Djinn

Djinn by Kathleen Brandt

Lyrical Press, Inc. www.lyricalpress.com

Copyright ©2008 by Kathleen Brandt First published in 2008, 2008 NOTICE: This eBook is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution to any person via email, floppy disk, network, print out, or any other means is a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment. This notice overrides the Adobe Reader permissions which are erroneous. This eBook cannot be legally lent or given to others. This eBook is displayed using 100% recycled electrons.

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CONTENTS Djinn About Kathleen Brandt Lyrical Press ****

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Lyrical Press, Incorporated Djinn 13 Digit ISBN: 978-0-9818905-1-7 10 Digit ISBN: 0-9818905-1-2 Copyright © July 2008, Kathleen Brandt Edited by Jana J. Hanson Book design by Emma Wayne Porter and Renee Rocco Cover Art by Renee Rocco Lyrical Press, Incorporated 17 Ludlow Street Staten Island, New York 10312 www.lyricalpress.com eBooks are not transferable. All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the publisher's permission. PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental. 4

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The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content. Published in the United States of America by Lyrical Press, Incorporated First Lyrical Press, Inc. electronic publication: July 2008

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Djinn by Kathleen Brandt

Djinn Kathleen Brandt [Back to Table of Contents]

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Djinn by Kathleen Brandt

With light eye and unbreaking heart They walk the iron changes of the world Untouched, untouching Ever and never in a single breath... The words of the poem came back to Sharadzi as she wandered the streets shortly after midnight. It was Friday night, and the cars passing by competed in the fields of drunken weaving, window-rattling bass beats and number of idiots hanging out the window waving bottles and screaming unintelligible remarks. She ignored them all and kicked on down the sidewalk alone, her hands in her pockets, her mocha hair streaming out behind her on the stinking wind of their passage. The poem was a recent one, written by an unimportant poet she'd come across in a library. It had caught her eye because of its title—Song of the Djinn—but she hadn't thought it applied very well. Odd to find it resurfacing in her mind now. She brushed through a pack of young Latino wolves, dangling near-empty longnecks between two fingers and rattling on at a fast clip to one another in a language she'd never had the opportunity to learn. They turned toward her as she broke through them, spreading out like the hunting pack they were, calling to her and to one another. Sharadzi stopped, wheeling to face them, her black eyes no different from theirs. Her skin, dusky enough to be a shade darker than her hair, combined with her high cheekbones, wide mouth and large eyes gave her the look of a mixed race— 7

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universally despised and desired. The perfect victim for them. She tilted her head a little to the side. "Pretty girl," their leader jeered in a heavy accent. "You come home with us, eh?" His pack bayed laughter in response. Identical colored scarves hung from their back pockets, the uniform of their tribe. At her hip, Sharadzi's cellphone rang in a tinny representation of a landline burr. She slipped it out and glanced at its screen for the flashing name of the caller. Ah, he so loved his modern technology—calling her on a cellphone! "Not tonight, little wolves," she said to the Latinos with real regret. She waved her hand to them and turned to walk away, lifting the phone to her ear. "Master?" Behind her, the boys converged on the spot where she had stood, shouting. They circled and crossed it again and again, barking in furious puzzlement, unable to get a scent. "Sharadzi?" her benefactor said in his cracked, smokehoarsened voice. "I'm having some special guests in tonight, and I'd like you to serve." "Of course," she said warmly, her step quickening. "Now?" "They'll be here in a few minutes." A pause. "I know it's late, but you don't mind, do you?" "You always were nocturnal, old man," she said with a chuckle. "I'm fine. You can sleep in tomorrow, right?" "It doesn't matter. I'll see you in a moment." "Yes, Master." She hung up the phone—a delightfully meaningless holdover term—and slipped it back into the tight pocket of her jeans. From one place to another she stepped 8

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and blinked in the dimness and quiet of her master's expansive bedroom. It was the penthouse suite. Curtains covering the huge windows on two sides of the bedroom were drawn, but soft pendant fixtures glowed here and there. Her master, smartly dressed even at this hour, extended both hands to her. She took them gently. It was the most contact he had allowed since the wheelchair became necessary. "Master," she said, bowing to kiss the arthritic fingers. "You look lovely as ever, my dear," Ray Carroway said, putting her a little distance to look, a move as graceful as the dancer he had once been. "But tonight I'd like you to dress a little more traditionally." He looked up at her, a young man's eyes in an old face. "Traditionally, I dress in the fashion worn by the women of the time," she said. "This is it." He gave her hand a reproving little shake. "You know what I mean. This is a special gathering, not an ... ordinary business matter. Wear your old things." She froze, staring down at him, her black eyes wide. "Then you mean..." "It's time to begin making a decision. The doctors give me less than a year. My empire must pass on." He sighed deeply. "Including my greatest treasure." "Less than a year," she repeated. "You know you can change that." "I will not," he snapped, steel in his voice. It was a voice that had steered four companies and a thousand lesser 9

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holdings to success in his time. "I chose long ago, and I stand by that choice." "Stubborn," she whispered. "Wise," he answered. "And I will not lose you until I must." She lowered her head, ringlets of her hair falling in her eyes, and began unbuttoning her shirt. Knowing his eyes were on her, she made a production of it, coyly revealing and concealing her lace and satin undergarments then slipping them away. She heard him sigh as she stepped out of the jeans and stood naked before him. The fullness of her breasts and hips had once been considered more attractive than the scrawny boy-like women admired nowadays, her height no longer unusual. Her body was dusky, smooth as a child's, her wide shoulders framed by the tightly curling fall of her pale, coffee-colored hair. From the chest at the foot of the bed, she drew the gauzy pantaloons, the tight halter spangled with ruby beads and the golden bangle bracelets. Once costumed, she knelt before him in the attitude of subservience she knew he would want for his guests—his candidates. "Perfect," he said softly. "Your beauty never dims, my djinn." "Ever and never in a single breath." "What?" "Nothing." She rose to push his chair out to the hall, but stopped, her hands on its cool, hated handles. To the top of his bald, age-spotted head, she said in the dimness, "I have called them all Master, but I have not loved them all." 10

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He made no sign, and she rolled him out to greet his guests. There were three of them standing in the wide entry hall handing their coats to the serving girl, all young businessmen. The most aggressive stepped forward at once, a dark-haired swain in a slim dagger of a suit. He held out a manicured hand, his eyes taking her in with great interest, sweeping over her in a single assessing glance. "You must be Sharadzi," he said as she took his hand. In a maneuver he must have practiced at a thousand cocktail parties, he turned her hand and brought her palm to his lips. She saw his eyes widen at the feverish heat of her skin, but he finished smoothly. "Ray's told me so much about you." "I'm sure you didn't believe half of it." She kept her tone light and flirtatious. It was clear from their faces that the only thing Ray had said to any of them was that they were to meet her. "This is Alex Gaitman," her master said from behind her. "He runs Brooks Industries. One of my top money men." "Please, call me Alex." The young shark retired with some reluctance in favor of the next. The blond one's glance was admiring, taking her in as a sexual being, not merely pegging her as threat or asset, the way Alex had looked at her. No more than twenty, Joss sported a slim ponytail and an artistic tie, confirming his genre even as Ray introduced him: "Jossrey Taylor. My personal computer genius—designed my security system and reverse engineers those of my competitors." 11

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"Hacks," the blonde corrected, with a quirky sideways grin that she liked at once. "Let's call things by their proper names, Ray." Her master liked him too; she could tell by his chuckle. "And I'm Rich," the last candidate said, stepping up to give her a firm, businesslike handshake and a winning smile from under his permed wave of black hair. He kept his blue eyes on hers, having ogled her during the other introductions. "Only because you were born that way," Alex quipped. Rich smiled genially at this well-worn joke and tipped an imaginary hat to Sharadzi. "Richard James," Ray said from his chair. "Or James Richard, I never can remember which." Rich winked. "Public Relations," her master finished unnecessarily. "For Spencer Catalogs. Used to write ad copy. That's what he's still good at." "You'll feel delightfully naughty in this genie-in-a-bottle outfit," Rich recited, "complete with genuine CZ accents and luxurious opalescent gauze, ready for a thousand and one Arabian nights. Accessorize with gold bangles, page fortyone." It took Sharadzi a moment to realize he had just described her outfit. "You are good at it. Why aren't you still doing it?" Her master rolled up beside her, resting his gnarled hand on the back of her thigh, just above the knee. "In the business world, if you're good at something, you get promoted. So you keep going up the ranks until you find 12

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something you're not particularly good at. That's why so many morons are CEOs." "Present company very much excluded, Ray," said Alex. A murmur of agreement went around the group. Sharadzi smiled, recognizing the moment, and turned to the sideboard. From it she brought a tray of champagne flutes, and all present toasted her master formally. "I've managed to avoid the moron-go-round myself," Joss said afterward, waving his glass. "Right out of college, they hired me for this top-level job." "There are two reasons for that," Ray said. "First, when you were in high school, you got the computer system to run a questionnaire-based grading plan on the teachers that revolutionized state educator assessment programs and bumped you into Harvard before you could say 'algorithm'—" "Just a prank," Joss said, his pale gray eyes alight. "And second, computer programming is still a relatively new field, flexing wildly as it grows. The usual channels don't apply, not yet." Ray looked around at his guests. "But it's not just you, Joss. You are all young; all of you have made extraordinary achievements in a short time. The corporate potential I have gathered in this room is staggering. And that's why you are the ones I have brought here tonight, to be exposed to this fantastic opportunity." "Yes, Ray," Alex said, "do tell us what the mystery is." "Come and sit down, gentlemen," Sharadzi said, extending a smoothly inviting hand to the social living room, a vast expanse off the main greeting hall. It had once been sunken, before the wheelchair; now a gradual slope led them down. It 13

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was primarily white, including the spotless leather couches. Touches of color were provided by fresh roses, the pastel frames of black and white photos and ruby trim on pillows, rugs and golden vessels. It was a room designed to show off Sharadzi herself, and she felt the approval in her master's smile. Ray paused for a moment to speak to Monetta, the headwoman. The penthouse boasted a staff of five. "Keep everyone out," he said to her, no possibility of disobedience hinted at in his voice. "Supper in half an hour—but wait until I ring." "Yes, Mister Carroway," she said and left. Like most of the staff, she ventured not a glance at Sharadzi, solving the problem of her presence by pretending she didn't exist wherever possible. The three young men had seated themselves, Alex occupying an arrogant single chair. The others had taken either end of a couch, with a person's width invitingly between. Sharadzi chuckled, but knelt gracefully at her master's feet. She wanted to feel his frail fingers touch her hair. "I was a dancer, once," he told the younger men as they settled in. "You all know the story—how an off Broadway toetapper inherited a small holding company in Chicago and worked his way up to multi-billionaire-hood in twenty years. You know most of the things I've done to keep and expand my holdings. The extraordinary luck I've had. But there are parts of the story you don't know." 14

