Tales of the Djinn: The Guardian (19 page)

Think, Elyse
, she told herself.
What do your instincts tell you is true?

That was her father’s advice. Not “what do
other people think?” Not “what’s the most sensible explanation?” He
wanted her to trust her own take on things.

A man who used that as his yardstick might be
open to believing in genies.

Elyse let her eyes open. Her instincts told
her to believe what she’d seen. Arcadius wasn’t human and David
hadn’t been lying. She also believed he loved her, so on that score
her judgment hadn’t been abysmal. Maybe on other scores as well.
For most of her life, she’d had mixed feelings about Cara and Uncle
Vince. She’d shoved those feelings aside because they were
family.

She thought back to her father’s death. Uncle
Vince always seemed to work to make people like him, with his loud
jokes and his fancy house and his big gestures. Her father had
drawn people to him without effort. One conversation at an airport,
and he’d have a lifelong friend—as if being loveable was simply his
nature. Uncle Vince was sad after her father died, but he’d also
seemed more relaxed. Elyse had assumed this was due to being out of
his big brother’s shadow, to finally being free of the inevitable
comparisons.

What if the reason for the change were more
sinister?

David’s claim that him falling for Elyse
bugged the hell out of Cara was credible. Murdering him for it
seemed a stretch, unless maybe Uncle Vince was responsible for
that? She didn’t want to believe either of them capable of killing
him so horrifically—or of hiring someone else. Clearly, people she
thought she knew had the power to fool her. She glanced at the door
behind her. She wanted to trust Arcadius, though that could be
because she’d slept with him.

Not trusting anyone struck her as
unpleasant.

The door across the hall creaked open,
causing Elyse’s heart to jump. She sagged as she saw Mrs. Goldberg.
The old lady was shuffling out in her housecoat and slippers with a
little tied-up bag for the garbage chute. She nearly dropped it
when she saw Elyse.

“Goodness,” she said. “You startled me.”

“Sorry,” she said—or tried to. Her voice was
scratchy from her turbulent emotions.

Mrs. Goldberg cocked her head at her. “Are
you all right, dear? You look upset.”

Elyse’s nosy neighbor was no monster, but she
was often crotchety. Her unexpected concern caused Elyse’s tears to
spill over.

Mrs. Goldberg immediately tut-tutted. “You
should come in for tea,” she said, waving her toward her door with
a gnarled hand. “You can tell me all about it.”

Elyse nearly laughed. She couldn’t tell her
anything, not without Mrs. Goldberg having too tasty a story to
spread around.

“Oolong,” her neighbor said temptingly.

Elyse gave in. Anything that delayed her
having to deal with Arcadius seemed like a good option.

She hadn’t been inside the other sixth floor
unit since Mrs. Goldberg’s sink backed up while the plumber was on
vacation. The decor was the faded jumble she expected from a tenant
who’d lived here forever. Too many chairs and tables crowded the
space, topped by too many cheap knickknacks. The paintings on the
wall were so bland and muddy it hardly seemed worth the trouble of
hanging them.

Old motel art
, Elyse thought, catching
sight of some blah pink flowers in a blah brown vase.

Mrs. Goldberg ate a lot of meals in front of
her TV. A rickety folding table with a tray stood by the recliner
that faced it. To Elyse’s surprise, the television was a large LED
model. Maybe her tenant didn’t need rent control as much as she’d
thought.

“Come into the kitchen, dear,” Mrs. Goldberg
said. “I’ll get the kettle going and we can be cozy.”

Cozy
was right. Though the layout of
this unit mirrored hers, the wall between Mrs. Goldberg’s kitchen
and living room was intact. The enclosed cooking space was tiny,
the Formica table tucked in the corner barely big enough for two.
Despite the lack of space, the kitchen was cheerier than the rest
of the apartment.

“This is very kind of you,” Elyse said. “Can
I help with anything?”

Mrs. Goldberg set the kettle on the gas
burner. “I may be slow but I do everything. Tea is in that cabinet
by you. You could get it down for me.”

The cabinet held pretty tins with loose
leaves. Elyse placed the oolong where her neighbor could get to it.
As she leaned back against the edge of the countertop, she noticed
a sleek little notebook computer open on the cutting board
opposite.

