Magic Shifts

CHAPTER 19

I WALKED INTO Applebee’s wearing my work clothes: loose dark pants, boots, a gray sweater, and a simple black jacket. Sarrat’s weight rested comfortably between my shoulders. Curran walked next to me. He wanted to wear sweatpants, because “they tear easier.” I asked him if he wanted me to get him some male stripper jeans so he could avoid looking like a Russian gangster from pre-Shift movies, after which he got all offended and put on a pair of regular jeans instead.

Julie brought her Kestrel axes. She also wore her big black steel-toed boots, the burgundy-colored sweater I’d knitted for her, and a short pleated skirt with no stockings despite the cold. Some things had no logical explanation. You just had to roll with it.

The hostess looked at the three of us and pointed to the sign above her head. “We have a strict no-weapons policy.”

“What if my fists are lethal weapons?” Julie asked.

A manager emerged from the back room, saw us, and nearly sprinted down the hallway.

“You may keep your fists,” the hostess said. “But—”

The manager nearly slid to a halt in front of us. “This way. Your table is waiting.”

The hostess opened her mouth and snapped it shut.

He led us to the back of the restaurant to a table by a window. The table was designed to seat six. My father sat by himself, wrapped in a plain brown cloak. The cloak had seen better days and the deep hood that hid his face was frayed. He was trying his best to be inconspicuous, his magic folded and wrapped around him. His “god in beggar clothing” act was impressive, but I saw through it anyway.

As we approached, he pushed the hood back and my father’s face greeted me. Hugh once described it as “if the sun had risen.” Saying Roland was handsome would be a gross understatement, like calling a hurricane a gentle breeze. My father was beautiful, his face perfectly proportioned, with bronze skin, a square jaw traced by a short graying beard, a full mouth, a powerful nose, high cheekbones, and large dark eyes under dense eyebrows. The moment you saw those eyes, you forgot everything else.

There was a passage in the Bible in the book of Job that said it wasn’t age that guaranteed wisdom, but it was the spirit in a person, the breath of the Almighty, that gave sage men understanding. When you looked into my father’s eyes, his spirit looked back at you. They shone with power, as if the magic itself filled him, ageless but very much alive. He was a man who walked the Earth before the Bible had ever been written, and his wisdom was as towering and timeless as the Sarawat Mountains. It didn’t keep him from making very human blunders or being immune to small petty things like revenge, punishment, or murdering my mother because he thought I was too dangerous to be born.

Yep, that last one did it.

Behind me Julie stumbled but caught herself. Curran appeared completely unconcerned. Former Beast Lord—not impressed.

Curran approached the table and pulled out two chairs. I sat in one, and Julie sat in the other, on the side. If things went sour, I could shove her into the booth next to us with my left hand in half a second.

Curran sat next to me. His face was relaxed, his expression unreadable.

The manager hovered next to us, a look of complete devotion on his face.

“Iced tea,” I said.

“Coke,” Julie said.

“Iced tea,” Curran said.

“Iced tea for me as well. That will be all,” my father said.

The manager took off.

“Is there any way you could refrain from magicking our waiter?” I asked.

“I abhor poor service,” he said and smiled. “I took the liberty of ordering potato skins and onion rings. I’m so glad we could do this.”

It was time to play my part. “The tower, Father. I want it gone.”

“It’s not a tower. Merely a tall building.”

I pulled the Polaroid from the inside of my jacket and put it on the table. “This is a model of a tower.”

“We consider it a threat,” Curran said. “If you want a war, you will get one.”

“I’m building a residence,” Roland said.

“Why?”

“So I can be closer to you, of course. I’ve come to dislike hotels over the years and I want to have a comfortable place to stay while I visit you.”

“I don’t want you to visit me.”

“Parents don’t always do what their children want them to do,” Roland said. “Sometimes they show up unannounced and nag you about your eating habits. And I am about to do just that. Have the two of you set a date for your wedding?”

“Don’t change the subject,” I growled.

