My father cocked his head. “What are you looking for, beti?”
I exhaled, searching for something that made him unnatural,unfamiliar. But he felt as real as the sword in my hand. “The answer, Baba.”
My father leaned forward, his hand reaching out to touch me. My lungs contracted in my chest.
“Don’t,” I whispered, my voice cracking. His hands paused in midair, a question in his gaze. When my mother had died, my father picked up the pieces of our life. My nanu had been broken, inconsolable, and I was left with the loss of both of them. But my father was the one constant in my life, the one who loved me no matter what happened.
Finding out about his death caused my heart to crack open, the blackness spilling inside, hardening my insides with more rage than I thought imaginable. I hadn’t had him to comfort me then, when I’d most needed it.
If I felt his hand on my shoulder now, I would fall apart.
And I couldn’t fall.
Not now, not when it wasn’t just my revenge in the balance but Noor’s life as well. What if my only living friend died because of me?
The cost of my body was something I’d pay a thousand times if I knew I could get my father back. But that wasn’t what the djinn offered.
No one could bring back the dead, not even the djinn.
But if I could save someone else.If I could save Noor. What would I give for that? What would I do?
I looked up at the djinn, wrenching my gaze away from my father, as much as it pained me to do so.
I had the answer, I’d always had it, I just didn’t know if I had the strength to see it through.
“I accept the cost,” I said, my voice causing an odd vibration across the garden, like a ripple in a pond. I kept speaking before I lost the nerve, before my legs gave out and I crumpled to a heap on the ground. “But I want more than what I have.” I tightened my hands on the hilt of my sword, remembering the other lives Vahid had taken, destroyed, starved. The protestors burned in the street. Mazin’s parents,slaughtered in their village. He had systematically destroyed the kingdoms with his own greed. Now I would take them back.
“I want the power to free Noor and burn this empire to the ground. I want the emperor dead. And…” I paused, remembering a set of dark eyes I’d sworn to forget, the touch of someone I thought loved me until I knew better. “I want Mazin to watch it. All of it. I want him to know that I was the one who took it all away, before I kill him. That is my bargain, djinn.”
I dropped my sword on the ground and held out my hands, studying the lines, the scars, the bumps and ridges that made them me. On top of those scars the black spidery veins crawled up my arms from the center of my palms, like slick oil bleeding into my skin.
But my hands were still mine. Every cut and mark wasmine.
And I was about to give them to a djinn.
My stomach was a dark pit eating away at me. Everything in my body rebelled against this decision. This would give me what I wanted but take away everything I had left.
I looked back at my father, but it wasn’t his warm smile I saw anymore. It was the djinn’s, those icy teeth glittering, now razor blades in the moonlight.
“Done.”
Forty-two
I watched Thohfsa from behind the closed bazaar stall, the moonlight outlining her form like a glowing beacon in the night.
She came alone, with no sign of Noor at all. If she had at least brought Noor, I could have fought her with my sword. But I couldn’t take the chance Noor was out there waiting to be killed if Thohfsa didn’t come back for her.
“Where is she?” I let my voice slice through the night, as my sword would have. “Where is Noor?”
Thohfsa’s head jerked up, her mouth twisting into that familiar sneer. “She’s safe for now.” Her gaze swept over my face, void of the magic that had disguised me previously. “I’d forgotten how ugly you were.”
I rolled my eyes. “I want to know Noor’s still alive.”
Thohfsa chuckled. “The little worm is still alive, she’s of no value to me dead.” Then she raised her lit torch in the air and whistled low.
A light went on in a building at the edge of the bazaar. Noor was illuminated in the window, a knife pressed to her throat and a look of misery painted on her face.
Relief flooded through me that she was alive and here.
