The Accidental Genie

by Dakota Cassidy

  “Nina.” Wanda let out a low warning growl, sending her friend a scowl filled with discontent. “We’re absolutely not going to begin this way again. No more yelling and threatening and in general taking far too much pleasure in someone else’s pain. Now, you will sit. You will sit without uttering another word unless it’s supportive and warm, and you will smile like you just ate someone’s limb clear off while you do it. I will not have you offend another client.”

  Jeannie clacked her jeweled slippers together when she glanced at Nina and Wanda. “I’m not offended. I thought it was pretty funny.”

  Nina grinned. “I like her. She can stay. At least until some crazy shit’s about to go down and we have to save her life. Then she has to hit the bricks.”

  Marty crossed the room and splayed her fingers over Nina’s mouth, placing her other hand on her shoulder as leverage. She cocked Nina’s head back and peered into her friend’s coal black eyes. “I’m going to remind you of your husband’s words after the last disaster you created. If you don’t learn to keep your mouth in check, he’ll hand you over to clan rule himself. Remember those words, Nina? Remember why he said those words. You remember Phoebe, don’t you, bulldozer? The sister you turned into a vampire in one angry shove?”

  Nina’s chin lifted and her eyes narrowed to black slits in her head, but when Marty slid her fingers down to her chin, her lips pressed tightly together in compressed silence.

  Marty rocked Nina’s head up and down, making the long, dark cascade of her hair fall out of her hoodie and tumble over her shoulder. “Why, yes, Marty,” she mimicked her friend. “Yes, I remember every word my adorably fed up husband Greg said, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to heed those words, because I do not want my head chopped off at dawn in front of my entire clan of vampires. No chopped heads. None. It’s messy, and neither Wanda nor myself can fit your beheading into our tight schedules. Not to mention, I find myself faltering on what to wear to a beheading.”

  Nina ripped Marty’s hand from her chin with a snide smile. “Maybe you should ask Mistress Sloan?”

  Marty slapped her hand back over Nina’s mouth.

  Jeannie was instantly on her bejeweled feet, the chair the girls had so graciously sat her in tipping over and clattering to the floor. The look of panic on her face made Sloan want to reach out and squeeze her hand in comfort.

  Oh, ick. Comfort her? If it weren’t for her, he’d be home right now, watching the game. This girl thing—this sympathizing with a woman he hardly knew—was work, not to mention everything he hated.

  Jeannie’s stiff frame straightened. “Okay. You had me at the head-chopping thing. I don’t know what that means, and while I’m sure you’d all be good enough to explain it, because you’ve been nothing but gracious to me. Well, except for on the drive over when I thought Gina, Trina, Farina was going to attempt warp speed, and she so awesomely offered to do something I can’t even repeat to my intestines if I didn’t stop backseat driving. But that was just a simple misunderstanding. I mean, I’d threaten to eat someone’s intestines like they were a spaghetti dinner if they interfered with my audition for NASCAR, too. It’s only natural. So no explanation needed. I’ll just go. You know. Home. To my house . . . I think I can figure this out on my own.”

  “It’s fucking Nina.”

  Jeannie nodded absently. “Right. Sorry. Fucking Nina. The vampire who turned her sister into a vampire, too.”

  Wanda, Sloan noted, sensed Jeannie’s rising panic and went instantly to her side. She wrapped an arm around Jeannie’s shoulder and patted, steering her back to the chair. “It’s all right, Jeannie. I can see you’re panicked. But I promise you, if you go home, you’ll only be right back here again in need of our help. Don’t be frightened. We would never hurt you.” She eyed Nina with a familiar warning look Sloan often saw pass between the women.

  He watched Jeannie’s shoulders go rigid through eyes that were sticky with mascara. Until she looked deep into Wanda’s compassionate eyes, and then he saw her face transform from frightened deer in the headlights to one of tentative trust.

  He’d give Wanda that. She had a way of creating calm in the midst of complete chaos. She was always who soothed Nina when she went off on a tirade, and she was the peacemaker between her friends. Jeannie was in good hands with Wanda.

