A human witness is a manageable problem. Everybody has a price—a wish they’ve been sitting on. Something they want badly enough to trade their silence for. It is perhaps the most reliable truth I have encountered in three thousand years of existence.
“Tell me about this witness,” I say, leaning back in my chair. “What do you know about this person?”
Miller clears his throat, suddenly looking uncomfortable. “She’s a young woman. Human. No priors, no record, no obvious connections to the monster community.”
I give him an unimpressed look. I couldn’t care less about the woman’s record or lack thereof. “What does she wish for, Miller?”
“I don’t think Ms. Beckett wishes for anything but justice, if my understanding is correct.”
Beckett. I know that name. A sudden shiver runs down my spine. I feel colder than should be possible for a djinn.
The intake form is the second sheet in the folder. Miller slides it across the desk without a word, and I read the name printed at the top.
Iris Beckett. 14 Riverton Road, Apartment 4B.
The decanter on the shelf behind Miller develops a crack along its left side. The bourbon runs in a slow line down the glass and onto the shelf below. Smoke starts to gather over the floors, making the expensive threads in the carpet curl in protest.
I have no idea what Iris could have been doing on a Saturday morning in the Old Quarter. But knowing her, I suspect she has no clue what she just stumbled into. She provided the police with the information she had—my name, as it turns out.
Then she presumably went home to her apartment, believing that justice was coming. It will not. What will arrive for her is considerably worse.
Miller breaks the silence carefully. “Mr. al-Rashid, is everything all right?”
I force myself to suppress my power. The crack in the decanter stops spreading, and the smoke dissipates. “Of course,” I say, and my voice comes out level. “Everything is fine. Why would it not be?”
Miller is too clever to believe that. He’s also too human to question it. He accepts the answer because that is also part of the arrangement.
“Now, for your price,” I say before he can close the folder.
In all the years he’s worked for me, he has never been extravagant about this part. The wishes he asks for tend toward the practical and the small. The last time we met, he asked me for a limited-edition toy his son had been unable to find anywhere in the city. I produced it in two seconds, and he thanked me as if I’d done him a political favor.
He isn’t asking for something small tonight. I can see it in the way he takes a breath before he answers.
“M-my wife,” he stammers. “She was diagnosed four months ago. Stage three. The doctors have given her eight months. Please, Mr. al-Rashid. I know it’s a lot, but… Can you help her?”
It brushes against that one wall every djinn hits eventually—our inability to create life. But I’m old enough to understand subtleties. I can reach into a living thing and shift the conditions, altering a trajectory that was already set. It’s difficult in a way that most wishes are not. It requires precision rather than power, and it leaves a mark on the djinn who does it.
Miller has worked for me long enough to understand the difference between what is easy and what is possible. He’s looking at me as if he didn’t actually expect me to agree.
He has no idea just how valuable his information was to me. But that’s fine. He doesn’t need to know.
“It’ll be done,” I tell him, and I mean it completely. “Before the week is out. Your wife will live.”
Miller’s eyes go very wide. He lets out a small noise, as if I’d just caused him physical pain. Maybe I did. Hope is a painful thing, and that is exactly what djinn are exceptional at giving people.
But the hope I provide isn’t empty. Miller knows that. He straightens his back and picks up the folder. For the first time since he arrived, he looks like a man who might actually sleep tonight.
“Thank you, Mr. al-Rashid,” he says quietly. “Truly, you have no idea what this means to me.”
Actually, I just might. I don’t tell him that, only acknowledging his words with a silent nod. He takes his cue and lets himself out.
The door clicks shut behind Miller, and I stop restraining myself entirely.
The smoke pours from my skin and fills the study in seconds. Thick and dark, it swallows the edges of the room. The heat spikes, making the silk wall panels shift like something alive.
Shapes move through the smoke, impressions of my own anguish and desires. There’s Iris behind the coffee counter, the particular way she holds herself when she’s ignoring someone she has absolutely noticed. Then again, in the Obsidian Lounge, our dance, the way she looked when she reached her peak, the last moment before everything became complicated.
And now here we are. The first person in three thousand years who actually means something to me is standing directly in the path of the most dangerous thing I’ve ever failed to contain.
