40°49'37.0"N 47°42'45.1"E

  Q?b?l? International Airport

  20.05.2024 – 22.30 UTC +04.00

  “What did you say?”

  Ramin stared at me. His eyes darted left and right, and then he leaned forward.

  “Keep your voice low, Nisy. What the hell? I said: no plane is going anywhere. We need a change of plans.”

  “Why?” I did not understand, or rather, my mind was still wandering about the vision of a storm of Starlings I had just witnessed. I tried to push away the thoughts and focus on my surroundings.

  Ramin waved, showing me the crowd around us. I looked around, confused – I had never been to an airport before. I assumed this chaos was usual, but it was not. Large screens mounted on pillars next to us informed everyone around us on the status of the flights.

  DELAYED. CANCELLED. DELAYED. DELAYED. CANCELLED.

  More and more people were gathering only to see a bright red DELAYED next to their flight’s number. Some were throwing a fit, others tried to maintain their calm.

  “For the love of whatever god. We are never going to Italy at this rate,” a young man said to his hollering friends, all of them wearing flowered shirts, their faces flicking back and forth from the large screens and their phones. I saw one of them, their face contorted with the sadness of a missed celebration, perhaps. He raised his eyes to meet mine, and I turned back to Ramin.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  Ramin was equally unsettled. He held our two counterfeit boarding passes in his hand. All the trickery and hexing were for naught.

  A woman in a long skirt started fighting with an airport clerk. I tried to ignore her bickering, as more and more people raised their voices around us.

  “Can’t you see?” Ramin said, “All flights are delayed for at least a couple of hours due to a storm.”

  “A storm,” I said at the same time, waking up to reality. Starling’s army was bringing a storm with them. Not for cover, but for distraction. Grounding everything. I lowered my voice: “I get it now, Ramin. I saw it. I was outside, and they were too. They are riding this storm and are about to come here. We need to leave this place. We thought we could get away, but we can’t.”

  I looked to our right, the closed gates, the long glass windows, the grounded airplanes, and the storm coming from the West.

  “We can’t. We will find another way then,” I said. I stood up, prompting him to stand up as well. He was at a loss for words as he raised his hands and turned them like a showman, illustrating the situation around us. The crowd was growing larger as more and more gates were canceling boarding.

  “Where do we go? We just passed security,” he said, and then he winced. He tried to stretch his arm as he stood up. “I really feel terrible. I am in no condition to run. I am tired, maybe, but my shoulder hurts after the hit earlier today. It hurts… too much.”

  “Let me see.” I gently turned him around. I pulled his shirt a bit, just so that I could see his shoulder. Black blood was pooling where he had previously been hit. “There is blood again. The wound opened.”

  “That’s not possible, it must be just a leftover stain or something,” Ramin said, but I could feel in his voice the worry of being wrong. I had also seen the wound completely heal hours ago, courtesy of his Shadow heritage. Had it not been healed? Was it reversing?

  “No. The wound is opening again.”

  Was it Hokum?’s doing? I remembered my Farsight, how it was abruptly stopped. It looked like mirrors shattering and obstructing my Cursed vision. And then the posters outside the airport: SEE A CURSE, REPORT A CURSE. That was not Hokum?. It was something else. I looked up.

  “Is this your friend’s Curse?” Ramin asked, going through the same train of thought.

  “She is not my friend.”

  “Get out of my way!” A suited man carrying a suitcase shoved us, trying to get to the gate. The crowd turned louder and rowdier by the minute, the collective desperation taking over their civil thought. I glanced at him only to find a sense of pity inside me for him. I turned my attention to the ceiling.

  Newly installed, if I were to judge by the paint, but otherwise hand-crafted and well-designed, perhaps out of the best glass manufacturers and metallurgists of this side of Azerbaijan. Silver mirrors, lodged to the ceiling, their surface reflecting the crowd, myself, and my gaze right back at me. Old Perso-Arabic script lined the mirrors.

  ???? ??????? ??? ??????

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  “Your reflection binds you,” I read out loud.

  “What did I do?”

  “K?lg?n, not as shadow. But as reflection. Unfortunate coincidence…” I said, and my voice trailed. I gently turned his head to the ceiling.

  “They got mirrors on the ceiling?” He whispered his question.

  “Deflectors. A security precaution. They are made to weaken us, nullify our Curses. That explains your wound.”

  “That’s new.”

  “There are many. Installed on the roofs,” I told him. My eyes scanned for them; every nook and cranny of this side of the airport was lined with deflectors on the ceiling. They were not there in the entrance, but perhaps they thought it was enough to place those expensive crafts in the most critical area of the airport, just past security.

