Djinn Justice (The Collegium Book 2) (14 page)

When he felt like it, Fay amended, recalling the villager’s comments about Victor’s refusal to answer the radio.

“I won’t go in.” As they approached the front step, the rogue mage attempted to dig in her heels. Given Victor’s greater strength and relentless forward progress, it had no effect. “Let me go.”

“As you would have let me go?” Victor growled.

“That was different.
He
needs you.”

Fay controlled the impulse to question the identity of that “he”. Currently, the woman could lie. Give Fay a few minutes and that would change. She hated compulsion spells, but a truth spell would ensure that the answers she got wouldn’t have to be sieved for their veracity.

“Do you have salt?” she asked Victor.

“No!” The woman pulled back against Victor’s hold.

He opened the front door and pushed her through. “Salt is in the smokehouse. I will bring you a sack.” He tramped out, leaving the women alone.

The rogue mage hugged her arms around herself, looking forlorn and resentful. Beaten. She huddled just inside the door.

The one room living space was dim, the windows small, the walls covered in prints and maps above a large worktable with computer equipment claiming half of it. A long sofa against one wall had a blanket folded over an arm and a television opposite. The room was dominated by a central woodstove, unlit.

“I know who you are.” The woman looked at Fay through the tangle of her long black hair. “You are the false heir’s lover.”

The nape of Fay’s neck tingled. No one had ever, in her hearing, as much as alluded to any challenge to Steve’s right to inherit the Suzerainty. But command of the weres might be a position coveted by some—if they didn’t realize that the authority rested on the approval of a capricious djinn.

On the other hand, the woman could be playing games. Fay couldn’t believe a word she said until the truth spell lit.

Keeping a distance between them, Fay waited for Victor’s return.

A sink, cupboards and a table occupied a quarter of the space. His kitchen. It was spotless, evidence of an organized personality.

He returned with a canvas bag of salt.

“Watch her, please.” A nod of Fay’s head indicated the mage. Then she turned her attention to the amulet she held. Quite apart from the dream essences leaking from it, its powering spell had warped the smooth pattern of magic. It was unstable and skin-crawlingly wrong, and it evidently didn’t need Narelle’s magic to sustain itself since she wore the magic-sucking manacles. They was self-maintaining. Fay would have felt happier slipping a live grenade into her pocket than this.

If she wrapped it in a containment spell, she risked severing the enslaved weres’ links to their dream essences. If she didn’t contain it somehow, it could simply destabilize, taking her and anyone near her with it in a magical explosion.

“It’s a mess,” she said aloud, but to herself.

“It works.” The rogue mage was defensive. “No one else managed to magick weres.”

“I think there could be a good reason for that,” Fay said. She wove a loose mesh of magic around the amulet and floated it up to the ceiling. It was the best she could do for now, limiting the distraction of the amulet, while she questioned its maker. “But first, let’s find out what you’ve done.”

Fay poured a thin line of salt to form a circle on the wooden floor of Victor’s house, in the empty space near the entry.

The rogue mage watched from her position slightly further inside. She rubbed at her wrist where the gold thread of the magic manacle sat immovably. “What are you doing? Are you going to hurt me?”

Victor answered. “Her? No. Me? If you try to escape, if you give me any excuse, yes. You came to my home with magic and evil intent. It is why the warding kept you out. I have the right to kill you.”

Cold, of the emotional rather than physical kind, stiffened Fay’s spine. The menace in Victor’s voice sounded genuine, not assumed to frighten the rogue mage into compliance. If Fay wasn’t very careful, her witness would be taken from her—or rather, she’d have to fight the tiger-were for her.

“All right.” She put the remaining half bag of salt against the wall. “Step into the circle, please.”

The rogue mage stare wildly from Victor to Fay and back to Victor. The promise of death was in his eyes. Discretion won out. The woman stepped over the line of salt and into the circle. She cried out in shock.

“Do you recognize the spell?” Fay asked. A trainee Collegium guardian would, but this woman’s magic was unstable, suggesting poor teaching underlying the added burden of the unnatural magic she’d attempted.

“No. It pinches.”

Fay nodded. As part of her training, she’d been ordered to lower her personal wards—too strong for her teachers to defeat—and experience the sensation of a truth spell. The exercise had been a semi-success. Fay had broken the truth spell when she’d refused to answer a question as to her personal relationships. Steve was her first lover, but she’d had a couple of typical teenage crushes and been asked out by a few mages. Basically, she’d objected to sharing her thoughts. So she’d broken the spell.

Her training had gone up a notch after shattering the truth spell. They’d called it accelerated preparation for real world action. Her teachers had preferred to unleash her on the world rather than leave her inside the Collegium, threatening their authority by her greater power. The toxic mix of envy and ambition to use her power had isolated her within the guardians.

