Eventually, though, even Qadir grew bored. “Can we go home? We should—” His words collapsed into a sharp inhale. “Loulie, to your right.”
At first, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Stall owners waved their hands and beckoned to crowds. City folk strolled through the cramped thoroughfare garbed in everything from black veils to colorful silk robes.
But then she caught sight of the woman fading in and out of the hordes like a mirage. Tall and radiant, with impossibly sculpted features that betrayed no imperfection. Loulie was awestruck by her beauty.
Qadir hissed in her ear, and she hurriedly rubbed at the iron rings on her fingers. Slowly, Loulie’s mind cleared. It occurred to her that despite the woman’s otherworldly perfection, no one so much as glanced in her direction. She may as well have been a wraith. Even now, Loulie had to consciously focus to keep her in sight. Had Qadir not alerted her to the woman’s presence, Loulie’s gaze would have slid off her like water.
A jinn?
No sooner had she come to the realization than she saw a human man in plain beige attire trailing behind the jinn. He had an odd smile on his face that did not reach his glazed eyes.
“What could possibly bring a jinn to Madinne?” Qadir inched closer to her ear.
“I don’t know,” she murmured. “But I would like to find out.”
She politely broke up her conversation with the merchant, then followed the jinn and the smiling man from a distance. “You think the human’s a hunter?” She withdrew the two-faced coin and flipped it. It came down on the jinn side. No.
“Strange. I have only known jinn to follow humans into cities for revenge,” Qadir said. Loulie picked up her pace. Qadir hissed in her ear, “What are you doing?”
“Following them.”
The two-faced coin had never lied to her, which meant the jinn had enthralled this man for other reasons. She returned the coin to her pocket and took out her compass. “Lead me to the jinn,” she whispered. The enchanted arrow obeyed, pointing her toward the vanishing jinn.
“This is unwise,” Qadir said.
“When has that ever stopped me?”
Qadir sighed. “One day, your curiosity is going to get you killed.”
But Loulie had stopped listening. Her focus was on the compass, the magic that had never led her astray. The magic that, many years ago, had saved her life.
“How does it work?” Layla asked as she tilted the compass.
She had been traveling with the jinn through the desert for a week now, and she noticed the way he commanded the compass to lead them to shelter and quarry.
“It provides me with direction. When I am looking for something, it helps me locate it.” Qadir looked at the compass with a fond smile on his face.
Layla tilted it left and right, but the red arrow always swished back to her. Temperamental, her father had called it. But he had not understood its magic when he gave it to her, just as he hadn’t anticipated that Qadir, its true owner, would return for it.
And that, in doing so, he would save her life.
Qadir moved closer to their dying fire. He waved his hand over the faintly burning embers, and they flared back to life. Other than the fire, there was little else in the camp save for their weather-beaten tent and Qadir’s bag of infinite space.
The jinn rolled his shoulders. “The compass is mine. It insisted I accompany you, and so it is with you I shall stay until it points me in some other direction.”
“Why would it do such a thing?”
He looked at her for a long moment. “I was lost in your human desert and could not return home. That is why, when I tracked the compass to you, it saw fit to guide me down a different path.” His dark eyes bored into her. “Your path.”
Layla swallowed a lump in her throat. “Why can’t you return home?”
He shook his head. “Because I am no longer welcome there. But it does not matter; the compass has never led me astray.” He said the words with a bold certainty, but his eyes…
Even awash in firelight, there were haunted shadows in them.
Loulie passed through a network of alleys before she saw the jinn again. She was guiding the man into an abandoned building of worship, a humble clay structure with latticed windows and faded crescent and star patterns running up the walls. The large metal doors leading into the building were open, barely revealing a chamber draped in unnatural darkness.
“What is your plan?” Qadir’s voice was a whisper.
“I’m going to talk to her. But just in case…” Loulie reached into the bag for her weapon of choice: a curved dagger with a hilt of black obsidian. A qaf—the first letter in Qadir’s name—was painted in gold on the backside. It was the only mark of his ownership.