With two weeks left in her exchange program, Sibel ignores her intuition and follows her friends into the Istanbul gypsy quarter to visit a fortuneteller. Prophesy doesn’t scare Sibel, but the protective verse on the cryptic, djinn-channeling gypsy’s hip does. It’s similar to the one her biological parents tattooed on her own hip.
Sibel’s flirtations with eerily familiar Haydon turn into something more when his touch triggers an exhilarating energy: the essential fire of the djinn. They set out to research djinn lore, looking for clues about the tattoo and the power, and they’re sucked through a portal to the djinn world.
There Sibel learns that she is pure djinn, and she’s not only been married to Haydon since she was five, but she’s also the lost Queen of Kilikia. She’s unwilling to accept the backward conventions of djinn society, so she resolves to find a way back to the human world. Yet she also wants understand her djinn self, and to determine if Haydon is after her crown, or her heart. The price for the wrong choice is a future cut off from both worlds forever.
BURNT AMBER is a 69,000 word novel inspired by the tale of 12th century castle, Kızkalesi, and the life of Zabel, the queen of Armenian Kilikia. The lore and exotic location of the story should appeal to fans of DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE.
My experience living in Turkey helped me enrich the book with authentic cultural details. Recently, a blogger for the Turkish national newspaper, Milliyet, recognized my blog as a worthy portrayal of modern Turkey. More information about djinn lore along with customs and places described in the book can be found at carolynsnowabiad (dot) com.
First Chapter:
One
The human shape is a
ghost,
Made of distraction and
pain.
-Rumi
Foreboding coiled
up like a ball of hot barbed wire in my stomach. I took a deep breath, held it
for three counts, and released. The sensation inched back down to almost bearable.
Anna glanced over
at me. “Something wrong, Sibel? You look a little pale.”
“I’m fine.” I
lifted my chin and forced a smile to prove it. “Twisted my ankle on the
sidewalk.”
Uneven was a generous
word for the steep, narrow streets of old Istanbul. The pavement in front of
each building was a different level than the neighbor’s, and in the dark it
made a plausible excuse for me to steal a minute and rest. I balanced myself
against a streetlamp, bending down to adjust the strap on my glittery sandal.
“We’re not really dressed for this adventure.”
The light
flickered on above us, setting Anna’s platinum hair aglow like a beacon for
street urchins. She fussed with the hem of her shirtdress in a futile attempt
to cover her Scandinavian legs. “I agree. But it’s not everyday someone offers
me a session with a Romani fortuneteller.”
“Hmm.” My own intuition insisted that consulting a
psychic was the very last thing I should do, especially when the best of those was
located in the back alley underworld of the Sulukule area.
“C’mon. Your personal
guide is waiting,” she teased and helped me up, linking my arm in hers with a
small squeeze. “If he was a couple inches taller, I’d be jealous.”
A few steps ahead
of us, Seyhan, clicked off his phone. Since connections meant everything in
Turkey, his knowledge of Istanbul made him the perfect exchange student assistant.
Apparently, seventeen was old enough for the job.
The gypsy visit
was his fault.
“Did he just wink
at me?” I asked.
“I think he just
winked at you.” She pursed her lips, but quickly recovered, beaming a smile in
my direction.
Seyhan ushered us through
a cobblestone passageway. “Come on, ladies. We’re going to be late.”
He turned his velvet
brown eyes on me, so I shifted my gaze to the guitar strap settled across his
chest. In his own rock-star-rip-off way, with his slick black hair and an
eternal five o’clock shadow, he was hot. The problem was he knew it. I swept
past him, jaw clenched. I was still shaking off the cheesy “Ballad to Sibel”
he’d sung to me at the club earlier that evening. He expected me to fall right
in with his adoring fans at the front row, but the harder he tried to get my
attention, the less I wanted to give it to him. Plus I had no plans to upgrade
any relationship with only a few weeks left in Turkey.
“This is it.”
Seyhan said, stopping at the door of a tiny coffeehouse.
Anna and I would
have never found the place on our own. The faded stucco façade was punctuated
by a single grimy window, and over the entrance a hand-scribbled sign boasted
the name of the shop. It was a sign you could pack up on a moment’s notice, or
hang on the back of a gypsy cart. A street dog opened one eye to evaluate us,
and then tucked his head back under his paw when Seyhan opened the door. Smells
of roasted coffee, dusty wool and candle smoke wafted out into the street.
“No tourists
around here,” Anna squealed. She practically ran me over to get inside.
My eyes took a
second to adjust to the inside of the shop. Glass lanterns draped around the
room flooded seating areas with an amber glow. Groups of people lounged on the
woven floor cushions, their voices a murmur secreted inside the curtained
nooks. A few well-heeled customers took one look at us, and then got up and
left.
