Chapter 32
Iwaited to see what the afterlife would be like. Would my relatives who passed on before me be waiting to greet me? Was I going to float as a spirit and watch as Zafir and Nadia lived out the rest of their lives?
Anxious voices talked around me, but everything was still black. I could hear Nadia foremost among them, asking question after question, and Zafir’s deep tone answering her.
Someone shook my shoulder. “Wake up, Alia.”
Blearily, I cracked my eyes open. Faces, many faces, peered at me. A woman bent to lift one of my eyelids while another patted my arm and a third, Nadia, dabbed a warm, wet cloth against the spot where the knife had plunged into my chest.
“Welcome back,” Zafir said.
I blinked. Zafir had been stabbed. He’d been gravely injured, and yet here he was, looking wholly undamaged and surrounded by six other women.
I had been killed…hadn’t I? I went to place a hand up to my forehead and, as I did so, saw that my tattoo had disappeared. I was no longer marked by the genie.
“What…what happened?”
“You won,” one of the women said. She looked by far to be the oldest of the bunch, but something about her looked strangely familiar…
“Joy?” I looked between her and the portrait on the wall. Her face was more lined now and her hands showed their age, but it was undoubtedly her. “Aren’t you… weren’t you…”
“Rahil’s first wife, yes. He stole a great many years from me to sustain his own life.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yes. You saved us.” Nadia knelt at my side, her hands clasped around mine.
I blinked slowly, still struggling to comprehend.
Zafir cleared his throat. “When you wished to be Rahil’s only master, it freed everyone else and made Rahil very vulnerable.
He lost his supply of human prey, and then was confined by the vow bond I put in place.
You threw yourself in front of me, and you were his only living master.
Without a living master and having the vow bond’s consequences for killing you, he was destroyed. He’s gone for good.”
“Too bad,” one of the former wives said, cracking her knuckles in a menacing way. “I’d have liked to punch him a few times before he died.”
“But how am I not dead then?” I asked, bewildered. I ought to feel more pain than I did. “I’m…alive, aren’t I?”
“You’re forgetting that I made a wish after getting stabbed.” Zafir’s face split into a grin.
“You…you wished that you could heal anyone.”
“Including myself.” He pulled his shirt to the side so I could see where the wound had neatly sealed itself. “I healed myself then got to you just in time.”
“So the wishes didn’t vanish along with Rahil?”
One of the other wives shook her head. “No. Just look around you. Rahil was the one who had us wish for this house, room by room, but it’s still standing.
Any wish he granted while alive will live on, but the genie is gone.
Once a spell is cast, it lives on, regardless of whether or not the caster is alive. ”
I tried to sit up and Zafir leapt to my side to assist me.
Samira was smiling from ear to ear. “I wish there was something we could do for you to show how thankful we are.”
Karis, the musical wife, shuddered as she looked around. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I just want to get out of here as fast as possible, and I’m never coming back. I’ve spent far too many years trapped here.”
All the other wives agreed, nodding their heads and expressing how they loathed every wall.
“Are you kidding?” I said with a laugh. “It’s a magical mansion that gives you anything you could ever want, and you’re turning it down? Rahil isn’t here anymore.”
Samira smiled. “Then it’s all yours, unless your sister wants it instead.”
Nadia shook her head. “No way. Alia’s the rightful owner of the entire house.”
“Keep it, along with our gratitude,” Samira told me. “You’ve earned it.”
Rahil’s former wives began to leave, already talking amongst themselves about the things they would be able to do now that they were freed, from smelling the fresh air to seeing their families again.
Within minutes they’d all vanished, leaving me alone with Nadia and Zafir.
“Now what?” Nadia asked. “Does Zafir have a job that he needs to go back for, or…”
“Funny question,” I told her, pushing myself off the floor as my strength returned. “Zafir’s actually looking to start a new life now. He sort of resigned his position and sold everything he had to come here.”
Zafir pulled me to my feet and I held on to him. “What do you say, Zafir? Do you want a tour? You’ll love the alchemy room, though you may not care now that you’re a healer.”
“I always want a place to brew potions. Besides, I can only heal people. What if I want to make some weaponized potions?”
Nadia quirked an eyebrow at him.
“I’m joking,” he hastened to say, then added in an undertone, “sort of. You never know when you might need more essence of lockjaw.”
I ran a hand over the spot where the dagger had plunged into my heart. There was no mark, no pain, nothing. I didn’t even have my old scar from Rahil’s original attack.
“You got your wish,” I told Zafir with a smile as I pulled him down the hall to the alchemy room. “And it seems that I owe you a new stock of supplies after you sold everything to bail me out of jail.”
“I was glad to do what needed to be done. I won’t miss Parliament or Julian or any of it.”
“What if Julian misses you?”
Zafir raised a dark eyebrow.
“Maybe he’ll miss ordering you around,” I amended.
“That sounds more like it.”
“If you want to be ordered around, I could take a stab at it,” I teased.
Zafir slid his arms around me from behind as I approached the alchemy room door. “The difference there,” he told me, “is that I like when you order me around.”
I opened the door to the alchemy room and looked back to see Zafir’s reaction.
I wasn’t disappointed.
His mouth fell open and his eyes widened. If anything, the room was even larger and grander than before, with more shelves of ingredients, more cauldrons simmering over fires, and a greater number of differently colored vapors wafting through the air.
He took down a clay jar and brushed his finger across the label. “Powdered hen’s teeth,” he breathed, then took the lid off, his eyes shining with enthusiasm. “This room has everything.”
“I knew you’d like it.”
“I love it,” he breathed. He reverently ran his fingers along the shelves of potion books and stared at the ingredients neatly labeled and organized.
“It seems I owe you some sea serpent mucus, as well. There are replacements over there,” I told him, pointing down the row.
“As far as I can tell, the ingredients replenish themselves, so you’ll be able to make as many potions as you want.
There are also some dragon scales, phoenix feathers, wyrmsleep and—”
Zafir cut me off by kissing me. “It’s perfect.”