by Judi Fennell
The words were hitting, but not computing. What did O’Malley mean about her being Kal’s last master? About him needing the lantern? About him “enjoying the perks” while waiting for the lantern? About using her?
Samantha dropped the pastry box and ducked behind the hut a little more while her brain made the leaps it needed to to connect all the dots. Kal needed the lantern to be free so he could get the job he wanted.
She had the lantern.
Oh God. He’d used her. He’d wanted the lantern and had used whatever means he could to get it—and she’d gone right along with the plan. It wasn’t as if that had never happened to her before.
Samantha tried to stem the oncoming hyperventilation.
Was that what all the seduction had been about? Was that all she was to him? All she meant? A means to an end?
Well, duh. What’d you think? The guy has been running around the planet for the last two thousand years unable to get his hands on that thing. You think you’re a bigger prize? Wake up and smell the hookah, baby. You’ve been played by Kal every bit as much as you were by Albert.
The croissant she’d had in Paris lodged in her throat. God, was she that much of a patsy? That much of a doormat? That gullible?
But he’d turned her down when she’d tried to give it to him. Had that been a halfhearted refusal? One he would have caved in and “reluctantly” accepted when she offered it to him again in a gracious, if-you-insist protestation designed to keep her suspicions at bay?
And here, she’d been planning to give him the lantern; wouldn’t that have been ironic? Just hand it over, free and clear. Then what? He’d fly out of her life on that magic carpet, leaving her high and dry?
Oh, the pun. The stupid, silly, ridiculous pun about being left high and dry in a desert. Duped, then dumped. All under the guise of caring for her and her own delusions of grandeur.
She’d been played. Again.
So much for learning a freaking lesson from past mistakes.
Samantha swiped at the corner of her eyes. She wasn’t going to cry. Not here. Not now. Not in front of those leprechauns and sure as hell not in front of Kal.
“I say ye just grab it and run. What’s she gonna do, follow ye?”
“She has the amulet, O’Malley.” Kal’s first words in his defense were the ones that condemned him. Where was the “I don’t want the lantern. I want Samantha”? Where was the “I don’t care about anything but her”?
She knew where it was: lodged in her stupid fairy-tale-believing mind right next to the one about Albert and happily ever after.
That Oracle hadn’t had a clue what he was talking about. She was a fool. A damned fool. And she had no one to blame but herself.
Hot tears stung the backs of her eyes. Samantha blinked and looked away. She’d wanted it so badly. To be valued for who she was—just once—and not for what she could do or give or bring to the table.
She was fooling herself. A fool fooling herself. It was all a sham.
Clueless. A worse adjective than useless.
And the sucky thing was that Albert had been absolutely right. The lizard—literally and figuratively—had been right about her. And if that didn’t make her feel worse…
How easily she’d given in to Kal. How easily she’d fallen for him. His words. His lies. And all along, he’d only wanted the lantern.
The damned lantern.
Samantha closed her fist around the pendants. If only she’d never found the damned thing, none of this would have happened. She would have celebrated Dad with his memorial service, broken up with Albert in due time, and then gone about finding someone to share her life with in the normal way.
Instead, she’d given her heart and her trust to someone who only wanted to use her. Again.
No one wanted her for herself. For who she was. Even Kal. He’d made love to her as if she’d meant something to him. As if she could give him something no other woman before her could—
But then, she could, couldn’t she? That damned lantern.
Samantha looked at it. At the gemstone. These… these things that were the cause of all her troubles. Albert, Kal, the desert, the talking fox, the dragons, the leprechauns… all of it.
She was done with all of them.
Samantha marched across the clearing. It took Kal about two seconds to see her; the leprechauns about five times that long. But the birds in the reeds saw her first and understood immediately what she was feeling.
The clearing went quiet. So quiet that Samantha thought she could hear her stupid slipper shoes hitting the ground.
“I still say ye should just tell her what’s what. Women. They need a firm hand—”
If Kal hadn’t given Paddy a firm hand across his mouth, Samantha would have.
The smile Kal had on his face disappeared. “Samantha, what are you—”
She thrust the tangled necklaces—that damned lantern—into his chest. “You know what’s really ironic, Kal? All you had to do was ask for them and I would have handed them over. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “You did all this game-playing for nothing, and I, gullible fool that I am, would have just handed them over as if they were nothing.”
Kal looked at her hands, then her eyes.
“I couldn’t ask you for it, Samantha. It’s against the rules.”
She would not fall for the look she saw in his eyes. Not again. “Fine. Then don’t ask. Here you go. They’re yours. Enjoy your freedom.”
“But Sam—”
When he didn’t move, she thrust them harder. “Take them. I don’t want them. I don’t want them, I don’t want you, and I just want to get the hell out of here.”
Kal looked at her. Then he looked at the necklaces. Then he looked back at her.
It was there. That gleam in the eye that everyone got when they were getting exactly what they wanted from her. God knew, she’d seen it enough to recognize it. Samantha capitulated, it said. She couldn’t bear it in his eyes.