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The looks on their faces were changing now, she noticed. They had been sure, at the beginning, that they were in for an old man's life story. True interest began to infuse the false. "And you all know about my will," Ray went on. "My exwife gets a fat pension on top of what she's gouging now, and my companies and fortune go to her three sons, who will no doubt fuck it all up more spectacularly than I can currently imagine." He sipped his champagne with a palsied hand. "But there is one more inheritance that isn't listed in my will." He truly had their attention now. She saw Joss's eyes flicker to her speculatively, and then back to the old man's face. He's smart, she thought. Blisteringly smart. Ray's fingers pressed her shoulder, signaling. Sharadzi rose gracefully and took center stage, standing on the carpet in a pose that drew all eyes. She pulled in a deep breath, straining the halter, and began to speak, letting some of her original accent leak into the growly tones of her voice. "I am Sharadzi, djinn of the Burning Rose People, born in an ancient, nameless desert." She spread her arms wide, her long fingers like the widespread feathers at a hawk's wingtip. Her voice deepened, its resonance rattling eardrums. "I am immortal, servant and observer, timeless power, a secret jewel at the heart of the world. My age is counted in centuries." Her toes pointed downward, their tips eight inches off the floor. She hung there, glowing softly. "Many have been my owner, each the wise or foolish commander of three extraordinary acts of magic and a hundred lesser powers. One 15

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of you will be chosen to receive this gift, at the will of my Master." You can't lay the showmanship on too thick, he'd said to her some years ago, discussing this contingency. She remembered the gleam in his eyes of pleasure in his true vocation—theater. By the light surrounding her, burning coldly from her dark skin, her mocha hair, she watched their faces at this crucial moment. Movies have much to answer for, she thought. It would take more to convince them, but that was no surprise. More disturbing to her was the lack of amazement. These were the eyes of men who had seen better than this a thousand times on screens big and small. Alex's look was cold, suspecting a trap designed to make him look a fool. Rich, after glancing about for wires and spotlights, got to his feet to applaud, a provisional belief for the sake of keeping Ray on his side written all over his face. Joss looked puzzled, his pale eyes searching everywhere, returning again and again to her. After a moment of Rich's applause, sounding foolishly all alone, Joss also rose from the couch. He approached her, trying to peer around her without being too obvious, and then with some daring, reached up to put his hands on her bare waist. He started back at the heat of her body then touched her again, tugging downward. "Please come down," he said. "That's ... very uncomfortable to watch." Smiling, she let her toes settle onto the carpet. Looking, for that moment, like a man of twenty who had been abashed, the programmer retired to the couch. 16

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"This is a lovely show," Alex said to Ray. "I'm very impressed with your ... genie. And if, as you imply, she is part of your inheritance—Well, I must say, she'd be a kingly gift to any man. But..." "But you don't see yet," Ray said. The amused patience in his voice rankled Alex, who had been failing to give the same impression. "Sharadzi, my dear, you must demonstrate until our guests declare themselves satisfied." So for the next quarter hour, she used her intrinsic powers. She conjured music from the air, flooded the room with sparkling illusory butterflies, filled the men's pockets with live rabbits. At Alex's request, she turned his pocket watch to a solid diamond, its tiny, fiery-clear gears still working. Dinner was a subdued affair, the three candidates toying with their food. Their glances at her were shocked, a trifle hurt at their inability to figure out what the trick was. Only Joss's looks were speculative, a little frightened, as he turned over the idea in his mind that things might not work the way he had always relied upon them to. Rich hid his reaction best, nodding politely in response to Ray's explanations. Alex stabbed with his fork, angry at his shaking fingers. "Whether you believe or not, you have seen," Ray began, accepting a glass of water and a colorful array of medications from Sharadzi. Still attired in the harem gear she privately considered ridiculous, she moved among the silent servants, pouring and offering, her motions alluring. "I'm still not exactly sure what I saw," Rich said, with a ghost of geniality. 17

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"You've seen parlor tricks, magic, silly showoffs—nothing!" Ray thumped the table feebly. "Diamond pocket watches! Foolishness." Passing behind Alex with the water pitcher, Sharadzi trailed her fingers over his broad shoulders, felt them tense under the suit. "Let me tell you more about her capabilities, so you have some idea of what you're dealing with, what a treasure I'm offering you—one of you." Ray met Sharadzi's eyes as he deliberately injected this reference to competition between them. She smiled at him. This meeting had been discussed so often in his declining years, leaving nothing to chance. His young hounds would not be allowed to tear down the pack leader over this prize. "A djinn has two sets of powers," Ray continued, "the intrinsic and the requested. You've had a bare taste of her intrinsic powers—far from all of them—tonight. The requested ... those are the famous three wishes you've heard about." Alex glanced up, irritation in his eyes at being asked to swallow this. Sharadzi touched Joss's arm lightly to offer him wine, smiling back at him when he declined. Ray plucked at the napkin she had spread over his immobile legs. "If you want something big ... something not illusory or ordinary, something that makes a real change in things, you must expend a request, a wish. On the third one, you lose her—forever." He looked at her again. Sharadzi saw the sadness in him shining like firelight through the old sweet ivory of his skin. "What were your three?" Rich asked politely. 18

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"Stop humoring me and listen, you young fool," Ray said, more in weariness than anger. "I have made two requests. Else she'd not be mine still." Sharadzi laid a placating hand on Rich's wrist, as if to apologize for her master's snappishness. Rich stared at her hand as if it were a scorpion. "I asked for the means to become wealthy," Ray said, "and that holding company was mine. No, it wasn't some cautionary tale, death of a beloved relative that put it into my hands. As far as I know, Carroway Offshore didn't exist before that moment. And the luck, the businesses opening before me, the fortune that attended it—success beyond a CEO's dreams—was part of the gift." "I see." Rich glanced at the other two with a let's-humorthe-old-fool look, got no sympathy from either and subsided. "I won't tell you about the other wish," Ray said flatly. Sharadzi saw him glance at the small framed portrait of his ex-wife Anna, whose sons alone had been able to compete with the violent, consuming passion for him that Sharadzi had laid on her. There was silence for a moment. Sharadzi drifted around the table to stand behind her master, daring to put her hands on his narrow shoulders. In public, he did not shrug her away in deference to his pointless pride, but she felt his breath draw in at her touch. "I have a proposal for you," he said briskly. "A way to answer all our questions—yours as to the reality of what I've told you, and mine as to whether one of you will receive this treasure upon my passing." His implication that they were not the only candidates was probably spurious, Sharadzi decided. 19

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The three men glanced at one another. "We'll do whatever you suggest, of course, Ray," Joss said. Alex seconded this with a nod, his hand in his pocket, probably fingering the hidden sparkle of his diamond watch. "I have a legal conference in Ventura," Ray said. "I will extend my time there to a week, to take the sun." He chuckled harshly at that. "Maybe I'll go surfing. In my absence, the three of you will attend what we'll call a management retreat on paper, but it will actually only be those here. You will stay in my cabin in the Rockies for one working week. During that time, each of you will have one day and one night in temporary ownership of Sharadzi." "This is most irregular," Rich said nervously. "I mean—I have a wife and children." "You may do whatever you wish with her," Ray said, a little scornfully. "Have her conjure rabbits all afternoon and sleep in the attic. It's up to you. But test her, test her abilities. At the end, you will know two things, as I knew them. One, that you must have this woman. And two, that she is a creature apart, a gift and a bargain that stands outside the normal laws and relationships of our culture." Sharadzi watched them, shifting where they sat, silent and troubled. Then Joss met her eyes for a moment. He spoke directly to Ray, with all the confidence of a young, egotistical man with his own skills as easily salable there as here. "You'll be testing us, too, won't you? Deciding which one gets her." "If we believe all this," Alex put in. "You will," Ray said dismissively. "That's exactly the case, young Mister Taylor, exactly the case. Prove it to yourself, 20

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yes, but then think well what you would do with this inheritance. I will expect an answer." **** In the cold clear light of daybreak, as the sun gilded the peaks overhead, Sharadzi walked down the hill a little way from the cabin with her cellphone. "Have they all arrived?" "Yes, Master. Alex found it difficult to break some of his engagements, but I told him it was part of the test that he be able to do so, and he found a way." She touched her fingers to the piercing cold of the stream that ran behind the foothills. Even in midsummer the air was pleasant, the water chill. His voice chuckled raspily in her ear. "So he should, too. If he doesn't know when to make time for something really important, he's not the man I thought he was." His tone changed, becoming more serious. "Sharadzi, I've put your bottle in the special safe while I'm away—the dedicated one." "Yes, Master." "The Berektis don't know they have anything of value in their basement, and their caretaker Danny only knows that I asked him to put the bottle in the fireproof box. He's no idea of the way it locks or the isolated computer combination. I told you all this before, didn't I..." "Yes, Master," she said sadly. "That's all right." There was a momentary silence, filled on her end by the dawn chatter of birds arising from the pines and aspens around the cabin. Then Ray said quietly, "Oh my dear, if 21

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anything could tempt me, it's the forgetting. My body fails me, and that is expected. Death is coming for me. I expect that, too. But if I come to a state where I don't even know what's happening ... no, Sharadzi, be kind to an old man and don't offer again. I will not make that request." "You have all my respect, Master." "Well, then. You'll do Alex last, child, so he'll have time to see you with the others and work on his disbelief, correct?" "Yes, as you asked." The djinn turned back to the house, a trail of smoke rising thinly from its chimney. The long, curving drive that led to the skier's road and the power and phone cables strung overhead were the cabin's only connection to civilization. "Who will be first?" "Rich," she said, knowing he could hear the smile in her voice. "Mister Rich 'I've-Got-a-Wife-and-Children' James." "I know you'll enjoy this," her master said. "I wish I could be there to watch." Not at this altitude, she thought. "Oh, did you just make a wish?" she said, their old joke. Ray laughed and broke the connection, still laughing. Sharadzi let the cellphone fall from her fingers, knowing it would land on the little table just inside the front door instead of into the scrub grass at her feet. She circled the house and crunched up the gravel drive just as the sun flooded full upon the split log and concrete walls, turning the windows into blazing jewels. The door opened silently at her approach, and she stepped through, leaving the mud and gravel that had been on her 22

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shoes outside. It was nice to let such small powers attend her, without need of camouflage, much as it had been when she was young and magic was still the accepted way. Rich was in the kitchen, half-awake in his dressing gown, blearily staring at the coffee maker. The so-called cabin was in fact a palatial summer house, furnished in lodge style and appointed with every convenience. The kitchen was big enough for two to sit and eat at the bar, while another— presumably staff—cooked and served. There was no staff at the moment, Ray keeping this 'retreat' in utmost secrecy. "What can I do for you, Rich?" she asked, standing before him. She'd abandoned the genie outfit as soon as she was allowed and now wore a loose silk tank and slit skirt in a sage green color that brought out the subtle red-browns of her hair. The pine twig caught in her curls was artifice, and she saw it have its effect. Rich's hand half-lifted to remove it, but he stopped himself. "How about coffee?" he said, nodding at the empty machine. "I don't know how this one works." He rubbed one eye. "Anything you want," she said. "I'm yours until tomorrow." She opened one palm, holding it flat, and made a coffee cup appear on it. "Two sugars," she said, handing it to him. After what he had seen, he didn't blink. "Starting with me, are you?" He sipped, then did a double take. "Wait—two sugars? How did you know?" "I can't read your mind," she reassured him. "Ray told me such of all your preferences as he knew." She winked. "That's 23

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why the sheets in your room are blue, and you were awakened by music and earlier than the others." He sighed as the coffee began to take effect and ran a hand through his black hair, making it stand up crazily in all directions. "If I were your real master, would you be able to read my mind?" "Only if you made a special request—a wish," Sharadzi said. "I wouldn't advise that one." Rich laughed, his blue eyes twinkling through fallen-over strands of his hair. This time it was Sharadzi who had to stop herself from reaching up to put them back. The laugh made him beautiful; it was genuine, transforming his usual gladhanding manner into something real. It made her like him. Even the unshaven shadow across his chin was endearing, unpolished. "Sharadzi, I hardly know what to do with you. It seems demeaning to ask you to ... to magically polish my shoes or something." He set down his empty cup, meeting her gaze frankly. "I don't really need a slave." "I don't find it demeaning. Most masters don't treat me as a slave, but as their companion, advisor, their secret power— their luck, if you will." She smiled. "The only thing I truly hate is being exiled to my bottle and forgotten. Anything you ask me to do for you is interesting, because it's in the world, and the world fascinates me still—endlessly." "Anything," he said, tucking his hands into the pockets of his robe. "What if I don't ask?" She nodded to his challenge. "Then I stay with you if I can. If you send me away, I walk the world, watching, 24

