Inside, Jules had more of the potion, which he used to mark out a path: from the front door, into the parlor, where more marks funneled the path to a circle in the middle of the floor.
“Are we sure we want to be doing this inside?” I said. Inside this very old house made of dry and flammable wood, I didn’t need to add.
“We want it in a confined area,” Jules said.
At least no one lived here.
Jules paused in his work. “Here’s my problem. I’m a scientist. We’re in the business of studying these phenomena. Investigating, collecting data, analyzing. We’re not in the business of doing battle with them. We’re not exorcists or crusaders.”
“Maybe we should be,” Tina said, leaning on the rickety banister near the foyer, regarding our handiwork rather than addressing anyone in particular. “You remember that house in Savannah? The two-hundred-year-old cottage that was supposed to be haunted by a murdered little girl? We recorded some sounds but didn’t find anything definitive, like what usually happens. But I felt something. The place was old, and more than just one little girl had died there. The old woman who lived in the house was scared, really scared. She lived by herself on a tiny income, didn’t have any family, and couldn’t afford to move. She lived every day in fear that this spirit wanted to harm her. Maybe she was just paranoid, but if I could have done anything to convince her that the house wasn’t haunted, or that we’d found a way to drive the spirit out, I would have. Who knows? If this works, maybe we’ll discover there’s a market for this sort of thing. We’ll go from Paradox PI to Paranormal Exterminators.”
I shook my head. “I so wish I was recording this. Are you guys recording this? The birth of a new show?”
Tina smiled. “If we start a new show, you’ll be the first to know. I promise.”
Hardin arrived with her fire truck, as well as a couple of patrol cars; her people had blocked off the street, to keep innocents from intruding, and to keep watch in case anything should happen. Like what? We all kept asking. If we knew, we’d be able to plan a little better.
The detective marched into the house, lit cigarette in one hand, cup of steaming Starbucks in the other, and announced, “I can’t decide if I want something to happen to prove I’m not nuts, or if I don’t want anything to happen because of the mess it would make,” she grumbled. “But if I hear my boss humming the I Dream of Jeannie theme one more time, I’ll kill him.”
Daaaaa-dum, da dum da dum dum...
“Great, now you’ve got it stuck in my head,” I said. The music was way too jolly for this situation.
“American television,” Jules hmphed derisively.
Everyone took their places. Hardin, Gary, and their people waited outside. Ben was stationed near the door of the parlor with a fire extinguisher. Jules was waiting outside the circle in the parlor. Tina and I were by the front door. Playing bait. That was the plan: Announce our presence, summon it, like had happened the other times, then piss it off enough that it would stumble into the trap.
“I still don’t like this,” Ben muttered for the umpteenth time. “I don’t like you putting yourself in the way of this thing.” His expression had gone taut and snarly. He was pacing back and forth along the wall like a wolf in a cage. I didn’t point this out to him, since I was doing the same thing.
“I’m not putting myself in the way of anything, yet. Besides, I’m beginning to think it’s way too smart for us,” I said. “It’s probably not going to come anywhere near here and is off killing people somewhere.” Hardin had one of her people in touch with the 911 dispatchers. If there was any emergency in the city that had anything to do with fire, we’d hear about it when they did.
We really needed to come up with a djinn detector. Something that would tell us exactly where it was, so we could go after it. Because that sounded like a good idea.
Jules shook his head. “All the evidence suggests that this thing is tied to you and has been watching you. It won’t stop now.”
“Since when did you know so much about it? I thought you were the rationalist in the bunch,” I grumbled, unfairly. He was only trying to help.
“Even magic follows rules,” he said.
This was true. Vampires burned in sunlight, silver was poison to lycanthropes, and the right spells controlled a demon like this djinn. All that was fact. Rational. Just a whole different kind of rational.
“Right,” Tina said, brushing her hands on her jeans. “Let’s get started.”
