Jack and Djinn

by Amber Sweetapple

  Miriam stopped walking, finally, and looked up into Ben’s eyes. She saw glimpses of the Ben she had first met, and that decided her. “Fine, Ben. You can take me to the gas station. But if you lay a hand on me, or yell at me, I swear…”

  “I won’t, I promise.” He was grinning happily, and she wondered if maybe he had changed after all. He opened the passenger side door for her and closed it behind her, slid behind the wheel and pushed the manual gear shifter into 1st, but didn’t release the clutch, just stared at her with a strange look on his face.

  She never saw it coming. There was a flash of silver and a brief burst of pain at her temple, and the gaping maw of unconsciousness swallowed her whole.

  * * *

  Jack sat in his apartment, idly flicking channels on the TV, a nearly empty bottle of Jameson next to him.

  Empty, like his heart. The thought was melodramatic, but he didn’t care. He had tried convincing himself there were other women in the world, but it hadn’t worked. There weren’t other women in the world, not like Miriam. Not because of the thing with the fire and the healing and all that, but because she was…amazing. Jack lifted the bottle to his lips and drained the rest of the Jameson in a long gulp, relishing the burn in his throat. A burning throat, a wild, dizzy drunk, those were feelings he could deal with. The cracking of his heart he couldn’t. She had just…walked away, gone with that pig, Ben. He didn’t deserve her. She was so kind and so sweet and so beautiful, and Ben was…god, so awful. Jack had trouble understanding what she’d ever seen in Ben besides his looks. Sure he was like 6’4” and 250 pounds of solid muscle and rugged good looks, and he wore the uniform like he was born in it. Women loved men in uniforms. Stupid. Nothing that special about a uniform. It didn’t make the guy wearing it any less of a giant dick, did it? Jack worked himself into a rage.

  He wanted to get on his bike and go to Ben’s apartment and lay into him, maybe bring Doyle and Johnny with him and teach Ben a lesson. Jack stood up, wavered on his feet and realized that maybe getting on his bike wouldn’t be the best plan just yet. And besides, his bike was still MIA anyway. He shut off the TV and stumbled to his bed, fell across it sideways, wanting to crawl the rest of the way in, but somehow he just couldn’t, his limbs wouldn’t work and the room was spinning in crazy circles. He passed out, managing to roll over on his side, just in case.

  Jack didn’t often dream. Or at least, he didn’t usually remember them. This night, however, was different. At first he thought he’d woken up. He was standing in his the doorway of his room looking out into the living room; in real life his stack of paintings was by the counter of his kitchen, turned so he could see them. That was the first hint that he was dreaming: the paintings were on the adjacent wall. The next odd thing was that the painting he’d done of the candle flame was in front, when he knew for a fact it was near the back of the stack. Jack felt drawn to the painting, pulled toward the candle flame as if he were a moth. His feet didn’t move, the flame tugging him to itself with irresistible magic, and then he was standing in front of it and he could swear the flame was flickering and giving off heat. He stretched a hand out and felt a breath of hot air brush his knuckles, and yes, the flame was moving, twisting and dancing on the canvas, jumping and bending in hypnotic gyration, sucking him in to it, closer and closer, the form of the flame looking ever more like a woman dancing, graceful curves undulating, long hair waving and skirling, like Miriam’s hair; the flame turned and grew and stood before him, took on shoulders and legs, hands and breasts, hips and eyes, limpid glowing brilliant fiery brown eyes exactly like Miriam’s…no, not exactly like, but actually hers, boring into him with the tender affection so unique to her that melted him every time. He wanted to touch her, the fire-girl, the fire-Miriam; he tried to step closer to her but his feet were frozen, his hand was fixed half-stretched and she shook her head, curled a finger at him, beckoning. Jack would follow her anywhere, felt his spirit drifting after her as she floated away, the canvas now empty as the Miriam-flame coruscated in the midnight dark, blowing through the window and out over the silent suburbs, Jack pulled behind as if connected to her by a string. The image of a string refused to leave Jack’s dreaming mind, and suddenly there was a string between him and Miriam, a rope of luminous golden particles of sand stretching from his chest to hers, each speck brilliant as a miniature sun, shifting like billowing flames and radiating power. The skein of magic was a tangible thing: Jack wrapped his hands around it where it entered his chest, felt its familiar catalytic energy, brushing his soul with shades of Miriam. The magic was Miriam, and he followed it even after she was out of sight over rooftops. His hands were coated with the magic, and lifted his fingers to his lips, licked the magic from them, and he tasted Miriam, saw her face burst into his mind and fill his thoughts, not the fire-carved creature but the real, physical person, the flesh-and-blood woman. She wasn’t looking at him, in this vision; she was asleep, her face pressed against a car window, her neck contorted in an obviously uncomfortable position. Jack focused on her and realized she wasn’t asleep, she was unconscious, a thin trickle of blood weeping from a scabbed gouge at her temple, thick strands of brown hair escaping from her braid and sticking to the blood. Jack reached for her, needing to wipe the blood away, needing to cradle her in his arms. His hands neared her skin, and the vision broke.

