Blood Ex Libris Page 22

  After that, I sat around and waited and watched while the girls chose outfits, rejected them, chose new ones, gossiped and laughed, and packed small bags with a couple of days’ changes of clothes and styling products. They seemed to be a happy and kind and generous bunch. Remembering they were my enemies was difficult, and what did it even mean—enemy—in this context? I knew for sure Mehmet wanted only bad things for Sandu and Bagamil and everyone who followed them, but would these women fight for “Iblis?” Did they really buy into his shit heart and soul? Would they fight the am’r for it? I couldn’t tell. I thought about asking them but was too shy and scared and stupid to do so. I was finally having a moment of relative comfort and safety, and I didn’t want to do anything to mess it up.

  It was nice to have this safer-feeling moment, but I didn’t dare bond with my captors. I couldn’t forget that Iblis was in the next room, and he wanted to kill Sandu and add me to his harem.

  As things drew to a close, my tummy growled embarrassingly loudly. I’d been aware of weakness and hunger ever since Sandu had snacked on me, and while adrenalin had made the weakness ignorable, the hunger was getting less so. To my horror, everyone in the room stopped, turned their heads to me, and stared at me as if I had made some astonishing noise comparable to whale song or a discharging canon.

  “Oh!” Nadilla giggled. “She needs food!” They all laughed, which made me grow hot with discomfit and awkwardness. “We have some! Do not worry!” she said and ran off. She came back with a tray, and while I ate, she taught me about the cheese-filled pastry, “börek,” I was eating and “aşure,” a cold pudding of grains, fruits, nuts, and spices. And tea. The gals all looked a bit wistful about the tea, which they called “çay,” which sounded like but was not what I thought of as “chai.” They did, however, finally show me the correct way of using the two pots: you steeped the top pot nice and strong, filled the pretty glass cup as full as you liked tea-strength-wise, and finished by diluting it with the hot water in the bottom pot. And they had sugar cubes, which had been missing in the previous haphazard service. I think they had fun showing the clueless Westerner how it was done, and I was sure they missed drinking their çay. They kept sniffing it as appreciatively as they sniffed me.

  It never stops being weird. I’m as much a drink to them as a cup of tea. Seriously, I’m having the strangest captivity in the hands of an enemy ever.

  Finally, things were all packed. Gals were all dressed properly over their call-girl undergarments, and the one who needed to eat food had been fed. If the ones who needed to drink blood had been fed, well, I didn’t know about it, nor did I want to. We all donned head-scarves—I was taught a few styles of wearing them, and it was decided which worked best on me—after which we could finally go.

  We walked through passage after hallway after corridor. Some halls were finished in tiles and carving, others cut out of the living rock, awaiting decoration. As we went, our ranks swelled with male jinn joining us with various bags and packages of their own. I finally started to wonder where we were going.

  We came out into a huge parking-lot cavern with an entrance big enough for a bus, filled with all sorts of cars from battered vans and utility vehicles to a wide variety of sports cars. Many of the cars were being loaded as we got there, and the group we had been for a short while dispersed to the different vehicles. I stood looking lost and useless until The Nose came up to me. “Naz hanım, güzelim, your radiance makes it clear you belong with us. You bloom with the happiness that comes only from being with your own people. Come now. You ride with me!”

  He led me over to a typical sports car—rounded corners, low to the ground, spoiler, fancy lights—which he exotically called an Etox Zafer. He described it in reverent terms, which, since I knew nothing about cars, went right over my head. I made appropriate “Really?” and “Wow,” and “You don’t say” and “Impressive” responses at all the right places. Sigh. Vampires and their toys.

  The back of the car was stuffed full of packages and bags, and it was just Iblis and me for however long this drive would be. Joy.

  We left the parking cave, and I shortly realized we were leaving a mountain in the midst of mountains. Iblis kept on about the car, and I leaned back, tuned him out, and reveled in the landscape around me. “Night in the mountains” was not a theme to waste. The moon was full, and with my am’r-enhanced vision, I could wallow in the loveliness.

