“Well, I’m probably fired,” she muttered darkly. “But no, I’m going to be late for coffee with May unless I get a move on.” Emily dropped her hands, and regarded him steadily. “So those things won’t come back?”
“They will not.” Or I will attend to them.
“Do you promise?” She slid for the side of the bed, and despite the care with which he had transmuted the sheets and blankets around her sleeping form, he could not tell if she was wearing anything other than the camisole.
“I do,” he managed. There was some kind of obstruction in his throat.
Two slim bare feet, two long, pale, lightly muscled legs, and he found out she wore breeches cut indecently short to allow freedom of movement. What in the world had happened to nightgowns, as the women of Cavnaugh’s time wore? This display was… He had never, never had this manner of reaction to a bearer before.
“You made a whole house? With all my stuff?” She picked her way over the carpet, graceful as a gazelle, plucking at the camisole and the small breeches to arrange them more comfortably on her frame. Her breasts moved slightly with every step, just like her curls.
“Each of your possessions is safely…” He lost the thread of the sentence, for her knee was still scratched. There was a gemming of dark blood-beads along it, and it occurred to him that he had not repaired that, as he should have. He made a lunging effort to remember what he was saying, his hands itching to move, to touch the scrape and see it vanish along with the dark bruise on her thigh and the one on her right arm. “Safely here. Your chariot—your car, everything.”
“Holy wow.” She stopped, turned in a complete circle, gazing at the bedroom. There was her battered red alarm clock, a little out of place on the beautiful white nightstand. The prints were still hers, and a fuzzy pink bathrobe was folded neatly on the vanity’s bench, with her almost-threadbare slippers tucked underneath. “You did all this while I was sleeping. Crazy.”
“You are quite sane.” He had no idea what else to say. The breeches hid almost nothing, and he denied himself the urge to look at the fascinating portion of her midriff he could see, the flare of her hindquarters, the—
“I’ve been that way all my life.” Her lip faintly curled, as if she considered it a highly dissatisfying state of being. “But you know what, Hal-the-Genie, my man? I’m beginning to think it’s overrated.” Her phone chirped again. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “I gotta get going. Please tell me you didn’t mess with my clothes.”
“Indeed, I did not—”
“Great. Uh…where are my clothes?”
He pointed at the wardrobe, and found himself watching the sway of her hips as she stalked for it, poking at her phone with her thumb and muttering various imprecations. His jaw was suspiciously loose. He had not expected… By the Ring, how did mortal men bear it? Was this what made them chase the fairer half? He had no recollection of suffering this…distraction…in the dim, gray time before his transformation.
She stopped halfway, glanced over her shoulder at him. “I’m gonna get dressed, do you mind?”
I most certainly do not mind at all. “Ah. Um, no.” He felt for the doorhandle behind him, and just as she lifted the hem of the camisole, meaning to strip it off over her head, he staggered back through the door and shut it with a bang, without even the sense to slide into insubstantiality.
Many Principles
Emily blinked, shading her eyes with one hand. It wasn’t just a house. It was a gigantic whipped-cream pile of overblown Taj Mahal, with a huge honking helping of stained glass. Oh, hell no. But when she brought her chin back down, she found the genie studying her face, and he looked a little…
Well, he looked like a kid really proud of his macaroni artwork but suspecting it wasn’t up to snuff. Even though his mouth was pulled as tight as ever and his hair was all slicked back, his nose was high and proud, and his almost-ugly cheekbones too, a tiny fleeting motion around his dark eyes gave Em a definite sense of uneasy pity.
“Do you like it?” He even sounded eager, for God’s sake. Like an elementary school kid showing you his art, hoping for a good reaction.
“It’s very…big. It’s nice,” she added hastily. “And in Grant Park, too. That’s a good address.” The neighbors are probably furious. Do you think they even notice? She refrained from asking by sheer force of will.
Her Honda looked very small on the tar-black, circular driveway, but it was gleaming as if it had been freshly waxed. The genie meekly got into the passenger’s seat when she told him to, and she had a moment of dry-mouth irrationality before she could open the driver’s side door. She put the key in the ignition, buckled her seat belt, and paused. “Look, don’t do that disappearing shit, okay? Not while I’m driving. Try not to startle me.”