“What’s with them?”
I asked Seyhan.
“Nothing personal.”
He hung his guitar on a coat hook and straightened his collar. “They probably just
want their privacy. Or maybe they don’t like teenagers.” He winked at me.
Again.
Anna settled into a snug corner space. “I looove
finding places like this.”
Seyhan sat down
across from her, expecting me to slide in. I dropped my purse between us and
plunked myself down, curling my legs up. Thankfully, I’d worn jeans because the
low Ottoman-style table offered no refuge for the inappropriately dressed.
Anna fussed some
more with her hem, trying to get Seyhan’s attention.
I tossed her my
scarf. “You might want to cover up before you give some old guy a heart
attack.”
“What old guy?”
She glanced around the room, and then pulled a cord on the curtain closest to
her. It closed in around us. “Atmospheric and useful.”
“A bit too much
Otto-mania for me.” I didn’t really mind the décor. In fact, my suitcase was
stuffed with lanterns, kilims, and a bunch of Ottoman-style stuff to redecorate
my room at home, but my stomach ached so the appeal of the nook escaped me. I
added a smile as an afterthought, to take the edge off my remark. No one cared
anyway. Anna was tracing the mother of pearl inlay on the table with her finger.
Seyhan was busy waving at the waitress.
“Nasmiye’s busy
tonight.” He settled back onto his pillow. “We’re lucky I called ahead.”
As if on cue, a
group of businessmen walked in and took the last table. Seyhan tilted his head
in their direction. “Wish I could join that crowd. No one gets in without a
birthright, or an awesome referral.”
“You look more
like the entertainment industry type, Seyhan.” Anna poked him in the arm
playfully.
“Don’t get me
wrong.” He nodded and frowned at the same time, which seemed like he was
agreeing to disagree. “I love to sing, but I had something else in mind after I’m
done with school.”
“I’m sure you’ll
figure something out.” I slid a little further away from him, shuddering at the
way he set his jaw. It was if the world only saw half of the real Seyhan, and
the dark determination I read on his face showed me the half I didn’t care to
know. Actually, I wasn’t so fond of either half.
His face lit up as
a woman with brassy, bleached hair approached us. “Here comes Nasmiye,” he
whispered.
Without even acknowledging
Seyhan, she placed a tray with a copper coffee pot on our table, and proceeded
to fill our espresso cups. She set one in front of me, fixing her artificially
blue eyes on mine. “Welcome.”
“Thank you. I mean
teşekkür. ” I took the cup, searching
her face for some trace of her true personality, but I couldn’t read her. It
was as if there was a hole in the atmosphere where she stood. That nasty
feeling twisted back over itself in my stomach and demanded my attention.
“Nasmiye gives the
best readings in Istanbul,” Seyhan said, putting a hand on my shoulder.
“I’m sure she
does.” I stared down into the frothy coffee. Something about the woman made me
want to hide. From everyone. Yet something about her promised me the one answer
I sought, but wasn’t sure I could handle.
Who was my mother?
Nasmiye cut her
eyes at me, as if she heard my question. “Call me when you are ready.” Then she swirled her gypsy skirt and headed away
to another table.
My heart pounded a
few beats double-time before it resumed the normal rhythm.
Across from me, Anna
flicked her blonde hair around and glanced up, doe-eyed, at Seyhan. “Thank you
so much for bringing us.”
“My pleasure,” he said, returning her
enthusiasm with his regular polite grin. He rubbed his hands together. “Let’s
see what the future holds!” He drank his coffee almost in one shot. Then he inverted
the saucer on top of his empty cup, pressing them together between his thumb
and forefinger. He swirled the whole thing around three times, flipped it and
put it on the table to cool. “Don’t forget to make a wish.”
Anna followed his example. “Come on, Sibel,
you too!”
“You know, an old
Wiccan woman once told me that prophesy equals submission,” I said, breathing
normally for the first time since Nasmiye left.
“Prophesy is a big
word for it,” Seyhan said. “Think of it like a head’s up.”
“Still, I’d rather
not have my fortune told.” I sipped the bitter concoction until I tasted the sludge
on the bottom, and then placed the cup back on the tray.
Anna reached over
for my cup and flipped the saucer to start the ritual.
I grabbed her arm.
“Don’t-“
“Will it work if I
make a wish for her?” she asked Seyhan while she pushed me away. He nodded,
looking at me with amusement and a tiny flicker of concern.
“Sibel. What are
you afraid of?” Anna asked. “You told me yourself you thought all this was a probably
a scam.”
