and I save up for our vacation, where do I take my suits now that my regular dry cleaner closed, and how do we save the world. Yep. Normal.”
Darren snorted. “Yeah, tell me about it. Look, I didn’t want to ask around Kavon, but have you kept in touch with Angel?”
“No... why?” Les asked, and a half second later, he said in an exasperated tone, “Bruh! He’s a baby. Don’t drag his ass into this mess.”
Darren was fairly certain that all of them were babes compared to Bennu and the other ifrit. However, they didn’t get to sit out the coming battle. “If history repeats itself, the evil ifrit will make it hard to hide from trouble.”
“Evil ifrit. That’s a mouthful.”
“What should we call them?”
“Demons?” Les suggested.
Darren sighed. He wondered if he had been this annoying when he’d first found out that he’d landed in the middle of a prophecy. Probably. He just couldn’t remember his own annoyingness. “That's a little inflammatory.”
“Good,” Les said. “I think this is a time for some inflammation. Besides, have you looked up ifrit on the Internet? Man, that is the stuff of nightmares. If these guys have even a fraction of the bad mojo I read about, we are in serious shit. Calling them evil demons seems a little redundant, though.”
“Ifrit is what the Egyptians call the old jinn.”
“Jinn?”
“Shamans, adepts, and guides. They see all of us as the same species, and that species is separate from humans.”
“I’m fairly certain I should take offense,” Les said in a flat tone. “Calling shamans and adepts something other than human is step one toward convincing the mundane world that hunting us to extinction is acceptable.”
Darren hadn’t thought of it that way. Most of what they knew came through Salma, and he hadn’t questioned her language. However, as an FBI agent, he knew the dangers of incorrect labelling. In the early days of the team, Kavon had assigned agents to play devil’s advocate to avoid closed-off thinking. That had been before Darren finely tuned his ability to go off on a tangent.
He reached for his laptop and pulled up a thesaurus. While he typed, he asked Les, “So, who do you think our jailbreaker will target as a partner?”
Les snorted. “You’re assuming either of us can think like one of these old guides.”
Darren put guide into the thesaurus. “We’re just brainstorming.”
Les sighed. “Honestly? I have no idea. I still can’t believe an ifrit picked your sorry ass. But if this guide or his shaman are smart, they’ll make sure to keep any criminal activity inside the shamanic community. I’m not kidding when I say that too many of our people still don’t go to the police.”
Darren hated that, but he did understand why it happened. His gaze landed on one of the synonyms. “What about calling the ifrit vanguards?”
“You mean an advance group in front of an army? I don’t know... how do you feel about making mundanes irrationally insecure and defensive?”
Darren grimaced. “I hate that we have to worry about anti-Talent bias when we have bigger fish to fry.”
“Yeah, you won’t feel that way if we all get burned at the stake.”
“Speak for yourself,” Darren teased. “My guide will get me out of trouble.” The second he said the words, butterflies woke in his stomach. Bennu would save him if he could, but his absence worried Darren more than he wanted to admit. He offered Les the next word on the list that might work. “Guru?”
Les retorted, “Naked guy on a mountain. Roué?”
“Roo-ay? What the hell is that?”
Les’s monotone suggested he was reading straight out of the dictionary. “A debauched man, especially an elderly one. Old and selfish. It might work for the evil half of the ifrit family.”
“It sounds stupid.”
“Which is tons better than sounding terrifying,” Les countered, and then he sighed. “I know, I know. I need to stop with the fear-mongering. Boucher is going to kill me if I can’t get a grip.”
“He gets it,” Darren said. Hell, Kavon was on the terrace, and the bond was locked down tight. That suggested he was dealing with his own fears.
“Nothing scares Boucher. I hate him a little for that.” Les quickly changed the subject. “So, rapscallion sounds too goofy and potentially culinary, but what about profligate?”
Darren frowned. “What the hell are you looking up?”
“Villains. If you’re going to drag me into a comic book plot, then I’m giving these evil ifrit a comic book name.
“I thought that meant something else, but I’m going for