CHAPTER TWENTY–FIVE PRESENT DAY
I stare at Khalto Safa, and an absurd thought strikes me: We’re going to have to move again.
We’ve ruined the heart of this house like we did our old one. Nourished its bones on dread and loneliness. On my father’s blood, slipping between the floorboards and into the house’s waiting mouth.
Blood. A dizzy fog steals over me, and I yank my gaze from the puddle. I won’t faint. I can’t.
“He’s alive,” my aunt reassures me. Khalto Safa cups a slim hand around her lighter, the snick snick snick of her thumb against the wheel cacophonous.
The spark finally catches, and she lowers the tip of her cigarette to the precarious flame.
“Don’t look so frightened, ya habibti. I just want to talk. ”
“How did you find me?” I sneak a glance toward the shoe rack, where I’d tossed my purse. Jesse’s switchblade is still in my bag.
She rolls her eyes. “Your father’s photograph is on the university website. I didn’t even need to pay to find your address. It’s rather alarming, how accessible all your information is.”
Khalto Safa picks up a strand of thick, glossy hair and twirls it around a ringed finger.
Her skin glows, unnaturally smooth and pristine.
Every part of Khalto Safa dazzles, and now I understand that this perfection is part of the curse’s bargain.
Anyone who looks at her wouldn’t think twice about her intentions.
She is too beautiful to doubt—too stunning to suspect.
Mama had always look normal to my eyes, but how lovely must she have been when she was the Terror of El Agamy, feeding the curse and reaping its benefits?
Khalto Safa crosses her legs, folding her hands over her knee.
If it weren’t for the unnatural orange glow in her eyes and the repugnant odor wafting off her, she’d be the most elegant person to ever enter Ward.
“I know you have questions about your mother. About the Haikal villa. I can answer them for you.”
“I have all the answers I need.” I slink an inch back. Her reptilian gaze tracks the motion.
“Fantastic!” She claps her hands once. “Then you must be all caught up on what happened to your mother eight years ago.”
I go still. An icy finger of dread drags down my throat.
Reason insists that trusting anything she says is a mistake.
Khalto Safa is a consummate liar. A murderer, worse than almost everyone in her family.
Only poison falls from her lips, as naturally as the ash flaking from the end of a burning cigarette.
But if anyone knows what really happened to Mama during her visit to Egypt, it’s Khalto Safa.
“She died in a car accident.”
A ghastly grin spreads over Khalto Safa’s face. A black shadow darts from the fireplace to the kitchen wall. Another swirls beneath my feet, causing me to stumble backward.
“I’m afraid not,” Khalto Safa hums. She beams at the shadows. “Would you like to see?”
She crooks her finger, and the shadows rush to me. Vying for attention. Snippets of sound leak from the swirling pockets of black. I screw my eyes shut.
“They won’t hurt you, Mina. They just want you to see.”
“What are they?” Mama had studied the curse’s movement over centuries, and she still hadn’t found an answer for these shadows. “What do they want?”
Khalto Safa’s laugh rings like music. “They don’t want anything, habibti. Every legacy needs a record, and these shadows keep ours. Our shame, our regret. Our choices. If it weren’t for Bamba, we wouldn’t exist. Every scar we leave on this world creates a shadow.”
Breath drifts over my cheek. I need to open my eyes to see an attack coming, but the shadows are all around me. Disaster waits in any direction I turn. The only choice they’ve left me is to decide how much I can bear.
“Open your eyes, ya umri,” my mother’s voice whispers, and I obey.
Standing inches away is me.
Or a version of me. One more beautiful than I’ve ever been—more beautiful than I can bear. Shadows lick at her edges, slipping tenderly through her shiny curls.
I hold my breath, unable to shrink away. Khalto Safa moves to stand by the other Mina. “There’s still a chance for you to have everything you’ve ever dreamed of. Come with me. Come back to the Haikal villa and claim the legacy your geda Bamba built for us.”
“Legacy?” I bark a harsh laugh. “Bamba stole her legacy.” Even from her own bloodline. Our lives were hinged on this curse; our existence tied to the debt Bamba opened in our name.
