Chapter 17
Malek tapped the front of his jacket, ensuring that the jewels were still there.
He’d taken them out of the box and wrapped them in silk to keep close when he decided to get some air after the meal.
His constant vigilance made him feel as if he was fifteen again and stealing petty things from convenience stores or keeping his pot extra close at dances.
After tucking them away, he took out his phone and texted an update to Jocasta.
So, Caspar is a djinn. Ask Chaz and Katja for more details.
Next he opened the message chain he used to talk to Twigs.
Help, bb doll. Protection spell that’ll last longer than three hours. Your strongest stuff.
Malek surveyed the outside of the diner as he waited for her reply.
Across the street were a few business supply stores, Jamaican patty places, and an empty lot where a Blockbuster had been.
Nothing too out of the ordinary. He sauntered over to Katja’s red car, double-checked the doors, and scanned the area again.
He had a sinking feeling that they were being watched—but maybe it was just paranoia.
His phone buzzed with Twigs’s reply. What kind of protection spell we talkin about, good sir?
Protecting objects that are part of a family legacy. That’s enough info, right? Want to keep this one close to my chest.
Uh-huh. This for the djinn boy?
Malek stared at the phone, brows furrowed, before he typed. What?
Word travels fast. Jocasta is here right now, tearing her hair out. This is the kind of thing that needs to be vetted, you know.
I know. Malek bit his lip. If Jocasta had known they were removing a djinn from prison, they wouldn’t have done it.
Too risky. They would have needed to deal with the El-Mohtar family patriarch before moving Caspar, since it was far too likely he would try to wedge his way into the removal if he knew about it.
The thought of Caspar still being in prison made Malek’s stomach roil.
He texted Twigs: But Caspar poses no threat right now since he’s in stasis.
He didn’t know he was a djinn either, or we wouldn’t have been able to remove him at all using my magic.
At least right now things can’t get any worse or any better.
So I just need a spell to protect his good, you know?
So we don’t wake up old ghosts. Then Caspar’s in the clear.
Funny how being “no threat” has already made him pass out a couple times, Twigs typed moments later. But fine, I got you. I’ll work on something soon. xoxox. Love the CD, by the way. Keep up the good work.
Malek barely had time to smile before a hand touched his back. Startled, he nearly dropped the phone. Caspar stood in front of him, hands awkwardly jammed in his pockets.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No, no. It’s fine. I’m not usually this jumpy. Just—”
“Getting used to things, too?”
“Yeah, I suppose so. But hey, look at you. You can walk without tripping. That’s good. How are you feeling?”
“Better. Katja gave me some of the elixir to go, so I can keep taking some and ease into the memories or whatever. I think most of it was done, though.”
“Oh? Is more coming back to you?”
“Yeah. I know I saw my parents now. When they were younger, though.”
“Do you… do you want to talk about it?”
Caspar shook his head, and though Malek wanted to push him to open up, he didn’t want to do it in the open like this.
“Well, if you ever do want to talk, I’m here for you. Not just as your djinn, but as your friend.”
“Friend,” Caspar repeated. Malek couldn’t tell if Caspar was annoyed or relieved.
“Yes, a friend. We’re part of the same class of supernatural now, so we have to watch out for one another.”
“Even if we’re not the same family?”
“Even more so, yes.” Malek held back that maybe, one day, they could be in the same family—even if the patriarchal culture of djinns didn’t so easily accept homosexual unions. “Well, I should probably go back and pay the tab inside. We ordered a lot of beer.”
“Chaz got it. Said he felt bad enough that they didn’t realize all of this until it was ‘too late.’” Caspar made air quotes.
“I tried to tell him that I didn’t think there was a right time to figure out how your parents really died, but he still insisted.
For mourning, or whatever.” Caspar shrugged.
“Some legacy, huh? From ghoul to genie. What a crock I am.”
“You’re not a crock. This is your history. I know it seems confusing, but what if I told you we could find your family tree? Put a name to those faces you saw when you were out.”
Caspar’s eyes lit up. He’s never had a family like that before. Malek’s heart hurt thinking about that reality, even though he himself had lived it for a long time now.
