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Instruments of the Goddess
—
Balu flew them back to Milion on the family’s fastest Persian. Ostensibly, he did this so Yasmin and Joseph would arrive fresh. In reality, Yasmin knew her brother didn’t want to miss what happened next.
They circled town until they found Iksander and his men. Circumstances had changed since Connor left. Evidently, the guardians’ reinforcements beat them there. A cluster of tents—festive in appearance but in actuality a temporary headquarters—dotted a fallow field near the Temple of Demeter. The largest tent flew a light blue pennant on which the white Nummius leopard reared.
“Shall I land there?” Balu asked, knowing the leopard was Iksander’s family emblem.
“Wait till the guards wave us down,” Joseph said. “When they do, I want you to find Celik. Tell him I sent you and offer your services as a skilled amateur. If he accepts them, fine. If he doesn’t, fly back to town and wait. I don’t want you in the way any more than I want you hurt.”
“I can’t stick with you two?” Balu asked.
“No,” Joseph said.
“No,” Yasmin confirmed, when her brother turned pleadingly to her. Once Iksander knew his best magician had arrived, he’d move Celik off the frontline and Joseph on. Wherever Celik ended up, Balu would be safer there.
“But—”
“Joseph is being generous. I’d send you home if it were up to me.”
“That’s mean.”
“Do you want Mother and Father to think Joseph isn’t a good influence on you?”
That shut him up. He muttered when they landed but did as Joseph said.
“That was sneaky,” Joseph complimented. “You really do have a strategic mind.”
Side by side, they entered the royal tent.
Iksander and his guardians stood at a light camp desk, studying a local map. Yasmin hadn’t seen the sultan since their divorce, the details of which his lawyers had handled. Her former master was as beautiful as ever with his thick golden hair and his noble warrior face. Interestingly—at least to her—she felt perfectly calm to see him. Not resentful or regretful to have lost his favor. Not even shy to be in the presence of her social superior. She remembered a childhood lesson from temple school.
In the eyes of the Goddess, all djinn are equal.
She smiled at Iksander when he looked up.
“You’re here,” he said, including her and Joseph in the greeting. “Good. We sent Connor off so fast, I didn’t think to ask him to speak to you. Recovered from your ordeal, it looks like?”
“We are,” Joseph said. “Where are LaBass and Dimitriou?”
“Camped out on the other side of Demeter’s house trying to pry off their new footwear.”
“Celik’s boots worked then?”
“Yes. He’s done well, but I’m happy you’ve arrived. As you can see, we don’t have the conspirators in hand. Dimitriou has announced a self-styled public hearing to prove his innocence, scheduled for this evening at sunset. His allies barricaded the post office and got word out with the booster there. Djinn have been arriving from neighboring towns ever since.”
“Loyalists, I presume?”
“He hasn’t been shy about stacking the audience in his favor. This movement LaBass is building is looking more and more organized.”
“Even loyalists can be made to see the truth,” Yasmin said. “Connor said he thought we should have hope.”
Iksander seemed a little startled that she’d spoken.
“That’s a direct quote,” she added.
“Well, sometimes he knows things the rest of us don’t.” Though he didn’t exactly overflow with optimism, he smiled slightly. “You’ve reminded me I have something I want to return to you.”
He pulled a little carry tin from his pocket and handed it to her. Curious, Yasmin unscrewed it.
“My braided lock!” she exclaimed, identifying the coil inside. “The one we used to tie the scroll and postcard together.”
“It seemed best to return such a personal object to its owner.”
Yasmin definitely wouldn’t want anyone using this to do attack magic against her. Joseph, either. The lock was infused with his essence too.
“Thank you,” she said sincerely.
“Least I could do,” he said. “Now why don’t we four talk strategy.”
Joseph opened his mouth to say it ought to be ‘we five.’ That was nice, but Yasmin shook her head. The sultan was their sovereign, and she—ironically—wasn’t someone he knew well. He was entitled to choose whoever he trusted to consult. She squeezed Joseph’s arm to reassure him it was all right.
