Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Kit
The silence woke me.
When I came to with my head resting on Lienna’s shoulder in the back seat of our taxi, neither she nor our driver, Suleiman, was speaking.
My shallow slumber had been punctuated by bouts of semi-consciousness filled with the friendly chatter between them, but now Lienna was focused on her phone’s navigation app and Suleiman was more silent than a library in A Quiet Place.
From my position, I could only see half of him, but there was a certain tautness to his demeanor—he gripped the steering wheel like a vise and his jaw seemed wired shut.
That was odd, considering how gregarious he’d been in the roughly six seconds I’d spoken with him before sleep had pulled me under like a kraken swallowing its prey.
Had he and Lienna gotten into an awkward convo-killing argument?
She appeared relaxed. Only our driver was tense, and that made me tense.
Focusing on his mind, I listened in on his thoughts—for about half a second since he was thinking all those thoughts in Arabic.
I switched psychic lenses, searching for clues, but he didn’t have the anticipation or villainous vibes I would expect from a Consilium operative luring us into a trap.
Nor did he have an inkling of magic, unless my clairsentience really sucked when I was half-awake.
All I could sense from our driver was vague unease.
Weird.
I unfurled from my slouchy siesta posture. “Where are we?”
Only when I spoke did I realize I had a severe case of dehydrated cotton mouth, and my question came out in a raspy hack.
“Almost there,” Lienna said as I scrambled for my water bottle.
I gulped the unpleasantly warm and plastic-flavored liquid and peered through the car windows.
On my side, there wasn’t much other than rocky, sandy terrain.
I looked past Lienna through her window to find a rather large, extremely old rampart that could have passed as a natural cliff face to my bleary-eyed vision if it hadn’t been for its level top.
That must be the iconic wall, built over five hundred years ago, that surrounded the ancient oasis city of Bahla. Apparently I’d dozed for most of the two-and-a-half-hour ride from Muscat.
The highway pulled us away from the old wall, past a mosque, and toward a traffic circle. It was pretty clear that the first exit would take us into the city of Bahla, but Suleiman skipped that turn, electing to pull into a public parking lot on the side of the road.
“Why are we stopping?” I asked, alarm bells going off in my perpetually paranoid brain.
Lienna pocketed her phone. “Suleiman told me he won’t drive into the city. This is as far as he goes.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“I have never been inside Bahla,” the driver stated as the car came to a halt. “That will not change today.”
Well, that warranted a whole host of follow-up questions. Was there some kind of longstanding feud between Bahla and Muscat that we didn’t know about? Was he the victim of a geographical hex? Had he been banned from ever setting foot inside the city walls?
Before I could pose any of those queries, he hopped out of the car, circled around the nose, and opened Lienna’s door with the utmost courtesy. As I clambered out and slung my backpack onto my shoulders, Suleiman hustled back around to the driver’s side.
“It’s a nice day for a walk,” he told me as he got behind the wheel. “It’s not too hot, even for American tourists.”
“I’m Canadian,” I protested.
That didn’t seem to matter. Suleiman shut his door, put the car in reverse, and cracked his window.
“Have a good time,” he added amiably. “But watch out for the jinn.”
Then he backed out of the parking stall, waved, and sped off like a Mad Max stuntman, spitting up dust and rocks in the wake of his orange-and-white cab.
I pivoted to face Lienna, who was adjusting her satchel around her backpack straps. “What was that all about?”
“It is pretty nice out, isn’t it?” she observed.
Okay, sure, it was late November, so the Omani desert was pleasantly warm instead of flesh-melting-off-your-bones hot, but the weather wasn’t among the top ten concerns on my “You’re a Wanted Fugitive So Try Not to Die” list.
“I mean the part where that dude wouldn’t even drive through the city and then ominously warned us about jinn,” I clarified.
“It wasn’t that ominous.” She walked toward the edge of the parking lot. “Maybe he believes the myths about this place.”
I slipped on my sunglasses to combat the morning sun, then took a couple of quick steps to catch up to her. “Don’t just casually mention mythology and walk away.”
“I read up on it during the drive,” she said in a classic display of the Type-A research she brought to all our missions.
“Legend has it that jinn built the wall surrounding the city in a single night. There are also tales of ghosts haunting the city, men turning into donkeys, a flying mosque, and cursed tree branches that make people disappear.”