“Blossom, I purchased the land. You can’t really prevent me from building anything I want on it. But if it causes you distress, I will be willing to stipulate it won’t be more than two floors in height.”

Yes, and each floor would be a hundred feet in height. “No more than fifty-five feet in height for the entire building.”

Roland smiled. “Very well.”

A waiter arrived, a stocky dark-haired man in his late twenties, bearing a wide platter with drinks, potato skins, crunchy fried onion rings, mozzarella sticks, and pretzels with beer sauce, and he began setting them on the table. Apparently my father had ordered the entire starter menu.

“Now that I’ve conceded that point, the wedding. When are you going to stop living in sin?”

“This is rich, coming from you. I’m sorry, how many wives did you have?”

“Recently, only one.”

“Yes, and you murdered her.”

The waiter valiantly clutched onto his stack of small appetizer plates.

Roland sighed. “Let’s not talk about that again.”

“She was my mother.”

The waiter nearly dropped the onions.

“Yes, and I loved her deeply.”

The waiter set the last plate on the table and paused. “May I take your order?”

“French fries with cheese,” Julie said.

“I don’t care,” I said.

“Bring me some meat,” Curran said.

My father turned to the waiter. “The child’s order stands, with the addition of a Shirley Temple. My daughter prefers Baja tacos, shrimp sautéed not fried, hold the onion and bring her a blackberry iced tea with extra lemon. My future son-in-law enjoys lamb, medium rare, no pepper, baked potato with butter and salt, no sour cream, and a Newcastle Werewolf, although he will settle for a Brown Ale or a Blue Moon. I’ll take a bourbon steak and a glass of red.”

The waiter almost saluted before taking off.

My father had us watched. Not just followed, but observed thoroughly enough to know I picked cooked onions out of my food.

“Now if we could all stop pretending to be lesser versions of ourselves, I believe this conversation will flow much easier.” Roland dipped his pretzel into beer sauce.

“Okay. How many spies do you have in our territory?”

“Enough.” Roland smiled. “I can’t help it. It’s the lot of a parent. Even when our children don’t want us in their lives, we can’t help but watch from afar and stand ready to protect and render aid.”

Watch from afar . . . Interesting.

“You didn’t answer my question about your wedding.”

I leaned back. “Why does it matter to you?”

“Consider me old-fashioned,” he said. “People talk. People ask when or if there will be a formal union.”

“Who are these people?”

“D’Ambray,” Curran said.

“How is the Preceptor?” I asked.

“I haven’t seen him.” My father shrugged. “He is taking a sort of a sabbatical. A journey to find himself.”

“Was that his idea or yours?” Curran asked.

“A bit of both.”

The waiter appeared with our drinks, cleared the empty plates, and vanished.

Hugh had been exiled as a punishment for his failure. “And while he’s on this sabbatical, you have complete deniability. You can’t be held responsible for whatever crazy crap he pulls off while he’s in exile. How convenient.”

“It is rather convenient, isn’t it?” Roland smiled.

Argh.

“Your continuous insistence on keeping your options open is causing a stir,” Roland said. “Don’t get me wrong, the elaborate plotting is highly amusing, but this Judeo-Christian age does come with some stricter conventions. It’s evident in the language. ‘Living in sin,’ ‘make an honest woman,’ ‘shacking up’—the implication of that last one, of course, being that you are too poor to get married and so must live in a shack. It isn’t a matter of money, by the way, is it?”

“Stop,” I growled.

“I understand you’ve been burning through your reserves,” Roland said.

Oh no. He didn’t.

Curran took a swallow of his beer. “Your spies have been falling short. We didn’t burn through our money. We shifted our cash reserve into real estate holdings. Currency falls and becomes devalued, but land will always retain its value. They don’t make any more of it. However, if you find yourself short on cash, let us know. We can liquidate some of our holdings on short notice.”

Ha! Shots fired.

“I’ll be sure to keep it in mind. I don’t mean to nag. I simply want to walk you down the aisle, Kate.”

