Jack and Djinn

by Jasinda Wilder

  Some instinct in Miriam’s gut told her this wasn’t over. Ben wouldn’t let this go, not this easily. Not after the things she’d said.

  The walk home was long, and by the time she reached her door, her bare feet were bleeding.

  She let them bleed. She didn’t care.

  Chapter 14

  Miriam

  Four days earlier

  Miriam called Larry and told him she needed some time off. He didn’t like it, and liked even less that she wouldn’t explain why, but he knew her well enough to grant it. She’d worked for him for a long time and had never taken a single day off, so to ask for two full weeks off meant something serious was going on.

  “Hey, if there’s anything I can do….” Larry said before hanging up.

  “Thanks, Larry, I’ll be fine. I just…need to figure some things out.”

  “Okay, if you say so. But seriously, Miriam, call me if you need anything. You know I’m here for you.”

  Miriam knew he meant well, but he wouldn’t be able to handle the trouble she was in. He wouldn’t know where to start. Neither did she, if she was honest. A million questions were banging around in her head like moths trapped in a lampshade, and she had answers to none of them.

  Who was she? If she had all this magic inside her, where did it come from? This wasn’t a book or a movie. Magic wasn’t real. But the things she’d seen herself do were undeniable. What about her parents? Had her magic come from them? They’d never seemed anything but totally ordinary to her. Had they adopted her and never told her? But no, she’d seen her birth certificate from the hospital in Beirut with her parents’ signatures on it. She’d seen pictures of herself as an infant in her father’s arms—she looked just like him, got her dark brown eyes from him, her thin nose and full lips from him. If not from her parents, then where was this fire inside coming from?

  She was going in circles, asking questions that had no answers. She had to leave. She couldn’t stay in her dinky little apartment any longer. Besides, Ben would show up eventually. Or Jack would. And if Jack showed up, she’d go back to him, and then it would start all over again. Ben would do something else, hurt Jack again, or his family. He’d let her go for the time being, but she knew Ben wasn’t done with her yet.

  She stuffed some clothes in her tattered Jansport backpack, got in her car, and drove, not really going anywhere in particular, just driving to get away. She needed space from everything, from men, from her own fears and desires, from magic. She was hoping, somewhere deep inside, that she’d find answers to her questions somehow. Maybe the magic would provide answers on its own.

  Maybe Jack would find her in spite of herself. She had her cell phone, and she’d heard it buzz a number of times, but she’d refused to look at it. There would be a dozen messages from Jack, all of them probably pleading with her to pick up, to talk to him, to tell him she was okay. She didn’t want him to worry, but she couldn’t talk to him, couldn’t have any contact with him. The only way to protect him was to keep away from him.

  Maybe if she stayed away, he’d forget about her. Find a girl to love who didn’t come with so much baggage. The thought of him with another girl sent pangs of pain knifing through her heart, but she knew what he deserved. He deserved better than she could give him. She was damaged goods, and he was…Jack was perfect.

  She felt tears dripping from her chin, but she didn’t care. She wiped them away, let herself cry, allowing herself to grieve for what she could have had, what she had experienced, if only for a moment. But all that was gone now.

  She was traveling north, away from the city on I-75, speeding faster than her car could really handle, but she didn’t care. She passed Great Lakes Crossing without noticing, her thoughts spinning in circles, going from questions about the fire and magic in her blood, to thoughts of Ben and the man he had been before he went to Afghanistan, to Jack and how genuine he was.

  So consumed was she in her own thoughts that she never even glanced in her rearview mirror. If she had, she might have noticed the red Maserati two cars back, and she might have noticed that it had been following her since she left her apartment.

  Hunger gnawed at her stomach and thirst scratched at her throat, but she didn’t stop. If she stopped driving, she might never start again. She might just curl up in the back seat and cry until she slept, and then she would sleep forever. She kept driving, paying no attention to mile markers or exits or landmarks. At some point she passed the Birch Run Outlets, and she realized she had driven a lot farther than she’d realized. It didn’t matter. She didn’t care where she was or where she was going, as long as it was away from Ben, away from the temptation of Jack, away from everything.

