Abandoned

A Fantasy Short Story Related to the Spell Weaver Series

(The story can be read as a standalone, though it features some characters from the Spell Weaver series. Shar is introduced in Book 1. Shar’s family and Khalid are introduced in Book 2. If you decide you want to read more, you can find the series at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XXC9ZLJ.)

Fer Gregory/Shutterstock

Emad looked down at his watch for the sixth time in ten minutes and frowned. His limo driver should have been here by now, but there was no sign of him. The rental company hadn’t texted him either, a courtesy he would have expected if there had been some kind of delay.

He glanced back in the direction of the Santa Barbara airport’s terminal. Everything about it was designed to remind a viewer of the California missions, with their bell towers, white walls, and adobe tile roofs. To him the effect seemed contrived. The only thing he found even remotely appealing about the view was the rows of palm trees on either side of the walkway leading to the entrance, because they reminded him of Egypt. Everything else just reminded him of how far from home he was, but still he wished he could go back inside and sit for a awhile. The breeze was too cool for him, even though his suit was fairly heavy.

Perhaps Allah was trying to tell him this trip had been a mistake. Emad wasn’t usually impulsive. If anything, he weighed every decision too carefully, but not this one. He had made the travel arrangements on a whim and left Cairo at the earliest possible moment despite having business matters he really should have been attending to.

Emad shivered and looked at his watch yet again. He had half a mind to cancel the limo rental and just take a taxi. The detective’s office was in Goleta, just a little northeast of the airport, barely a long enough trip for a cab to become uncomfortable.

He tried calling the limo service, but his call went straight to voice mail—odd for a respectable company to do that during what should have been regular business hours. Whatever else happened, Emad did not want to be charged for the rental of a limo he didn’t end up using, and just leaving a voice message didn’t seem like a good way to cancel. He clenched his jaw, put his phone away, and resolved to wait a little longer, even though he seemed to be getting colder by the minute.

Every so often he noticed people staring at him. Though he understood why some Americans were nervous about Arabs near airports, he was in no mood to tolerate such a prejudice. However, he restrained himself from asking them what they were staring at, which would have just drawn more stares, and given the way his luck was running, probably get him into a conflict with someone whose neck was red, or something like that. He couldn’t quite remember the American expression at the moment.

Suddenly, Emad felt a little dizzy, as he had the one time he had visited an American amusement park and ridden one of the faster roller coasters. There was no reason for such a feeling, since he was standing more or less still, but the sensation kept getting worse.

Emad tried to take a step back toward the terminal and staggered a little. He tried to regain his balance and came dangerously close  to falling flat on his face. The idea of looking so ridiculous in public made him shudder more than the cold. Passersby might think him drunk, even though he had never touched a drop of alcohol in his life.

Emad managed to stay upright, but only by holding the trunk of the nearest palm tree with both hands, making him look only a little less ludicrous than if he had taken a tumble.

What could be wrong with him? He was a healthy man in his early forties, yet suddenly he couldn’t take a single steady step.

Morbid thoughts crossed his mind. If he died today, was his will in order? Were his business partners prepared to keep the company from going down the drain?

The air around him abruptly became warmer. For a moment it was comfortable, then overly hot. In seconds he was sticky with sweat. Was he getting a fever? Surely the air temperature couldn’t have shifted that fast.

He looked around and noticed his vision was starting to blur. He should probably have been on his way to the emergency room by now, but he was afraid to let go of the tree trunk, whose rough bark was now biting into his hand.

He could see the fuzzy shapes of people hustling past him and thought of asking one of them for help. He couldn’t help wondering, though, why no one had already offered help. Surely, he must look as if he needed it.

By now his vision had blurred to the point that, if he hadn’t known where he was already, he could never have figured it out. The Santa Barbara landscape had crumbled into millions of multicolored grains of sand that swirled around him aimlessly.

Then his hearing started fading away as well. The background noise created by the planes landing and taking off had become a whisper, and the other noises he would have taken for granted—footsteps, conversations on cell phones, car engines—were no longer audible at all.

Suddenly, he could no longer feel the palm tree trunk in his hand. He fell, but instead of hitting the concrete beneath his feet, he just kept falling—falling and screaming, though in the void in which he found himself, he could barely hear his own screams.

It seemed as if he had been falling for days when he finally slowed, then felt ground slide up gently beneath his feet. He could hear and see again—but he almost immediately wished he still couldn’t.

