“So, my daughter is dead.” The harpy elder picks up her teacup and stares into the liquid inside. “I always did tell her to be careful what she wished for.”
For all the words I have at my disposal, I’ve never found the right ones for grief. “I’m sorry. She didn’t deserve what happened to her.”
“No.” She sets the cup down. “She didn’t. But then, most people don’t.” Her eyes move to the child asleep on the cushion in the corner. “She’ll ask questions when she wakes up. I don’t know what to tell her yet.”
“Tell her the truth. When she’s ready for it.”
The elder looks at me for a long moment. Her eyes are old enough to have seen everything, though perhaps not quite as old as mine. “You didn’t have to bring her here yourself. Why did you?”
The honest answer has Iris at the center of it, and that’s not something I’m going to say in this room. “It needed to be done,” I tell her. “And I was the only one who could do it.”
She studies me for another moment, then nods. It isn’t forgiveness or absolution. It’s acknowledgement—that I came, that I brought the orphaned child, that I sat here and drank her tea. It’s enough.
I set the cup down and take my leave. On the landing outside her door, the eastern quarter spreads out below. The market stalls are closed, and a pair of naga are coiling together in an alleyway. It’s an ordinary night. I stand in it for a moment longer than I need to, and then I let the shadows claim me.
The library light is on when I return to the penthouse. I make my way there and stop in the doorway.
Iris is kneeling on the floor, leaning over an ancient scroll. She’s tracing the lines on the weathered parchment with almost reverent care, a respect so few people show to ancient things.
I lean against the doorframe and take the time to look at her. At this point, she shouldn’t be able to surprise me any longer, but she does. “This scroll… It’s priceless,” she murmurs.
She’s the one who’s priceless, but I can never tell her that. “It’s eight hundred years old, yes. You have a good eye, Iris.”
Her eyes shoot up to me, but she doesn’t immediately stand. “Rakan.” The anger from earlier is still there, but something else surfaces first. “You came back. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to mess with something valuable.”
“Of course I came back. I wanted to make sure you were comfortable.” Perhaps she might prefer it if I abandoned her, but I’m just not willing to take the chance. “And you can mess with the scroll as much as you like,” I belatedly finish. “It’s only an object.”
She looks down at the scroll, then her eyes come back up to mine. “An object. Just like I’m only a barista?”
“Yes and no.” I raise my hand and the scroll floats away, up into my palm. I close my fist around it. Fire erupts from my fingertips, and in an instant, eight hundred years of history become ash on the floor. “You see? Fragile. A flick of my fingers and it vanishes. In some ways, I suppose you were right.”
She goes pale but doesn’t look away. That particular stubbornness has been my undoing since the morning we first met.
I twist my wrist and the scroll settles back into my palm, intact, every character preserved. “But it’s something material. Not alive. That’s why it’s in my keeping. The sultan who foundit knew I could preserve it, no matter what. Centuries pass. Civilizations end. The scroll remains.”
“That must be reassuring, then,” she says, pushing her glasses up her nose.
“Not as much as you’d think.” The scroll is warm in my palm, but that brings me little comfort. “Humans are nowhere near as easy to preserve.”
“I don’t need you to preserve me, Rakan,” Iris replies, narrowing her eyes at me.
“Of course you do. You have no idea what you’re really dealing with.”
“Because you’re lying to me,” she snaps back, shooting to her feet. “You’ve always been lying to me. Pretending to be someone you’re not.”
“You want the truth?” I take a step closer. She doesn’t move back. “You have it. You always had. I’m exactly the person you saw in The Daily Grind.”
“Then why—?”
“Because you were the only one in this city who looked at me like I was simply a man in a room.” I close the remaining distance between us. She finally stumbles back, into a library shelf. “I kept coming back for that. Not the coffee.”
Iris doesn’t reply. Her hand lands on my chest, her fingers spread flat against the fabric. And at that moment, the last of my restraint gives way.
When I brought her here, I told myself I wouldn’t push her. But I am a djinn, and not truly a creature of restraint.
I kiss her, and she kisses me back.
10