“I’ll be outside,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll find me if you need me for anything.”
~
She didn’t have far to walk before finding a craggy boulder to sit against. Djinn in uniform seemed to be everywhere. Some guarded tents others ducked into. Some strode about the camp on errands, while still more patrolled the perimeter. No one seemed agitated. The atmosphere was calm and professional.
And male. As far as she could tell, she was the sole djinniya in the vicinity.
Somewhat to her surprise, no one challenged her presence.
Maybe she was learning to look like she had a right to be anywhere.
She turned her gaze toward the Temple of Demeter. Perhaps a mile from Iksander’s camp, the building drew many eyes. Though a haze blurred the horizon, the sky was clear. The edifice stood out distinctly, being near no other structures on flat terrain. Yasmin easily made out its triangular pediment and white columns. She wondered if Demeter were aware of events unfolding around her house. Did divinities pay that much attention? Supposedly, named gods had their being nearer to people. The goddess Yasmin followed was simply ‘She’ or ‘the Creatoress.’
She clasped her hands together before her mouth but wasn’t sure what to pray. The idea of Dimitriou and LaBass winning tonight’s standoff both frightened and angered her. Dimitriou in particular had demonstrated his base nature. Yasmin wanted passionately for this conflict to resolve in Iksander’s favor but couldn’t be sure it would. How could any djinniya know what the Creators had in mind? What if corrupt, power-mad murderers ruling the Glorious City was a thread in the Divine plan? Deities were by nature ineffable.
Guide me, Goddess, she thought. You teach that the humblest djinni matters. If the essence of what I wish can be, please help me be a part of bringing it about. If it cannot be, please give me the strength and wisdom to work toward a happier future for our city.
She wiped her cheek where a tear spilled over. She had prayed. Now she would be quiet.
~
She was as calm as she was getting when Joseph came for her at dusk.
“It’s time,” he said, extending a hand to help her rise. “Dimitriou’s side is illuminating the temple steps. He’ll be well lit for his rally.”
“LaBass and he know their theater, I guess.”
He lifted her knuckles to his mouth. “I told Iksander we’d take a spot near the front. I’m not sure what we’ll be up against. We may have to act on the fly.”
She nodded. This was her impression too. “Iksander didn’t object to me taking part?”
“He asked me to thank you. Your willingness to support his leadership surprised him.” Joseph laughed. “I suspect he underestimates how much you enjoy your newfound freedom . . . and how much help you can offer.”
They were walking among a crowd—and not only a crowd of guards. Civilians joined the moving mass: Milioners and djinn from other towns, pushing closer together as they approached their goal.
A large, gently fluttering banner hung down from the temple’s pediment. The magic-powered spotlights were trained on it. Their light revealed a white sailing ship on a blood red ground.
“What do you suppose that’s about?” she asked.
“Perhaps it’s their pirate flag,” Joseph quipped, making her laugh unexpectedly. “Seriously, I don’t know. Something LaBass masterminded, I wager. He’s more of a planner than Lord Dimitriou.”
The crowd had grown dense, hampering them from moving closer. Joseph didn’t try to push more aggressively.
“This ought to be near enough,” he said.
Yasmin supposed it was. They could have lobbed a javelin up the marble steps, assuming their arms were fit. A sturdy brass chain on posts barred the audience from going higher than ground level. She and Joseph were ten or so bodies back from the front. Thankfully, the audience space was dark, and Joseph didn’t wear livery. The throng had no way of knowing which side they supported.
Assuming her eyes weren’t playing tricks, she thought she saw LaBass lurking in the lee of one of the tall columns. If it were him, was it good news or bad that he was sticking close to his accomplice?
“Dimitriou,” someone near them shouted. “Dimitriou, speak to us.”
