Magic Shifts Read online

  Roland looked at me, his expression odd.

  “You may ask a follow-up question,” I told him.

  “Toys, makeup, jewelry, dresses, cute shoes, a kitten, perhaps a puppy?”

  I laughed at him.

  “Not even a pet.” Deep regret reflected in my father’s eyes. He was actually bothered by this.

  “Pets teach children empathy. Voron was trying to turn me into a psychopath. Besides, we would often take off without warning. We couldn’t be tied down.”

  “A child’s life should be filled with joy. It pains me to know you lived like that.”

  “If it had been up to you, I wouldn’t have lived at all.”

  Roland exhaled.

  “My turn.”

  “As agreed. You may ask one question. Think carefully. Most of the battle to get the right answer depends on asking the right question.”

  There was so much I needed to ask. One question didn’t even begin to cover it. I had to ask the most important one.

  “If an ifrit is trapped in an ancient earring, what would he hope to achieve by granting three wishes to the owner of the earring, turning said owner into a giant and rampaging through Atlanta, and then repeating this process?”

  “How do you know it’s an ifrit?”

  “I saw him in a vision.”

  “Did he wear jewelry?”

  “Yes. Gold with large green stones.”

  “Emerald or peridot. So we have a sultan, then.”

  Don’t ask a question. He only said one question and there had to be a price for failing to follow the rules. “One would think that an ifrit sultan would wear a ruby, because it’s the color of fire. Humans living in the Arabian Peninsula prize emerald above all stones because it’s green and Arabia is mostly arid. But djinn are not human.”

  Roland leaned forward, a sly look in his eyes. “One would think that. Then one would brush up on her geology and learn that the purest peridot is found in harraat, the lava fields in the west of Saudi Arabia. When the volcanoes in the west erupted, they brought peridots with them from the depths of the magma chambers. The djinn treasure these stones because they were bathed in the fiery lifeblood of the planet. Only the highest ranks of the ifrits wear them.”

  A waiter came to refill his coffee.

  “God created men from clay and djinn from smokeless fire,” Roland said, once the waiter left. “Even people not versed in the Qur’an know this line. Have you ever wondered about the meaning behind it?”

  “People are made of clay. We are tied to the Earth and soil; our magic is its magic. Also clay soil is almost impossible to enchant.”

  “But you can enchant a clay pot.”

  I thought about it. “But to make a clay pot, you have to first add water, which holds enchantment, and then treat it with fire.”

  “Precisely.”

  “So djinn have a lot more magic than we do.”

  “Not only do they have a lot more magic, they are magic. They require a large amount of it just to survive. A djinn absorbs the magic from its environment, storing it like a battery. Now let’s take your ifrit, for instance. He is confined to an earring, imprisoned, likely driven mad by the thousands of years of confinement. He wants freedom but he lacks the magic to break free and to exist in our volatile world.”

  “The only way he can manifest is by possessing a human host,” I said. “I gathered as much.”

  “The granting of the three wishes is an ancient ritual. In reality, it simply makes the possession that much easier; to express a wish, you must first open your mind to the djinn and then accept his magic. You have to believe that he can grant any wish. Instead of a hostile takeover, the process becomes a seduction. With each wish, your body becomes more and more receptive until finally your mind submits to the djinn completely. Some djinn can take over a human in a single wish, but most of the time it takes three. As soon as the ifrit possesses a body, the reserve of that human’s magic belongs to him.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why he turns them into giants.”

  “Two reasons. First, from what I have been told, he turns them into giants and then attempts to transform them into heated metal. In my time the most powerful of the ifrits transformed into armored giants before the battle. This state also permitted them to absorb a large amount of magic from the environment.”

  “So every time he makes a giant, he grows stronger.” I managed to make that into a statement rather than a question, but this one came too close for comfort.

  “He does.”

  It was like jumping on a trampoline. The first bounce was low, the second higher, the third higher still. First the djinn took over someone with only a little bit of magic, which gave him enough power to take over Lago, who had more magic, which in turn would give him enough juice to possess someone with yet a bigger magical reserve. Such as a knight of the Order. I really hoped not. “You mentioned two reasons.”

  “Djinn are vindictive by nature, and of all of them, the ifrits are the most likely to hold a grudge. They are creatures of enormous pride. Wrong them once, and they will hunt you across an endless desert just to watch you die. Once you strike out against one, he will be your enemy for life. If you frustrate his efforts in any way, you will find that out.”

  “I did.” He sent a bull made of fire to my house.

  “So I hear. What would you want in his place?”

  “Revenge against those who imprisoned me. But they are long dead.”

  “Blood never dies, Kate. It grows like a tree through generations. The ifrits can feel their own, especially those related to their particular clan. Look for someone he hates. He is likely gathering magic to become powerful enough to unleash his rage upon the descendants of his captors. Because he is a noble, he will call lesser djinn to him to do his bidding. He will identify his victims, and he will torture and maim them and do whatever he can to extract maximum suffering. The ifrits are not fond of granting a quick death.”

  Eduardo, the betrayer’s spawn. He must’ve been a descendant of the ifrit’s captors. Now the ifrit was torturing him.

