“What has your father been doing to them?” I breathed, afraid to hear the answer.

At this he glanced away, his gaze averting to the golden trapdoor. “You shouldn’t be here, Aisha,” he said, his voice lowering.

“I can’t leave without my family,” I said, tears prickling the corners of my eyes. “Please, have mercy.”

“It is my father you should be begging for mercy, not me,” he said, eyeing me pointedly and clearing his throat. “But I suggest you leave now, if you place any value at all on your life.”

“I can’t leave,” I repeated, my voice shrill with desperation. “If you will not help me free my family, then take me down into your lair with you—”

A scraping came from the trapdoor. The drawing of bolts.

Before I could even catch a glimpse of who was emerging from the trapdoor, Horatio had hurtled toward me and gripped my shoulders. The next thing I knew, my body was shrinking and I collapsed to the ground. As my hands and feet made contact with the sand, I realized that I no longer possessed the body of a jinn. I had the limbs of a mouse… or a rat. Horatio had caught me unawares and turned me into a rodent. Is this what they did to my family too?

“My apologies, Josiah,” Horatio called to a young male jinni who had poked his head through the entrance and was surveying the dunes. “I decided to stay out longer. Go back to what you were doing.”

With that, Josiah’s head disappeared and the trapdoor shut again. My small body quivering all over, I tried to scamper away, but I wasn’t fast enough. Horatio’s strong hands closed around my body and he lifted me upward until I was level with his chest.

His green eyes were severe as they drilled into mine. “I meant it when I said that you should leave,” he murmured.

His hand tightened around my furry midriff and then our surroundings disappeared. When my vision came into focus again, we were standing near a beach. The sand was still coal black. We were on one of The Dunes’ shores.

Horatio set me back down on the ground, near the lapping waves. I made a second attempt to scramble away, but he arrested me with his magic. Then my body started tingling all over and expanding until I had resumed my normal form.

I glared daggers at Horatio. “What are you doing?”

“What I’m about to do is for your own good and in time, you will thank me for it,” he said. “Please, trust me… for old times’ sake.”

“What? No! Wait! What are you—?”

“I’m banishing you from the land of jinn, Aisha.”

Before I could scream out in protest, something heavy and invisible hit me square in the chest, knocking all the breath out of me. I went hurtling backward and then upward into the sky, traveling with speed that I had no control over, as though I had just been fired from a cannon. I went soaring over the waves, and I couldn’t even twist myself around to face forward. I was stuck, falling backward, watching helplessly as The Dunes, my old home, shrank to nothing but a small speck on the horizon.

By the time I’d slowed down —again, a result of no effort of my own—The Dunes were completely out of view as I hovered over the ocean.

“Damn you, Horatio!” I screamed, fat tears spilling down my cheeks. “Damn you and the whole lot of your wicked family!”

My whole body shaking with rage and grief, I gazed down at the empty waves rolling beneath me. Horatio had said that he had banished me—and I knew what that meant. His curse upon me would mean that I couldn’t even enter The Dunes anymore. As a Drizan, he was powerful enough to cast such a curse.

Still, I tried. I couldn’t help but try. I hurried back over all the miles that I had been flung and stopped at one of The Dunes’ black beaches. As I attempted to move onto the mainland, I was stopped short, barricaded by an invisible boundary. A boundary that I couldn’t break through no matter how much I tried.

Horatio had said that he’d done this to protect me. But protection wasn’t what I wanted, dammit! I wanted my family, and I wanted to be wherever they were, no matter how horrible the conditions.

But, as the hours passed, I had no choice other than to accept that I could not reenter The Dunes. And so in the end, after much more crying and screaming and cursing, I did the only thing that I could do: leave.

Maybe with hindsight, I would indeed come to thank that prince for sparing me my family’s fate—whatever they were still going through—but right now, locking me out felt like the cruelest act in the world.

My shoulders sagging in defeat, I moved away from The Dunes, further out into the ocean. I drifted over the waves, aimless. I did not know where I was going or what I was going to do. I was just… trying to cope with the pain.

I hadn’t realized that I’d backtracked so far until I caught sight of Julie’s ship a mile away. Forgetting that it was infested with monsters, I wandered toward it. As I eyed its mast, the ship became nothing but a place to sit and rest. I perched myself among the sails and gazed out with blurry vision at the ocean. What is going to become of me?

I could not have known how much time passed as I sat atop that mast. I was barely even aware of the deck below—now mostly cleared of the writhing bodies, and standing ones for that matter. They were all, I guessed, packed into the lower decks because this ship was still on a course.

My body felt weaker and weaker as the hours passed. I was starved, but that was not the cause of my increasing frailty. Grief and mourning could weaken jinn and cause their powers to diminish. I’d never experienced such sorrow before, and so had never experienced this phenomenon. It was unnerving feeling my strength ebb out of me. I had to regain control over my emotions, but I simply didn’t know how. Soon it felt like it was all I could do just to maintain a grip on the mast and keep myself from tumbling down to the deck.