Two Deals: a Djinn Paranormal Romance (Blackwell Djinn)

by Nikki Kardnov

  When he’d first laid eyes on her, she’d immediately reminded him of a fox. Small and delicate, but also quietly fierce.

  He would be lying if he said he’d never thought about fucking her. There was something that held him back, though. It felt like his conscience, like it was trying to stop him from being an asshole. That seemed ludicrous, though. He was an asshole. Rarely did he ever care about someone’s feelings.

  As Willa popped the tops on two beers, the air shifted behind Poe and a second later, his younger brother Dae was at his side.

  Poe kept his eyes on Will. He liked watching her work.

  “Gawking at the help again?” Dae said.

  Technically Dae owned the club. Technically Dae owned half the city. Technically Poe pretended not to care.

  “I tried to talk her into doing a reading for me again and she turned me down.”

  Dae leaned against the wrought iron railing and followed Poe’s line of sight down to the bar. “Why? For a psychic, she isn’t a very powerful one.”

  “By their very nature psychics are powerful,” Poe argued. “They’re too rare not to be.”

  “And what did you plan to ask her?”

  Poe stayed silent.

  “After that again are you?” Dae asked once the silence had said enough. “If you’re meant to find your caeli, you will.”

  Caeli.

  A djinn’s soul mate. Their Fated.

  Once a djinn bound himself to his caeli, he didn’t need to be invoked to manifest. He didn’t need to be invoked to vade. If power was currency, then being caeli-bound was like tapping into the infinite wealth that was his by rights.

  Last week, Dae found his caeli. Or rather she found him. Her husband had left her. She’d come to Dae to make a deal to win her husband back.

  Fate did work in mysterious ways.

  Poe would like it very much if his caeli just stumbled into his lap.

  “What are you doing here anyway?” Poe said, trying to change the subject. “I thought you hired people to run this place so you didn’t have to mix with the lowlifes.”

  Dae cocked his head to the side and regarded Poe with cool indifference. At one time, the brothers had been inseparable and Poe had felt like he was missing an arm when his little brother was anywhere other than by his side.

  And then their mother died and everything changed.

  Because Dae had blamed Poe for it.

  Poe had introduced their mother to the Italian shoe cobbler who she immediately fell in love with who it turned out was dying of cancer. She burned through her deals trying to heal him to no avail.

  Sometimes Death does not go quietly into the night.

  Sometimes Death takes exactly what she’s due regardless of magic or love.

  Poe couldn’t relate to the choices his mother had made. The Italian shoe cobbler—Giovanni was his name—hadn’t even been her caeli. And he was human no less. It didn’t make any sense then and it still didn’t now.

  But after finding his caeli, Dae said he understood why their mother had done what she’d done. And somewhere through that realization, he’d forgiven Poe.

  They were still on shaky ground, however, still trying to navigate the last hundred years of anger and frustration. Because while Dae had blamed Poe for their mother’s death, Poe was angry at Dae for abandoning him when he’d needed him most.

  It was just one betrayal from his family in a long list of betrayals. He had decided after Dae left that he was much better on his own anyway and so far this was proving to be true.

  “Red wants us,” Dae said now. “I was sent to fetch you.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Another letter arrived.”

  “About Corvin?”

  Dae shrugged.

  Poe grumbled.

  Caleb Corvin was human, but he had a lot of supernatural connections. And his collection of magical artifacts was quickly outpacing theirs.

  But Poe often brushed up against Corvin in the seedy underbelly of the city and he felt like they had an understanding of a sort. Don’t fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you.

  It was Red that had the problem with Corvin. Red did not handle challenges to his authority very well.

  “I wish I could help,” Poe said. “But you know I don’t like to get my hands dirty.”

  Dae hissed out his frustration. “Well you don’t have a choice.” He grabbed Poe by the arm and vaded. The pulsing beat of the club and the swirling neon lights disappeared with jarring speed and was immediately replaced with the quiet, soaring hush of Blackwell House.

