Page 37 of Waves
“If she’d had his ring, he couldn’t have turned her human yesterday,” I responded slowly, thinking aloud, as if speaking slowly might help me detect the motive for the murder of a woman I’d met for less than five minutes. Kicking aside the book on my feet, I started to pace. “He had to have his own ring.”
“Djinn magic can’t wish for death,” Sahar pointed out.
“He didn’t. He wished to turn her human. She happened to be underwater,” Lizza’s snark was too harsh for the situation,but her ability to meter her responses seemed to have shriveled along with her skin. The undead woman sighed, hunching her shoulders and bringing her hand up to her mouth as she went to chew on a fingernail. But the entire nail detached, and I looked quickly away, not wanting to see what her finger looked like or what she was going to do with that nail. A crunching sound generated the answer I’d tried to avoid.
Back and forth, back and forth I paced on feet that felt as flattened as halibut. I fought the urge to wring my hands but failed, twisting my fingers together. “She saw him commit murder. He must have wanted to get rid of witnesses.”
“By subtly murdering her in cold blood in the middle of a public festival? He sounds like a genius,” Lizza jibed.
My own worry was far darker, and her sarcasm was beginning to grate on me. This was a serious matter. And yes, it seemed foolish to kill her in public in such a drastic way. He must have been desperate.
My intuition tingled.
“She was talking to me.”
“Yes, we know.” Lizza sank into a chair.
“No. She was talkingto me. He must not have wanted her to tell me who he was.” The desperate urge to beg Lizza to bring the girl back came over me again, even though I knew she couldn’t.
There was only one djinni I knew of who wouldn’t want me to know he was here, in my kingdom. One who could kill without a second thought. One who knew me.
Sahar and I spoke at the exact same moment, our faces mirrored expressions of horror. “Raj.”
Chapter 15
Avia
Goosebumps riddled my arms as sharp and cutting dread sliced me to bits. The sultan. The never-ending king. The madman. He was here. My lungs felt pierced by a thousand ice crystals, and I couldn’t breathe.
The bookshelf on the far side of the room seemed to go out of focus for a moment and shakily, I whispered, “He easily turned that siren human. He could do the same to me at any second.” While it wasn’t my first brush with death, and I’d had many far closer, something about it turned my core as icy as the glacier that surrounded us.
“No. He can’t.” The dismissal seemed to echo in the silence.
My gaze darted to my mage and Lizza’s eyebrows rose as she waited for me to catch up. But I stood in the middle of a maze and each way I turned was a dead end.
What the hell did she mean?
I glanced at Sahar, but my adviser clasped her hands on her lap and looked as confused as I felt. Which meant that Lizza’s comment had nothing to do with Okeanos. Nothing to do with my current abilities because the siren knew me better than I knew myself most days. She had practically become a mother figure…
Mother figure.
“He can’t. Because Queen Gela already used magic to disguise me as a human.”
“And a wish can’t restore what once was.” Lizza raised a gnarled finger to emphasize her point.
He couldn’t drown me. Solace liquefied my limbs. The knotted tangles of my muscles relaxed and sagged and for a moment I was as weightless as a jellyfish. But reason soon eclipsed relief and I found myself pacing around my mage and her bag of tricks as I said, “Still. There are countless other ways he could destroy me.”
“There are plenty of ways you could destroy yourself too. Worrying, for one.”
That got a chuckle from Sahar, who didn’t bother to hide her amusement when I shot them both with a solid glare. “He’s the deposed monarch of Cheryn! The lunatic who sent a dragon to take me!” I clutched at my anger desperately because the terror of trauma threatened to bubble up. Remembering that flight when I’d been snatched, and my certainty of death made the edges of my vision blur. Purposely, I bit my bottom lip so hard it stung, trying to snap myself out of it. “He allied with my mother and sought to kill me.”
“He allied with your mother to expand his own power. We don’t know that he actually sought to kill you,” Lizza replied in a bored tone, as if we were merely discussing the weather and not my life.
“So, comforting to think that my life meant so little to him. It was just a footnote in his war novel. A little blot on the victory he was writing for himself.” I bit out harshly, balling my fingers into shaking fists.
“We’re all blots,” Lizza said. “All of us. Queen, soldier, peasant. It doesn’t matter. We come and we go. And make no mistake, no one else’s death means as much to us as our own. So,don’t go holding grudges against him for doing what royals do. Otherwise, one day you’ll have to hate yourself.”
That truth struck me like a slap to the face.