Khalto Safa rolls her eyes. “You spoiled little child. Don’t you understand that it takes sacrifice to build something great?”
The other Mina curls her lip. I hold perfectly still as Khalto Safa uses razor-sharp fingernails to lift my chin.
“Bamba accepted this debt because she wanted to be someone. She wanted power, and this bargain is power. Everyone is born with a debt, Yasmina. Every choice has consequences, and sometimes, we are asked to pay for the choices others made. It isn’t fair.
It isn’t just.” Her eyes soften as she studies my face.
“All we can control is our own choices. Our own fate.”
I’ve heard that before you die, the world around you sharpens. Isolating sounds, smells, sights. A last bright imprint of the life slipping away, burned on the inside of your fading eyes.
Orange light rings the halo of shadows. Spreading inward, reaching for me.
Hot breath moistens my neck. I whirl around, fists raised to protect myself from the other Mina, and stare directly into the shredded face of my mother.
Bloody slashes the width of my thumb gouge across every inch of Mama’s face and neck.
Half her skull is missing, the indents around the hole suggesting teeth marks.
Her eyes melt, sludgy orange rivers dribbling down ravaged cheeks.
She opens her mouth, revealing a swollen, pocked tongue.
Tiny creatures wiggle on the roof of her mouth.
A scream catches in my throat and expands, choking me slowly.
“When your mother returned to the villa, she never planned to leave.” Khalto Safa regards the monstrous version of my mother without flinching.
“She knew I was sick. She knew that if there wasn’t anyone willing to serve the curse, it would claim every Haikal life still roaming the earth. Including yours.”
Khalto Safa sighs, scratching her eyebrow with a thumb.
The cigarette’s red tip comes alarmingly close to her hair.
“You were my last hope, you know. When you passed the test, I was ecstatic. I thought … I thought it might go differently.” She perches on the arm of the couch, and the orange drains from her eyes.
The glimmer of ethereal perfection wavers.
For a split second, Safa Haikal just looks like a woman. A tired, ill woman.
Passed the test?
“Khalto Safa—”
“It’s time to make a choice, Yasmina,” she says.
The shadow ring bursts upward, forming a column of smoke with me in the center.
The world goes black.
When I open my eyes, I am on the ground.
Kneeling.
Shadows wreath the inside of my house, hanging over every surface like a widow’s shroud.
A dark shape materializes in front of me. In seconds, the stench of rot and exposed sewage thickens in my nose, slithering wetly to the back of my throat.
There have been several times in the last few months that I’ve experienced terror.
Too many to count. But if someone summed up all the fear I’ve lived through, tallied up every scream and whimper, collected each stone of dread in my gut—it wouldn’t come close to this.
Every awful moment would still pale in comparison to the visceral terror swallowing me whole.
I have seen this creature before.
In another time. Another place. Another Haikal.
As it had the night I witnessed my grandmother’s death, time thins around me. The shadows slither over the floor, brushing over my skin.
YASMINA MANSOUR.
My lungs seize, collapsing beneath the wrecking ball of a scream hammering in my chest.
It’s my own voice.
I CAN GIVE YOU WHAT YOU DESIRE MOST.
I try to unclench my teeth, but they won’t stop chattering. A shadow wraps itself around my neck, and I hear the faintest echo of Rainie’s voice.
“Come see what I wrote, Mina!” the phantom voice calls. “Quick, before Mrs. B comes out!”
Second grade. Rainie had to give herself a red card after Mrs. B saw the string of profanity she’d written in chalk on the playground.
YOU CAN HAVE A LIFE. YOU CAN HAVE THIS ENTIRE TOWN.
The dark shape leans, and before I can faint, heat explodes in my head.
And finally, I understand what my mother’s journal meant.
The shadows are its vulnerability. They come with the curse, but they cannot be controlled by it.
The shadows pin us to reality. They show us what was, and most importantly—what could have been.
The curse shows you a dream. It shows you what could still be.
