Genie Knows Best (21 page)

After ten minutes of silence—unless Samantha counted Bart’s grumblings and Maille’s hissed “quiet!”s—they finally arrived at a large metal gate in the tunnel wall. Harv rapped on the upper right corner with both antlers like a drum riff, and it swung open on squeaky hinges.

“Hurry inside,” he growled, which, coming from a talking heraldry symbol, was just wrong. But then, all of Harv was wrong. “I don’t need any of my neighbors knowing I actually talk to fennecs. It’s not good for the image.”

Dirham, who’d rejected Samantha’s offer to carry him, teetered to a halt on his three uninjured legs, his tail shooting vertical. “Hey, I resent that.”

“And you resemble it, too, so get over it.” Harv held the door open and nudged—shoved—the fox through with a hoof.

Lexy snapped at him, missing when Harv leapt out of snapping range. Then she trotted inside with a hum of “oh, you poor thing”s to Dirham and bared-teeth snarls to the Yale.

Making sure Kal’s lantern necklace was tucked safely between her breasts, Samantha scooted past Harv as quickly as possible, but that didn’t stop him from leering.

Kal elbowed him in the neck.

The torch lit the small room they walked into. As rooms went, it was straight out of a classic B-movie bad-guy hideout. So much so that the black Stetson on the scarred wooden trestle table surprised Samantha only because it wasn’t dusty and worn like a cowboy’s would be. But the requisite knives and gas lamps were there, albeit Persian curved blades and iron scrollwork. A Jim Beam “genie” decanter played the part of a whiskey jug, though the whiff she got from the open stopper was more along the lines of absinthe.

“Sit.” Harv locked the metal door behind them and scraped an antler along the tabletop, creating a spark on the tip that he used to light several oil lamps. The other antler struck a big metal pipe in the corner that ran up through the ceiling, the sound reverberating through the small room.

Maille swung one leg over the bench and sat down, her fingers strumming the tabletop. Her nails had been bitten to the quick. “So where’s this crystal ball, Harv?”

Harv leered. “Come on, Maille. You of all people know they aren’t crystal.”

Bart huffed, then did it again when no smoke came out.

“Enough with the innuendo,” said Maille, staring Harv down. After five thousand years of being a dragon, feared and revered by every culture on the planet, Maille had to be used to getting her way. “We’re desperate here.”

She won the battle of wills with Harv, too. He dropped eye contact and sighed. “Fine. Dieter will report in and we can find out about this clown, Albert. Then you can give me the lantern and get the hell out of my lair.”

“Albert’s not a clown,” said Dirham, pulling himself onto the bench next to Lexy with a grunt. “He’s a businessman. Always making calls to some guy named Henley and another one named Bookie and lots of bankers. Or maybe that’s backers. I never could tell ’cause I was trying to stay away from him. But he liked to skulk around the house so I’d occasionally have to duck out of the way to avoid him.”

“He did what?” Samantha was surprised. With Albert’s delusions of grandeur and self-entitlement, she wouldn’t think he’d skulk—unless he was doing something he shouldn’t.

Like trying to steal a genie. He’d been after Kal and the lantern for a long time.

And
bookies
didn’t sound good. That kind of desperation put a whole new spin on his reasons for coming after Kal and kidnapping the dragon.

“Oh, yeah,” said Dirham, nodding. “He liked to hide behind those long curtains in the hallway outside Monty’s office. That was always the riskiest part for me, coming and going. I never knew when I’d run into him.”

Eavesdropping. She shouldn’t be surprised—though she completely enjoyed the cosmic retribution of Karma allowing her to find out about him in the same way. Now she just had to beat him at his own game.

And she would; Albert didn’t have any clue what she was capable of. Not that she did either, but sheer determination had to count for something. She could be a hero, too.

A sudden clattering in the pipe that sounded like a horde of tap-dancing cats pulled her focus back to the scene at hand, and Samantha braced herself for any eventuality. Harv hadn’t specified what a Dieter was, so it was somewhat of a dénouement when only a gnome with wooden little-Dutch-boy shoes backed out of the pipe, landing atop the worn chest of drawers beneath it.

The gnome spun around, swiped the pointed cap off his head, clacked his heels together, and saluted. “Dieter reporting in, sir!”

