HWJN (English 2nd Edition) by Ibraheem Abbas, Yasser Bahjatt Read Free Book Online

me.
    “Mother, what’s wrong?” I asked. “Is something bothering you?”
    “Shut up and follow me.”
    In a few moments, I found myself far away from the city, on a mountain where no Human nor Jinn lived. Mother sat next to a water trail under a large boulder and moved her hand over the sands.
    “Mother, I know you’re upset, but I swear to God I didn—”
    I was shocked when I saw the sand move beneath her fingers.
     
    We cannot interact with your world directly.
    Our universe is parallel yours, like a one-way window—we can see and hear you and have limited interactions with your world, but you cannot feel anything in ours.
     
    Mother wanted to let me know, without saying a word, that she was an Efreet, and that she had some Efreet capabilities. Such powers are limited to a very few of the Jinn elders, and I do not know how to gain them other than cooperation with Devil Marids, who ask for impossible terms to grant such difficult requests. So impossible that lots of Jinn lose their lives before their requests are ever fulfilled.
    “I am not an Efreet,” Mother began, “but your father, before he died, taught me how to protect myself from Humans. I met him for the first time here. Our hundred years together passed like a dream.”
    I listened, as I expected she would reveal to me the story of her and my father that she had always hidden.
    “Our village was behind the mountain,” she said, “and I loved to come here alone on the day of a flood to play and watch. Our lives were simple. We rarely saw Humans save from afar, when travelers would pass through the valley. One day the floods were really strong and washed away the boulder I was standing on, taking me with it. I thought I was going to die!”
    I tried to comfort her as she looked so over whelmed, but she went on as if I was not there.
    “I then opened my eyes and saw your father. I’m not sure if I was happy because I had been given a new life, or if I was terrified because I was now at the mercy of a Marid. Yes, your father was a Marid! The strongest of all his brothers! In fact he was the chief of all Marids after your grandfather died. Anyway, when I first saw him, he could have easily taken my life without any of my family ever knowing. They would have thought I had been taken by the flood. But he didn’t. Instead I became the reason your father rebelled against your uncles and your entire tribe. He sacrificed everything for me. He left his possessions in the world of Marids and sorcerers, and fought the world so would could live together even though we could barely make ends meet.”
     
    This was a shock I almost couldn’t comprehend! My father had been the chief of all Marids? And had fought his family over his love of Mother!
    She got up, and we walked in the valley, the winds creating a dust storm along our path. “There was no one like your father,” she went on. “Do you know how many of the Nafar had proposed to me, and your grandfather refused to let me marry them? Yet he accepted my marriage to your father. That’s why the Nafar abandoned him. They told him, ‘How can you refuse us and marry your daughter to a Devil Marid?’ Your grandfather told them this Marid had repented in a way that made him closer to Allah than any of us.”
    Mother suddenly stopped and turned to me. “You are all that remains of your father. It’s like I can see him here in front of me when I look at you. Even in your foolishness, craziness, and feelings. But you need to know something important: love made your father sacrifice the world of blasphemy, his power, and his entire family to live with me, and your love is making you sacrifice yourself, your family, and your love herself for your foolishness. You will not be able to live with the Human or protect her, and you will destroy her future! Tell me, how can you communicate with them? Or are you planning to turn to blasphemy and live in Qummah so the Devils will kidnap her for you, and then you