Chapter 16 #2
“Oh. Um.” Caspar was quiet, and Malek wondered if he was imagining the shower they’d shared not three days ago now, and if Caspar wanted to do the same things Malek had thought about.
“Well,” Caspar continued moments later. “I’ve never died. Not to my knowledge, though certainly what I experienced just now felt like a near-death experience.”
“Because it is,” Katja said. “You were close to your trinkets, so now you can own them.”
“You keep saying that about trinkets. What do you mean?”
“Those four jewels. Every single djinn has four items to disperse their power through. All djinns are part of a family, and with each new child born into it, they are given four jewels that will eventually become the four items their power is associated with. When you get old enough to choose the objects, the jewels disappear—but yours are still jewels. That means you were born into a family of djinns, but were never activated. You were never given the choice to practice.”
“What? My parents couldn’t have been djinns.”
“Not at the time of their deaths, no,” Chaz said. “It’s likely they were ex-djinns who decided not to practice. So they buried and hid their items, hoping that they could hide their former choice from you, too.”
“I… I don’t understand,” Caspar said.
Chaz shot a look at Malek. Chaz gestured toward the photos, and though Malek didn’t want to say yes aloud, he knew looking at the crime scene was a good next step. Caspar needed to see the room his parents had died in again in order to fully understand how all of this made sense.
“You don’t remember your parents’ death, do you?” Malek asked.
“No. I told you. I go in, I smell ammonia, and then something shimmers.”
“It was their tokens. Their trinkets. The shimmering was their items being scattered as they died. And the ammonia smell is usually associated with violence between blood and object. It’s like…” Malek struggled for words.
“Guns leaving gunshot residue. Something that powerful always leaves a trail,” Katja explained. She took the file from Chaz, and with a careful, practiced smile, slid them close to Caspar. “Can I show you these pictures? They’re crime scene photos, full disclosure.”
After a while, Caspar nodded. Malek expected him to throw up again like before, or touch his temples in a horrendous headache, but he merely opened the file. He pushed his pie aside and became consumed with the photographs.
Malek knew the scene from viewing the file.
Luna and Bilal Nassir lay in the centre of the living room floor, in front of the couch, as if they’d been watching TV.
Blood soaked the furniture, the walls, and flowed outwards from their bodies like hideous rain puddles.
Both of Caspar’s parents had been stabbed, so violently that most of the wounds weren’t matched to any kind of blade.
Malek understood now that it wasn’t teeth marks like the Ghoul rumour had suggested, but marks from the kind of swords the ancient patriarchs used.
Beyond the blood staining everything, the room had been destroyed.
Bookshelves were upended, china huts were smashed, and objects were scattered all over the floor and across their lifeless bodies.
“Do you recognize anything?” Katja asked after a while. “Pay particular attention to the stuff on the floor.”
“Some,” Caspar admitted. “But not a lot, honestly.”
“Point to something you don’t recognize.”
After a moment, Caspar touched a lamp covered in red jewels that shone under the blood. Katja cross-checked it with the evidence folder and nodded. “That had spectral interference when we tested it. Can you point to something else you don’t recognize?”
Caspar pointed to a watch on his father’s wrist. On closer inspection, it seemed to be draped over the wrist—not worn around it—as if someone had set it there. Katja did another search and nodded with the same results. Three items with spectral interference later and Caspar was getting fed up.
“What does all of this mean? Spectral interference? Why have I never seen these things before?”
“We thought the spectral interference was from ghosts. But now we know that this is djinn material. Those items you don’t recognize were your parents’ token items. At one point, they used them to grant wishes, but then stored their power inside of those objects and rejected their legacy.
They did so in order to live a normal life. ”
“To get the Canadian dream?” Caspar asked with a snide stare.
“More or less, yes. They renounced their power and hid these items. But the patriarch for your family must have found your parents, then their objects, and confronted them about leaving. When the patriarch gave them a choice to come back to the family or stay here and not practice, they must have said no to him, so he killed them.”
“Patriarch? What?”