Harv returned the salute—Albert wasn’t the only one with delusions of grandeur. “Have there been any intruders, Dieter? Aside from Kal and his friend, that is.” He smirked at Kal as if to say that Kal didn’t know what he was talking about. Or maybe Harv was counting the minutes until the lantern was his. If only she could wish for a way out of this.

If only she could wish.

The grim line of Dieter’s mouth got grimmer. His miniature look-alike companion poked his head out of Dieter’s hat, shook his head, and said, “We aren’t certain, sir.”

Harv’s smirk disappeared. “What do you mean you’re not certain?”

Dieter glared at the littler gnome, then gave the hat a hard shake. His partner in crime disappeared into the bottom, while Dieter straightened his shoulders and clacked his Dutch-boy shoes together again. He plopped the hat on top of his head. “Last evening, there was a disturbance in the spectrasphere surrounding Valerie Ann’s Sundries Shop. But the fight was going on in the street out front, too, so the ripple could’ve been caused by that magic being hurled about. The leprechauns alone generated more wattage in that short period of time than they had over the entire previous month.”

“That’s true,” said Lexy, standing on her hind legs on the bench, and resting her front paws on the tabletop. “With so many magical beings around, the cumulative effect of the magical matrix could have ignited a magi-kinetic infusion and, depending on the magnitude and velocity of the directives, it could indeed have created a string-theory type reactive, thereby disrupting the stability of the spectrasphere. I’ve been studying just such phenomena for my thesis.” She looked at Dirham. “If you wouldn’t mind, Dirham, I’d like to collect a few samplings from the charge-pulse remnants inside that store when we’ve finished locating this Albert person.”

No one said a word for a full thirty seconds after Lexy finished her dissertation. Then Dirham nodded—slowly—and Dieter’s little friend peeked his own pointed hat out from under Dieter’s and asked, “Did we get sucked into a black hole or something?”

“That isn’t possible in Izaaz,” said Lexy. “The gravitational anomaly that allows the sand walls to support the glass ceiling, as well as the environmental irregularities that have to be sustained, point to the curvative theory of sand/wind generation, which was proven by Seleucus to retain its solidity in the face of possible vacuum vortex conditions. An article about it will be in next month’s issue of
Magical
Mental
Musings
.” Lexy sat back on her haunches and slicked a hand over her snout, pausing after a few seconds of silence to look at them.

Dieter’s doppelgänger’s jaw was at his knees, Dirham’s pride was written all over his face and his chest was puffed up like a strutting rooster, Bart scowled, Kal tried to hide his smile, and Maille managed to look impressively unimpressed.

“What?” said Lexy. “The editor’s a friend of mine. It’s no big deal.”

Harv clapped his antlers. “Well bully for you, foxy loxy.”

“It’s Lexy.” Dirham said. The accompanying snarl was the first one Samantha had heard from him. “
Doctor
Lexy.”

The antlers made circles in the air. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. Kumbayah and all that camelshit.” Harv sauntered over to his wall of swords, removed a katara, and slapped it on the table with a
thwack!
“So Dieter, was there anything in our resident genius’s lesson you can use to locate the cause of the disturbance?”

“I don’t know. What’d she say?” Dieter looked as if one of those vacuum vortices had sucked the words from his mouth.

Dirham stood up next to the vixen. “She said that while the amulet could explain the ripple, so can all the magic, therefore, we don’t know any more now than when we got here. Is that right, Lexy?”

The vixen beamed at him as if
he
were Mensa material instead of her.

“Oh. Well, in that case, she’s right,” said Dieter. “But it doesn’t explain the other ripple.”

“There was another one?” Maille shot to her feet, smoke coming out of her ears. Literally. “When were you planning to mention that?”

“He just did,” said the Mini-Me gnome, peeking out from Dieter’s hat.

Dieter shoved him back inside. “I was getting to it, but Miss Smarty Pants didn’t give me a chance.”

“Lexy doesn’t wear pants,” said Dirham, ever so literally.

Lexy nudged his shoulder, then rubbed her cheek against to his.

“So there you have it.” Harv’s one antler unfurled toward Kal, the tip making a “come on” motion like the flexible end of an elephant’s trunk. “Hand over the lantern. I did my part of the bargain.”

Kal held up a hand, and the antler tip poked his palm. “Not so fast, Harv. The deal was for you to
deliver
Albert. You haven’t, so no go.”

“What? No fucking way you’re weaseling out of this one! That lantern is mine, fair and square.
You’re
mine.”

