Chapter 16

Burns didn’t wait to exit the elevator before vanishing. He didn’t even cloud the mind of the poor sap who’d been riding with him. With an angry huff of frustration, he puffed away into thin air, leaving a sliver of ember to drift to the ground. He didn’t even linger to enjoy the panicked jabberings of the mortal, who’d witnessed his disappearance.

He sought the air currents and fled the oppression of the office building. He stirred a sharp wind behind him, one that howled his irritation.

Banished. Like he was a lowly worm, unworthy of her notice.

How dare she? He’d lived through more history than any mortal could comprehend. He’d witnessed the rise and fall of entire civilizations. He’d served kings—

Served.

The sobering thought hit him like a bundle of wet rags, heavy and damp, chilling him to the core. His form solidified around it. He became the man he called Burns again.

Standing in the atrium of his current home, the tiny corner he’d pilfered from the city, he let his mind drift back to her visit here. The light in her eyes, the glisten upon her lips, parted in wonder. Admiration.

She didn’t have the play of light in her eyes when she kicked him out just now. She wore a look of stone. Cold unfeeling stone. It chilled him, made him feel like stone, in return.

He scanned the room, spying a lantern. It was a stack of rosy glass globes, a thin stream of hammered gold undulating around and over and through. The lantern was reminiscent of the one that had burned next to his bed when he dwelled in Solomon’s palace.

He ran his hand over it, the glass cool under his palm, growing warmer closer to where the flame burned inside. Closing his eyes, he clamped down on the impulse that gripped him. He tried to squash the rage that twisted within him. He tried to hold the beast at bay.

He failed.

He seized the lamp and hurled it at the brick façade of the fireplace, wanting to hear the smash and the shatter. The lantern puffed away a split-second before impact with a most unsatisfying chuff. It reappeared a few moments later in its original spot on the table.

He had no treasure. Everything around him was an illusion. The only thing that had ever been real was Tamarinda.

And she was gone. She’d banished him.

He paced, fists balled, jaw set in a cramped line. That crazy, spellbound creature. She possessed him. It made him want to scream. Centuries of running and chasing, pursuing and evading. All he wanted was his talisman. He’d seen it. He’d held it. For the briefest of moments, he had it. Why didn’t he act? Why didn’t he do what he did best? He’d had years to plan it and yet he failed to act. Why?

He hung his head. He knew why.

That crazy, spellbound creature. She possessed him and banished him in the same breath.

He knew the path was clear for him to take what he wanted. He knew where the talisman was, and he knew her weakness. Her spellbinding. Three thousand years offered plenty of time to devise the particulars.

He wasn’t a coward. He didn’t lack conviction. The trouble, he knew, was that he allowed her the advantage. He allowed her to possess him. She did it when she beckoned him to her dream. He felt the unspoken wish and had been drawn to it. The moth to a hungry flame.

He closed his eyes and crumpled into his chair, head drooping. The heaviness of the realization was too great to hold aloft. He sagged beneath the weight of the first burden he’s felt since he began the search for his talisman.

She possessed him. And he allowed it. A willing prisoner. He crafted the bars to his own prison when he allowed her to possess him.

And now he was banished, prison and all.

Three thousand years, and he’d finally stumbled upon his bleakest moment. A tear slid out of the corner of his eye as he imagined her face, the very picture of his greatest despair.

He knew one thing, and one thing only. Talisman or no, he had to get her back.

And he, the djinn with all the answers, hadn’t the faintest idea how.