  Why would they want to rush away from being children of the night when the night was this beautiful?

  It was late spring, and there were still some day-flowers open. The night-flowers were starting to send out gorgeous scents, plus the resonant smells of pine trees and wet soil wafted to me. The smell of the fresh night air after being stifled underground was enough to get drunk on.

  About an hour later I had to ask him for a rest break, to my intense mortification. Happily, he waved the rest of the convoy along, so I didn’t have the whole group waiting for my bladder. He overtook them in no time after I’d finished, his fancy car growling as he passed them all to get to the front again.

  I was tired of his fancy car after a few short hours of driving in it. My new am’r-nafsh body did not have the same cramping of muscles or that horrible thing where limbs fell asleep, but an over-eight-hour-drive in a comfortable car will still make you hate it and want to not be in it any longer. The Etox Zafer had not been designed for comfort in the first place. Mostly we were on the open road and the views were amazing, but we started to pass through small towns, and eventually, bigger towns. Road signs flashed by with numbers like D950, D955, D080, unpronounceable-looking names like Sarıgöl Caddesi, İnönü Caddesi, Küçükkonak Köyü Yolu, Erzurum Ağrı Yolu. After one of the bigger towns, there was a police checkpoint. Iblis was in the lead and had a friendly chat with the officer, and a fat wad of colorful bills changed hands. All the cars in our convoy were waved along. Iblis cheerfully told me it was one of the good things about driving at night: “Many troubles of the day are just not there.” We still found ourselves behind the occasional slow truck that blocked the road, at which Iblis honked profusely until it lurched aside to make room for him to pass. The drivers behind us did the same, filling the night with raucous noise until we were in the dark and silence of the open road again. Occasionally, he would precipitously swerve. It made me gasp and think we were going to die the first time, and never got any less disconcerting. Each time it was to avoid an impressive pothole, except the time it was to avoid the cow that appeared with horrifying suddenness in our headlights.

  Iblis was one of those people who liked to talk as he drove, and he spewed a strange travelogue of Turkey that interwove his history of traveling around this part of the world over the ages with the changes he had seen and all the ways that things were exactly the same. It was fascinating; the historian in me thrilled at the details and wished I could take notes. The other parts of me were all too aware I was being driven at about ninety miles an hour by the maddest of madmen in a direction away from the last place Sandu had seen me. How could Sandu track me? Could he follow my scent as it blew out the open window? Even if I memorized the impossible names of the roads we were traveling, how could I get the information back to him?

  The sky started lightening in the east. We were in a part of Turkey with little but desert-like badlands by way of nature to all sides of us, and the sky was a big feature of the view from the car windows. Iblis put on sunglasses and indicated I was to search the glove box until I found an extra pair for my use. They didn’t compliment my face, but beggars could certainly not be choosers, and I slid them on gratefully. The higher the sun rose, the less the Mad Genie said, and he soon subsided into scowling silence, the sufferer of a terrible light-hangover.

  We reached the cave before the sun was too high or bright in the sky. We’d turned off the main road onto something much like a glorified cattle path, and it was doing the Zafer’s undercarriage no favors. We lurched along, turning right and left in interesting switchba
cks until we came to a squat hill with high scrub in front of it. I watched in horror as we drove straight at it. We turned sharply at the very last second, and a hidden entrance to a low cave admitted us. We were safely underground, away from the intense daylight. I had to admit I sighed with relief at the same time as The Nose did.

  This cave was not a vampire lair—nor was it Aladdin’s cave—but simply an underground road. A long underground road. I wondered if there were networks of vampire-gnawed pathways under the whole world and I shyly inquired about it to Iblis, hoping not to be shot down. Unlike Sandu, Iblis was happy to answer any questions I had, often with a far greater depth of information and direction of discourse than I’d anticipated or wanted. It made me uncomfortable to realize my good guys had left me painfully and dangerously ignorant, while the bad guys were sharing knowledge—even if it was their warped and propagandized version of it—with delight and enthusiasm.