  Sloan crossed the room, his ankles buckling at awkward angles in his heels, in order to place his hand on Jeannie’s shoulder and give it a squeeze. “It’s all good, girlfriend. Wanda will take care of you,” he reassured her, then realized he’d called her girlfriend.

  Jesus and fuck.

  Sloan eyed Jeannie as she took a deep breath. “Okay, so let me get this straight because everything’s very crooked right now. What we have so far is this: I can grant wishes, and I’m responsible for Sloan’s cramping and the ugliest high heels I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  Nina snorted, but her lips remained compressed. Good thing, too, Sloan noted, or now he’d officially be able to take a bitch out and get away with it. Being a woman and all.

  Wanda’s eyes went warm when they focused in on Jeannie. “I think you did, honey, and until we know what’s going on, I think we’ll all have to be very careful about the things we say out loud. On our way over, I googled genies and the djinn. While I’ll admit to watching a lot of I Dream of Jeannie as a child, I guess I just always thought Hollywood had Westernized it—maybe romanticized genies and their powers. Anyway, I went to Wiki and all sorts of places, and they all back up the TV show’s theory. So if the myths really are true, Sloan gets three wishes courtesy of you.”

  Sloan paused for a moment and decided he’d better take matters into his own hands before menopause set in—or he got pregnant. Wait. Did he have the equipment to get pregnant? Shit. He didn’t want to know. “I wish I was a man again!” he yelled into the room without hesitation, making Jeannie and the girls jump.

  Out of thin air, the mysterious lavender smoke appeared once more, swirling around Jeannie and creating a thick cloud of jasmine-scented haze.

  The very spiky heat he’d felt the second he’d wished he was a woman overcame him again, whooshing upward toward his skull, then racing back down to his toes. It was like being on some crazy hormonal rollercoaster with a slow rise and a sharp fall.

  As suddenly as it began was how suddenly it ended.

  Sloan rocked forward on his feet, catching himself just before he fell on top of Jeannie.

  And then there was more of that crazy silence.

  His gaze went immediately to his chest. He sighed in relief.

  There was indeed someone in the universe looking out for him.

  Wanda smiled up at him, her eyes twinkling. “Well, that’s one problem solved. However, folks, we have another problem, and I imagine it could be prohibitive to you, Sloan. Maybe more so you than even Jeannie.”

  “Now what?” he asked gruffly while he ran his hands over his arms and checked to be sure his feet were out of those damn heels.

  Wanda clucked her tongue. “If the legend of genies in fact holds true, and I guess after that little bit of magic gone horribly wrong, it has some merit.” She poked a finger in his chest. “You, Sloan Flaherty, have just inherited a genie to call your very own.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means Jeannie, God help her and forgive me for using the word, is in essence, your slave.”

  * * *

  YES. This was crazier than crazy. It was cray-cray to the tenth power.

  Yes. She wanted to fly the cuckoo’s nest right now and never look back.

  Yes. The more she heard these women chatter around her in the basement office of OOPS with its pressboard matching desks, stacks of multicolored sticky notes in decorative Christmas tree shapes, and a lone JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS poster, the more she was convinced they were, in fact, truly the definit
ion of crazy.

  Yes. The pamphlet they’d handed her filled with their paranormal testimonials was absolutely crazy. But it was, Nina insisted, necessary to speed up the process of rambling disbelief and overall too much carrying-on and sometimes even rocking and drooling by the bewildered client.

  They’d paid good money to have them made up, she’d said, so they could cut through the bullshit explanations and get to the business at hand. It was a quieter process to read the trio’s traumas rather than see them, Nina assured her. There were fewer horrified tears and more silent contemplation, which was just how Nina liked it.

  Plus, Nina added, she was “sick to fucking death of proving to people they were real in freak-show fashion.” If those afflicted chose not to believe, they could kiss her pale, vampire ass.

  The brochure, beautifully made-up with pictures of each of the women in their before and after paranormal forms, well, except Nina, whose square was empty because she didn’t photograph, read like some script from a movie with three or four sequels. There were paragraphs filled with their personal encounters involving poodles and a werewolf, hygienists, fangs, hell, cougars, mixed breeds of paranormals, and all sorts of mad-assery Jeannie couldn’t quite process.