She retrieved a box from a bag shoved in the corner: the Ouija board again. I wasn’t sure I was ready to call this part of the plan rational. She set it up on the floor inside the open front door, within sight of the gap in the protective circle. Sitting cross-legged before it, she gestured me to join her. We sat with the board between us.
Ben stalked menacingly behind us, fire extinguisher in hand.
Tina rubbed her hands before setting her fingers on the planchette. I didn’t want to touch it. I knew I’d feel some kind of spark, an electric shock, and I wasn’t sure I could handle it.
She didn’t look like a medium performing a séance. She had none of the closed eyes, relaxed breathing, and meditative stance that were supposed to happen. Hunched over, braced and glaring, she looked like someone preparing to do battle.
“Come on, come on,” she murmured but wouldn’t say what she was thinking, what she was doing to call this thing besides sitting there, glaring at the board. I figured it was more likely to burst into flames than talk to her.
Nothing happened.
We waited. The house creaked, a normal sound of old, settling wood, something shifting in a breeze that rattled outside, shushing through vegetation. To tell the truth, I had almost forgotten that the house was supposed to be haunted. This might have been spooky if I wasn’t so worried about the djinn.
“What’s happening, Tina?” Jules asked in a hushed voice.
“Nothing is happening,” she answered around gritted teeth.
I started pacing. “It’s too smart for this. It’s not going to walk into our trap.” But if it wasn’t here, where was it? What part of the city was it burning down this time?
Frustrated, I went to the front door. My pacing carried me right through it. Ben called after me, a warning. I didn’t stop. I went to the end of the walk and looked up and down the street.
The breeze picked up, and I caught a scent.
That scent was now so deeply buried in my memory that I’d never associate it with anything else. Years from now, the barest hint of it would bring all this to the front of my mind: fire, fresh ash, smoke-tinged air, sulfur, brimstone.
The shrubs around me—overgrown, climbing, tangled, and dried out from a hot summer—ignited. Towering flames appeared with no warning, no opening spark or ember, and roared into the sky. I was caught in the inferno.
Strangely, my fear was an undercurrent, buried. Because what I was mostly thinking then was gotcha.
The quiet, late-night world erupted with noise. Sirens from down the street came to life, and behind me Tina was yelling, “Kitty, get in here, get behind the line!”
The fires weren’t stopping here. Flames leapt from shrubs to trees along the street, to trees at the next house. It was only a matter of moments before the houses would ignite. I was glad Hardin had brought along the fire department.
I turned and ran to the front door of the house. Then I stumbled, falling to my hands and knees when my heart clenched. Like something reached in and squeezed, and it was hot, burning, like a fever. Sweat broke out over my skin. I felt heat from the fire around me, from the burning within. I groaned—it was Wolf squealing through a human throat.
Tina and Ben were at the front door, yelling at me. Five steps. I could do this.
I hauled myself to my feet and stumbled up the house’s porch. The flames behind me seemed to growl, but I didn’t have time to stop and growl back. I ran, over the threshold and across the line of potion we’d drawn on the floor. Ben’s and Tina’
s hands were on me, helping me.
A flare, like an explosion of fireworks, burst in through the front door with me, singeing my hair and clothing. Instinctively, we screamed, raising our arms to shield our heads, falling back, scrambling out of the way—
I felt no heat. The searing flames around me, the fire gripping my heart, all of it was gone now. I was safe, behind the stripe of blackish goo painted on the floor. On the other side of that barrier, hand-sized tongues of flame danced on century-old floorboards.
Ben leapt forward. I grabbed him, calling, “No, stay back!” But he didn’t cross that magical line. He fired the spray from the fire extinguisher over it. The flames vanished, leaving behind blackened streaks and the smell of scorched hardwood.
Something made a growling sound. It might have been a natural creaking in the house, or a distant rumble of thunder. Except the sky outside was clear. This sounded like a voice, very close by, muttering low, too soft to make out the words, assuming it even spoke in a language I could understand.
Outside, people were shouting, water was spraying from fire hoses into front yards and against houses, and the sirens were still wailing. Inside Flint House, though, was oddly still.
