resent her for that any more than I can resent you for being what made her stay.”

My mother takes his hands. “But you resent me, don't you? At least a little?”

Zak shrugs, but it's clearly a “yes” shrug. “But I understand. That's the way it was. That's the way it still is. And that's what Father is trying to fix.”

He then begins to tell my mother—our mother—how Xavier sent him here without the Afrit's knowledge, let alone consent. Because in just a few more days, my delay in granting Megan's wish would have been discovered. Zak was the only one Xavier trusted to see what was taking me so long.

But Zak wasn't supposed to risk getting into contact with our mother or revealing himself to me. He confirms what little my mother has told me: that a growing number of Jinn do want to challenge the Afrit. Xavier—it might take time to call him “Dad”—has been working to prevent a true revolt of this faction in Janna, hoping to change things diplomatically instead. He's deep into his plans to win over the council, to convince them to reverse all of the restrictions the Afrit have put in place over the years.

Zak doesn't seem to know more. I can't tell whether my mother knows more and isn't telling or there isn't more to know. All her diary said is that she's been under pressure from both Raina and Samara to admit that things couldn't go on as they have been and that it was time to do something about it. She's been too afraid to risk it, writing in her diary that she's lost too much already. I now know that “too much” means Zak.

Though I want to know more about all of this, my mother wants to know more about Zak. While she asks him about his favorite food (cookies, especially ones made with mescouta, which I learn are dates), I head into the kitchen to put together a plate of snacks. Clearing the skeletons out of the closet has made us all hungry.

And Zak is quite an old skeleton. Nineteen years old, to be exact. They all lived together as a family before I was born. I never got the chance to be a part of the full Nadira clan—the full Afrit-Nadira clan. Zak left with our father shortly after I was born, when the Afrit commanded all males to return to Janna.

Their time together was short, but it's more than I've ever had. Even if you add up all the times they visited, it doesn't equal three years. Still, my mother chose me. I can't be bitter about what could have been, especially when what
could have been
could have been a hell of a lot worse.

The wish I've made on every birthday, on every shooting star, on every eyelash since I can remember, the wish I thought could never come true, has. I have the family I've always wanted.