Jinn and Juice

by Nicole Peeler

  “Believe me, we were all surprised.”

  “And it was on its own?” asked Yulia.

  I nodded, shrugging as I did so to indicate I thought it was weird, too. There was always someone stupid enough to bring something like a bugbear Sideways, but such morons were incredibly rare and they usually at least tried to control whatever they brought.

  “Whoever Called it probably got eaten.” Yulia’s fatalism never waned.

  Charlie’s brow furrowed. “Well, I’ll check with Sid. The bugbear had to come from Sideways, so he may know who brought it over.”

  “Let me know what he says.” Sid, Bertha’s uncle, lived under a Bridge that went directly Sideways, the usual portal used by anyone trying to Call something as big as a bugbear.

  “Will do,” said Charlie, his gaze turning inward as he stroked his pointed Puck chin.

  “How is he?” Yulia asked, sidling closer as she pointed to my new Master.

  I knew she didn’t mean how he was coping, but how he was behaving. “He’s easy. Hasn’t tried any funny business. But I was right, he really doesn’t understand our relationship.” What I meant was that he didn’t know how much he could make me do, but she could translate.

  “Good.” Her always-grim Slavic voice was extra grim. She knew as well as I that Oz’s wonderful ignorance wouldn’t last.

  Ozan was standing in front of our intricate Victorian bar, long since stained black. Red accents were lacquered into its intricately worked surface. The back-bar was from the same old-fashioned set, but it had been embellished by Charlie’s favorite pastime… taxidermy.

  Crows wearing top hats brandished tiny canes, while squirrels in tuxes played eternal hands of poker. A deer’s open mouth also functioned as a bottle opener, and a set of rhesus monkeys held liquor bottles upside down, serving as the creepiest rack and pour system ever seen.

  There was a ton of other taxidermy around the place, all blending with the overall theme of Purgatory, which was “early gothic circus from hell.” A giant red-and-black striped circus tent hung from the ceiling and down the walls of the whole club, allowing Charlie to decorate with other examples of his work, such as a sloth wearing a sequined leotard and hanging from a trapeze.

  Besides all the stuffed stuff, Purgatory was mostly dominated by the sort of stage normally found in a strip joint, with a runway that led to another circular platform in the center of the room. There we could set up a mic, or a portable pole, or a jinni-size glass lamp for bathing in champagne, depending on the act.

  “This place is… interesting,” Ozan said, staring with trepidation at the looming figure of a polar bear wearing a tutu and a monocle.

  Charlie gave him a chilly grin, made chillier by his pale stare. “Thank you. I do the animals myself. Now, why don’t you tell us about yourself?” He indicated the barstools and we all took a seat, Charlie taking his place behind the bar to serve.

  “Well,” Ozan said, warily eyeing the people who kept trying to kill him. “Like I told Lyla, I’m a cultural anthropologist. I was part of a research team working for the government on a study of violence against displaced people.”

  Rachel rolled her eyes, white against her dark skin. Today she was wearing a black caftan done all in sequins, her wig a sleek golden bob and her makeup smoky and shimmering.

  “Boring,” she yawned. “Lyla told us this bit.”

  Luckily Ozan didn’t bother to wonder when I’d told them, but I shot Rach another warning look.

  “Oh, okay,” he said. “So what do you want to know?”

  “Where are you from, boy?” Rachel said, leaning forward. “Who are your people?”

  “I grew up all over,” Ozan said. “My dad was in the service. But as an adult I’ve mostly lived in Chicago. That’s where I went to school…”

  I sat back, sipping an old-fashioned Charlie had made for me. He listened as Ozan shared with my friends the same story he’d told me last night about his background and how he’d learned of his Magi inheritance. Charlie also mixed Yulia’s and Rachel’s favorite drinks, pointedly ignoring Ozan till I gave him a look. With a sigh Charlie pulled out a can of PBR and placed it in front of my new Master, not even bothering to open it. Then he poured himself a generous dram of whiskey.

  “So you want to find this girl?” Yulia asked.

  Ozan nodded. “Her people were family to me. And she’s just turned seventeen.”

