His breathing became more uneven. His eyes fell to my lips.

Slowly, he reached a hand up into my hair at the back of my head. The next thing I knew, he was leaning in closer. And then his lips were on mine.

I breathed hard, pulling him closer as his mouth locked with mine. I tasted the salt on his lips, felt their coolness, their firmness as they pushed against mine and closed around them. When the tips of our tongues touched, fireworks erupted in my chest.

I had never kissed a boy before. But Ben’s kiss was everything I had imagined it would be… and so much more.

Even the echoes in my ears that I’d heard again earlier that evening vanished completely as I was consumed by the vampire prince of The Shade.

Chapter 14: Jeramiah

I looked around the room at the sacks of ground human bones that Michael and I had just finished processing in the machine. We had done extra this week and there were too many to carry downstairs comfortably, so Lloyd came to assist us. Entering the prison beneath the atrium, we walked swiftly past the half-bloods’ and humans’ cells, traveling deeper and deeper into the maze of cells until we reached the farthest chamber that was hidden behind a storage room. Entering inside, I told Lloyd and Michael that they could leave.

Looking down at the trap door in the center of the room, I bent down and lifted it open to reveal a dark, metal chute. A fragrant aroma of cooking wafted out. I’m just in time. I dropped the sacks through one by one before closing the trapdoor.

If this were a usual day, my work in this room would be done now. But today, I had something else to accomplish.

Opposite the main entrance to the room was a smaller, narrower door. I pulled it open and began making my way down the staircase behind it. Reaching the bottom, I found myself standing in the corner of a kitchen the size of a large hall. Everything about it oozed extravagance, from the table tops made of solid gold to the shiny silver cutlery.

Several large pots were bubbling over stoves and snake heads were baking in the giant oven. The sacks of ground bones I had just dropped through the chute were piled up in a heap in one corner, ready for the chef to return.

Passing through the kitchen, I opened its rosewood door and stepped out into another atrium. Situated directly beneath ours, this atrium was similar in design, except that it was much larger and immeasurably more luxurious. There was barely an inch of surface that wasn’t made of some kind of precious stone or metal, and in the center was row upon row of celestial fountains. It was truly a glimpse of heaven.

I began to make my way along one of the heavily ornamented verandas when a veil of light blue mist appeared before me. I stopped and stared at it until the body of a man manifested in thin air from the waist up. Beneath his torso was nothing but the light blue mist, which had thickened and now looked more like smoke. With gleaming golden eyes, long, curling black hair and a thickset jaw, Karam levitated before me.

Karam Nasiri—brother of the head of the Nasiri family of jinn. Our cohabitants and self-proclaimed masters of The Oasis.

“I have brought you three times the requested amount of supplies today,” I said. “Now my wish is to see your sister.”

He frowned at me, then nodded. “All right,” he replied, his voice low and throaty. “Come with me.”

He kept himself manifested so I could see him, and I followed him as he levitated toward the uppermost level of the jinn’s atrium and stopped outside a gold-plated door studded with red rubies.

He opened it and moved inside. “Wait here,” he said, before closing the door behind him.

I stepped back and leaned against the wall of the veranda, looking down at the sparkling fountains below.

Sometimes I still couldn’t believe that we had lived this way all these years. When my coven and I had first escaped the Elders decades ago and I’d gotten the idea to come to The Oasis, we’d had no idea what we might find here. We’d guessed we’d come upon—at the most—a ruined palace. And indeed that was what we’d found. With the help of our five witches, we’d renovated and built up The Oasis into the beauty that it was today and placed a protective spell over it. What we hadn’t realized was that The Oasis had already been inhabited since the Maslens had lived here. The place had been infested with a family of jinn—one of the oldest of this mortal realm.

We had already put so much effort building up this place and making it our home, when we discovered what we were living with, we couldn’t find it in ourselves to move.

And yet the jinn, who had made their palace deep underground, would not allow us to live in peace without submitting to their rules—not even our witches could resist them. At the time, I didn’t know where else we would go. We didn’t want to risk leaving The Oasis to get stranded in the desert or be discovered by hunters, so we’d seen it as the lesser of two evils to stay, and provide them with certain… luxuries.

Some of our vampires had protested and refused to cooperate. They all ended up leaving, and we never saw them again. We didn’t know what had happened to them—whether they’d escaped the desert safely or not. The rest of us who decided to stay were marked by the jinn, initiated as part of their extended family.

It certainly took some getting used to—I’d never seen a jinni in my life and hadn’t even known they existed until arriving here. I’d hated everything about them at first—the way they used their wish-granting powers to manipulate a person’s mind and always twisted things for their own benefit—and truth be told I still did. But as time had gone by, I had gotten used to them. If there was one thing I’d learned in all my dealings with the creatures, it was important to control one’s mind and one’s desires around them. They thrived on uncontrolled emotions and unfulfilled wishes. That was how they manipulated their victims. The more you desired in this place, the more sway they had over you, and the more indebted you became.