Scratch that. This was Type-A creepiness. Maybe some research was best left de-searched.
“Oh, and hyenas with mouths of fire that roam the desert,” she added. “There are a ton of local stories and superstitions.”
Logically, I knew that many myths and superstitions were just that. But if my experiences as a mythic had taught me anything, it was that the scarier something sounded, the likelier it was to have its roots buried deep in magical history.
I kept my eyes peeled as we walked along the edge of the highway before traversing a short bridge that arched over a dried-up riverbed. A minute later, we were inside Bahla proper.
The city had a distinct two-tone color palette: the pervasive tan of the mud-brick buildings, which complemented the bone-dry climate nicely, and the silvery-green hue of the dense date palm fronds that filled the gaps between structures.
“Relax, Kit,” Lienna said softly. “We aren’t going to round a corner and come face to face with a jinni.”
I tried to tone down my paranoid scanning of the street. “Honestly, I’m a tad more concerned about bounty hunters, sandworms, or demons than jinn.”
As we crossed to the shady side of the street, Lienna slipped her hand into mine. I curled our fingers together. With our backpacks, wide-brimmed hats, and sunscreen-coated skin, we looked like an average tourist couple on a day trip. Nothing to see here, folks.
“There are only two guilds in Bahla,” she informed me, “and neither has any licensed bounty hunters or demon contractors. I don’t think we’ll run into either while we’re here.”
That was mildly comforting, but I still felt nervous. Maybe it was the exhaustion. Or the stress of being the most wanted man in the mythic world. Or this morning’s revelation about Lienna’s DOA bounty. Whatever it was, I was more on edge than usual.
We ambled past storefronts with signs in both Arabic and English—a bicycle repair shop, a textiles and perfumes outlet, the Bahla branch of a national bank—and it almost felt like we were actual tourists on an actual holiday. Almost.
Being midmorning on a weekday, the locals were out and about.
Both the men in their white ankle-length dishdashas and the women in their black abaya cloaks offered us friendly waves and smiles, and we returned them, playing the role of vacationing Westerners.
We’d arrived at the beginning of tourist season—the cooler months being more inviting to sightseers—but the streets weren’t exactly brimming with globetrotting excursionists; we must’ve left them all behind in Muscat.
There was a pleasant, unhurried energy in the air.
Even my constant, low-level clairsentience, which I kept running in the background of my brain, like the data-gathering software tech giants swear isn’t on every device they make, didn’t pick up anything concerning.
It was the antithesis of Vancouver’s damp, aloof, rushed atmosphere.
“How much farther?” I asked, doing my best not to sound like a toddler on a road trip.
Lienna checked her phone. “A half-hour walk or so. The address we got is up north.”
I was about to make a grumbling declaration of hunger—one of the downsides of the B&E lifestyle was a serious lack of continental breakfasts—when I caught a furtive shadow out of the corner of my eye.
Something tall and impossibly thin loomed in a doorway, with spindly arms and fingers that dragged at the ground.
I twisted my neck to stare at the doorway—and blinked. It wasn’t a dark, Signs-esque alien. It was just a broom leaning against the doorframe.
“I need a heavy dose of caffeine, stat,” I groaned.
“There are some cafés on the way. I’m sure we can pick you up a Sleepy Kit Special somewhere.”
Oh, hell yes. My brain thirsted for its bitter brain fuel. Pour me a steaming heap of high-octane jitter juice and watch me ascend from droopy-eyed zombie to actual functioning human.
As I contemplated whether there was a designated coffee deity to whom I could pledge my eternal soul, the constant flow of pedestrians shifted, and across the street, I glimpsed the pasty complexion of a fellow sufferer of northern winters.
The woman was standing in front of a bakery, her face pointed my way before she turned her attention to the colorful woven beach bag on her shoulder.
Alarm zinged through me, and it took me a moment to realize why.
“Do you see that woman across the street?” I whispered. “The tallish one with a bandana.”
Lienna gave the crowd opposite us a casual glance as we ambled along. “Yeah, what about her?”
“I can’t sense her.”
“Huh?”
“I can see her, but I can’t sense her. She’s invisible to my clairsentience.”
The woman’s hair, somewhere between blond and brown, was tied in a messy bun above her bandana, and her black tank top and extra baggy blue jeans looked super comfy. If not for her invisible mind, she’d be indistinguishable from a tourist.