Master and Apprentice (22 page)

“Follow me.” He started off in a direction I was pretty sure led up the mountain.

I fell into step with reluctance. One way or another, I’d have to try and get to Ian soon. I couldn’t destroy him—didn’t want to anyway, damn it—and I couldn’t take many more unexpected voyages into his personal hell. Unfortunately, I suspected things were about to get worse. I was hanging around with a Morai, and I had no desire to kill him. Hello, bad luck.

“All right,” I said. “I’m almost afraid to ask … but what’s a
ba’isis
?”

He took his time answering. “It’s a fertility spell,” he said slowly. “Vaelyn is coming into her reproductive cycle, but she’s unable to conceive in this realm because of the tether bond.”

I nodded. Ian had more or less explained that. Part of the spell that bound them to their tethers screwed with their blood, exactly so they couldn’t do what Ian had done. Breed
with humans. But Akila had been able to break it for him because tether spells were a Bahari thing. “So she’s going to get one of her studs to impregnate her,” I said.

Calvin shook his head. “She wants a child of her own. But she doesn’t want a scion.”

My head pounded sickly, and I connected the rest of the dots before he continued.

“Gahiji-an is already fertile. She intends to force him to breed with her.”

It took me a few minutes to react to the news. I couldn’t imagine how she’d possibly get Ian to screw her. Then I decided that I didn’t want to know. But I had to wonder how she knew about this fertility spell—and why she needed Calvin to do it, instead of just doing it herself.

I suspected he’d used his magic at least once more after he released Vaelyn.

“So, about those Morai scions,” I said.

His back stiffened while he walked. A good sign he was about to lie. “What about them?”

“Who’s their father?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wrong answer.” He was moving pretty fast for a guy who’d been on fire twenty minutes ago, but I didn’t have any trouble keeping up with him. “You wanna try again?”

“A Morai, apparently.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Brother Calvin. You know a hell of a lot more than you’re saying.”

He stopped midstep. After a few seconds, his shoulders slumped. “Maybe we should rest for a few minutes, and have that chat you mentioned.”

“Good idea.”

“Here. We’ll have a seat.” He made his way to a fallen
log, brushed a few pine needles from the surface, and settled on it.

I hung back. “What are the chances of bugs crawling on my ass if I sit there?”

“Slim to fair.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Suit yourself.” Calvin let out a breath and absently fingered the wooden crucifix around his neck. “It was an experiment,” he said at last. “When I first released Vaelyn, she seemed … sane. Grateful. And she was curious about my work, about my discoveries regarding djinn magic in the human realm.”

“And her being your sister, you weren’t suspicious.”

“Yes. I believed she’d found some balance.” He blinked slowly. “I had long ago accepted the fact that I’d never return to our realm, and worked to carve out my place here. Vaelyn told me that she wanted the same thing—only her vision of staying in the human realm included a family. More than that, a community, separate from humans but at peace with this realm.” A quick sigh escaped him. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Yeah. Road to hell, right?”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind,” I said. “So you were trying to give your sister a community. Does that mean they’re your scions?”

He shook his head. “I’ll get to that. In the first few years, she would disappear for weeks at a time. Exploring the new world, she said. Each time she returned a little more confident, and just a bit … harder. Hungry, and anxious. I didn’t want to see the decline. Finally, after a two-month absence, she came back with a companion. Another Morai. She said she’d found him in London, living as a museum curator.”

“Who was it?”

“His name was Barzan. I had never met him before, but Vaelyn claimed he sought peace among humans, as we did.” Calvin frowned. “Once she’d found him, she pressed me relentlessly to attempt the fertility spell with him. One child, she told me. She wanted them to raise a child, her and Barzan. She’d made arrangements for a human surrogate. A young woman, she said, living in poverty, whom she intended to pay enough money to start a new life.”

“How noble of her,” I muttered.

He hesitated for a minute. “I wanted to believe her,” he said. “Allowing her this gift, this opportunity to become a mother of sorts—I hoped it would smooth the rough edges I saw resurfacing in her. And so, I relented. I performed the
ba’isis.
Since the binding spell that creates our dormancy in this realm is one of air, I was only able to undo it temporarily. Three days,” he whispered. “Seventy-two hours. Plenty of time to impregnate one woman. Or dozens.”