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experiencing, meeting people and seeing what they do." She stepped closer to him, leaning against the counter next to him. "But I hope you won't send me away. That would convince you of nothing, and my Master asked you to put me to the test." He swallowed, but did not move away from her. "I have a wife," he said. "You've cheated on her three times," Sharadzi said. Rich jumped, fidgeting with the ties of his robe. "I have not! Where did you hear those lies?" "Rich, the Master's been watching all three of you very closely over the last years," she said, untangling the twig from her hair. "Your wife cheats on you, so you cheat on her. The difference is, you don't let her know." She twisted the little branch in her fingers, its scent mingling with her own wilder spice. "You were chosen because of your imagination, your vision ... and your discretion." "Sharadzi," he said, her name half a groan in his throat. The more his pretenses were laid aside, the more she liked him. What would he be like if he let her see all the way inside? "Do you always come on to your owners like this?" In five hundred years, there has never been a master of mine who has not wanted me, she thought, but did not say. "Is that what I'm doing?" she asked. "You persist in thinking of it as slavery. In a sense it is, but how you treat me is up to you." She set down the twig and turned to face him, very near now. "I can be the perfect companion, always there, always on your side," she whispered. "I never get jealous and let your secrets out. Available whenever you want me, 25

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completely outside the realm of human morals, human promises and never the same twice. You don't even know the things I can—" With a groan of surrender, he turned on her, pushing her against the edge of the counter, sharp against her hip, and as she turned her head to him, his mouth crushed hers urgently. She arched back against him, reveling in his almost angry passion. He had her skirt most of the way up her thighs already, his big hand squeezing her flesh, and she heard him growl at the heat of her skin under his palm. She felt his fingers clench in her hair, dragging her head back, and his lips against her neck drawing back in favor of his teeth, scraping her neck just above her collar. Sharadzi moaned, her skin electrified with the pure pleasure of his eagerness to have her. Behind her, his robe rustled open, and as he yanked her skirt up, his cock pressed to the back of her panties. He thrust against her, and she freed one hand from its supporting position against the countertop to help. She tugged her panties down on that side, but he was too impatient for that and pulled them himself, the fabric tearing, the elastic ring cutting into her hip before it tore away. Rich shoved, and she bent over the countertop with a huff of breath, agilely swinging one knee up to brace against the edge. For an instant his cock nudged around her slit, and Rich gave a gasp as his head slipped through the wetness there, burning hot against the smooth blunt skin. She arched her back, encouraging him with a groan, opening herself to him. 26

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He thrust into her hard, seating himself with a jerk of his hips. He bent over her, his fist still knotted in her hair, tugging painfully as he humped and thrust again and again, biting his lips to stifle his moans. Through his cock she felt him getting closer, getting harder with each stroke. She tightened around him, a shudder running through her as she heard a shout explode through his teeth in response. "Fuck," he grunted against her shoulder, a shocked cry of unexpected pleasure, and bit her hard as he came, spurting into her with a pulse she felt through her whole body. She moaned deeply, stroking him with her inner muscles, squeezing, until he slowed and stopped, panting against her back. His hand loosened in her hair, and she dropped her own head, sighing. "I see you're taking full advantage of Ray's generous hospitality," Alex said dryly from the door of the kitchen. Sharadzi felt Rich startle against her. He drew back, snatching his robe closed as he stumbled around to face Alex. "And I suppose you'll do any different when it's your turn?" Rich's voice shook a little. Alex laughed scornfully and turned back to disappear into the hallway. There was a moment of silence. Sharadzi adjusted her skirt. "Can you adjust his memory of seeing that?" Rich asked with a wry smile. She touched his face. "No, I can't do anything to his mind without a special request," she said. "But I can make sure he doesn't speak of it to anyone." "How do you do that?" 27

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"It just works out that he won't," she said with a shrug. "Something happens to get in his way. He won't be allowed to speak." Rich studied her, his blue eyes big and solemn. "I seem to have become a believer," he said. "Will you do that for me, please?" She smiled warmly at him and closed her eyes for a moment. "It's done." He drew her against him, his arm tightening possessively around her waist. "The business applications of that little trick alone..." he muttered to himself. "You begin to see," she said. "What can I do for you now, Rich?" "You don't call me Master?" He pressed her close, smiling at the pliant way she twined her arms around his neck. "No, not unless my bottle is in your hands." "Would you like it to be me?" He lifted one hand to caress her throat, and she felt him hardening again, an eager pressure against her thigh. "Yes," she said, thinking, that is what none of them can understand ... that answer is always yes. A wash of ancient, familiar loneliness passed over her. "Then come to my room, djinn.". "I can do better than that," she said, tightening her arms around him and took a single step from here to there, drawing him after her. He gasped, stumbling as he found himself in the blue bedroom where he'd spent the night. "God," he said, his eyes starting from his suddenly white face. "My God, you ... you!" 28

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She reached behind her to unfasten the zipper on her skirt, letting it fall partway down her hips, watching his face. The shattered remains of her underwear had vanished. "All that rigmarole with the rabbits," he said. "You could have just done that to us one time and we'd have had no choice but to believe you!" Sharadzi slid her top off overhead. Her lace and diamonds bra was startlingly white against her skin, sparkling, alluring in the low light from the curtained window. "Men like to have a choice," she said. "They don't like surprises." He was recovering his color, but he still stood on the other side of the bed from her. His hands twitched as he watched her skirt fall with the flowing grace only silk has and puddle around her painted toes. "You terrify me," he agreed roughly. "The power you have." Sharadzi arched her back, reaching behind her to unfasten the bra. She tossed it aside and stepped lithely around the bed to him. She sank gracefully to her knees, her hands resting on her coyly parted thighs. "Men know one way to stop fearing power," she said, looking up at him. "Take it." He growled, his hands leaving his robe to bury themselves in her hair. As the robe fell open, she saw that he was hard, as she knew he would be. She resisted the tug on her head, instead extending her pointed tongue to trace a circle on the blunt head of his cock. He groaned then gasped sharply as the rest of her long, prehensile tongue snaked out, wrapping itself spirally around him. She had expected him to draw back—it was always a shock to a man, and at his most vulnerable place, too—and swayed forward with him. A 29

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moment later his startled, revulsed cry melted into a groan as the tiny muscles all along her tongue caressed him. His hands tightened in her hair. She drew him into her throat by that spiral grip and sucked him powerfully as her tongue stroked him like fingers. In moments he was thrusting, his head thrown back, his grunts surely audible in the next rooms. She felt him tighten more and more in the winding caress of her tongue and lifted her hands to take hold of his hips. His breath stopped in his lungs, then he cried out as jets of hot saltiness flooded her throat. She closed her eyes, swallowing over and over, and when he was done she slowly unwound from his cock and rolled her tongue's long base back into its sac, so that she could return to human speech. He sat down rather abruptly on the bed, petting her hair absently. "He was right," Rich said eventually. "I've got to have you." Sharadzi smiled. "What can you do?" His breath slowed, the words spoken as much to himself as to her. "Can you bring things? See things at a distance? Can you show me ... Marco Salia's police record, for example?" "Do you want to see it, or hold it?" "Um, how about just see it?" She hitched herself up to sit on the edge of the bed beside him and waved a hand. In the air before them, a flat patch of nothing brightened. Like a window, it looked in on a dirty office, centered on a locked rank of filing cabinets. As they 30

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watched, a drawer opened and unseen fingers riffled through the hanging files within. "Won't the people in the office notice?" Rich asked in a whisper. She shook her head, smiling with delight. That's one good thing about the movies, she thought, so many good ideas. "This is just showing you some context. None of it's real, except the data you requested." One file lifted and opened, spreading all its pages for their review. "I knew it," Rich whispered in tight, bitter satisfaction. "They're talking about promoting him over my head. I think he's got family connections. Look there. He was arrested as a kid for drug running, but never convicted. Guess he got smarter since then." He turned to her, and she let the bright illusion fade. "This is how Ray kept tabs on us, isn't it?" She nodded. "It's how you were chosen." He was silent, brooding over this. "I don't like the idea of someone watching everything I do, knowing all my secrets." "But you like the idea of doing the watching." He shot a glance at her, but there had been only mild observation in her tone. "Yes, of course I do," he admitted. "You're a very powerful tool, my dear." **** She gave the three of them lunch on the patio that afternoon—an elegant tray of small sandwiches, fruit confections and crushed-ice drinks. She wore a fluttery outfit of blue veiling, transparent enough to tease, light enough for the wind to play with. Rich was mostly silent, perhaps 31

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digesting the five-course meal of information about various business rivals he'd been taking notes on all morning. "So tell us, Rich," Alex said, "how is it having your own personal slave?" Joss looked up from his plate, interested in the answer, and they both stared at the oblivious Rich for a long moment before he looked up. "What? Oh." A flash of annoyance crossed Rich's face, swiftly traded for his usual joviality. "It's grand, boys. Absolutely grand." She happened to have her eyes on Alex at that moment and saw him open his mouth, probably to say something on the order of Sure looked grand this morning in the kitchen! His throat locked up on a bit of ice. Through his coughing fit, Joss set his fork down and inquired, "What did you ask her to do so far?" Rich coughed a bit himself, while Sharadzi calmly gathered up finished plates and let them dissolve between her fingers. "Research mostly," Rich said. "Business research." Joss studied Rich for a moment, his gaze sharpening. "I see. And did she do things that were ... out of the way? Out of what you or I could do, I mean?" He frowned. "What I'm trying to say—" "Is she for real?" Alex got out, his throat easing now that he was distracted from his tendency to make smart remarks about the kitchen. Rich caught Sharadzi's wrist and drew it over his shoulder, arresting her progress as she passed behind him. "Oh, she's for real, all right. You have no idea." 32

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After a pause, Joss said, "I guess we'll find out when it's our turn." "Who goes next?" Alex wanted to know. "Joss is tomorrow," Sharadzi said with a momentary smile for the blonde alone. He smiled back, looking a little troubled. "Saving the best for last," Alex growled. He seized his glass and stalked into the house. "He's a very jealous man, you know," Rich said. "I've known him a long time." "So my research suggests," Sharadzi said calmly. In fact it hadn't. Alex wasn't married and had gone through a long succession of girlfriends since finishing college, but their complaints upon leaving were usually the typical ones of him being closed to them, unfeeling. Her master's file on him, which she had read and verified before this retreat, gave the picture of a devious, underhanded but brilliant man, perfectly placed for a quick rise in the financial and legal circles in which he moved. **** She asked Ray about him that night, standing on the roof of the house. Below her in the blue room, Rich had reluctantly gone to sleep around midnight. "Master..." "All going well?" He sounded so tired. "Just as expected. Are you all right?" "It's been a long day, but I'm fine," he said, putting a strength into his voice that she didn't believe for a moment. "How are my boys?" 33

