You couldn’t have done anything else,I think.No. That isn’t the point.
The smoke shifts. The Iris in it scatters and dissolves, and a threatening figure steps into the space she left behind. In some ways, the silhouette looks just like me. But the angles are sharper, and the darkness deeper. And through the smoke, two bright points of cold fire shine like beacons.
I stare straight at them, at the eyes that had once been just like mine. “So you’re back, Kasim.”
8
The Loose End
Iris
The police detective didn’t call. The nice woman at the station promised they’d look into my claims and get back to me. I should have known better than to believe her.
I pace through my living room and struggle not to cry.
The apartment is three hundred square feet of peeling paint and secondhand furniture. There’s a kitchen the size of a closet and a window that looks out onto the brick wall of the building next door. The futon cost me eighty dollars at a garage sale. The bookshelf is a pile of milk crates. Camille once stood in the middle of all of it and told me it had character.
Camille also told me to get out more and guided me straight into the arms of Rakan al-Rashid. Who is a murderer. And I can’t call her because it would put her at risk, too.
“This is a disaster,” I whisper. “I never had a chance.”
The worst part isn’t being scared. I’ve been scared before, plenty of times. That I wouldn’t make rent in an expensive city, that I’d fail in my career, that I’d never be good enough. No, fear isn’t my problem. It’s just that my hands won’t stop remembering what his skin felt like. I can still feel his heat, his taste, his touch, and I’m furious at myself for that.
I try to line up my options the way I would approach any other problem—practically, in order, without panicking. Option one: wait for the detective to call back. Option two: go back to the station in person. Option three: find a lawyer, explain what I saw, and figure out what protections exist for human witnesses in monster cases. These are all reasonable things. These are all things a person with a functioning brain would do.
My brain keeps sliding back to his hands on my waist in the dark.
The memory should turn my stomach. Those hands summoned the fire that killed an innocent woman. Instead, a traitorous part of me clings to the memory and still craves his touch.
“I’m such an idiot,” I hiss under my breath.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” a familiar voice says from behind me. “Perhaps you’re far too clever for your own good.”
I spin around so fast I knock a book off the milk-crate shelf. Rakan is standing in the middle of my living room, dressed in one of his too-expensive, ridiculous suits.
For a few moments I just stare at him, frozen. He tilts his head at me, an almost gentle, barely-there gesture. Then my glasses start to fog up. Smoke drifts around his feet, dark and ominous. Just like that, I snap out of my trance. Stumbling back, I scream and reach for the shelf.
I don’t own a lot of books, but the ones I do are heavy enough to be used for weight training. I pick the first one up and throw it at him. The book hits his chest with a crack and falls to the floor. The cover flips open to an illustration of an ancient European warlord.
Rakan doesn’t move. He doesn’t look at it. He keeps his eyes on me the entire time, patient and completely still.
It is the exact same treatment the harpy received before she went up in flames. Somehow, that strikes me as particularly undignified. Surely, I’m worth at least a little more emotion than a stranger.
I know I’m being stupid and that my feelings make no sense. But even so, I can’t help but straighten my back and glare at him. “Are you going to kill me too? Now that you have no use for me?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. The smoke at his feet stills, almost as if I had cast a spell on him. It would only be fair. After all, some days it feels like he cast a spell on me.
“I have no interest in your death,” he finally says. “But there are others who do.”
I stare at him. Whatever I expected him to say, it wasn’t that. He appeared out of nowhere in my apartment, presumably to tell me I’m in danger. But I know what I saw. If there’s anyone I’m in danger from, it’s him.
“You were in that alley,” I snarl at him. “I know what your power feels like. I recognized it.”
“What you recognized was a djinn.” He holds my gaze. “Not which one. The signature of my kind reads the same to anyone who doesn’t know the difference.”
“I saw you,” I insist, shaking my head. “I heard you talking.”
He shoots me an almost self-deprecating smile. “I’m flattered to think I’m unique, but that isn’t remotely the case.”
