Chapter 8
The Loose End
Iris
The police detective didn’t call. The nice woman at the station promised they’d look into my claims and get back to me. I should have known better than to believe her.
I pace through my living room and struggle not to cry.
The apartment is three hundred square feet of peeling paint and secondhand furniture.
There’s a kitchen the size of a closet and a window that looks out onto the brick wall of the building next door.
The futon cost me eighty dollars at a garage sale.
The bookshelf is a pile of milk crates. Camille once stood in the middle of all of it and told me it had character.
Camille also told me to get out more and guided me straight into the arms of Rakan al-Rashid. Who is a murderer. And I can’t call her because it would put her at risk, too.
“This is a disaster,” I whisper. “I never had a chance.”
The worst part isn’t being scared. I’ve been scared before, plenty of times.
That I wouldn’t make rent in an expensive city, that I’d fail in my career, that I’d never be good enough.
No, fear isn’t my problem. It’s just that my hands won’t stop remembering what his skin felt like.
I can still feel his heat, his taste, his touch, and I’m furious at myself for that.
I try to line up my options the way I would approach any other problem—practically, in order, without panicking.
Option one: wait for the detective to call back.
Option two: go back to the station in person.
Option three: find a lawyer, explain what I saw, and figure out what protections exist for human witnesses in monster cases.
These are all reasonable things. These are all things a person with a functioning brain would do.
My brain keeps sliding back to his hands on my waist in the dark.
The memory should turn my stomach. Those hands summoned the fire that killed an innocent woman. Instead, a traitorous part of me clings to the memory and still craves his touch.
“I’m such an idiot,” I hiss under my breath.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” a familiar voice says from behind me. “Perhaps you’re far too clever for your own good.”
I spin around so fast I knock a book off the milk-crate shelf. Rakan is standing in the middle of my living room, dressed in one of his too-expensive, ridiculous suits.
For a few moments I just stare at him, frozen. He tilts his head at me, an almost gentle, barely-there gesture. Then my glasses start to fog up. Smoke drifts around his feet, dark and ominous. Just like that, I snap out of my trance. Stumbling back, I scream and reach for the shelf.
I don’t own a lot of books, but the ones I do are heavy enough to be used for weight training. I pick the first one up and throw it at him. The book hits his chest with a crack and falls to the floor. The cover flips open to an illustration of an ancient European warlord.
Rakan doesn’t move. He doesn’t look at it. He keeps his eyes on me the entire time, patient and completely still.
It is the exact same treatment the harpy received before she went up in flames. Somehow, that strikes me as particularly undignified. Surely, I’m worth at least a little more emotion than a stranger.
I know I’m being stupid and that my feelings make no sense. But even so, I can’t help but straighten my back and glare at him. “Are you going to kill me too? Now that you have no use for me?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. The smoke at his feet stills, almost as if I had cast a spell on him. It would only be fair. After all, some days it feels like he cast a spell on me.
“I have no interest in your death,” he finally says. “But there are others who do.”
I stare at him. Whatever I expected him to say, it wasn’t that. He appeared out of nowhere in my apartment, presumably to tell me I’m in danger. But I know what I saw. If there’s anyone I’m in danger from, it’s him.
“You were in that alley,” I snarl at him. “I know what your power feels like. I recognized it.”
“What you recognized was a djinn.” He holds my gaze. “Not which one. The signature of my kind reads the same to anyone who doesn’t know the difference.”
“I saw you,” I insist, shaking my head. “I heard you talking.”
He shoots me an almost self-deprecating smile. “I’m flattered to think I’m unique, but that isn’t remotely the case.”
Could it be? The smoke did dull my senses slightly, and my glasses were so foggy. But still… How similar could two people be for me to make such an insane mistake?
I know Rakan. He’s been a regular in The Daily Grind for weeks. He’s been inside me, for heaven’s sake. I like to think that, at the very least, I wouldn’t mistake him for some other guy.
“I’m not the killer you met, Iris.” The simple sound of my name on his lips makes shivers run down my spine. For the wrong damn reason. “The creature you saw… He’s ancient. He kills selectively. Everyone he targets made a wish. He considers that sufficient justification.”