I shivered. Ian had done the same thing a century or so back, when Akila undid his fertility bind permanently. But he’d done it to stay alive, to keep the Dehbei-powered barrier between realms running and make sure the Morai stayed trapped. I suspected Val and Barzan had slightly different motivations.

“Vaelyn had already built her community. Her compound, as you called it. She’d recruited young, fertile human women with the promise of wealth and power. She had formed a cult. And Barzan seeded them all.”

I decided I should sit down after all. “So now those two are running the army down there,” I said. “What do they really want? Besides Ian and Akila, I mean.”

“I don’t know. But Barzan isn’t with her anymore.”

“You sure about that?”

He nodded. “Shortly after the
ba’isis
expired, he went mad. I’m not certain whether it was a side effect of the spell, or Vaelyn, that drove him insane. She may well have, just to get rid of him—since it was obvious she wanted complete control. After the scions were born, she had their mothers slaughtered. She recruited human males to do it.” He closed his eyes, crossed himself. “Barzan fled into the mountains. Lived in caves, sealed himself away from all contact. Until …”

“I destroyed him,” I said through numb lips.

“Yes. Quite a feat, considering how powerful he must have been.”

“He was powerful?”

He looked at me like I’d just asked if water was wet. “Living scions increase a djinn’s power in this realm. Surely Gahiji-an told you that much.”

“Oh. Right.” I frowned at him. “But he really wasn’t that strong. I mean, we had a lot more trouble with Lenka, and he didn’t have any scions.”

“Maybe he wanted to be destroyed,” Calvin said.

“Or maybe the guy we found up there wasn’t Barzan.”

He offered a dry laugh. “How many djinn do you think there are in these mountains?”

“I don’t know, but I saw someone with Vaelyn when they attacked my house.”
Jazz’s house,
a little voice reminded me. I told it to shut the hell up. “A guy in a white hooded cloak, like the one she wears. I’m almost positive it was another djinn.”

“It must have been a scion.”

“Could a scion keep a single bridge open long enough for five guys to pass through?”

All the color fell out of him. “No.”

“I think your sister pulled a fast one on you. There’re two of them.”

He folded his arms as if he were cold, or in pain, or both. He didn’t say anything, but I figured he was thinking the same thing as me.

We were screwed.

T
he rain came back like God ordered a second flood.

I stood and sent a few curses skyward. Sheets of water pelted me, and the stinging pain in my chest and arms reminded me that I still needed to heal myself from the burns I’d sustained. If that was even possible. I’d always had Ian or Akila to do it for me.

“We have to get out of this.” A violent whole-body sneeze sent me stumbling and punctuated the urgency of escaping the elements. “Any ideas?”

“Not in particular.”

Thunder pounded over the tail end of his statement. I blinked some of the rain out of my eyes and tried to look around. There were a lot of trees. A blinding flash of light burst almost directly over us. For half a second I thought about how I’d never seen lightning so close before.

In the next half, I was facedown on the ground, feeling like someone had swung a baseball bat into my back. And then zapped me with five or six Tasers at once.

“Apprentice!”

I barely heard Calvin’s shout. My ears felt plugged—or
maybe shattered—and I smelled something burning. Not a single muscle wanted to move.

Jesus Christ. Save a Morai and get struck by lightning. What a fun curse this was.

Calvin rolled me over, and I yelled something incoherent when the motion hammered pins and needles through every inch of my body.

“You’re alive,” he said.

I glared at him. “Lucky me,” I muttered, moving my mouth as little as possible.

“Can you walk?”

“Ugh.” I curled and uncurled a hand. It hurt, but at least it responded. Groaning, I boosted myself up on my elbows and managed to sit. “Not much choice there,” I said. “Unless you’re gonna carry me.” I stared at my feet. Something wasn’t right there. Finally, my spinning head put it together—the toe of my left boot had blown out, and shreds of charred sock poked through.

I never knew lightning left exit wounds.

Calvin held out a hand. I sighed, took it, and let him help me on my feet. “There’re a few caves not far from here,” he said. “Come on.”