Be civil, be civil, be civil . . . “No.” There. Good.

“What if there is a child?” Roland asked.

“So?” Where was he going with this?

“You don’t want your children to be bastards, Kate. It never turns out well.”

I put my head on the table. It was that or physical violence.

The food arrived. I picked up one of my Baja tacos and ate it out of desperation. I needed fuel to continue this conversation.

“How’s school?” Roland asked Julie.

All of my senses went into high alert.

“Fine,” she said. “Thank you. I just got an A on my essay on Daniel.”

“Did you use the Apocrypha?” Roland asked, his voice mild.

“Of course,” Julie said.

The Apocrypha, a collection of ancient writings that had been edited out of the modern Bible for various reasons, had a whole chapter on Daniel. The ancient Daniel kicked a lot of ass, unlike his modern version that stressed humility and passive resistance. It was entirely possible that I was reading too much into this conversation, but the way they spoke suggested that this wasn’t their first discussion. Julie had some explaining to do. And my father had to stop inserting himself into my life, or he would regret it.

“Your grandmother is in poor health,” Roland said to me.

Who, what? Where? “My grandmother is dead.” And her magic, trapped between life and death, fueled the madhouse of Mishmar, my father’s prison.

“Your other grandmother,” he said.

I froze.

“Your mother’s mother is still alive,” he said. “Barely. She is eighty-nine years old. I visit her sometimes and she is rapidly declining.”

“Does she know what happened to her daughter?”

Roland shook his head. “She knows she died.”

He kept finding ways to avoid saying my mother’s name.

“She does know about you. She doesn’t have much time. If you wish to know more about your mother, I can arrange for transportation so you can speak before this chance is lost forever.”

My world turned upside down. I didn’t remember my mother. Not a hint of her face, not a whisper of her voice, not even her scent. He was dangling bait in front of me and I wasn’t sure if I hated him more for using her memory or myself for considering snapping it up.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“Seattle,” Roland said.

There it was. He wanted to get me out of the city and away from the ifrit. He’d picked a hell of a lure. Sure, he would arrange transportation there. He said nothing about arranging it for the trip back.

“You can be there in three days,” he said.

In three days Eduardo would be dead. I was sure of it.

Curran glanced at me and I saw a warning in his eyes. Yes. I know. He is trying to distract me and get me out of town. For some reason, my father really didn’t want me dealing with the djinn, and that was precisely why I had to stay.

“I’m sorry, but I have to pass.” The words hurt coming out. “I have things I need to do here.”

“Kate, you won’t get another chance.”

“I’m not going to trouble an old woman who has never seen me in her final days. My place is here. I have something to do and I can’t leave until I see it through.”

“Very well,” Roland said. Not a hint of disappointment. Very nice, Dad.

I wanted to jab him with my fork. He’d used my mother’s memory to manipulate me. He would regret it.

“Besides, you knew Kalina best.”

I watched him closely and the corners of his eyes trembled when I said her name. How does your own bitter medicine taste, Father? Have another spoon on me. “Why don’t you tell me about her? You were there till the end. You saw the light go out of her eyes.”

Roland took a swallow of his wine.

“If you wish to know how your mother died, I will tell you, Blossom. Ask me.”

Walk away. Walk away, because that way lie dragons.

Screw the dragons. I needed to know. “Tell me how my mother died, Father.”

He waited.

We were stabbing each other and pretending that it didn’t hurt.

I wanted to squeeze the word out through my teeth, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. It took all of my will to make it sound casual. “Please.”

“There is a small café in the south end of Wolf Trap,” he said. “That’s where I first saw your mother.”

Wolf Trap, Virginia, northwest of Arlington, was a new town, built from the ground up by the Order. That was where the Knights of the Merciful Aid made their headquarters. My mother had worked with the Order for a while. And my father had visited it, walking its streets in the plain view of dozens of knights, knowing they would fall over themselves trying to kill him if they only knew who he was.

“She sat at a table by herself reading a book and drinking coffee from a chipped white cup.”

