Lewis emerged from the back, hesitated over the sight of me all cold and shaken, and gave Patrick a look. Patrick shrugged again. “Jo? You okay?”
“Sure.” I closed my eyes and willed it all away. “Why the hell wouldn’t I be?”
Lewis took an uncomfortable perch on the shoe chair. Patrick himself picked a plastic thing in the shape of a hand, wished some kind of alcoholic beverage into his hand, and waited for the show with the genial half-interest of a golf fan at a tennis match.
“Go ahead,” he said. Lewis and I looked at each other. Lewis rolled the bottle between his fingers again, testing it for durability, apparently. “Just do it. It’s not that hard.”
I wasn’t sure I could do this. I wasn’t sure anymore I wanted to do it. God, if it took that much power to create a true Djinn, how was this going to help me? How could it help anyone? I squeezed my eyes tight shut again, fighting back tears.
Someone took my hand. Large, blunt, warm fingers. I looked into Patrick’s sea blue, tranquil eyes.
“Do you want to die?” he asked me, very softly.
“If you do, stop now, Joanne. Stop before you suffer any longer.”
I thought about David, running through the rain and mud, bleeding out his life, reaching out for something greater than himself. Stopping the greatest power in the world— ofthe world—from consuming life.
That was my heritage.
That was what had given melife.
Seemed pretty damn cowardly to give it up without a fight.
“No,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m good. Back off, Santa.”
Patrick smiled and resumed his seat.
Lewis took a deep breath, opened his palm and balanced the open bottle there. “Okay. Ready?”
“No. Just get it over with.”
“Be thou bound to my service,” he said. I was expecting something portentous in his tone, but this was an off-the-cuff style, so portent-free he could have been ordering pizza. I didn’t feel any different. I made a little come ongesture with my hand. “Be thou bound to my service.”
Patrick leaned forward on the arm—thumb? — of the plastic chair, and I wondered how it would feel to sit in a chair that was shaped like a hand. Like having your ass grabbed by a giant, maybe.
“Be thou bound to my service,” Lewis finished, and something changed.
It wasn’t immediately evident to me what it was. I mean, yes, I knew, but it started at some cellular level and worked its way up. Fast. I felt odd, then I felt weird, then I felt out-and-out funky.
And then I came apart in a silent explosion, mist swirling, and somehow I could still see, but not with human eyes, and not in the human wavelength… not on the aetheric level, but definitely accessing some of that plane to do what I was doing.
And then the wave crested, and I felt myself being turned inside out, torn apart, remade… reborn.
Into myself. Only… different. Better. Faster. Stronger.
Dissolving.
“Hey!” I yelped, but by that time my body had given up the flesh. I was a thin gray mist, moving faster, being sucked in by a gravitational force so huge I might as well have been a dust speck moving toward a black hole.
Which was the little perfume bottle in Lewis’s hand. I plunged into that tiny, tight container, squeezed like Concentrate of Djinn, and no matter how hard I tried to leak back out again, it wasn’t happening.
Shock was being replaced by an all-over warm feeling of fury. Man, I didn’t like this. I sodidn’t like this.
Lewis said, after what seemed like half a millennia, “Come out, Jo.”
And the negative pressure holding me in the bottle eased. Bam, just like that. I blew out of there fast, swirled around him like a cloud of angry bees, and folded myself back down into flesh again.
It took some concentration, but this time I managed to do it pretty fast—just a fraction of a second between skin and clothes. Kind of like one of those tip-the-pen-the-clothes-come-off sort of things. Lewis looked a little surprised, and then he looked a little smirky, and then a second later he remembered he was a gentleman and pretended he hadn’t seen a thing.
“You okay?” he asked. I looked down at myself and was relieved to find I was still pretty much the same person, only I’d acquired a more down-home wardrobe of blue jeans, sturdy shoes and a denim shirt. Work Djinn. I was ready to fetch and haul out on the construction site.
“I’m good,” I said absently. I was busy trying to reset the outfit to something less—literally—blue collar, but unfortunately that now seemed to be outside of my control. Lewis’s doing, whether he knew it or not. Great. At least I knew what turned him on, now. Sturdy women in sensible shoes.
“You okay?”
“You just asked me that.” I looked up at him, puzzled.
He gave me a little tilted half-smile. “Exactly. You okay?”
Oh. Rule of three. I felt the compulsion kick in, and heard my mouth say, “Hell no, you idiot, I’m not all right! I died less than a week ago, David’s being held prisoner by some bad-ass Djinn with delusions of godhood, and I just got my butt stuffed into a bottle! By you! With crappy clothes!”
He heaved a big sigh of relief. “You’re okay.”
“Sure. Fine. Whatever. Let’s do this thing.” I was more than a little unnerved, because I damn sure hadn’t meant to say any of that. Well, okay, maybe the part about crappy clothes, but the rest of it was dealing-with-it stuff. So the compulsion thing actually worked. Interesting. “Give me an order. Something small.”
“What’s the use of that?” Patrick asked. I’d forgotten all about him, but there he was, still sitting on the hand, arms folded, watching me with those crystal blue eyes and bad-Santa leer. He’d seen the same flash-peek-show that Lewis had, he just in no way imagined himself a gentleman. “If you’re going to do it, do something productive. Let her really get her feet wet.”
Lewis considered that for a few seconds, then waved a hand around vaguely at Patrick’s porno theater-circus tent apartment. “Okay. Redecorate this place.”
Patrick came up off the hand like he’d been goosed, but it was too late.
Talk about something happening.
Power slammed into me—rich, thick, golden, unstoppable. Lewis’s potential. I now had access to everything Lewis had, everything he was, everything he could be. The amount of energy stored in him was unbelievable—enough to destroy cities, level mountains, reshape the face of the earth.
It was more than enough to do a Trading Spaceson Patrick’s apartment.
I started at one end and swept through it like a color-coordinating storm. The carpet morphed into a neat champagne beige. The walls turned light cream. The statues disappeared altogether in a swirl of mingled body parts, gone to bad-plaster heaven.
The porn tribute to Michelangelo was replaced by a nice mullioned ceiling, with gold accents. I added a wine red accent wall and replaced a black velvet painting of a pneumatic-breasted naked girl with a Mondrian. I didn’t think I’d just stolen an original, but hey, I was new at it.
Furniture. The banana couch turned to dark leather, butter soft, with manly little brass studs on the legs. Lewis’s platform shoe chair became a matching armchair.
I made Patrick’s plastic hand chair disappear completely, along with the tacky chrome coffee table.
“Stop!” Patrick sounded absolutely horrified. “What are you doing?”
“Public service,” I said, and added a nice brick fireplace with an art-deco brass screen. And a little china vase holding matches next to it. I turned to Lewis. “Any special requests?”
He was squinty-eyed with glee. Truthfully, so was I. Damn, this was fun…unlimited power crackling at my fingertips. I could do anything. Anything.
“ Ithink she’s got the hang of it,” Lewis said to Patrick.
Patrick walked helplessly in circles, not knowing which way to stare; every new revelation brought an additional flinch of despair. I fought the urge to spitefully add a copy of Great Homesto the new deco-styled cherry wood table because no, that would just be rubbing it in. “Yes. I think… she might have.”