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"They intrigue me." A sharp sliver of breeze tossed her hair aside and flirted with her skirt. "Rich is more endearing than I expected, his appetites so simple..." Ray chuckled. "That nonsense about his wife didn't last long, did it?" "No, Master." "You told me, when I was trying to seduce you for the first time, that they all do." "I have had some seventy masters. For the most part, yes, they all do. And that is right—it's part of my function. It's what I want." "You remember them all?" Sharadzi closed her eyes, keeping her balance effortlessly on the spine of the slanted roof. "Master, until my long term of service ends, however that may be, while I live you will not be forgotten." There was a pause, and she distinctly heard him sigh. "But that's off the subject. Have you assessed the others at all or has Rich kept you to himself?" She hesitated. "The others are interesting too.". "And?" "Master, how can I give you an opinion? Whomever I pass to next, it will be an adventure. I can't say one is better than another. Good man, bad man, my service is the same. And it is always fascinating." He sighed into the phone, this time in frustration. "You're not much help when it comes to making a decision." "I can advise you on what's best for you," she said. "But this goes beyond you." 34

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"It's certainly beyond me at the moment. Well, carry on, my dear, and I'll have your report when it's all over." "Yes, Master." **** Mister Jossrey Taylor, youngest of all her master's chosen candidates by nearly ten years, had impressed her with his intelligence when first they met. On the morning of the second day, he did so again. She turned her head sharply when she heard his alarm go off. In New York it was early morning, chilly and gray, the bustle at the fish market nearly half that of its nine o'clock rush. She set down the striped grouper she'd been examining. "Lovely fish," she said to the marketeer. Since she wasn't yelling or holding money, he didn't hear her. Sharadzi walked through the harbor until she was sure no one was looking at herand stepped away. She arrived in the hallway of the darkened cabin, the sky barely lit in this part of the continent. Joss's door opened a bit, and he looked out blearily, his eyes checking the closed bedroom doors on either side of his before they lit on her. "Come in, please," he whispered. He gave a little shake to move the long strands of his blonde hair out of his eyes; unbound, it streamed thinly over his tanrobed shoulders. "Bring coffee, if there is any." She plucked a silver coffee tray, with steaming urn and cups, from a side table where it hadn't been a moment ago and followed him in. 35

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Joss had the white bedroom, with lace curtains and frothy pastel lampshades. It fit neither his taste nor his coloration, but he ignored that. "Thank you," he said fervently as she poured him coffee. "I have my first request for you." "Already?" Sharadzi smiled and arranged herself on the loveseat that faced the bed, her back to a mirror that spanned the sliding closet doors floor to ceiling. For the fish market she had worn jeans and a windbreaker; now she wore an emerald lingerie ensemble. Her hair was adorned with many tiny, sparkling scatterpins. It had to be distracting, but he wasn't looking. He paced the room, resting his palm on one wall, conjoining the room where Rich slept, then the other, on Alex's side. "I thought about it yesterday," he said, drinking his coffee fast. He was pulling himself into focus as she watched, his lean frame straightening, his pale eyes sharpening. "If you can do this, I want you to put Alex and Rich to sleep for the whole day. Or freeze them, keep them immobile, put them in stasis." He turned to grin at her. "I want no interference from them until my turn ends." Sharadzi spread the fingers of both hands wide. "It's done. They'll know nothing until you go to sleep tonight, or the dawn breaks tomorrow, whichever comes first. Then they'll wake normally, as if from sleep, with no ill effects." She smiled at him in genuine admiration. "How did you come to think of that?" He heaved a sigh, relaxing, and set down his coffee cup. "I thought of it at lunch. Remember how Alex acted?" She nodded. "Rich said he was jealous." 36

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"I just thought, when it's my turn, I don't want to deal with that. And—" he broke off, a little embarrassed. She reached to take his hand. "What?" Joss sat down beside her, and she nestled against him. After a moment he slipped a tentative arm around her. "Well, I heard you yesterday. You and Rich, in his room." "Oh," she said and smiled. "I didn't want anyone listening to me, if—Well." She turned her head to meet his gaze. "You aren't going in their rooms to check that they're really in stasis?" Joss smiled, that quirky lopsided one she'd liked from the first. "Oh, I don't need to. I believe you are exactly what you say you are. You see, I have an advantage over the other two. I read science fiction." "I don't understand," she said. In the limited time sci-fi had been available, she had noted it as an important social phenomenon—magazines, books, then movies and television offering a new mythos to replace the vocal storytelling of the past. But she'd never had close relations with one of its devout proponents. "Think of it as training," he said with a laugh. "Most of my life I've been training my mind to think on several tracks at once. A programmer has to be able to hold a conditional belief in prospect A at the same time as prospect B. So does a sci-fi reader." The djinn laced her fingers through his where they rested on her shoulder. "So you conditionally believed in me?" "Oh, no. When I saw you floating in midair at Ray's flat, I knew." He squeezed her fingers. "A sci-fi fan spends his life 37

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preparing for the unusual, breaking down his disbelief in the impossible, daily, for fun." "You make it sound as if all fans are insane," she said, amused. "Conditionally insane." Joss laughed. "Maybe so. But when confronted with the actual impossible, if you know what I mean, I didn't waste time looking for the trick. My senses told me you were real, and I was a lot more prepared to accept that than Rich and Alex." "I'm not sure Alex believes in the impossible even now" "You'll fix that tomorrow." He flicked his long fingers dismissively. "Although no doubt he'll spend most of the day in the bedroom with you, like Rich did." She chuckled, and nudged him gently with her shoulder. "I note that you have me in the bedroom right now.". Joss laughed wryly. "Yes, I do, though I've never felt less like it in my life." "Why?" He raked his free hand through his hair, disordering the long strands further. "Because I'm terrified." "I wouldn't hurt you," she said softly. "Not of you, Sharadzi." He squeezed her against him for a moment. "You're a lot of power, and I ... therefore have a lot of responsibility, at least potentially. I would be a traitor to my principles not to find some use for you, and yet—" He pulled in a huge breath and sighed it out. "Science fiction is full of cautionary tales about abuse of power. It might be best for the world if I just kept you in your bottle for the day." She stiffened. "Don't do that. Please ... don't." 38

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"Well, in my room then. Why? Is the bottle so bad?" "It is nothing," she said, her voice small, inflectionless. "Cold ... and silent. Nothing at all." "I wouldn't send you there then," he said. "Not ever. If you were mine." "Thank you." She rested her head on his shoulder. "Come on,let's have some breakfast and talk about something else." He asked no questions when they found eggs and ham and elaborate coffees laid out steaming on the kitchen bar, moments later. She ate with him, companionably, and watched his quick, vivid gray eyes move here and there in thought, his slender fingers clever and sure. Afterward she blatantly waved a hand and disappeared the dishes. He laughed. "You could make them get up and dance or wash themselves in the sink, couldn't you?" he said. "If you like." He shook his head, his sideways smile fading. "I have bigger plans for you. But first I'd better have a shower and get dressed." "Certainly," she said. "Would you like me to come in with you?" He stared at her. "I..." Looking very young, he struggled not to blush. "I've seen the shower; it seats four. Um, sure, why not?" Sharadzi smiled, standing and taking his hand. He was a few inches taller than she when he stood, unusual enough. Silently, fighting his embarrassment, he led her down the hall 39

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to the cabin's single enormous bathroom. The hot water was running by the time they got there. "Um," he said. The blush was winning. Sharadzi shut the door and leaned back against it. "You first," she invited softly. He ducked his head, untied his robe jerkily, and halfturned from her to remove it and hang it up. "Briefs," he said with his half-smile. "The eternal question answered." Steam billowed. The shower was indeed big enough to hold four friendly people; nozzles projected in all directions behind frosted glass. "You won't need your briefs," she said. "Mm-mm. It's your turn." She slid the jacket of the emerald chemise down to the floor and slipped the tiny straps down her shoulders. He could no more have kept his eyes on her face than he could have walked on the ceiling, but he did try. The chemise puddled at her feet. "God," he said softly, to himself. "Now you." In deference to his insecurities, she stayed against the door. He had a young man's erection, easily triggered, long and slim like the rest of him and curved slightly to the left. "I'm the last circumcised baby in Little Rock," he said. "They stopped doing it automatically at birth right after me." She smiled. "You're lovely," she said truthfully. "And you're—God, you're fucking incredible." He turned abruptly and fled into the shower. She followed, since he left the door open. 40

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His hair darkened in the water, plastering itself in a straight fall down his lean back. When he turned to her, he had gathered his courage and reached out to her with one hand. His long fingers gathered her in, and she stood with him under the fine mist of the lesser jets. Her arms slid easily around his waist. "You're as hot as the water," he said. "Why is that?" He kissed her hair. "I don't know." Unable to resist, she pressed her lips to his wet shoulder, his collarbones finely made under his pale skin. "It was always that way. My people have a naturally higher blood temperature." "Do you find me, us, humans cold then?" She pressed her hip against the firm line of his cock, heard him gasp. "No, not cold," she murmured in satisfaction. "My body knows what it wants," he said into her hair. "But my mind is full of questions. Your people? There are more ... djinns like you?" Your mind knows you're nervous and knows how to calm you, she thought. "Once. As far as I know, I am the last. The others have all vanished over the years, even my brothers." She restrained the quick rush of sadness that stabbed at her. "Brothers. Male djinns. Do they only have female mistresses?" He pulled back to look at her, at arm's length. "I got the impression your masters were pretty random, or at least out of your control. What happens if you get one that's a woman, or—or a gay man?" For a long moment—long enough to be absolutely sure— Joss found himself holding a compactly muscled, nude young 41

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man at arm's length from him in the shower. The boy had a frizzy halo of mocha hair to complement his dusky skin, a girlish mouth with full lips, a deer's dark eyes and a strong chin. His hairless chest was broad, his hips and thighs powerful, his cock thick and blunt, standing to attention from its nest of light curls. Joss stumbled back against the wall with a thump, whipping his hands away as if from a boiling kettle. Then Sharadzi was female again, lushly curved and beaded with water. "Don't do that!" Sharadzi lowered her head. "I'm sorry. You told me you were able to accept things that—I am sorry. Forgive me. I'll go." "Wait." He stood against the wall, his back shoved, surely painfully, against two or three brass steam nozzles. She watched as he mastered himself. After a long breath, he looked up. The wariness in his eyes dismayed her. "You did answer my question," he said. "But for God's sake, will you please warn me before you do anything like that?" "I'll try," she said. She clasped her hands, standing where she was. "I am sorry." "Do you—was that an illusion?" He answered the question himself. "No, I saw, I felt, I fucking smelled you—you were male, for a minute." He let go of his clawed grip on the tiles, but stayed as far from her as the wall would allow. "You ... don't have a real gender of your own?" "I must say, it's nice not having to explain these things to you." She risked a smile. He didn't give it back. 42

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"I guess I can accept this. I ... can't help but think of you as female. You're the most female thing I've ever seen. And that's how I saw you first. So. It appears my cultural conditioning is pretty strong." She could see the analysis calming him, and dared to look into his eyes. "Keep the water hot," he said finally, and turned from her to pick up the shampoo bottle. She stood still, in the colder air away from the water, feeling the totally unaccustomed shock of rejection. It robbed her of speech, made it hurt to breathe, while he soaped his blonde hair and let the water run through till it was clear again. "You're bruised," she said then in a ghost of a voice. It was all she could summon. Her hand lifted hesitantly toward two reddened places on his upper back. She let her hand drop before he turned to look at her. "And you're crying," he said, stunned. They looked at one another for a long moment. She couldn't move. He had to step closer to touch her tears, scalding his fingertips. "You have feelings, of course." . "The ways in which I'm like a human outnumber the ways in which I'm not." She couldn't move, didn't move until his arms closed around her. A sound she hadn't known she could make tore itself from her throat, and then she was silent, burying her face in his shoulder. "It must be very lonely," he said musingly. She heard his voice, felt his heart, through the wiry muscle of his chest against her. "You are the last." "It's lonely for mankind," she said. "I am the last." 43