His voice weaved a spell, filled with longing, love, and grief. I wanted to believe it was false, but it felt so genuine. So real.

“The sun shone through the window and her hair glowed like the finest gold. I sat at her table and I asked her why she didn’t ask for another cup. She said that there was a unique beauty to the imperfection. No other cup would ever be chipped in quite the same way. It reminded her to pay attention, for every moment could offer an experience that would leave her forever changed. When she decided she was tired of running, I found her there again, in that café, sitting at the exact same table. I took the other chair and told her that I loved her. I told her that she didn’t have to run, and that if she wanted the moon from the sky, I would reach out, pluck it from heaven, and give it to her. She told me that you were a beautiful child. That you were a part of her and a part of me and you were perfect. She took my hand, kissed my fingers, and said, ‘I love you. Don’t look for her.’ Then she stabbed me.”

The pain in his eyes pierced me, still alive and vibrant after almost thirty years.

“Your mother knew that your existence challenged my power. She had betrayed me for your sake. It wasn’t a private event. She had subverted my Warlord and turned her back on our union. The core of my power, those closest to me, knew about it and expected action. My pride and my reign demanded it. A betrayal that cut that deep required public punishment. Voron was merely a pawn. You were a babe and bore no responsibility for what had occurred. That left only your mother. When she drove a knife into my eye, I knew she sacrificed her life so you would live. If she was dead, the public demand for revenge would be satisfied. And so I honored her wish and killed the woman I loved for a child I had helped bring into the world.”

He’d loved her still, after all those years. He must’ve loved her more than anything, and he was both an instrument and a cause of her death. If he hadn’t loved her, he wouldn’t have agreed to my conception. He wouldn’t have imbued me with his power and then he wouldn’t have had to try to destroy what he’d created out of love. I had told him that our family were monsters and he had corrected me. He said we were great and powerful monsters. But none of our power mattered. We were still cursed.

“Your mother loved you before you were ever born. Nothing, not even me with all of my power, could diminish it. I wanted her more than I ever wanted anything in all of my years. To think that all that I am was undone by the simplest and most basic of things—a mother’s love for her child.”

He reached out to me and touched my hand. Too late I realized I had dropped my shields and my magic had filled the room, plain for anyone with a gift to see it.

“Your magic is beautiful, my daughter,” the Builder of Towers said, his eyes luminescent with power. “You should show it more often, for you are perfect.”

BY THE TIME we were almost done with our plates, Julie announced that she was cold. Curran offered to take her to the car to get a sweatshirt. They got up at the same time and walked out. A moment later our waiter appeared and placed a small plate with a slice of chocolate cake on it in front of me.

I looked at Roland. He shook his head. “Not me.”

“The gentleman ordered it on the way out,” the waiter said, then put a coffee in front of Roland and departed.

Chocolate was really expensive. I sliced a tiny sliver of the cake with my fork and tasted it. It melted on my tongue. I had to eat this very slowly so it would last.

“Do you think he really loves you?” my father asked.

“He does.” And I had to change the subject before he started on the second round of the wedding conversation. “Father, why is our magic bouncing from humans possessed by an ifrit? Is it because of the geographical proximity?” Oh yes, that was smooth. Not.

“What did you try to use?” he asked.

“A power word.”

“I remember trying that. Worst pain of my childhood. Let me teach you. There is so much you don’t know, Blossom. Let me help you make sense of it. At the very least, let me keep you from making rudimentary mistakes.”

“You tried it.” I sliced another bite of the cake.

“I was eight.”

Oh.

“And I did it because I was specifically told not to.” Roland drank his coffee. “I wanted to know what would happen.”

That sounded very much like something I would do.

