A Fork of Paths

Never mind the Bloodless, I wish I knew how to murder jinn.

From what I was able to pick up while traveling with them, it appeared that Aisha had a crush on Benjamin. I guessed that this was one of the reasons why she was so defensive of him. Maybe she’d even been in love with the vampire, despite him clearly not returning her advances in the slightest. He’d already told me that his heart was set on a girl back on his island. River, he’d said her name was.

I sank down on the sand, stretching out my legs, allowing the waves to wash over my feet and ankles.

I certainly couldn’t blame the jinni for crushing on Benjamin. Aside from his uncommon good looks, his strength of character and unwavering bravery could easily make a girl fall for him. I wondered whether, if my heart hadn’t already belonged to Hans, I might’ve fallen for him too.

But I would never live in a world where that was the case, because Hans owned me. Now and forever.

“Julie,” Uma called, startling me. I shot to my feet and whirled around to see that she had arrived on the sand just behind me. She had changed out of her nightclothes and was wearing a long brown dress. Wrapped around her was an apron which, to my discomfort, appeared to be stained with blood. Braithe might not have had blood of his own, but after the feasting on that small island, I was sure that he still must’ve had some of his victims’ blood left in his system. My pulse quickened as I feared she might’ve gone back on her word to do nothing to harm him.

Apparently she noticed my unease. She said beneath her breath, “Don’t worry. He’s all right.”

Her eyes shifted from me further along the beach. Following her gaze, I caught sight of Aisha moving toward us. She had spotted Uma already.

“So what happened?” I asked anxiously.

“I suggest you come with me to my treatment room. Your jinni friend can come, too.”

“Not my friend,” I muttered.

Aisha arrived next to us, for the first time laying eyes on Uma for more than a few seconds at a time.

“Well?” she asked, eyeing the witch expectantly. “What did you discover?”

This was also the first time that she had directly addressed the witch since arriving on the island. I guessed that she really was fed up with waiting and just wanted to get this task over with.

Uma eyed her. “I suggest that you both come up to my castle. That’ll be a more suitable place to talk than down here.”

I turned on Aisha and raised a brow. “I guess you’ll be waiting here again?”

“No, I’ll come with you,” she huffed.

“Okay,” I said, even as disappointment clawed at my chest. What I really wanted to know was whether the witch had managed to gain an idea of how to cure the Bloodless. But with Aisha present, we would only be able to discuss Uma’s findings on how to murder them. I would need to find another opportunity to ask her about the cure—perhaps, once we arrived at the ship, we would find a moment when Aisha was distracted.

I looked back down in the box. This wasn’t a private island. Although it belonged to the witch sisters, Uma had many visitors—a myriad of supernaturals who wanted treatments of various illnesses.

“If Aisha is coming with us this time,” I said, “I don’t want to leave this box alone here on the beach. It’s a… special type of box and it has a lot of value to me.”

“Not a problem,” the witch replied. With a click of her fingers, the box vanished. “I transported it up to the castle, behind the desk in the waiting room. It will be safe there. Nobody will touch it.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I approached Uma and reached out to touch her so that she could vanish me up to the castle. Seconds before she vanished us, Aisha whizzed toward me and grabbed hold of my other arm. We disappeared, the jinni allowing the witch’s magic to flow through her and transport her with us. This took me by surprise. A jinni willingly submitting to the magic of a witch? I didn’t know an awful lot about the jinn, but I was certain that this was unheard of. Was she really too lazy to travel on her own strength? It made me recall how reluctant she had been to offer me any help with the box, and back on the ship when she had used me as a guinea pig to attack the Bloodless. The most strenuous thing she had done to help me then had been to lift me away from danger. Had making me face the danger while she watched really all only been about exacting revenge on me?

These behaviors combined made me wonder whether this jinni really was as strong as she made herself out to be. She had recently spent a lot of time within Benjamin fighting off the Elder. I wondered whether that was having an impact on her strength.

But again, I didn’t have much time to ponder this as we arrived in the witch’s treatment room, which looked very much like the potion room I’d met her in earlier to talk. This one also had countless bottles of ingredients lining shelf upon shelf against the wall, each one labeled neatly and clearly—most of whose names I couldn’t even pronounce. But in the center of this room was a long, metal examination table, upon which lay Braithe. His wrists and ankles had been strapped to steel posts at each corner of the table, and he was lying there, stretched out and unmoving. His eyes were closed. Again, a horrible doubt filled my mind that the witch could have deceived me. I moved closer to examine him. Yes, he was breathing. He was alive—or as alive as he could be in his present state. He just appeared to be in a deep slumber, perhaps also still in the state of paralysis the witch had put him under earlier with her magic.