Murphy dropped his chopsticks into the carton. “I don’t know why that would surprise me. It doesn’t benefit him to tell you what he’s doing. What he’s really after.”
“It does if he wants me to actually find the thing. Whatishe doing? Who’s in the box?”
Pushing his carton away, he leaned forward, arms crossed on the table between us. “It isn’t awho, in the traditional sense.”
“The body isn’t human.” I’d suspected as much, of course. Human corpses didn’t typically cause chaos, confusion, or compulsion from beyond the grave. In fact, they were generally pretty well-behaved, as far as cadavers go.
“Not even close. It’s a djinni.”
I blinked, sure I’d heard him wrong. Or that he was joking. “A dead genie? As in, I Dream of…”
Murphy’s mouth crooked in wry amusement. “Sort of. Not exactly.”
“Not exactly a genie, or not exactly dead?” I asked, searching for a full packet of soy sauce in a pile of empty wrappers.
“Both. If we could figure out how to kill him, we would have done it long ago. But we can’t. The djinni isn’t dead; he’s just good and pissed off. And he bears no resemblance whatsoever to Barbara Eden.”
I laughed around a mouthful of chicken. “More like Aladdin and the lamp? You know, Robin Williams saving the day with a poof of purple smoke and a catchy one-liner?”
Murphy shook his head. “Getting even colder.” He took a long draw from his root beer, and I got the distinct impression he was avoiding telling me something.
“Then spell it out for me.”
He put the can down slowly, and for once, that twinkle of good humor in his eyes was absent. “Thereareno genies according to the American pop culture definition. No jolly cartoon magicians or blond women wrapped in pink gauze. No eye blinking, head nodding, or nose wiggling. All that belongs to Hollywood. And the truth is that it was always a rather offensive appropriation.”
I considered reminding him that Samantha Stevens was a witch, not a genie, but I held my tongue because he was probably too young to have seen “Bewitched,” except in reruns. And because that didn’t negate his point. “So, what are we dealing with here?”
“Devich has found anactualdjinni. D-J-I-N-N-I. Some people call them djinns.”
Ah, like the Djinn Fizz, I thought, swallowing a sudden craving for a Grateful Dead over ice. Finally, the name of my favorite bar made sense. Sort of. “Whatisa djinn, exactly?” I asked, not quite able to let go of the Disney image in my head.
“They’re similar to demons in that they specialize in pain and chaos, but much more dangerous because they aren’t bound to hell. Though rumor has it that’s where they originated.”
A djinni from hell. Fantastic. What I knew about djinnis wouldn’t fill my own bellybutton. “I’m afraid I’m not up to date on the latest djinni lore. Do you have a primer, or a cheat sheet? Maybe a copy of ‘Djinn for Dummies’?”
Murphy grinned, and the dimple in his left cheek flashed at me. “Unfortunately, no. Just oral tradition.”
A double entendre of his own? “That’s the best kind,” I said, just in case.
That time his grin wasdefinitelyflirtatious. Maybe Lorelei was right about the mutual lust. But the heat in his expression was gone all too fast, as he turned the discussion back to business. “Here’s what I know: Devich is after a djinni called Xaphan—one of only four in existence, that we know of.”
“There are only four?”That doesn’t sound too bad.
“That weknowof,” he repeated, pinching a shrimp between his chopsticks. “Trust me, four’s more than enough.”
“Please tell me they weren’t all in the Oak Island pit.”Because they’re gone now…If they were still there, the pit would surely still feel “bad,” instead of cold and empty.
“No. I have no idea where the others are—that’s sort of need-to-know information—but I’ve been assured that they’re kept far away from one another.”
“They’re all buried?” My chopsticks scraped the bottom of my carton, and I peered into it in disappointment.
“Or otherwise contained.”
“So who ‘contains’ them?” I asked, plucking a single pink shrimp from the bed of rice.
“We do. The elementals,” he added in response to my confused look.
I nearly choked on a half-chewed chunk of shrimp. “You mean—” I sputtered, then washed the bite down with a sip from a fresh can of Coke. “You mean a few wood and water sprites are the only thing standing between humanity and a hoard of evil, pain-and-chaos wielding djinnis hell-bent on the destruction of mankind?”
