“We go that way,” I said as I pointed to a distant dust storm.
“Oh, shit,” said Ariel.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s an ifrit, a dust devil,” she said.
“So? We’ll just walk through it. It can’t hurt us.”
“No! What’s the word in English? A dust devil is what we call a djinni!”
I looked at the distant storm. It was now a funnel of sand and fury, almost a mile across. A tornado of magical energy.
“Won’t it just ignore us?” I asked. I struggled to remember Mason’s lessons on magical menageries. He had said the djinn were like dragons, aloof and uninterested in human affairs. Unless they wanted to play games.
Ariel dropped both packs and slumped her shoulders in resignation. “Normally, yes. We’re insignificant to them. But you let loose a torrent of foreign magic in its backyard.”
“Foreign magic?” asked Mike. “Like your mind-control spell? Don’t blame this on us.”
“The golem spell is local magic.” Ariel fought for an analogy. “It’s like a smell the djinni is used to.” She stared at his forehead. “New magic, unique magic, makes us a target.”
I briefly wondered if my hurricane spell had also irritated the djinni, then suppressed the thought. It didn’t matter now.
“Let’s get down to that depression between the dunes,” I said, pointing. “The djinni might not be after us, and we can wait out the dust storm down there.”
Mike started down right away. Ariel held back for an instant, then obeyed her alpha.
We hunkered down as the storm approached. Mike was eerily calm, but Ariel dithered. She started muttering in Hebrew. I couldn’t tell if she was mouthing a prayer or a curse, so I glared at her to make her stop.
We sat on our haunches and covered our heads with our arms as the funnel of sand hit. The roar of the wind was deafening, and the pounding of the wind was like being punched by a hundred fighters.
Mike and I had our oxygen-mask spells to allow us to breathe, but I had no idea how Ariel survived. And frankly, I didn’t care.
In a few minutes—which seemed like hours—the pounding ceased. We were almost covered in sand and grit, but we were alive.
My ears popped with the change in pressure as the storm passed.
“See?” I said. “It ignored us. That wasn’t so bad—”
“Stupid foreign alpha!” Ariel spat. “That was just the beginning. We’re in the eye of the storm. Now comes the hard part.”
I opened my mouth to respond, then the storm hit us with full fury. A hurricane-strength wind pushed me to the ground with irresistible force. Even with my oxygen-mask spell, it was hard to breathe with that force pushing on my body. The sandstorm was like a giant sandblaster stripping away at everything. My clothes were shredded under that maelstrom.
If it was this bad on me, how was Mike going to survive? I crawled over to him and covered his body with mine. Despite the thunderous noise of the storm, I could hear his whispered prayers.
I could survive the storm if it passed soon, and Mike would be safe.
But the storm didn’t ease up. It continued beating us with unrelenting force.
Mike was nearly buried in the sand. I was covering his body, lying face-down on top of him with my arms pushed into the sand on either side of him.
Desperation drove mad thoughts. What could I do against a djinni? They were creatures of fire and air, unrelated to human elements like earth and water and spirit. A lot like demons, in fact.
Could a demon trap hold a djinni? There were stories of bottles that held these creatures, rendering them impotent. Mason had created many such bottles to help Dr. Patrizia trap demons, and I could vaguely remember the spells he’d used. Could I duplicate them?
It would take a lot of magic and a lot of glass to create a djinni trap. I squeezed my hands, compressing the sand into lumps of silica. Silica was another name for glass. And magic? I had the magic of the tornado that was being dumped on us in fury.
Without a second thought, I unleashed a spell, channeling all the rage and energy of the storm into the sand beneath us. It was more magic than I had ever used before—an amount that would have killed me to channel only a year ago.
Over fifty meters below, a ball of silica melted, then formed into a globe—a globe that grew under my direction.
It started out the size of a baseball, then expanded to soccer ball size, then beachball size. I forced more magic into the object and the sand around it melted to silica, adding to the mass. Larger and larger it grew; three meters across, ten meters, twenty meters, fifty meters. Then I thickened the walls into crystalline buttresses that almost no force on earth could damage.
Its walls were three meters thick, stronger than sapphire, without stain or defect. The most perfect object I had ever conjured.
Still, it needed something more. The extra-dimensional twist that would make it inescapable for a creature of fire and air. What did humans call it, a Klein bottle? I twisted the glass like the world’s largest glassblower, tying a knot in both space and matter. An opening into the bottle appeared directly below us, going through that extra dimension and making it a one-way valve. A valve that I could expand or contract at will.
It was done: a huge globe of impossible structure erected in the sands just beneath us.
The storm continued unabated; we couldn’t survive much longer. I willed the valve to open to the size of a manhole cover. The sand started trickling into the opening of the bottle, and Mike and I were pushed down by the force of the storm.
Just before it pushed us through the entrance of the globe, Ariel jumped onto my back. That freeloading bitch was going to ride my tail to safety. Too late to throw her