“Technically, he’s his own person,” said Dirham.

“Not exactly,
dirtbag
. Whoever owns the lantern, owns the genie, so he will be mine.”

“
Own?
” said Samantha, shooting to her feet, the idea so repugnant that all she could think of was getting the lantern off her neck and into Kal’s hands.

She whipped the chain over her head. “Here. People shouldn’t own other people, genies or not. Wars have been fought for that very reason. Here, Kal. Take this and be fr—”

Harv lunged toward her. “Oh no you don’t! Kal’s mine!” His antlers glanced off her fingers as Kal yanked her out of the way.

“Gods-dammit! I almost had it
again
!” Harv back-kicked the dresser and the gnome teetered over the edge of it, arms windmilling. The little guy in the hat did the same thing.

Kal took the necklace, hefted it for a second or two, then draped the chain over Samantha’s head again. “Thank you, Sam. That’s a very generous offer, but it doesn’t work like that.”

“That’s true. You’d have to—” Dirham yelped when Lexy stepped on his paw.

Kal shot a pointed look at the fox. “As I was saying, I really appreciate the offer, but being a genie is an honor. It’s more than my job; it’s who I am.”

As someone who knew what it was like to be used for personal gain, who knew how dehumanizing it was, how it stripped away all sense of self-worth, Samantha didn’t agree with him. Being used was being used. But she had to respect his interpretation, though it didn’t make being on this side of the equation any easier.

“Bunch of mumbo-jumbo if you ask me,” said Harv, rubbing his back hoof with an antler. “All the powers of the universe at your fingertips, and you voluntarily restrict yourself to a master’s wishes. I’ll never get it.”

“You don’t have to, Harv,” said Kal. “It’s the way of the Djinn and what we were born to do.”
Kharah!
It’d all but killed him to give the lantern back to Samantha, but rules were rules. Better to finish out his sentence with her than grant even one wish for Harv. And forget about trying to find the opportunity to finagle an appointment with the High Master if he got a new master; that’s why he was so desperate to complete his sentence with Sam; there would be no other master after her.

Damn Harv. If she’d only finished that sentence this would all be over and done with. He’d be free of his sentence. Free to pursue the life and career that should be his.

Free of her…

“Yeah, well,” said Harv, combing an antler through the tuft of hair behind his ears. “I was born to roam the plains and eat grass. Not quite the way I envisioned my life, if ya catch my meaning. Izaaz’s a damn sight better than being target practice for griffins.”

“Griffins don’t eat Yales,” said Dirham.

“That’s ’cause there aren’t many of us left, thanks
to
the griffins. See how that works, dirtbag?”

Lexy leapt onto the table and growled. “
Don’t
call him that!”

Harv speared the Stetson with an antler and threw it at her, but Lexy leapt back onto the bench beside Dirham and the hat sailed over both of their heads, landing on the floor at Bart’s feet. Who took great joy in crushing it. Typical Bart.

Harv grabbed the katara and jerked it toward Kal. “Enough. Hand it over. I won.”

Kal shook his head. “No, you didn’t. We still don’t know where Albert is. If he’s even here. For all we know, he could be sitting in Samantha’s living room right now.”

“Probably not.” Dirham climbed out from under the table. “Albert never sits. He paces.”

Kal arched an eyebrow. “Just how often did you almost run into him, Dirham?”

Dirham looked sheepish—an affectation Kal had learned to see through centuries ago—and the fox suddenly found a wormhole extremely interesting. “Well, I…”

Maille stood and slammed her palm onto the table. “Who cares what this Albert does? He has my baby. Or are you trying to tell me that this is all one big coincidence? The disturbance… this mortal… Laszlo? That they all just happened at the same time but aren’t related?”

Kal raked his hands through his hair. “There are no coincidences, Maille.”

“Burroughs,” said Lexy, nodding.

Dirham cocked his head. “What do donkeys have to do with anything?”

“Not
burros
, Dirham,” said Lexy, patting Dirham’s paw. “
Burroughs
.”

“I don’t see the difference.”

“William S. Burroughs. It’s his name.”

“Whose name?”

“Burroughs’s!” Kal loved Dirham, but the guy could be a test. “The guy who coined the phrase.”

“About donkeys?” Dirham tapped his other paw to the side of his head. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t see what burros have to do with coincidences.”