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They stood for a long time in silence, pressed together. Sharadzi kept the water hot. **** He asked her to take them somewhere else for lunch. With some misgiving, she stepped with him from the mountain retreat to a little restaurant she knew in San Francisco, but he did not react as she feared. He only blinked in the sun and caught his breath. "A man could get serious jet lag, traveling with you," he said, taking off his jacket. They sat outside, at a tiny patio table, perfectly private amid a bustle of waiters and a chattering surround of patrons. Joss's fingers toyed with hers across the table. "Wasted our time this morning," he said wryly. "Not that I mind. Working things out with you is important. Sharadzi, if you're mine, if I win you, I mean to treat you as a person." She smiled back at his earnest look. "You do. You have. They always do, my masters—and yet they never really can." She stopped, blinking. She hadn't meant to say anything like that to him. I'm still shaken from this morning, she thought. I made such a mistake there. He hadn't touched her, getting dressed, or sought a kiss after making business calls and checking email on his laptop. He hadn't noticed her discomfiture. "I have a lot of things I want to do. I hope you'll help me. The problem now is to decide which is the most important, since my foolishness used up so much time." "Perhaps I can advise you, if you tell me what you were thinking about." 44

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"You—" Joss pointed a pickle spear at her. "are a stealth weapon. If I understand it right, your restrictions are pretty simple. Ray explained it as a list of things you could do in and of yourself, and then a further list of things you could do as a special wish." She nodded, idly turning around her tea glass. All conversation between the businessmen at the next table had stopped, but they were staring at the cleavage revealed by her white silk shirt, not listening to Joss. "But if you look at it from the other end, you consider what results you can get. From that perspective, the key is what I can do myself. It seems to me that your intrinsic abilities are all shortcuts." "What do you mean?" "You make a tray of coffee appear or a breakfast," he said, waving his hands in hokey mystic passes. "Well, if I spent some time in the kitchen, I could do that. And we've traveled to California. Three hours in an airplane would do the same. Not that I'm putting you down," he added hastily. "I understand." . "But the things you need a wish to do, those I couldn't do no matter how long I tried, how much I sacrificed. Creating a previously established holding company out of nowhere ... some of the other things Ray mentioned ... I couldn't do that." Sharadzi nodded. "What you say is true enough. Although with time and effort, he could have purchased a holding company. But the success of his ventures then and since has been unusually consistent." 45

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"It's outside the laws of probability," Joss said, nodding. "But for the moment, that doesn't matter. I don't have the special wishes right now, may never. Ray's always liked Rich very well, and Alex would be a great choice to run his own company. I'm somewhat the wild card in this matter. Maybe if you spoke for me..." He tilted his head conspiratorially. "I will tell my Master everything that has happened. I know you'll be given an opportunity to speak in your own cause. But..." She looked away. "I don't want to hurt you. But the truth is, I cannot maintain a preference. I want you to have me, but ... I also want Rich or Alex." "We're all the same to you." "No! Far from it, Joss. But you are all equally yourselves, equally fascinating. It is ... always an adventure." She spread her hands. "I can't explain it better." "I guess I understand." He set down his napkin, finished, and slid his credit card out of a slim wallet. "In any case, my point is, right now I have your intrinsic powers at my disposal." "And my friendship," she said, surprising herself again. "You are an unusual man, Joss." He took her hand, and she thought how sad it would have been never to see that halfway smile again. "I value that very highly," he said, "very highly indeed." He was silent while the waiter came to take his card, sprinkling pleasantries with a lavish hand in hopes of a heavy tip. "So what can I do for you?" she asked with a smile when the man had gone. 46

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"The things I want are many," he said thoughtfully. "I want the space program to flourish. I want the economy to recover. I want peace on earth and goodwill to man." He laughed. "I want my mom to come back from the dead. Lots of things." "All would require a special wish, and I'm not sure I could arrange world peace in a good way," she said. "It would mean changing human nature. If mankind lost its aggression, I'm not sure it would survive very long." Joss nodded. "Just the sort of thing I was, wait, you mean you could bring my mom back from the dead?" The returning waiter gave him a funny look, then apparently decided they were soap opera producers and laid down the ticket. Joss, his face flushed, signed hurriedly. "It would impact less, if you know what I mean," Sharadzi said. Joss sighed. "I can't think about this right now." He frowned for a moment, recovering his train of thought. "Stealth weapon. Yes. You're a stealth weapon. If your power was generally known, well, it would take a lot to prove it, but I suppose it could be done." "It has been done," she said tranquilly. "In the old days, it was just another magic. Some places and times, it might have cost a man much to let it be known he employed a witch. More recently, people have assumed it was just a trick. Nowadays..." She smiled. "Nowadays, the words 'special effect' cover a lot of ground," Joss said with a nod. "So your best bet is to operate in secret. Data piracy, breaking and entering, illusion for 47

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thought control—how can I change the world much that way?" "Political power?" Joss grimaced. "Politicos don't have any power. Not in this country. Bunch of figureheads. I suppose I could—at a stretch—become important in those circles, but it's no ambition of mine. No, I can do more by moving money around than in any other way. Funding for projects I believe in, computer failure for those I don't, that kind of thing." She nodded. "That makes sense." "But it would be a long term project." Joss sighed. "Ray's got to give you to me. The others will be out for their own desires. I want to make things better, for the whole world. The old man's got no children he likes, from what he said at dinner. Sharadzi, I could be his immortality!" She said nothing, thinking of her conversation with Ray the night before. He's never liked the space program, she thought. We have enough problems right here on earth, he always said. Often caused by people trying to make things better, for the whole world. Finally she murmured, "He might not have the same views about what would and wouldn't make things better." Joss nodded and rose, draping his jacket over his arm. She stood, taking his proffered hand, and smiled up at him. He bumped his head lightly against hers.. "Tonight, you'll help me draft a speech, or an essay, on why it should be me. Your knowledge of Ray and what he likes to hear will be very useful." "As you wish.". 48

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"For now ... for now, I want to see some things. Set my backbrain to work on it and expose myself to a wide variety of experiences. For inspiration!" "Anything you like." He answered immediately. "Can you take us to space— safely?" She laughed. "No, my friend. As you said, it's not something you could manage in your lifetime ... not without a wish. But I can give you an accurate illusion of it." "Back to the cabin then. I'd like to see." In the black velvet silence of space, Jossrey Taylor thrashed and wailed. His inner ear told him he was falling, and it was fortunate that he hadn't eaten all that much. She steadied him with a hand, quelling his footless spin. His hair and hers stood out wildly, waving like seaweed, and he panted, pale and flushed by turns. "Perhaps I should have started with Mars," she said apologetically. "No," he gasped, his hands tight on her forearm. "No, this is fantastic!" They hung above the blue curve of the earth, a fragile shell of air and cloud around the pale sky-colored egg held all the minds he had ever known or read of or heard about, those he had never considered and all that had passed through all the years behind. "It's just like reality?" She nodded against the flaring halo of her hair. "Just the way it looks now. If you could command a picture from the space station, this is what you'd see. Plus the effects of being 49

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there," she added, "microgravity, and your stomach. Is it settling?" He shook his head absently, and she saw him pick out satellites by eye against the endless blackness, two, then another. The stars were the same distant companions they were from within the atmosphere, thousands more of them visible than even above the mountain retreat. The wide band of diamonds that was the spiral arm swept awesomely away. After a long moment she saw him rub his eyes roughly. "It's got to be me, Sharadzi," he said thickly. "For this. For humanity. It has to be me. You're the last, my last, maybe man's last chance to have this, before it becomes economically impossible or we blow ourselves up." He turned carefully in air, anchored by his grip on her. "Some gravity, please?" She let the white-canopied bed return to visibility within the illusion, and they settled to a seat at the edge of it. "If only I could really be there," he said. "It's just not permitted. I'm sorry. If I tried, we'd be prevented from doing it somehow." "Prevented by whom?" He looked around, as if expecting the voice of a god from the empty, alien blackness and the clustered jewels. "By whatever law governs me," she said softly, remembering the poem she'd read. "Whatever law made me born djinn, powerless power, bottled brightness." He drew her against him. "Tell me," he said. "Tell me your life story. Born djinn? How is that possible?" 50

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So she leaned gratefully into his embrace. In the silent wheel of the sky, she told him of her desert clan, riding their pony-like animals and living on cactus milk and lizard flesh, so long ago. "Not one in two hundred of the Burning Rose People was born djinn. My father's family was much celebrated, for every child he sired—three, no, four—was djinn. It was thought to be a great blessing on the tribe. Of course each one of us could be given to serve a great king somewhere in the world in return for much wealth. The Burning Rose People thought that through my father, they would rule the world." She fell silent a moment. "My brothers—we had one word for sibling, but it translates better as brother—were given to kings and rulers. I was born and chosen to serve the Eriate of a smaller nation to the south, who had excellent horses to trade. My father planned to ask also for a spacious estate to live in when the desert grew too much for him and pride was no longer an issue. That was his error. The Eriate granted him this, and in smiling gratitude feasted him, and brought him to tour his new lands. My father, the fool, gave me up in the course of this tour, and was immediately shown to a jail cell." "He wasn't a djinn?" "No, of course not. No djinn can breed, Joss. Imagine if we could! No, he was a man of the Burning Rose People. Not a man as you are, but no djinn." "I see. Why did he throw him in jail?" "The Eriate took him prisoner to breed him to human women. He thought to send women to my father and make a hundred djinn, to rule the world himself, just as my tribe 51

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wanted to do. Men are fools, my friend. It would have been better for my people had my father never been born." "Did he succeed?" "After a fashion. The ... things ... my father sired on those human women still live, hidden in the world, miserable monsters without power, only hideousness and bitter immortality. There was a war." She felt his fingers trail through the soft tips of her curled hair, felt that lightest, idle touch draw her attention, raise her alertness to a higher pitch. She continued, hoping he would not hear the change in her voice. "Only one man, the chieftain of the tribe, was allowed to have a djinn of his own. All others were traded away. He was jealous of his power, that chieftain, as all his predecessors had been. There was a war, yes. His djinn against me, now in the Eriate's possession; his tribe against my master's armies." He shifted in place beside her, stirred by the visions in his mind as much as by the slow-turning world laid out before him. "My father saw those armies from his cell window. He knew, as the Eriate could not, that one djinn against another is perfectly equal. In battle we cancel one another out utterly." He leaned his head against hers, the two of them seated on the edge of a bed that seemed to float, unconcerned for its incongruousness, in the middle of space, in a bubble of warmth and air. "What happened then?" "My father slew himself in his cell," she said. "My master raged. He swore to destroy the tribe, but they fled into the 52

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desert, once enough life had been lost to assuage their pride. I know that they died out, over time, but that the Eriate never came to cause the death of a single one after they retreated." "I'm sorry about your father," Joss said. "And that you had to serve his killer." "We are very different, you and I," she said with amusement. "What does that mean?" The djinn chuckled. "I loved serving the Eriate. So strong he was, and proud. His rages were so wild. He used to break the most priceless artworks, and then call the artist to make him another when he cooled." Joss shook his head in complete incomprehension. "What happened to the rest of the djinn?" She looked away, all the pleasure going out of her at once. "I do not know." "How can you not know, with your powers?" She shuddered, and he drew her closer, half turning to wrap both arms around her. "They have simply vanished," she said quietly. "Every decade, every century, fewer and fewer answered when I turned my mind to them. Felz was the first—gone! No one knew who had taken up his bottle when his master died, or where it was. Dropped in the sea, or buried and never unearthed, or left on a shelf, forgotten. We were not worried. It happens, time passes. Someone would find it eventually, and we all had our own tasks to perform." She closed her eyes, feeling a cold tear track down her cheek. "But not in five hundred years has Felz resurfaced. Nor Zerai 53

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or Aruzze or Zenob or a hundred others. Their voices are silent in my heart. It is my only sorrow in a world of great joy, Joss." He kissed her face, his lips crossing the line of her tears. He sighed, tasting it, and kissed her forehead, her closed eyes. "Has something been eating them somehow? Has forgetful mankind buried all the others in his trash middens? Is someone making an informed collection? I can't find them, Joss, I can't find them." She caught her breath, determined not to weep for the second time in a day, unprecedented vulnerability, unforgivable. Joss kept kissing her, helpless to offer any other comfort against a loneliness he could never understand, until at last her mouth was hot against his and her arms twined tightly around his neck. She unbound his ponytail and ran her fingers through the cool strands of his straw-colored hair. Slow-changing clouds moved over the face of the earth, their patterns obscuring and revealing the continents as he touched her, his long-fingered hands seeking to explore her wherever they could. He pushed her skirt up to spread his hands on her outer thighs, leaning half over her until she lay back against the bedhead. She breathed faster against his ear, caressing the flat planes of his shoulder blades, and felt his mouth open against her neck eagerly. "Sharadzi," he said softly into her skin. "I can't just use you. Is this what you want?"