  Jack woke with a start. He was lying down, his face pressed against a cold, hard, gritty surface. He was shivering, the air around him chilled by silence. He rolled over to his back, his head throbbing, his eyes crusted shut. He was outside, somehow. He pried his eyes open to see the night sky above him, black shadows of clouds illuminated by a crescent moon. Where was he? Jack struggled to a sitting position and looked around, a string of curses tumbling from his mouth. He was on a rooftop, the flat, gravel-strewn surface of an office building of some sort, twisting barrels of air-conditioning fans sprouting from the roof and cable TV satellites angling at the sky. He stood up and brushed his knees and backside and elbows clean of gravel, picking bits of rock free from where it was embedded in his face. He stretched his stiff muscles and went to the edge of the roof, looking for landmarks to tell him where he was. The obvious question of how he had gotten there was nagging at him, but he refused to answer it yet. He suspected the truth, but wasn’t ready to face that weirdness yet. Dozens of stories below him was an empty street, a few parked cars on the side, yellow lines stretching in either direction. Other office buildings rose up around him as far as he could see, except to the east, where he could just make out the Detroit River sparkling fragments of moonlight. He was downtown, somehow. He turned in place, examining the skyline, recognizing a few buildings. It was quite a view, actually, way up here. Jack cursed again, and sat down with his back against the half-wall at the building’s edge.

  The dream hadn’t been entirely a dream, then, it seemed. Miriam had demonstrated more than once that she possessed some rather unique abilities, but they’d always happened when he was with her. He’d dreamed about her before, but those dreams had been…different. He may have wished they were real, but they hadn’t been. Those dreams were nothing more than lovesick wet dreams; whatever it was that he had experienced after he passed out in his apartment had been far more. But why?

  He pushed aside his obviously-mistaken ideas of real versus impossible and tried to reason through this conundrum with an open mind. There was something else. Something nagging and familiar, subtle and just beneath the surface of the obvious. What was it? Jack’s mind wandered to the dream that had landed him here, thinking of the stream of glowing dust that had connected him to the dream-Miriam, and he realized with a rush of excitement what it was nagging at him: beneath the flames, subsumed by the heat and the flickering fire and the glimpses he’d gotten of Miraim’s glorious body, beneath all that was that same golden magic-sand, covering his whole body as if he’d bathed in it, a coating of dust that led from him, to Miriam. He’d seen it even before that night, too; when he’d laid his bike down t
o avoid hitting her, she’d healed him. He’d been unconscious for most of it, but when he first came to consciousness he’d cracked his eyelids open to see Miriam facing Ben, her body alight, and trailing from her to him, the skein of magic.

