by Jim Butcher
“Be nice when you whammy the uniforms,” he murmured, eyes closing.
She bent forward, pushed a strand of hair off his forehead, and tried not to notice how much of it was gray. Kissed the damp, exposed skin, nose wrinkling at the scents of so many other people. “I always am.”
The apartment looked more like a junk shop than a residence. Every horizontal surface was piled high with old dishes and magazines and, occasionally, a second horizontal surface, also piled high. Vicki spotted six old rotary phones, a Commodore 64, three waffle makers, and two nearly complete sets of thirty-year-old grocery-store encyclopedias. Lamps, electric and oil; velvet paintings, Elvis and otherwise; and a stack of soup tureens—identified with the help of Downton Abbey. Stepping around a disemboweled vacuum cleaner, she found herself reluctantly impressed that when Mike had been thrown out the window, half the contents of the apartment hadn’t gone with him.
The refrigerator held a liter of milk and an assortment of aging condiments.
In the bedroom, a twin bed had been shoved into a corner; the rest of the floor space was taken up by a maze of bookcases. The contents were eclectic at best.
Vicki could smell dust, a variety of molds, and the fear stink of a human female, recently but not currently present. Her clothes were in the closet. Her toothbrush and medications were in the bathroom. The stack of mail on top of a box labeled CAT TOYS held bills and beg letters and a flyer for a chain hardware store. Vicki took photos of the bills. She found no computer, but a laptop and a phone charger filled some of the limited space on the kitchen counter.
Amy Shaw would be back.
And she’d walk right into the waiting arms of the law—who got enthusiastic about making an arrest when one of their own was attacked.
Vicki wanted a crack at her first. For exponentially the same reason.
She acquired a copy of Amy’s picture from the uniform in the stairwell: slender, mid-thirties, white female, short green hair, dark rectangular glasses, and an apparent fondness for liquid eyeliner. Amy clearly didn’t cook and, without a car, it was unlikely she traveled far to eat. Unfortunately, sunset had been at 8:01. Vicki hadn’t gotten to the hospital until after ten, and there wasn’t a restaurant in the area that stayed open after eleven on a Tuesday. She might be the only person in Toronto who missed January and darkness by five.
For all that she’d bitched about Mike using her as a hunting dog, she couldn’t track the scent of a single woman she didn’t know through Scarborough when that scent was nearly ten hours old. The trail led down the stairs, out the back door, into an alley, along the alley to the sidewalk, and then disappeared under half a hundred footprints. A stranger in the midst of strangers.
With Mike in the hospital, she saw no point in returning to the house they shared in Downsview and drove instead to her office. She caught a familiar scent on the west wind as she got out of the car. A familiar fear. When she was three meters from the entrance to the building, the slender, green-haired woman sitting on the step raised a trembling hand.
“Don’t come any closer.”
Vicki stopped. “Amy Shaw?”
“That depends.”
Sometimes it did. Appearances could be deceiving. Arbitrary identities were far from the strangest things Vicki dealt with.
“Are you Vicki Nelson?”
“I am.”
Amy’s arms tightened around the bundle in her lap. “I need your help.”
Getting both of them inside while maintaining the two-meter distance Amy swore was necessary had been an inconvenience, given the double doors and keyed locks. Fortunately, the building’s other tenants had learned to ignore Vicki and her clients, although most of them weren’t sure why.
“The detective came too close. I warned him, but he didn’t listen.” Leaning against the inside of the office door, Amy gently rocked a roll of purple fabric back and forth. “I don’t like being touched, right? So that’s what I asked for, to make it so no one touches me.”
Vicki perched on the edge of her desk and shoved her office chair across the room. “Sit. And asked who?”
Amy unrolled the fabric—it turned out to be a Ryerson University hoodie—and held up . . .
“A brass gravy boat?”
“It’s a magic lamp. With a genie inside.” Amy frowned, pulled the chair closer, and sat down. “They told me you dealt with the weird stuff.”