Instead of being back in the airport, he found himself in the middle of a vivid hallucination that made him fear his mind had snapped.

He recognized the drawings and hieroglyphs on the walls around him from his school days. They were ancient Egyptian, but he hadn’t studied enough to have any idea what they meant. They looked…fresh was the only word he could think of, not worn the way they would have been if they’d survived from ancient times.

Looking away from the nearest wall and trying to take in the whole scene, he realized he was in a vast chamber, whose ceiling he couldn’t see in the flickering torchlight.

At the center was an enormous gold scale that seemed to glow with a light of its own. On one side of the scale was a feather. The other remained empty, but as his school memories flooded back, Emad knew what was supposed to go there: his heart.

He was hallucinating being in Duat, the ancient Egyptian land of the dead, but why would a good Muslim such as himself be subject to such wild visions?

On one side of the scale stood Ma’at, the so-called goddess of truth and justice, recognizable by the ostrich feather with which she was crowned. On the other side stood the jackal-headed Anubis, grinning at Emad in a way that showed off the false god’s daggerlike teeth.

Though Emad felt no pain, his heart was suddenly out of his body and plopping into the scales on the side opposite the feather. He wanted to scream, but whatever kept him from feeling pain also shrouded him in silence.

He couldn’t help noticing that his heart was almost completely black. Not only that, but it was so heavy it nearly broke the scale. Ma’at frowned at him, Anubis howled, and from the shadows behind them emerged Ammut, the abomination whose body was an unholy mix of lion and hippo, and whose head was that of a crocodile. Its enormous mouth gaped open as it approached the scale. Its sharp teeth gleamed in the torchlight, ready to tear his heart into tiny pieces.

Emad knew what he was seeing had to be a dream or a hallucination. That knowledge did not prevent him from trembling, as if those crocodile teeth really could shred his very soul and keep him from a good afterlife.

Just as abruptly as the scene began, it ended—and he found himself face to face with the one “person” he least wanted to see. Frankly, he would rather have gone another round with the crocodile head.

“You!” he snapped, pointing an accusing finger at her. “I should have known! Only you could bring such evil into my life.”

The woman’s midnight black hair, brown skin, and dark gray robe stood out against the swirling red mists that had replaced the Egyptian scene. Her frown was almost exactly the same as the one he had seen on Ma’at’s face in the hallucination.

“What evil is in your life, you have brought upon yourself,” said the woman in a deceptively soft voice. “All I did just now was remind you of just how much you have blackened your own soul.”

“With blasphemous visions of false gods?” asked Emad, biting his lip to hold in even angrier words.

“I thought you might find it more blasphemous if I portrayed your judgment before Allah,” she replied. “I knew you had studied the old myths in school, so I chose images from them instead. It seemed a fitting choice, Husband.”

Emad felt the muscles in his neck tighten and a vein in his forehead throb dangerously. “You have no right to call me that. Our marriage was unlawful, Zahra—if that’s really your name. You lied about everything else.”

“I lied about one thing only…and I regret that,” said Zahra, looking down for a moment. “If I had it to do over again…ah, but what point is there in wishing to change the past? Even my people do not have that kind of power. All any of us can do is seek to make the best future—for ourselves and everyone else.”

“It was a big lie,” said Emad, not ready to let go of that issue. “It was the one our marriage was built on.”

“I said I regretted that,” said Zahra, “but our marriage was built from our own feelings, not from my one…omission.”

“You call pretending to be human when you’re a djinn an omission?” asked Emad, not certain whether to laugh, scream, or spit in her face. “Our marriage was an offense against my Muslim principles.”

“We djinn are every bit as Muslim as you are,” replied Zahra, “and I don’t recall a single verse in the Qu’ran that prohibits such a marriage.”

“The prohibition is implicit in the statement that Allah provides us with mates of like nature,” said Emad, balling his hands into fists. “You know this. You also know most imams would never agree to bless such a marriage.”

He longed so much to hit her, to make her pay for her lies. He’d never hit a woman, but then again she wasn’t really a woman.

She was, however, a being who could theoretically kill him with a snap of her fingers. He needed to stay cautious, keep control of his temper.

“I didn’t bring you here to discuss our failed marriage and certainly not to argue for its validity,” Zahra told him. “The djinn must ultimately face Allah’s judgment in the same way humans do. He and He alone will pass sentence upon me. I came to discuss our son.”