  Charlie and I exchanged looks. He’d been ten when priests had plucked him from his parents to be entered by the gods. I’d been fourteen, and engaged to be married, when I’d made my devil’s bargain and wound up a jinni.

  Seventeen was practically ancient for bad shit to happen to you, in our books.

  “Tell us what happened,” Charlie said to Oz, who did. The story was identical to the one he’d told me, and he pulled out Tamina’s picture as he’d done before. My friends passed it around, studying it, and it was his turn to watch them.

  “Can I ask something?” he asked, as Charlie passed the photo to Rachel, who gave a soft tsk at the sight of the girl.

  “Of course,” said Charlie, although Yulia looked distinctly less benevolent.

  “What are you all? I mean… you all look human. Like that woman we just met… Loretta? But Lyla said she was a siren, so I’m assuming you all are something…”

  I blinked at Oz. Loretta had looked hot but she had also definitely looked like a siren—complete with gills and nictitating membranes. And Yulia’s wisps were quivering around her like giant irritated ferrets, so I really couldn’t understand why he thought she looked human…

  Then it clicked. For one of us, at least. “Ask her to make you See, son,” Rachel said, quietly. I groaned. Duh.

  “But I thought Magi can See?” he said, brow furrowing.

  “You can See jinn,” I said. We’d discussed whether Oz could See, but I’d forgotten. Now I had my answer. “So while you’re not entirely blind—your Magi blood gives you enough Sight to See through light glamours, like we have on Purgatory—you were raised totally human so you don’t have full Sight.”

  “I could See the bugbear,” he said.

  I sighed. “Yeah, bugbears don’t really bother trying to glamour themselves. They’re dumb. And they eat everything.”

  “Just ask her to make you See,” Yulia growled at Oz, cutting his constant questioning short with her usual impatience. She wasn’t a big fan of humans at the best of times, and especially not of humans who Bound her bestie.

  “Um, can you make me See?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But you have to tell me to do it, not ask if I can. I need big magic for this.”

  Nonplussed, Ozan rephrased his question as a command. “Make me See,” he said.

  I passed a small hand over his face, pulling on the Deep Magic. He blinked once… twice… we waited…

  “What the fuck?” he yelled, jumping up from his bar seat. He stared around the room in horror, his eyes flicking around as if unsure where to settle. He yelped when they moved to Yulia, his eyes wide.

  Then they sparked. Like, for real.

  “Shit!” I shouted, lunging for him, but I was too late.

  Ozan hit the ground hard, passed out cold.

  Yulia sauntered over to him, nudging him with her booted foot and grinning up at us. “I do have that effect on men.”

  After raising her glass at the prostrate form before her, she drained it in one gulp.

  I felt like we were reenacting the final scene in The Wizard of Oz, with all her friends surrounding Dorothy while she says, “And you were there, and you were there, and you were there…”

  Only none of us were Oz’s friends and he hadn’t woken up from a nightmare.

  He was living it.

  “Will he be okay?” Rachel asked, as Oz started to stir.

  “Who gives a shit?” Yulia said. “Hopefully he dies.”

  “Shush,” said Rachel. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Yes, she does,” Charlie said. “And she�
��s right. He Bound Lyla, and with only a week left of her curse.”

  “And he doesn’t even know what that means.” Rachel rounded on the rest of us crowded into my dressing room, where we’d carried Ozan after he collapsed, a victim of what we affectionately knew as over-Sight. Suddenly gifted with true Sight of the world that existed Sideways from theirs, most humans had a little trouble accommodating their new vision and their little brains shorted out. “He’s just doing what he thinks he has to, to save a child. And y’all have been so busy trying to kill him you haven’t even told him what he really has done. I bet if he knew…”

  “Knew what?” Oz croaked from the head of my chaise longue. He opened his eyes and sat up, only to take one look at Yulia and collapse back onto the chaise.

  “What the hell happened?” he asked, eyes tightly shut.

  Rachel took his hand, her dark skin very dark against his normally pale flesh, which had gone almost albino with shock.

  “Lyla gave you the Sight,” she said. “Until now you’ve been seeing our natural glamours. But now you’re Seeing everyone as they really are.”