“You are partially correct, the resistance is due to the geographical proximity and a miscalculation on the part of your great-great-great-great . . .” He frowned. “No, that’s right. Great-great-great-great-grandfather. The ifrit were threatening his borders, and he decided that a child of mixed blood would be a great idea, so he married a half-human, half-ifrit woman. She was his fortieth wife. I remember because it was a nice round number. He begat a child, a daughter, and as expected, she had partial immunity to the ifrit magic and was fierce on the battlefield. She was far down in the line of succession, so he hadn’t worried about her, and by the time he decided to worry about it, it was too late. Bararu, the Shining One, the Star of the Valley, had cut her way through his progeny to his heart and took his throne. She was your great-great-great-grandmother.”

“She killed her brothers and sisters and her father?”

“Well, in all fairness, he did execute the man she wanted to marry.”

“Why?”

“He was trying to check her power. She was becoming too popular with the army.”

I rested my chin on my fist. “That’s a heartwarming story, Dad.”

“You called me Dad.” Roland smiled.

“I wouldn’t read too much into it. Were any of our family members ever famous for doing something nonviolent?”

“Your great-great-grandfather cured the Plague of the Godless. It was a very virulent strain of influenza and it threatened to wipe out the human population on the entire continent.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Of course, he felt obligated to do it, because your great-great-granduncle had unleashed it in the first place.”

I just stared at him.

“History provides us with vital lessons,” Roland said. “For example, I have no plans to murder Curran.”

He couldn’t murder Curran, not as long as our agreement held. “Why, you’re afraid I might take your throne?”

“No, I don’t want the heartbreak of having to kill you, Blossom.”

Mm-hm. “Heartbreak.”

“You don’t trust me,” he said.

“No.”

He smiled, and I realized that was what parental pride looked like. He was proud because I had enough brains to anticipate that he could entrap me. I wished he’d come with some sort of secret manual, so I would know how to deal with him.

“So how shall we move forward?” he asked.

“You could teach me here and now. I need to know about the ifrits.”

He paused for the briefest of moments. It took half a blink, but I was watching him very carefully. For some reason he really didn’t want to tell me about the ifrit.

“Very well. We might as well make good use of the time my future son-in-law is so kindly providing to us. Answer one of my questions and I will answer one of yours.”

Nothing was ever simple. “Okay.”

“When Hugh came to kill Voron, he found no sign of a child living in the house. You had gone into the woods, but where were your belongings?”

So Hugh and Roland had a long chat before the Preceptor was exiled. “Hugh didn’t look well enough. Voron knew a clairvoyant.” Her name was Anna, she was the ex-wife of my dead guardian, and she no longer returned my calls. “I think he must’ve been told to expect something bad to happen when he sent me out of the house, because whenever I went into the woods, I packed my duffel bag and buried it under the pines on a hill behind the house.”

“But there had to be other signs of your existence,” Roland said. “A child’s life doesn’t simply fit into one bag.”

“Mine did. A week’s worth of underwear and socks, two pairs of jeans, five T-shirts, a sweater, and two pairs of boots. My knives, my belt, and sword fit in there as well. Toothbrush, hairbrush, a favorite book, and that was it.” I could pack it all into my bag in ten minutes and it was as if I had never existed.

Roland looked at me, his expression odd.

“You may ask a follow-up question,” I told him.

“Toys, makeup, jewelry, dresses, cute shoes, a kitten, perhaps a puppy?”

I laughed at him.

“Not even a pet.” Deep regret reflected in my father’s eyes. He was actually bothered by this.

“Pets teach children empathy. Voron was trying to turn me into a psychopath. Besides, we would often take off without warning. We couldn’t be tied down.”

“A child’s life should be filled with joy. It pains me to know you lived like that.”

“If it had been up to you, I wouldn’t have lived at all.”

Roland exhaled.

“My turn.”

“As agreed. You may ask one question. Think carefully. Most of the battle to get the right answer depends on asking the right question.”

There was so much I needed to ask. One question didn’t even begin to cover it. I had to ask the most important one.

“If an ifrit is trapped in an ancient earring, what would he hope to achieve by granting three wishes to the owner of the earring, turning said owner into a giant and rampaging through Atlanta, and then repeating this process?”

“How do you know it’s an ifrit?”

“I saw him in a vision.”

“Did he wear jewelry?”