Fay looked at the huddled woman in front of her. “What you feel is a truth spell.” Usually, Fay cast magic without props, but the salt, with its purifying properties, was a natural amplifier of a truth spell and enabled Fay to conserve her power. “You’re now locked inside the circle till I release you, and you’ll feel a compulsion to answer my questions, and answer them honestly.”

“Please, no.” For the first time, the woman met Fay’s eyes directly. Her eyes were a dark brown, glistening with tears and terror.

Fay steadied her own emotions. “You enslaved the weres, endlessly. Your suffering will be only a few minutes.” The woman didn’t have the strength to resist the spell. As quickly as Fay asked the questions, this would be over. “What is your name?”

“Narelle Fletcher.”

“Where are you from?”

“I grew up in Sydney. I live…” A shrug. Her accent was Australian. “I’ve lived in many countries. India, most recently.”

“Which city in India?”

“Mumbai.”

“What is the name of the jackal-were you are siphoning dream essences to?”

Victor hissed.

Fay ignored his shock at a fellow were’s involvement. She watched Narelle struggle a moment with the question. The truth spell overcame her resistance.

“Tarik Joshi.”

“Where did you meet him?”

“Mumbai.”

Interrogation had its own relentless tempo. “Where is he now?”

A glare, a triumphant one. “I don’t know.”

“Where was he the last time you did know his location?”

“Uganda.”

“Specifically?”

“The mountains. In the Mountains of the Moon.”

The Rwenzori Mountains.

The more specific the question, the less an answer could hide. “How did you learn of the spell for stealing dream essences.”

“Tarik showed it to me.”

“What was it written on?”

Narelle looked puzzled. “Paper.”

“In what language?”

“English.”

So the jackal-were had acquired a translation of the spell or translated it himself. Perhaps they were all wrong and it was the were, rather than the mage, who’d both initiated and owned this situation. “What is your relationship with Tarik?”

“He is my lover.” A proud straightening of her hunched posture.

“And what else? Did he teach you magic?”

“No.”

Fay had so many questions. Questions like who had trained Narelle, because that person had to be stopped. Poorly trained, damaged mages were a danger to themselves and others. But for now, Fay’s focus had to be the enslavement of the weres. “When Tarik gave you the spell for stealing dream essences, what did he ask you to do with it?”

“He asked if I could use it.”

“Did you test it on him?”

“No! We tried it on a…” Her gaze slid sideways to Victor. “On an old lion-were.”

“What happened to him?”

For nearly ten seconds Narelle withheld her answer. Then it burst out. “He died.”

“Do you know the spell is unstable?”

“It works.” That the truth-compulsion allowed her to avoid a yes or no answer suggested that much of her magic was unstable.

“Why on earth did Tarik get you to do this magic?”

“He trusts me.”

“Controls her,” Victor growled.

“Would you do anything Tarik asked of you?”

Narelle collapsed. She bounced off the invisible boundaries of the containment circle to slump in an untidy heap on the floor. “He is wonderful. He is clever and brave. I am incredibly lucky to be able to help him. So, yes, I would do anything he asked of me. I have.”

“What do you know of Tarik’s intentions? Why does he want the weres’ dream essences siphoned to him?”

Narelle put her head on her knees. “This hurts. It hurts.”

“Tell the truth and it will stop.”

Narelle glared at her. “You won’t let me go.” She stared up at the amulet suspended near the ceiling. “I hate it. It’s evil.”

“Then why did you make it, stupid girl?” Victor exclaimed.

“Tarik asked me.” And finally, answering Fay’s question. “He wants to challenge Steve Jekyll. Your lover.” A poisonous glare at Fay. “He is not the rightful heir to the Suzerainty. My Tarik should rule.”

“Bah.” Victor stalked away.

Even Fay, recently introduced to the complexities of were politics, understood more than Narelle’s naive answers. She knew why the tiger-were was so disgusted, and she knew Steve. “Steve won’t rule the weres. No one does.” The Suzerain didn’t rule, he judged, which was in its way, another form of saying, he served the weres.

“My Tarik will rule. And I’ll be beside him.”

Victor rattled pots and ran water in his kitchen.

Fay hoped he was making coffee. She needed a cup or three. Delusions, or dreams Tarik had fed this pathetic woman. Did Tarik believe that a djinn like Uncle would compliantly hand over magic to a bully? Or did Tarik not know of the djinn?

She looked at Victor in the kitchen. But no, if the djinn was a secret of Steve’s family, Fay couldn’t reveal it by asking Victor what he knew of Uncle’s existence.

But that brought to mind another interesting question. How much did Uncle know of this situation? He’d sent her and Steve in blind, claiming he hadn’t investigated, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know all of this and more.