  Miriam kept driving, mile after mile humming under her tires. She would need to stop, as the gas gauge showed she was perilously close to empty. She had no idea where she was; she hadn’t been paying attention to anything but the road in front of her, driving on autopilot, lost in her whirling thoughts. The exits were few and far between in this area, and the trees were beginning to change from deciduous to conifer, oaks and birches and elms becoming pine and spruce and fir. How far had she gone?

  She started watching the road signs, waiting for one that indicated a gas station. After another twenty minutes, she passed a blue sign advertising a Tubby’s and a Sunoco, both just three miles ahead. She prayed she would make it that far; the gas gauge was faulty and often indicated more gas than was actually in the tank, something she’d learned the hard way more than once.

  Miriam pulled off the expressway and turned left, cursing under her breath as the engine sputtered after less than a mile. It coughed, but caught again and kept going, and Miriam decided to throw caution out the window and gun it, hoping to get as far as possible before it died on her. She really didn’t want to have to walk to a gas station and back, alone, way out here in the boonies. She glanced around her, realizing how far out in the middle of exactly nowhere she was. Farmland spread out in every direction, row after row as far as she could see, the sprawling farms lined by distant walls of trees and dirt roads, dotted with farmhouses and barns. The road she was on lay in a perfectly straight line right out to the horizon, reminding her how far three miles actually was. The Volvo coughed again, guttered and sputtered, and then went silent. She coasted over to the shoulder and turned the ignition one more time, despite knowing it wouldn’t start. The engine turned over.

  Awesome. Now all she needed was some gas.

  She got out, locked the door, and opened the trunk to get the red gas can—she’d run out of gas enough times that she always kept one in her trunk for emergencies like this. With a sigh and a curse, Miriam set off down the road, grateful that at least the weather was warm and dry.

  Jack consumed her thoughts, her stomach a heavy pit of sadness. He had been so kind to her, so understanding. He didn’t deserve this kind of jerking around. She had to at least tell him it was over, in so many words. She pulled her phone out of her purse, not surprised to see thirteen text messages, ten missed calls, and three voicemails, all from Jack.

  She scrolled through the texts first. They started out simple enough: Miriam plz call me…at least lemme know you’re ok…I’m getting worried now. just send me a text so i know youre not hurt or anything…. Then the messages became more desperate: im going crazy, Miriam! call me before i flip out, plz!…i swear to god if he hurts you i’ll fucking kill him…. Miriam’s heart contracted, filling her with guilt. He was worried sick. She desperately wanted to talk to him, to reassure him that she was okay. She dialed his number, something she’d never actually done before. He’d always just…shown up, been there, seeking her out. Her phone beeped and went silent, telling her she was outside signal range. She’d have to wait to talk to him.

  She heard a car approaching from behind, and she moved farther over to the side of the shoulder, looking up from her phone to realize the sun was setting. She turned to watch the car drive by and felt her stomach clench. It was Ben, pulling up next to
her, rolling down his window, pacing her. How had he found her? He must’ve followed her, she realized. She turned away from him and kept walking.

  “What are you doing out here, Miriam?” He sounded sober and calm. Miriam ignored him. “Don’t ignore me, baby, please. Just get in the car. I’ll take you home.”

  “I’m not your baby.”

  “Okay, fine, Miriam, please let me take you home. Come on.”

  “I don’t want to go home. I’m fine.” She refused to look at him. He was looking at her with puppy-dog eyes, pleading silently.

  “Look at me, Miriam. Just stop for a second. It’s sunset—you’ll be walking for hours. Anything could happen out here.”

  “I’ve walked home alone in the dark plenty of times. I can take care of myself. I’m a freak, remember?”

  “I’m sorry I called you a freak. I’ve been an asshole. I know I have. I’m sorry, okay? I apologize. I can change, I promise. I’ll stop drinking, and I’ll treat you right. Just let me take you home.”

