Ashes and Flame by Aiden Bates & Jill Haven

Author:Aiden Bates & Jill Haven
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2020-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

14

Daniel

“So,” Laleh said lightly when she brought tea to the frankly stunning sitting room at the back of her house, “let us start with your entanglement with one of my Shaitan cousins. How did you come to be the target of one of them?”

I held the warm little cup with both hands, which had gone clammy the moment she seemed to realize what I carried with me. That she didn’t want to know about that first seemed deceptively relieving. “I got involved with this group,” I said softly. “The leader, Ivan Baranov, had this policy about commitment. When I finally decided to work with him, and the rest of them, in the hope that maybe one day I’d be able to fix my magic, I, ah… I agreed to let him take a sliver of my soul. He said it was so that we would all be connected, always. That if something happened to one of us, he’d be able to find us and bring us back. Then he died. Which we didn’t think was that big a deal, but then he didn’t return and… for a while we just carried on without him. We believed it was just a matter of time.”

Laleh gave a soft, thoughtful sound, her keen eyes impassive as she pursed her lips. “So, this bit of soul was given to the djinn who pursues you. You betrayed your… congregation?”

“More like a cult,” I said. “But, yeah. I mean I didn’t intend to. There was an accident. My magic—I glitched, and some of them died. The ones that were supposed to be watching over me, making sure that I completed my work for Ivan. I… panicked. And by then, I didn’t feel right about being there. So I ran. And I’ve been running ever since. The first time the djinn came for me was three years ago.”

She lifted one of those perfect dark eyebrows slowly. “Three years. Shaitan are relentless, and clever, and very powerful. How did you evade this one for so long?”

I cleared my throat and let one of my hands drift to my bag and the book. “I picked up a few tricks. Learned. Did what I could, and kept moving.”

“Remarkable,” she breathed. And then she got around to the matter that I somehow knew she was far more interested in. “You can read the book, then?”

I shrugged. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“The book isn’t the thing we’re here about,” Rez pointed out, his tone only barely managing to be polite even if his words really weren’t.

Laleh didn’t seem to notice. “On the contrary,” she mused. “It is not Daniel that this djinn truly seeks. It is the book, most assuredly. He simply possesses it. I believe that the book is precisely what you are here about, my friend. Even if my arts could break the connection that my cousin possesses, they will not simply stop pursuing the book. It is of immeasurable value. No one with any awareness of that value would ever stop seeking it.

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