The landscape was empty. No prince, no merchant, no bodyguard. Nothing but sand.
The dread hit suddenly, with the force of a punch to the stomach. Aisha keeled over in her saddle. She clenched her reins with trembling hands. Omar had given her this single, simple job. If she confessed to him that she had lost his brother simply because she’d underestimated the storm and hadn’t taken the proper precautions, that she hadn’t even bothered to rope their horses together…
No. She bit her cheek, hard. Self-pity is for failures.
She would find the prince. It was her mission to protect him, and she would not fail. She focused on her breathing, exhaling slowly and deeply into her scarf to settle her thudding heart. The merchant and her bodyguard had been heading north, probably toward some kind of shelter. If she could find a way to reorient herself in that direction…
“Aisha!”
The call was barely a murmur, but Aisha could still discern the direction it was coming from. Her heart simultaneously leapt and sank with relief when she turned in her saddle and saw the shadow of the prince waving at her from a distance. She waved back—one curt motion to let him know she saw him.
The prince raised his hand and pointed east. Aisha veered left, mirroring his progress from afar as she worked to close the gap between them. But it was a sizable distance, and the wind was beginning to pick up again, bringing with it a thick layer of sand that made it difficult to tell whether he was miles or feet away. In this visibility, she couldn’t even see his face.
Aisha leashed her frustration and focused on her progress. Never mind that there was sand in every crevice of her body, or that every one of her breaths was a rasp because there was so much of it in her lungs. Never mind that the wind was unraveling her shawls and that its howl had softened into a whisper that sounded, oddly, like a voice…
Ya Awasha, that glower will stick to your face if you don’t lighten up!
Aisha tensed. Unbidden, her eyes wandered to a smear of color at the edge of her vision. She inhaled sharply at the impossible sight before her: a man, standing in the middle of the storm and waving at her with a crooked smile on his face.
But… no, she was mistaken. There was no storm. There was only her brother standing in the fields of Sameesh, teasing her because he knew it was the best way to spark her motivation. I know you, dear sister. Deny it all you like, but I know that it is spite that best fuels you.
The longer she stared, the clearer her brother’s visage became: the angular face, the dark eyes, the stubble he had never had the chance to grow into a beard…
A door slammed shut in Aisha’s mind, and her brother suddenly vanished. She tightened her grip on her reins and thought, The dead do not speak.
Normally, being self-aware was enough to overcome the heat-induced hallucinations of the desert. But these mirages were just as persistent as the storm. Every time Aisha turned away from one, another materialized before her eyes. She saw her mother, beckoning to her from beneath a date tree as she worked on one of her baskets. She saw her uncle, leading a herd of sheep to pasture.
Aisha dug her nails into her palms hard enough to make the skin tear. “The dead do not speak,” she murmured to herself. “The dead do not speak.”
“How curious, that you can silence their voices.”
She whirled, and suddenly there was her brother, inexplicably riding beside her on the prince’s horse. No, not the prince’s. The shadow she had thought was Mazen was not him at all.
“Tell me, killer. Does it ease your conscience to silence your victims?” The phantom’s eyes darkened with his smirk, the pupils bleeding into the whites until they were as black as coal. “Typical hunter, thinking you are above death.”
Jinn magic. The epiphany burned through Aisha like fire. She moved on instinct, sliding a knife out from her sleeve and throwing it at her brother’s face. The mirage that had been her flesh and blood crumbled to dust, and the horse vanished with it.
But Aisha was no longer alone.
Beneath the layers of wind and dust, she could make out a dune. And at the top of the dune was a lone, grinning shadow. Find me, jinn killer, it whispered in her mind. Aisha’s possession-resisting rings burned; it was all she could do to keep from prying them off.
She knew she should turn around. That she should try to find the prince again. Trying to fight in this storm was madness, and the jinn was clearly taunting her. But this creature had looked into her mind. It had thought to fool her. And Aisha refused to be deceived by a jinn.
A deadly calm washed over her as she spurred her mare forward. She would deal with this monster and its illusions, and then she would resume her search for the group. It would not take long to dispatch the creature; she had faced many like it before.