The djinni frowned, a chip inches from his mouth. “A live clerk can call in the authorities. A dead clerk cannot. If he’d called his police, there would have been many more bodies to burn. The other man presented the same threat. This way, there was less mess.” The chip went into his mouth, and fury battered my already fragile temper. I was so mad I couldn’t even speak to him without screaming. So I slid back into my seat and wiped more ashes from my face with the damp cloth.
“We have to get rid of him, Cale.” I didn’t bother to whisper. “I can’t sit in this car with him for another sixteen hours.”
He gave me a sympathetic glance, but I couldn’t help noticing that his jaw was clenched in the same fury plaguing me. “We’ll get rid of him in Memphis. There’s nothing we can do until then.”
“Yes, there is,” Xaphan said, and I tensed, already knowing what he would say. “You can make a wish.”
That’s when I realized he’d done it on purpose. Somehow, even tainted by his own incomprehensibly amoral viewpoint, he’d known that killing those people would upset me. That it would piss me off so badly I’d do almost anything to get rid of him. Xaphan was playing the game, and he thought he’d just won.
He was wrong.
Oddly calm, now that I knew what he was up to, I tilted the rearview mirror so I could see his face. His irritatingly smug andevilface—the toddler-with-a-pistol imagery was long gone. “Xaphan, there is nothing in the world I want badly enough to set you loose upon humanity. Not one. Fucking. Thing.”
The djinni’s lips turned up in a smooth, creepy smile. His eyes, already blacker than the midnight sky, darkened even more, until I felt like I was staring into the depths of evil itself. “Nothing?” He tilted his head slightly, arching dark red brows.
“Nothing.” I was confident in my answer. Completely, utterly confident—until I heard his next words.
“Think carefully, Alexandra.” His eyes burned into me, as if they could singe not just my body, but my spirit too. “Say the word, and I can restore your very soul.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Restore my soul?
I laughed out loud, unable to conceive of such a statement as anything other than a joke. A really fuckinglousyjoke. “What the hell does that even mean?” I demanded, tossing the used wipe into the plastic sack on the floorboard between my feet. “Are you saying there’s something wrong with my soul?”
Djinni-in-the-mirror shrugged, still chewing. “I cannot judge the worth of a soul. That is beyond my ken. But I can tell you this: the problem with your soul is not quality, but quantity.”
“What?!” I glanced at Cale to find him staring at Xaphan in the rearview mirror with the same perplexed expression I surely wore. Only his was flavored with a healthy dose of anger.
The nymph shook his head. “Ignore him. He’s pushing your buttons on purpose because his last trick didn’t work.”
“But he’s telling the truth, right? You said he can’t lie, so he has to be telling the truth.”
Cale frowned. “He’s tellingpartof the truth, I would assume. Or maybe hisversionof the truth. But he’s not going to give you the whole story—not unless you wish for it—so arguing with him is pointless.”
He was right. Still, pumping the djinni for information couldn’t hurt, so long as I didn’t say the magic word. Right?
Ignoring Cale’s warning, I pulled another wipe from the package, then dropped the remainder into the plastic bag and twisted to face the backseat again. I tossed the balled-up tissue at Xaphan, but he merely watched it fall into his lap, arching one brow at me in question. “It’s to clean your hands. And your mouth. You look like a Kindergartner after snack time.”
Frowning, he prodded the tissue cautiously with one orange-stained finger, like a cat poking its prey to make sure it was dead. An hour earlier, I might have laughed over a comparison of the powerful djinni to a harmless house cat. But now, havinginhaledthe victim of his human barbecue…
Images of the roasted store clerk haunted the backs of my eyelids. It wouldn’t do to underestimate the djinni again. “What do you know about my soul, Xaphan?”
One corner of his cheese-rimmed mouth turned up in a cagey, wicked smile. “Not as much as I would know if it were intact.”
For a long moment, I couldn’t quite process what he was saying. Nor could I think of a follow-up question.
“Either tell her what she wants to know, or shut up entirely,” Cale snapped. “Enigmatic answers just piss her off.”
I could have kissed Cale, but the djinni ignored him completely, as had become his habit. Orthus held Xaphan’s interest, and I held his freedom. Cale was nothing to him.Lucky nymph…
The djinni dropped the now-empty chip bag on the floor at his feet. “What do you want to know?”
Everything. “What do you mean by ‘if it were intact’? Are you saying my soul isbroken?”
Wet wipe draped over one finger, he swiped almost delicately at the stain around his mouth, and the cloth caught on patches of reddish chin stubble. “In a manner of speaking…yes. Your body and soul are still joined. If they were not, you could not sustain its physical form.”
My pulse pounded in my throat. The djinni was skirting dangerously close to a subject I’d rather he not touch—and Cale not know. I rolled my eyes, hoping to communicate impatience, instead of panic. “Every imp in diapers knows that. Get on with it. What’s wrong with my soul?”