“Yes, mistress.”
Lord help me, I’m in an I Dream of Jeannie reboot. “Just…call me Emily, okay?” In the center of the driveway was a statue that looked vaguely familiar, until she realized she’d seen it at the museum. A Waldroup sculpture in blue metal of a man sitting hunched over, his hand to his head, the lines more fluid than metal should be. The piece breathed resignation and sadness, but it was beautiful, and she’d folded down the page it was on in the museum catalog.
Good God. The sense of being in a dream returned, but she didn’t think pinching herself was a good idea.
“Yes, Emily.” Again, just like a kid. Anxious to please. Hopeful.
Oh, goddammit. She reached for the key again, stopped. “I, uh…look, I was really upset last night. I’m still not too happy about this, but…well, you seem like a nice person. You know? You seem…nice.” Is that all I can say?
That earned her a long, considering look. His chin wasn’t as big as she’d thought before, really, and if he got a haircut his face probably wouldn’t look so…weird. A ghost of a smile touched his tight-drawn lips. “Thank you, Emily.”
“I mean, I’m probably crazy, but if I have to be bazonko nuts, you’re not bad company.” Though I hardly know anything about you.
“Thank you.” That ghost of a smile strengthened a little. “Emily? May I touch your wrist?”
Say what? “Uh.” Her hands were on the wheel, and she darted a glance at the car door. “Sure, I guess. Thank you for asking.”
He reached over, and two fingertips touched the back of her hand.
Em gasped. Warm electricity traveled down her arm, tingled in her fingertips, bolted down her aching side and turned hot on her scraped knee. When he took his hand away, the various aches and nips of pain from last night’s tango with the big hairy things had vanished, and the looming caffeine-withdrawal headache had retreated. “Wow. What was that?”
“I should have attended to your hurts last night. I am…sorry, that I did not.”
“Oh. Okay.” She twisted the key, the engine woke, and she let out a long breath, bracing herself. “Thank you. That’s, ah, very kind of you. Put your seat belt on.”
“What?”
“Your seat belt.” She pulled the strap of her own away from her chest, let it go. The idea of checking to see if the bruise was still on her arm from whapping her bathroom’s threshold was almost overwhelming, but she’d had all the weird she could take just at the moment. I am doing okay with this. Doing really well. Sort of. “Put it on. In case there’s a crash.”
“I cannot be harmed by—” He stopped, shut his mouth with a snap, still watching her. “Is that a command?”
For Chrissake. “No, it’s just a basic precaution. Please put your seat belt on, Mr. Hal.”
It took him a moment, but he figured it out, and when it clicked home Emily nodded. “Thank you. I mean, it doesn’t mean a lot when there’s magic, but it’s the principle of the thing.”
“Do you have many principles, Mistress Emily?”
She dropped the car into drive. “Well, we’re about to find out. Having a genie is probably an acid test for ethics, you know.”
“Is that what you wish to call me? A genie?”
<
br /> “What would you call it?”
He didn’t say anything. The Honda crept cautiously for that huge iron gate, which opened as smooth as silk, the E in the middle suddenly, uncomfortably bisected. Man, this guy doesn’t do anything halfway, does he.
“Mistress Emily.” Almost prissily formal. “I have not had many…principled…bearers.”
“Oh.” Well, crap. It was amazing none of them had nuked the world, for God’s sake. “Guess I’m going to have to be the first, then.” She pulled out onto Forest Park Way, one of the most expensive and narrowest streets in the whole damn city, and tried to remember how to get downtown.
* * *
“You’re late.” May peered over her heart-shaped sunglasses, one hip hitched artfully on a high barstool. Caprasano’s Coffee didn’t have many tables, and the ones they did have you had to climb on mismatched barstools to get to. The place took hipster to new heights, but they roasted the beans on-site and their pastries were works of art. The place smelled of coffee, baked goods, diets blown to smithereens and tubs of chocolate gleefully rubbed all over naked skin.
