Murphy leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest, framing an impressive set of pecs. “You have this way of making everything I say sound completely ridiculous.”
“Hey, I work with what I’m given. Is that about the way things stand?”
“Basically…” He shrugged. “Yes. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. Elementals are the most qualified for the job. Our abilities mirror those of the djinn, so we’re the natural choice to keep them in check.”
“Or in boxes.”
He smiled. “Yeah. The first three have been out of the way for more than a millennium, but Xaphan was a real bitch to catch. They finally caught up with him in the late seventeenth century, and now Devich is trying to wash all that hard work down the proverbial drain.”
“So, we stop him.” I shrugged. It was as simple as that. Right? “What do you mean by ‘mirrored’ abilities?”
Murphy leaned forward again, his eyes bright and eager. I’d clearly pressed his hotkey. “It’s kind of like a cosmic game of ‘rock, paper, scissors.’”
I shook my head, brushing a stray grain of rice from my lap onto the floor. “You’ve lost me.”
“‘Rock, paper, scissors’ is a game kids play in pairs.” Murphy held his hands up for a demonstration, one stretched out, palm up, and the other clenched into a fist. “You pound on your palm three times with your—”
“I’m familiar with the game.” Lacey beat me every time we played. “But I don’t see what it has to do with your gig as djinni warden.”
“Oh. Okay, just a minute…” Leaning to one side, Murphy snatched his notebook from the seat of the empty chair between us. He flipped it open to a blank page and drew several small images in a circle, connected by curved arrows pointing clockwise. When he was done, he set the notebook on the table and spun it around to face me.
“This is earth,” he said, tapping the eraser end of his pencil on a skilled sketch of snow-covered mountain peaks at the top of the circle. “The element, not the planet. And this is air.” He traced the arrow leading from earth to a small drawing of clouds and several lines clearly representing the wind. “Earth beats air, just like rock beats scissors.”
“So, earth elementals are better than air elementals?”
“No. Notbetterthan. But if an earth elemental pits his abilities against an air elemental, the earth elemental will win, assuming they have similar levels of power.”
“Why?” I leaned forward for a better look at his notebook.
Murphy smiled at me gently, like a parent humoring a child’s silly question. “That’s just the nature of our abilities. But if it helps you to remember, think about it like this: earth’s gravity pulls everything in the air back toward the ground.”
“Everything that goes up must come down?” I was starting to grasp the big picture.
“Basically, yes.”
“So, air beats water,” I said, following the arrow leading from the clouds to a sketch of an ocean wave. “Because air evaporates moisture?”
He shrugged. “Not exactlybecauseof that, but it works as a mnemonic device.”
“And water puts out fire?”
Murphy nodded as I tapped the image of roaring flames on the left side of the circle. “Xaphan is a fire djinni. That’s his element to control.”
“And you’re a water elemental.”
“A half-breed. My mother has the real power. With a little assistance, she can control him, or at least confine him. She helped put him in the box in the first place. Then into the pit, where he wouldstillbe if Devich hadn’t spent a fortune and several centuries finding him and digging him up.”
Severalcenturies? That meant that both the djinniandDevich were older than I was. By alot. It had been a long time since I felt like the new kid on the playground. Fortunately—or maybeunfortunately—Murphy still made me feel like I ought to be walking with a cane.
For most Netherworld creatures, age was directly proportionate to power level, so the younger the monster, the easier he’d be to put back in his place. Wherever that was. “Just how oldisthis djinni?”
“Really old,” Murphy said, and my stomach clenched a little at his serious tone. “I’m talking prehistoric. My mother remembers Julius Caesar’s reign, and she says the djinnis were already ancient by then. As far as we know, the four we have contained are the only true djinnis there have ever been.”
“How is that possible? If there were only ever four, how has their lore spread all the way into sixties American sit-coms?”
“That’s a bit complicated,” Murphy said. “So, there are djinn mentioned in all kinds of ancient texts, including the Quran. Several ancient, pre-Islamic, pre-Christianity cultures recognized djinn as one of the mortal, sentient races, like humans, gremlins, goblins, and all the others. But those djinn, who lived and died in a vaguely human lifespan and had minor supernatural abilities, were actually descendants of the four originaltruedjinn, stemming from their…interactions with humans, throughout the years. Just like the Greek gods were rumored to have spawned demi-gods with literally hundreds of humans.”
“So, the djinn most people are kinda familiar with are actually the part-human offspring and descendants of those four?”