  This tunnel, it seemed, was even farther underground than being under the surface of the earth. It was a border crossing, or rather, a way to get around border crossings with all their tiresome paperwork, passports, and necessary large amounts of graft. It was also basically a vampire truck stop, giving tired travelers of the night a chance to rest through a too-long, too-bright day. “Every once in a while, the people of clay find our tunnels,” Iblis added. “Their outlaws, criminals, terrorists. We do our clay brothers a service then, for once one of them goes in and we find him, well, he does not come out.”

  So, basically, the truck stop is sometimes stocked with snacks for the road, I thought. I shocked myself with my callousness. It must be the inferior company I’d been keeping.

  We drove for at least an hour underground before we pulled to the side of the road. Everyone else followed, turned off their ignition, and went to sleep.

  Seriously, only I could fall into an adventure story where the bad-guy vampires pull over for a nap. In the books and movies, once the action starts, people don’t stop for a nap in their car. They are too busy blowing things up or having sex or killing someone at the end of a great fight scene. I tried to stay awake and think of some way to sneak off and get a message to the good guys about where I was, but I just ended up panicking myself. Then I worried about where Sandu was, and how he and the good guys were going to find me, and ruminating upon the fact that Sandu had left me with the bad guys to help him, but what good had I been? None. Zilch. Zip. Finally, disgusted both with myself and also with Sandu for leaving me with not even a half-assed plan, I fell asleep, curled up in the stupid sporty leather bucket seat.

  I came to with Iblis shaking my shoulder and saying my name. Well, saying “Naz hanım,” at any rate. He got us out of the Zafer, and a jinnī to whom I’d not been introduced unpacked the back and got in, turned it around, and headed back the way we’d come. My heart lurched when I saw the Qarînah waiting by the dusty four-wheel-drive vehicle Iblis was leading me to. He called shotgun, and I shared a backseat with a pile of full white sacks.

  Al-Jinn Convoys Ltd. is back on the road again.

  At least they talked in languages I couldn’t understand thenceforward. I could just keep to myself in the back seat and not have to engage with Bat-Bitch.

  We emerged from the vampire Underground Railroad right after sunset, and I immediately knew we were in another country. The potholes in Turkey had been impressive, but they could not compete with the state of the roads wherever we were now. There were more potholes than road.

  Also, the road signs now went from having letters I could read if not pronounce to completely unreadable, a written language unlike anything I’d ever seen before. We were on highways the whole way, a journey that seemed to take about three hours. I never got a true sense of the country, a factor both of it being nighttime and the truly distracting state of the roads.

  We turned off the highway and found another hidden entrance to the next line in the vampire Underground Railroad, which categorically killed the sight-seeing. This time we drove for at least two hours and came up in a wild, mountainous region. Never mind road maintenance; here, there was no observable infrastructure. We bumped along a dirt…well, path until my teeth felt like they were going to rattle out of my head.

  Were the vampire fangs around me feeling any more stable?

  Around sunrise, we were hitting wider dirt roads, roughly paved roads, and small villages. Iblis’s SUV was leading the convoy, of course, and Bat-Bitch pulled into a decrepit farm. The main farm building was big enough to house all the vehicles. Everyone got out, and we headed en masse to the farmhouse, which was far nicer on the inside than the rickety outside would lead anyone to believe. I had to ask and then make a rush for the lavatory. I savored my first real sit-down toilet in I-don’t-know-how-long with an almost embarrassing bliss.

  When I came out, Obizuth shooed me to where the other gals were resting, stretching out, and gossiping in a room with six mattresses and blacked-out windows—a room obviously set up solely for daylight-crashing vampires. Nadilla shyly handed me some almonds and dried apricots, and I found myself deeply touched by her act of kindness.

  She does not need to eat, but she remembered to feed me.

  I immediately started worrying about Stockholm syndrome. It had been less than two weeks, and no one had tortured me in the slightest. How could it not upset me to realize how grateful I was for the most basic food and thoughtfulness. I’d always liked to think I was one of those people who would only break after the most gruesome of interrogations. It was upsetting to realize I was not made of such stern stuff.

