Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom (32 page)

Just then the man in the ravine called out, “Danya! Is that you? I can hear you. Come down. I miss you. Please, come down!”

The man’s voice shook as he pleaded with the night sky, and Zerai’s resolve grew both sharper and yet more brittle. Here was proof that the man was a djinn in league with the woman who attacked Shivala, and yet he didn’t sound like a diabolical monster. He sounded sad, and lonely.

“Danya!” he cried.

Zerai grimaced. The smell of burnt crab meat slowly filled his nostrils, threatening to choke him. He blasted the air from his nose. “Are you sure you can handle him alone? These aren’t normal djinn, or normal clerics.”

“Thank you for the reminder. I’ll be fine.” She turned and dashed away in a blur of shadows and dust, sending a wave of shimmering frost into the air behind her.

Zerai hesitated a moment, then put away his sword and began gathering rocks, the heaviest he could lift, and placed them in a row along the edge of the top of the ravine, all ready to be pushed over the brink at a moment’s notice. But then he heard voices echoing up from below, and he flattened himself on the ground to listen.

“…name is Samira Nerash,” she was saying. “Who are you?”

“Kadir,” he said warily. “I don’t know you.”

“Of course not. I’ve only just arrived,” she said cryptically.

His head jerked sharply to the side. “Where did you come from? Did Danya send you? Is she okay? Is she coming?”

“She was delayed. Near Shivala.”

“Ugh!” The djinn called Kadir threw up his hands and grabbed his short black hair, which was spiked with flashes of coppery red and gold. “Shivala! She never listens! We’re done with Shivala. What about that is so hard for her to understand?”

The following silence seemed to be less rhetorical, as though he actually wanted Samira to tell him the answer, so after a moment she said, “I think she’s just passionate about her… work.”

“Obviously!” He folded his arms and sat down on a rock, and began violently bouncing his knee.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Just tired. And hot. And tired.” He shivered and a small jet of flame burst upward from his body, the incandescent cloud rolling in upon itself as it rose into the air and faded into smoke.

Zerai jerked back from the ravine as the smoke passed, carrying a scent of burnt flint and salt with it.

“How long have you been here?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Days. Weeks. Forever.” A second fireball erupted from him and spun upwards as it faded to cinders and smoke. The force of the blast shoved the man forward for a moment.

Zerai frowned.

It’s coming from his back. And I don’t think he’s doing it on purpose.

“Are you all right?” Samira asked calmly. “You seem to be having a little… trouble.”

“I’m fine,” he snapped as he recrossed his arms over his belly and began rocking slightly.

“I see that.” She stood in the center of the ravine, several long paces away from the man, her hands folded behind her back. “Why are you so tired?”

“Why do you think? Keeping the Sapphire Sea frozen, day and night, no sleep for weeks, who wouldn’t be tired? It was worse when I had to actually stand in the water. Moving in here helped a little. But still, it’s been weeks now…” He rubbed his eyes as yet another burning cloud burst from his back.

“Of course. Forgive me.”

“Did he send you to help?” Kadir looked up at her. “To help me? To… relieve me?”

“Yes, he did,” she said, nodding. “He said you’ve done excellent work.”

Zerai raised an eyebrow.

She’s very good at lying. Very smooth. And who is this “he” they’re talking about? Some djinn commander? Maybe even Jevad?

“Oh, finally!” Kadir stopped jittering his knee and swaying on his seat as he wiped both hands across his face and leaned against the rock wall beside him. “When? Now?”

“Yes, if you’re ready,” she said. “You can stop now. I’ll take over from here.”

The djinn man shuddered as he closed his eyes and exhaled, slumping against the wall of the ravine. “Oh, yes. Oh, finally.”

Zerai glanced to his left, as though he might see some change in the dark storms over the distant water, or feel some change in the air, but the cool sea wind continued to carry its salt scent and flurries of silvery frost.

Kadir leaned forward and convulsed in a violent fit of coughing and hacking, and when the fit passed he leaned back again with starlight shining on his sweating face as he gasped for air. He groaned like a man about to give birth, and two streams of red fire blazed from his back for a long moment.

Samira stepped back. “I thought you stopped freezing the sea. Why are you still burning up?”

