Blood Ex Libris Read online

  I wondered if I should be insulted I hadn’t been invited to the party, but upon a few seconds of reflection, I realized how good it had been that I wasn’t. In the immediate high of blood-drinking, the whole room might have decided they simply must have a sip of the one am’r-nafsh in the room, and the arch-enemy’s frithaputhra at that! I didn’t want even one of them drinking from me, and I certainly wouldn’t survive all of them tippling from my veins.

  And what else would I have done there if I was not dessert? Drink blood from a kee myself?

  I shuddered at the thought—and shuddered even harder at the small part of me that considered it might not be a bad idea, certainly more satisfying than a handful of dried fruit and nuts. As an am’r-nafsh, I didn’t know if anyone’s blood but Sandu’s was even good for me.

  Add that to The Very Long List of Important Things I Don’t Know. But, of course, it needs to be well down the list under such action items as “How Do I Get Away From The Bad Guys At The Right Time,” which is followed immediately by “When Is the Right Time?”

  While I worked through my useless contemplations, we trouped out to the barn, where Iblis was directing the loading of supplies into the vehicles and redistributing drivers and passengers. I was back in the lead car with him and the Qarînah again, and I had an even bigger pile of white sacks to lean against. I took the time to investigate the words printed on the sack in red and yellow and black: ANFO Patlayıcı. I didn’t know what that meant. They were not particularly comfy to lean on at any rate, so I used the door armrest instead and looked out the window.

  We finally started hitting civilization and highways and road signs, most in the Latin alphabet again. Villages started flashing past, with names like Sharq, Turklar, İmamverdili. After Bəhramtəpə, things started getting more modern, with more lights in the night. The last hour was along a coastal highway that ended in a city full of fancy skyscrapers. It was surreal to be back in the kee world, surrounded by innocent people who had no idea a convoy of vampires, albeit ones who thought they were genies, were passing amongst and through their seemingly safe civilization. I stared out the windows, wondering if things looked strangely foreign because I was in a foreign city or because I no longer fit in the mortal world.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The endless drive ended, finally, at the docks. I had to consciously focus on overcoming the stench of old boats and dirty dockside water with every breath. Everyone parked around us, cramming the small area. The biggest boat at the dock was an unpromising ancient ferryboat in all possible shades of rust and decay. It was the only boat with any indication of activity—lights lit and human forms moving within. A man, an actual kee whose aroma had an off-putting top note that indicated a certain lack of personal hygiene but had delightful base notes of warm, delicious kee blood came over to greet The Nose and welcome him aboard.

  Iblis ordered me to accompany them back to the boat, and we climbed the somewhat dubious gangway. I observed that decrepitude was a ship-wide decorating theme. Discussion between the captain and the Mad Genie had started on the dock and continued as we moved through a narrow corridor to a small cabin.

  I stood awkwardly in a corner, wondering why my presence was required, while the captain insisted on what seemed to be terms of his boat’s rental with determined vehemence. He had a long list of items, and it was boring to be stuck listening to an unintelligible discussion that probably would’ve been just as tedious in English. Iblis smiled amiably and seemed to agree easily to every condition.

  Finally, the captain held out his hand to shake on an agreement, grinning and obviously certain he’d gotten the best of the deal. As he clasped hands with Iblis, he was pulled with shocking speed into the leader’s arms and spun as he was pulled, so his arms were trapped back between their bodies. He tried to cry out, but Iblis had his hand over his mouth and his teeth in the man’s neck. I watched in frozen disbelief as the man struggled and squawked while his blood was suctioned in great gulps from his jugular. With even more horror, I saw the Mad Genie use his other hand to roughly undo the man’s belt, tear open his trousers, press him face-first against the wall, and thrust into him roughly as he continued to guzzle blood. I stood there, immobile, feeling like I was being raped right along with him by being forced to watch this horrifying violation.

