by Tanya Huff
*
Eddie Ease owned a condo in a building across from St. Lawrence Market. An upper-middle-class building beginning to show its age, the lobby looked as though it had been recently renovated to make room for a concierge. Vicki flashed her fake badge through the glass, and, once the door opened, walked straight to the desk and the middle-aged white man behind it. Probably downsized recently from a better job, he clearly thought being a middle-aged white man was protection enough. Idiot.
Vicki smiled and let him fall into the silver in her eyes. “I was never here. When I leave, you won’t see me.”
“You weren’t. I won’t!” He licked his lips, his knuckles white where he gripped the edge of the desk. “I’m sorry. Please, I… I have a family.”
Not as much of an idiot as she’d thought. Or a more perceptive one, at least. “Good for you. Next time, check ID and ask questions when someone flashes a badge. Don’t just open the door; these things aren’t hard to come by.”
“I will. Thank you. I’m sorry.”
She could feel the pull of his fear all the way to the stairs and felt it fade the moment she stepped out of sight and literally out of mind. The temptation to step back was strong. Hunger fighting her control, she gritted her teeth and climbed to the sixth floor, moving too fast to register on the security cameras. Eddie Ease had a corner unit at the far end of the brightly lit, freshly painted hall. Odds were very good he kept his business away from his home.
As she walked, she sifted through the surrounding lives. Hearts beating, blood flowing; slowed in sleep.
Power.
The hair lifted off the back of her neck and continued to lift as she approached Eddie’s door. She remembered fire, and the Hunter broke loose as instinct took over from rational thought. She raised a hand to force the door. It opened just before her palm made contact.
“I didn’t hear anyone knock,” Eddie said over his shoulder, turned to look at her, and moaned. His heart sped up. Visible skin gleamed with sweat. Blood pounded through wrists and temples and throat. Vicki snarled before she could stop herself. Eddie staggered back until he hit a wall, then he slid to the floor, eyes rolling up, consciousness surrendering to terror.
“A little extreme, don’t you think, Nightwalker?”
The genie was… Five-seven. Six-two. Dark. Fair. A slender Asian. A burly redhead. Female. Male. Both. Neither. No heartbeat. No blood moving temptingly under white, black, brown skin. Nails cutting half circles into her palms, Vicki pulled herself back from a darkness she didn’t own and said, “At least he wasn’t a screamer.”
“Oh, well done. You know what I am and still manage a jest.” It rose out of the leather club chair and became a pillar of smokeless fire. “You have found me. What do you want, Nightwalker? Have you come to pay homage?”
“Not even close.”
“Then why are you here?”
She frowned, suddenly realizing she had no idea of what to do now. For fifteen years, she’d been the fastest, strongest, darkest… She’d come up with a way to find the genie, found it, and faced a pillar of fire. How did she defeat a pillar of fire? She didn’t even have the lamp.
“Ah, hubris.” Vicki could hear the amusement in the fire’s voice. “I stand between the gods and humanity, little blood-drinker. When I last walked this world, taking who and what I desired, there were heroes and sages and mighty wizards fit to challenge me. Now your wizards are children, your sages are unable to see the truth, and the only hero I have to face is you. A hero out of the darkness for a time without light. I tremble. I shake. I…”
“Am a genie. You’re a genie,” she clarified.
“Jinn.”
“Right. Jinn. Given you’re a jinn, why do you need Eddie to change your gold to currency? You took the gold off a skyscraper. Can’t you change it yourself?”
“I did.” It moved aside, and Vicki saw coins spilling out of a basket on the floor next to the chrome-and-glass coffee table. “But the daric is no longer in use, and I am unfamiliar with its modern replacement.”
Made sense, Vicki acknowledged silently. There were more than a few Canadians still having trouble with the new plastic bills, and they hadn’t spent centuries locked in a magic lamp. And it clearly couldn’t just create what it wanted, or it wouldn’t have taken the gold. “You plan on staying around?”
