Loretta of the Lamp - The Fallout

Bait

Loretta came to with a headache that said her skull was splitting in half. When her head drooped against her outstretched arm she could feel the sting of the fist-sized egg her skull had produced. Her arms were strung up above her head, and she half expected to open her eyes to the darkness of the dungeon, likely the same cell Akil had been kept in.

But it was light and there was warmth against her skin. As she opened her eyes she could feel the crust of the tears and blood on her eyelashes flaking away.

Everything was blurry. Every inch of her body hurt. Every muscle stung. Her arms were stiff and heavy from the effort of her heart pumping blood all the way up to her fingers. Even if she'd wanted to cry, she couldn't. She was too angry and too sore, and too hopeless. She felt dirty when she remembered the weight of the his body pressing against her and she trembled to think what could have happened. Her interest in boys had never before extended to such close contact. Akil had been the first to inspire such attraction, but falling in love with him had been a slow process, and even then the pessimist in her guessed that their feelings had been born of the simple knowledge that they identified with each other, and knew each other's pain in a way that no one else could understand. By bitter contrast, the Djin King caused feelings of revulsion that made her want to vomit at the memory of the way he'd looked at her, and the way he'd made her skin crawl as he ran his fingers over her body.

She did vomit, only narrowly managing to avoid getting the sick on herself. After spitting a good few times, she wiped her mouth on her arm as her thoughts led her back to what had happened in the moments before she was knocked out. She didn't want to think about it, but the nature of the memory was that her mind constantly returned to it, turning it over and over again and again, because she wished so desperately to change it. If she'd done something different in event the slightest of ways, at a better moment, with more precision, more speed.

From what she could feel, her body was still whole, not that she was sure she had ever known what feeling whole actually felt like.

Also, the Djin King had mentioned her father, but to what end? Akil had told her knowledge was shared by all who lay in the valley on the Mountain of Smoke. He had to know the memories of her father were her weakest point. He knew all her weaknesses, just as much as she now knew his strengths – how to start fire in matter, and break things apart, and other things that she could not have known before. But the fact remained that he knew her weaknesses.

All of them.

Loretta looked up at her wrists, now that her eyes were able to open wide enough to see more than just blur and brightness. She felt no shock in her at all to see that the chains around her wrists were dipped in black pitch. What did shock her however, was to see the burnished bronze sky overhead, lit by the sun-like flame of the lamp. She blinked back tears at the brightness.

What a pathetically stupid idea it had been to step into Hess' place. She'd never had a chance at killing the Djin King. Hess had been training to do this for her entire life. She would've had a better shot at it, and now Loretta had wrecked it for them both.

No. Loretta knew it wasn't true. The Djin King had led her for a fool the whole time, and he would have led Hess the same. If he knew who Loretta was, for mere weeks of being in the lamp, he surely knew why Hess was there, and the desires Hess had long carried in her heart for causing his suffering. He was immortal.

How stupid had she been to think that she, for all her sixteen years of breathing, would have a chance at winning in a straight fight against him? And now she was strung up in the open, and even if she was lucky enough that Akil found out where she was and what had happened to her, he had no chance of saving her. The Djin king held the same power over him as he held over Loretta in the blood magic. She knew this was how he had kept Akil prisoner in the dungeon and why he had been in such a horrific state when she had found him. He had referred to Akil as his prize. With a sudden twist of fear in her stomach, she realised there was something else the Djin King wanted, most importantly.

"Akil," she gasped. Her throat was excruciatingly dry. The walls of her oesophagus burned like shredded meat over an open flame, but the pain was only a small part in the collection of acute pains that she felt at that moment.

"Loretta, my love, I'm here," he reached out and caressed her cheek.

How was he here? He had to run! He had to be far away from here.

"Akil," she felt a burning in the corner of her eyes. The will to cry without the tears to fulfil it. "You have to r–" She stopped cold. The fingers against her cheek, no tingle, no spark, no fire in the connection between them. It was like a never ending nightmare. She stretched her head around and forced her eyes open enough to look at him, the Djini King.

"That's a nice thought," he said.

Loretta's sight was blurred and confused by the knock to her head. She frowned with concentration as she worked to focus on him.

"A nice thought that he would come rescue you. Too bad he cannot."

"Why am I here?"

"Tell me what you mean Loretta? I don't understand the question." He stroked his finger up the centre of her chin, and she could feel his breath on her face.

She couldn't move her head away from him, it hurt too much. "What are you going to do?"

"I'd love to get rid of you, though fratricide is not an option for our kind," he sighed. "I could get someone else to do the job, but frankly I think you have robbed me of that satisfaction. A genie who was not created by sacrifice is a rare thing, you are one of a kind. Both Akil and yourself are phenomena I cannot explain, and therefore I cannot simply be rid of you, though I may wish it so."

"Then why do you not return me to the mountain?"

He laughed, "Because you never came from the mountain, did you? And first, foremost, I require the return of your lover."

Loretta said nothing. It stung for him to refer to Akil as her 'lover'.

"So it stands to reason I would not return you to the mountain, not when there is so much I am set to gain from your company." He paced around her, and reached his hand out to her again, placing it flat against her skin. The sensation of weakening passed over her again, the same way it had when he held her to the floor.

"He won't come for me." How cliche, the desperate moment those words left her lips, because she knew he would. Even if he didn't want to, Akil had no choice in the matter, their paths did not allow them to walk away from each other.

The Djin king laughed, then clasped her face between his hands and kissed her forehead before he turned and walked away. Loretta could feel her concussion clearing as she watched him walk away and the world around her slowly came into focus.

The totem pole she was ingloriously chained to was rooted in the stone of a raised platform at the top of a wide road running down the face of the mountain Misbah was built on, transcending each tier of city, a road almost entirely made of stairs.

Everyone in the city would be able to see her, from the bottom to the very top. She hadn't seen the stair road before, but the palace and the burning enclave of the ziggurat were behind her and the view out into the desert was a land of grey sand and rock. Loretta guessed she was looking toward the north of the lamp. The lands she knew, Doua, Hikari and Rama were behind her. The light of the lamp in the sky seemed dull today, a shade of old gold rather than a burnished fire.

The Djin King reached the bottom of the platform, and Loretta gave a tug at the chains on her wrists even though she knew it was no use. Not only did the black pitch they were coated in stop her from using any magic, it stopped her from being able to focus clearly.

He turned to look back up the flight of stairs and smile at her. "You'll tell me when your lover comes, won't you?" he said with a smile, and as he turned away a wall of flames burst out of the stone around Loretta, entrapping her completely.

"Come back here!" Loretta shouted at him, out of pure anger and quite unsure what she would say if he did. But he didn't even glance at her again, and the sight of him was swallowed by his retinue waiting at the bottom to escort him back up to the palace.

Alone in the open, trapped by the fire and the cuffs around her wrists, the heat of the flame and the pain of her swollen head made her drowsy, and Loretta succumbed sleep.