“I do,” Vicki sighed. “But hope springs eternal.” With luck, the smell of scorched metal was coming from the lamp and not the building’s wiring. Again. “So, let me see if I understand the situation. You found the lamp.”
“I bought it at a charity yard sale with a handheld vacuum and an old Underwood typewriter. I know a place I can get ribbons. For the typewriter,” she added, when Vicki frowned.
“Okay, sure. When you got it home, you rubbed the lamp.”
“It was really tarnished.”
“Then the genie appeared.”
“Not what I expected.” Amy shook her head. “I mean, even if I’d been expecting a genie—and I wasn’t, right?—I wouldn’t have expected that.”
“What?”
“Fire that didn’t burn.” Her heartbeat sped up. Her breathing grew shallower and faster. “A voice I could hear”—trembling fingers touched her forehead—“in my head not my ears. It said it was a genie and, as I was the owner of the lamp, it would grant me three wishes.”
Fire that didn’t burn would make a fairly persuasive case, Vicki acknowledged. “So, you wanted to not be touched, and the genie interpreted that as ‘Toss anyone who comes within two meters out a window’?”
“Only people intending to touch me!” Amy protested. “Not random people in a crowd.”
She was so defensive, Vicki frowned and wondered if she’d been at Victoria Park station yesterday morning. Two teenage boys had gone off the platform and were nearly killed by the next train. Police had assumed they’d shoved each other. Maybe not.
Amy pushed at her glasses. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.” Arm broken in two places, collarbone broken in one, three cracked ribs, multiple cuts from broken glass, and impressive bruising . . .
“You sure about that? I doubt Detective Celluci intended to touch you.”
“He wanted me to calm down.”
Which might not have put touching entirely off the table. And then Vicki remembered why Mike had been in Amy’s apartment. “You screamed. Why? Was it the genie?”
“It was my second wish.” Her shoulders rose protectively and she curled around the lamp. “I wanted to find something that would make me special.”
Given the state of her apartment, it wasn’t hard to work out what something meant. A lost da Vinci. The Arkenstone. Metal arm with a star on the shoulder. “And did you? What was it?” she asked when Amy nodded. Mike wouldn’t have responded to happy screams.
Instead of answering, Amy set the sweater and the lamp on the floor and stood. She unzipped her oversized Windbreaker and let it slide off her shoulders. She was naked to the waist, but, in the grand scheme of things, bare breasts weren’t particularly notable next to a second and third set of arms. . . .
Not arms—tentacles, Vicki corrected.
. . . which unwrapped from around Amy’s waist and stretched out to either side, bifurcated tips spreading. “I found them”—all four tentacles twitched when she sketched quotes around the word found—“when I took my sweater off. Special.”
Vicki wasn’t sure if special emerged on a laugh or a sob. “Can you control them?”
“What difference does it make? I’m not keeping them!” She grabbed her jacket off the chair and shoved her arms back into it. The tentacles writhed, apparently unhappy about being hidden away again. “You need to fix this!”
“What was your third wish?”
“I only made two.” Elbows clamped against her s
ides, she struggled with the zipper. “What does my third wish have to do with—”
“Use the third wish to fix it yourself,” Vicki snapped. It wasn’t that she was unsympathetic; she thought of Mike lying in a hospital bed. Actually, she was entirely unsympathetic.
“No. I’m using the third wish to . . .” Amy pressed her lips tightly together into a thin, pale line.
After a moment, when Vicki was sure she wasn’t going to be told about the potential third wish, she sighed. “You’ve got tentacles. I’m not sure what you think I can do. I’m a private investigator, and there’s nothing about that to investigate.” She allowed her voice to pick up an edge. “You’ve also acquired a potentially deadly don’t touch me zone, and that’s reason enough to take you down.” For those two boys. For Mike.
“Take me down?”
“You’re a danger the police can’t handle. Dealing with that’s my job.”
“You’re supposed to help me!”