“My ascension is close,” Kadir wheezed. “So close now. Danya’s too. We’re nearly ready. Ready to become more like him.”

Zerai grabbed the nearest of his rocks, ready to push it over the brink.

Ascend? Oh shit. What does that mean? Are they all turning into angels? Is that what happens when you steal the soul of an angel? And if it is… how many of these angel-djinn could there be?

Kadir cried out again, convulsing and groaning as Samira took another step back and risked a quick look up at Zerai. But their attention flew back to the anguished djinn as twin columns of red fire poured out of his back, rising and flaring in the narrow confines of the ravine, growling and purring as a thousand burning tongues tasted the night air.

Shit, it’s happening now!

Zerai shoved the largest of his stones over the edge of the cliff and watched it plummet straight down onto the djinn’s neck, but it burst into flames, vanishing in a cloud of cinders and ash before it struck the man’s flesh.

“Kadir!” Samira called out. “Can you hear me?”

The man went on groaning and wailing as he clutched his head and rocked back and forth, smacking his bare hands against the stone walls where waves of flame and frost raced up the sides of the ravine.

“Samira! Get back!” Zerai waved her off as he kicked a second stone off the ledge, only to see it incinerated in midair above the djinn’s head. The falconer squinted. He could see Kadir’s head clearly, and the short black hair streaked with bright copper was now waving around his shoulders, and it was far more copper than black now. Zerai kicked more and more stones into the ravine, though each one was smaller than the last, and each one vanished in a burst of flame and smoke before striking Kadir. “Samira!”

The djinn cleric nodded up at him and raised her hands in a defiant gesture that sent massive stone arms flying out of the stone walls toward the djinn. One by one, her stone lances smashed against Kadir’s raised arms, and while they glowed with an unnatural heat, they did not shatter. Second by second, more and more spears of rock shot out of the walls and crashed down on the wailing djinn, pinning his arms against the walls and burying his legs in the ground.

“You lied to me,” he muttered.

Samira relented as Kadir sagged in his new earthen shackles, and she called out, “Where is Ramashad? Why did you attack Shivala and why are you freezing the sea?”

Kadir slumped a bit lower, and then slowly raised his head.

Samira stepped back.

The djinn’s flaming hair hung in long red ribbons around his shoulders, and he spoke with a new voice, a strong young tenor. “Oh my. Look what you’ve done. Poor little magi. Poor little cleric. So small, so weak. But you won’t be weak for long. Come here. Come closer, little djinn girl. Let me taste you, and I will let you taste true power. Nothing so childish as the gifts of Tevad. Come here. Take my hand and share in immortality, in divinity!”

Samira regarded him with cruel, narrow eyes. But she said nothing, and did nothing.

Zerai gripped his sword and looked around for a stone large enough to kill a small angel, but there were none at hand. And then he looked back at the distant shadow of the shelter where Lamia and Nadira were waiting for him. He stepped back from the ravine. “Samira! Kill him! Now!”

The cleric reached out into the empty air and summoned the ground to rise around the djinn’s body, encasing him bit by bit in layers of earth and stone. The ravine itself groaned and keened, rumbling and shaking as more and more of the rough red rock rose up, pressed in, and crushed down, until all that remained of the djinn called Kadir was a man’s head that shone like fire and spoke with the voice of a teasing lover.

“Oh, you sad little thing, still clinging to your doctrine, to your angels on the mount?” Kadir smiled. “I’m afraid they can’t save you now. And why would you want them to? The future is racing toward us, a new future, a new world. Djinn, angel, human, magi. All of the lines between us will be swept away in my embrace. The last embrace. The only embrace this world need ever know.”

“Are you still Kadir?” she asked. “Or are you… someone else?”

“Of course I’m still Kadir,” the stranger purred. “But also so much more, now.”

“Don’t you see what’s happened?” Samira shook her head. “Stealing the angel’s soul has twisted you, turned you into a perverted echo of yourself.”

The flame-haired djinn laughed. “Is that what you think?”

The walls and buttresses of red rock that Samira had lifted and sculpted to imprison him groaned softly and shattered into a landslide of boulders, pebbles, and dust that cascaded down the sides of the ravine and pooled at the cleric’s feet. She leapt backward with the uncanny speed of a djinn, never letting the debris touch her.

