Falling

by Amber Jaeger

  “Oh, um, a place where they put mentally ill people who are out of control.”

  “I can see I have a lot to learn from you,” Jordan said solemnly.

  “What do you do with your crazy people here?” I asked, picturing dungeons again.

  “Oh, we don’t have any people here. Well, besides you, and I don’t think you’re that crazy,” he said with a friendly grin.

  “No people?” I repeated with my own uncertain grin.

  “No, you’re the first one in a long time.”

  I looked out the window to see nothing but moonlight on grass rushing past. Being locked in the fast moving carriage dragged by two demon horses further into the night with someone who didn’t consider himself a person was making feel light-headed.

  “So you are a ...”

  Jordan smiled. “Nothing to worry about. Not like any of those monsters you humans seem so fond of making up.”

  I didn’t like his evasiveness. “So I’m a human and you’re a ...”

  He settled back on the bench, crossed his leg over his knee and ran a hand through his wavy hair. He certainly looked human. “We’re very similar. I believe the thought goes that you and your people are made from dirt, my people and I are made from fire and then there’s the third kind made from light, although they don’t always stay that way,” he mused. “Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about them.”

  “So is there a name for what you are?” I pressed.

  “I believe the deal was I ask the questions and you answer,” he said, his jaw tightening.

  I swallowed and nodded, more uncomfortable with each passing moment. The rocking of the carriage and passing of the moon stained grass should have been soothing. I waited for him to say something, afraid of what would come out of my mouth if I opened it.

  “Your world has so many inventions, which one is your favorite?” he finally asked, his eyes gleaming again.

  I sat dumfounded. Once again the idea that maybe I was just having some very bizarre and elaborate dreams seemed a shining possibility. “Electricity, I suppose? We wouldn’t have a lot of things without that.”

  “Electricity?” he scoffed. “That’s not an invention! That’s just floating around, waiting to be harnessed, controlled. And you people do a terrible job of that anyway, what with all your ugly poles and lines marching all over the land. Ridiculous—pick another.”

  A glance out the window didn’t show any utility poles but I was pretty sure I had seen light fixtures, or at the very least inside the castle it had been too bright to attribute just to fireplaces. “So how—”

  “Pick another,” he interrupted darkly.

  His mood swings were unsettling and seemed to put him closer to my age than I had first thought.

  “All right, the printing press. That did have to be invented and without it we wouldn’t have nearly as many books or stories.”

  “I disagree. Before the printing press things could still be written down and maybe your oral traditions of storytelling and passing on history wouldn’t have been pretty much destroyed,” he countered.

  “Well, since I’m obviously not going to pick an invention you find acceptable, why don’t you just tell me your favorite?”

  Jordan rubbed his hand together. “There are so many! And they’re all so fun! This one was a gift from my uncle,” he said, reaching into his pocket.

  It was an ink pen. An expensive, heavy one, but still just a retractable ball point pen. “And why is that your favorite?” I asked, mystified.

  “It writes upside down! And underwater! It has a tiny little ball in the end and a spring as well and when you push the button, you can write things out, then push the button again and it hides it away so that ink doesn’t get everywhere.”

  “May I see it?” I asked, glad I wasn’t going to have to scratch something out on the back of my hand with a quill or something equally painful sounding.

  He handed it over reverently. I paused for just a moment, thinking, before I carefully scrawled “Jordan” where it had previously read Lincoln.

  Jordan looked at me, his head tilted. “Just an experiment,” I explained.

  He smiled. “Still don’t think I’m real?”

  I smiled back. “Not really.”

  “That’s all right, it doesn’t matter if you do or not. You still have to uphold your end of the bargain. Your brother is alive and well, after all.”

  I relaxed a little when he said that, because it was completely true. I had gotten the only thing I had ever really wanted, for Lincoln to be alive and back with me. Who cared if I thought I was a little crazy, or had more potent dreams than usual? Nobody even knew except for me, and I certainly wasn’t telling. From the outside, no one would even be able to tell I thought I had brought my brother back from the dead by making a deal with some not-human person. “Bixby?” Jordan was asking.

  “Sorry, what did you ask?”

  “How do cars work?”

  We both looked down at the flashing of the smoke chains. “Ah, so soon?” he said wistfully. “Until tonight,” he was saying as I faded out.

  Another swim through darkness and then I was opening my eyes in my bedroom, light just beginning to come in the windows. I could hear Grandma moving around in her room. I pulled my hands out from under the covers, noted the bracelets, the smoke chains and then what I was even more afraid to find—the word “Jordan” printed on the back of my hand.

  Chapter 8

  I TOOK ANOTHER LONG SHOWER and shakily made my way downstairs to fix everyone breakfast. I was vaguely aware I was supposed to be going to school that morning but with everything going on, Dad didn’t say anything and so neither did I.

  I brought the laptop into the kitchen and in between cooking searched for information. Each search was more frustrating that the last. “Made of fire” brought up a pottery place, a tattoo parlor and many references to, of course, fire. I tried “made of dirt” and got pretty much the same things—art and earth. I thought I hit the jackpot with “made of light” but it was only a gazillion websites about angels. Most seemed pretty crazy, going on about evil angels and the different names for all of them. One entry on a site didn’t seem to be about angels exactly, but also wasn’t in English and when I searched the most prominent word in the article the only result I got back that was in English brought up a picture of a huge cave.

