Damn Pittsburgh and its French-fry-laden sandwiches. The only Magi to bother coming to Pittsburgh would have to go to the tourist trap a stone’s throw from Purgatory.
“I was eating and I felt something. It was faint, but I felt it. So I followed it to the bar.”
I waved at him to skip this part. I knew what happened next.
He ignored me. “I saw you, and at first you seemed human, but then you did that dance, and you definitely used their Fire. I wasn’t sure what you really were, though, until you ran. Then I knew you had to be a jinni, and I Bound you.” He looked away from me, as if feeling guilty, at the same time that his jaw set, as if he was making a decision.
“You have to help me find Tamina,” he said in a firm, determined voice. “I know it’s unfair to you, but I need your help. She needs your help. Tamina’s young, and vulnerable, and something terrible has happened to her.”
“Are you asking me or telling me?” I said, genuinely curious. A lot depended on his answer.
He cocked his head at me. “What do you mean?”
When I saw his confusion, my mind went into overdrive. I knew only one thing: I should not answer that question, if he couldn’t answer it himself.
“How are you feeling?” I said instead. “You look tired.”
It was an old jinni trick, used on only the greenest Masters. And this one was so green I could have worn him in Pittsburgh’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade.
“I am,” he admitted.
“Trouble sleeping?”
He scrubbed a big hand over his face, a rough scraping of calluses over beard stubble. “Yeah,” he admitted. “A lot on my mind.”
I set the trap. “I bet. I always wish mine had an off switch.”
He gave me a rueful smile before nibbling at my bait. “I know. I do, too.”
“Do what?”
“Wish my brain had an off switch, so I could finally get some rest,” he supplied, obligingly.
He watched as I reached my hand out to touch his forehead, obviously wondering what the hell I was doing. My fingers brushed his warm skin and I told him, “Sleep.” He slumped forward onto the table, deep in dreamland.
I stood up and made my way over to the big house, my idiotic inner jinni happy to have done her duty while my outer woman was glad to be free, at least for now.
And eager to make that freedom permanent.
Chapter Five
So he’s here to rescue someone, and he’s enslaved you to do it. He does recognize that’s bullshit, right?” Rachel’s voice was pitched so low it was like thunder, and she resettled her lacy peignoir around herself to punctuate her sentence.
Yulia, Charlie, Rachel, and I were sitting in the gothic splendor of the big house’s parlor, sipping champagne. Rachel met everything in life—be it tragedy or triumph—with bubbly. She had crowded her soft bulk next to me on one of the huge room’s many sofas, which I appreciated. I was cold and Rachel was always so warm. Yulia sat in a chair to my left, and Charlie was sitting, leaning forward, on the sofa across from ours.
“That’s my whole point,” I said. “I don’t think he really knows what he’s done.”
“He doesn’t know what Bound means?” Rachel asked, her drawn-on eyebrows rocketing upward toward her hairline.
“The word defines itself, after all,” said Yulia, equally skeptical.
“Not fully,” I said. “I mean, yeah, he knows I’m bound, but I don’t think he realizes the full implications of Bound.”
Rachel waggled a beringed finger at me. “But that doesn’t make any sense! How could he not have known he was different? He has to See totally crazy shit, all the time—shit other humans can’t see.”
“Nope,” I said. “He was unInitiated until like a minute ago. As an unInitiated Magi, he would have been able to See jinn from birth, even if he couldn’t Call or Bind them. But his chances of randomly running across a jinni in the States were slim to none and, as for other supernaturals, he would have been as totally susceptible to their glamour as a normal human.”
“So can he See us now, as we truly are?” asked Yulia.
I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. He lived so long unInitiated that his brain might be as hardwired to see what he expects to see as any normal human. He can certainly See jinn, though,” I concluded, dryly.
Charlie interrupted. “None of this matters. Whatever his understanding of or excuse for Binding you might be, he needs to rescind that spell. How long do you have?”