We braced, waiting for the flames to overtake us. My heart hurt, it raced so hard, bruising my ribs from the inside. My skin prickled, my shoulders bunched, fur and hackles. Wolf snarled from my hindbrain. Adrenaline kicked the need to Change into overdrive.
Ben gripped my shoulder, his fingers like claws. I touched his hand.
“What’s happening?” Jules said, low and urgent, from the next room.
“It’s here,” Tina said. “It’s looking right at us.” We stared at the doorway, where the fire had followed me, but saw nothing.
I squared my shoulders, took a breath, and wondered if this was what bungee jumping felt like. You couldn’t think of all the things that could go wrong as you stood on the edge of the precipice and looked over; you just had to take that step and trust.
“Kitty,” Ben said, his voice low, almost a growl. His hand twitched on my shoulder.
Squeezing it, I pushed it away. “Just be ready with that fire extinguisher.”
I stepped over the dark line on the floor.
All remained still. I could look through the front door and see fires still burning outside, but the fire department had those under control. By all appearances, the thing had fled, but Tina said it was still here, and I believed her.
“Hey!” I called out, venting my anger at the flames for lack of a better target. “You son of a bitch, where the hell do you get off setting fire to my city? Not to mention killing people. I’d have thought some ancient fire demon like you would have better things to do than harass me. Don’t you have a lamp somewhere that needs redecorating?”
A voice spoke words I didn’t understand, and a furnace engulfed me. Like leaving an air-conditioned house and entering a summer desert. It was supposed to be autumn, but I’d never felt so hot. The heat rumbled like a furnace pumping full-force. I heard words in the noise, but I couldn’t understand them.
This was what was supposed to happen. This was what I wanted. I ran.
My clothes might have been on fire, but I couldn’t stop. Ben and the others might have been shouting at me, but I couldn’t concentrate to hear what they might have said. Any moment, I expected to fall, to be engulfed by the thing that chased me, to be smothered in foam from the fire extinguisher, or any other of a thousand things that could happen. But none of that did. I trusted that the thing followed me, keeping to the path we’d put in place. It had to be following me, because the air was so hot I couldn’t breathe. Or maybe I was burning up, like Mick had.
Ahead of me, Jules shouted, his eyes wide with panic, urging me on like I was running a race. I sprinted into the next room, crossed the dark line drawn on the floor, and slammed shoulder first into the opposite wall, because I didn’t bother slowing down. My clothes were smoking, my skin was red.
Jules leapt forward with a jar of the blood potion, splashing it across the floor in a messy arc that managed to close off the circle painted in the room.
Inside the circle drawn in blood, the floor caught fire, exploding up in a column of flame that reached the ceiling. No little flickering campfire, this. This was the inferno of a forest fire, right in front of us.
Jules and I fell back, curling up for protection while the fire merrily burned on the hardwood. Tina and Ben appeared at the doorway. Ben had his fire extinguisher in hand and sprayed the conflagration. The foam streamed, then sputtered, then died. Empty. He went to grab for another one.
Tina stared at the fire with an expression of awe. Shielding my eyes, I looked into the light.
A figure stood in the midst of the fire, wavering, like a distant shape lost in a heat mirage. Far from harming it, the flames seemed to give it form: indistinct limbs, definite torso, and a strange face that kept changing. Its body hunched over, arms bent and fists clenched, ready to launch into a fight. It hovered, snarling. This was the figure we’d seen in the video footage from the New Moon séance. The ifrit, manifesting to confront us properly.
The room filled with the scent of flaming disaster, we were surrounded with searing heat, but the floor, though scorched black, was no longer burning. We all just stood there looking at each other.
“Er, now what?” Ben said. He had a new extinguisher, but like the rest of us, when confronted with the humanoid figure, he could only stare.