“Yes. Gold with large green stones.”

“Emerald or peridot. So we have a sultan, then.”

Don’t ask a question. He only said one question and there had to be a price for failing to follow the rules. “One would think that an ifrit sultan would wear a ruby, because it’s the color of fire. Humans living in the Arabian Peninsula prize emerald above all stones because it’s green and Arabia is mostly arid. But djinn are not human.”

Roland leaned forward, a sly look in his eyes. “One would think that. Then one would brush up on her geology and learn that the purest peridot is found in harraat, the lava fields in the west of Saudi Arabia. When the volcanoes in the west erupted, they brought peridots with them from the depths of the magma chambers. The djinn treasure these stones because they were bathed in the fiery lifeblood of the planet. Only the highest ranks of the ifrits wear them.”

A waiter came to refill his coffee.

“God created men from clay and djinn from smokeless fire,” Roland said, once the waiter left. “Even people not versed in the Qur’an know this line. Have you ever wondered about the meaning behind it?”

“People are made of clay. We are tied to the Earth and soil; our magic is its magic. Also clay soil is almost impossible to enchant.”

“But you can enchant a clay pot.”

I thought about it. “But to make a clay pot, you have to first add water, which holds enchantment, and then treat it with fire.”

“Precisely.”

“So djinn have a lot more magic than we do.”

“Not only do they have a lot more magic, they are magic. They require a large amount of it just to survive. A djinn absorbs the magic from its environment, storing it like a battery. Now let’s take your ifrit, for instance. He is confined to an earring, imprisoned, likely driven mad by the thousands of years of confinement. He wants freedom but he lacks the magic to break free and to exist in our volatile world.”

“The only way he can manifest is by possessing a human host,” I said. “I gathered as much.”

“The granting of the three wishes is an ancient ritual. In reality, it simply makes the possession that much easier; to express a wish, you must first open your mind to the djinn and then accept his magic. You have to believe that he can grant any wish. Instead of a hostile takeover, the process becomes a seduction. With each wish, your body becomes more and more receptive until finally your mind submits to the djinn completely. Some djinn can take over a human in a single wish, but most of the time it takes three. As soon as the ifrit possesses a body, the reserve of that human’s magic belongs to him.”

“That still doesn’t explain why he turns them into giants.”

“Two reasons. First, from what I have been told, he turns them into giants and then attempts to transform them into heated metal. In my time the most powerful of the ifrits transformed into armored giants before the battle. This state also permitted them to absorb a large amount of magic from the environment.”

“So every time he makes a giant, he grows stronger.” I managed to make that into a statement rather than a question, but this one came too close for comfort.

“He does.”

It was like jumping on a trampoline. The first bounce was low, the second higher, the third higher still. First the djinn took over someone with only a little bit of magic, which gave him enough power to take over Lago, who had more magic, which in turn would give him enough juice to possess someone with yet a bigger magical reserve. Such as a knight of the Order. I really hoped not. “You mentioned two reasons.”

“Djinn are vindictive by nature, and of all of them, the ifrits are the most likely to hold a grudge. They are creatures of enormous pride. Wrong them once, and they will hunt you across an endless desert just to watch you die. Once you strike out against one, he will be your enemy for life. If you frustrate his efforts in any way, you will find that out.”

“I did.” He sent a bull made of fire to my house.

“So I hear. What would you want in his place?”

“Revenge against those who imprisoned me. But they are long dead.”

“Blood never dies, Kate. It grows like a tree through generations. The ifrits can feel their own, especially those related to their particular clan. Look for someone he hates. He is likely gathering magic to become powerful enough to unleash his rage upon the descendants of his captors. Because he is a noble, he will call lesser djinn to him to do his bidding. He will identify his victims, and he will torture and maim them and do whatever he can to extract maximum suffering. The ifrits are not fond of granting a quick death.”

Eduardo, the betrayer’s spawn. He must’ve been a descendant of the ifrit’s captors. Now the ifrit was torturing him.