Under its touch, a life unfolds before my eyes like an unraveling roll of thread. I see rain pounding our house, but not a drop makes its way inside. The roof, finally fixed. Baba sitting on the couch, reading the newspaper while a pile of pistachio shells gathers on the coffee table.
In my room, the metal door is gone, as are the yellow stains on the ceiling.
It’s been transformed into a space I couldn’t have designed in my wildest dreams. Colorful and cozy, a place I could dance or study or lounge inside for hours on end.
Our house wouldn’t be a villa, but it would be the envy of everyone in Ward.
The thread turns, and I see Jesse leaning against his car, boots crossed at the ankle. Waiting for someone.
In front of him is a small dance studio bearing my name.
Mina’s Moves, a name so incredibly silly that I fall in love with it immediately.
I watch myself run out of the studio with a large bag and light up at the sight of Jesse.
He slings my bag over his shoulder before pulling me in for a long kiss, laughing when I playfully shove him away to gesture at the sweat on my face.
Another twist of the thread, and I’m in Alexandria.
Sitting on a thick carpet while a pretty woman braids my hair, both of us fixed on the television, where the soap opera we’ve been tuning into daily after dinner plays the mid-season finale.
She’s my aunt, my father’s second cousin.
Baba comes out with a tray of tea, passing me one while he pretends not to be avidly watching the soap.
He hands the next two cups to his mother and father, who argue with my cousins about their grades and the upcoming nightmare of senior year exams. Another cousin splashes sharbat over a tray of hot kunafa, the sizzle of syrup on hot shredded dough momentarily distracting everyone.
The thread could go on forever. It could show me every moment of my life until the day I die, and I know it would show me the most beautiful things.
For the first time, I understand why Bamba cursed herself. How she didn’t look hard enough through the mirage to see the monster behind it.
I want it. I want that life more than I want my next breath. When I passed the test, the curse gave me the ability to make my fantasy a reality. It put the power of choice in my hands—a power and burden not every Haikal bound to the curse gets to claim.
I open my eyes, and in front of me is the third-floor door.
My muscles finally unfreeze. I throw myself back, away from the door.
I CAN GIVE HIM HIS SOUL.
I yank my gaze from the door to the monster. I don’t need to ask, and it doesn’t need to explain. We both know whose soul it means.
“And the cost?” I whisper.
As one, the shadows rise, filing into neat formation.
The room blurs, and before me appear dozens of children. Each shadow melts into one of the lives lost at the hands of Bamba’s curse. The price paid for the deal she struck so long ago.
In front of them stands the little girl with the feeno sandwich. The daughter of the woman on the beach.
YOU WILL WANT FOR NOTHING. THIS HOUSE AND THIS TOWN WILL BE YOURS.
I stare at the little girl’s mournful eyes, and her mother’s words ring in my ears.
… not all the people who stay are good.
It wants me to carry on Bamba’s curse. To live out my dreams by the anguish of the families I destroy. Another small town to feed on, more families with little to their name to steal from.
I wish I could say I didn’t consider it. I wish I could say there wasn’t a second where I imagined accepting. That I cast aside the life it offered with force and certainty. That I immediately looked past the thread to the cruel hand unspooling it.
At the top of the stairs, the third-floor door cracks open. Orange light spills down the steps, creeping closer. Reaching for me.
CAN YOU PAY THE PRICE?
The life it offers is beautiful. It’s beyond what I might have dared dream.
Which is why when I speak, when I utter the single word that puts scissors to the thread, it leaves my throat bleeding.
“No.”
Jesse has a soul. Whatever he says, whatever it says. He has more soul than anyone I have ever known. Jesse’s problem is not the lack of a soul, but the excess of one.
At the bottom of the stairs, Khalto Safa appears. She climbs the steps, her fingers gliding over the banister. She glances back at me, then to the children still gathered around us.
“Foolish girl,” she whispers. “You could have lived.”
The door opens wider, and Khalto Safa slips inside.
“No!” I shout. I struggle to my feet. “Wait!”
Small hands grab onto my clothes, my ankles, restraining me as I try to chase the door. The children converge around me as I weep, and for the second time, everything goes dark.