I can’t help but shudder. That matches the conversation between the murderer and his victim. The harpy must have made a wish to be more beautiful. The djinn clearly took offense and murdered her.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the killer was not Rakan.
I look at him, at the way he’s standing there in the middle of my cramped apartment. I try to feel the same fear I did in the alley. It just… doesn’t come.
Maybe it’s stupid, but I believe him. And yet, there’s something that doesn’t quite fit. “I didn’t make a wish. I didn’t do anything except hear a scream.”
Rakan nods, but his face only gets darker. “That’s true. But you’re still a loose end.”
A loose end. Of course I am. Because even djinn murderers with some kind of twisted agenda know better than to leave witnesses alive.
“Well, isn’t that just great?” I ask, hysteria threatening to suffocate me. “I bet you’re really happy with yourself, aren’t you?”
“I wouldn’t say that, no.” His voice comes out careful and measured, and I hate that I notice. “I would never want you hurt. Surely you must know that, Iris.”
“Oh, really?” The laugh that comes out of me has nothing funny in it. “I’d have never been there if not for you. But I needed to make sure your little diversion didn’t make me a single mother.
“Fun times, right? But why would someone like you care about that?”
He doesn’t answer. He stands there and takes it, which is almost worse than if he’d argued back.
I’m more terrified and furious than I’ve ever been in my life.
I spent the morning trying to outrun the night before, too rattled to make good decisions.
The decision that I did make… It was to walk into that alley and witness a harpy die.
It’s going to cost me, and I hate myself for that. I hate Rakan even more.
“Whatever you might think of me doesn’t change the situation,” he says once I’ve finished my rant. “You’re in danger, and you’re coming with me.”
I don’t like the sound of that. Even if he’s right, even if someone is hunting me… I just can’t bring myself to trust him, not really.
After all, why would a monster mogul like him protect a random barista like me? He’s already made it clear that I’m nothing but a notch on his bedpost.
“Absolutely not,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“That isn’t one of your options.” He narrows his eyes at me. It’s the first time he’s ever looked at me like that, in anything remotely resembling anger. “You’re coming with me tonight, Iris, because the alternative is staying here alone and exposed.”
“Get out of my apartment.”
He doesn’t move. I understand then that nothing I say is going to change what happens next. He’s already made his decision. But as luck would have it, so have I.
I cross to the kitchen drawer and pull out the taser Camille gave me eight months ago. “For emergencies. Don’t argue with me,” she told me. Well, this is certainly an emergency. “I said, ‘Get out’,” I tell him.
He looks at the taser, then back at me. “Iris, please. There’s really no need for this.”
Except there’s every need. Maybe there always was, from the very first moment he walked into The Daily Grind.
Rakan takes a single step toward me, and I don’t hesitate. I fire the taser directly at his chest. He doesn’t flinch. He stands there while I hold the trigger.
I stare up at him, and for a few moments, I feel completely hypnotized. Pressure pulses in my wrist, too intense, too potent. And then Rakan is right in front of me, and he is holding my wrist in one massive hand.
At first, I try to jerk away. “Let me go, Rakan! Let me go!”
“If I weren’t holding you,” he says, his eyes not leaving mine, “you’d be missing a hand.”
I blink, and for the first time, I realize I’m no longer holding a fully working taser. Only the smoking ruins of it are left. My hand is completely unharmed, gold-dust motes dancing around my fingertips.
It feels surreal, and anything I could possibly say dies on my lips. But Rakan isn’t finished, not just yet. “You don’t need to agree to this. You don’t need to understand. I’ll protect you anyway.”
Smoke erupts around us all over again, more powerful than ever before. It fills the apartment in seconds. And then there’s nothing left but the darkness and his grip on my wrist.
His voice comes from somewhere too far away. “Don’t fight it. Just let go. You’re safe now.”
No, I’m not. I’m afraid I’ll never be safe again. But it’s too late for me to protest. The smoke takes over my senses, and the world melts away into nothing.