“Once he finishes his revenge, he will turn against the lesser targets. He will seek to rule because that’s what he did in life.”

And we would be his targets. We had to end this chain of power-ups before it went any further.

“You’ve allowed me one question. I will allow you one as well,” he said.

“Why is he using the ghouls?”

“Because he is used to ruling. He likely thinks that he requires an army to do his bidding, and they, by their very nature, are easy for him to dominate for him. Your cake is getting warm,” Roland pointed out.

The fountain of knowledge had run dry. I had more questions. I wanted to ask about ghouls and about defeating the ifrit, but my time was up. One question was all he would answer, so I settled down to eat the rest of my cake.

THE EVENING WAS dying slowly, the sun bleeding its lifeblood onto the horizon when Curran pulled into our driveway. We had taken a short detour. The answer my father gave me at dinner made me rethink our stalker, so we stopped by the address the Clerk had given me. Derek had emerged from the shadows as we had pulled up and reported that he hadn’t seen anyone. We picked him up, I left a short note by the door, held in place by a rock, and we went home.

The magic had ebbed. Technology once again took the planet in its grip. At least we’d get a short break from the ifrit.

There were so many things I had wanted to ask my father. I wanted to know about the ghouls. I wanted him to tell me why he had broken Christopher’s mind. I wanted to know more about my mother. But this was a slippery slope.

There was one person I could ask about all of this. Trouble was, he wasn’t always reliable.

I stepped out of the Jeep.

“You okay?” Curran asked me.

“Yeah. I’m going to go talk to Christopher for a little bit. Do you think the note will work?”

“It can’t hurt.”

I walked to Barabas’s house. Here’s hoping Christopher was lucid.

Barabas let me in and went back to the Guild Manual. I found Christopher on the floor of the downstairs living room, sitting on a rug, surrounded by open books. His face lit up when he saw me, his eyes clear.

“Mistress.”

“Hi, Christopher.” I sat on the carpet outside his book fort.

“I’m glad you didn’t die.” He smiled.

“I’m glad I didn’t, too. I’ve come for advice.”

“My mind is shattered,” he said. “But I will try.”

“What do you know about ghouls?”

“Ghouls are the fallen djinn,” he said.

“Fallen like demons are the fallen angels?”

He leaned back, shifting his weight. “The djinn are creatures of magic. They require it to survive. The more magic, the more . . .” He struggled for a word.

“Powerful? Larger?”

“Evolved. When they lose their magic, they become ghouls. They are fallen.”

Christopher held his hand out, parallel to the floor. “Ghoul.” He raised his hand up as far as he could. “Marid.”

I nodded. A marid would have much more magic than a ghoul.

Christopher struggled with it for a few seconds and brought his hands together into a ball. “One S. Two S. Two P. Three S.”

And I lost him. “I don’t follow.”

Christopher frowned. “One S.” His hands moved wider. “Two S. Two P.”

“He is talking about the electron configuration of an atom.” Barabas came over with a piece of paper and a pen, sat next to me, and drew a circle on the paper. “This is the nucleus of an atom, protons and neutrons bunched together into a mass. It has a positive charge.”

He drew a circle around it and put a dot on it like a planet around a star. “The electrons have a negative charge. They have set orbitals.” He drew another circle, wider, and then another. “These orbitals are identified by scientific notations. This lowest one is 1s. This one is 2s. This bigger one is 2p. The farther away the orbital, the more electrons it can fit. The first can fit two, the second can fit eight, and so on.”

“Okay.” This was way above my pay grade, but if I could learn cuneiform, I could learn about electron orbits. “What does it have to do with djinn?”

“I’m not sure.” Barabas looked at Christopher.

“The electron jumps.” Christopher said. “It’s excited.”