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She drew her breath in, slipping her hand into his hair at the temple, and met his pleading eyes. "So much," she answered him, "I can't tell you. Please." He smiled his lopsided smile before he covered her mouth with his, and his weight came down over her, one long leg bent to rest on one knee, the other extended alongside hers. His hair fell down around her face, getting in the way of his kisses, and he laughed, but let it hang there. She gasped when his hands found her breasts, spreading over the silk of her blouse, her nipples as hard as the buttons. She slid her hands inside his shirt, felt him stiffen in response to the heat of her fingers. He removed her clothes with great deliberation, no virgin's hasty fumbling at the fastenings. She rolled and writhed to help him. He took pleasure in throwing her garments aside, watching them fall away endlessly into the illusion of black nothingness between the stars. "If they burn up on re-entry, I'll be impressed," he said and kissed her laughing mouth. She pressed her body against him, her nakedness against his jeans and polo shirt, loving the feel of it, the wantonness. His hands were everywhere, slow but never stopping, finding the rounded flesh of her ass to pull her against him harder, the curve of her spine to scratch slowly. She moved against him, responding to his touch, her moans soft in his ear, her body pliant, offered entirely to him. She heard his breathing, ragged, sharp when she ran her palm over the tented front of his jeans, hissing when she raked her bent fingers lightly up his sides. He ducked his head out of his shirt as she drew it away, giving a soft, thrilling sound when her bare breasts 55

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pressed against him. Then he rolled aside from her, panting, his eyes darkened to smoky blue. "Do it again," he said. "What you did in the shower. Show me the man I saw then." "But you—" "Do it!" She closed her eyes, unwilling to see the rejection in his face, and did as he asked. The young man who had, in his time, been known as Zasharad, the Queen's Gift, through generations of matrilineal possession, had a raging hard-on. When he could not stand the silence any longer, he opened coffee-colored eyes to see Joss staring at him, running his gaze slowly up and down. The blonde's lean frame was tense, but unless he was mistaken, the front of his jeans had not gone down at all. "You see? I can learn." He reached out to touch, laying his long hand flat on the smooth chest. "I can learn," he said again, as if to himself. "Joss..." That quirky smile. "Your voice is different. Don't go back to yourself just yet. I want to..." He shook his head quickly, scooting closer, and the djinn felt the hand on his chest tremble. "This is myself too." "I know. I know." Joss looked into his eyes for a moment, and with an effort Sharadzi felt in every little muscle of his fingers, slid his hand lower. He wrapped his fingers lightly around the djinn's cock, thicker and shorter than his own, and held it, the corner of his mouth lifting as the touch drew a gasp from its recipient. "Yes," Joss said, "yes." 56

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Sharadzi groaned, the sound half a growl as Joss's hand slid along the length of his cock, the skin alive with sensation, feeling every crease of his palm. His hips tilted involuntarily toward Joss's fingers, and then they were pressed together, chest against chest, and Joss slid his free hand into the curly mocha hair, pulling his head down, against his lean shoulder. "Oh, fuck," Joss said raggedly, his hand stroking. "This is so wrong. You're still really beautiful." "Nothing here is wrong," he answered, his voice shaken. He held back from putting his arms around Joss, not wanting to frighten him, but his whole dusky body yearned against him. "Nothing, nothing you want is wrong..." "Don't stop me then," Joss said, and again it seemed to be to himself that he spoke. He licked his lips then shook his head, his blue eyes glazed, caught up in what he was doing as much as Sharadzi was. The fingers on his shaft now seemed to burn him with pleasure, the strokes clumsy but more beautiful in their inexperience than he would have thought possible. Joss held his head against his shoulder, as if afraid to look into his eyes, and he didn't see it coming when Joss's hand slipped away, rising over his belly to spread out on his chest, exploring. The widespread fingers passed over his nipple, making it stand out harder, and found the heavy pulse at the side of his throat. Sharadzi loosed a groan and caught at Joss's hips, unable to stop himself, pulling the slender man against him, his cock long and slim and standing perfectly upright against his thigh. Joss shook himself, gasped, and the firm hand at the back of Sharadzi's neck trembled, then 57

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released. "Fuck," Joss said again quietly, wonderingly as the djinn looked up at him. "You're incredible." "Joss..." He bit his lip hard on everything he wanted to say, things it was his duty to keep safely to himself. Instead he said, "What—what can I do for you?" "I want..." Joss' voice failed him, and the words your mouth were left unaspirated, the shapes of the words barely seen on his lips. He cleared his throat. "Go back," he said. "Change back to Sharadzi. Is that still your name when...?" His eyes widened, the change happening even as he watched, from one second to another, no moment of transition in between. She said, "My male self was called Zasharad, when I was a woman's djinn. But you may call me Sharadzi still. They are my names, both or either." "Did I ... does it feel..." Joss spluttered a moment, lost and shaken. "Your touch is sweet," she said shyly, "whatever part of me you may be touching." He groaned and gathered her against him, his skin catching fire from hers, flushing and warming, his arms painfully tight across her back. She met his kisses without hesitation, wrapping her calf around his to draw his leg between hers. The stars burned in the blackness overhead, beneath, all around them save for the brightly shining globe hanging over the end of the bed, tranquil, not hearing their moans. He rolled back, his grip on her pulling her over him, and she captured his thighs between hers. His hands tangled in her hair. She took the opportunity to run her nails lightly 58

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down his sides, making him gasp and wriggle beneath her, ticklish. She felt his cock move against her, and tilted her hips to press her sex to him, the lips opening hotly on the base of his slim shaft. "Ohhh, my God, Sharadzi," he groaned, bucking against her. She lifted herself up, her hands briefly hard on his shoulders then straddled him upright. For a long, bright moment she only looked at him, his cock standing up between her widely parted thighs, and then reached down to guide him. He cried out deeply as she impaled herself on his cock, sinking it fully into her soaking grip, almost hot enough to pain him. Slowly she moved, feeling the pleasure of her clitoris bumping his base with each rock of her hips, the mounting tension in her muscles. She stroked him with her grip on him, taking pleasure in the cries she drew from him, heedless groans of rising hunger, and he began to buck beneath her, lifting her from the tangled sheets. Joss's hands opened and closed next to her thighs. Palms brushed her knees as he thrust up into her, losing control, the animal part of him seeking its satisfaction. Her head tipped back, her body shuddering, tightly clenching him within her, a sharp sting of pleasure that swept out to her nerves, her hands and feet, overwhelming her. For an endless, nameless moment her senses were so wrapped up in him that she knew the instant when he opened his eyes. The woman riding him was framed in the turning glory of the earth, surrounded by uncounted stars, breathless blackness deeper than oceans all around. "Sharadzi," he 59

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named her, jerking his hips to hers. "Goddess." The word lost itself in a grunting cry as he stiffened, pulsed, spurted into her again and again, spilling his heat and his seed into her in perfect release. She slipped from him after a time, when her breathing had begun to slow, his shaking to recede. She found her face wet with painless tears and turned it down, resting her head on his shoulder, trembling. He held her, for once wordless. I ... she thought, knowing she would do no such thing once she recovered. I'll ask in all humility that he be my next Master, for who else in the world will desire to make good use of my power ... and yet worship me? After a time, he slept. When he woke, the bedroom was the bedroom again. She had watched him sleep, listened to his soft snoring, and appreciated the abandonment of his unconsciousness. Now she smiled, and he gave back his odd little corner-of-themouth grin. "Hi," he said. "What time is it?" "Scarce five in the evening. You have time to make your speech up." She had come back to herself a little and knew that her truths were still her truths: good man, bad man, her service was the same. She was willing to assist him with the wording, but that would be all. Sharadzi, help! The silent words were the voice of her Master, calling to her in the way only he could—one he had refused to use since the invention of the cellular telephone. The shuddering pain in the cry snapped her whole body taut. "What is it?" Joss said, sitting up next to her. 60

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She was out of the bed in a blink, standing poised, listening. She might have forgotten he was there. Help me ... Sharadzi, I'm hurting! Chest! I need you! She took the step, remembering to have clothes on at the other end. Just before the bedroom vanished, she caught a glimpse of its door flinging open, slamming against the wall behind Joss's troubled, bewildered face. Sharadzi finished the step into a large meeting room, big enough to echo. It was a chaotic mass of milling people, dark business suits and avid faces. He lay spilled out of his wheelchair like a casually broken toy, his white hair a mess, his tie pulled down into a tight knot and the first three buttons of his shirt undone. She swept aside the young businessman who tried to stop her, and the blonde woman crouched next to Ray looked up at her. "The doctors are on their way," she said. "I've done what I can." Sharadzi didn't hear her. She knelt beside her master, hearing sirens rising outside the windows, behind the sound of many men discussing this unusual happening and its future implications. The double doors at the far end opened then, and medical personnel hurried through, equipment slowing them. She took his hand. "My heart," he said inaudibly. Years of experience let her read his lips, withered though they were. His paleness terrified her. "Master, please—" "No! Sharadzi, no." He gasped, the effort of speaking strongly ripping half the dwindling strength from him. Not 61

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that wish, he said in the despised way, into her mind, not now, not ever. She let the emergency people push her aside, let them take his poor frail body aboard the wheeled contrivance. Nothing would keep her from following them, riding with them, although she did not answer their questions about who she was. The other woman, his secretary, came with them too, offering information about his medications, his regular doctors, his age. They worked over him feverishly in the ambulance, a nightmarish profusion of things hanging from the ceiling and walls swaying, the endless wail of the siren making it hard to hear anything. But she heard his voice in her heart, on and on, denying the wish that would heal him, make him young again if he desired. He was unconscious now, the huge pain in his chest and side never easing. "He's not going to make it," the secretary said in a little frightened voice. Dimly Sharadzi considered killing her, but duty would not allow it; her master would not want that. There was a bruised, empty silence when the siren went off. The back doors gaped to let the paramedics pull out the rolling contrivance they'd strapped him to. Sharadzi followed slowly, stopping in the middle of the white waiting room, clasping her hands as her master vanished into the body of the hospital. There she stood, no tears in her now. Later, the woman he had requested Sharadzi to cause to love him came with her three adult sons to stand at his bedside, all in a row. A faraway fear of her own rage at them, at their properness in the face of this, made her stay away. 62