  The man’s stifled cries and futile struggles eventually slackened, and he went totally limp. Iblis dropped the body, adjusted himself back into his suit, and turned to me, smiling. “I am sorry to be such a bore, Naz hanım, but I hungered, and I realized I hungered in more ways than one. It is a compliment to you, tatlım. My lust for you is strong, yet I have been denied you for the time being. I must be strong for what comes, and thus must I feed from clay since I cannot yet have your sweeter nektar. He had to die anyway.” He shrugged, and I just stared at him and at the blood smeared on one side of his mouth.

  In all this time being around first am’r and then jinn, I had not seen anyone die. No people had been harmed in the making of this crazy experience, at least not that I had seen. I stared down at the body and wondered who he’d been, and if he had a family or a pet who would miss him.

  I’d thought things had started getting real when I’d first been am’r-nafsh-napped. I’d been wrong.

  “Shamhurish!” the Fucking Insane Rapist Genie yelled out of the cabin. A jinnī popped into the cabin. “Evet, Fātiḥ?”

  “Shamhurish al-Tayyar, has everything been taken care of?”

  “Yes, my Sultan! The crew has been disposed of. We are all on board and ready to go.”

  “Excellent. Take care of this for me,” Iblis negligently kicked the corpse, which was lying there obscenely, blood smeared on its neck and the naked buttocks hanging out of its clothing.

  Shamhurish picked up the body with negligent ease, and I averted my eyes from the nameless captain’s frontal nakedness as he was hauled out. Someone had to show him some tiny modicum of respect.

  “I will leave you here, Naz hanım. Get as comfortable as you can. It will take about seventeen hours to make this crossing.”

  He turned to leave, and I found myself blurting, “You have a little blood just there—” I gestured to the location on my face. I wanted to ask him how he could possibly think he was a genie-of-the-lamp when he was so obviously a vampire. The worst sort of a vampire at that—the kind that makes the villagers want to get out the pitchforks and burning torches and do brutal rituals in cemeteries with garlic and nails. I looked at the-Genie-Formerly-Known-as-Mehmet with hatred and a desire to start learning how to use a wooden stake and anything good at decapitation.

  Just hand me the tools of the trade, even if I’m now half-vampire.

  Hmmm, maybe I should start with myself.

  He nonchalantly wiped the blood away and smiled his brilliant smile at me, his metallic eyes glittering with madness, “Teşekkür ederim, sevgili.” And then he was gone, and not a moment too soon because I couldn’t keep up the pretense any longer. I collapsed onto a lower bunk bed. I didn’t want anyone to hear my crying, so I wept noiselessly into a pillow, a pillow that smelled like it had belonged to the dead captain—which made me spasm harder in silent sobs.

  I spent the next seventeen and a half hours in that cabin, or so the clock on the desk told me. I didn’t want to see anyone, vampire or am’r or jinn or whatever the fuck they wanted to call themselves. Obizuth and Nadilla both tried at separate times to come in, but I opened the door a crack and told them I was seasick and I needed to just be alone. Of course, I was not seasick; I was pretty sure I couldn’t get any kind of sick anymore. They had obviously forgotten their own time as am’r-nafsh, for they bought the story and left me alone. I was certain the door was being guarded during the night, but I didn’t care as long as I didn’t have to see or interact with whichever loathsome creature was on the other side. Happily, the Fucking Insane Rapist Genie did not try to come back in. I don’t know what I would have done, but it would not have ended well.

  Ther
e was a bathroom in the cabin, a small square of space with a filthy shower I had no desire to attempt to use. I did need to use the squat toilet, but the less said about it, the better. There was a porthole, and during the daylight hours, I sat atop the desk in front of it and stared out into the headache-inducing glare. Punishing myself didn’t do any good, I knew, but it was the only thing that made me feel remotely better about anything. I didn’t think there was a guard on my door during the day, and I contemplated rushing out, jumping off the ship, and drowning in the sunlit Caspian Sea. Then I realized I’d probably just come back as a water-logged am’r, and I didn’t know how to then kill myself permanently at that point.

  Another item to add to my to-do list: “Am’r Suicide, How To Make It Conclusive.”