  Frustrated, I slammed breakfast onto the table.

  “Problem?” my dad asked.

  “Uh, no,” I told him, hastily shutting the laptop.

  We ate in silence while I tried to come up with another way to figure out what was going on. Finally I said, “I need to run to the grocery store before we pick up Linc.”

  Dad shrugged. “He won’t get released till this afternoon. Bring your grandma with you.”

  “Can’t,” I lied. “Last time she got upset and sort of made a scene.”

  Grandma frowned at me but didn’t say anything. Dad glared but just said, “Fine, but hurry up.”

  I threw the dishes in the sink, grabbed the Honda key before my dad could make me take Lincoln’s evil truck, and ran out the door.

  The Backdoor Bookstore was the second, smaller, weirder bookstore in Hemlock Bay. If anyone would know what I was talking about, it would be the owner, Jack. I hesitated at the door. Just start looking, or actually ask him? He solved the problem for me.

  “What can I help you with?” he asked, looking up from a huge novel.

  “I’m looking for some more information on something, but I’m not really sure what …”

  He looked at me expectantly, waiting.

  “There’s this uh, thing, or people, or maybe just a person, I guess. And he, or they, maybe, are made out of fire?”

  “The djinn,” he confirmed.

  “Djinn?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay,” I drew out. “And what are they? Or him? Is it just a him?”

  Jack stared at me for a moment, his eyebrows drawn together. I didn’t think
he was going to answer me but finally he said, “Djinn is plural, as in a whole race. Djinni is singular, for a male or female. Djinni, like genie in a bottle, get it?”

  “A genie!” I exclaimed. “Wait, no, that can’t be right.”

  He raised his eyebrows and leaned forward over the counter. “How is that?”

  “I, uh,” I stammered. I really didn’t want to have to explain myself—at all. “I’m supposed to be doing a report for school—a serious one—not writing about a blue guy from a Disney movie.”

  His unblinking stare said he did not believe me.

  “The djinn are a very ancient part of Arab culture. They are one of the three sentient creatures made by Allah. Like humans, they have free will and like humans some are bad, some are good, some are just somewhere in between.”

  “Okay, so where does the lamp part come in?”

  “They’re able to do things humans would view as magic. They can be compelled to grant wishes, or perform tasks for humans. They could even be enslaved or trapped, in something like a lamp. Although, if you let one out I doubt very much it would be in the mood to grant wishes. What did you say this report was for?”

  I racked my brain for a reasonable answer. “World Religions class?”

  “Wow,” he said, clearly still not believing me. “How progressive.”

  “Is there a book or something I can buy? The Internet is no help at all with this stuff. You should have seen the crazy stuff that came up when I searched for a race made out of light.”

  Jack’s head snapped up at that. “Angels?” he asked. “Fallen angels?”

  “No, definitely not those,” I assured him, wondering why he needed to be assured about that.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “You’re positive that’s not what you’ve encountered?”

  “Hey, I haven’t encountered anything,” I said, holding my hands up.

  “Are you positive?” he repeated.

  After a long pause I said, “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  He nodded and got up, making his way to a corner of the little shop. I admired his style. Frayed tee shirt and jeans with shaggy hair and thick glasses were a perfect geek chic. He searched the overloaded shelves, pulled out a thin book and handed it to me. The graphics on the cover were old fashioned and boasted the name of the author as well as the translator. “Am I going to be able to understand this?” I asked.

  Jack shrugged. “Your other option is to stop messing around with whatever you’re messing around with,” he suggested, ringing up the book.

  “Not an option,” I muttered under my breath, pulling out my wallet.

  Driving home, I went right past the grocery store and had to double back. I grabbed everything for a pot roast except the actual meat and had to go back in. The little that Jack had been able to tell me fascinated and scared me. Jordan did not seem like a wish-granting genie, nor did he seem that particularly Middle Eastern. Glumly, I had to admit to myself I still had no idea what I was dealing with but there was at least a chance that I wasn’t just crazy.

  “Oh right, because entertaining the idea of genies being real is the pinnacle of mental health,” I thought, making my way back to the car.

  The house was clean, dinner was in the crock pot and my new book sat unopened on my bed when we finally got in the car to bring Lincoln home. My dad crabbed the whole way to the hospital about the nonstop phone calls and one reporter that had dared come to our door while I was gone. “Just unplug the phone and don’t answer the door,” I wanted to say, but wisely kept my mouth shut.

  I saw the news vans parked in front of the hospital as we drove past to the parking garage. We were met at the door by a grim looking security guard who brought us up to Linc’s room.

  His outline against the window was so thin and hunched I almost thought we had entered the wrong room. But he turned his face towards me and it was still Lincoln, just a pale, frightened looking version of him. The dark circles under his eyes told me he had barely slept last night and I felt guilty for not staying.

