Tempted by the Djinn: Monster Moguls

Iris

The hiss of the espresso machine is the heartbeat of my morning. I’ve worked at The Daily Grind so long my hands know the rhythm without my brain getting involved. I twist the dial, and the grounds pack under the tamper with the satisfying give of fresh espresso. There’s something settling about it. Like a well-worn blanket that never fails to keep the rest of the world at bay.

“You like your silence too much for a barista,” Camille once told me. It is probably true. But somehow, I make it work.

Behind the heavy mahogany counter, the air smells of roasted beans and old paper. The steam fogs my glasses every time I lean too close to the wand. Some mornings I forget the rest of the city exists at all.

It’s just past ten on a Tuesday, the quietest hour of my shift. The morning rush is gone. The lawyers in their bad ties left first, and the night-shift nurses followed close behind. What’s left now is the low hum of the refrigeration units, the aggressive typing at one of the tables, and me.

“Do you think the ferns look a bit thirsty today, Iris?” Mary asks from her usual corner.

I run a clean rag over the counter for the third time this hour. It’s habit more than necessity. “They probably just miss the rain.”

Mary is a wood nymph who works at the botanical gardens three blocks over. She always looks a little wilted by mid-morning, but today the tangle of ivy growing from her scalp has drooped past her shoulders. The leaves are pale at the edges, as if they’re visibly complaining. She has both hands wrapped around her chamomile tea and breathes the steam in with her eyes closed. I make a mental note to give her a refill on the house.

Mary sighs, her fingers tracing the rim of the ceramic mug. “The city air is so heavy with exhaust.”

“I’ll give the ferns an extra misting before I head out at noon,” I say, already reaching under the counter for my paperback.

The cover is creased, and the edges curl from a year of being shoved into and dragged out of my bag. It’s an academic history about Mediterranean trade routes, specifically the salt taxes that bankrupted half the ancient world. Most people would rather chew glass than read about Phoenician customs duties. I have a paper due in nine days that proves I disagree.

Leo is at his usual table by the window, and his typing is becoming more frantic by the minute. “Iris, if I don’t finish this essay by noon, I might actually turn into a gargoyle,” he snarls without looking up from the screen.

“No, you won’t,” I tell him. “If you had that kind of skin tone, you’d cry. Now finish your latte, and stop worrying.”

Leo grumbles under his breath and keeps typing. I find my place on the page again.

I’m halfway through a paragraph on a Tyrian salt merchant when the bell above the door rings. It isn’t the brassy jingle I know. The chime is deeper, and I can feel it buzzing in my teeth before I properly hear it.

I look up.

The air in the shop changes the moment my eyes find the door. It thickens, like the pressure that builds before a summer storm. A man stands in the doorway, though the word man doesn’t quite fit him. Underneath his obsidian skin, fine veins of amber fire pulse with a slow, steady rhythm. Two black horns, dark as volcanic glass, curve up from his hair.

Leo’s fingers freeze on the keys. Mary’s mug pauses halfway to her mouth. The shop falls so quiet my own heartbeat sounds loud in my chest.

“Good morning.” I mark my page and slide the bookmark home. “What can I get for you?”

He goes still. His gold eyes settle on me with a level of attention that prickles the back of my neck. He starts toward the counter. The floorboards creak under his weight, but the sound is wrong. Heavier than it should be.

His suit is a deep blood-red silk that shifts when he moves. He stops a few feet from the counter. Up close, he smells of ancient spices and desert heat.

With a touch of distant hysteria, I wonder if Tyrian salt merchants ever smelled something like this. I certainly haven’t.

“You speak to me,” he murmurs, “as though I were anyone.”

His voice is low, unhurried, and something in my chest answers it without my permission. But I refuse to let that show.

“You’re a customer in a coffee shop,” I reply steadily. “Unless you came for the plumbing, I assume you want a drink. Do you need a minute with the menu?”

His gaze moves to the chalkboard behind me. He studies it like he would a foreign train timetable.

“I do not need the menu.”

“Suit yourself,” I say with a small shrug. “We have coffee, tea, and espresso. There are muffins, but they’re from yesterday. The lemon loaf is fresher if you’re hungry.”