“You mean it?” Caspar asked. “How can you? Wouldn’t my parents have changed their surname?”
“That’s possible, since the main patriarch’s name is El-Mohtar, it was likely that Nassir was a distant name associated with either your mother’s or father’s history, or maybe even a friend they had.
We’ll search for both names, though. Since we can’t exactly go to Genealogy.com and feed in your name to get results pertaining to djinns, we have to be a bit more creative.
” They both leaned against Katja’s red car as Malek brought up Caspar’s old house listing, along with several listings and sales where El-Mohtars were involved.
“Why real estate?”
“Because djinns have to own items in order for their power to work, and these items leave a trail. So you need to look at estate sales. Same with auctions at storage units, especially for ex-djinns. Sealing away items allows for normalcy, but it also makes the djinn extremely vulnerable to being found out. So many lost items end up at sales, and oftentimes head honchos or their associates will show up and collect what’s leftover.
More often than not, they find the lost objects for a djinn and they conjure them and get them back into the family.
If the head honchos find a different family in their purchases, trading happens, but usually, they find their own. Like a sixth sense thing.”
“That doesn’t bode well for the future.”
“There are ways around being found. The incantation Katja mentioned is integral because it scrambles a djinn’s honing mechanism by allowing objects to become inert.
Estate sales remove the incantations in the shuffle, though, and that’s when the vultures truly start to circle.
Four items in a box is a dead giveaway at an auction, but the head honchos also know what they’re looking for.
They can usually spot a trinket before most of the bidders have any idea what they’re looking at.
When items are scattered, it’s harder to pick up on them since most items stop looking like a powerful magic source and start looking like general junk. ”
“So how does all of this tell me my family line?”
“People need to put down names to purchase items at most estate sales and auctions. Not so much at yard sales, but if you follow enough bidding, you start to find patterns. Similar names show up and you can see the connections. Foreclosed houses are good places to look too, since that’s likely where an ex-djinn has gone back to the family.
” Malek did a quick skim through the results for El-Mohtar at auctions, but found no one named Qasim.
“Hmmm. Does anything here look familiar to you? Any names?”
Caspar shook his head.
“Well, these tracking methods are the same ones used by patriarchs to find the people who defected, too, so if we retrace your parents’ property line, then we can see where Qasim came in instead of looking for him first. Do you remember your parents defaulting on any loans?
Property? Even reselling their cars? We need to figure out how Qasim found their items. They were obviously successful at hiding yours for years, because they owned their house outright and never mortgaged it, so no one but them could get inside.
For their items, though, we need to start looking at other places where the property could have been taken from them by the bank or robbed by an intruder. ”
“No idea,” Caspar said after thinking for a moment. “I should have paid attention when I was a kid. I thought my parents were weird and something was off, but they were ultimately boring. They worked at a grocery store, for fuck’s sake.”
“What grocery store?”
“Fine Food Market on Bloor. They owned that. Bought it from the first owners when I was eight or nine and celebrated for weeks. But they never defaulted on any loans. It was completely paid off when I sold it.”
“And no robberies?” Malek asked. “That doesn’t seem like a good neighbourhood.”
“Yeah, no kidding. I carried a butterfly knife there all the time.”
“So there was something?”
“Only petty stuff, really. And I doubt my parents were hiding their jewels in the snack aisle, you know? They were always too smart for that. Always cautious, reserved, and very smart. I thought they were being paranoid, but now I get it.”
“I understand,” Malek said, fighting the urge to put a hand on Caspar.
He pulled up as much info on Fine Foods as he could.
Caspar edged close to Malek’s side, observing the items on the screen as Malek went through search results.
In between newspaper reports and accommodations for the Nassir’s Fine Foot Market, there was nothing substantial that could help them rebuild Caspar’s past. Caspar’s parents bought the grocery store from a white guy, and when Caspar was in prison, the store had been sold to a clothing outlet owned by a different white guy.
There were no other sales or break-ins where anything had been reported stolen.
“So this is a dead end, right?” Caspar asked.
“Yes. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said I’d find something so soon—”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I got used to this kind of thing in prison. Lost causes.”