  “You’ve said all this before, Ben. Nothing has ever changed, and it never will.” She hiked her backpack higher on her shoulders, tightened her grip on the gas can. “Go away, Ben.”

  “Miriam, this is stupid!” Ben said, frustration bleeding into his voice. “Come on. Just get in. I’ll take you right home. I promise.”

  “Yeah, right. Funny how ‘right home’ always means going to your apartment so you can grope me. No, thanks.”

  Ben hissed, gunned the car, and pulled it over in front of her. He got out to stand in front of her, not quite touching her. “You’re being fucking stupid, Miriam. Come on. Let’s go. Now.”

  She stared at his chest, refusing to meet his eyes. “Get out of my way, Ben. You’re wasting your time.” She pushed him out of the way as she said this. Or tried to, though he didn’t move.

  “No. This is idiotic.” He grabbed her arm.

  Miriam wrenched her arm free and slapped him, hard. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Listen, please! No, don’t walk away. Just listen. Do you remember how we met?” Ben was walking beside her, his car still running, door open, on the side of the road. “You had just started at the Taproom. You were living in your car, and you thought no one knew. You didn’t say one word the entire first day, just followed Beth around on your shadow shift, watching. You looked scared of everything. Your hair was braided down to your waist, and you had a ton of eye shadow on, making your eyes look big and even darker than they are. God, I was crushing on you from that first day. There was something mysterious about you. There always has been, actually, and that’s part of what makes you so attractive, aside from your looks. There’s this sense of…I don’t know…mystique, something secretive about you. You refused to even look at me that first day. You’d come up to the service bar and you’d just stare at the liquor bottles, or out at the customers. You wouldn’t look at me, and it drove me nuts. I thought you were so hot, and I just wanted to say hi, but you wouldn’t cooperate. You barely glanced at Larry during your interview. Everyone wanted to know what your deal was, who you were, why you lived in your car, but you wouldn’t talk to anyone. It was months before you even looked at me.”

  Miriam remembered. She had been trying to leave Nick. When she’d woken up with Nick holding a knife to her throat, she’d finally gotten desperate enough to run, but Nick had come after her, found her at the Taproom, tried to scare her into going with him. Ben had hospitalized Nick, protecting her, and after that he had acted like a friend and protector to her, going out of his way to talk to her, to make her laugh.

  She had still been wary, keeping her distance from him for several months, putting him off at every turn. That had only made him want her more, though, made him chase her all the harder. Eventually she had given in, let Ben take her to his apartment, let him kiss her, let him touch her, let him sleep with her.

  He was nicer than Nick…at first. He seemed normal. A bit quick-tempered sometimes, prone to outbursts about little things, but he’d never hit her, never treated her the way Nick had. His temper worried her. The ease with which he had ripped into Nick had sent warning flags waving in her head, but she ignored them. He was big and tough, promising to protect her, which was exactly what she thought she wanted after having barely survived Nick. Ben made her feel safe, or at least he provided the illusion of safety. She allowed herself to ignore the warning signs, one after the other.

  Things had been fine for about six months, and then he told her he had enlisted with the Marines. She had just begun to get attached to him, so it hadn’t been welcome news. He left for basic, and came back bigger and harder. He got drunk the day he received his orders sending him to Afghanistan, and he’d been rough with her that night. He hadn’t been violent, just rough in the way he threw her to the bed and stripped her clothes off, rough in the way he had slammed himself into her, ignoring her whimper of pain. That should’ve been warning enough, but she’d shoved it down. For his sake, she told herself. Then he shipped out, and his letters and Skype calls got more and more infrequent over the months of his deployment, and the times he did call or write, he communicated in short, terse sentences.

  He voluntarily signed up for a second tour, not even coming home in between, spending the time on a base somewhere in Europe. When he finally opted out and came home after the second tour, Miriam met him at the Detroit Metro Airport, and she’d seen the difference right away. It was in his eyes, in the way he assessed her, the way he hugged her. There was a distance somehow, a gap of a million years between them, a chasm ripped in his soul by whatever he’d seen or done over there, things he refused to talk about, things that gave him nightmares.