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She sat uneasily in a waiting room chair. Eventually they came out, discussing the will in low voices. None of them looked at her, and she never knew whether Ray's ex-wife recognized she was there or would have known her if she had. She went into the room, hushing the orderly who tried to stop her with a touch to his forehead that left him blank and wondering for a moment, before he remembered something else he had to do and wandered off. Ray was barely recognizable among a forest of devices. Every one of them seemed to find it necessary to run a tube or a wire to the battered skeleton, barely covered with flesh, that breathed so slowly and shallowly. His heartbeat, in contrast, was far too fast and light, the indicator that marked it strobing on its monitor machine. She touched the back of his hand, her fingers gentle on the taped intubation there. "Master," she said softly. He was nowhere in the room. Surely this broken thing was not he? She could remember him, strong and laughing, dancing with her when he was young. He'd danced so well. His mother had been heartbroken when he had chosen business instead, and of course he'd never told her he wanted to be rich more than he wanted to be a dancer. Sharadzi often wondered if he missed it, but since he had become too old to do it anymore, he had never spoken of loss, not a word in all these years. The djinn closed her eyes. The door locked itself immovably. She followed the tenuous line from the place in her heart where his voice had sounded, found the incoherent, scattered thing that was his mind, caught in a dream. She 63

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stood with him, waiting to be seen and watched dream versions of herself, of Rich, of the secretary, of fifty other people she hardly knew, move and talk and fade away, phantasms with only a moment of his attention. "Master," she said. He turned from them to look at her, and her heart broke. He was twenty, his black hair slicked back from his forehead, his feet bare except for tape where the floor of the dancing studio would rub. Now and then he would age a little, his tights change to a suit that had gone out of fashion long ago, his hair lengthen or shorten. His eyes were the same, always. "Sharadzi," he said. "I'm dead, aren't I?" "No, Master." "Not yet." She bowed her head. "It's close, I fear." She hesitated, then said it one more time. "You can stop it." He only shook his head. His attention strayed, losing itself among the dreams again, and she felt her presence at the center of his mind grow pale, almost unseeable. She struggled with it, brought herself close to him again. "Ray," she whispered, the name she hadn't ever called him. "I'm here. Did you need ... oh, Sharadzi! I'm dying. You're still with me." He reached to touch her, but could not. "My beautiful girl." "If you go, I can't go with you," she said. "Stubborn. I'm stubborn. You always called me that. Did I do something about you?"

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She knew what he meant. "The candidates. We were in the middle of the retreat. It's Joss's day. Remember? Rich, Alex, Joss..." "I remember. Did you decide which one?" "It's for you to decide, Master." She held her eyes with his, keeping him away from the clustered dream things, though his hand touched the rail next to him, a mirror forming to reflect him. He lifted his foot to the rail casually, as if he had never stopped being able to do that. "I want to hear your recommendation," he said in a sharp business voice, and bent over his own leg, touching his ankle with an outstretched hand. "Report, please." She shook her head. "I wish you'd gotten to hear their own reports. I can only say that Rich is greedy and smart, Joss is brilliant and idealistic—sometimes unrealistic—and Alex ... I don't really know yet, but he has the reputation of being jealous and sly." "It sounds like none of them were a good choice." "All of them were a good choice, Master. I believe in them all. My service is the same." "Yes, yes." Dressed in a suit with absurd shoulders, wearing the moustache he'd only worn two years out of his life, he waved a hand irritably. "You'd rather have Joss, I'm guessing. I rather like him too. Idealistic, as you say, but he's damn smart. And he has good ideas." "He has a way of ... making me say things I didn't plan to say. Of making me feel things." Ray nodded. "His computer work is like that. Always a different way to get it done than you expect, and you find out 65

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it's so much better you wonder why you didn't think of it." For an instant, his young eyes looked out at her from his old face, the hair flaring white, thinning, and she saw a ghost of the wheelchair. Then he brushed himself off and stood up lithely, growing young while the mirror disappeared. "I've liked him from the start," he announced. "He's the favorite? He thought he was the least likely." Ray snorted, grinning his showman's grin at her. He wore his old tee shirt and ripped jeans now, the ones he'd worn to court the Congressman's daughter, to prove she could not help but love him. That was certainly true, despite her horrified parents, but it was no fault of her own. Ray said, "I wanted him to think that, but he's been the odds-on—" And he was gone. She stood at his bedside, hearing the scream of alarms, nurses rushing in, and it was all fading. She reached out for him, impossible to touch him now. There was something between them. Silence, cold and silence. Nothing, nothing, nothing... Time did not pass in the bottle. There had been intervals of fifteen, twenty years passing without her, no one finding her container interesting enough to touch it. One didn't have to rub. A hand gripping the neck of the jeweled bottle, eight inches long, barely big enough for perfume or scented oil, often dusty and dirty, was all it took. Removal of the ordinary little cork to let her out. Possession. Inside, there was nothing; no thought, no motion, no time passing. **** 66

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She spilled from it in a solidifying mist of smoke, gasping, sucking at the true air of the world, grateful beyond all belief to be there again. She had stumbled into the basement of the Berektis's house, crowded with junk, lit only by a single bulb on the far side of it from where the special safe, disguised as an old cooler, had been tucked under the stairs. There was a copper and cordite reek in the air, a whiff of excrement. The safe stood open, her bottle no longer in it, now gripped by the neck in Alex's fist. His attention was elsewhere, his arm fully extended, a .45 handgun aimed lethally at Joss, who crouched against the stairs, his hands in the air. Joss's pale eyes were flatly murderous, but he did not move. Draped across the stairs behind him was the unmoving, no longer bleeding body of the Berektis's caretaker, Danny. "Master," she said to Alex. "Get out of here if you want to live," Alex said to Joss. "You did a good job hacking the computer lock, so I'm letting you go. You know what'll happen if you tell anyone. I've got her power now." Joss glanced at her once, his face unreadable. Sharadzi watched him back away, walk up the stairs slowly, and step over Danny's body. His footsteps receded in the house above, and she heard the door close. "You're mine now?" Alex said, lowering his weapon to his side cautiously. "Yes, my Master," she said. "What can I do for you?"

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"Hide that body!" His voice was just beginning to shake, his shark's ruthlessness cracking now that the deed was done. "No evidence left." She waved a hand. When Alex turned his head, the stairs were clean, an artistic scatter of dust making the risers where Danny had lain look the same as the rest. "Good," he said, beginning to relax. He looked around him then thrust his gun into the little safe with a metallic chunk sound. He kicked the door shut and spun the latch with his toe. "I already buried Rich," he said, thinking out loud. "No evidence. He's in Chicago. Nothing traceable. And if it is, you can stop any trouble, can't you?" "Yes, Master. I protect you, wherever you are." "Come here," he said. She stepped close, and he grabbed her roughly, jerking her against him, his body shaking hard. She wrapped her arms around his neck, but he wasn't looking for comfort, at least not that sort. He pushed her down to the concrete floor and unsnapped his pants, tugging open the zipper in a single motion. She had begun to turn over, to look up at him, when he fell upon her, tearing her skirt in his haste to open it. He was soft, still shaking with reaction from his murders, and growled with frustration. She felt him shove her into the concrete floor, her breasts flattening against it. "Master—" "Shut up!" He wound his fingers in her hair and pulled, and she scrambled to her hands and knees, roughing the skin on the concrete. He tore the shreds of her skirt from her, yanked her panties half down, and at last hardened himself enough to poke at her. She felt his nails claw at her ass, and gasped, 68

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opening to him, the pain stinging her system like the darker sister of pleasure. He found her tight, unwilling opening and shoved himself into it, driving her shoulders against the floor. She held herself silent while he grunted, thrusting again and again, stiffening more as he worked himself into her ass. She arched to open herself to him more, taking his violent strokes, deeper and deeper. Her left knee bled onto the concrete, and she reminded herself to fix that when they left—the Berektis's would wonder. She moaned as she felt him begin to spurt into her, hot juices lubricating him now, letting him slide as he cried out hoarsely, bucking, releasing the tension of his plots and recent actions at last. He fell against her, scraping her knee and shoulders as he collapsed them both down onto the concrete. "That's good," he said as he shrank from within her. "That's a good girl." Sharadzi turned to hold him against her, and this time he let her, his heart still pounding. She crooned softly, petting his head, letting him take some ease if he would. "It'll be all right now," she said softly. "Mm." He actually fell asleep for a few minutes, she estimated, and smiled to herself. Her body throbbed, a welcome change from the chilly nothing inside the bottle. He said little to her beyond a request that she move them to his house in the city. She stepped with him from one place to another, heard him shudder and spit as if the act revulsed him, and then he brusquely directed her to wait while he showered and changed. He set her bottle down on the mantelpiece, among a jumble of other decorative items. She 69

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touched it, the outside touch of it always cold to her fingers, her name woven in gold on the lead band around its neck. Her father had made it, as he made all the bottles for all his children. Glass, blown and touched with gems just before it cooled, so that they stayed. Lead and gold, silver and brass wound around and around, soldered on. Any container would do, to bind the soul of the newborn djinn, but the Burning Rose People had always designed them to be lovely. There was a knock at the door, and she turned. There was no staff here; Alex had always done for himself. Now he was in the shower. As she moved toward the door, the knock was repeated, light and hurried, urgent. She opened the door. Joss had a broken finger, splinted with metal and green foam. He looked behind her fearfully. "Is he there?" "He's in the shower," she said. Joss swarmed against her, his heartbeat rapid against her chest as he folded his arms around her tightly. "God ... seeing you again." She squeezed him back, but then put him away from her. "I can't let you in. He wouldn't want it. I'm his now. It's his will that I must do." "That's what I came to talk to you about," Joss said. "I figured it would be that way, but I had to know. Sharadzi ... can't you help me?" "I don't know what happened." "You went in the bottle when Ray died?" At her nod, he hurried on. "Rich and Alex burst in when you vanished. They were furious. They had looked at the clock, seen the time— they knew you'd put them to sleep. It convinced Alex, I 70

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guess. He was about to strangle me then and there. Rich stopped him. They couldn't contact you or Ray, and they found out Ray went into the hospital. Alex guessed that was where you were, and he ... he just went into his room, got that gun, and shot the hell out of Rich. He made me help him clean up." He shuddered, and passed his hands through his hair, ducking his head to press his face for a moment. "Joss," she said softly. "He held the gun on me. We went straight to the Berektis's. They weren't home, and that caretaker Danny took him right to the basement." "That's how he knew about the safe?" "Danny told him. He's been paying Danny, I think. Sharadzi, he's more ruthless than I ever knew. Jealous isn't the half of it. I don't think that was the first time he's killed someone." Joss looked over her shoulder again, but she shook her head, still hearing the shower. "There's nothing I can do for you, Joss," she said. "If he comes out here, if he tells me to make you die or vanish, I'll have to do it." "But you don't want to..." "Joss," she said, "you're still my friend. Please, go and don't ever come back. It's who I am, Joss, it's what I am. Good man, bad man, my service is the same." "You'll be mine soon," he said, backing down the stairs. "I'll make sure of that." "I will be his until he dies," she said, watching his face. "I'll get you out of this," he promised and ran for it. 71