  “Bloody hell!” Poe said, his voice echoing through the foyer. “Give me a warning next time.”

  “That would have defeated the purpose.” Dae headed for the conservatory.

  “This better be good.” Poe straightened his suit jacket. “I was on my way to making a deal.”

  “Funny. It didn’t look like it from where I stood.”

  Poe scowled. “Well maybe you weren’t standing in the right place.”

  “Come on. You know Red doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  Poe smoothed back his hair and followed his little brother through the large arched doorway, grumbling the whole way.

  Chapter 3

  WILLA

  It took Willa over an hour to get through the customers at the bar and she hadn’t seen Raina in that amount of time.

  “Hey Clint? Mind if I take a break?” she said to the other bartender.

  Clint nodded. “Sure. And then I’ll go when you get back. I need a smoke break something horrible.”

  “I’ll be quick,” she said.

  She ducked beneath the bar’s hinged top and headed for the club’s far corner. Raina liked the shadows best and there was a row of private booths beneath the second-floor overhang where the swirling lights of the club couldn’t reach.

  She heard Raina’s laughter first and then caught sight of her in the corner booth nestled in between Caleb Corvin and one of his hangers-on. Raina’s dusky auburn hair hung around her face in thick waves. The thin straps of her tank top had fallen from her shoulders, but she made no move to right them.

  Raina leaned into Caleb and whispered something in his ear, making him nod and laugh.

  When they moved to the city a few years ago, Willa had been hoping they could find a place where Raina could fit in. Growing up, they’d never been in one place long enough to find friends and even if they had been, Raina was special. “I’m not like those other girls,” she’d complained once when Willa had pressed her to try to make friends at their new school—their third one that year. Raina had been a freshman and Willa a junior.

  “It’s okay to be different,” Willa had said. “I’m not like those girls either.”

  Raina had gotten this far off look in her eyes as she said, “At least the shadows don’t whisper to you.”

  Willa had asked her what she meant by that, but she’d turned back to her book and pretended she hadn’t said anything at all.

  It wasn’t until the following year that Willa learned the truth of that admission.

  “Hey,” Willa said now as she came up to the table. “Poe Blackwell over-tipped me tonight. You want to grab a pizza on the way home and watch Under the Madelina Stars with me?”

  It was their favorite movie, one they’d watched more times than either could count. Once, when they’d been fending for themselves on the third or fourth day of their mother’s absence and Willa had made do with canned corn and ramen noodles for dinner, Raina had poked at the food and looked at Willa and said, “Do you think we’ll ever live somewhere like Madelina?”

  Willa’s heart had nearly broken in two.

  “Absolutely,” she’d said. “We’ll have ice cream for breakfast on the boardwalk and smores on the beach at night. It’ll be just like in the movie.”

  “We’ll be there together, right?” Raina had asked.

  Willa had squeezed her hand. “I will always be where you are.”

&n
bsp; It was the only thing that kept them both sane, clinging to that hope that someday everything would be better.

  “You sure that money didn’t come with a catch?” Caleb asked Willa. “Poe isn’t generous with anything.”

  Willa set her hands on her hips. “He’s always been nice to me.”

  That got Caleb’s attention. “Seriously? Why?”

  Good question.

  Willa hadn’t meant to back herself into a corner. She’d just wanted to defend Poe because...well...because.

  But it was Raina who came to Willa’s defense. “What do you mean, why? Look at my big sister, Caleb. She’s gorgeous, smart, and she makes a mean cocktail.”

  Willa’s favorite foster mother Maggie used to say it was best to accept a compliment with grace and gratitude. But Willa had never been the graceful type so instead of saying thank you, she ignored the compliment entirely.

  “What do you say, Rae? Movie night?”

  Caleb said to Raina, “We have that thing, remember?”

  Raina nodded, her eyes big and bright. “How could I forget?” She draped her arm around Caleb’s shoulders and said to Willa, “Raincheck. Maybe tomorrow night?”

