Loretta of the Lamp

The escape

Hot and sticky, the night air clung to the sides of Loretta's throat as she inhaled and screamed. Her whole body felt like ice and the hot air gave her no relief. She flung the sheets off and began to climb out of the bed, screaming her sister's name again.

Suddenly a pair of hands, burning hot to her frozen flesh, wrapped around her. She screamed again, but Akil was quick to place one hand over her mouth as his strong arms pulled her back onto the bed.

"Loretta! Shhhhh! You'll scream the whole city awake," he hissed in her ear as he held her tight.

But she wasn't quite awake, and the electric burn of Akil's flesh against her own only made her struggle more. In the darkness she head-butted him as hard as she could. He let her go and dropped back down onto the bed with sharp inhale of pain. As his arms came away a peel of flame flickered off his fingertips and illuminated the room.

Loretta saw his face clearly, and the trickle of blood where she had split his skin. She gasped and covered her mouth.

"Akil!" she whispered, glancing from his face to the flame which snuffed out as quick as it had appeared, and they were plunged back into darkness again.

She scrambled off the bed as fast as she could and ran to the door. In her panic she couldn't get the door open, her fingers were trembling so much. Then she remembered the pitcher full of water that Malah had provided for them to wash with. She grabbed her scarf off the pile of clothing she had discarded when they had arrived back that evening and gone straight to bed. She took the scarf and rinsed it in the water and then ran back to the bed where Akil was still lying, pressing his hand to his bleeding forehead.

"Ahh," he gasped as she climbed back on the bed beside him.

"Don't be a baby, it's only your head, not your whole body," she told him grimly.

"Keep away from me," he said, though his voice had lost all of his usual disdain. "I knew you would be bad for me," he muttered as she prised his fingers off his head and carefully daubed the cut.

He glared up at her, but she continued to carefully clean the blood away and then pressed the cloth to the cut to stifle the remaining trickle as he grumbled at her.

"Here then, you press it," she suggested, and he reached his hand up to place it over the cloth, she moved to pull her hand away but he stopped her.

"You are so cold," he said.

"I had a nightmare about the Jin."

He reached his free arm up around her and pulled her back down to the bed.

She allowed it, too weak and cold to protest, though the warmth of his body and the shocks that stung right through her felt like they would fry her skin. She still wasn't quite sure what to make of this new and more affectionate side of Akil that had started to peek through the holes of his angry, closed-off facade in the last few days.

"And you thought I was a Jin so you head-butted me?" he asked, ruefully.

She shook her head, still pressed into his shoulder.

"Then why did you do it?"

She stammered over the answer, "I – I, I didn't know what was real. My dreams have been strong since I woke in the lamp. But they have always been in my world. Every moment I sleep I've been reliving my life leading up to the moment I arrived here. I've never dreamed anything untrue, or anything to do with being inside the lamp, until now."

He said nothing for a moment, and Loretta wondered what he was thinking. "And this dream?" he asked finally.

"I was in Misbah. You weren't there, and I couldn't feel the connection between us any more, you were just – gone, and there were Jin in the streets of the city," she omitted the part about her sister.