Magic Gone Wild (19 page)

Jesus. Why couldn’t this just be a normal clearing out of a house? He’d expected odds and ends. The occasional nest of spiders and a bunch of mice. But genies and cross-dressing phoenixes and enchanted rugs?

“Faruq is in command of Djinn Compliance. Or, rather, he was before he was put on lantern arrest.” Vana sat back and intertwined her hands in her lap.

Zane scraped a hand over his face and blew out a breath. He was going to go with the question most relevant to his situation. Forget whoever the rug was or what lantern arrest was and why Faruq was on it. “So what am I supposed to do with it now?”

“Well, I—”

The rug stroked its fringe along her arm.

“What’s it want?” he asked, marveling that he could ask that question so nonchalantly.

“You have to understand about this rug, Zane.” She brushed the fringe off her arm as softly as it had stroked her. “Faruq wanted Fatima as part of his harem, but when he caught her in the arms of one of his head guardsmen, well, he wanted everyone to walk all over her as he’d felt she’d walked all over him.”

“Uh, okay. Understandable.” If one were a genie.

“But, the thing is, Fatima wasn’t cheating on him. She’d fallen into the river and couldn’t swim. Ghazi saw her flailing around and rescued her. Faruq, however, saw what he wanted to see and had her imprisoned in the threads of this rug.”

Zane didn’t ask what Faruq had done to Ghazi. He had a feeling he didn’t want to know.

“So now Fatima has to wait for a thousand and one people to walk over her—”

“A thousand and one? As in
The
Arabian
Nights
? Are you kidding me?” Zane mentally kicked himself. He needed to stop asking irrelevant questions and just be on a need-to-know basis so he could
know
what he
needed
to do to remove this craziness from his life. It was a wonder Peter had actually been sane.

“Of course I’m not kidding. That number is very auspicious in djinn culture.” She cleared her throat and straightened her shoulders—which drew his eyes to her breasts.

Christ. He really did need to get laid if he was thinking about breasts while dealing with rug people and screwy genies… though the images he’d been having of Vana and him in bed together were as real as if it were last night.

But that was ridiculous. Of course they weren’t. He’d spent last night awake and aching on the uncomfortable couch, hearing every tap of the branches of the old oak against the house. It didn’t matter how hard he’d knocked his head on that rafter, he definitely wouldn’t have forgotten having sex with Vana. His libido, imagination, and ego were quite certain of that.

“Fine. Okay. Whatever.” He scratched both hands through his hair. “So what am I supposed to do with the rug, Vana?”

“Well, you could put her downstairs so she can fulfill her sentence. She’s already had 748 people walk on her.”

“You want me to put a magical rug, one that’s capable of moving itself, where she can pop up in a cloud of pink smoke and a harem costume when she reaches the magic number? What if it’s in the middle of a walk-through?”

“Fatima’s smoke is green.”

He’d had to ask.

“But of course she won’t, Zane. Fatima will be able to transform at any time once that number is reached, so she’ll wait until the coast is clear. And you’ll even get to keep the rug once she’s back to normal.”

Such a bonus.

“Please, Zane. She’s been locked up here for such a long time.” Vana’s voice was soft.

And the rug was sitting up with one unrolled edge wagging like a dog begging for a bone.

Kittens
and
puppies. Hell. He was toast.

“Fine.” He put his hands on his knees and pushed up to standing, managing yet again to knock his head on a rafter. You’d think at some point some sense would be knocked in with the bumps and bruises, but apparently not. “But no funny business while there are mortals around. Understood?”

The rug shook the fringed end—Fatima’s head?

Zane shied away from any kind of thought like that. If he started imagining a woman’s body being woven into the threads of a rug…

Vana jumped to her feet and clasped her hands. “Oh, Zane, thank you! Thank you! Fatima won’t be any trouble. You’ll see. You won’t even remember she’s there.”

Zane wouldn’t bet on it.

He hefted the rug again and started walking toward the door. “Fine. Let’s get her downstairs. I’ve had enough magical beings in the attic for one day.”

And then the armoire tripped him.

19

After waking from
that
conk on the head when he’d hit the floor, Zane learned that he was the—um,
proud
?—owner of not only a personified rug, but a haunted armoire, a bewitched coat rack, an enchanted lady’s compact, and several stacks of animated dishes, making this a worse cartoon than the earlier
Fantasia
debacle.

Zane gawked at Vana while she rattled off the list beside him.

“Henry Fitzsimmons wished to hide himself inside his lover’s armoire when her husband came home, but his genie, Eirik, had been imbibing a little too much absinthe and, well, now Eirik’s the coat rack over there.”

The piece of furniture in question leaned out from where it was partially hidden behind a pile of boxes and waved an upper limb just slightly enough that Zane could have imagined it but, sadly, hadn’t.

“Since Eirik’s Way of doing magic is to cross his arms, you can see why he’s unable to change either of them back.” This time there was no imagining the heaving sigh the coat rack gave.

Vana pointed to the compact on an old vanity. “Lucia’s genie didn’t speak Italian, so he didn’t understand her wish to have a mirror that reflected her inner beauty to the world instead of
being
a beauty
in
the mirror.”

A burst of sparks blinded Zane for a few seconds. Oh, joy. Merlin had shown up to complete the fun.

“Yeah, that one still has me scratching my feathers,” said the phoenix—who was wearing leopard. Someone needed to have a serious talk with the bird about his fashion sense. “No offense to Lucia, but a beauty she wasn’t, so I don’t get the mirror thing.”

The mirror rattled on the tarnished silver tray.