  Having given up on the self-torture for a while, I was on the bunk drifting between nightmares and the waking nightmare of reality when I felt the boat thump roughly into something solid. After some shouted directions, we thunked gently into it on a regular beat. We were obviously tying up at a dock, although where in the world that dock was, I could not guess.

  Did Sandu know? How was he ever going to find me again? How could I get him information about the Fucking Insane Rapist Genie and his equally insane genie gang? And why hadn’t I asked him these questions back in my comfortable dungeon under the mountain? He’d said he would come get me, but when? Had I missed my only chance when I missed Dragoș?

  I heard a shouted hail from outside the boat, and Iblis called back. Shortly thereafter, Obizuth came into the cabin, gave me more dried fruit and nuts, and helped me put on a headscarf and shades. I silently followed her out of the cabin and disembarked from the vessel of rust and disillusionment to find we had not sailed to another city, but we had come ashore.

  It was not a promising shore. The pebbly sand was covered in debris, and the beach smelled strongly of every type of pollution. The sand of the beach turned into hills of the same thirsty shades of tan, khaki, and umber. There was a convoy of utility vehicles in the early evening light, which was still far too far from sunset to please anyone. No sports cars here, just dusty utilitarian boxes on wheels, a few unremarkable cars with Lada and Opel on them, and an incongruous red Corolla. To make it more thrilling, the person striding over to me was Bat-Bitch, draped to kill, with humongous eighties blue-blockers over most of the top half of her face.

  “Come with me,” she snapped, and Obizuth and I exchanged glances that meant, “Damn, but she’s a raging bitch, isn’t she?” She practically dragged me over to a 4x4, shoved me in the back, and closed the door. I heard discussion outside in one of the myriad languages I couldn’t understand, but the voices were all too recognizable as Iblis and the Qarînah. They climbed in the front, and we peeled off in a cloud of sandy dust and clanging pebbles in the direction of Who The Fuck Knows, our caravan of grouchy sun-hungover jinn lurching along behind us.

  It eventually got better as we drove away from the sunset into the dimming east. After some miles of dispiriting dusty tracks, things began looking greener and more alive. The hills provided some scrubland: grasses, flowering shrubs, and succulents with bright flowers catching the light from behind us. The trees were strange gnarled, twisted things, but there was the green hint of spring on their limbs. If I’d chosen to be here, walking through these hills, I could have found it beautiful, watching the cool sunlight sliding ever more angled across the alien florae. As it was, it reminded me that every rotation of the tires was taking me to some unknown but undoubtedly disagreeable fate, rolling farther from help, farther from even such dubious allies as the am’r.

  Eventually the sun went down, and I watched the landscape change from scrubby hills to outright desert. Strange ghostly trees like thin, branchy bushes on drugs occasionally rose in the moonlight to startle me from a near-trance state. We were not on roads, but the desert was a smoother ride than the roads we’d driven on in the past days. The sound of the wheels on the sand and the wind rushing past the windows lulled me into a stupor. Perhaps I’d burnt out my fear and exhausted my adrenaline. Now the road to my doom just anesthetized me.

  For hours and hours, we drove. The only break was another humiliating bathroom stop just for me. I huddled behind one of those twisted bush-tree things and saw the droppings of some other living creature, a small one. I hoped it was happily living a good life in the desert and had not been killed by whatever predators lurked out here. I was kind of over predators at the moment.

  A few times, we drove past little villages: small collections of round, woven huts and more modern homes, dead trees and wire used as fencing around them. The road was just a regularly-driven path of tire tracks. Telephone lines strung these villages together. Those and the rubbish collected around the villages were the only things that proved we had not driven back in time. No one came out of their homes to watch our convoy sweep past and back out into the empty desert. Smart people.

  The sun rose. Like the rest of the jinn, I put on sunglasses as soon as the rays were stretching out from behind us. Behind the glasses, I closed my eyes and wished I was anywhere else in the world, as long as it was not a moving car in a sunny desert.