  He cracked open one eye. “You look the same,” he said to the drag queen.

  “I’m human,” she said. “A psychic, but human. Mostly.”

  “Mostly?” he asked. I could tell he was focusing on Rachel while he got his bearings.

  “Psychics are usually humans with a little fey in their background. I probably have a fairy grandfather, or something.”

  “Oh.” Ozan accepted this tidbit of information, opening both eyes and shifting them slowly to Yulia.

  “What are you?”

  I knew that Yulia no longer looked like the tall, androgynous blonde he’d first met. He was Seeing her in her true form, that of a wisp. Just as long and slender, but with a bright, enticing glow, the lines of her body faded so that she appeared made of light.

  As he grew used to her, she’d glow less brightly, as she did for us. He’d see Yulia within the light. But until he adjusted, she’d blind him.

  “I’m a will o’ the wisp,” she said. “I lead men into the swamps and drown them, feeding off their vital energy to fuel my magic.”

  His pale face managed to whiten further. “Do you really?”

  She grinned at him, showing off her long, thin fangs. “Not so much anymore. But I’d make an exception for you.”

  I kicked her in the shin, and his eyes shifted to me.

  “You look the same, too,” he said. “Like a human, but with black fire for hair and eyes that glow red sometimes.”

  I nodded. “You Saw me from the beginning. That’s your gift, as a Magi: the power to See jinn as they truly are.”

  “But the other jinn are made of fire and smoke. Why do you look different?”

  Unable to speak of my curse, I looked helplessly at Charlie.

  “That’s what you need to know,” said my oldest friend. “Lyla wasn’t born jinni.”

  Oz looked at me. “What? How?”

  Unable even to acknowledge my curse in front of my Master, I sat, mute.

  “She can’t talk about it,” Rachel explained. “Well, not to you. Not to her Master.”

  “You’re part of her curse,” Yulia growled, flashing him those fangs again. He gulped.

  “How can I be part of her curse?” Oz said. “I just met her and she said she’s been alive for nine hundred and ninety-nine years…”

  “She’s been a jinni for nine hundred and ninety-nine years,” Charlie explained. “Before that she was human.”

  “Human?” Oz’s eyes met mine, his gaze racing over me as if trying to strip me of the Fire surrounding me at all times.

  “Yes. That’s why her natural shape isn’t pure Fire, as were the born jinn shown to you by Tamina’s tribe. You See her as she is, a human being cursed to be a jinni.”

  “Cursed? How was she cursed?”

  I hated this. Hated having my story told by another. Hated the curse that bound my tongue as thoroughly as it bound my body. This was my story—the agony I’d lived through. It should be mine to tell.

  Charlie took my hand, sensing my consternation. “Lyla was born to a wealthy merchant family, at around the time the Mongol hordes were making a nuisance of themselves. Her father, wanting to keep his business interests safe, promised her in marriage to a famously brutal Mongol warlord. She was fourteen.”

  I lowered my head, not wanting to see the pity in Ozan’s eyes.

  “Her father employed a Magi, as did all men of wealth in that place at that time. He was powerful, and had Bound an incredibly old jinni named Kouros to serve the family.”

  I shivered, hearing that name. Unbidden, I saw those red eyes before me, that taloned hand reaching for my heart…

  “Desperate, Lyla approached Kouros, asking him to help her. She told the jinni she didn’t want to be married. She asked that she no longer be a woman, to be bought and sold like an animal. But she didn’t specify what she did want to be.

  “So Kouros made her a jinni, like him. No longer a woman, not technically. And he cursed to her to live a thousand years like that.”

  “Why a curse? And why a thousand years?”

  Charlie took a sip of his Scotch before replying. “Magic has its own laws, and one of them is that curses cost less power than more permanent solutions. The gods only know what it took for Kouros just to curse Lyla, but we know he hasn’t been seen on the human plane since shortly after he made her a jinni. We figure he didn’t have enough mojo to turn her into a jinni permanently or fully, just enough for a curse.”

  “Why did he do it, then? That seems like a pretty extreme thing to do, just to mess with someone.”

