Titan and Tradeis perhaps the most well-known business publication in the world. Rakan’s face takes up most of the cover, composed and too perfect to be real. The pull quote sits just below his jaw.“Three thousand years teaches you that very little requires urgency.”
I stand there for a moment longer than I mean to. The man on that cover has never rushed for anything in his life, or so the quote would have you believe. The man from the night before chose not to rush. But was that all a lie?
Before I can tear myself away from the magazine stand, a scream comes from the alley to my left. “No, please! Have mercy!”
There’s no time for thought. Instinctively, I rush in the direction of the sound. My glasses fog up, and I walk straight into a wall of smoke.
Normal smoke disperses. This clings to me like it’s alive.You don’t belong here,it seems to say. The reasonable part of me agrees with it entirely. But the scream is still echoing against the bricks. And I’m terribly familiar with this type of smoke. What is happening?
I take two steps in. At Rakan’s will, the street sounds cut off the exact same way the club music vanished last night. I swallow around the knot in my throat. I want to call out Rakan’s name, but for whatever reason, I can’t bring myself to.
The light in here is wrong. Shapes are visible but unclear, and each step deeper feels like another mistake. One I can’t erase with Nullivex.
The first thing to become clear is the wing. It’s bent at an unnatural angle that makes me flinch. Even without wings of my own, I can tell that must hurt.
The wing’s owner comes into focus slowly. She appears to be some kind of harpy. Maybe a hybrid of sorts, because she doesn’t look like any harpy I’ve seen in the coffee line. Her wingspan is much grander, and her face looks almost… sculpted. It’s symmetrical in a way that living faces aren’t—beautiful, yet not. There’s something wrong with it that I can’t name. But it’s definitely not the face of a harpy.
The woman hasn’t noticed me. Her eyes remain fixed on a certain dark point in the smoke. “Please. Have mercy. I know I made a mistake. I’ll do better.”
A dark silhouette steps up to the fallen harpy. He stands with his back to me, completely still, while the smoke seems to move around him. His obsidian horns curl over his head in a way that’s nauseatingly familiar.
He doesn’t answer her, and that silence is a condemnation in itself. The harpy knows that, too. She tries to push herself upright, her broken wing scraping against the cobblestones. “I didn’t understand what I was asking for. I beg of you. I have a daughter.”
The man tilts his head at her, as if regarding something he deems beneath him. “You had a daughter when you made the wish, and it changed nothing,” he says.
The voice is the same one that murmured endearments in my ear just last night. Suddenly, I’m aware of just how vulnerable I am, standing like this out in the open.
To my left, half-hidden in the smoke, there’s a dumpster. I duck behind it and pray no one will see me.
Outside my hiding place, the harpy is still trying to defend herself. “I only wanted… I didn’t know it would—”
“You knew.” The man cuts her off. “You were well aware of what you wanted and what it meant. The ignorance you’re claiming now does you no favors. And it will not save you.”
The harpy shoots to her feet and snarls, her beautiful face twisted into something grotesque. Perhaps she means to attack him, to resort to violence now that words haven’t worked. But in a fight, she doesn’t have a chance.
When the fire comes, it’s blue, the color of something deep underwater. Impossibly, it’s hot and cold at the same time. It carries with it the scent of anger, sand, and ancient spices. I cover my mouth to keep myself from screaming.
The harpy screams in my stead. Her screech ricochets off the brownstone walls like a bullet, so loud it’s deafening. The fire engulfs her in seconds, but she doesn’t immediately burn up.
The air fills with the scent of burning flesh and burned feathers. And throughout it all, the man—the djinn—is standing there, watching.
And then it’s over, and the harpy is completely gone. There’s a scorch mark on the cobblestones where she was, and nothing else. Not her bones. Not even her ashes.
The djinn—Rakan, I realize with a choked sob—stands in the smoke, staring at the mark. It’s almost as if he’s admiring his handiwork. He murmurs something under his breath that I don’t understand, then vanishes.
I stay behind the dumpster, still frozen.
I want to say it’s solely because of horror. After all, I just watched someone get violently murdered. But that’s not the thing that hurts the most.
The smell of the smoke still clings to the back of my throat, almost more suffocating than the stench of the dead harpy. Last night, he called me a diversion, and I thought that was terrible. But this… This must be his true face.
I’ve never seen the blue fire before, but that doesn’t mean anything. Perhaps that’s something he saves for special occasions or for moments when he’s feeling particularly cruel.
“You’re wrong,”a part of me protests.“This is Rakan you’re thinking about. He wouldn’t kill anyone.”
Except he obviously would. And besides, what would I know about Rakan’s character? I slept with him once and made him coffee for a few weeks. That doesn’t exactly make me an authority on his morals.
I can’t understand anything anymore, but the scorch mark on the cobblestones taunts me. The harpy said she had a daughter. Somewhere in this city, there’s a child who’s going to wonder where her mother is.
