This was going to take some real juggling skill. Best thing to do was to take the initiative, and since I didn’t feel anything stopping me, I took a step toward him. I made sure my new stance had that Xena Warrior Princess bad-ass cachet to it.
“What’s yourname?” I asked him. He backed up again, lips parted, brown eyes wide and riveted behind the glasses.
“Kevin—Kevin. Kevin Prentiss.” He cleared his throat and tried to make it go deeper than its current punk-kid range. “What’s yours?”
“What do you want it to be?” Because I wasn’t going to have this horny little bastard calling me by my real name. And the twenty questions was a way to waste time.
“Um… Honey?”
I lost my sense of humor. “You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“Really.”
He hadn’t expected resistance. “Um, no?”
“Okay, let me put it this way: You’d betterbe kidding.”
He blinked. “You’re arguing with me?”
“Of course not,” I purred. I really did. I wasn’t trying to purr, it was just the way things were going today. Apparently, my new voice had a built-in seduction filter. “Why would I argue with you?” Always answer a question with a question.
“I don’t know, but you shouldn’t be arguing with me, you should be—”
“What?” I interrupted, and crossed my arms. It was, not coincidentally, in the classic I Dream of Jeanniepose. Maybe I could change his subconscious wish. Even frothy pink and orange gauze and a blonde horsetail through an organ-grinder-monkey hat would be preferable to slinking around in this outfit.
He licked his lips, watching me. Uh-oh. Not having the desired effect. “You should be obeying me. Like, when I say do something, you should—”
“You haven’t told me to do anything yet,” I pointed out.
“Well, I would if you’d just—”
“Take your time.”
“Let me—”
“Really. Take your time. Think about it. Because you’ve only got three wishes.”
Which was bullshit, but I figured if he didn’t understand the Rule of Three, he probably got his entire Djinn education from Saturday morning cartoons anyway. Man, I reallywished I had control of my appearance. Even aside from the currently occurring fashion disaster concerns, it would have been great to do that whole Arabian Nights shtick, half-misted. Plus, no teenage boy is going to assume he can screw a girl with mist for legs.
“Just… three?” He sounded breathless. Oh boy. Tell me he hadn’t worked these out in advance.
It was too late to switch it to one wish. Damn.
He opened his mouth to blurt out something that I just knew was going to involve hot oil and rubber sheets, so I jumped in with, “You really ought to think about it first. It’s like making a deal with the devil. There’s always some loophole that ends up turning things sour. Like, you say that you want a million dollars. I give you a million dollar life insurance policy and kill you. See?”
He stopped, mouth still open far enough that I could see some cavities forming on his back molars. Then he got a sly, shallow look in those brown eyes, and closed his mouth and smiled.
“You’re trying to stall,” he said. “You’re afraid of me.”
Well, yeah. I’d already seen the dark side of Kevin, as he kicked Lewis in the face with every evidence of sociopathic glee. “Am not.”
“Are too.”
“Not.”
“Too.”
We both jumped at a sudden rattle of the doorknob. It jiggled back and forth briskly, three times, and went still. An annoyed female voice said, “Kevin? What are you up to in there?”
“Nothing!” His voice went into the boy’s choir range and cracked. “Mom, a little privacy?”
It took me a minute, but I placed the voice with the wish-I-could-forget-it memory of Yvette Prentiss dry-humping Lewis just before all of the trouble began. Mom? Well, she’d certainly got started early, if she was old enough to have a son Kevin’s age; she didn’t look a minute over thirty. Sure, flawless makeup, Botox and lots of spa treatments could work wonders, but not thatmany.
I suspected she was the trophy stepmother, stuck with the unattractively teenaged son-by-marriage. The father was obviously out of the picture, no doubt dead, and the kid was one of those ugly iron candelabras you get as a Christmas present and don’t dare give away because, well, what would people think? Yvette sure hadn’t been dragging the anchor that was Kevin around at my funeral. Would have spoiled her perfect image, not to mention harshed her chances for scoring another bad, rich daddy.
Or maybe I was doing her a disservice. Maybe she’d been knocked up at age thirteen, courageously endured the pregnancy, overcome daunting odds to be a good mother to her obnoxious-going-on-creep of a kid. Maybe she was just looking out for the two of them the best way she knew how, using the natural advantages she’d been given.
Uh-huh. And I was Mother Teresa in a Magenta outfit. Riiiiiight. She’d used the kid to commit assault, at the very least. Homicide was certainly still a possibility. God, Lewis…
The doorknob rattled again. Loudly. Longly.
“Open up!” Yvette snapped. She didn’t sound like a courageous Madonna figure. She sounded like a bitch with a bad attitude. “Right now, Kevin, or I swear…!”
“Um, okay, okay, coming—” Kevin threw me a help me! look. I just stared back. He changed his tone to a scared, tense whisper. “Back in the bottle?”
I didn’t feel compelled. I just raised my eyebrows and cocked my head to stare harder. His anxiety level shot up another ten levels, and the whisper got even thinner. “ Please? Back in the bottle?”
Yvette hit the door. Hard. It rattled on its hinges.
“You’re killing me, here, please!Get back in the bottle!”
Whoops. Command mode. I felt myself instantly dissolving into mist, felt that toilet-bowl swirl of the bottle dragging me in, and braced myself for the pain I knew was coming.
Yep, being squeezed like a baby in a birth canal was not my idea of fun, but there I went into the bottle, and I felt the world tilt as Kevin grabbed it up. Seen close through the glass, his fingers were huge and grimy and definitely nothing I ever wanted to have pawing my skin, substantial or insubstantial.
And then he twisted the stopper home.
Lights out.
I dreamed again. I guess that was what Djinn did in bottles… dreamed. Sure as hell wasn’t anything else to do. To make matters even more strange, this one wasn’t even my dream.
It was David’s.
He was pacing restlessly in a strange square glass room I didn’t recognize, coat swirling like smoke around him from the violence of his turns. His hands were clenched behind his back, and his whole body vibrated with tension. As I watched, his legs began to blur and become mist; he hissed out something in a language I didn’t know and exerted a pulse of will that I could feel even in my drifting, dreaming state.
His legs went solid again.
He threw himself violently against the glass, pressing hard, so hard I felt the effort like a distant earthquake. Outside of the glass, there was a giant-sized world, distorted into warped shapes and weird colors. People moving around out there, giant blobs of color and form. One of them caught my attention— neon yellow outfit. Rahel?
David was inside a bottle. Unlike me, he wasn’t sealed in, but for some reason he couldn’t get out, either.
Where David was pushing, the thick glass vibrated. I felt the energy building in waves as the thick surface began to whipsaw violently, rippling. David pushed harder. The glass bowed out in a bubble, went from clear to milk white, distorted…
David collapsed to his knees. The glass snapped back into shape with a ringing, singing popof energy. Clear and perfect.