  “Once he finishes his revenge, he will turn against the lesser targets. He will seek to rule because that’s what he did in life.”

  And we would be his targets. We had to end this chain of power-ups before it went any further.

  “You’ve allowed me one question. I will allow you one as well,” he said.

  “Why is he using the ghouls?”

  “Because he is used to ruling. He likely thinks that he requires an army to do his bidding, and they, by their very nature, are easy for him to dominate for him. Your cake is getting warm,” Roland pointed out.

  The fountain of knowledge had run dry. I had more questions. I wanted to ask about ghouls and about defeating the ifrit, but my time was up. One question was all he would answer, so I settled down to eat the rest of my cake.

  • • •

  THE EVENING WAS dying slowly, the sun bleeding its lifeblood onto the horizon when Curran pulled into our driveway. We had taken a short detour. The answer my father gave me at dinner made me rethink our stalker, so we stopped by the address the Clerk had given me. Derek had emerged from the shadows as we had pulled up and reported that he hadn’t seen anyone. We picked him up, I left a short note by the door, held in place by a rock, and we went home.

  The magic had ebbed. Technology once again took the planet in its grip. At least we’d get a short break from the ifrit.

  There were so many things I had wanted to ask my father. I wanted to know about the ghouls. I wanted him to tell me why he had broken Christopher’s mind. I wanted to know more about my mother. But this was a slippery slope.

  There was one person I could ask about all of this. Trouble was, he wasn’t always reliable.

  I stepped out of the Jeep.

  “You okay?” C
urran asked me.

  “Yeah. I’m going to go talk to Christopher for a little bit. Do you think the note will work?”

  “It can’t hurt.”

  I walked to Barabas’s house. Here’s hoping Christopher was lucid.

  Barabas let me in and went back to the Guild Manual. I found Christopher on the floor of the downstairs living room, sitting on a rug, surrounded by open books. His face lit up when he saw me, his eyes clear.

  “Mistress.”

  “Hi, Christopher.” I sat on the carpet outside his book fort.

  “I’m glad you didn’t die.” He smiled.

  “I’m glad I didn’t, too. I’ve come for advice.”

  “My mind is shattered,” he said. “But I will try.”

  “What do you know about ghouls?”

  “Ghouls are the fallen djinn,” he said.

  “Fallen like demons are the fallen angels?”

  He leaned back, shifting his weight. “The djinn are creatures of magic. They require it to survive. The more magic, the more . . .” He struggled for a word.

  “Powerful? Larger?”

  “Evolved. When they lose their magic, they become ghouls. They are fallen.”

  Christopher held his hand out, parallel to the floor. “Ghoul.” He raised his hand up as far as he could. “Marid.”

  I nodded. A marid would have much more magic than a ghoul.

  Christopher struggled with it for a few seconds and brought his hands together into a ball. “One S. Two S. Two P. Three S.”

  And I lost him. “I don’t follow.”

  Christopher frowned. “One S.” His hands moved wider. “Two S. Two P.”

  “He is talking about the electron configuration of an atom.” Barabas came over with a piece of paper and a pen, sat next to me, and drew a circle on the paper. “This is the nucleus of an atom, protons and neutrons bunched together into a mass. It has a positive charge.”

  He drew a circle around it and put a dot on it like a planet around a star. “The electrons have a negative charge. They have set orbitals.” He drew another circle, wider, and then another. “These orbitals are identified by scientific notations. This lowest one is 1s. This one is 2s. This bigger one is 2p. The farther away the orbital, the more electrons it can fit. The first can fit two, the second can fit eight, and so on.”

  “Okay.” This was way above my pay grade, but if I could learn cuneiform, I could learn about electron orbits. “What does it have to do with djinn?”

  “I’m not sure.” Barabas looked at Christopher.

  “The electron jumps.” Christopher said. “It’s excited.”

  “Ah. The electron can exist in two states: the ground, or lowest energy state, and the excited state. To make it really simple, the electron naturally wants to stay at the lowest orbit. However, if the electron absorbs some energy, it might ‘jump’ to the next orbit. I’m bungling this badly, but it’s been a long time since college chemistry. For example, if you have a neon atom, it has a configuration of 1s2 2s2 2p6, if I remember correctly. If we give it some energy, by shining a light on it for example, one of these electrons might ‘jump’ to a higher orbit such as 3s or 3p or sometimes even 5s. Then the electron emits the energy in a form of light and ‘falls’ back to the ground state.”

  “Djinn,” Christopher said helpfully.

  “So let me get this straight. A ghoul is the ground state of the djinn. The lowest magical form. Then, if the ghoul somehow gets some magical energy, it will evolve to a higher-order djinn, just like an excited electron jumping to the farther orbit?”

  “Yes.” Christopher smiled. “It will be what its true nature meant it to be.”

  “But then it will revert back into a ghoul when the magic runs out?” I asked. “It will fall again?”

  “No.” Christopher shook his head. “Higher-orbit djinn make more magic.”

  “Does this make sense to you?” Barabas asked.