The chant spread, soon joined by rhythmically stamping feet. So many took up the petition that the ground vibrated. The stamping caused silvery wisps to issue around their feet, probably the dusty remnant of old wild magic dews. Whatever the source, the wisps made the grass look as if it were smoking.
Speak to us. Speak to us. Lord Dimitriou, speak to us.
Joseph shook his head in horrified disbelief. Unnerved as well, Yasmin wrapped her hand tighter around his.
“He’s coming,” someone nearer the front announced.
He was . . . and he didn’t come alone. Dimitriou led Safiye onto the high platform. She was robed in white—modest, lovely, with rainbow glints here and there to mark her outfit’s lavish diamond embellishment. Though she seemed to come voluntarily, her face was nearly as white as her garments. As foil to her, Dimitriou wore velvet so deeply blue it read black. When he reached the center of the stage, he lifted Safiye’s arm as if claiming victory.
The djinn around them let out a cheer.
Stefan and Safiye looked as fine as any sultan and his kadin.
“His boot is gone,” Joseph said. “And the cuff. Damn it. I was hoping Celik’s restraint would stick.”
“Friends,” Dimitriou began, lifting his hands for quiet.
The crowd fell silent within a breath.
He smiled in recognition of their respect. “Friends,” he repeated. “Thank you for giving me this chance to prove my innocence. I promise you won’t regret it.” He turned slightly to gesture behind him. “I expect you see this flag and wonder what it means. It is our flag, friends: symbol of our ships coming in. Symbol of the good fortune that should and, I believe, will be shared by all of us.”
“Shared by some a lot more than others,” Joseph muttered cynically. “And so much for not harboring ambitions of rulership.”
Dimitriou couldn’t hear him. Joseph had pitched his comment for Yasmin’s ears alone. Up on the temple step’s, the murderer’s expression increased in seriousness. “You’ve heard lies about me this day, accusing me of terrible, depraved things. Some of you may believe them. Others may speculate. Before we move into the future we all deserve, I must set your minds at ease.”
“Show us you aren’t dark!” someone’s voice lifted to demand.
A plant, Yasmin thought. The person’s timing was too perfect.
“Yes,” Dimitriou nodded soberly. “That’s the core question, isn’t it? If any djinni had done what our current sultan claims . . . if he’d murdered and raped the dead . . . if he’d committed parricide, and theft, and who knows what atrocities our current sultan wants to ascribe to me . . . if any djinni had done these things, he’d have turned ifrit a thousand times over. His soul would be black as pitch. He couldn’t hide what he’d become if he were the greatest sorcerer our dimension had ever known.
“Even the Empress Luna, who—on our current sultan’s watch—wreaked havoc on all of us . . . even she revealed her ugliness to those who knew how to look for it.”
“Well, that isn’t true,” Joseph said. “Luna looked completely normal until the end. I can vouch for that personally.”
Yasmin didn’t think Dimitriou cared about sticking to the facts . . . or what could be proved in any court but public opinion. On the other hand, when it came to magic, Luna had been massively more adept than Dimitriou. He should have turned dark. And it ought to be visible. Yet there he stood, on a goddess’s very doorstep, without lightning striking him.
He had to know how virtuous the setting would make him look.
“The steps,” she said slowly.
Joseph turned to her. “The steps?”
“My brother Ramis hid that he’d turned. It took a lot of energy, but he could conceal the signs for hours at a time. What if, along with putting cutouts between himself and his dirty deeds, Dimitriou is using magic to prevent the change from manifesting in the first place.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Maybe it is with those wild magic cakes.”
Joseph glanced back at Dimitriou. “You think he’s got some stashed underfoot up there?”
“He might consider it insurance. In case Demeter takes offense at him trumpeting his virtue in front of her.” She wasn’t joking. The uneasy, magic-stuffed atmosphere made her feel anything might happen.
“We could scan the steps and see,” Joseph said. “If the cakes are there, possibly you and I could remove them. Iksander is willing to give this poseur a bit of rope, but there’s no reason to let him have that kind of advantage.”