Well, maybe not the last one, but it was close.
Emily set her purse on the postage-stamp table and unwound her sober, sensible, navy blue knitted scarf. I had to explain the concept of paid parking to a genie. “Rough night.”
“Isn’t that my line?” Her best friend’s cherry-glossed lips pursed, and the scrutiny quickly became uncomfortable. Two lattes—one hazelnut, one ginger, and they always took sips of each others’—sat there, only a little past steaming. The traditional plain croissant—Emily’s—and pain au chocolat—May’s—sat on sugar-dusted plates, and for a moment, it was like being fresh out of college and starving again, both of them pooling tips or whatever quarters they could scrounge out of someone else’s couch cushions to pay for a shared entree somewhere nice.
“What’s wrong?”
“Just…” Emily glanced at the plate-glass window stretching along Fourth Street. “Nothing. Life. That sort of shit.”
I can be invisible, the genie had said. I will merely watch, to protect you.
Her left thumb touched the warm silver band of the ring, pressed against her sweating palm.
May made a small beeping noise and pushed her sunglasses up like a headband, sweeping coppery hair away from her face. Today it was purple glitter eyeliner and striped tights, a knee-length plaid skirt and white buttondown with a vest that belonged in a prep school. She was wearing her oxfords, too, and an unwontedly serious expression. She would probably be able to pull off Catholic-schoolgirl schlock until the day she died. “Wrong answer. You’ve been out of signal since the party. What happened?”
I fell into a fairy tale. “I just got too drunk. Depressed, I guess.” Emily clambered onto her own barstool and pretended interest in her latte. “You know, just life. Plus this cowboy stripper keeps calling me, which I know you have something to do with.”
For once, May didn’t have a snappy comeback. She actually flushed, looking at her own rapidly cooling latte, and the guilty expression was so new that for a moment Emily thought maybe the whole thing was an elaborate prank and May was going to come clean, tell her how her drinks were spiked, and ask for forgiveness. We rigged your apartment—Bert’s a real whiz with lights, you know, and we dressed up some of the guys as werewolves. Crazy, huh?
“So yeah,” May finally said, pushing her plate away a fraction of an inch and turning even redder. “About that. I, uh…you’re gonna kill me.”
“Now why would I do that?” The sinking sensation in her stomach wouldn’t go away. It couldn’t be a prank, could it?
What did it mean that she was suddenly hoping it wasn’t?
“Well…I offered him…to, uh, give you a…a private date, sort of.” May fidgeted on her seat, her fingers jumping like little mice. “I thought, you know, he was supposed to take you home and…”
Emily blinked several times, willing the situation to make sense inside her skull. “You…bought me a boy hooker?”
“No! Nothing like that, he wasn’t… But I said you were repressed and… Christ, Em, I thought it wouldn’t kill you to have a date and he was so nice, he said he understood and—”
“You paid someone to take me on a date?” I can’t decide whether to be relieved or kind of insulted. “Wait. You paid a Canadian stripper to ask me on a date?”
“He’s Canadian?” May looked horrified.
Emily suppressed the desire to put her head down on the tiny table and burst into helpless laughter. Frankly, there wasn’t room. “From Ontario. Did you miss that bit?”
“I didn’t pay him. I just said, you know, you should take my friend out. And he said he’d be happy to, because not everyone could pull off Elvira, and—”
“You asked a stripper to…” Her voice shook. “Only you, May. Christ Jesus, only you.”
“Don’t be mad. It’s just that, ever since Steven—”
“Can we not bring Steven into this?” Laughter won, just barely. Emily clapped a hand over her mouth, rolled her eyes, and tried to hold back the flood.
“Oh, God.” May’s blue eyes shone with tears. “Please, please don’t be mad. I just thought you could use a little, you know—”
Emily waved her free hand, desperately. Her stomach hurt, her own eyes blurred. May probably thought it was fury, because she went dead white except for the crimson patches on her cheeks. It took a while for her best friend to figure out Emily was laughing as messily and completely as a child.