“Ah. The electron can exist in two states: the ground, or lowest energy state, and the excited state. To make it really simple, the electron naturally wants to stay at the lowest orbit. However, if the electron absorbs some energy, it might ‘jump’ to the next orbit. I’m bungling this badly, but it’s been a long time since college chemistry. For example, if you have a neon atom, it has a configuration of 1s² 2s² 2p⁶, if I remember correctly. If we give it some energy, by shining a light on it for example, one of these electrons might ‘jump’ to a higher orbit such as 3s or 3p or sometimes even 5s. Then the electron emits the energy in a form of light and ‘falls’ back to the ground state.”

“Djinn,” Christopher said helpfully.

“So let me get this straight. A ghoul is the ground state of the djinn. The lowest magical form. Then, if the ghoul somehow gets some magical energy, it will evolve to a higher-order djinn, just like an excited electron jumping to the farther orbit?”

“Yes.” Christopher smiled. “It will be what its true nature meant it to be.”

“But then it will revert back into a ghoul when the magic runs out?” I asked. “It will fall again?”

“No.” Christopher shook his head. “Higher-orbit djinn make more magic.”

“Does this make sense to you?” Barabas asked.

“Sort of. We don’t really know why ghouls are ghouls. But we do know from folklore that they were relatively rare in ancient times, when magic was strong. The other types of djinn were mentioned more frequently. Yet now we have an abundance of ghouls but no djinn. We also know that some djinn tended to interbreed with humans. If we suppose that a very small percentage of the human population carries the djinn genes somewhere deep inside. They have the djinn blood but very little magic. It follows that with the influx of a magic wave, they would transform into ghouls. Their magic is too weak for them to be anything else. That’s probably why we haven’t figured out what causes ghoulism. There is probably some sort of catalyst that initiates the change, but it’s not a disease. It’s a genetic predisposition.”

Christopher smiled at me.

“It would explain why they devour corpses,” Barabas said. “Human remains, especially after a supernatural event, have a lot of residual magic.”

“They’re probably instinctively driven to it to try to get enough magic to transform.”

Barabas nodded. “But, if I understand correctly, if a ghoul somehow got enough magic to evolve into its true form, he wouldn’t ‘fall back’ the way an electron does?”

“No, because once it’s transformed, it will gain the ability to absorb more magic from its environment and will be able to survive. It’s getting them past that threshold that is the problem.” So far this was lining up with everything my father had told me about djinn. “Christopher, could my blood give a ghoul enough energy to evolve?”

Christopher pondered it, got up, and began looking through the boxes. A minute crawled by, then another. He pulled an old book out, flipped through it, and placed it in front of me. Hmm. Alchemical symbols. Looked like standard Renaissance nonsense . . . I flipped the page. A circle, within the circle the symbol for ether, a triangle pointing down imposed on the triangle pointing up. A creature writhed in the center, caught in flames. Above it blood poured from a cup held by a disembodied hand. Let’s see, viridis flammae, green flames. Blah-blah-blah . . . Spirit of box, salt of vitriol . . .

Barabas was looking over my shoulder. “Can you understand any of this?”

“Yes, it’s basic alchemy. They used methanol and boric acid to make trimethyl borate and set it on fire. It burns bright green.” A plan tried to cobble itself together in my head. I could actually do this if all else failed.

“So you don’t know about electrons but you understand medieval chemistry?”

“Electrons don’t help me survive.” I smiled at Christopher. “Thank you, Christopher. You were great.”

He hugged me. It was such a simple wordless gesture and so not like him. Christopher didn’t like to be touched. He’d spent too much time in Hugh’s cage starving slowly in his own filth. Any physical contact had to be initiated very carefully, but here he was hugging me, so I held still and smiled at him. For a few moments we sat on the floor next to each other with Christopher gently hugging my shoulders.

Someone knocked on the door. Barabas opened it. Julie stood in the doorway. Her face said she was clearly put upon and no adult could ever understand the full extent of her suffering.

“Mahon came to talk to George, but she won’t let him in her bedroom, so they are talking through the door,” she recited in a monotone voice. “Could you please come home because Luther and some knight of the Order are here to see you and Curran can’t talk to them because he has to stand in the hallway and make sure Mahon and George don’t break the door down and kill each other.”

Why me?