Especially because I knew I was about to consume them.
“Have you ever tried them yourself?”
Her head snapped up. “No. Absolutely not. It wasn’t allowed.”
“Then how do you know the right amounts?”
She swallowed thickly. “As an apprentice we trained in all types ofblends for healers of the unseen. Because my blends were so effective, Souma graduated me to… more intense use of the magic.”
“Such as?”
“Torture. Possession. Transfiguration. The same powers the djinn themselves might harbor.”
I moved closer to the seeds, daring to let my fingers dip again toward their cool glossy exterior. As soon as my skin touched the smooth surface of the seeds, I felt a growing frisson of pressure. Those same soft whispers sounded from the boulders surrounding us, and I started.
“Do you hear that?”
The whispers grew louder, like the stones themselves were speaking to me, like the earth had been cleaved in two and begun talking.
And that one word rose again, above the rest, an incantation and warning all at once.
Revenge.
“Yes,” I whispered back.
A face appeared before me, eyes black, face gaunt. I reared back, a cry wrenching from my throat. I knew that face, and had thought about seeing it again every day for a year.
But it was not as I remembered. Instead of his warm crooked smile, he was a festering body, a decomposing ghoul, come to snatch me away.
My father.
The warm grip of Noor’s hands yanked me back to the present as she heaved me away from the seeds.
“Dani!”
I blinked twice, and then looked at her, my chest feeling as if it were going to explode. I couldn’t wipe away the image of my father’s ragged face staring back at me, an apparition come to haunt me. “What was that?”
Noor stared at me. “We aren’t letting you touch these again. Not without the right dose from me.”
“You said you had to consume them for it to work.” I shook my head to clear it. “All I did was touch them.” I thought about what had happened in the cave, but that felt too unbelievable to explain.
“What did you see?” Noor asked, cocking her head. “You looked… vacant for a moment. I’ve never seen it do that before, influence someone just by touching it.”
“I saw…” I licked my dry lips, trying to make sense of exactly what had happened.
But I couldn’t form the words to tell her about my father’s rotting corpse.
A shudder rippled through me. “It doesn’t really matter. Do you think it will happen again?”
“I have no idea, usually the healers of the unseen consume the blended zoraat before knitting together bones and the like. They transfigure the human body with the power they ingest.” She watched me a moment more. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
I wasn’t sure exactly which part she was asking me about—the revenge? Consuming zoraat and possessing myself with djinn magic? But I pushed that gaunt, wretched image of my father from my mind, and thought instead of my baba’s rough hands working his smelt, his deep laugh as I told him a joke I’d heard from the palace guards, or the way he always hiccupped after taking a deep sip of chai. The heat of rage filled my chest once more, replacing the fear of his ghoulish face, replacing that unsettling voice whispering from all directions.
My father would still be here if it wasn’t for the ones who had taken him from me.
“Yes. I’m sure. I want to do this.”
Noor nodded. “Let’s get to work, then.”