Zerai swore.

Below him, Kadir stood on the broken remains of his prison with his fiery hair flying in the wind. “I know exactly who I am, little sister,” he said. “And exactly who you’ll be, very soon.”

He dashed toward her and grabbed her wrist in one hand and her neck in the other, and in both places her skin erupted in red fire. Zerai grimaced as he watched Samira struggle in his grasp, her dark hair slowly turning a bright crimson gold just like Kadir’s. The falconer grabbed his sword and scrambled down the rocky slope toward them. But he had only gone a few steps when a pair of strange writhing tendrils of loose sand rose up from the desert floor behind Kadir, and proceeded to lash him viciously across his shoulders.

After a handful of strikes that cracked louder than bullwhips, Kadir staggered and dropped Samira to the ground. She stood and backed away from him, her hair still shining like copper. Her sand lashes snapped around Kadir’s neck and waist, and hurled him away from her, suspending him high in the air.

Kadir roared as a blaze of red fire engulfed his body, transforming the sand whips instantly to glass, and shattering them, sending tiny crystalline fragments flying in every direction. He fell to his knees, one hand pressed to his throat. Then he slowly stood up, scowling at Samira, and said, “It would seem I’m not quite ready for… this. Pity, but no matter. We’ll just have to do this again some other time.”

A column of red flame roared up from the earth at Kadir’s feet, and the djinn rocketed into the night sky like a streak of angry fire slicing across the sea of stars. Zerai watched the tiny red needle lance toward the east until it finally faded from sight, and when he looked down again he found Samira standing beside him.

“You all right?”

She nodded as her hair slowly began to fade back to its natural black sheen.

“So,” he grunted. “Djinn who think they’re angels. That’s new.”

“He really did change. It was more than his hair, more than his voice. I could feel it.” Samira paused to look up at the sky again. “He’s much stronger than me now, only he was… dazed? Off balance? Whatever it was, it will probably pass soon. An effect of the change. And when he’s had time to recover, I don’t know if I’ll be able to kill him.”

“Perfect.” Zerai shook his head. “Just perfect.”

“That must have been what was happening to Danya,” she mused. “Fortunately, we found her in time. But Jevad is still out there. That makes two of them.”

“Two?” Zerai raised an incredulous eyebrow. “They’re from Ramashad, remember? The city of evil djinn? For all we know, there are ten thousand of those monsters getting their red-haired blessings tonight.” He paused to sigh and lower his voice. “This could be the end. Right here, right now. The end of everything. They’ll fly across the world like a storm, crushing everything in their path and burning everything in their wake. I doubt the angels at Shivala will even slow them down.”

She peered at him. “Are you finished feeling sorry for yourself?”

“Go to hell! At least you have a future in their new world order. It sounds like they’ll be recruiting you, or enslaving you, to be like them. Must be nice to have that sense of security during the end times.” Zerai closed his eyes and leaned his head back against a cold, sharp rock as all his plans for a home and a life with Nadira vanished into piles of rubble and ash beneath the fiery wings of a legion of angel-djinn warriors.

There’ll be no way to run, nowhere to hide, and no hope of defense. Just slavery, torture, and death, if the attack on Shivala is any sign of things to come. With an emphasis on death, I’m guessing.

He opened his eyes to see Samira still standing over him, staring at the sky. “Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll get used to the red hair,” he muttered.

“Have you always been such a coward?” she asked the stars.

“I’m no coward!” he roared. He pushed himself up to his feet as his words echoed down the ravine and across the dunes. “When soldiers killed my family, I survived. When demons ate my friends, I fought back. And when there was no hope for Tigara, I brought the clerics to save Raziel. I’m not afraid of anything!”

He was shouting into her face, letting flecks of spittle fly at her cheek. But he kept his hands still at his sides, and then he stepped back sharply, not so much out of fear of her response as from a sudden disgust with himself.

Zerai blinked and swallowed. “But this isn’t like that. This isn’t men, or demons, or even war. This is the raw power of heaven, perverted and stolen by genocidal monsters. I can’t stop them. All I have is an old sword, a bird, and these two hands. That’s all!” He paused. “And it’s not enough. Not nearly.”