Samantha dropped the necklaces, uncaring where they landed. The damned things could break for all she cared. She knew enough about breaking.
“I’ve got ’em!” O’Malley dove to the ground.
Paddy was right after him. “No, they’re mine! Mine, I tell you! I need a genie.”
They smacked heads and collapsed in a heap.
God, she couldn’t even do this right.
Samantha bent down, yanked the chains out from under the leprechaun mound, separated them, and draped them over Kal’s head. “There.”
“Sam—”
No. She couldn’t listen to him. Didn’t want to hear the platitudes. The excuses. The half-truths.
The lies.
“Just leave me alone, Kal. You have what you want. What you were after. I don’t need this.” She didn’t need him.
O’Malley cursed and Paddy grumbled as they stumbled back to their feet, casting malevolent glances her way.
Kal, however, just looked resigned. And maybe a little bit sad.
She wasn’t falling for it. “I just wish I could go back to before we met and forget this ever happened.”
Kal sighed and jerked his hand, with something that looked suspiciously like tears in his eyes. “As you wish, Sam. As you wish.”
40
A few hours later
Well, in Al-Jannah time…
“Congratulations, Khaled,” said the High Master when Kal entered the office he’d been summoned to on Cloud Thirteen.
The High Master waved a hand toward the microfiber seats beneath the ninety-six-inch, high-def TV, then tapped his iPad screen. A scene from Google Venus popped up. Probably a prototype; the High Master was a huge technology geek. “I hear you’ve fulfilled your sentence.”
“Yes, Sir.” Kal went with the shortest answer possible, because arguing that it was a sentence he never should have been given would get him nowhere at this point. Especially since it had already cost him Samantha.
He couldn’t believe she jumped to
that conclusion about him. Although, in all fairness to her, she hadn’t been far off. He would have jumped higher than Dirham could at the chance to get his hands on his lantern if Harv hadn’t cut her off, but that didn’t mean he would have left her.
She’d changed him. She’d shifted something inside him, so that when he should have been rejoicing in the sweetness of restoring the honor to his name and his family, of having the job he’d wanted for so long within his grasp and gaining ultimate power, the taste on his tongue was anything but sweet.
Gods, how could she have run from him? She’d given him his freedom—didn’t she know he’d choose to spend it with her?
“Now that you’ve fulfilled your debt to Djinn society, we can get down to business.” The High Master motioned for Kal to take a seat on the sofa.
Kal did what was required as if on autopilot. He’d been like that a lot in the time Sam had been gone.
“Kal?” The High Master sat on the other end of the sofa and looked at him expectantly.
What the High Master had said finally registered. Didn’t make any sense, but it registered.
“Business?” Kal asked. “What do you mean?”
“You want the vizier job, correct?”
He blinked. Was the High Master offering…
“Speechless.” The High Master chuckled. “Yes, I can see where being given your life’s dream would do that to a man.”
“Being given? Aren’t you going to read this?” He set his thesis down on the table. “Don’t I have to jump through hoops or something?”
The High Master shook his head. “I already know what’s in that.” He nodded toward the bound doorstop Kal had spent years crafting. “Perks of the job, you know. And hoops are for show dogs and circus animals. Where do you think I found Dirham?”
Dirham. Kal was going to miss the little guy. Full-fledged genies had no need of a magical-assistance assistant. “So you’re just going to hand it over? As if nothing’s happened? As if I hadn’t gotten rid of the bracelets?”
What was he doing? Did he want to get thrown back under lantern-arrest?
The High Master conjured a tray of food. It hovered an inch off the sofa between them. “Of course. You paid your debt to society, and the job has always been yours for the taking.”
“What?” Kal leaned forward. He wasn’t on autopilot now. He was on auto-pissed. “What do you mean it’s always been mine? It was Faruq’s.”
The High Master shook his head and helped himself to some satay. “Faruq thought it was his. And I had to be sure that you understood the rules and the importance of living by them. Our personal wants and needs can’t come before the greater good of our people, and the vizier and High Master must recognize that their leadership needs to be focused on what’s best for Djinn society.”
“So this was a test? You put me through two thousand years of hell as a test?”
“You can’t say it was all hell. I know for a fact you had many more decent masters than jerks. I do have some pull with the cosmos and Karma, you know.”
No, Kal didn’t know, and frankly, he didn’t care. Because, all of a sudden, this stunk.
“So you’re saying that the job’s mine? That all I have to do is agree, and I’m the vizier?”
The High Master nodded and took another skewer of goat meat. “Seems like there should be more to it, I know, but, nope. That’s it in a pistachio shell.”
Sam would have corrected the High Master’s semantics.
Sam. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. Wondering about her. Had she really forgotten everything?
The question was rhetorical because, as much as he’d like to believe otherwise, the truth was a bitter pill to swallow. Magic erased the memory if it was wished for.
And she’d wished.
The thought of her forgetting what they’d shared hurt more than any of the last two thousand years. He would’ve hoped the magic they’d created together would be stronger than just his.