“Fine.” I got up
off of my cushion. “I need to find the restroom.” I headed to the back, locked
myself up in the closet-sized bathroom and slumped against the door. Ouija
boards, tarot cards, tea leaves - I avoided them all since the fourth grade, after
I told a friend her cat would die. Her mother found a bloody pile of fur at the
end of their driveway the next day. Then the threats written in blood red nail
polish appeared on my desk, and I had to find a new school. For the third time.
Dreams and premonitions
still stalked me, but I found a way to control them. Avoidance was the first
part of the maintenance plan. So when Seyhan proposed the Romani coffee shop, I
tried to convince Anna the fortuneteller was a scam. Most of them usually were.
In spite of all that, I wondered if Nasmiye really could tell me something
about my maddening visions.
I took a deep
breath and went back to the table. I’d come to Istanbul to confront my problems,
not run away from them.
Nasmiye looked
over the top of her reading glasses as I approached. She sat in my place next
to Seyhan, so Anna made room for me on her cushion.
“There is an ant
at the bottom trying to climb. He means determination,” Nasmiye said to Anna.
“That’s all I can see.”
Cliché, right out
of some fortuneteller’s manual. I exhaled a mixture of disappointment and relief.
Maybe I’d worked myself up for nothing. I couldn’t even sense the emptiness
around Nasmiye anymore.
Seyhan slid his
cup over to her.
She picked it up,
but it was vacuum-sealed to the dish underneath. Seyhan’s smile slipped.
“Sorry, canim! It
means we are not supposed to know what is inside,” she said.
Anna gave Seyhan a
sly look and passed my cup to the fortuneteller. I gritted my teeth against a
wave of nausea.
Dark coffee swirled
into the saucer when she tilted my cup open. I crossed my arms, leaning back
against the wall, while she examined a lump of grounds at the base of the
cup.
“This means you
are living through some difficulty.” Nasmiye adjusted the glasses on the end of
her nose and her brow knit into a maze of lines. She mumbled something to
herself before pointing out some random squiggles.
“There’s a boy
watching over you, but you are looking away.” She showed me the side of the cup
to prove it. “Here he is, putting a crown on top of your head.”
I sucked in a breath as the stick figure
Nasmiye was pointing to zoomed into focus. Hot air closed in around me,
clinging to my skin like a filmy shroud.
In the cup, a
giant scorpion, tail poised for a strike, hovered behind the figures. A
stabbing pain exploded in my stomach. I pushed the cup away and the heat slid
off of me.
I’d expected the
truth to be painful, but not like that. Maybe I wasn’t ready to face facts after
all.
She pointed at
another line. “This here is a very long road or journey. Here you take a side
turn before you come back to the same road.”
I didn’t dare look
into the cup again.
Anna leaned toward
me. “Maybe this is about your nightmares,” she whispered. “I wished for you to
find the solution to your nightmares.”
I shot her a
warning glance, trying to make her understand that I didn’t want to share the
information with fortunetellers and hot Turkish guys. I never would have told
her about my dreams either, except living in the same dorm room made it hard
for me to explain away the psychotic sobbing in the middle of the night.
“What does the
scorpion mean?” I asked Nasmiye. Either she wasn’t perceptive enough to see it,
or she was avoiding it, but I wanted to know what she thought it meant.
She fumbled the
cup in her hand and paled. “Tashkiri?”
Seyhan sat bolt
upright, but Nasmiye recovered and shook her head at him.
“The scorpion is a
sign of evil, and in your case it probably means…” She rubbed her brow, trying
to find the right words. “It must only be about the boy in the cup. Or another boy
with very bad intentions.”
Seyhan and Anna
stretched over the table to see the mysterious sign, but Nasmiye poured the coffee
from the saucer back into the cup, obscuring the patterns. “That’s all I can
see.” She put the cups back on her tray and shook the bangles down her arm, as
if she was trying to shake off the ill omen.
“Don’t worry.”
Seyhan put a hand on Anna’s knee. “I won’t let anything happen to you girls while
I’m around.”
If he thought he
was the protective boy in the cup, I knew better. I closed my eyes for a
second, wishing it was Haydon, a dark-haired boy I’d seen around campus. His angular
features haunted me for some reason. But it wasn’t him, or not quite. The boy
in the cup was a stranger.
Nasmiye stood up
and smoothed down her blouse, preparing for the handsome customers at the next
table. As her fingers grazed her waist, I noticed a tiny blue verse swirled on
her hip.
In vinculis-
The mark darkened.
Nasmiye’s face transformed into a rigid mask and the hole in the atmosphere
flickered around her again for a brief second. She covered the mark with her
hand. Her eyes darted around the room looking for the culprit.