“That’s why she made her wish, Merlin,” said Vana. “She might not have been beautiful on the outside, but she was on the inside, and she thought that if people could only see that part of her, they would find her delightful and charming, and she’d then be able to find
her
Prince Charming.”

“Stupid Grimm brothers,” said Merlin. “All a ploy for more tail. Those guys were dogs, let me tell you. They’d go around spouting sappy, happy stories of true love, prince charmings, and happily ever afters, and end up with women falling at their feet. Thank the gods a genie fixed that.” He brushed his feathers together.

“One of the brothers decided to hit on the wrong guy’s wife. The king, of all men. And being the ultimate in treasure hunters and hoarders that all successful kings are, His Majesty just so happened to have had a genie. One wish. That’s all it took to kill two lovebirds with one big downer of an alteration to their stories and ruin the guys’ MO. What a day it was for the rest of us, I’ll tell you.”

Zane didn’t want to know. He didn’t care what the Grimm brothers did or who they did it with or what had turned their happily ever afters into the dark, depressing stories they were known for. He just wanted to get out of this attic with his sanity and body parts intact.

Unfortunately, neither looked promising. Zane sighed and shook his head—and son of a bitch! It hurt.

“So what about the dishes?” He had to ask. Sometimes not knowing was worse than knowing—though he’d reserve judgment in this instance until he heard their story.

“A group of children,” said Vana sadly, caressing the box she’d taken from the armoire.

Henry
. Sheesh.

“Would you like to meet them? They’re cute little imps.”

“Not real imps,” interjected Merlin. “Just saying. If they were real imps, there’s no way they would’ve stayed nice and quiet in that cupboard this long. Real imps would have broken themselves all over the place the minute the doors had closed. And good riddance I would have said. Imps are royal pains in the tail, let me tell you.”

“Vana.” Zane directed the conversation back to her because there was only so much insanity he could take.

“The children were visiting the home of a dowager countess as part of her charity work,” said Vana. “Peter had heard about them during our trip through Hampstead when all the locals were talking about loony Lady Lockshaven. They laughed at her talk of dancing dishes, but Peter always paid attention to those kinds of stories.”

“How did they come to end up as dishes?” Cheating adults and non-multilingual genies were one thing, but Zane was concerned about the transformation of a half dozen or so children who were now under his care.

“One of them had broken a piece of her china, and she cursed them, wishing they knew what it was like to be so delicate. Her husband, a fellow explorer associate of Peter’s, had just given her the genie he’d found. It ended up being her first and last wish. She was so distraught over what she’d done that she threw the lantern—and the genie—into the fire.

“Now, we djinn normally live forever, but we can be killed, and fire is a nasty way to go. The woman was doubly horrified by that, so when Peter showed up, her husband begged him to take the children with him, hoping I’d be able to turn them back someday.”

“Is there a chance you can?”

Vana tucked her chin to her chest and fiddled with her fingers again. “I… don’t know…”

“Wrong answer, Van.” Merlin looked at her pointedly.

Zane raised her chin with his finger. “What does he mean?”

“Well…”

Merlin stuck his beak between them, his beady black eyes boring into Zane’s. “What I mean is, she
could
have changed them back
if
she’d stayed in school just a wee bit longer. But not our Van here. No sirree. She had to jump feet first into the first bottle to come along and missed the lesson about a dying djinn passing on an obligation. In this case, the children.

“But that’s not the part I’m talking about. Oh no. Van now has to figure out how to undo the enchantment all on her own. There was a reason she skipped school and a reason the kids are still the way they are. Isn’t that right, Van?”

“You know, Merlin, for someone who’s supposed to be her friend, you’re not exactly on her side.”

“I’m more of a friend to her than you’ll ever know, Lover Boy.”

“I hear rotisserie’s pretty good, bird.”

“Guys.” Vana shooed Merlin out of arm’s reach. “Since we know how to get my magic to work, maybe now I can turn them back.”

“Uh, Van?” interjected Merlin over the excited clatter of dishes. “Not to be a party pooh-pooher, but you haven’t exactly been hitting home runs with Studmuffin’s kisses. You really want to risk the kids on a maybe?”

As much as he’d like to fricassee the bird for pointing out Vana’s lack of success so harshly, the bird was right. They couldn’t risk the kids until her average was one hundred percent.

Practice
makes
perfect…

Zane stood up and smacked his hands together. “Okay, so that’s it, right? There aren’t any other magical beings around here I should know about?”

“Um…”

“Um” did not bode well for his peace of mind. And of
course
there were others. Peter couldn’t do crazy in a small way now, could he? “Who are they?”

Her fingers twiddled in her lap. “A pair of enchanted wind chimes. But they’re not in the house, so you don’t have to worry about them.”

“Being out in the open where anyone can see them is supposed to make me feel better?” He pinched the bridge of his nose again. Much more of this and he’d have a bruise. “It’s not going to work, Vana. I’m sorry, Fatima.” He looked at the rug, then shook his head. He was conversing with a rug… “One, maybe two magical beings are doable, but all of these? It’s just not feasible. I can’t have them here. It’s too much. How do I get rid of them?”

Vana jumped to her feet as the rug wilted like a flower to the floor.

“Oh, but you can’t get rid of them, Zane. They belong here. This is their home.”

“Vana, I can’t have a rug with a mind of her own sliding across the hardwood floors. What if someone wears stilettos or something on her? I can’t afford for her to yank herself out from under that person. What happens if the coat rack sneezes and hats go flying across the room?”

Zane heard himself asking the questions and found them surreal. He’d lost his mind. One day back and he’d broken with reality. Sliding rugs? Sneezing coat racks?