“I just thought you deserved a nice time!” she kept saying, and that sent Emily into fresh cascades of relieved merriment. It was just the sort of alcohol-laced, hilarious generosity May was prone to. At least Ontario Cowboy hadn’t mentioned Emily just vanishing.
That would have been awkward.
Finally, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin, Emily regained some kind of control. Some of the other customers were glancing uneasily at their table, and normally that might have mortified her. Today, though, her mortification-meter was pretty well absent. “Okay.” She managed not to go into a fresh spate of giggles. Her stomach hurt. “Good Lord. Wow.”
“He’s really a nice guy. Saving up for when he goes home, he said. We had a big long conversation, and…” May twisted her own napkin into a fraying rope, a sure sign of nervousness. “You’re not mad? I really… Don’t be mad, okay?”
“I’m amused.” Somewhat grimly amused, but she didn’t have to tell May as much. “I wondered why he was calling, that’s all. You had a long conversation?”
“We both like eighties cartoons. You remember that one with the guy who had the emerald ring, and he and his friends were fighting off giant plants?”
Not at all. “Vaguely.”
“Well, he knew the title.” May’s grin, a little tremulous, was gathering strength. “And we talked about She-Ra and He-Man and Care Bears and—”
Aha. Hang on just one cotton-picking second. “Sounds like you like him.”
“Oh, no.” Instant disagreement. But the lady was protesting a little too much. “He’s not my type. I thought some no-strings-attached might be good for you, and he asked for my number but I gave him yours and said you could use a date—”
“Christ, am I really that pathetic?” Em shook her head. “Don’t answer that.”
“You’re not pathetic. But if you keep locking yourself up and refusing to have any fun your hymen’s going to grow back, and who needs that shit?” May kept twisting the napkin. “So…has he been calling you?”
Huh. She really likes him. “Once or twice. I couldn't talk, I was at work—”
“Work?” May looked perplexed. “Okay, that’s new, when did you get a job?”
I’ve been working since I was fourteen. “I…” Wait a second. The genie.
She hadn’t had him explain just what he’d done to her apartment, and it looked like he’d made a few other changes, too. Great. “I like to be useful,” she said, hoping it was vague enough to
pass muster. “Anyway, I was driving, so I didn’t get a chance to chat. But I’ll call him.”
“You will?” May’s face went through three or four lightning-fast flickers of expression, one after another, settling on a neutral smile. “Good, that’s good. Tell him I said hello.”
“I will.” Em’s brain had begun to work again, and a few things were fitting together. Oh, will I ever. “So. I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages. Tell me everything.” Hopefully, she could pick up a few things around the edges of her best friend’s chatter. She should have thought to question the damn genie more closely.
“Well.” May settled on her barstool, confident again. “So, the party. Omar found Andy and Bert necking in one of the bedrooms, and there was a knock-down drag-out that only ended when Gloria shouted them both down because Omar, you see, has discovered his hetero side again with June—Pascal, not that bitch Diamanti—and Glo knew about it. It’s a good thing the strippers were all so big and burly, because they had to keep everyone separated—”
“Holy crap.” Well, she didn’t have to feel bad about seeing Andy and Bert on the deck and keeping her mouth shut, then. And May was right: the Diamanti woman was a grade-A twatsicle. “Guess I left at just the right time.”
“I guess so.” May didn’t look envious at all. If there was one thing she loved, it was a good session of telling poor old bewildered Em all the gossip. “And Gwynnie—that dishwater with the horrible tattoos—was acting like she was going to pass out, so someone called an ambulance—”
Emily kept nodding and making the right noises, letting the chatter flow around her. All the time, she was busy planning—and making a list of questions for the genie, once May had her fill of attention.
No Way of Telling
Hal hovered uncertainly at the window. Their glass was of very fine quality, and there was so much of it. The luxury was utterly taken for granted, and he wondered if he had overlooked some small but critical items last night. She seemed pleased enough, but had insisted on leaving her car in a gigantic concrete building full of similar conveyances, the floors stacked atop each other high enough to make any mortal dizzy.
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