I limped after him up a slight incline and into a crumbling slit, curtained by tree roots, in the mountain. By the time we pushed inside, most of the buzzing sensation had dissipated and I merely ached everywhere.

The cave was completely closed in. Even with the changes in my vision, I could only see about six inches of lighter blackness in front of me. And I’d left the spare flashlight on the ground at the monastery. “Got a light?” I said.

A ball of blue flame blossomed in Calvin’s hand. He stared at me, half smirking. “I must say, I’ve never known anyone who was struck by lighting before. Does God not like you?”

“Not especially,” I mumbled, barely registering his words. I was busy gaping at the cave walls.

Someone had had a lot of time on his hands. I was guessing Barzan. Djinn writing covered the walls, marked in heavy charcoal black and a dark, inky substance that used to be blood. I couldn’t read it, but it still creeped me out. I doubted he’d been recording his mother’s recipes for mouse pie, or whatever the Morai liked to eat back home.

Calvin followed my gaze. When he noticed, his mouth opened wide enough to drive a train through. “I knew he was mad,” he said. “But I’d never suspected how much.”

“So what’s it say? Besides ‘Beware the deceiver.’ ”

He gaped at me. “How did you know?”

“We found a little of this when we … uh, set Barzan free. But it was mostly smudged out.”

“I see.” His lips thinned for an instant. “Most are protection spells. Wards and seals. But it does say ‘Beware the deceiver’ several times. And there’s something else. Here.” He carried the floating flame ball closer to a wall and ran a finger across a series of symbols that repeated itself several times. “ ‘He of two worlds will destroy all.’ ”

“That’s it?”

Calvin nodded.

I threw my hands up. “Great. Let’s play ‘Which descendant does the crazy guy mean?’ It could be any of them. Some warning. Doesn’t any of this stuff say anything …” I blinked. He was looking at me like I’d just confessed to being Jack the Ripper. “What?”

“Perhaps he doesn’t mean the Morai scions,” he said. “There’s only one of you.”

“Oh, come on! Do I look dangerous to you? Besides, I never even met this guy until—”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Okay. You got me there. But like I said, I’d never seen this guy before, so he couldn’t have meant me.”

Calvin looked less than convinced. He whispered something and moved his hand away from the flaming ball. It stayed hovering in the air. “You should heal yourself,” he said. “Those burns look painful.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t exactly transform. But I’ll try the healing thing, I guess.”

“Try?”

I shrugged. “I’m not very precise with healing. When I have to do it, I pretty much run on instinct. It usually works. I’ve just … never done it on myself.”

“I see.” He folded his arms. “Didn’t Gahiji-an teach you how to focus a healing spell?”

“I didn’t think you could do that. Ian doesn’t seem to know how, anyway.”

“But you can still use healing magic? Interesting.”

I wasn’t sure I liked this conversational direction. “What’s interesting?”

“Nothing, really. A stray thought.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “If you like, I’ll explain healing focus. There’s too much to cover at once, but I’ll give you the basics.”

I still wanted to know what was interesting, but I’d let it pass for now. If this guy was anything like Ian, he’d tell me when he was damned good and ready. “Go for it,” I said.

He nodded. “The body contains energy points. Each is associated with different aspects of life, health, and soul. The strongest of these points are located at the base of the spine and the throat. It helps to know which point controls the area you’re trying to heal, but in general these two are sufficient. Understand so far?”

“Yes. Wait … no.”

“All right,” he sighed. “By way of an example, your burns. Skin and muscle are linked to the throat base point. So you would focus the healing spell on that point and draw it down through the body to the damaged area. Like threading a needle.”

“I think I get it.” Maybe not exactly everything, but I figured it’d be clearer when I actually tried it. “Okay. Here goes.”

I held a hand out flat just above my throat, just like Ian usually did. It might’ve been instinctual for him—but maybe he knew more about healing than he’d bothered to tell me. That wouldn’t be much of a shocker.

My own magic came easily enough, and with the expected pain. I looked down and tried to visualize directing what I had there.
Heal.
I blinked once. A brief afterimage showed a bright spot right at my breastbone, so I closed my eyes to see if it would help.