Emad fidgeted just a little despite himself. “I know I shouldn’t have left him. I…could not bear to look at him, and I truly believed that you would return and take him to live with your people.”

“Left him?” asked Zahra, her voice suddenly cold and hard. “Is that what you call it? You screamed at him, made him feel worthless, hit him—you hit our child, and if I did not respect the commandments of Allah, I would burn you to death and laugh as the flames consumed you!”

Emad took a step back without thinking about it. From the moment he found out the truth about Zahra, he never trusted her, but he never really feared her—until now. The fact that the mists floating near her had turned an angrier red and her eyes, usually like dark stars, were now hot coals, wasn’t reassuring.

“I admit that was wrong,” said Emad. In truth, it was one of a very small number of regrets he would probably carry with him until he died.

“What about sneaking away like a thief in the night, leaving poor Khalid to wake up alone and frightened? Was that also wrong?” she asked as the mist shifted from angry red to white hot and her eyes glowed almost too brightly to look at.

“Yes, but I never knew I was leaving him all by himself. I—”

“Thought I would come and get him—you said that already,” interrupted Zahra. “You should have made sure I was coming before you did that.

“Unlike you, I loved our son, but my people did not approve of our marriage any more than you did. Nor did they have any intention of letting me raise a half-breed, as they called him, in their realm.

“Part of my punishment for living in the mortal world so long was being unable to return to it. All I could do was watch helplessly. I got to see Khalid suffer but could do nothing to help. Do you have any idea what that was like?”

Emad thought the temperature around him had risen several degrees in a couple of seconds, and the mist, looking hot as a supernova, lashed long, whiplike strands in his direction. He began to worry Zahra would kill him without meaning to.

“Just recently I started to suspect he wasn’t with you,” Emad told her, taking a couple more steps back as he did so. “I had a dream about it, so—”

“You hired a detective to track him down,” Zahra finished for him. “Khalid isn’t the only one I’ve been watching. That’s why I had to talk with you.”

“You want me to take him back to Egypt with me?” asked Emad, dreading the answer. Khalid was no ordinary boy; he was an abomination. Sure, Emad had loved him once—before Emad knew what he was.

“I want you to stay as far away from him as possible,” replied Zahra. “Egypt is hardly far enough, but I’ll settle for that.”

Emad had definitely not seen that coming.

“Wait—now you want me to abandon him?”

“You abandoned him long ago. All I want now is for you to live with the consequences of that decision.”

“But if the boy needs help—”

“He needs nothing from you, but I know you, Emad. Once you get the detective’s report, you are going to want to meddle, and you will only make things worse.

“He’s all right now, then?” asked Emad, feeling a vague kind of relief but still wishing the mist would stop looking as if it wanted to burn his skin off.

“No thanks to you,” said Zahra. “He spent two years living on the street—and at the beginning he was only nine, remember?”

“But they have something in this country…what is it called? Something like Child Protective Services, isn’t it? If you weren’t around, surely they would have found someone to take Khalid in.”

“Ah, the father of the year has been using the internet,” said Zahra, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Unfortunately, Khalid has what the Americans would call trust issues. Being beaten up and then abandoned by your own father will do that.”

Emad started to speak, but with a gesture she silenced him. No matter how much he strained, he couldn’t make a sound.

“There, now I can finish without having to be interrupted by your pathetic efforts at self-justification.

“Khalid looks a lot like you as a child, but he takes after me…in other ways. Child Protective Services would have trouble keeping up with a child capable of becoming invisible. Also, Khalid had a lot of dexterity for someone his age. He had no choice but to develop his lockpicking skills if he wanted to stay away from people but still eat. On those rare occasions when someone did catch him, he could escape pretty easily.

“He might have ended up being a master thief, but Allah, in his infinite compassion and mercy, laid out a better path for Khalid, despite the mistakes of his parents.

“By chance he crossed paths with a group of…well, let us say unusual teenagers, people touched by the supernatural in different ways. They contrived to get Khalid taken in by one of their families. At first they lied about who Khalid was, pretending he was a Middle Eastern refugee, but in the end he revealed himself to his new parents. Do you want to know what their reaction was? They didn’t care one little bit! They loved him regardless of his being a half djinn—because that’s what love is.”

Emad took the risk of gesturing at his throat, and with another wave of her had, Zahra freed his voice.