Hope…
If only he’d opened that box, at least he’d have a prayer of having some hope.
But he had the power to make his own wishes come true now; he didn’t need hope. And he didn’t need magic. He just needed a little luck. And a lot of love.
“I don’t want it.” Until the words came out of his mouth, Kal hadn’t realized what he was going to do.
Once he’d said them, however, it was as if the capstones of the pyramids at Giza had been lifted from his shoulders.
“What?” The High Master dropped his food.
“I don’t want the job. I want Samantha.”
“But you wrote the thesis. I’m all set to announce it next week. And she’s a mortal.”
“I know.”
“Kal, you have to seriously think about what you’re doing.”
No he didn’t. He knew what he was doing. And how to do it.
Kal conjured a diamond the size of a robin’s egg, slid it along the width of his gold cuff, ready for it to fall off.
Only… it didn’t.
Kal tried it on the other cuff. This was how he’d gotten free two thousand years ago, the action that had started all the trouble.
“It doesn’t work like that anymore, Khaled,” said the High Master.
“What?”
The High Master nodded at Kal’s wrist. “Diamonds don’t open the cuffs.”
That was unacceptable. “Then what does?” Kal yanked at the cuff, a seamless piece of gold wrapped around his wrist and contoured to his forearm, trying to slide it off, or rip it apart. He wanted these gone. And this time, for good.
“I can’t tell you that, Khaled.”
“Take them off.” Kal held out his hands, palms up.
The High Master studied him. Stroked his chin, his blue, blue eyes so concentrated it appeared as if the pupils were whirling.
“Are you certain this is what you want?”
Kal nodded. “Yes. Pl—” His voice broke, and he got the word out on a hoarse whisper. “Please.”
The High Master studied him some more. Then he heaved a sigh and leaned forward, taking Kal’s carnelian necklace from around his neck and holding it out to him. “You understand this doesn’t absolve you from The Service? You can’t just remove the cuffs and consider yourself out and expect it to be so. There’s protocol, and you’re still bound by The Code.”
Kal took the gemstone and drew it along one of the cuffs.
It fell off.
Kal smiled and removed the other. “Not for much longer.”
And with that, Kal poofed himself to the mortal realm.
41
Three Days Ago
Sort of…
If there was one thing Samantha Blaine knew how to do, it was throw a party.
Or funeral, as the case may be.
“Leave it to you, Samantha, to turn a somber occasion into something fun.” Dale, her father’s golf buddy, took two pita wedges topped with dollops of lemon-garlic hummus from the waiter and offered her one. “Your father would be thrilled.”
“Thanks, Dale.” It was true. The party was exactly what Dad would have wanted—because he’d stated exactly what he wanted in his will. So now there were hundreds of people in costume milling around Casablanca-inspired tents with Middle Eastern–themed food and entertainment as specified. David, the owner of The Main Event, the company she’d hired for the props, had outdone himself.
Samantha brushed orange flecks from the sleeve of the long, blue djellaba she wore—the iron lanterns must be rusting. Dad had liked blue, which was why she wore it and had carried the theme throughout the tents. Various shades of blue silk panels covered the ceiling, and carried through in the sofas and thick, handmade rugs. A rainbow of poufs—authentic Moroccan ottomans—and pillows broke up the color scheme somewhat, as did those scrollwork lanterns hanging from tent posts and gracing the carved wooden tables, most of which were covered in plates and glasses, a sure sign of a successful party.
“Great as usual, Sama
ntha,” said Todd, an IT guy from Dad’s company—her company now if she could wrap her brain around that. “Jensen’s certainly having a good time.”
Samantha followed Todd’s nod toward the tent’s entrance where the clang of castanets clashed with the rhythm of dozens of metallic discs swishing around a belly dancer’s hips as she danced inside.
No, the woman wasn’t dancing; she was evading. She was evading Mr. Jensen, Dad’s attorney.
Robert, as he’d told Samantha to call him once the will had been read and the sucking up had begun, was lurching lopsidedly after the poor woman. Definitely too much arak. Most people weren’t used to the aniseed aperitif. Samantha wished she hadn’t given in to that particular request of Dad’s.
She looked around for Albert. Her soon-to-be fiancé was good at these kinds of situations. He was good at a lot of situations, which is why he’d been such a godsend these last six months, handling the company while she’d dealt with Dad’s stroke.
But Albert was nowhere to be found, so she was going to have to deal with Robert herself.
Popping the appetizer into her mouth, she excused herself from Todd and Dale and made her way over to Robert. Her hand closed over his fingers before they could make contact with the belly dancer’s backside.
“Robert, I’m so glad you’re having a good time.” Samantha steered him away, years of grabby guys in clubs having given her unwanted expertise in that particular skill.
“Leave it to Monty to throw a bash for his own funeral, costumes and all.” Robert waved his drink around. “Though I never did understand why he liked Casablanca. Too damn far to travel to.”
“Good memories.” Samantha took the drink from him and led him toward a table of food. “Let me make you a platter.”