“That’s cute,” she said. “Is it the kind
where the keyboard snaps on and off?”

Mrs. Goldberg turned to look. “Silly me,
leaving that there. I was typing out a recipe for a friend of mine.
I should finish doing that before I forget. I love email, don’t
you?”

Amused, Elyse watched her abandon the kettle
to peck a quick message. The steam began to whistle as she clicked
“send.”

“Perfect timing,” her hostess said, shutting
the tablet with obvious satisfaction. She hummed as she prepared a
tea ball to steep. Elyse didn’t think she’d heard her do that
before. Was the old lady grumpy because she didn’t have enough
company?

“Delicious,” Elyse said, sipping the cup Mrs.
Goldberg poured her. The oolong was smooth and rich and just the
right temperature.

“Years of practice,” Mrs. Goldberg said.

A click from the outer room, like a door
opening, jerked Elyse’s head around.

“That’s just the forced air blowers going
on,” her hostess assured her. “Such noisy things. Now that you have
your tea, why don’t you tell me what’s troubling you?”

The thickness of her corrective lenses made
her eyes look big and interested.

“It’s not that important—” Elyse began to
say.

Something pricked the side of her neck, as if
a bee had stung her. She lifted her hand to touch the spot, but her
knees went out from under her. Just as shocking was someone
catching her from behind.

The arms that held her were familiar.

“Mrs. G,” her cousin Cara praised. “You
really should have been on the stage.”

“Shouldn’t I though!” The old lady seemed
unsurprised by this turn of events. Elyse would have sworn the
woman and her cousin only knew each other well enough to nod
“hello.”

“Crap,” Elyse said. She sat on awkwardly
folded legs on the kitchen floor. She’d have gone down completely
if Cara hadn’t been holding her. Elyse’s arms were limp, her tongue
thick feeling. “She emailed you that I was here. She’s been your
spy all along.”

“‘Spy’ is such a judgey word,” Cara scolded.
“Mrs. G and I are friends.”

“She told you when I rented the basement
unit. You crashed that dinner with Arcadius and Joseph because
she’d given you a heads up.”

“I had to see if they were threats to my
interest, didn’t I?”

Her
interest, not her and her
father’s.

Elyse shut her mouth against commenting and
twisted around to see Cara’s face. It wasn’t easy. All her muscles
were rubbery.

“What did you give me?” she slurred.

Cara smiled pleasantly. “Nothing that will
kill you. I am fond of you, you know. And now I think I should
return you to your apartment. Family business should stay that way,
don’t you think?”

“Mrs. G” probably would have preferred to be
included, but “Enjoy yourself, dear,” was all she said.

Before it occurred to Elyse that she could
still scream, Cara whipped a dashing Emilio Pucci scarf from around
her neck and used it to muzzle her. Elyse was unable to walk or
stand. Cara had to grip her under the arms and drag her backwards
through the living room to the building’s hall. Elyse estimated it
was around seven a.m. by then. One of her tenants was going out the
street door to walk her dog. She couldn’t see Elyse, of course.
When the little terrier barked, she just shushed her.

Cara laughed softly. “This is a bit
undignified, isn’t it?”

Be there
, Elyse thought to Arcadius as
Cara opened Elyse’s door. Elyse hadn’t locked it when she came out.
She’d been too eager to get away. If only Arcadius were a mind
reader, she could warn him to do something.

“There we go,” Cara said, using one
beautifully shod foot to shut the door behind them.

She was huffing but not a lot. Elyse wished
she’d been eating more pasta. Maybe with a few more pounds she’d
have been harder to lug around. She growled through the scarf as
Cara dropped her a little roughly into an armchair.

“Sorry,” she said, not meaning it. Her eyes
danced with enjoyment as she flipped her honey blonde hair away
from her face. “Stay there while I find something more to tie you.
Oh, wait, you can’t move, can you?”

There was an upside to getting taken captive
by her cousin: Elyse was too irritated to be fearful.

Cara strode briskly down the hall as if no
one could possibly stop her. Had Mrs. Goldberg not noticed Arcadius
staying over? Or did Cara have better knowledge of his whereabouts
than Elyse? Had he left when she ran out on him? God, she hated
being gagged. Not being able to ask questions was really
annoying.

