The Seven Kings of Jinn

“Just a dream, just a dream,” Ari chanted, backing all the way into the room now, her knees threatening to buckle in terror as it followed her, predatory, saliva dripping between its black gums and razor-sharp teeth. Its lack of a left arm and lack of a right leg only increased the ugly horror of the creature. The monster’s twisted, malformed body slithered toward her, somehow balanced despite its deformities. Its long, blackened claws clacked and scraped harshly in a high whine against the mirrored floors as it continued to back her into a corner.

Feeling faint and nauseous, Ari stopped, struggling to draw breath.

“It isn’t real.” She shook her head, trying to still her body. “It’s okay.” She exhaled, opening her eyes to stare the creature down. “Just let it happen. It’ll attack and you’ll wake up. That’s what happens in dre—” She cut off into a silent scream as the monster launched into the air toward her, its mouth open wide. Ari threw her hands up to cover her face, closing her eyes tight and waiting for her subconscious to rip her out of the nightmare. Instead, she felt the impact of it hit, her body slamming to the floor with a painful thud that knocked the breath right out of her. Her head smacked against the mirrored floor, eliciting eye-watering pain. A sharp streak of light shot across her eyes and then she felt wet heat clampdown on her forearm.

Agony ricocheted through her as the monster’s teeth tore through her flesh. She screamed, her eyes rolling back in her head as a wave of nausea swept over her.

“Vadit. Heel,” a deep, male voice commanded quietly and Ari felt the heat of the monster disappear. Air flowed across her wounds agitating the pain, and she felt the warm blood slip down her arm at too fast a current.

“It’s not real,” she whispered, tears leaking out from her closed eyes. It’s too real. She shook, gulping back panic, shuddering with the shock. Her chest tightened. I’m going to die, I’m going to die.

“Ari,” a hard voice whispered in her ear, and she felt the heat of someone bending over her. “Child, open your eyes.”

Dad? The thought of the familiar, of having someone here on her side in a dream world she couldn’t awaken from, eased the tightness in her chest and her heart slowed. Despite her pain, the overwhelming belief that she was going to die dissipated and she pried her eyes open. “D-d-d-dad?” she stammered through the shock.

But it wasn’t Derek who kneeled beside her in dark trousers hand-sewn to his body, his muscled chest bare beneath his rich voluminous robes. The man was enormous, perhaps in his mid-thirties, his dark face chiseled like granite. Ari’s heart clenched at the sight of this mammoth man and not because he was a stranger, but because of his bleak black eyes that blazed down on her without feeling.

They were empty.

“Yes,” he whispered, stroking her hair back from her face, seeming oblivious to the fact that she was in agony and bleeding all over the place. “Child. It is your father.”

Ari’s heart stopped. “M-my what?”

Slowly her thoughts swam up out of the murky waters they’d been drowning in and Ari gulped, drinking in the air of consciousness. It took her a minute to remember the dream. The nightmare. The pain.

She groaned, feeling achy all over.

And then her body caught up with her mind.

The floor was still cold and hard beneath her body, except for her shoulders and back. They seemed encased in inexplicable warmth. When she gasped at the feel of wet licks across her forearm, she gulped down the overwhelming scent of spices and jasmine.

Her eyes flew open and met the belligerent one-eyed gaze of the monster who had attacked her and was now licking her arm. She jerked, choking down a scream.

“Stop,” a soft, commanding voice whispered in her ear, stilling her movements. It was then she realized there were arms wrapped around her, that the heat behind her belonged to a person, to a ‘he.’ “Vadit is a nisnas. His saliva is the only cure to a wound made by him. I am his master, but even I cannot control him if you incur his wrath while he saves what he would rather destroy.”

The wet slide of the nisnas’ (what the effing eff was a nisnas?) tongue across her flesh was nauseating. Ari’s whole body was a live wire, vibrating under the creature’s attempts to heal what he had ravaged. She watched in silent terror and amazement as her flesh crawled toward itself, fusing the torn skin together under the swipes of the nisnas’ tongue. Finally, it grunted and backed away on its sliding, malformed body.

“Vadit, leave us,” the man at her back said quietly. He hadn’t spoken above the low register and yet there was a chill, as icy as the room they lay in, in his voice. A treacherous black ice that you dared not ignore. The nisnas did not. It left the room with screeching whines across the glass floor.