He leans forward and rests his hands on the mahogany. His fingers are long and elegant, ending in nails the color of black quartz. There’s a heavy gold band on his pinky, the metal stamped with a seal I don’t recognize—a sun being swallowed by a crescent moon.

“You don’t know me.” There’s no challenge in it. He sounds almost careful, as if he’s confirming something he can’t quite believe is true.

I suppose I can’t blame him. Most of the monster billionaires in the city are famous. Their faces pop up all over the billboards, in every tabloid magazine, and on every talk show. But I don’t have time for that sort of thing.

“I don’t,” I tell him, finally meeting his eyes properly. “And the name’s Iris. Are you going to order, or are you here to admire the woodwork?”

A small line appears between his brows. His gaze travels down to my hands, over my wrinkled shirt, finally landing on the coffee stain near my sleeve. “Coffee. Black.”

“A large dark roast, then. Coming up.”

I turn to the airpots, and I take a moment longer than I need to with the lid. That suit doesn’t deserve a splash on the lapel. When I turn back, he hasn’t moved. His weight is still tipped forward, his attention still on me.

“Four-fifty,” I say, sliding the cup across.

He reaches into the inner pocket of his coat and produces a wallet of some exotic leather. The card he draws out is cut from solid black metal, its only marking the same gold seal I saw on his ring.

I glance at the card, then at him.

“I don’t have a machine for whatever that is.” I gesture at the small white square plugged into my tablet. “Do you have cash? Or a regular Visa?”

He turns the card between his fingers, watching me as if my answer changes something.

“Do you know what this represents?” he asks, and there’s no boast in it. Only a kind of patience.

“I imagine quite a lot,” I tell him, drying my hands on the rag at my hip. “But it won’t go through the Square reader. I need cash or a chip card. Otherwise, I can’t open the till.”

The air around him turns warmer, and for a moment the shop smells faintly of burning sugar. I keep working. I’ve handled vampire businessmen who tried to dispute their tips, dryads who demanded the liberation of coffee beans, and sirens who tried to pay with what they called exposure. This is nothing.

The heat in the air starts to settle into something more subdued. He reaches into a different pocket and produces, of all things, a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. He sets it on the counter with great deliberation, like a chess piece committed to the board.

“Keep the change.”

“Thanks. We appreciate your patronage.” I drop the bill into the till and push his coffee forward. “Have a nice day, Mr …?”

He picks up his cup without looking at it. “Rakan. Rakan Al-Rashid.”

“Nice to meet you, Rakan. Enjoy the coffee.”

I open my book back to my place. He stays where he is, his attention moving from the page in front of me to the line of my shoulder.

I turn the page.

A long beat passes. Then his shoes click against the floorboards, and he walks to the door. The bell rings once on his way out, and the shop comes back to itself in stages.

Leo lets out a long breath and starts typing again, faster than before. Mary takes a careful sip of her tea and whispers a prayer to Gaia under her breath. The hum of the refrigeration unit returns. The faint scent of warm spice lingers behind the counter for another minute before it fades.

I slide the bookmark back into place and tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear. Whatever that was, it isn’t my problem. I have three more chapters to get through before my shift ends, and a salt merchant from Tyre is waiting for me on page ninety-four.

Chapter I. An Uncommon Traveler

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The night shift left the coffee shop looking like the scene of a crime.

I let myself in just before seven and stop dead in the doorway. Eight glass mugs sit in a row by the espresso machine, each crusted with dried Transylvanian Special at the bottom. A plate of half-eaten blood scones waits on the prep counter. The dark-red interiors have gone a worrying brown around the bite marks. Three empty bottles of donor stock sit on the under-counter fridge, blood smeared down the labels.

There’s a note in Sasha’s blocky handwriting tucked under the till. Vampire bachelor party. Came in at three. Drank us out of donor stock. Tipped HUGE. Sorry about the mess. Sorry x100 about the scone situation.—S.

I check the tip jar. She wasn’t lying. There’s a stack of fifties in there thick enough to cover my rent twice over. I tuck the cash into the till and take a deep breath. This isn’t the first time Sasha has dumped something like this on my shoulders. I will not scream.