  Raina had been dodging Willa more and more. The longer they stayed at Caleb Corvin’s place, the more the distance between them grew.

  “He understands me,” Raina had said once when Willa asked her what she saw in him. Sure, he was good looking. And yes, he had deep pockets that he routinely dug into to give Raina whatever she wanted. But he was also moody, fickle, and completely oblivious half the time.

  I understand you, Willa wanted to say. He’s using you.

  But history had proven that trying to push Raina to do something only strengthened her resolve. If Willa flat out told her sister that Caleb was a tool she should drop, Raina would probably run off and elope with him.

  “Okay, sure,” Willa said and pretended the rebuff didn’t hurt. “Tomorrow works too.”

  She lingered as Caleb texted someone and Raina cracked open a peanut to fish out its insides.

  “Will you at least wait for me to close up?” Willa asked.

  “Sure,” Raina answered, bored and distant.

  “I should be done around two-thirty.”

  Another peanut cracked. “Two-thirty. Got it.”

  Willa headed back to the bar hopeful that at least this once, Raina would follow through with her promise.

  Chapter 4

  POE

  The conservatory was Poe’s least favorite room at Blackwell house.

  It was too drafty in the winter, too humid in the summer. It smelled like lemons and roses and rosemary. And when it rained, it sounded like a damn hurricane.

  Red, however, loved the conservatory. Poe never could figure out why. Red did not like being on display and the conservatory was literally one giant room of windows.

  It was probably nostalgia. Red’s wife, Adelaide, Poe’s grandmother, had been a botanist. Or the equivalent of it in medieval Europe. Adelaide died several hundred years ago. He couldn’t remember what Red and Adelaide’s relationship had been like, though if Poe had to guess, it was equal parts disdain and wild passion. They had met in the middle of a battlefield after all.

  Now Red had a new woman in his life—a psychic like Willa—but for reasons unknown to Poe, they couldn’t be together. Something about Fate and wishes and the future.

  Fucking Fate.

  Despite being unable to see Red, the psychic had still reached out to send him an ominous warning. A week ago, a letter arrived that said, Caleb Corvin will bring chaos to your door.

  “You found him,” Poe’s older brother Mad said when he came down the three steps to the conservatory’s brick floor.

  “So sorry to keep you waiting. I know the meetings don’t start until I’ve arrived.”

  Mad snorted and crossed his meaty arms. “The meetings don’t start until we’re all here and you’re the one who’s usually MIA.”

  “Says the brother that disappeared for a decade.”

  Mad shook his head and dropped onto the leather sofa. “I had my reasons,” he muttered.

  Poe didn’t really care what the reasons were. He just knew mentioning it twisted Mad up like a garden hose. And judging by the vein popping across his forehead, it had done the job yet again.

  Poe went to the wingback chair in front of the massive stone fireplace and collapsed into it. He pulled a cigarette from his pack and lit it with the flick of a lighter. The flame made the tobacco glow and crackle.

  When the smoke filled his lungs, he started to feel marginally better.

  Dae took the chair across from him.

  Their littlest brother, Thorin, sat across the room dwarfing one of the iron café chairs. Like a prude, Thorin hated cigarette smoke. It wasn’t like it could kill him. Or any of them. They were bloody immortal.

  Red came out of the conservatory’s workroom, a folded sheet of paper in his hand. He looked well today, compared to how he’d been just a week ago.

  On his last deal, knocking on Death’s door, Red had been saved by Dae’s caeli, Ashley. She’d sacrificed one of her wishes for him. Now Red was technically human.

  They might have all been immortal, but they could die. There were certain blades that if carved with the right runes could get the job done. But if left to the natural order of things, a djinn would only die once he’d granted all three thousand of his wishes.

  Once their wishes were gone, they turned to dust.