- et tiam audax.
I didn’t need to
see the unusual tattoo to know what the rest of it said. My birth mother had
inked a similar one on my own hip. I’d never seen another.
The foreboding
sensation in my stomach twisted itself up tighter, but it fought against the
thrill of my first real clue. Nasmiye’s mark meant my search was pointed in the
right direction.
She shot a pained
glance in my direction. “As we say in Turkey, faldan inanma, faldan geri kalma!” Cups rattled on the tray as she
disappeared into the back of the restaurant.
“What’s that
supposed to mean?” I asked Seyhan. My Turkish was basic, so sometimes I still
needed translation, especially with idioms and obscure things like fortunes.
He
was looking at me like I’d sprouted an extra head. “She said if you don’t believe
in the predictions, then you won’t be held back by them.”
“I don’t really believe in all that crap,” I
lied. I sat on my hands so no one could see them shaking. My tattoo meant my
mother was gypsy, the Tashkiri scorpion freaked out the psychic, and deep down
I knew, felt in my twisted stomach that making the two discoveries at once was
no coincidence.
“It can also be
figurative, you know.” Seyhan kept looking toward the door where Nasmiye went,
as if she would help him explain what just happened. “When you ask about
someone’s fate, the fortuneteller channels a message from the djinn, and then she
uses the coffee grounds, or droplets of lead, or-” He waved an open hand around.
“Or even a crystal ball to interpret it.”
Anna fidgeted in
her seat like she was desperate for attention. “What’s a djinn?”
“You call them
genies.” He rewarded her curiosity with a smile.
“Not like the kind
with three wishes?” I asked. Clairvoyance was one thing. Blaming it on mythical
creatures was another.
Seyhan cleared his
throat and stared back at me as if I should know better. “No, like the kind who
live in a parallel universe.”
“You can’t be
serious, Seyhan,” Anna said. “And anyway, aren’t they supposed to be evil and
manipulative? Why would anyone listen to one of them?”
“Djinn can predict
the future because they see everything happening around us, like they have a
bird’s eye view. Lots of important people want that kind of information.”
He tilted his head
toward the table across from us, where Nasmiye was beginning to read for the
businessmen. Muscular bodyguards, suits straining at the seams, stood watch.
The one closest to me must have felt us staring because he turned around. I got
caught in his black eyes for a moment before the glimmer of his lapel pin
distracted me – KH. He whispered something to the other bodyguard
and I looked away.
“They’re from
Kemer Holding.” Seyhan lowered his voice. “Maybe you heard the story. Mr. Kemer
was a village boy, but then his ‘company’ swallowed every other business in its
path. He owns half of Turkey. Nasmiye will probably get a gold-plated apartment
when they redevelop this area.”
“And you think
djinn have something to do with it?” I managed a steady smile. “America must be
full of evil genies then.”
Seyhan narrowed
his eyes at me. “Djinn are one of God’s creatures. They have free will like us
and can be good or evil. And some of them can be very powerful.”
“Do you have to be a gypsy to communicate with
them?” Anna asked in a whisper.
“Technically, the
djinn can respond to anyone, but if they do, you can’t be sure they are
reliable. It’s like you have to have some pass code or something to gain their
trust.” His disappointed scowl made it seem like he wanted access to that pass
code pretty badly, but he didn’t know how to go about getting it.
“Exactly what kind
of something,” I asked, wondering if “something” was a tattoo on the hip.
“Sometimes djinn… How shall I say this?” He
rubbed the back of his neck and looked over at Nasmiye. “They interact with
people. Their powers can affect generations afterward. Those are the people who can communicate with djinn the best.”
A horrified look
crossed Anna’s face. “Interact? Do djinn possess you or something?”
Seyhan snorted and
shook his head. “People possessed by the djinn are mecnun.” He waggled his finger in a circular motion next to his
temple. “Crazy,” he whispered. “When I say interact, I mean it’s in the blood. There’s
a rumor that Nasmiye’s great-great-grandfather was a djinn.” He leaned toward
me, curling his fingers around my wrist. “How did you see the scorpion, Sibel?”
“I-” The knot in
my stomach twisted tighter. “I just have extra sensitive powers of observation.”
I pulled away from him, grabbed my bag and stood up. “Let’s go.”
Anna struggled to
her feet, and then dipped low in an exaggerated bow. “Yes, master!”
Nasmiye watched
with her intense blue eyes as I stormed out the door.
I wasn’t upset
because Seyhan believed in djinn. That wasn’t it at all. Something triggered my
sixth sense, maybe not djinn, but something intuition always wanted me to avoid.
Something about my mother and a Tashkiri scorpion.