I didn’t need to ask Charlie what he meant—the only thing he could be referring to was the day my curse would be lifted, conditional on my being unBound.
“One week from now. On the day before Halloween.”
“So he’s got to release you. We’ll make him.” Yulia’s already narrow eyes narrowed further when I shook my head.
“You can’t,” I said. “I mean I can’t let you do that. I have to protect my Master. If you use violence or any other form of coercion, I’ll have to defend him.”
Charlie sighed. “At least tell us more about him.”
“Well, the biggest thing is his background. Like I told you, he’s not a typical Magi.”
“What’s a ‘typical’ Magi?” asked Rachel.
“They’re taught to see jinn as property, not as sentient beings with their own wills and desires.”
“Like in the slave days?” Rachel asked.
I nodded. “Yeah. The mentality is similar. I knew a few slave owners, when Charlie and I lived in New Orleans back in the day. They were jerks.”
Charlie’s nose wrinkled fastidiously. “The absolute worst. All rich men, big plantation owners. We had to be polite, as they were important clients. But they were crazy. Lived for honor, except that their version of ‘honor’ quite handily made them superior to everyone.”
“Just like chivalry, back in the day,” I said, and Charlie and I shared a look of mutual commiseration. We’d hated chivalry.
“Jesus, y’all are old,” Rachel said, taking a deep breath. We didn’t talk about the past much, as it was the past and it tended to freak out the younger people in our lives, especially Rachel.
“So he’s not a typical Master,” I said.
“Yes, but that’s just because he hasn’t had time to understand what being a Master means,” Charlie said, frowning.
“What does he want from you, exactly?” Yulia asked, changing the subject.
“He wants help finding the missing girl I told you about. That’s it.”
“And he knows she’s in Pittsburgh?”
I shrugged. “He’s got some circumstantial evidence that says she might be. Personally, I think the whole thing is a wild-goose chase and she’s dead. But maybe he does know more. We didn’t get very far tonight—he gave me a window to use my power to make him sleep and I took it. He’ll get a good night’s rest and we can talk again tomorrow.”
Rachel frowned at me. “Do you need to stay here tonight? I’m worried about you.”
I patted Rachel’s plump hand. “You’re pretty awesome,” I told my friend. “For a human…”
Rachel’s long-nailed fingers found my hip to pinch me, hard. “I’ll give you a human…”
I giggled hysterically: Rachel always knew exactly where to find my ticklish spots. “Stop!” I shrieked, squirming away from her questing, pinching fingers. “How do you do that?”
Rachel tapped her noggin with a long nail. “It’s my superpower, remember?”
Besides being the sassiest drag queen since Ru first sashay-shantayed, Rachel was also a powerful psychic. It’s how she’d met Charlie. Once a human psychic, too, Charlie had been chosen to serve as an Oracle. Like the Oracle, of Delphi, way back in ancient Greece. It was a huge honor, mostly because it was a death sentence. Charlie had lasted way longer than any other human had, though—sitting on top of that much mojo and letting the gods speak through you tended to scramble your brains.
Charlie was different, however. Very different. After about t
hirty years of his sitting there, Oracle-izing and yet not dying, someone had pointed out that he had barely aged. Freaked out by this realization, an attendant guard had skewered him. The sword had gone in, and Charlie had died. But as soon as it was removed, the wound healed and Charlie’s eyes popped open, colorless as they were now.
He hadn’t died again since.
Anyway, he’d recognized Rachel for what she was seconds after her blundering into Purgatory. She shouldn’t even have been able to see the place—it had all sorts of wards on it to push away curious humans, plus it was just a tad bit Sideways, meaning pushed just a bit into the fey world. But one day Charlie had looked up from balancing the books to see a big, beautiful black woman had wandered in. She’d asked to speak to the manager in a voice so deep and dark it would have made James Earl Jones envious, and Charlie had hired Rachel Divide—his first human drag act—on the spot.
She’d moved into the big house with Charlie just three months later, and that had been over ten years ago.
