Dropping into a squat, I slammed the urn into a thick length of root arcing from the ground at my feet. It broke into three pieces: the lid, and two halves of the jar itself.
Eerie silence settled over the woods. The imps—all of them—froze in place. They stared at me and at the broken urn halves, one large and one small. Both empty.
What the hell?I picked up the largest piece of pottery and turned it over in my hand. In my peripheral vision, two of the imps shook their heads, as if to clear their mental fog, but I hardly noticed. I was too busy staring at the urn. The fucking empty urn.
All that work, for nothing…
“Lex?” Cale called.
I glanced up, expecting to find him every bit as confused and pissed off as I was. What I found instead was a tall, broad, red-headed man standing in a generous pool of moonlight. He wore knee-length breeches and a matching short-waisted doublet with the sleeves slashed to the elbow to show the shirt beneath. Despite wearing clothing more than four hundred years out of date, his smile was genuine and almost giddy. In fact, I couldn’t remember anyone ever before looking quite so pleased to see me.
The man reached down to help me up, and I accepted his hand, not surprised in the least when he pulled me to my feet with no visible effort. Nor was I surprised that his skin was hot to the touch. He kept hold of my hand, rubbing one very solid thumb back and forth across my knuckles as he spoke.
“Greetings, mistress. I am Xaphan. What is your wish?”
TWENTY-FIVE
My wish?
To die.
The question—or rather, the blatant asking of it—caught me so off-guard that I almost answered out loud, without even thinking. But at the last moment I stopped, my lips already parted. That wasn’t quite right; I didn’t want to die. Again. I wanted to move on from the mortal plane. Start my afterlife. But I couldn’t say that to the large djinni in short pants, who was eager to wreak havoc the world over.
“Lex!”
Leaning to the left, I glanced past Xaphan’s silk-clad shoulder to find Cale jogging toward me. The imps that had held him suspended moments ago now hung upside-down from those same trees, like human opossums, mouths gaping, hair swinging, arms crossed over their chests. I might have laughed at the absurdity of fighting a troupe of imps for possession of a djinni in seventeenth century clothing if I weren’t almost too tired to stand upright.
“Lex…” The djinni drew the single syllable out, as if he were tasting my name. He hadn’t looked back when Cale called out. Hadn’t, in fact, taken his gaze from me at all, as if nothing else mattered. Nothing but me and my wish. “You want for something. I see need in your eyes…Lex.” Again, my name lingered on his lips, as did that smile, which lent the unnerving impression that he knew everything about me. That somehow, he knew my every thought, every fear, and every desire. “Mistress?”
“Yeah, we don’t really use that term anymore,” I said, my words sluggish with shock.
“She doesn’t want anything.” Cale came to a stop at my side and pulled my hand from Xaphan’s grasp. I blinked, suppressing an overwhelming urge to shake my head like a wet dog.
The djinni stared down at me through eyes so black I could find no boundary between his irises and pupils. “You have only to name it, and it will be yours.” His voice slipped across my skin with the intimacy of a much more carnal touch.
Cale put one hand on my arm, his fingers sliding across the leather of my coat. “Don’t listen to him.” He tugged me to the side, threading his arm through mine. “He can’tmakeyou wish for something, but he can tempt you, and until you get accustomed to his attention, he’ll be hard to resist.”
“Silence, sprite!” Xaphan ordered, his voice as sharp and threatening as it had been smooth and alluring only a moment before.
Cale glared up at him through an impenetrable mask of anger. “Bluster all you like, Xaphan, but you have no influence over me. I’ll say anything I damn well please.”
Was that his version of na-na-na-boo-boo, you-can’t-catch-me?
The djinni’s smile returned, and his gaze shifted from Cale to me. “She can think for herself.”
“Yes, she can,” I said as I pulled my arm from Cale’s grasp. He should have known better than to hinder my gun hand. “And thanks, but no thanks on the wish,” I snapped at the djinni. “I don’t want anything.” Except Devich’s head mounted on the street sign at the corner of Main and Beale. And to figure out how to get the djinni back in his urn. Which I’d smashed.
Okay then, into a new urn. Or a fucking shoe box, for all I cared. Whatever worked.
“Orthus?” I pulled my flashlight from my pocket to scan the crowded clearing. Two red pinpoints flashed in the beam of light, and Orthus barked, weaving among a scattering of stunned-looking imps. “They going to be okay?” I asked Cale as Orthus bounded toward us.
“Unfortunately, they’ll be fine. Your buddy here has probably had them wrapped around his finger for the past two days, and we’re damn lucky they couldn’t pry the lid off that coffin.” Evidently being small enough to swing through the trees left them lacking in the strength department. “But they’re coming around now. I suggest we get going before they wake up enough to want to defend their territory.”
“How can this be their territory?” I followed Cale as he set off through the woods again, compass in one hand, flashlight in the other. Orthus walked at my side, and I could sense, rather than hear Xaphan behind me, because his feet made no sound when he walked, despite the stiff-looking cuffed knee-high boots. We were going to have to find the big guy something else to wear before we took him out in public.
Or maybe we should just keep him out of sight altogether…
“They probably only stay here in the winter,” Cale said, sidestepping a tangle of thorny vines. “I’m sure they spend their summers some place colder.”