  How could any of this be really real?

  Yet, she’d been well and truly stuck in a gin bottle. That had been real. She’d turned Sloan into a woman. That had also been real. Nina did have fangs that miraculously healed in just an hour after meeting her with a broken one. Wanda’s tufts of stray hair from her “shift” had magically disappeared, too.

  So who was she to be so judgy?

  There was no one else to trust. Trust wasn’t something that came easy to her. In fact, she was probably a front-runner for finding people who were about as untrustworthy as a crooked politician. Her track record spoke for itself. She’d been scammed once before, and it had ruined her entire life.

  But she really had been stuck in a bottle. She had.

  So if these people said she was Sloan’s slave, then slave it was. She’d just suck it up until she could find a way out of these crazy harem pants.

  Even if the very idea of catering to a man’s every whim made her gag a little. Okay. A lot.

  Looking down at the sapphire blue fabric covering her legs, Jeannie decided if she was going to pay for that trust later by way of her death, it was just as well. She’d rather die than wear this skimpy piece of flimsy material another second anyway. “So is that why I can’t get more than a couple hundred feet from him before I feel like he’s got a leash on me?”

  Wanda held up a finger, her expression one of uncertainty. “Now, that I’m still pretty unclear on. I didn’t find any information about that at all. Yes, in some antiquated way, Sloan, for lack of a better word, owns you. But I can’t find anything that has to do with being attached to him in this manner.”

  “So this is really like all those reruns I used to watch of I Dream of Jeannie? Really?” Jeannie squawked. Man, had she been shafted. Jeannie’s bottle was cute and had lots of pretty pillows. It was nothing like the piece of shit she’d been stuck in.

  Wanda nodded her head, her expression grim. “I think so. I think what happened was you replaced the genie trapped in the bottle. When he managed to get out, someone had to go back in—that someone was you.”

  “Speaking of the bottle,” Sloan interrupted. “Who was this guy you were catering the party for anyway, Jeannie? Maybe he has something to do with this?”

  Jeannie shrugged her shoulders. “He was just a regular client like any other client. He hired me to cater, I catered. There was nothing unusual about him at all.”

  Wanda massaged her temples, and said, “I’ve got feelers out on the man that hired Jeannie. If anyone in our circle knows about him, we’ll know soon enough.”

  Sloan sighed, his beautifully handsome face tight with tension, a face that, even in her anxiety, Jeannie couldn’t help but take a moment to admire. “So, back to the business at hand. This means we can’t go anywhere without each other? That’s why I ended up back at her place in all the smelly smoke—because I’m her master?”

  “Well, if the folklore holds true, you did let her out of the bottle, Sloan. Don’t you remember I Dream of Jeannie, brother-in-law?” Marty asked. “You must have at least watched it just to see Jeannie in her hot costume. Major Nelson was the one who set her free, and that meant she became his genie.” She crossed her arms in front of her and blinked her eyes in the same way Barbara Eden had, her blonde ponytail bobbing behind her. “Remember that?”

  “Wow. You’re really good at that,” Jeannie said, an almost smile crossing her lips. “You wanna wear this?” She plucked at the veil under her chin.

  Marty chuckled but shook her head in vehement fashion. “Not if it means I’m attached to him. No chance in hell.”

  Nina slapped her feet up on her desk and tucked her fingertips under her armpits. “Know what this means, don’t you, ass sniffer? This means no more free-range cootchie-la-la till you figure this shit out.”

  Wanda threw a sticky pad at Nina, clocking her on the top of her head. “Remember the wrath of the clan? Zip it.”

  Clan. Right. She’d read that word in the pamphlet, too. Being a vampire meant you had a clan. She took a deep breath while she processed more of the information she’d read. Bits of it were still very fuzzy, but she was determined to eventually wrap her brain around all of it. “So where do I go from here? How do I make this go away?”

  Wanda crossed her legs at her ankles, her eyes hesitant. “Do you want honesty?”

  “Always.” Maybe. No. Yes. Suck it up, Carlyle.