“The way to my home has been long closed.”
A troll lived under the Bloor Viaduct.
“All right.” Her city. Her rules. “Amy held your prison, you get a pass for frying her. Kai Johnston could be considered an accident, don’t have any more. Humans aren’t toys; don’t play with them. If you stay, no more of them die at your hand.”
To her surprise, the fire began to laugh. In her own defence, even given her life, laughing fire was still way out past the borders. “Oh, I have missed the ridiculous arrogance of your kind. For such enjoyment, you may live a while longer.”
One moment, she was enclosed in flame.
The next, she stood in her empty office.
*
“What part of it’s creepy when you watch me sleep do you not understand?”
Now he was awake, Vicki settled on the side of Mike’s bed, pressed against his hip, enjoying the warmth she could feel through the thin hospital blanket. “The part where I care about being creepy.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re a few pints past that.” He took her hand, wrapped it in his, and pressed it to his chest over his heart. “What happened? You look thrown. And not through a window thrown, either. Find something new in the woodpile?” When she hesitated, he tightened his grip. “Talk to me.”
“Not here.” She saw a flicker of red in the corner of her eye, turned, and realized it had to have been an LED on the machine shoved into the corner of the room. Had to be, because there was nothing else in the room. “There’s too many vulnerable people here. I need a favour,” she added before he could respond. “I’m waiting for a call from a Dr. Hariri. If it doesn’t come in before dawn, I want to forward it to your phone. Tell him I’ve been detained, that he should get some rest, and I’ll see him in his office at nine tomorrow…” It was five thirteen. “…tonight.”
“You want to use my phone, and you want me to pass on a message?” The creases around Mike’s eyes deepened when he smiled. “What did your last slave die of?”
She could hear the nurses talking down the hall. Room 417 was terminal.
“Vicki?”
“Don’t die.”
“Hey…”
“Just, don’t.”
He studied her expression for a long moment, then kissed her knuckles. “I wasn’t planning on it. Not until I’m old and wizened and people give me shit about robbing the cradle.”
He pulled her head down onto the right side of his chest, the side not arguing his mortality with cracked ribs, and she listened to his heartbeat and thought, Not then either.
*
“…police were already on their way, called in to assist a member of the staff having trouble with a customer. The assumption is that the two incidents aren’t connected, as a preliminary investigation by the fire marshal suggests the cause of the fire that destroyed the restaurant was most likely an exploding gas range. The customer is assumed to be among the nine dead. The fire marshal had no comment on why the fire seemed to be contained within the restaurant, not spreading to the surrounding buildings or the apartment upstairs.”
Vicki gently leaned the bathroom door against the slightly scorched wall of her still-empty office and released the crushed handle. She had a comment. She had a few comments. Most of them involved profanity.
*
“The words engraved on the lamp appear to be the spell that contained the jinn. It seemed the…” Dr. Hariri paused, rubbed tired eyes, and sighed. “…wizard who imprisoned him wanted to ensure the jinn could be re-imprisoned should it escape.”
“Just what I wanted to hear.” Vicki patted the lamp. “How does it work?”
“T
he words are inscribed in a circle…” He moved a book from the closest tottering pile on his desk and flipped it open to a tabbed page. “…sorry, carved in a circle. The lamp is placed in the centre of the circle. The jinn is summoned. That’s another spell… wait…” He yanked at a piece of paper protruding from the bottom book.
Vicki caught top three books as they fell.
“I had to call in few favours.” The notes had been written in three different colours of ink. “Fortunately, I have a colleague at Istanbul University cataloguing their ancient literature collection. Took her about four hours, but she was able to put her hand on what I needed. I was fairly certain I’d read a reference to it in a 1930s dissertation, but eighty years later, there’s no telling where the manuscript might have gotten to. It was written by…”
“Dr. Hariri.”
He blinked.
“The spell?”