Joseph’s suggestion seemed good to her. They blew out their breaths and centered. As she scanned, she had a sense of displacement. She wasn’t sure if she were seeing through her inner eye or his. Maybe both. That was a little odd. She’d had no sense of breaching his personal barriers. Maybe he’d dropped them? She supposed Joseph was getting used to them working in unison. In any case, her guess had been correct. She discerned a cavity beneath the thick marble paver supporting Dimitriou. The heap of disks within it glowed. Yasmin counted six—no, seven of the things. Trying to move them telekinetically was no use, though she and Joseph broke into a sweat with the fierceness of their effort.
“Damn,” he said, giving up. “Those things are as slippery as greased pigs.”
“He’s set protections around them. We could try spelling a hole in the marble. See if we can get some of the magic to leak away.”
They had slightly better luck with this, though the opening they created was miniscule.
“That’s not going to help much,” she sighed.
“We can’t spend more energy on it. We might need the power for later.”
They’d forgotten to speak as quietly as they should.
“Shush, you two,” complained the person in front of them.
Yasmin and Joseph shushed. As they’d worked, she’d listened with half an ear to Dimitriou nattering about Safiye, reminding everyone she’d been Iksander’s until he cast her off. Would such a worthy, highborn djinniya, who could have any man she wished, consent to marry an ifrit? Of course, she wouldn’t! Consequently, she too confirmed his virtue.
Moreover—here his voice became impassioned—if they needed further proof that the evidence against him was fabricated, could any man with so comely a marital partner dream of stooping to the acts he’d been accused of? The mere idea was laughable.
Wait a second, Yasmin thought. Did Dimitriou say he and Safiye were married?
“Darling,” he crooned, kissing the hand of his maybe-wife. “Please forgive the display I’m obliged to make. It isn’t fair to you that your devoted spouse thus expose himself. Regrettably, I owe it to our people not to leave a shred of doubt.”
Crap. Him calling himself Safiye’s spouse confirmed it. They must have rushed a ceremony this afternoon. She noted that—in Dimitriou’s mouth—‘our people’ sounded a lot like ‘all people, everywhere.’ Most definitely, he wasn’t referring to Milioners alone.
By this point, only an idiot would believe he didn’t covet Iksander’s throne.
Safiye inclined her head, indicating she gave permission for the display Dimitriou had in mind. Would anyone but Yasmin see her elegant stiffness as discomfort? As to that, was Yasmin reading more into her manner than was there? Did the former concubine approve of Dimitriou’s intentions? As far as she could tell, Lady Toraman wasn’t being forced to go along with this.
“Good Lord,” Joseph murmured. “I think he’s about to strip.
This appeared to be the case. Dimitriou began unfastening his waist sash. Before he’d finished, a servant hastened onto the floodlit platform to take the removed item. Dimitriou’s man-of-the-people line must not extend to letting expensive garments lie on a dusty floor. His valet in place, he didn’t hesitate. One by one, he handed off his clothes until he was naked.
The djinn who watched sucked in a concerted breath.
Seeming unself-conscious, Dimitriou lifted both arms and turned. He didn’t do this hurriedly. He gave the crowd time to survey him.
Yasmin couldn’t deny the show was good. Dimitriou was exceedingly well formed. Though his face was ordinary, his Creator had compensated by blessing his physique. On top of that, his fondness for carpet polo had sculpted him. His shoulders were impressive, his torso tapered, his legs long and muscular. His skin was flawless—without a single sign of spiritual infirmity. His relaxed genitals were likewise unobjectionable. Smooth. Regular. Decent in size but not outrageous. In truth, they resembled pictures from her concubine training manuals.
Immaturely perhaps, she decided they were a teensy bit boring.
When he’d completed his rotation, Dimitriou dropped his arms and stood serenely. “Would your sultan bare himself to you like this? Considering some of his recent habits, do you think he’d be this unblemished?”