Ten seconds later, I tie the second-best apron over my shirt and get to work.

The mugs go into the soak first. Boiling water, dish soap, and twenty minutes if I want the residue off without scrubbing through the glaze. The scones I bag up for the compost run. Nobody is eating those now. The blood smears on the bottles need the cloth-and-bleach method Sasha taught me my second week. It takes hours and it works, but it leaves me smelling like a hospital ward for the rest of the day.

By the time the front of the counter is clean, my hair has half escaped the rubber band. There’s a wet patch on my shirt where I leaned against the sink. A streak of something dark crosses my apron strap at the hip, and I am choosing not to identify it.

I’m thirty seconds into scrubbing the prep counter when the bell rings.

I don’t have to look up. The chime is the same as yesterday—deep, wrong, settling into the floorboards before the sound properly arrives. The temperature in the shop climbs by a degree.

I straighten and push my hair back with the inside of my wrist. When I look up, Rakan is standing in the same spot as yesterday.

Today his suit is a charcoal grey, woven from what looks like smoke. The amber veins under his skin pulse slower this morning, more steadily. The gold of his eyes is still fixed on me. There’s a tension in his gaze I can’t read.

“Back again?” I reach for a clean cup from the stack with my cleaner hand. “The black coffee wasn’t that good, was it?”

He doesn’t answer right away. He starts toward the counter with that same wrong-weighted step. His attention goes to the wreckage I haven’t finished clearing. “It was adequate,” he says.

“Adequate,” I repeat, already moving toward the coffee pot. “High praise. Same thing today? Large black?”

“Yes,” he replies from behind me, and I can feel his gaze burning into my back.

I pour the coffee into the cup, no faster and no slower than I do for any other customer. Then, I reach for my trusty marker and write his name on the side.

Rakan. It’s a monster’s name, a name with weight that screams I’m powerful. It fits him almost better than those stupid suits.

“Four-fifty,” I say, sliding the coffee toward him.

He doesn’t reach for the metal card today. He goes straight to the inside pocket and produces another twenty. This one is less crumpled than yesterday’s, folded along its own crease. He sets it down. I make change—fifteen-fifty, exact—and offer him the bills.

He waves the change away with two fingers. “Keep it. I have no use for paper.”

“Suit yourself.” I drop the change into the tip jar with Sasha’s fifties. Between him and the vampires, we might end up needing a bigger jar.

Rakan picks up the cup. He doesn’t leave. He stands there, his heat filling the space between us. The cardboard hisses where his fingers close around it. He watches me without speaking.

“You are still here,” he murmurs.

“I work here, Rakan.” I rinse my hands at the small sink and dry them on a rag. “I’ll be here until four.”

He leans one elbow on the counter. The wood doesn’t groan under it the way it should. Traitor.

“Tell me, Iris,” he drawls, almost as if he’s tasting each word. “Is there something you wish?”

I narrow my eyes at him. I know what he’s asking, and I have no desire to play his game. “To finish my book, maybe?” I shoot back. “Though my friend Camille said last week I should be a little friendlier. So maybe… that.”

Rakan goes very still. He stares at me with the cup forgotten in his hand. A small flame flickers at the corner of his mouth, then vanishes.

“You are a strange creature,” he tells me.

“I’m just a barista,” I reply, shrugging. “And you’re blocking the line.”

There’s no line. The shop is empty. He knows it, and so do I.

He looks around once, slowly, taking in the empty room. When he turns back to me, his face has changed—not by much, just enough. The careful composure of yesterday has loosened by a degree. Whatever he is when he isn’t being looked at, this is closer to it.

“Until tomorrow, Iris.”

He turns and walks to the door. The moment he disappears outside, I press my palm to the spot on the counter he leaned against.

The wood glints, as if Rakan had turned it to gold with a simple touch. It’s warm, and I’m irrationally resentful of that heat.

This isn’t something I can clean up with a simple scrubbing. I take a fresh cloth to the counter anyway. I have a shop to open. And if eight vampires didn’t stop The Daily Grind, one djinn certainly won’t.