Fay pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. She had to focus and extract what information she could from Narelle. Later, she could contemplate Uncle’s machinations. “How does Tarik intend to use the weres’ stolen dream essences to claim this ruling power?”

“Weres can’t use magic. They disrupt it, which is why spells don’t work on them.” Narelle looked up at the amulet where it hung. “Except this one. Tarik found something special. The dream essence is a person’s potential. It isn’t magic. It’s energy, possibilities, raw force.”

Victor returned with two mugs of coffee.

Fay accepted hers with a nod of thanks and inhaled the dark aroma. She sipped, finding it both scalding and bitter, restorative.

“Harvesting dream essences gives Tarik two sets of power. The first is the simplest, but he isn’t much interested in it, not yet. A person becomes susceptible to direction, like a zombie. So he could command slaves.”

Victor stood ninety degrees from Fay at the turn of the salt circle. Narelle’s gaze followed him, and she wasn’t wishing for a cup of coffee. She shrank into herself as she huddled on the ground. Victor was all too obviously ready to strike her. Possibly making coffee and holding a hot mug were attempts to control his urge to gut her. Narelle spoke so casually of enslaving people.

Yet, despite her fear of the tiger-were, the truth spell forced her to continue. “Tarik is more interested in the second power. The energy of dream essences isn’t magic, so it can affect weres. He will use it as a weapon against Steve Jekyll.”

Suddenly, Victor wasn’t the most dangerous predator in the room.

“How?” Fay set aside her mug of coffee on a windowsill.

Narelle tried to scramble away and the salt circle held her. She pushed against the invisible barrier. “Tarik didn’t tell me. Not specifics. He gave me the task of gathering the energy and feeding it to him.”

“How many more weres do you need to drain of their dream essences?” Fay asked.

“I have five more on my list.” She clamped her mouth shut.

Fay waited.

The words exploded out of Narelle. “I think Tarik has enough already. I think. He seems different. Edgier. Angry.”

Fay recalled the warning of the Ancient Egyptian spell,
the toad’s heart shrivels
. “Nastier? Unkind to you?”

The rogue mage shivered. “Yes.”

Fay looked up at the amulet, wrapped in its containing mesh of magic. Dream essences still dripped from it. If she destroyed the amulet, the dream essences that Tarik harvested for their energy, would no longer feed him. But would the enslaved weres lose their dream essences, their selves, forever?

She needed to phone Steve. She had to warn him. This wasn’t simply a djinn-given test. It was personal.

“Car,” Victor said. “Someone’s coming.”

“Do you know who this visitor is?” Fay asked Narelle.

“No.”

“Would anyone try to retrieve you?”

Narelle ducked her head. “No.”

Now, Fay heard the noise of an engine that Victor’s sharper hearing had already caught.

With a glance at her, he put his mug on the windowsill beside hers and walked out.

“We’re alike,” Narelle whispered. “You and I. We’re both blessed to serve powerful men. But mine is stronger.”

Fay stared at her. There could be no comparison. “Steve would die to protect the vulnerable. Tarik is a monster who enslaves and would kill them. You have said, yourself, that he won’t rescue you.”

“He loves me.”

Tarik preyed on the vulnerable. How vulnerable was Narelle? Even as Fay shuddered at the intrusion, at the wrongness of using the truth spell to invade Narelle’s life, she had to know. “Have men hit you, abused you, in the past?”

“Yes.” Narelle scrambled up. “Don’t ask me. Don’t!”

“Has Tarik hit you?”

Narelle flung herself at the circle’s barrier. It held. “Yes. Damn you. Yes, but he loves me.”

Fay looked away, out the window.

The driver of the just-arrived car emerged from it: the bear-were who’d driven her from Magadan spoke in a rumble to Victor. Both looked towards the house, to where she stood at the window. The bear squared his shoulders and started up the path to the house.

Fay left Narelle standing in the circle, her hands covering her face, her sobs silent. Fay walked out, onto the narrow porch.

“I had a phone call from the Suzerain,” the bear said. “Your phone’s coverage failed, here. He has a message for you. Steve Jekyll has vanished.”

Silence. The world stopped.

Fay would have said she didn’t move, but the bear took a step back. Maybe it was her expression that changed.

He spoke hurriedly. “The message I received is that Steve stepped into the Alexandrian portal and…someone snatched him away from the porter, Faroud.”

Fay turned on her heel and strode inside.

Porters, the gatekeepers and navigators of the in-between, the directionless space between portals, were incalculable. All wanted a personal portal, but not all won one. Most were inherited, conscientiously passed down through the generations as the Alexandrian one was. This left unanchored porters to roam the in-between. Some might be willing to snatch a person.

Why would any sane person snatch Steve? The whole were world and Fay—and she was the scarier proposition—would come after them.