  Maybe there was a connection between them all the time, present but not always visible? Jack’s eyes popped open, and he looked down at himself, disappointed to see just himself, plain old Jack in ratty, paint-splattered, grease-stained jeans and an Irish Football Association T-shirt. He closed his eyes again, and this time visualized himself as he was at that moment, but with a river of glowing gold stretching out from his body, and he pictured that stream of gold reaching out over the city and through the suburbs to wherever Miriam was. Some instinct in Jack told him she was hurting, needing him. Maybe it wasn’t instinct, though, maybe it was the connection that bound them, the as-yet unspoken love between them. He summoned the image of her magic again, envisioned it floating from across the city to plunge into him, showing him Miriam.

  He opened his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief: the skein was there at the center of his chest, stretching out across Detroit, skirting buildings and spearing through others. He lifted a hand and waved it through the amorphous stream of particles, like sunlit dust floating in an afternoon window; his hand came away coated with it again, as in his dream, and he touched his fingers to his tongue, tasted Miriam.

  He saw her again, in his mind, although his eyes were open. It was disorienting: he saw the city beyond him, a few streetlights flickering, silent streets like a maze, and over that he saw Miriam, still slumped against the car window, trickle of blood now dried and crusted. Jack saw a male hand on a gear shifter, caught glimpses of a neighborhood passing in the window. Something told Jack he was seeing Miriam in real-time.

  Gramps had always told Jack that he had the Second Sight too; perhaps that’s the reason he could see the magic, now. Jack never wanted to believe in Gramps’ visions of the future. It was freaky and unnatural, and Jack would rather just deal with what he could understand. Now, though, with all that had occurred with Miriam, he simply couldn’t pretend everything was totally normal anymore.

  He had to find Miriam and help her; the only way he’d be able to do that is if he allowed himself to believe in the Second Sight, and that he had it, and that he could use it.

  Jack closed his eyes yet again, and focused on Miriam’s face.

  Chapter 15: Now

  Carson was close. He could feel it. The tumbling of facts and theories had slowed, and pieces were falling into place to create an image of a possible truth. He was still missing a couple of major pieces, but some thing told him he was closing in on those too. He had an abandoned vehicle way up near Grayling, licensed to Miriam al-Mansur. There were no witnesses, although a farmer had reported seeing a girl walking down the road near dusk. She’d gotten into a red sports car, the farmer said. Carson cross-checked his files and discovered that Benjamin Omar was the registered owner of a red Maserati; the strange part was that none of the high-end sports car dealerships in the Metro-Detroit area had any record of Benjamin Omar having purchased one. A few further phone calls and emails turned up more nothing. He owned a car he hadn’t bought, there were no stolen car reports, and a background check on Omar showed no connections that would suggest it was black market. Carson set that odd detail aside as not immediately relevant; it was interesting, and set his suspicions to quivering, but it didn’t feel as if it fit into the larger scheme of Ben’s death.

  Carson was back at his desk, back to staring at the file, turning the case over in his head, once again looking for something he’d missed, for the connection from one item to another. Miriam’s car was found way up by North Branch, a long drive from her apartment in Royal Oak. What was she doing up there?

  Séan Byrne had reported that Miriam had left the wedding reception with Ben to stop the fight. Where would they have gone? Ben’s neighbors report not having seen or heard from him since the day before his death, so they hadn’t gone there. Carson pinched the bridge of his nose. He hated playing ‘what if’ with cases; that was Jenn’s territory. Carson hunted down the facts and put them together, he chased the bad guys and collared them. Jenn wasn’t here, however, so Carson was on his own. With no family and no girlfriend, Carson ended up working most Saturdays just to fight off the loneliness. Brokaw from NARC had invited him to a barbecue, but Carson had been to one of Brokaw’s weekend cook-outs before, and he’d ended up getting hammered and passing out in the backyard.