  We slept all day, or at least, I did. When I awoke at twilight, I was alone in the room. I wondered where everyone had gone—and the realization crashed down upon me that this was the first time I’d been left alone. Now was the moment to do something. Anything.

  OK, then. Of all the anythings, what should I do first?

  I found myself frozen into inaction, imagining various options and following through the scenarios until they inevitably went horribly wrong. The worst but also the most likely of the bunch was that I got far enough away from the Mad Genie Gang, only to find there were no good guys following us just out of sight. No one keeping track of me, and I had just rushed off into some senseless, increasingly insane, and perilous future with no hope of rescue and of being in Sandu’s arms ever again.

  I forced myself out of bed and walked as quietly as I could to the door, boots in hand. The hallway was empty, and all doors I could see were closed. The house was quiet, the only sound being a sharp wind outside whipping around the building. I snuck down the hall in my bare feet, carrying my boots.

  Still no signs of life. Er, undeath either.

  I stood outside on a decrepit porch, pulling my boots onto my feet while looking desperately around. The land near the house and barn was clear, growing only patchy grass and weeds. About a hundred yards away, saplings and young trees started changing that into thin woodland, which grew denser the farther it stretched. The trees drew my eyes as the obvious location for anyone who did not want to be seen to be lurking.

  I listened behind me but heard no stirring from the house. No shouts of “The captive has escaped!” Since I was still at liberty, I started cautiously towards the woods, looking right and left into the deepening evening shadows. As time stretched, I had plenty of opportunity to range from confident assurance through to irresolute uncertainty.

  Yes, this is how the heroine of the story makes her escape. Of course, Sandu is waiting for me just ahead!

  But no. What the hell was I doing? No one was out there, and Iblis would shortly be Quite Displeased.

  Just as that unpleasant thought jangled through my brain, I saw movement in the trees—a person. Not Sandu—my heart twanged with disappointment—but it looked like...

  Could it be Dragoș?

  He’d be most welcome, despite his lack of Sandu-ness. He waved me to him. I proceeded towards him more quickly and confidently, bursting with gladness and relief that someone was out t
here for me, after all.

  Which was when I heard the most horrible sound in the world: the farmhouse door opening behind me. And worse than horrible, the Qarînah’s cold voice stretched out after me across the yard. “Where are you going, Naz hanım?”

  “Ah, I needed some air. And to stretch my legs after all that driving.” The Dragoș-shaped-person had disappeared from view. I turned around, feeling terrible despair and depression rushing through me, and walked back to where the Bat-Bitch waited like a disapproving schoolmarm scowling at a misbehaving child. “You will not go anywhere by yourself,” she informed me, her dislike of me dripping from her every word. “You are not in the Western world anymore, and you should at the very least have the escort of another female. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I am sorry. I do want to fit into my new world,” I told her meekly, trying to project the demeanor of a willing and obedient acolyte who just lived for instruction and guidance. It made me feel a bit ill. What I found I actually wanted was violent and graphic enough to surprise me, but this repugnant sucking up was required now if I ever wanted to have another chance of wandering off alone.

  The Qarînah dropped me off in the girls’ dormitory and left.

  The injunction to always have an escort doesn’t seem to apply to her. Bitch.

  Obizuth and the others fussed over me, and we took turns using the primitive bathing facilities to get as clean as we could with cold water and a rag. At least there were clean outfits for all of us.

  While that was going on, I noticed every face I saw was flushed with health, eyes glinting with satisfied pleasure. I knew that look, having seen it on Sandu after every…well, session. And there was a warm, rich perfume rising from all of them which I realized with shock was the sweet smell of fresh blood, practically oozing out of their pores. So that was what everyone had been doing while I slept in and missed my chance to escape. Where did they get the people, the living, the…the kee? I hadn’t smelled anyone in the house who wasn’t a known genie. Of course, I’d only been in a few rooms of the rambling building, and I didn’t have the sniffer of a fully-fledged am’r.