I am alive.
And I am free.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“STOP,” I SAY.
Nardukha drops Aladdin, who crumples to the ground. I run toward the thief, dropping to my knees at his side. He groans and blinks.
“Who are you?” he whispers.
“It’s me,” I reply. “Lie still. You’re hurt.”
“Zahra?” He seems bewildered, and suddenly I understand why. I put my hands to my face and suck in a breath, for it is not the face of Roshana I wear.
It is the face of a young Gheddan queen. My face. It is rounder and softer, my hair thick with brown curls and my skin a shade darker. How strange it is to wear it again, after so many years disguising myself in other forms.
“You,” Nardukha rumbles, and I whirl to face him. There is a wariness in him that I have never seen before.
I realize I have lost something else in my strange journey through the Eye and back: my fear of him. For four thousand years even the thought of him made my soul tremble. Now I look at him, and it’s as if I see him for the first time and find him . . . lacking. What did I fear in him before? By what power did he enthrall me? Whatever it was, it is gone now, and I will never cower before him again.
“All this time,” I say, rising to my feet to stand between him and Aladdin, “you’ve been so desperate to keep me—to keep any of your jinn—from loving a human. You knew what could happen if a jinni ever loved a human, loved one enough to die for them. That’s why you went to war with Roshana—not because Roshana sought to make peace with the jinn, but because I loved her enough that I would have died for her. You couldn’t let that happen because you knew what I would become. You knew the Forbidden Wish could work both ways.”
“What you are,” he breathes, “is an abomination. A jinni without a master, without ties to Ambadya or the gods. The order exists for a reason. I do not love chaos for chaos’s sake. All things are held in balance, and you are a loose thread in the fabric of the universe. One wrong move and you could unravel everything.”
“I have seen the threads of the universe, and they are stronger than you know.”
Squaring his shoulders, his eyes flaring red, Nardukha exhales streams of black smoke. “It is called the Forbidden Wish for a reason, girl. I was not the one who named it so—creatures like you have been forbidden since the dawn of time.”
Wings flare from his shoulders, spreading the length of the alomb. Claws sprout from his fingers and fangs from his lips. His skin shifts to smoke, his clothes to flames. He is shadow wrapped in fire, and he leaps forward, set on destroying me.
I meet the Shaitan in midair, drawing conjured blades. I raise my swords, clashing with his claws in a shower of sparks.
“You can’t defeat me,” he hisses, all trace of human form gone. He thrusts his head over my crossed blades, fangs snapping.
I roll aside, clear of his teeth. This fight is not going to be determined by swords and stances. Nardukha’s attacks are primal and powerful, not to be overcome by human tactics.
I draw him away from Aladdin, who is struggling to his feet amid a crowd of creeping, hissing jinn. He draws a short knife from his boot and holds it up, a paltry defense against the claws of a ghul or the teeth of an ifreet.
“Leave him,” the Shaitan snarls, and the jinn back away.
Then he pauses a moment, his eyes intent on me. Once, I would have cowered to be the center of his terrible attention. Now, I want only to finish this. Live or die, this is a fight I cannot abandon.
I draw a deep breath and relax, my conjured blades evaporating.
I reach for my magic.
And for the first time in my long, strange life, it answers my call.
With a gasp, I sway and nearly topple, but gritting my teeth, I stand my ground and let it swell. Always the magic has come from a human, siphoned off them and into me.
This time, the power is born at my center. It is an entirely different feeling. It’s dizzying and terrifying and wholly exhilarating. It spreads like white fire through my body, filling my limbs, my head, even my hair.
I can do anything. The Shaitan formed me into the most powerful of his jinn, and now I truly know what that means.
Nardukha acts first. He sends a funnel of fire shooting toward me. The blast of heat hits me first, blowing my hair back. I react instinctively, throwing up a wall of smoke to break the flames. By then he is already on me, striking me hard in my stomach and flinging me through the alomb. I let the momentum of his blow carry me out into the open, over the side of the mountain, where I shift to smoke from the waist down and hover in midair.
The Shaitan doesn’t immediately follow. Instead, he stands at the edge of the alomb and waves a hand. The clouds around the summit part, affording a view of Parthenia below. He looks at me, then at the city, and the moment I catch on, I throw myself at him.
“No!”
But he sends me reeling with a shake of his arm. Before I can recover, he directs a finger toward the summit, and the ground splinters with a succession of deafening cracks, which begin to glow red with swelling lava. The shaking of the ground knocks Aladdin to his knees, and he retreats farther into the alomb as the mountain rumbles.
“Aladdin!” I shout. “Stay down!”
Horrified, I try to dive past Nardukha to help, but he grabs me and hurls me outward. Without pausing, he issues a command to the jinn, and they rise and begin winging toward Parthenia.
“This is the price of your treachery!” he spits out. “This is the cost of your pride!”
He will destroy Parthenia, just as he destroyed Neruby and Ghedda, all to punish me.
But this time, I can fight back.
I fly away from the mountain, which begins to spew black smoke from the cracks opening in its sides. Nardukha follows, his enormous wings of shadow fully unfurled. He rolls onto his back and brushes a hand through the air, causing the stones of the mountain to break apart and rise up, igniting one by one. These he sends arcing toward me like comets.
I dodge his flaming stones while flying farther out. The sky is filled with falling fire and trails of black smoke. I blaze through them, then turn and fling my hands wide, sending a powerful wind gusting toward him. At my thought, the wind hardens into icy fangs that whistle as they speed through the air.
Nardukha crosses his arms in front of himself, breaking the icicles. I am already moving, heady from the power that pours through me in boundless amounts. Usually there is a limit to my magic, proportionate to my master’s wish, and I must wield it judiciously. Now with a mere thought I release floodgates inside, fueled by my desires, hampered only by the limits of my own imagination. And after four thousand years of granting wishes, my imagination is the most powerful muscle I possess.