She heard drawers opening and shutting in
David’s office. Sadly, no one seemed to be leaping out to subdue
her captor. Cara said “ah-ha!” and then fell silent. When she
returned to the living room, she was beaming from ear to ear. A
roll of duct tape circled one forearm like a cuff bracelet. This,
however, wasn’t the reason for the joy in her expression.

Between both hands, which she’d lifted to
breast level, she held the little volume of magical love poems: the
same volume Arcadius and David believed would ensure she loved him.
Elyse had left it on David’s desk, where anyone—including
potentially homicidal relatives—could find it.

Fuck
, was Elyse’s fervent mental
reaction.

“Thank you for still having this,” Cara
gushed. “You have no idea how useful this is to me!”

She wasn’t kidding. She opened the book then
and there. She filled her lungs, exhaled, and settled her
shoulders. When she’d composed herself, her gaze lifted to Elyse. A
glint of anticipation lit her green eyes. “Brace yourself, cuz.
Only one person at a time can use this charm. You may find you
don’t adore your departed husband quite so much in a few
minutes.”

Elyse had assumed the love spell ended when
the book shocked her. Maybe Cara didn’t know that, or maybe
something new would happen. She tensed as Cara turned the pages in
sequence, running her manicured finger across the lines. Her eyes
moved but not her lips, so Elyse guessed Arcadius was right about
the caster of the spell not needing to know Arabic. When Cara
reached the final page, she closed her eyes, shut the book, and
pressed it against her breasts.

“Infinite Power,” she murmured, “binder of
hearts: cause the man whose image is in my mind to fall in love
with me.”

Elyse couldn’t help but be fascinated. As
Cara finished speaking, some sort of energy wisped out from the
book’s pages. Though the wisps took the form of smoke, they glowed
golden. For a few seconds, the tendrils whirled around themselves
in the air, pretty but aimless.

“
Do my bidding
,” Cara insisted.

The smoke brightened, spread out, and winked
out of sight.

“Good,” Cara said, like she’d ticked off
number two on her to-do list, right after
Drug and kidnap
Elyse
. She tucked the book beneath a pile of other leather
bound volumes on a shelf.

“Feel any different?” she asked Elyse.

Elyse shook her head, annoyed that even this
small motion made her dizzy. She curled her hands around the arms
of the chair she was sitting in, her grip sufficient to keep her
from falling over but not to push her up.

“Ah, well,” Cara said philosophically.
“Perhaps the hero worship takes a while to wear off.”

A really, truly annoying possibility occurred
to Elyse. What if Cara had just caused Arcadius to fall in love in
her? She huffed around the scarf Cara had stuffed in her mouth.
Cara glanced at her but was occupied with pulling down the shades
in the living room. Once the windows were blocked, she returned to
Elyse with the duct tape at the ready. Something shiny on the couch
caught her eye.

“Hm,” she said, slipping whatever it was into
her pocket.

Go right ahead
, Elyse thought,
pointlessly infuriated.
Steal anything you want
.

At the moment, Cara seemed immune to shame.
As adeptly as if she took hostages all the time, she attached
Elyse’s wrists and ankles to the chair.

Elyse didn’t bother making angry noises, but
she glared really hard.

“Oh, don’t be that way,” Cara said. “You
didn’t have to choose to side with David. All right, maybe you did
but that’s water under the bridge. Now we’ll just tackle this head
on and make things turn out the way they should.” Crouched down to
strap her left ankle to the chair leg, she patted Elyse’s knee. “I
should probably warn you not to count on your new friends coming to
the rescue. They’re currently indisposed, though you were a clever
girl to spot what they were and recruit them to your side.

“I didn’t know for sure myself until you
escaped that car crash. Funny how the driver saw all that smoke and
nothing had caught on fire. Even funnier was both his passengers
disappearing without a trace. The crash wasn’t supposed to kill
you, by the way, just put you out of commission. As a general
thing, Dad doesn’t like having family blood on his hands.”

As a
general thing
? Did that mean he
sometimes made exceptions?

Elyse shivered. She’d fallen down a rabbit
hole where her uncle might very well have killed her father and her
cousin might still kill her. She wished she’d been as clever as
Cara thought. Not that pleading ignorant would help. Cara was one
of those people who couldn’t be convinced they were wrong.