“Lyla, honey,” Rachel continued, “I’m serious. He can take advantage of you. I don’t want that man poking his thingy into you just because he’s your Master. Although he is pretty luscious.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You don’t want him to poke his thingy in you, do you?”
I blinked at her. “His thingy? Poke his thingy?”
Rachel went ahead and poked me to demonstrate, but with her finger into my side. I squirmed and mewled again.
“What Rachel is trying to say in her nonsensical human way,” Yulia said, putting her cool hand on my arm, “is that if he tries to use his position as your Master to force you into sex, we will kill him. And nothing you can do will stop us.”
I looked at her long white face, bent toward me, a study in both earnestness and bloodthirstiness.
I burst out laughing.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, seeing her frown. “You’ve only known me unBound. It’s not funny.” Choking back my giggles, I took both Rachel’s and Yulia’s hands in mine.
“You don’t have to worry about me, guys. Seriously.”
“But Charlie told us you have to do anything your Master says. Anything.” To illustrate her point, Rachel unclasped my hand in order to make an O with two fingers, through which she plunged in and out the pointer finger of her other hand.
Subtlety was not one of Rachel’s strengths.
“Yulia’s right. When we’re Bound, jinn have to serve their Masters—we have to do everything they tell us. But that’s the great thing about human speech… it’s not very accurate.”
Charlie twirled one of his long mustachios, his lips curled in amusement.
“Lyla should have been a lawyer, not a dancer,” he said, “for how fluid she finds language.”
I grinned at him. We’d known each other for well over eight hundred years, and he’d seen me through a few Masters before we’d found refuge together in Pittsburgh.
“I don’t get it,” Yulia interrupted. “How can ‘Lyla, I want to fuck you’ be fluid?”
Rachel turned to the wisp. “Come on, girl. I know you’ve heard of water sports…”
Yulia glared as if she were going to murder our human friend.
“Think about it,” I said hastily, to save Rachel the few mortal years she had left. “If you tell me you want to fuck me, you’ve articulated a desire to fuck me, yes. But I can fulfill that in any number of ways.”
“How?” Yulia asked. “How can my wanting to fuck you be fulfilled any other way than by my fucking you?”
“Well, I could make you think you’re fucking me. But you’re really fucking a watermelon. Or a pillow. Or a succubus who pays me to make you think you’re fucking me, when you’re really feeding her.”
Yulia raised an elegant eyebrow and I shrugged. “What, a girl’s gotta pay her bills. Jinni isn’t a salaried position.”
Rachel shook her head. “So you can for real take a wish that specific and twist it around? Why do you ever do anything they say, if that’s the case?”
I shrugged. “We don’t, often. At least not the big stuff. You’ve probably heard at least some of the old legends. Did rubbing a genie’s lamp ever work out well for a human?”
“Girl, I’m from Memphis. We don’t know shit about genies. Except Aladdin.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, in most of the legends genies are like any fey, mostly because, like the fey, we can’t lie when we’re Bound—at least to our Masters. But we’re generally pretty pissed at being Bound, so we don’t really want to do our Masters any favors. The magic compels us, but we’ve got at least a little freedom in how we interpret the wishes we grant. So we become sorta… tricksters. Which is why my Master is currently snoring, facedown, and will be for the next eight hours as I figure out what to do with him. And,” I added, bitterness making my voice brittle, “how I ended up cursed to be a jinni. I didn’t ask for the exactly right thing.”
My friends nodded, having heard the story before. I tended to trot it out if enough tequila was involved.
“So he can’t make you do what you don’t want to do?” Rachel asked, still concerned. I started to say no, then reconsidered. But Charlie answered her for me.
“I’ve known Lyla for centuries, for a few of which she’s been Bound. She is very clever and she knows how to manipulate a Master as well as any jinni. However…”
He paused and I shivered. I knew all too well what his however entailed.
Charlie continued. “… there remains the fact that not even a jinni as clever as Lyla can get out of everything. A direct command is a direct command: she must obey. And if the Master understands language as well as Lyla does… there is always the potential for trouble.”