Yasmin thought he might but doubted Dimitriou cared. He had to know Iksander was unlikely to accept this particular dare. At the least, the sultan would think it undignified. Asking the question was what mattered. Putting suspicions into people’s heads.
In this and other things, Safiye’s new husband was successful.
“That’s no ifrit!” someone called. This time, she thought the pronouncement might be spontaneous. Others seconded the opinion. He’s no murderer. Look how perfect he is, how healthy and fit.
“He’s light,” someone cried, and this too was taken up.
“He’s light djinn. He’s light! Lord Dimitriou is light!”
“Uh, boy,” Joseph sighed.
Without warning, the illumination that blazed onstage dimmed to a blue flicker.
The acclamations petered out, replaced by murmurs of confusion.
What’s happening? people asked. Get those spotlights back on!
An icy shiver crawled across Yasmin’s shoulders. Joseph must have felt it too, because his hand clutched hers.
“Someone’s doing a spell.” He turned this way and that to find the perpetrator. “A big one.”
Yasmin wasn’t sure this was true. The rising power felt organic rather than organized. Was Demeter stirring? She shuddered at that idea. Praying to deities was one thing. Directly encountering them didn’t strike her as comfortable.
Joseph grabbed her hand and pointed. “Look at the mist.”
In the diminished light, she spied a thin, steam-like spout of power issuing from the hole they’d made earlier. A glance with her inner sight suggested they’d nicked a wild magic cake.
“Not that,” Joseph said. “Check the wings. See the silvery fog creeping onto the stage?”
She saw it then, swirling ever thicker across the marble floor. “I think the leak is attracting it.”
What ‘it’ was, she didn’t know. Something that liked raw magic. Something that didn’t read like a regular djinni in vapor form.
Soon the crowd saw it too. “What’s that?” someone cried fearfully.
The gathering mist swirled like a dust devil. Sparkling, it grew taller and denser, ultimately coalescing into a blurred female form. Veiled in smoke that resembled modest clothes, it glided to the place where Dimitriou’s hidden cache spouted.
Safiye and the valet retreated. Dimitriou held his ground, scornfully staring down the figure, though it wasn’t more than an arm’s length off. Perhaps the specter hoped to drive him back as well. It seemed to consider him, to hesitate as if gauging the threat he posed.
Temptation overcame it. It bent into the power stream and inhaled. Dimitriou’s eyes widened. Yasmin concluded he hadn’t noticed the magic leak before.
The specter’s pleasured sigh as it drank was clearly audible.
When it straightened, it was nearly solid, nearly alive-looking. Replenished, it threw back its veil and smiled—not nicely—at the male facing it.
“Tara,” Yasmin gasped softly.
Dimitriou must have recognized her too. He tossed his head haughtily. “You’re nothing but a cheap illusion, another of the sultan’s cooked-up attempts to malign my good character.”
“Is Celik doing that?” Yasmin asked Joseph.
“I don’t think so. I think that’s a genuine hungry ghost.” He cracked a fleeting grin. “That would make this Tara’s second afterlife. I guess LaBass’s old mistress isn’t easy to get rid of.”
At the moment, Tara wasn’t interested in the businessman. Her focus stayed on Dimitriou. “You shouldn’t have married her,” she said, her zombie form’s petulance replaced by a warning tone. “You said I was the one you loved.”
For just a breath, Dimitriou seemed shaken. Tara’s words implied real knowledge of him and her. “Lies!” he declared a moment later. “Everyone knows the beautiful Safiye is my soul mate.”
“Hm,” Tara said. “I think maybe you prefer me to look like this.”
Her traditional gray robes transformed in an eyeblink. Now she wore the poufy skirted human dress from the love nest beneath the ruin. Djinn gasped as they recognized the outfit from Joseph’s phone video. If they hadn’t known who Tara was before, they did then.
“Tricks!” Dimitriou said, his voice rasping the slightest bit.
He didn’t realize Tara wasn’t done.
“Not good enough?” she taunted. “I guess you prefer this.”
