He reached into his backpack, pulled out a metal box, and set it on the table. Pale silver lines of koftgari stood out, the script tiny, as if written with an enchanted pen on the blackened steel. The Ayat al-Kursi—the Verse of the Throne, Surah al-Fatiha, the last two verses from Surat al-Baqara, the first verse of Surah al-Imran, a large portion of Surat al-Jinn . . .

“How long did it take the smiths?” I asked.

“A year,” Bahir answered.

“You knew the ifrit was coming?” Luther asked.

He nodded. “It started on the day Eduardo was born. At first there were dreams. Violent disturbing dreams. Rima and I had been married for three years, we had an infant son, and I didn’t want to jeopardize them, so I sought treatment. I went to a psychiatrist. I got a prescription for medication, which I took on schedule. The dreams persisted. At first they made no sense; then gradually the meaning began to emerge. Something was coming. Something was hunting me. The visions were full of death.

“I had made a conscious choice to reject the visions. We’d discovered that Rima was a shapeshifter and she had a difficult time dealing with it. She was a werebison, an uncommon breed, and to her knowledge, she had never been attacked by a shapeshifter. Neither of her parents were shapeshifters, and it caused a great deal of tension between her mother and father. Her father asked her to undergo a paternity test. She was so deeply hurt by it. She saw it for what it was—a rejection of all the years her father had been a part of her life. To her it didn’t matter if she was or wasn’t his biological child. She cut off all ties with her family. She needed me, so I spent another year trying to convince myself that I was simply disturbed. My parents were dead. I had nobody to ask for guidance.”

Bahir sighed. “One night I was coming home from work. It was dark. A nervous woman came up to me asking for directions. She drew a knife sheathed in fire and stabbed me with it. I didn’t die. The blade passed through me and when she withdrew it, there was no wound. I was whole. I almost choked her to death out of sheer fear, but reason prevailed and I let her go. She told me that I was an ifrit, part of the ancient line stretching back from the time lost in history, when some ifrit, sensing the waning of magic, sought to mix their bloodline with humans in an effort to preserve it. The ifrits can sense those of the same clan. She said there were others like me who had felt my presence and sent her to test me.”

“That’s a hell of a test,” I said.

“What if you had died?” George asked.