We were all silent at that. I noticed my shoes were badly scuffed, and they were my favorite flats. When this was over, and I was free, and human again, I’d order new ones. They’d be my treat to myself.
“So what can we do?” Yulia asked in a low voice. She was a wisp of action and she was visibly chafing at not being able to do anything.
Charlie stood, pacing toward the white marble fireplace dominating the room’s far wall. “First of all, this Oz character needs to free Lyla as soon as possible, before he realizes his true power over her.”
“Why doesn’t Lyla just tell him about her curse?” asked the ever-practical Rachel.
Only my closest friends knew how I’d become a jinni, and most of those people were in this room. I kept it a secret mostly because I hated talking about it, but since moving to Pittsburgh I’d had other reasons to stay mum.
I’d never been Bound while living here, so I hadn’t been sure about my ability to use the Deep Magic of the Node. But because I could skim off of it pretty easily, I’d wondered if more would be possible, should a Magi come along. The chances of that had been slim, but I’d still kept my trap shut.
Now, however, I’d love for my social anthropologist Master to know my secret. There was just one problem…
I shook my head. “That won’t work. I can’t talk about my curse to my own Master.”
Yulia cocked her head, immediately seeing the big picture. “You can’t tell him. But can we?”
I nodded. She grinned.
“So we will tell him,” Yulia said, smiling as if she were a tiger being presented with a juicy bit of steak.
“What’s your impression of him? Do you think he’ll listen?” Charlie asked me.
I shrugged. “I have no idea. Oz seems like… well, like a good man, to be honest. He’s obviously educated and he’s chosen a career that faces social issues head on. He’s also very obviously uncomfortable with the whole Master thing. He visibly cringes when he hears or says the word.”
“So we talk to him,” Rachel said, pouring us all another tot from the champagne bottle. “Appeal to his reason, to his goodness. Explain to him your curse and maybe he’ll let you go.”
“There’s still the matter of the missing girl,” I reminded them.
“Screw
her,” said Yulia, bluntly. “Like you said, she’s probably dead.”
“And if she is alive, you can find her without being Bound,” Rachel said, more optimistically.
“Or we can leave it up to the Exterminators,” Charlie said.
“Exterminators aren’t going to help with a missing human, Magi or no,” I pointed out. “They keep our kind in control and off the human radar, period. They’re not going to deviate from the mission.”
“So how do we play this? What should we say when we sit down with this guy?” Rachel asked, sitting forward on the sofa as if ready to go wake Oz immediately and have at him.
Charlie rolled his eyes at his love, a pointless gesture considering they were colorless. Anyone else would have just thought he was staring at Rachel while twitching his eyelids, but we knew the signs.
“We can’t just hurl this at him,” he said, turning to me. “You need to spend some time with him tomorrow. Get him on side; get him to like you. Then bring him here, so that we can talk to him. If those people told him that he needs a jinni, we’ll tell him he has a jinni. That he has all of us. That we’re more than willing to help him find this Tamina, if he sets you free.”
“You’d do that?” I asked, feeling my eyes prickle.
“Of course. And I bet we can figure out a way to get the Exterminators involved. It should be a cinch to find this girl, with all of us looking.”
Involuntarily I knocked on my own skull, just as Rachel and Yulia rapped the wooden table.
I didn’t comment on our mutual bout of superstition, instead thanking them for being so willing to help me.
“Of course,” my oldest friend said, his snow-white eyes paradoxically warm. “You’re not alone, Lyla. Never alone.”
I ducked my head, gratitude making my eyes sting with tears.
“Again, thanks. Now do y’all have a watermelon?”
Rachel grinned at me. “No, but we do have a cantaloupe. Would you like me to drill a hole in it?”
I leaned over to kiss her heavily rouged cheek with its five o’clock shadow.
“Yes, thank you. And be generous. He may be a few videos short of Netflix, but I’m pretty sure my new Master has a copy of Shaft.”
Jinn and Juice Page 4