Malek stared at his pie, no longer hungry. He could feel the eyes of Chaz and Katja on him, so he started to talk. “Remember what I said last night? About the rum springa for djinns?”
“Freedom Summer? It’s always a choice. You have to be devoted to this life or it’s not free will. Or something like that,” Caspar said.
“Yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to go. Djinns must choose to serve, and if you take the break and don’t want to come back to the family, you don’t have to. Except that you always have to come back. No one leaves the family. No one leaves honour.”
“I still don’t understand. My parents left, so they were killed?”
“It seems more and more likely,” Chaz said. “You really were at the wrong place at the wrong time. You walked in during the middle of the storm, and you were caught in the crossfire.”
Katja placed a photograph on the table of Caspar from the night of the murder, covered in blood from head to toe.
His eyes were wild, livid. He had the same look as earlier today.
Sick. Strange. And about to fall apart. Beneath the blood, Malek also noticed his skin was shining in a reddish hue. He pointed to it, and Katja nodded.
“What?” Caspar asked. “I know I’m not following along all too well, but throw me a bone here. Don’t pretend I’m not in the room. Talk to me about me.”
“We are. We’re trying,” Katja said. “It’s just a lot to take in, and we don’t want to overwhelm you.”
“Bullshit. You don’t know a damn thing. I’ve always—” Caspar bit his lip, his breath and words coming out in ragged, guttural bursts.
“There’s always been something fucking wrong with my family.
I knew it when I was a kid and I know it now.
We had no relatives. We had nothing. My mom and dad always said it was because they immigrated, and the rest of the family was back home.
But we never saw them. There were no photos before a certain point.
I knew my parents had secrets, but fuck.
I didn’t know… I didn’t know any of this.
And their secrets got them fucking killed. ”
Malek slid a hand across the table. When their fingers touched, Malek swore he could feel fire underneath. Desire. Something stronger. Caspar seemed to regard their linked hands as if there was something there, too.
“So does this mean we’re like… brothers?”
“No,” Malek said. “You’re a red djinn. That’s what Katja noticed in the photograph. You’re a little red under the blood. But I’m blue.”
“What the fuck, man. What does that mean?”
“There are three major families in the djinn world, divided up by the colour of their incorporeal smoke—red, yellow, or blue. Sometimes the families mix and you get the secondary families, but these three are the power houses. Each family has a patriarch. When you’re born into a djinn family, you’re given four trinkets that you must change into real objects. These objects hold your power.”
“Right, right. Like your ring?”
“Like my ring. That’s not my most powerful one, though.
I have three other items. When you come back from your break and decide to stay in the family, you must give the patriarch the most powerful trinket.
He helps to assign cases and people to grant wishes to.
He makes sure the rituals go off without a hitch. ”
“Except?” Caspar asked, clearly already recognizing the tone in Malek’s voice. “Except that power corrupts? Come on. This story is familiar. Happened a hundred times before. Just didn’t think I was involved.”
“Yes,” Malek said. “Power corrupts. The three main djinn families all have notorious figureheads and legends of patriarchs stepping out of line. Mine’s Odafin Jallo, yellow’s is Isa Zamil, and yours is Qasim El-Mohtar.”
“So he’s the one that killed my family?”
“Yes,” Katja answered, and Malek was grateful for her. “As far as we know, anyway.”
“You have to understand something, though,” Make said, cutting in.
“Djinns have been oppressed for years. We’ve been torn from our homeland, made to survive in a new culture, and then made to serve the idiots who found our lost treasures.
Diplomats had us for years, then CEOs did, and now even when we attain some kind of independence and restructure our organization, the three main families still want us to serve CEOs and people high up in the food chain because it makes their lives easier.
The one percent always uses us to maintain the one percent.
They don’t let us help people. Djinns, at our core, want to help people.
So many people who go on break don’t want to come back to their families and instead want to run away and stay away, but the head patriarchs can’t do their jobs if their families disintegrate.
So they trade one evil for another, and they serve. They will always serve.”
“And my parents? Is that why they left?”
“We don’t know that yet,” Katja said. “Chances are, though, given their house and what we saw today, they wanted you.”
“What?”