Her appearance changed yet again. Color drained from her lifelike skin. She went white and then slightly green. She was once more a living corpse, her eyes without spark, her skin beginning to mottle with decay.
“I love you, Master,” she said in her dizzy-sweet zombie voice. “Would you like a martini?”
She held one out to him, the glass having materialized at her naming it. Dimitriou gasped and shrank back—as anyone might have. Then, definitely not as anyone might have, he began to breathe faster.
“My God,” the djinni beside Yasmin murmured. “He’s getting an erection.”
Naked as he was, his body’s reaction was unmistakable.
“More tricks!” Dimitriou said, slapping both hands over the unwelcome development. “My enemies create this illusion. They’re desperate to smear me.”
Illusions didn’t require two-handed coverups.
Tara threw back her head on a full throated laugh. “Don’t be shy, Master. I know how much you enjoy fucking my cold pussy. Shall we make Ivy watch from the other bed? Remember how you magicked her eyelids open? Even when she was dead, she didn’t want to look. Forcing her was fun, wasn’t it? Being able to. You’d made it so she didn’t have the mental wherewithal to refuse.”
Tara circled him, her icy green-white fingers trailing across his skin. Her victim shuddered in reaction, but within what should have been undiluted horror was a frisson of arousal.
“Maybe you’d rather your ‘soul mate’ watched,” Tara stage-whispered in his ear. “Of course, you’d have to kill her first, wouldn’t you? Then you wouldn’t have to work so hard to get excited.”
Tara knew her target. Dimitriou’s erection jerked violently enough that he had trouble holding it. He moaned, the sound as obvious a betrayer as his sex organ.
No longer front and center but still within earshot, Safiye covered her face and sobbed. Someone took her by the shoulders to comfort her. The djinni wasn’t LaBass or the valet.
“Stop this,” Iksander said quietly.
“I said stop it,” he repeated when Tara’s ghost continued her caresses.
Iksander didn’t command the sort of magic Joseph and Celik could. He did, however, exude authority. The ghost stopped and looked at him.
“This is beneath you,” he said. “Vengeance belongs to God. It’s past time for you to cross over. —Don’t be afraid,” he added. “Whatever sins you’ve committed can be forgiven. Mercy is His province too.”
He spoke as if he had personal knowledge. Whether Tara believed or not, she ceased resisting him.
“You are right. This—” she paused to curl her lip “—degenerate isn’t worth my time. I will go to whatever fate awaits me.”
The sultan’s speech seemed to have decided her. With startling swiftness, her form snapped down to a glowing spark and vanished.
Her disappearance allowed Dimitriou to regroup. One hand—all he could currently spare—gestured at Iksander.
“You arranged these tricks. You wanted to parade your dubious virtue in front of everyone.” In response to this, the sultan raised a cool eyebrow. His eloquence temporarily failing him, Dimitriou turned to the crowd again. “He won’t do what I have. He remains concealed. The Goddess is my witness: I am the honest one!”
Perhaps this was the final straw for Demeter. The first law of being light—the most important one, some said—was that djinn honor their Creators. Then again, maybe Tara had eaten too great a portion of Dimitriou’s magic protection. Yasmin wasn’t sure it mattered. Whether the goddess or his own poor choices called the punishment down upon him, the results were horrible.
His feet turned gray first—not corpse-gray but more the hue of smoke. No one but Yasmin noticed until the tide reached his bare kneecaps. Dimitriou must have felt something then. He stiffened and look down.
A tide of scales joined the gray creeping up his limbs.
“Stop that,” he ordered Iksander, his eyes fiery.
The sultan lifted his palms in a silent declaration of innocence.
The tide swept upward fast. The murderer’s torso was gray now too. His feet experienced a spasm that sent him tumbling onto his hands and knees.
“Who’s doing this?” he demanded in a strange nasal tone.
Yasmin gasped. His nose was lengthening—four inches, eight—until it flopped like a small elephant’s.
