Chapter Five
Darren scrolled throughhis texts as he waited for Les to answer. The man had been more than freaked out. While Kavon liked to pretend to be calm and cool, he had retreated to his meditation space on the terrace to panic in private. They all had good cause to worry.
Darren’s phone chimed as a new text came in.
—Nope. Anita=work : (
Darren cringed. Usually Les texted in sentences. For all his informal language in person, his written work had a formality that rivaled Kavon’s. For him to break out the sentence fragments, times were tough. And if Anita had gotten stuck working late, Les didn’t have anyone he could talk to about this shit. Darren pulled his legs up under him on the couch and dialed the phone.
Les answered with, “If you’re calling to tell me the world is ending, don’t.”
“Once upon a time I asked if you would want to know if the world was going to hell in a handbasket,” Darren reminded him.
“Did I give you a sane answer and tell you to leave me to revel in my ignorance?”
“Nope,” Darren answered.
“Damn.” Les’s humor reasserted itself with his exaggerated tone.
Darren hated that he had brought so much misery into his friend’s life. But at the same time, he couldn’t imagine hiding the truth from Les. “Are you okay?”
“Do I sound okay?” Les asked, but then he sighed. “I’m just feeling a little stressed. You know, normal stuff. How do Anita and I save up for our vacation, where do I take my suits now that my regular dry cleaner closed, and how do we save the world. Yep. Normal.”
Darren snorted. “Yeah, tell me about it. Look, I didn’t want to ask around Kavon, but have you kept in touch with Angel?”
“No... why?” Les asked, and a half second later, he said in an exasperated tone, “Bruh! He’s a baby. Don’t drag his ass into this mess.”
Darren was fairly certain that all of them were babes compared to Bennu and the other ifrit. However, they didn’t get to sit out the coming battle. “If history repeats itself, the evil ifrit will make it hard to hide from trouble.”
“Evil ifrit. That’s a mouthful.”
“What should we call them?”
“Demons?” Les suggested.
Darren sighed. He wondered if he had been this annoying when he’d first found out that he’d landed in the middle of a prophecy. Probably. He just couldn’t remember his own annoyingness. “That's a little inflammatory.”
“Good,” Les said. “I think this is a time for some inflammation. Besides, have you looked up ifrit on the Internet? Man, that is the stuff of nightmares. If these guys have even a fraction of the bad mojo I read about, we are in serious shit. Calling them evil demons seems a little redundant, though.”
“Ifrit is what the Egyptians call the old jinn.”
“Jinn?”
“Shamans, adepts, and guides. They see all of us as the same species, and that species is separate from humans.”
“I’m fairly certain I should take offense,” Les said in a flat tone. “Calling shamans and adepts something other than human is step one toward convincing the mundane world that hunting us to extinction is acceptable.”
Darren hadn’t thought of it that way. Most of what they knew came through Salma, and he hadn’t questioned her language. However, as an FBI agent, he knew the dangers of incorrect labelling. In the early days of the team, Kavon had assigned agents to play devil’s advocate to avoid closed-off thinking. That had been before Darren finely tuned his ability to go off on a tangent.
He reached for his laptop and pulled up a thesaurus. While he typed, he asked Les, “So, who do you think our jailbreaker will target as a partner?”
Les snorted. “You’re assuming either of us can think like one of these old guides.”
Darren put guide into the thesaurus. “We’re just brainstorming.”
Les sighed. “Honestly? I have no idea. I still can’t believe an ifrit picked your sorry ass. But if this guide or his shaman are smart, they’ll make sure to keep any criminal activity inside the shamanic community. I’m not kidding when I say that too many of our people still don’t go to the police.”
Darren hated that, but he did understand why it happened. His gaze landed on one of the synonyms. “What about calling the ifrit vanguards?”