  Linc gratefully grabbed the bag I had tossed on the bed for him and almost ran into the bathroom to change. “Can we go right now?” he yelled through the closed door.

  A nurse with a big stack of paperwork just smiled.

  After explaining every med he would have to take, every follow-up appointment that had been made, when and if to come back to the hospital and asking us a hundred times if we had more questions, she let another person take over.

  “I’m Sophie, I’m a social worker with the county. I’m sure you must know we get involved in all sticky situations like this. Now Travis,” she said, pulling out a pen, “I understand you’re a truck driver. Are you ever away overnight?”

  My dad cleared his throat. “At times, for work only.”

  “And who watches the children while you’re away?”

  “Well, they’re almost done with high school,” he said, eyeing Grandma. I prayed she would behave.

  “Mr. Grey, your son has a serious head injury and needs to be monitored by a responsible adult.”

  “I watch the children when Travis is away, I have for years.”

  My head snapped towards Grandma in perfect sync with my dad’s and brother’s. I hadn’t heard her say so much, so clearly in the time since she had moved in with us.

  The social worker opened her mouth again and I cut in.

  “Grandma moved in with us when our mom died and has been there ever since. She’ll be there to watch over Linc.”

  Grandma smiled hugely. We all did, praying the woman would believe our lie. Sophie wrote down a few more notes then looked up with a smile. “Well Lincoln, you are a very lucky young man. I wish you a speedy recovery and I’ll be stopping by in a few weeks to see how you are doing. I’m sure you’ll do fine with your wonderful family by your side.” We all shifted in our seats at that.

  Security finally escorted us to a loading dock where they had Dad pull up the car. “Why are we leaving like this?” Linc asked.

  “There are some reporters out front,” was all I said.

  He perked up on the ride home, asking about school and his friends. I had a feeling he wouldn’t be staying home as long as the doctors wanted him to and he was already talking about getting back in the pool. “I just can’t wait to get home,” he said over and over.

  We barely had time to finish dinner before the veritable parade of well wishers started coming by. No one acknowledged me when I answered the door, just pushed past to get in to see Lincoln. Hulking sports players, crying girls with smeary mascara, the fashionably geeky kids, all of them acting like the past few weeks had been the hell for them that it had been for me—or for Lincoln for that matter. Eventually I stopped answering the door, figuring they could answer for each other. I grabbed my book off my bed and returned downstairs to climb into an armchair by the window.

  It was hard to understand, written in 1940 and translated from Arabic. There were a lot of references to the Quran the writer just assumed the reader should know. But every few pages I would find an explanatory gem. According to the book, the Arabic God made humans, djinn and angels—humans out of clay, djinn from fire and angels from light. The humans and djinn were more similar and both given free will. That’s where things started to diverge. The djinn had “powers” but it didn’t explain it any further, only to go on to later say the djinn were responsible for most of what humans took as “magic,” that they would assist in tricks and fortune telling basically to mess with humans. A particularly confusing paragraph gave the impression that for the djinn to know or think of something was to have it. I made a little mark in the book next to that passage.

  I did my best to pay attention to my reading and ignore the teenage chaos going on around me. I could feel their pointed stares and ignored them. No way was I letting Lincoln out of my sight.

  There was a huge section on the djinn as well as angels being worshipped by man and not to do that. I just skimmed over that part; I definitely wasn�
��t planning on worshipping the guy.

  Finally, I came to some real history about them. They were tribal ... people? .... divided into five groups. At some point somebody had a vision of them being destroyed and it was decided they all had to decide to take sides with or against humans. The two rather evil tribes decided against, the two pretty good ones decided for and the oldest, most powerful tribe let each of their members decide for themselves.

  There was more information on that tribe than the others. They were the Marid and the book said they were small in numbers, masters of the weather and preferred the coast. They didn’t often interact with humans but when they did it was because they chose to.

  The two evil tribes, the Shaitan and Ghul, sounded pretty nasty, even feeding on dead bodies. There wasn’t much said about the two tribes that sided with the humans, the Jann and the Jinn, other than they had the most interactions with humans.

  I couldn’t believe it when I got to the last page. I looked up to see it had gotten dark outside and all of Lincoln’s friends had left. He was laid back against the couch, his face pale again.

  “Hey, why didn’t you tell me they all left?” I asked.

  He managed to grin. “You were so absorbed in whatever dork book you’re reading now I just couldn’t interrupt you.”

  “Very funny. You want to go to bed?”

  “I can do it myself,” he said dryly. “You’re too used to taking care of Grandma.”

  “Crap! Grandma,” I cried, jumping out of my chair.

  “Relax; she’s in the kitchen ‘reading’ her newspaper. I found her a couple pencils and she’s been set for a while.” Grandma’s preferred method of reading was to circle every word on the page.

  Linc disappeared into the bathroom and I managed to coax Grandma into bed. “Linc okay?” she asked as I pulled the covers up over her.

  “Of course.”

  “Bad dreams,” she said.

  “Well, I’m sure that’s to be expected after all he’s been through.”

  “No, Bixby. You.”

  I gave a little laugh. “You know me, Grandma, always a funny dream.”