  I was jolted awake when the car abruptly halted. We were in a parking cave again. Had we found another mountain in the middle of this endless desert, or were we just in a pit in the ground? It didn’t really matter. Am’r were obviously burrowing creatures.

  However, upon inspection, it was not the vampire lair I’d been expecting. We were in a plain old cave that had a sandy floor, with the cars from our convoy unloading various obscure items to join other…well, various obscure items. There were more white bags of ANFO Patlayıcı, whatever that was. There were lots of boxes and crates. I wandered over since no one was paying attention to me, and there were what looked a bit like red plastic funnels, only they were seemingly filled with something. And also boxes filled with long, thin white sausage-like things. They had writing on them, and after a double-take, I realized those words were in English. I sidled closer and peeked in: DYNO and DANGER EXPLOSIVE. Oh, shit.

  I sidled away, trying to make it look casual.

  What the fuck? Why were al-jinn hoarding explosives? No, rephrase that: Just what horrible plan did they have? I knew the answer was: “Not for any good reason.”

  I looked around; sacks, crates, and boxes were being moved with busy, eager industry both from car to car and from what looked like caches that were already here into other vehicles. More items were being added from the back of the cave: large black drums of something and blue plastic containers. The latter I recognized, or I recognized the shape and the smell. I couldn’t read керосин, but I knew a fuel container when I saw it. Upon recognition, the smell hit me like I had run into a wall: oily, acrid, and harsh. I quickly edged out of the way as some jinn came over to start loading the containers into the backs of the 4x4s.

  This is profoundly bad. I needed to be away from these D-Day preparations. No one was watching me, being caught up in the nefarious hustle and bustle. I wandered casually and indirectly towards the opening of the cave. Getting lost in the desert and dealing with sun-poisoning and dehydration sounded vastly preferable to sticking around with the Mad Genie Bomber Corps.

  The smell of morning in the desert wafted into the cave. I wandered a bit farther even more nonchalantly. I’d almost made it to the left-hand side of the opening when Bat-Bitch materialized beside me.

  “Where are you going, sevgili?” she purred with rancid sarcasm.

  “I just wanted to get an idea of our surroundings, Shaqîqah,” I said, trying to sound oblivious to her scorn. “No one has taken the time to catch me up on our plans. I want to help, but I don’t know what to do.” I put all my frustration at my possible near-escape into my voice, hoping it would be read as the frustration of the fervent convert wanting to be part of all the exciting things.

  “Ahhhh. You want to help,” she spat. Bat-Bitch was not fooled. “Our Sultan wants you with him in this battle. He belie
ves you are true to our cause. I know you to be the whore of Kazıklı bey, but he believes in you and wants you by his side for our glorious victory. I know you will eventually expose your deception, and then will come my personal victory, when I will help my Sultan drain you dry and leave your body to distress your patar and distract him into a fatal mistake. Or else, if we have killed him first, I may beg to be allowed to drain you to the edge of painful existence, leaving you always on the brink of life. Draining you over and over, never feeding you, but leaving you to fade out slowly in an agony of hunger and impotence. I will not count my work complete until I have helped to destroy you.”

  I blinked at her. I had always known it was war between us—had sensed it from our very first meeting—but I had not expected this outright declaration, this overt defiance of her master in sheer antagonism for lil’ ol’ me.

  “I understand,” I told her, meeting her eyes. “And I feel the same.”

  She nodded. “You will come with me now to Sultan Iblis. If you are to be told anything, he will tell you.”

  There wasn’t much I could say or do, so I followed her back into the cave through the busy hum of bad guys getting ready to do bad things. Iblis waved off the Qarînah’s concerns, and me. I was escorted to an area in the back of the cave where the lady jinn had gathered. Of course. Even though it was marginally easier to be around them, I still resented being sent to the harem. Room was made for me and a few nods and small smiles came my way, but no one drew me into conversation.

  The activity was dying down. Jinn were settling down on the sandy floor, lounging as bonelessly as cats, and talking and laughing quietly in groups. There was a feeling of waiting.