“Right. We had to fill in a few words with frog DNA… That’s a Jurassic Park joke.”
“I know.”
“It’s just you’re a little young for… Never mind. Problem is, the spell won’t work.”
“Because of the frog DNA?”
“No, that should hold. It was synonyms mostly. It’s because…” Pulling on a pair of white cotton gloves, he opened a book even Vicki could tell was ancient. “…you don’t have an angel.”
“I’m sorry?”
“In the Koran, jinn, humans, and angels make up the three known sapient creations of God. As jinn predate the Koran, I suspect the word angel actually refers to one of the lesser gods who helped humanity lock away certain troublemaking jinn.”
“Okay. How do we summon this lesser god?”
“We don’t. We can’t. Mythology is not reality, Ms. Nelson. It doesn’t matter anyway because the angel…” Dr. Hariri touched the text with a white cotton finger. “…approached the wizard.”
“Wonderful.” She swept her gaze around the room—at the books, at the papers, at the lamp. “All right. Back to square one. What does the lamp actually say?”
“Place me in the centre of words carved round—then there’s the words.” He traced the etched lettering. “And after… Summon the jinn to be sealed with immortal blood.”
“Say again.”
“Summon…”
“After that.”
“Sealed with immortal blood?”
“Thank you, Dr. Hariri, you’ve been a great help.” She picked up the lamp and the summoning spell and frowned down at the paper. “Could you write this out phonetically?”
*
“He’s buying one of the last of the old warehouses on the waterfront.” Eddie Ease twitched in Vicki’s grip. “Said he needed room to build a palace. He doesn’t want to deal with the city, so I’m acting as his agent.”
“He’s not a he,” Vicki growled.
“Yeah, well, that’s his choice isn’t it?”
To be fair, Vicki acknowledged, it was.
*
Vicki was impressed the jinn had found real estate in the Lower Donlands that hadn’t already been gentrified. But then, jinn. It could be convincing in ways other buyers couldn’t.
The bulk of the warehouse had been given over to storage—a huge, two story space with high windows and a stained concrete floor. The security lights provided an artificial dusk, plenty of light for Vicki to carve the words from the lamp into the enormous circle she’d drawn on the floor with a tire iron, a rope, and a piece of sidewalk chalk. Not her first rodeo—approximately a circle wouldn’t do. Retrieving the tire iron and setting the lamp in its place, she began gouging out the words of the spell as quickly as accuracy allowed, the concrete rolling up like lines of chunky orange peel. It was almost eleven. She didn’t have all night.
At two forty-three, she straightened, cracked her back, and moved to stand beside the lamp, paper in one hand, knife in the other, prepared to read the summoning.
“As if I wouldn’t know you were here.” The pillar of fire moved around the outside of the circle. “As if I wouldn’t feel words of binding in a space I’d claimed as my own.”
Probably for the best. Her French accent sucked; her phonetic Aramaic could only be worse.
“Do you assume you’re safe from me, Nightwalker, there inside the words you carved?”
“Talking pillar of fire,” Vicki pointed out. “I’m not assuming anything.”
“Clever meat sack.” It advanced toward her, crossing the spell.
Sealed with immortal blood was a little unspecific regarding the necessary volume. Figuring too much beat too little, she drew the blade of the knife across her left forearm, then her right, hissed at the pain, and, about to be engulfed by fire, took the fight to the jinn, throwing her arms around the flames.
It screamed.
And it burned.
Vicki screamed and hung on.
The flames became a lion, fetid breath in her face as teeth tore at her shoulder.
The lion became a snake, length looped around her, her ribs cracking.
Through the pain, she wondered if she’d wandered into the wrong story. Or if the sidhe were jinn seen through a different geography and culture.
The snake became a fucking enormous crow with a beak like a pickax.
Tentacles…
Then a man. Broad shouldered, dark eyed, skin slippery with her blood. “I can give his youth back to you, Nightwalker.” It smiled knowingly. “I can give you two or three times the years he has remaining. Delay the time you’ll spend in darkness without him.”