“He’s grown a tail!” someone cried.
He had. The thing lashed angrily from the fulcrum of his tailbone.
“Look at his feet! Good Goddess, are those hooves?”
“It’s a trhhh—” Dimitriou seemed to be trying to say this also was a trick. As he did, his tongue flicked out like a snake’s, garbling the final word.
Someone in the crowd threw a clod of dirt at him.
“Liar!”
“Think you can fool us all?”
“You’re ifrit!”
“You’re a damned dark djinni!”
Dimitriou wasn’t so changed he couldn’t flush with shame and anger. He staggered back onto his hooved feet, struggling to hold himself upright on legs that no longer bent like a djinni’s should.
“I am your lord,” he protested thickly through his changed mouth.
The next clod of dirt hit his scaly chest.
“Arrest him!” the flinger said.
The crowd took up this chant with the same enthusiasm as they’d previously yelled accolades.
Arrest the ifrit. Arrest him. Murderers belong in jail!
The djinni’s nerve finally failed.
“He’s going to run,” Joseph said. “Shit. Without that boot, I don’t know if we can stop him.”
A vivid picture of what to do flashed into Yasmin’s mind—as if a supernatural arrow had shot it there.
Was the goddess inspiring her?
“The lock,” she said, digging for the tin she’d stuck in her sash pocket. “It’s still carrying a charge. And we already know it can work around wild magic.”
She unscrewed the tin, fumbling a bit to get the coiled braid out.
“Cup your hand,” she said.
Joseph complied as easily as if it were his own idea. He trusts me, some part of her took a twinkling to exult. Ignoring it, she dropped the braid into his palm.
She’d cupped her hands under his when an uproar among the crowd announced Dimitriou was indeed fleeing. Turning dark hadn’t weakened him—the opposite, actually. Bellows of dismay broke out as he bulled past his would-be captors. Yasmin blocked out the furor to collect her faculties.
“You’re a net,” she firmly informed the lock, “an instrument of Demeter, divine and unbreakable. If it pleases Her, do my bidding. Seek and catch the djinni, Stefan Dimitriou. Carry him back alive and do not for any reason allow him to escape.”
Joseph murmured his own enchantment, separate but compatible. Glowing glyphs sprang to life in the air, swiftly circling their cupped hands. One by one, the braid sucked in the symbols. Joseph nodded, satisfied.
“Seek, catch, hold, and return,” he intoned.
As he reinforced Yasmin’s order, the lock flamed bright and transformed. A large butterfly-style net hovered above their heads. Eager to fulfill its mission, the net zoomed off in the same direction as its quarry.
Because the top of the temple steps seemed the best viewing spot, Yasmin and Joseph swung over the restraining chain at the base and jogged up. No one stopped them. Everyone was focused the other way. From Yasmin’s hours sitting out and Joseph’s studying maps, the terrain was familiar.
They saw their creation hadn’t succeeded yet. Dimitriou was uncaught and on the run. He didn’t spy his supernatural shadow until he’d sped through the enraged crowd. They weren’t quick enough to keep up, but his spelled pursuer was relentless. The net was meters behind and closing when he twisted to check his lead. Alarmed, he veered right, even faster, across the countryside.
“I’m not worried,” Yasmin said to Joseph, her nail jammed between her teeth.
“Me either,” he responded. “He’s hellish fast, but I don’t think he can change form.”
“He’s dropped to four legs! He’s heading for the ruin. Do you think he’s got more magic cakes stashed there?”
“No,” Joseph said. “I think that bunker is the place he feels safest. I think he’s hoping to barricade himself.”
“The net won’t let him,” Yasmin said hopefully.
“It won’t,” he agreed, surer than she was. The net surged closer, shrinking the gap between.
“Oh!” Joseph cried, grabbing her with excitement. “He’s tripped. It’s got him. It’s pinning him to the ground!”
After that, as the adage goes, the only job was to say ‘Amen.’