  Carson brushed that memory away; it reminded him all to vividly of his dad passing out in his easy chair, reruns of Matlock playing to an empty house, drowning in a pile of empty Busch Light cans. Don Hale was an alcoholic. Carson wasn’t. Getting wasted once in a while, off duty, that didn’t mean anything. If he was an alcoholic, he’d be drinking all the time, and that wasn’t the case.

  What if Miriam had gone with Ben, as old Séan had said, just to stop the fight; she wouldn’t have gone with him to be with him, not when Séan had spoken of Miriam and Jack as dancing together. He wasn’t clear on the status of Miriam’s relationship with Jack, but it sounded like she had found someone who would treat her better than Ben. But that would make Ben jealous, wouldn’t it? If Ben showed up angry and causing trouble, Miriam might have gone with him just to keep the peace. She’d know how mean Ben could get, and if the fight got nasty enough to where people were getting arms broken, then it just might send Miriam over the edge. So then, she leaves with Ben, but only to get him away. Once she’s alone with him, her own temper might flare. Maybe they argue, and Miriam tries to really get away from Ben, just hops in her car and drives anywhere, heads north. Of course, Ben would follow her, being the jealous type. He’d be upset that she was at a wedding with another man. She runs out of gas, and Ben might convince her to let him take her home. Her car was found on a country road, out in the middle of nowhere, and the farmer had reported seeing her walking about sundown. Out in the boonies, alone, at night, out of gas and upset? Even an angry Ben might seem like the lesser of two evils.

  But then what? This is where Carson hit a wall.

  It would have gotten ugly eventually, Carson figured. If Miriam was going to family weddings with Jack, she must have been pretty well done with Ben. The incident Mrs. Willis had described lent strength to the idea that Miriam was done with Ben, as odd as some parts of Betsy’s story may have been. So Miriam is in a car with an ex-boyfriend who’d put her in the hospital, which meant he’d definitely knocked her around before. The nurse’s testimony confirmed that.

  Carson flipped through the file. He had Ben’s credit card purchase history, pulled when looking for a record of the Maserati; now Carson looked through it again, not really knowing why, but ready to try anything other than more ‘what if.’ Ben had expensive taste: upper-end steakhouses, cigar shops…and a room rental at the MGM Grand Casino and Hotel.

  Carson grabbed his keys and went back to the casino.

  Chapter 16: Then

  Miriam woke up slowly. First came the sensation of consciousness, accompanied by a wave of confusion and nausea and pain. Her head was throbbing, and she had no idea where she was. The last thing she remembered was getting in Ben’s car, and then…what? She had a vision of Ben’s hand flashing out, something silver in his hand, then nothing. He’d hit her, apparently, and knocked her out. Miriam stretched, cracked her eyes open. She wasn’t at her apartment or his, that much was clear: she was lying on a wide bed, an expensive flat-screen TV hung on the opposite wall and floor-to-ceiling windows ran the length of the adjacent wall. Thick carpeting, a leather couch and chair in a sitting area near the windows, a fully stocked minibar…she was in a hotel room. Miriam sat up, or tried to; her head swam and she lay back down. When the dizziness faded, Miriam sat up again, much more gingerly this time.

  She stood up just as carefully and realized she wasn’t wearing her clothes. She had left the house in an old pair of jeans and a hoodie; she was now wearing an expensive s
ilver cocktail dress, scooped low in the front, the hem barely brushing her knees.

  In the forefront of her mind was the question of Ben himself: where was he? She’d seen the madness back in his eyes just before he knocked her out, not just back, but worse than ever. He’d always been good at hiding it unless he was drunk, but he’d seemed stone-cold sober when he showed up next to her on the side of the road. Seeing her with Jack must have pushed him. Either way, she knew she had to get away before he came back. She was barefoot, and the thought of running away on bare feet didn’t appeal to her, but it was better than still being here when Ben came back. He had something planned, and she had no desire to find out what.

  She had her hand on the doorknob, but before she could leave the door opened and Ben entered, followed by a hotel employee pushing a room service cart. Ben took the cart from him, gave him a $20 and shoved him out the door.