  Wanda blew out a puff of air, her rosy cheeks expanding. “We’ve never experienced anyone who was able to change back. We’ve had several cases now, and none of them resulted in a return to their former lifestyles.”

  Jeannie gulped, twisting her fingers into the filmy fabric on her legs. “So I’ll always be attached to Sloan? I’ll always have to call him master?”

  Wanda popped her lips and gave a slight shrug. “I’m only giving you our stats thus far, Jeannie, meaning OOPS and our experiences. We’ve never dealt with someone who’s been turned into a genie. I’m just telling you where we are at this point.”

  “And we’re still really new to this, Jeannie,” Marty comforted, her blue eyes warm. “We’ve only been doing this for a couple of years, and we’ve dealt with several paranormal events. They just didn’t include genies. Who knows what could happen? Maybe when we learn more about what happened to you, we’ll find out the solution is a simple one and you can go back to your life as you knew it.”

  One she’d fought long and hard for. She bit the inside of her mouth hard before speaking in order to keep a scream of frustration from seeping out into the room. “So until then I’m stuck with him?”

  “Hey! I have feelings here. And I can think of worse people to be stuck with,” Sloan protested.

  “Name them,” Jeannie dared, fighting the urge to roll her head on her neck in challenge.

  Sloan’s mouth slammed shut to the tune of Nina’s snort.

  “Okay, so let’s do this,” Wanda offered in her compassionate way. “It’s late. We’re all tired, and we don’t have a lot of information right now anyway. I can’t seem to locate Darnell, who’s our go-to guy because he’s been around for an eternity—”

  “Darnell?” There were more of these paranormal people? Wait. Of course there were. How could she have forgotten all that she’d read?

  “The demon,” Sloan chimed in, wiggling his eyebrows when she expressed her shock.

  “Yes. Darnell’s a demon, as is my sister Casey,” Wanda noted. “Her testimonial’s in the pamphlet if you think you can possibly absorb anything else tonight. Anyway, Darnell’s very knowledgeable about the paranormal in general, and if he doesn’t know about it, he can
usually find something out. So why don’t we wait until he contacts us? For now, go home and get some rest. We’ll follow you and stay with you in case you need us.”

  Jeannie still couldn’t believe she was so definitively linked to this man. “With him?”

  Wanda patted her thigh. “It appears you don’t have a choice.”

  “Choices are overrated, right?” Jeannie said with a nervous wince, her heart crashing against her ribs.

  Wanda gave her another hesitant yet probing glance. “You’re taking this awfully well, Jeannie, and while I admire that, I hope you’ll read our pamphlet on delayed reactions to your accident and the seven stages of grief. All of which you’ll eventually experience while you go through your adjustment period.”

  Being tethered to a man as gorgeous as Sloan would certainly take adjusting to. “The only stage I’m experiencing right now is the one called mourning, wherein I mourn the fact that I’m not attached to Clive Owen or Daniel Craig.”

  The three women looked at each other with some sort of secret glance she couldn’t quite interpret.

  “Fuck,” Nina grumbled. “Get your Barbie pink marabou mules and that made-from-the-eye-of-newt, five-thousand-dollar nighttime moisturizing cream, Marty. We’re gonna be braiding each other’s hair and playing dress up tonight. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  Jeannie let her confusion show. She looked to Wanda, who had become her beacon in a long, dark night.

  Wanda sighed and shook her head at Nina, her eyes admonishing. “What Nina’s unfiltered response means is that you’ll need us with you for the inevitable crash to reality. We want you to feel safe and well cared for.”

  “So Nina’s going to come to my place and nurture me?” Jeannie joked, trying to keep her breathing steady.

  “Yeah. That would be me. I nurture your organs until I’m ready to eat them for my midnight snack.”

  Ironically, Jeannie believed Nina really would dine on her organs. No hesitation.

  Marty began to move around the colorless basement office of OOPS, gathering items to jam in her large tote bag. She held up what Jeannie thought was a first-aid kit until she read the small print. It was a paranormal kit. “Just in case you have powers that are dormant and we need to deal with them.”