  Miriam stopped walking finally, and looked up into Ben’s eyes. She saw, for a moment, a glimpse of the Ben she had first met, and that weakened her resolve. He’d been a decent guy once. The things that had changed him hadn’t been his fault.

  “Fine, Ben. You can take me to the gas station. But if you lay a hand on me, or yell at me, I swear….”

  “I won’t, I promise.” He was grinning happily, and she wondered if maybe he had changed after all. He opened the passenger-side door for her and closed it behind her, slid behind the wheel, and pushed the manual gearshift into First, but didn’t release the clutch, just stared at her with a strange look on his face.

  She never saw it coming. There was a flash of silver and a brief burst of pain at her temple, and then the gaping maw of unconsciousness swallowed her whole.

  * * *

  Jack sat in his apartment, idly flicking channels on the TV, a nearly empty bottle of Jameson next to him.

  Empty, like his heart. The thought was melodramatic, but he didn’t care. He had tried convincing himself there were other women in the world, but it hadn’t worked. There weren’t other women in the world, not like Miriam. Not because of the thing with the fire and the healing and all that, but because of who she was. Jack lifted the bottle to his lips and drained the rest of the Jameson in a long gulp, relishing the burn in his throat. A burning throat, a wild, dizzy drunk, those were feelings he could deal with. The cracking of his heart he couldn’t.

  She had just…walked away, gone with that pig, Ben. He didn’t deserve her. She was so kind and so sweet and so beautiful, and Ben was…god, so awful. Jack had trouble understanding what she’d ever seen in Ben besides his looks. Sure he was, like, six foot four and 250 pounds of solid muscle, and he wore a uniform like he was born in it. Women loved men in uniforms. Stupid. Nothing that special about a uniform. It didn’t make the guy wearing it any less of a giant dick, did it?

  Right now he wanted to get on his bike and go to Ben’s apartment and lay into him, maybe bring Doyle and Jimmy with him and teach Ben a lesson. Jack stood up, wavered on his feet, and realized that maybe getting on his bike wouldn’t be the best plan just yet. And besides, his bike was still missing. He shut off the TV and stumbled to his bed, fell across it sideways, wanting to crawl the rest of the way in, but somehow he just couldn’t
—his limbs wouldn’t work, and the room was spinning in crazy circles. He passed out, managing to roll over on his side in his last moment of consciousness.

  Jack didn’t often dream. Or at least, he didn’t usually remember his dreams. This night, however, was different. At first he thought he’d woken up. He was standing in the doorway of his room, looking out into the living room; his stack of paintings was by the counter of his kitchen, and he turned so he could see them. That was the first hint that he was dreaming: The paintings not in their usual spot but were leaning against the adjacent wall. The next odd thing was that the painting he’d done of the candle flame was in front, when he knew for a fact it was near the back of the stack.

  Jack felt drawn to the painting, pulled toward the candle flame as if he were a moth. His feet didn’t move, the flame tugging him to itself with irresistible magic, and then he was standing in front of it, and he could swear the flame was flickering and giving off heat.

  He stretched a hand out and felt a breath of hot air brush his knuckles, and yes, the flame was moving, twisting and dancing on the canvas, jumping and bending in hypnotic circles, sucking him into it, closer and closer, the form of the flame looking ever more like a woman dancing, graceful curves undulating, long hair waving and skirling like Miriam’s hair.

  The flame turned and grew and stood before him, taking on human form with shoulders and legs, hands and breasts, hips and eyes—glowing brilliant fiery brown eyes exactly like Miriam’s. They were not “like” her eyes but were actually hers, boring into him with the tender affection so unique that it melted him every time.

  He wanted to touch her, the fire-girl, the fire-Miriam; he tried to step closer to her, but his feet were frozen, his hand was outstretched, and she shook her head, curled a finger at him, beckoning. Jack would follow her anywhere, felt his spirit drifting after her as she floated away, the canvas now empty as the Miriam-flame coruscated in the midnight dark, blowing through the window and out over the silent suburbs, Jack pulled behind as if connected to her by a string.