Chapter 24
When the events of that night were pieced together, various accounts would conflict.
Whispered descriptions of a maiden, beautiful and alluring, with the strength of a thousand men, ripping apart Portuguese soldiers.
How she had devoured their flesh, drank their blood as if it were water poured from a holy grail.
A jinn with beauty that only shaytan himself could have bestowed on her, a wailing woman with no mercy and the ability to tear flesh from bone as if it were bread.
The first witness had been Tariq, bleeding and left to die by his fallen brothers at the gate.
His story would be the only one that was not shared among the men and travellers that would come through the citadel for generations to come.
The most accurate. The only one to know who the enchanting jinn had been before—a story rooted in truth.
In the pain of the fate she had been given, and the tragedy of all that she lost before her soul had become damned.
Before he died, Tariq had seen her body convulse, and then move.
A body that he had witnessed be mutilated and bled dry.
He had watched as Aicha pushed herself up, a placid expression on her face as she absently rubbed her cheeks to rid herself of the tears, and bloodstains.
As if she had merely awoken from slumber, and was yet to become fully conscious of her surroundings.
Her eyes cast over the carnage that surrounded her, empty of the enemy—all of whom had fled to the docks—and Tariq held his breath as he saw her gaze settle on Rachid’s unmoving body.
For several moments, she simply stared, as if unsure of who he even was.
A crease in her brows hinted at her confusion, and his familiarity.
If he had lived, Tariq would have told others of the moment something registered in her eyes, how they morphed from the honeyed brown they had always been into something darker.
Until pitch blackness eclipsed the whites of her eyes and all that remained was a dark abyss, a black hole in replacement. The eyes of a jinn.
“Astaghfirullah.” he had choked out, surprised when her head snapped towards him.
A sneer spread across her features as she began to rise, followed by Tariq’s horror as he watched her legs grow.
Where there had been two bloody stumps, new legs began to form, and bile rose in his throat as he watched the animal hair grow across the calves, until it reached the end of where the feet should have been. Instead, he saw hooves.
Tariq watched as she stood, higher than he had anticipated, and stalked towards him.
Her steps were large, eating up the distance, and he could only sit and pray to Allah that these were the hallucinations of a dying man.
When she bent towards him, taloned fingers reaching him, but not quite touching, he noticed that new life had breathed into her.
Aicha’s hair was longer, vibrant and voluminous.
Her skin was unblemished, free of scars and a healthy brown, lips pink and soft.
She was devastatingly beautiful, and it did nothing but elicit terror from him.
She leaned in close, taking in his scent in order to decipher who he was, studying him, Tariq surmised.
As if his smell were his identifier, she pulled back quickly, unconvinced that he was whoever she thought him to be.
Her eyes then travelled down to the gaping hole in his abdomen, and this time her sneer turned slack.
She reeled away from him with an ear-splitting shriek, as if the sight of his wound pained her, and her attention quickly diverted to the iron gates.
He watched as her shoulders straightened, and purpose infused her steps as she stalked towards it.
He would have told others of the way she had stood tall, weaving her clawed fingers into the fence and abruptly pulling it with such vicious force that it split in half.
She tossed it behind her and it fell to the ground with a deafening crash.
The gate was gone, and they were free. The Sultan’s armies were not far away.
As the sun slowly began to rise, and Tariq’s life began to slip away, he realised he would not be able to recount to others that—even as a jinn—Aicha had fulfilled her vow.
That she had kept the gates open and freed them from the Portuguese.
That, even in death and with the hand of shaytan on her shoulder, she vanished in search of ending Duarte.
Sergeant Lionor’s last memory would be of euphoric bliss, akin to what he experienced when he had a woman in his bed.
He had just withdrawn his sword from the chest of a rebel he had struck down, his comrades long gone, fleeing to the docks like the cowards he deemed them to be.
There was an inclination that he had to look up, that he must look up, and so he had.
There she was, standing barely a few paces ahead of him, watching him. Eyes as black as a starless night, focusing on him.
“Beautiful,” he had whispered, a smile spreading across his lips that would only look endearing on a child. “So beautiful.”
He had had the sense he knew her, that he had seen her face before.
Yet, Lionor found it difficult to believe when she glowed so.
Her hair cascaded down her back and over her shoulders, and he imagined her skin glistening in the sun.
He longed to see her in the day and watch the way sunlight reflected in her hair as he ran his fingers through it.
Lionor dropped his sword, the jarring echo of steel clanging against the stones beneath his feet numb to his ears.
He could hear nothing, could feel nothing except the overwhelming desire to move towards her.
So he did. Feet stumbling, he reached his fingers out, smile widening as she extended her own towards him.
“Who are you, beautiful creature?” Her face did not change, no flicker of joy or a shift into rage, she simply stared.
As if she were frozen in time, perfect for eternity, a painting that would have been coveted and displayed in the King’s Palace.
He was half certain that this was all a dream.
He should have been able to smell the metallic scent of blood on his clothes and hands, or the taste of ash and smoke on his tongue.
But instead, he gripped onto her hand, allowing her to pull him towards her until they were close.
She smelled of a fresh morning breeze, the start of a new day.
If she hadn’t placed her other hand on his pale cheek, he would have pressed into her and buried his head into her neck.
Her hand travelled up, running through the short locks of his light hair until it rested on the back of his scalp.
It was impossible to know when she had begun growing taller, as his vision and senses blurred.
The piercing pain of her nails—claws!—digging into the back of his neck would come too late.
The shift from her peaceful, obsidian gaze into an endless fury that promised isolation and fear came too quickly.
The exhilaration that pumped through his veins interwove with fear and helplessness at a rate too fast for him to understand.
“Stop!” he had breathed out, unable to shout.
His scream was halted in its tracks. Her teeth pressed into his neck.
Sharp, pointed, and ravenous, unrelenting.
She ripped out chunks of his flesh. Lionor’s screams died in his throat—he was unable to distinguish his agony from shock and his fear from excitement.
When she pulled back, he would find her smiling.
His vision turned dark as she used her teeth to tear his head from his body.
Houria had stood at the docks, among the debris of the explosion and the littered bodies of both sides, with her child in her arms and her invaders sailing away, when her story began.
The sun had only just emerged, the skies purple and dark blue.
She had been told to stay inside, but with the sound of the gazelle horns, and the eventual quiet of the docks, something had told her to venture outside. To see what was left of her home.
The breeze of the ocean caressed her skin…
and she saw her. It was only for a few moments, but long enough for fear to freeze her veins.
From the corner of her eye she noticed a tall, cloaked figure step onto the damaged docks.
Houria cupped the back of her child’s head, pressing him into her chest and taking a shaky step away as her gaze met a blackened one.
Ayat al-kursi spilled from her lips, the words memorised like a lullaby as she clung to her son.
Her stomach churned as she took in the body that dangled within the tall, demonic beauty’s grip.
His head was missing, and her large, fanged mouth bit into the stump.
The creature’s black eyes were crazed with a potent lust, seemingly for blood, as if what she had in her hands was not enough to sate whatever hunger she felt.
The fact that his bloodied uniform appeared to be that of their invaders would only come to her later, when the fear had subsided, and she had made as many duas as she could to beg Allah to rid herself of the memory.
And to stop her child’s cries of terror in the nights that followed.
Because, in that moment, it did not matter that the demon was eating the flesh of the men who had deliberately antagonised Houria her entire life.
All she saw was the very type of jinn that her elder brothers had warned her about as a child, stories fabricated to deliberately scare her.