“How?”
Amy opened her mouth. Closed it. The sides of her Windbreaker billowed.
“You’ve got the means to help yourself, Ms. Shaw.”
“I don’t.”
“Use the third wish.” If Vicki’s eyes silvered and her voice dropped past command into coercion, she figured an Amy Shaw without tentacles would thank her.
Amy’s shoulders slumped. She dropped back onto the chair and picked up the lamp. “Do it now?” she asked in a voice that suggested she’d finally realized this was something she’d done to herself.
“Yes.” Given time to think things over, Vicki doubted she’d go through with it.
“Here?”
“Yes. Here and now.”
“I didn’t intend to hurt anyone.”
“I admit that’s a nice change.” Most of the people Vicki dealt with fully intended to cause as much damage as possible.
Lamp cradled against her body with her left hand, Amy began rubbing it with her right. From the way the Windbreaker rippled, it seemed the tentacles had joined in.
Vicki hadn’t expected I Dream of Jeannie—in her experience, reality seldom made an accurate crossover to pop culture—but neither had she expected a trickle of flame to become a column of fire that lapped against the ceiling and threw no heat. If the genie spoke, she couldn’t hear it, but she could sense an ancient, barely restrained malevolence, and her reaction was instinctive. Her eyes silvered again, her lips drew back from her teeth, and she snarled.
It had been paying attention to Amy, much the way a child with a magnifying glass pays attention to an ant, but now it turned to her.
Vicki snarled again.
“Nightwalker?” Beyond the flames, Amy’s voice trembled on the edge of panic. “Undead and undying. Death in the darkness. What are you talk— Blood drinker. Oh.” And it dove off the edge. “Vampire! She’s a vampire!”
“Amy!” It seemed Amy’s accepting attitude toward genies didn’t extend to others in the metaphysical community. “Amy! I won’t hurt you!”
Amy ignored her, the power in a name not enough to break the power of the genie over the one who held its lamp. “Of course I know what vampires are! No, I don’t want to die! I don’t . . . Do you promise? You won’t let her kill me? I know. I can say that. I can. I wish—”
“Amy!” Vicki charged forward, hit the two-meter mark, and slammed against the far wall under the loft. She bounced up onto her feet, her bones too dense to break but bruises already rising.
“I wish for the genie kept captive in this lamp to be free!”
The flame roared.
Vicki leapt onto her desk and flung herself up into the loft she used as shelter from the day, slamming the steel door behind her. She could smell paint blistering. Wood scorching.
Smoke.
Pork.
The inside of the door grew hot under the pads of her fingers.
She’d had the loft built to withstand fire. If the building went up, she wouldn’t be comfortable, but she’d survive. Although explanations, she acknowledged silently, would be a bitch.
The fire alarms in the studio should have gone off, setting off the building’s alarms. They hadn’t.
At nine minutes, the inside of the door felt cooler.
At ten, Vicki opened it.
Her office was empty. She took a quick look under the loft. Completely empty. Except for puddles of melted metal and glass and a pile of ash and bone residue by the door that looked like it had been tipped out of a cremation urn. Crematoriums burned between 1,400 and 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Wood and fabric burned at a significantly lower temperature than flesh, which explained why her furniture appeared to have been vaporized. The walls, ceiling, and floor looked scorched, but she saw no structural damage. The fire alarm and the brass lamp were the only untouched items in the room. Although the bathroom door was closed, so it was possible the plumbing had survived.
“Genie redecorating. I suspect I won’t be collecting on my insurance,” she muttered, dropping down from the loft. Her phone and keys were in her pocket, but everything else had been lost with her purse. “I’m half inclined to hunt you down for that alone, you inconsiderate shit.” Squatting beside Amy’s remains, she poked at the lamp. “Okay, protecting the fire alarm was you being funny—I get that. And you definitely had a few anger issues when the leash came off. But if the lamp is your prison, why not take it with you rather than risk someone using it again?”
