My shadow has a heartbeat. His stomach knotted with fear.
Before he could pull his hand away, he felt blood dribbling down her lips as she coughed. “How…？” She gasped as the knife was pulled from her shoulder. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she turned, hand over her gaping wound. She was stunned by the apparition before her.
“Impossible.” She stepped back. “You… I killed you!”
He had to be a mirage. A hallucination. He could not possibly be alive, not after she had suffocated his heart with magic. Not when she had watched the life fade from his eyes. Not when every human in the diwan had seen him collapse, lifeless.
And yet—the hunter stood before her with his terrible black knife, grinning.
“You, kill the King of the Forty Thieves? What a conceited notion.”
“No!” She stepped back. If she perished here, there would be no stopping him from making her into his slave. He would kill her, just as he had killed her beloved, and then he would steal her magic. Her eyes shifted to the shadows—what might be her final escape.
But there was no running from the hunter. In moments, he was upon her, sinking his cursed dagger into her heart, and…
He was barely breathing as the vision of the shadow jinn faded. The world—his world—returned in all its starlit chaos. He could make out sounds from the present, the most recognizable of which was a voice. He had spent enough time despising its lulling cadence to know it by heart, even if it was uncharacteristically soft.
Ahmed. Mazen stumbled toward the stairs. Dark spots danced before his eyes, threatening to pull him back into a memory that was not his. Desperate, he reached for his rings. Heat shot through his fingers. It burned like hell, but—it was enough to root him in the moment, to remind him of the uncharacteristic softness of Ahmed’s voice. The Ahmed he knew did not speak in conspiratorial whispers. The Ahmed he knew did not abide silence; he shattered it.
“How many jinn have you killed?” the wali said in his strange, stiff voice. Beneath his cadence was another voice, so soft it was barely audible. “All so you could steal our magic and paint your world with our blood?”
Mazen stepped into the diwan.
Ahmed’s guests lay on the floor, staring unresponsively at their surroundings. It appeared as if they had been in the middle of a feast, for food and drink lay scattered across the floor, staining the rich carpet and tile. Ahmed stood at the center of the mess, holding the merchant up by the collar of her robe. She was limp as a rag doll in his grasp.
“No more.” The wali raised his hand. Mazen saw a flash of silver. “Goodbye, jinn killer.”
Mazen did not think. He moved.
One moment he was standing unseen at the diwan entrance, and the next, he’d tackled Ahmed to the ground. Ahmed lay stunned for a few moments, face paling as he took in Mazen’s—Omar’s—sudden appearance. “You,” he choked.
Mazen’s eyes flitted to the scarf hanging loosely on the wali’s neck, to the band of golden bones no longer concealed beneath it. He reached for the grimacing skulls.
But before Mazen could grab the collar, Ahmed seized his wrist and wrenched it sharply to the side. Icy pain rippled through Mazen’s arm. He bit back a yell as the wali threw him off. For a heartbeat, he lay stunned on the floor, overwhelmed by the pain shooting through his bones. But then the adrenaline kicked in, and he was able to push himself up.
It was just in time to watch a groggy-looking hunter approach Ahmed with a blade in hand. “Foul creature!” the hunter cried. “Leave the wali be!”
Ahmed reached for one of his daggers as the man rushed toward him. Their blades met with an ear-piercing screech. The standstill lasted a heartbeat, two. Then Ahmed slid past the hunter’s guard. The man lost his balance, and Ahmed used the opening to aim a hard kick at his legs. This time, the hunter toppled, and the wali fell on him with the dagger.
Mazen had been audience to mock battles before. He had watched palace soldiers cut flesh and draw blood as they outmaneuvered each other. But there were no artful tactics in this struggle. There was only life-ending defeat as Ahmed carved a crescent into the hunter’s neck. The dying man’s scream faded to a choked gurgle and then into a horrible, broken wheeze as Ahmed rose to his feet. When he turned, his robe was drenched with blood.
Mazen did not hear his own scream over the uproar that followed, but he felt it tear through his chest as he scrambled away from the gore. A yell on the other side of the diwan drew his attention, and he looked up to see another hunter—a grizzled man with scars on his face—come at the wali with a sword. Ahmed slid past his reach and plunged a dagger into the back of his neck as he swept past.