  “Sort of. We don’t really know why ghouls are ghouls. But we do know from folklore that they were relatively rare in ancient times, when magic was strong. The other types of djinn were mentioned more frequently. Yet now we have an abundance of ghouls but no djinn. We also know that some djinn tended to interbreed with humans. If we suppose that a very small percentage of the human population carries the djinn genes somewhere deep inside. They have the djinn blood but very little magic. It follows that with the influx of a magic wave, they would transform into ghouls. Their magic is too weak for them to be anything else. That’s probably why we haven’t figured out what causes ghoulism. There is probably some sort of catalyst that initiates the change, but it’s not a disease. It’s a genetic predisposition.”

  Christopher smiled at me.

  “It would explain why they devour corpses,” Barabas said. “Human remains, especially after a supernatural event, have a lot of residual magic.”

  “They’re probably instinctively driven to it to try to get enough magic to transform.”

  Barabas nodded. “But, if I understand correctly, if a ghoul somehow got enough magic to evolve into its true form, he wouldn’t ‘fall back’ the way an electron does?”

  “No, because once it’s transformed, it will gain the ability to absorb more magic from its environment and will be able to survive. It’s getting them past that threshold that is the problem.” So far this was lining up with everything my father had told me about djinn. “Christopher, could my blood give a ghoul enough energy to evolve?”

  Christopher pondered it, got up, and began looking through the boxes. A minute crawled by, then another. He pulled an old book out, flipped through it, and placed it in front of me. Hmm. Alchemical symbols. Looked like standard Renaissance nonsense . . . I flipped the page. A circle, within the circle the symbol for ether, a triangle pointing down imposed on the triangle pointing up. A creature writhed in the center, caught in flames. Above it blood poured from a cup held by a disembodied hand. Let’s see, viridis flammae, green flames. Blah-blah-blah . . . Spirit of box, salt of vitriol . . .

  Barabas was looking over my shoulder. “Can you understand any of this?”

  “Yes, it’s basic alchemy. They used methanol and boric acid to make trimethyl borate and set it on fire. It burns bright green.” A plan tried to cobble itself together in my head. I could actually do this if all else failed.

  “So you don’t know about electrons but you understand medieval chemistry?”

  “Electrons don’t help me survive.” I smiled at Christopher. “Thank you, Christopher. You were great.”

  He hugged me. It was such a simple wordless gesture and so not like him. Christopher didn’t like to be touched. He’d spent too much time in Hugh’s cage starving slowly in his own filth. Any physical contact had to be initiated very carefully, but here he was hugging me, so I held still and smiled at him. For a few moments we sat on the floor next to each other with Christopher gently hugging my shoulders.

  Someone knocked on the door. Barabas opened it. Julie stood in the doorway. Her face said she was clearly put upon and no adult could ever understand the full extent of her suffering.

  “Mahon came to talk to George, but she won’t let him in her bedroom, so they are talking through the door,” she recited in a monotone voice. “Could you please come home because Luther and some knight of the Order are here to see you and Curran can’t talk to them because he has to stand in the hallway and make sure Mahon and George don’t break the door down and kill each other.”

  Why me?

  CHAPTER

  20

  I WALKED INTO my house to see the knight and the wizard sitting in my kitchen, drinking coffee. If you added in Julie’s thieving skills and my sword, we almost had an adventuring party.

  “It’s too bad we’re missing a cleric,” I said.

  They both looked at me like I had grown a second head.

&
nbsp; Never mind. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?”

  “The earring is gone and I can’t account for one of my people,” Nick said.

  I sat in the chair and rubbed my face. Julie positioned herself on the couch with a notebook and several books.

  “Go ahead and get it off your chest,” Luther said. “It will make things easier.”

  “I told you not to leave it where people had access to it.”

  “I didn’t. I put it into the Vault, into the wall containment unit, until an expert from Wolf’s Head could examine it.”

  The Vault served as the Order’s repository of all things dangerous and magical, but too valuable to set on fire.

  “Is the expert missing?”

  Nick didn’t say anything. Great.

  “What’s done is done. Let’s not point fingers,” Luther said.

  “This is a waste of time,” Nick said.

  “Why don’t you like me?” I asked.

  Nick leaned back. His hair was cropped very short and his features looked like they were carved from granite. “I could fill the room with it, starting with who you are and what you did.”

  He had to be referring to the claiming of the city.

  “I had no choice.”

  “No, there is always a choice.”

  Luther was giving us odd looks. “Should I give you two some time?”

  “No,” I told him. “I get it. You have a problem with me. What are you going to do about it?”

  “I haven’t decided. I’m contemplating killing you.”

  “Knight-protector,” Luther said.

  Nick got promoted. He had been a crusader before. He was like a scalpel: when you had a nasty boil, you sent in a crusader to lance it. He got the job done, cleaned up the mess, and moved on. The last time I saw him, he was deep undercover pretending to serve Hugh d’Ambray. He’d spent years infiltrating Hugh’s Iron Dogs, and the former head of the Order, Ted Moynohan, blew his cover just before he died. All of the things Nick had endured were useless. The experience had changed him. The man I had met years ago was deranged but human. The man in front of me now looked like he’d petrified from the outside in. And now he had Ted’s job. Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to put Nick in charge of Atlanta’s chapter of the Order?