What would she give to delay Mike’s death? To delay watching him die?
If she changed him, she’d lose him the way Henry had lost her. Vampires were apex predators and they did not, could not, share a territory. Not that it mattered, Mike would never agree to the change. He’d made that profanely clear on more than one occasion.
If the jinn changed him, made him young again…
…she’d lose him the moment he realized she’d made the decision for him. It might be worth the risk with someone else; his youth restored, she could wait a year or two while he dealt with the betrayal of his trust. But that wasn’t something Mike would, or could, forgive.
She knew what the future held. He’d lose his strength. Muscles weaken. Bones grow fragile. Hands that now touched her with passion would turn to swollen joints and tremors. If he was lucky, his heart would fail before the rest of his body wore out a piece at a time. She would watch, forever thirty-four, as he diminished.
Died.
Rotted.
The last anchor to her humanity gone. No one left who’d known her before. No one left to say enough.
Did it matter if he never forgave her as long as he had a few more years before death claimed him?
Yes.
Because it wasn’t about Mike. It was about her. Always had been.
Mike would live the life he chose, and she would love him for however long that lasted. When he died—at the end of a mortal span or next Thursday while trying to bring in a couple of Scarborough gangbangers—she would mourn him. She would weep and she would rail and she would paint herself with the blood of the undeserving. Of the dark dregs of society who dared to live when he was dead.
And then she’d stop because she was Vicki fucking Nelson, and if she was strong enough to watch the man she loved wither, if she was strong enough to watch him go into the ground because that was what he wanted, then she was strong enough to do what she had to.
“Make a wish, Nightwalker.”
Her lips drew back. “You have nothing I want,” she snarled and slammed her forehead into his nose.
He swore as he jerked back, eyes wide, nose bleeding.
Tossed his head, became fire again as a drop of blood fell…
…and hit the lamp.
Vicki stumbled, arms empty, a little faint from pain and blood loss.
Sealed with immortal blood.
“Points for originality,” she muttered, touching the growing lump on her fore
head. “Also, ow.”
Licking her own arms, as undignified as it felt, put the coagulant in her saliva to work, and by the time she’d eradicated the spell—not the sort of thing she wanted left lying around, that never ended well—the bleeding had stopped. A spray bottle of bleach took care of the DNA evidence—splatters of blood on a torn-up floor would be investigated sooner or later. Probably later given the backlog in the labs Mike kept complaining about, but no point in being careless.
The lamp… Three wishes and, after, the jinn would still be confined.
Glass falling.
Mike thrown through a window.
And the sort of metaphysical S.O.B. who thought nothing of lives lost.
She picked the up the lamp, holding it carefully so as to keep from even suggesting the faintest possibility of a rub. The brass felt warm, satin smooth, and smelled alive. She touched it to her cheek… bit through her lip and wrapped the sneaky fucking thing carefully in three layers of green plastic garbage bags.
*
It was five thirty-seven. Sunrise was at seven twenty-five. She should wake Mike so they could spend at least part of that two hours together, both of them conscious. She’d fed on the way home—another packet of drug money donated anonymously to Covenant House—the edge taken off before Mike insisted on them reaffirming he was alive. For however much longer he had.
He threw an arm up over his head, the sheet slipping down around his waist. The grey threaded through the thick mat of his chest hair turned silver in the predawn light.
Maybe watching him sleep was a little creepy.
Vicki slipped out of her clothes and slid into bed on his right side, tucking her face into the curve of neck and shoulder, listening to his heartbeat, lips against his pulse.
The lamp was downstairs in her basement crypt, safely hidden.
Not the least bit tempting…
Author’s Note
Since her change, Vicki hasn’t used a gun, but since I wrote this for an anthology that included guns as part of the theme, I had to come up with a reason for her to change that. Giant snakes seemed like a decent reason.