  For the first time in a while, I saw Ramin turn as pale as white paper. I tried to guess what was going through his mind, but if I felt vulnerable once, he must have felt that ten times. His Curse was to heal his wounds, and now he was incapable of doing that.

  “Hi, can you help us?” A middle-aged woman pulled our attention from the ceiling back to the ground. “My friends and I are heading for a trip, but we can’t see what it says.”

  “Where are you flying?” Ramin asked, but I blocked out the unnecessary chatter. All I could feel by hearing that woman’s voice was a sudden remorse – for what I could not tell. Knowing that an army of witches was heading here, perhaps?

  I needed a plan.

  “What do we do?” Ramin asked.

  “Do you have more money?” I asked back, and he nodded. “If we can’t run, we need to weather the storm. Let’s go find supplies.”

  We pushed through the crowd, towards the closest shop. There was a big line at the cashier, but we ignored it and rushed through its small corridors. It was a mini market confectionery, one of the many shops inside the airport, where you could simply walk in from the boarding area. “Get a couple of lighters,” I told him, pointing to the cigarette corner. “And some tobacco too.”

  I went towards the food section. There were only snacks in this aisle. I needed something with a dust form – besides sand, salt, sugar, and perhaps flour could work. Implements like this could enhance my warding Curse. But I was in an airport.

  Imishli Sugar, I saw a small vial with white powder in it, sold in a premium package. I grabbed ten of them, all that was left. If I were right, no one would miss them or be disappointed not to have their piece of premium sugar from Azerbaijan from this shop.

  I bumped into Ramin. He was holding a basket with a couple of lighters and some cheap tobacco. I threw the sugar vials into the basket, grabbed the tobacco plastic bag, opened it, took a few patches, and placed them in my mouth.

  He grimaced as I munched on it.

  “It calms the nerves,” I explained. “Let’s go.”

  Ramin went and stood in the queue, which was moving ominously slowly. He hadn’t realized the urgency of the situation.

  “I definitely don’t have enough money for all that.” He said, but I ignored him. It did not matter.

  “Listen, I do not know how much time we have before they raze this place. If they bring so many with them, this will be a warzone. They have ways to break the deflectors, but I don’t. So, when they do, I have to act immediately. It is a very small window to react.”

  “You are scaring me. All this for us two? Why do they care?”

  I was about to tell him to shut up when I thought about what he just asked. This did feel unnecessarily dramatic, even for Starling. This was something else.

  “And they shouldn’t even know we are here, right? I know they have seers, but why would they be looking here? Why wait to attack this airport and not through our whole bus ride?”

  I was having the same thoughts as he did. But it did not matter. I saw the glass of a water bottle shaking in the fridge behind the cashier. Only for just a tiny bit, but I needed no other warning.

  “Stand behind me!” I yelled at everyone in the queue as I turned towards the entrance of the shop. People got startled by my command, but they obeyed, as they saw me grab the vase of sugar, open it, and hurl it around at the entryway of the shop. White powder covered the floor and lined the entrance.

  “Are you nuts?” I heard someone yell – and I bet I looked nuts, but that would be only for a passing second. I grabbed a second vase, and as I did, the lights went out. Not just of the store, but the entire boarding area’s lights snuffed out one after the other.

  “Stand behind me!” I commanded again, and terrified customers rushed behind me.

  Reveal yourself! A woman’s voice echoed through the airport, and as it did, everyone’s heads turned around and up, scared. I raised another sugar vase, ready to hurl it around at the right moment.

  “Oh shit,” Ramin said, recognizing the voice as much as I did.

  Okay then.

  S?nd?r! Shatter!

  Her hexed voice echoed through the area, and as she did, everything shattered. The windows that lined the airport, the doors out of tempered glass, glass bottles around the shops, and the mirrors of the deflectors on the ceiling. Everyone screamed in fear and started running around.

  Some people dropped their suitcases and started running, while others took cover behind tables, as glass rained from all directions. Their instincts were correct, but in vain.

  We, on the other hand, had a chance.

  “Stand in my ward!” I yelled and finally threw the next vase of sugar. I knew my eyes ignited in light when using my Curse, but this time, I also saw the sugar light up in a mix of golden and green. It was the only brief source of light inside the dark airport.

  The sugar grains did not fall guided by gravity but flew and lined the divide of the small shop with the rest of the airport. The sugar I had previously thrown on the border of the shop raised itself, highlighted by the same golden and green colors, and met the rest of the sugar grains, creating a wall of shiny dust between our warded mini-market and the rest of the airport.