“What are Khalid’s…new parents like?” he asked. He probably should have  been relieved that Zahra was satisfied with the arrangement and just let it go—but somehow he couldn’t.

“It is easier to show you than to tell you,” said Zahra, and an image flickered into life in the mist behind her.

Emad gasped. Khalid looked so much more grown-up now, even though he wasn’t yet quite twelve. He would be a handsome teenager…just like his father. He was at dinner with his new family, smiling and laughing the way he used to do when he was little. He was also kidding with someone who looked about twenty but had to had to be his teenage…brother. The young man looked as if he spent half of every day working out at the gym. Emad wondered if he was supernaturally strong, but he didn’t want to ask.

The parents, who looked slightly older than Emad, were clearly devoted to their two…sons. The woman did almost nothing but fuss over the boys. The older one at times looked irritated, but Khalid just ate the attention up, though Emad imagined Khalid might feel differently once his teenage years started.

The family was clearly affluent, probably better off than Emad, and the decor, which reminded him of his last trip to Tehran, suggested the parents were probably Persians who had come to America after the overthrow of the Shah. In that case, though—

Emad could hardly believe he had been staring at the images for so long without seeing what was right in front of him. The older boy was wearing a star of David. There was a menorah on one of the side tables.

“This family is…is—”

“Yes, they’re Jewish,” said Zahra, sounding impatient. “Honestly, I never understood how someone so sensitive to prejudice in others could be so blind to his own.”

“Is it prejudice to think it is best for a Muslim boy to be raised by Muslims?” asked Emad.

“No, but this particular Muslim boy was abandoned by his Muslim father, and his new Jewish family isn’t trying to convert him. Publicly, Khalid has to pretend to be a distant cousin—”

Emad found himself clenching his fists again, this time so hard his fingernails bit into his palms. “They make him pretend to be Jewish?”

“Would you like to lose your voice again?” asked Zahra. “You will if you interrupt me one more time. Perhaps then I’ll forget how to give it back. No, they don’t make him do anything. Part of his original…cover is the term, I think. Yes, part of his original cover was being a distant cousin. There had to be some way to explain the sudden appearance of a child in their house. Khalid practices Islam privately—with the full support of his new family.”

“Surely you cannot think Allah would approve of such an arrangement.”

“Unlike some people, I do not presume to know what Allah is thinking, even though I have lived far longer and seen far more than you have. It is this very judgmental attitude on your part that is why you must not interfere in Khalid’s life.

Emad started to object, but a wave of Zahra’s hand made him think better of it.

“You may just learn manners yet,” she told him. “Let me explain why you must not see him. Khalid is one of the most loving people I have ever known, despite the two years of childhood you stole from him. Even now, he longs to see you.”

“Then why not let him?” asked Emad. It wasn’t that Emad particularly wanted to see him, but he was willing if duty required it. At least that’s what he kept telling himself. By this point his feelings were as clear as the thick mud on the banks of the Nile after a flood.

“Because you don’t really want him in your life,” Zahra replied. “You want to meddle now only so that you will not have to feel like the neglectful parent you are. You would come along and disrupt the loving family of which he is now a part, but for what purpose? To be a father to Khalid? No. At best you would ship him off to some boarding school so that you wouldn’t have to see much of him. At worst you would take him away from his new family and friends to place with a family of strangers—and probably ones who would have just as low an opinion of him as you have if they ever found out about his true nature.”

“I don’t—” began Emad.

“You do, and you know it,” insisted Zahra. “I have seen you in your secret moments. You think of him as an abomination—as if Allah would reject a child just because his parents should never have married! How was what we did his fault?”

“Humans and djinn were never meant to—” began Emad.

“Even if that’s true, and I’m not sure it is, the same religious authorities you would quote to that effect say nothing of the children of such a union—except that some of them say that a human and a djinn could never have children together. We both know that isn’t true. In any case, not a single one of them calls such a child an abomination. You invented that idea in the depths of your own claustrophobically narrow mind.

“Nothing Khalid has done gives a shred of justification to your low opinion. He is a hero, Emad. He has put his own life at risk to help others, and more than once. He has faced evil without flinching, and he has beaten it. Here, I will show you.”

Visions of such intensity and complexity appeared in the mist behind Zahra that Emad had a hard time absorbing everything. There was too much to take in all at once, but even what little he managed to hold onto left him shaking.