  Charlie and I exchanged glances. That was one question neither of us had ever figured out. And at this point in the game, we hoped we never would.

  “We don’t know why,” was all Charlie said in response.

  “But she’s almost free, you said?”

  “No. She’s not almost free,” Charlie said. “Not as long as you have her Bound.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the condition of the curse,” Charlie explained, keeping his voice neutral. “She has to be unBound at the thousand-year anniversary of its being cast. Otherwise she’ll be a jinni for another thousand years.”

  “Oh,” Ozan said, his voice small.

  “Yes, ‘oh,’ ” said Yulia, her tone harsh, mocking. “Now you see what you have done?”

  Ozan sat quietly for a full minute, looking between me and his big hands resting on his lap. I could see tattoos peeking out at his wrist, and another vintage anchor decorated the fleshy space between the thumb and pointer finger of his right hand.

  “I do see,” he said, looking up at me. “But I can’t do this alone. And I have to do this, I have to repay my debt. They were my family.”

  Ozan’s voice vibrated with passion and we all shifted uncomfortably. We understood debt, and what it was like to live with a true debt, a debt of the soul, gone unpaid.

  As if he’d come to some sort of agreement with himself, Ozan looked at me, his face set. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you and I don’t want to keep you cursed. But I want my life back, like none of this ever happened. I need to find Tamina, send her back to her family, so I can forget. And to do that, I need help. I know nothing of this world…” His eyes crept to Yulia, darting back to me before she could blind him.

  “I hate myself for using you like this, but I don’t know what else to do,” he said, his voice quiet. For me, only. “Please, give me another option.”

  “A bargain,” I croaked. It was about all I could get out before my curse clamped my lips shut again.

  He looked up, hopeful. “A bargain?”

  “Yes,” Charlie said. “An offer from all of us. If you unBind Lyla, we’ll help you. All of us. Lyla, me, Rachel, Yulia, Bertha… I’m sure other people at Purgatory will help, too. Trip and Trap, Trey… we’ll all help you. We just want Lyla back.”

  “You’re mak
ing this sound like a ransom,” said Oz, obviously uncomfortable.

  “Well, son, it is,” said Charlie. Physically, he appeared younger than Oz, but something about how he said “son” had all of his hundreds of years of experience laced through it. “If you don’t let our friend go, she’s going to be cursed again. That’s not fair.”

  “Of course it’s not,” Oz said, but he didn’t look like a man who’d seen a clear injustice and was ready to act to fix it. He looked confused. And guilty.

  “Are you Immunda?” he asked me suddenly, and my heart thudded in my chest.

  “I…,” my jinni started to say, as I struggled with her to keep control of my tongue. But I couldn’t refuse a direct question.

  “No.” My voice was clipped. I had to answer, but I didn’t have to supply a critical exegesis on the subject.

  “But you’re not pureblood.” Oz’s eyes were narrowed in thought, undoubtedly putting two and two together to make slavery.

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m not sure what this has to do with anything,” Charlie began, but Oz interrupted.

  “That’s what you did when you reset the wards. And why you were stronger even than that snake thing. You’re neither Immunda nor pureblood, so you can use the Node you said was so powerful.”

  Charlie swore, Yulia sneakily tried to garrote Oz (my jinni caught the wisp without even trying), and Rachel looked confused. But I understood what was happening. My Master had grown teeth.

  “I don’t want to do this, but sometimes things are bigger than we are,” he said. “And I swear to God I’ll let you go the second we find Tamina. But I will find her. She’s just a child and she’s alone and I can’t do this by myself. You said yourself you’re stronger Bound to me. We’ll find her faster this way and then I can let you go. But until she’s found…

  “Until then, you belong to me.”

  His words dropped like a bomb in the otherwise silent room. Charlie paled, Yulia bared her teeth in a snarl, Rachel fanned herself, and Oz sat, looking determined and guilty at the same time.

  I felt about six thousand emotions, most of them located on the rage continuum, but my jinni wouldn’t let me castrate him or peel off his tattooed skin to wear as a raincoat. I tried to find purchase among all that anger, to reclaim myself, but all I could feel was my rage and my jinni and my bondage.