  Seeing someone as formidable as Red succumbing to the inevitability of death had unsettled Poe. It reminded him of his own ticking clock. He had sixty-one deals left to his name. After that...

  He would rather not think about what came after that. Just another reason to find his caeli. Sixty-one deals could last centuries, longer even, without the pressing need to make deals. As soon as a djinn was caeli-bound, whether she was human or not, she got the added benefit of immortality. As long as the djinn was alive, the caeli would live by his side. Their lives were bound together.

  “Glad you could join us,” Red said. He sat in the leather sofa next to Mad, somehow managing to do it without making a single sound.

  Red had always been eerily undetectable as a djinn—more ghost than djinn—and it was even more eerie now that he was human.

  “Are you telling me I had a choice? Because Dae made it sound like I didn’t.”

  Red handed Poe the letter.

  The paper was crisp in his hands, like it’d gotten wet and then was left out to dry. He pulled back the flaps to see one line of cursive handwriting.

  He read it aloud. “‘Poe, don’t be afraid to sacrifice yourself.’” He looked up at his family. “That’s it?”

  “Let me see,” Dae said and snatched the letter from him.

  Thorin said to Red, “Is there really no way to ask your psychic if she has any more insight?”

  Red sat perfectly still as he said, “If there was more, she would have said it.”

  “This isn’t a lot to go on.” Dae refolded the letter. “And how does this connect to the warning about Corvin?”

  Red looked at Poe.

  Someone once asked him what it was like to have the legendary Red Blackwell as a grandfather and Poe had said, “It’s like living with the devil.”

  Once upon a time, Poe had worshipped Red. Now...now he wasn’t sure what he thought of him. Some days he hated him. Some days he didn’t.

  When Red said nothing, Poe took a hit from the cigarette and expelled the smoke with a purposeful breath. “I can assure you all that I most definitely will not be sacrificing myself. Not for any cause.”

  “We need more information,” Mad said. “Poe, don’t you know a psychic?”

  “Willa. Her little sister, the witch, is dating Corvin, so I’m not sure we want to go poking around that bush.”

  Raina was a firecracker burning at both ends. She spent a lot of time at Club Drav with Corvin, and a few of the other clubs frequented by the supernat
ural denizens of the city. Whenever Poe crossed paths with her, he couldn’t help but shiver. There was something not quite right about that girl.

  “Is Willa loyal to Caleb?” Mad asked.

  “I honestly couldn’t say.”

  Mad sat back against the sofa and the leather groaned. “What do you think, Red? Should we tap a new resource?”

  “Too much of a risk,” Red answered. “Willa might not be loyal to Corvin, but she’s likely loyal to her sister. And if she was a psychic worth anything, I would have heard about her before now. I doubt her abilities would be of much use to us.”

  Poe bristled. “You haven’t heard of her because you’ve been slowly decaying in your own bed the last half decade.” He took another hit and bowed his head. Defending Will in front of Red was a mistake. Why did he care what Red thought of her?

  He didn’t.

  And anyway, if Willa wouldn’t do a reading for him to help find his caeli, then she certainly wouldn’t agree to a reading about the shady dealings of the Corvin family and how they might intersect with the Blackwells. Or Poe’s apparent need to sacrifice himself.

  “Wish I could be of more help,” he said as he stood from the wingback. “But I really must be going.” He took one last hit from the cigarette, the smoke curling around his face. Once the tobacco had burnt nearly to the filter, he flicked it into the barren fireplace. “Goodnight, brothers. Red.”

  They didn’t try to stop him.

  Halfway to the door, he realized that Dae had vaded him here and that meant Poe’s car was still at Club Drav.

  Bloody hell.

  He hated not having his magic at his fingertips.

  He hated being neutered and useless and rooted to the world.

  He almost backtracked to ask Dae to return him to the club and then decided against it. He was not in the mood to be asking for favors. He’d get himself to the club on his own.

  He didn’t need his brothers or Red.

  He didn’t need anyone at all.

  Chapter 5