Zahra could have been showing him false visions, but if she was not, the events he witnessed more than supported Zahra’s opinion of her son…their son.

“Was…was that Israfel?” asked Emad.

“Yes, the archangel has come to Khalid’s aid more than once. If Allah disapproves of Khalid, He has an odd way of showing it.

“Face it, Emad. Israfel has helped our son when I couldn’t—and you wouldn’t. What does that suggest to you?”

“If I had known he was living on the street, I would have done something,” Emad insisted.

Zahra sighed. “You would have done your duty. You would have gotten him off the street. Angry as I am with you, I know you are a decent man, Emad, at least by your own standards of decency. You would not have given him love, though. Even now you cannot love him.”

“I could try,” said Emad, honestly not sure at that moment how he felt about Khalid. Perhaps he should never have been born, but if he was as compassionate and as brave as the visions suggested—no, Emad could not let himself follow that line of reasoning. Why rip the scabs from the still unhealed wounds of the past?

“Trying is not enough,” snapped Zahra. “Not when he has love from others. Behold what may happen if you interfere with the boy.”

She showed Emad one final vision: Khalid, pale and still, lying on hard ground soaked in blood that could only have been his own.

He looked at most a year older than in the earlier vision of happy home life. So young to die…

“This is a lie!” Emad almost shouted. “How could anything I do now kill the boy?”

“This is only a possible future,” Zahra conceded, “but it is a likely one. Khalid has made his share of enemies in the supernatural world. Without the support of his friends, it is likely one of those enemies will bring him down eventually.”

“But you said Israfel protects him,” Emad protested.

“Israfel has intervened at times,” replied Zahra. “However, he can do only what Allah bids him to do, and angels are limited in how much they can do in the mortal sphere. For reasons we cannot know, Allah sometimes allows the triumph of evil. Who knows? Perhaps we could never develop our own ability to help each other if Allah always came to the rescue. It is not for us to question His will.

“Suffice it to say that Allah has helped Khalid find people who can protect him. They are the constant angels in his life, and upon them we must rely.”

“You cannot protect him?” asked Emad.

“Allah in his wisdom limits we djinn these days even more than he limits angels, and in any case, the punishment my fellow djinn imposed upon me is still in force, limiting me even further. If you destroy what protection he has, I cannot replace it, much as I wish I could.

“Normally, I would not even have been able to come and see you, but some of my people have been watching Khalid just as I do, and he has softened their hearts a little. They gave me permission to see you privately. They also gave me the latitude to manipulate events enough to get you jailed for abandoning Khalid in the first place if you don’t stay away. He’d never testify against you, but we djinn have our ways.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” said Emad slowly. “Wouldn’t that hurt Khalid?”

“I wouldn’t want to, but if I had to, it would hurt Khalid a lot less than death.

“Emad, I loved you once, and I don’t really want to hurt you, either. Given all that I have told you, can’t you just accept that Khalid is better off without you and stay away from him?”

“I only want to do the right thing,” said Emad slowly.

“Leaving Khalid alone is the right thing. Will you do it?”

Emad was having a hard time adjusting his emotions to the flood of new information Zahra seemed determined to drown him in. He thought about lying to her and then doing whatever he decided later, but since she could watch his every move, there wasn’t really much point.

“I’ll stay away from him,” he said quietly, “but if he does need me at some future point, you’ll tell me, won’t you?”

“The day he actually needs you will probably never come,” said Zahra. Then, more softly, she added, “However, the day may come when you can see him without harming him. If you’re man enough to apologize to him then for what you did, I’ll let you know when the time comes.”

Emad sighed. “All right, I will do as you ask.”

He wanted to say something else to her, what he wasn’t quite sure, but she didn’t give him the chance. Just as roughly as she had abducted him in the first place, but much faster this time, he found himself standing on the walkway at the airport. No one seemed to notice his sudden reappearance, but he supposed Zahra had chosen a moment when no one was near enough or looking in the right direction to see him. That was just as well, since it took him a couple of minutes to feel normal.

Emad called the detective and told him he had decided not to pursue the matter. Then he walked back toward the terminal to start the tedious work of setting up his flights home. From Santa Barbara it would take two connecting flights to get him back to Cairo.

A single tear rolled down his cheek. He wiped it off.

(A form of this story was originally published in Unknown: A Collection of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Stories, Hidden Worlds, Volume 1, 2017.).