It was obviously still magical, or it would have been destroyed like everything else.
She poked it again. It slid about six centimeters across the floor. Smart money said genies couldn’t handle their own lamps. “At the risk of stating the obvious, Ms. Shaw, it looks like you solved your problem.”
She watched Mike sleep. Listened to him breathe. The person who’d put him in hospital had been dealt with, and four and a half hours remained until dawn. Vicki stood in the shadows and pretended it was these most recent injuries that had aged him.
He’d be sixty in a couple of years.
She’d always be thirty-four.
“. . . say there is no way all twenty-five hundred ounces of gold could have been removed from the fourteen thousand windows of the Royal Bank Plaza.”
Vicki stopped drying her hair and started paying more attention to the television.
“Except that all twenty-five hundred ounces are gone from both the south and the north towers,” Ian Hanomansing of CBC News pointed out.
A muscle jumped in the jaw of the middle-aged white man with the two-hundred-dollar haircut and the three-thousand-dollar suit. “Until our investigations are complete, we’re assuming it’s a trick of the light.”
“Because otherwise it would have to be”—Hanomansing raised an eyebrow—“magic?”
The muscle jumped again. “And we all know there’s no such thing.”
“Damn, genie,” Vicki snickered, “pretty ballsy way of restoring your finances.” Given that bankers weren’t known for thinking outside the box, the odds were extremely low they’d ask her to track the perpetrator down, so she allowed herself to enjoy the spectacle. Sure, at almost fifteen hundred dollars an ounce, it was a sizable theft, but, as evildoing went, it didn’t even register on the measure she used these days. No harm, no foul.
“As the gold was a microcoating to reduce heat, how could its removal have weakened the glass?”
“As I said, we’re not certain the gold has been removed.”
“The police say that the piece that killed Kai Johnston had been stripped of gold.”
“That may have happened after it fell.”
Harm.
And foul.
With her laptop slagged and her phone in the charger, she wrapped the towel around her waist and settled in front of Mike’s computer.
The Royal Bank could deny all it wanted, but the gold was mi
ssing and Kai Johnston, a fifty-three-year-old Hawaiian-Canadian, was dead. The triangular piece of gold-free glass that had killed him at 2:34 in the afternoon had fallen from a shattered section covering fifteen square meters of floors thirty-one and thirty-two on the east side of the South Building. Two other people had been injured, but given the amount of glass that had fallen and the number of pedestrians often around the plaza, it was a miracle no one else had died.
The gold had been gone when the sun came up. The weakened glass had taken eight hours to fall. If it had fallen at either the beginning or the end of the workday or when the sidewalks were crowded during lunch . . . The removal of the gold couldn’t have weakened the glass, yet something had. That was the problem with magic: all bets were off.
An Internet search on genies was not particularly helpful.
“Supernatural creatures from Islamic and pre-Islamic Arabian mythology. Come from another world beyond the known world. Well, that depends on whose known world you’re referencing, doesn’t it?” Her known world was larger than it had been. “Can take different forms. Have free will, can be good or evil.” Vicki considered Amy’s remains, scooped into a plastic bag and currently sitting on the corner of Mike’s desk. “What do you think?” she asked, poking the bag. “Good genie having a bad day, or psycho nutbag? What’s that? Yeah, I’m going with psycho nutbag too. It’s not all Disney out there, Ms. Shaw.”
Searching how to defeat genies pulled up a list of gaming forums too specific to be helpful.
“Once again, people are your best resource.”
Vicki had been changed for only nineteen years and, not surprisingly, most of the resources she’d nurtured during her years on the police force were seldom helpful in her weird new world. But Henry Fitzroy, the vampire who’d changed her, had been around for more than four hundred years—the tomb of the bastard son of Henry VIII at Richmond empty for all that time. He’d gathered an impressive Scooby Gang over the years, some of whom she’d inherited when he left Toronto. If Dr. Sagara didn’t have the information Vicki needed, she’d know where to find it.