The thing spoke, in Arabic I assumed, the same clipped language from the video. Though I couldn’t understand the words, I understood the emotion behind it: anger. The djinn raised a fist, gestured, its whole body lurching with the motion of its tirade. It ranted at all of us, looking back and forth between us. Like we’d kicked its dog or walked on its lawn.
The stories, the lore, said that djinn were like people in all ways but what they were made of. They had families, jobs, their own societies, all invisible to us. They felt all human emotions, love, grief, joy, anger. They prayed. This was a person standing before us. I may not have understood that until now, when it was yelling at me in rage.
I couldn’t go soft on it. This thing had killed Mick.
My job wasn’t over yet. This barrier wouldn’t hold it forever. If it didn’t burn down through the floor, it might go up through the ceiling. The whole house might burn down around us. We had to finish this, which meant I had to distract it while Tina and Jules worked.
I called, “Hey, shut up a minute! I’m not finished telling you off! God, what a jerk.” I didn’t know if it understood English. But the same way I recognized its anger, I was pretty sure it recognized mine. Sure enough, it turned. Were those yellow shadows within the orange flames its eyes? The spots flickered at me, as if blinking.
It may not have understood me. I was guessing not, since it fired back a stream of Arabic, probably with as much rudeness as I’d flung at it. We should have brought along a translator. I was a little sad that we couldn’t talk this out. Not that we ever had a chance of that.
I didn’t wait for it to finish before continuing. “I don’t understand why something as powerful as you would let yourself be controlled by a bunch of idiots like the Band of Tiamat. Even if they are run by a vampire.”
It chuckled. The light sound, like sparks crackling in a piece of wood, couldn’t be anything else. It was a condescending laugh, clearly suggesting I didn’t know what I was talking about. True enough.
I focused on it. To even let my gaze flicker to the others to check their progress would be to draw attention to them. But it wasn’t like I’d ever had a problem running my mouth off at someone before.
“I think you can’t possibly be such hot shit if you let yourself get trapped with a little bit of paint.”
It roared, starting softly and letting the sound grow. The sound turned into a word.
“Bitch.”
Note to self: Never assume a person speaking a foreign language can’t understand what you’re
saying.
Tina started yelling, “Thus by a spark the power that binds you is destroyed. Be banished now and never bother us henceforth!”
It was a formal, archaic, and definitely mystical speech, exactly the sort of thing found in a magical grimoire, and I had no idea if Tina had found the chant in such a place, or if she made it up, or if she was channeling some other spirit, some other power that she’d called on to help us here.
She held a bottle—she’d finally decided on the kind used to hold powerful acids in a chemistry lab, pint-sized, made of thick brown glass with a heavy rubber cork—over the edge of the boundary, its mouth pointed toward the djinn. Jules put a lighter to a small bundle of hemp tied up with my hair, which he held over the mouth of the bottle with a pair of tongs. The fibers lit immediately, glowing hot red and sending up a tendril of black smoke.
Tina repeated the chant, with variations but with the same meaning, commands of banishment, of release. The djinn turned to look, the flames surrounding it swaying in another direction, sparks licking out behind it. Jules blew on the smoke from the burning hair, so it drifted forward and mingled with the flames writhing around the djinn.
An odd thing happened.
The line of smoke from the burning hair shifted direction and began to move into the jar, as if sucked in by a tiny vacuum or draft of air. The flowing smoke began pulling the djinn with it.
Realizing what was happening, the figure inside the flames flinched back, flailing its arms, like a swimmer fighting against a riptide. It shouted with its furnace-and-flamethrower voice, begging while it gasped.
A burst of light threw me to the floor. I curled up, covered my face with my arms, convinced something had exploded and the house would now fall down around us, killing me, Ben, everyone. Our rapid healing wouldn’t help us if our whole bodies fried first. My nose was dead, unable to smell anything, unable to tell me where Ben had fallen. I thought I had seen him for a split second, holding the fire extinguisher up as a shield, flung away from the circle as I was, a silhouette against the atomic flare. The sound—this must be what the inside of a star sounded like, a constant nuclear explosion times a thousand.
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