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In the following weeks, inquiries into the unrelated deaths of a Chicago public relations guru and a caretaker in an upper New York mansion were bogged down. Alex was questioned, but mildly, and only because he had been at a business retreat with one of the deceased only a few days before he was found. Alex was charming, sympathetic and apparently a little shaken at the death from natural causes of his mentor, Ray Carroway, whose empire was being legally handed over to his children. The detectives left with his promises to call if he thought of anything useful. Sharadzi went everywhere with him. His uses of her at night were kinder than his first tension-driven roughness had been, now that things had returned to normal, and she enjoyed his utterly self-motivated pleasure taking. He was such a fierce and unconfined soul, without the boundaries normal men labored under. He was all shark. She'd known such men before, unhappy for the most part, knowing themselves separate from their fellows and unable to bridge the gap, no matter how much pain and ruthlessness they dished out. Alex was no exception. He kept an office in the high-rise that housed one of Ray's satellite companies, Brooks Financial Industries, in the main New York banking district. She stopped him from going in one morning and pushed him back against the hallway wall without a word. "What is it?" "Wait, please, Master." Sharadzi opened the door cautiously. The charge blew, but she stifled the resultant sputter, silenced the bomb, held it still with her power. "It's 72

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safe now," she said, lifting the elegant little mechanism from the other side of the door handle. "It won't go off." "A bomb?" He backed a few steps farther, staring at her. "You ... killed it?" "That's right." She smiled warmly at him, extending her flat palm with the deadly little thing resting on it. "It can't explode now." "You saved me," he said numbly. "How did you know it was there?" His shark's eyes watched her face, his powerful shoulders no more tense than usual. "My power protects you, Master. If there's imminent danger to your life, I sense it. And I stop it." She flicked her fingers, and the bomb vanished, leaving only a scent of cordite from the initial charge and a burned spot on the door's narrow edge. "I think I'm going to like having you around," he said, satisfied. "I've thought of a wish, but I'm not sure I want to use it up. I'm going to wait." "As long as you like," she said calmly. He nodded, and she pulled the door the rest of the way open for him. A week later, a sniper on the roof of a nearby building had no opportunity to fire at Alex before Sharadzi vanished his gun. Alex laughed in his face when the young black man was arrested. He was released, later on, because no weapon could be found, which made Sharadzi laugh, though it angered Alex. "Who's behind this?" he said to her, coldly. "I want you to find out." 73

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"I'm fairly sure who it is already. Joss Taylor. He wants me." "Kill him," Alex said at once. "Kill him dead." "Is that a special request, Master?" She saw his look when he turned his head to her, the suspicion and balked fury in his eyes, and thought mournfully little of Joss's future. But he shook his head. "Never mind. I'll get him myself," he said bitterly. She sat quietly in the taxi beside him on their way home and held her face still. There was a lost flutter in her midsection. She had not done that for a hundred years, implied that an ordinary request of her Master's was a special wish in order to misdirect him. There were loopholes, ways to circumvent the perfect obedience to his will, but using them was very dangerous. If he came to mistrust her, especially with a mind like that, he would begin to phrase things very carefully indeed, and her small store of leeway would be gone. And I did that only to save a man's life, she thought. It's nothing, nothing to me. Nothing in the great long pattern of human things. Why did I do that? She remembered how Joss had asked to see the stars. Alex lay beached beside her after a particularly fierce encounter that night, his strongly muscled body sheened in sweat, his breathing slowing. She turned to him to offer the warmth of her embrace, something he only permitted at times like this. He shook his head, warning her off. There was something coiled within him, as if he were ready to take her again, but she sensed it moving in another direction now. 74

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"What is it, Master?" He studied her face, his own cold and distant as if he'd never touched her that night. "I want to ask you a question," he said. "It's not a request, not a wish, just a question." "Of course." She smiled. "You have to be very clear before I take special action, don't worry." "Good. Then tell me, can you make me immortal?" She drew a long breath, regarding the question soberly. "You aren't the first to ask," she said. "It is a special case. It requires more than one of my requested efforts, for it's no good unless you also stay young and never get seriously hurt. The three go together or you are quite, quite miserable. I can take you to the prison of a Mistake, if you like. It's a rock cavern with no air, no water, no light, no way to escape, only his endless screaming." Alex blanched, one of the first times she'd ever seen that. "I would like to see it," he said after a moment. "To learn about that. But what you're saying is that if I ask for immortality, it would be stupid not to ask for the eternal youth and constant health. Three wishes. You'd be gone." "That's true. But with all the time in the world, you can make almost any other desire come true for yourself." Except the one Ray wished for, she thought. Everything except love. He smiled wolfishly. "I'd hate to give you up. I'd rather wait. If I never wish for anything else then when I get old and tired, I can use up those wishes and lose you and start over." "That is wise," she said. She didn't tell him how often it had been expressed, and then true wisdom, learned over the course of a lifetime, made them take Ray's way out. 75

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"There are people walking around now who made that wish five hundred years ago," he mused. The darkness hid him now, except for his silhouette, which shifted restlessly. He slept little, a few hours a night at most, and the energy burning off him seldom dimmed. "Immortals." "Only a few," she said. "It seems like anyone would want that," he said. "Fools, to give it up." She shrugged one shoulder, though he couldn't see her in the dark. There was silence, the slow prowl of his thoughts reflected in his breathing, and she closed her eyes, wondering if sleep passed the time for him. There was no sleep for her; the Burning Rose People had been puzzled and amused by sleep when they encountered it in humans—a thing of animals, they said, proving the lowness of mankind. Behind her eyelids, she conjured the living stars, the breathing earth and the blackness of void between. A virus ate all the company files, targeting strictly the ones Alex needed most, his databases and financial records, his lists of contacts and his secret dossiers on important people. He hit her when he found out, turning right from the apologetic messenger to strike Sharadzi across the face with the back of his hand. Then tightly, he spun to snap out a dismissal, and the young lady with the sheaf of useless papers scurried out as if the room had filled up with snakes. The mark of his hand burning on her cheek, the djinn looked at him calmly. "You've the right to beat me to shreds if you want." "Bitch! I thought you were protecting me." 76

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"I'm not protecting your computers. I can't do that. If someone aims a gun at you, I'm there. I don't have the power to be everywhere at once." "Find the power," he snapped, but she saw his shoulders relax, his pupils shrink, and knew that he accepted the logic of her response. He stalked out to yell at his subordinates, and she sat down. The sting in her cheek faded slowly. If he had broken her bones, they would have healed; if he had stabbed her, it would have healed. She was a djinn, and no man could kill her. It was nothing. She leaned her head back against the wall and sighed. No man could kill her Master either. But Joss was capable of making himself a serious nuisance, obviously. There were no more computer attacks for a few weeks. But on a Friday, Alex found out that his bank accounts had been tapped, skillfully and without trace. Jossrey Taylor was funding his private war from the most logical source. She rose, left alone in his office again. After a second's hesitation to place her Master, far down the hall and railing at his unfortunate employees, she stepped from here to there. He was in Brazil, living in a small house, previously the servants quarters of a large plantation. It was now occupied mostly by marijuana plants, and the smell of them—burning and unburning—was thick in the air. All the windows were open, and he was wearing only a tank top and shorts, both marked with sweat. He looked miserable, she saw, his ponytail a draggle down his back, uncut, his head resting on his crossed wrists, seated at a metal desk with a scatter of 77

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papers on it. The computer hummed in the shaded corner, a large cooling fan directed at it. "Joss," she said softly. He started up, looking around wildly and knocked over his chair. "Oh, it's you. I mean, it's you!" He opened his arms to her, and she leaned against him, feeling the strength of his bones thrumming against her, his embrace as always a little too tight around her back. The smell of him comforted her somehow, and she felt his breath heave against her, almost a sob. "He didn't send you to kill me then," he said, muffled against her hair. "Even if he did, I'd want to hug you first," she said and reveled in his laugh. She took a half step back, looking up at him seriously. "He will, if you keep this up," she said. "Keep what up?" He winked at her. "He hit me," she said reluctantly. She hadn't wanted to play this card, but the danger was very real. "When he found out about the computers. He knew it was you, of course. That's your best weapon, genius." "He hit you?" Incredulity burned into anger, like the fuse in the bomb he had sent. "The ass! Hit you!" "He can do that," she said. "I do his will. I'm his, and I won't stop him. He could shoot me if he liked. It wouldn't kill me, and it would relieve his feelings—" "Stop it right now," Joss said sharply, "before I lose all respect for you." "No sense in that," she said gently. "It's what I am. There's no shame in it. It's not a humiliation, well, it is, in his 78

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mind. But not in mine. I know what I am. There will be another after him." "Me," Joss said. She could not say that she hoped so, could not encourage him. "My point is, that he will hurt me when you hurt him. And eventually he'll be angry enough to send me to kill you. Joss, understand me, I will do it." "I believe you.". "It would be a great waste," she told him, and then looked at him, puzzled, when he laughed. "All right. I'll find some other way. No more computers. We can't have waste." She smiled. "That's better." "Can't you help me? Advise me how to kill him?" "Of course not!" She glared at him. "I have to stop you if you try." "Then I'd better not plot with you, I guess. I wish I knew a way." "Please, just live your life, Joss. The level of nerve he burns away every day, you will outlive him. Then you can figure something out." "And have you when I'm fifty? No, Sharadzi. No. May I kiss you?" She kissed him, for answer, curling her tongue with his when he met her passionately. His arms tightened further around her, and she gasped softly, bending against him. "I must go," she said. "Don't..." 79

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"I have to. He'll be looking for me soon. I don't want him to ask me where I've been." She drew away from him, increasing her strength against his tight hold, and he had to let her go. "What if I stole your bottle?" he said desperately as she half-turned from him. "It wouldn't work," she said, one foot over the threshold that divided there from here. "He would have to die." "Does he know that?" She was shaking her head, a barely visible motion, the tiniest shake, as she stepped across and was gone from his sight. But she saw the corner of his mouth quirk up. The bottle was already gone when they got home that night. Always aware of it, she could feel it, in the possession of a thin, nervous Brazilian, on a plane heading south. She said nothing, feeling her duty stretch to the limits of its tensile strength. It would not rip; she would betray Joss first, whether she wished to or not. Alex, tired from his furious day, failed to notice her missing container. It would take time, she considered, for him to become obsessed with the bottle. So many of them did; Ray had been no exception. His elaborately secret computer-locked safe in an acquaintance's house had been the mistake that had handed her to the young shark. Alex's own solution, keeping it in plain sight among unimportant artifacts, was far more elegant and effective. Unless the enemy knew what and where it was. Joss had to have seen it when he came to the door, seen it and recognized it from the Berektis's basement. 80

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There was no way for Alex to mistake the culprit. He had killed the only other person who had known where it was, and no one but he and Joss knew what it was for. When he got up the next morning, he left the bedroom yawning and stumbling and came back in as a deadly whirlwind of silent fury. He grasped her wrist, dragging her from the bed, and thrust her naked into the living room. Wordless, icy, he pointed at the mantelpiece. "Joss must have taken it," she said. He struck her to the ground with a heavy blow of both fists, right between the shoulder blades. The world spun, and she looked up at him dizzily. Any harder would have broken her spine. It hadn't cooled him. "You let him take it," he hissed. "Plotting against me!" "No," she said. Calm was her only possible answer to his madness. "He didn't take it while I was here. I don't know who actually took it. But he's the only one who—" "I know that!" He spun away from her, pacing in the quick, smooth turns that she recognized as his greatest fury. "If he gets his hands on it, he owns you! I've got to kill him, wish or no wish." He opened his mouth, then thought better of it. "No. I have a better way. Dress yourself!" He plucked his keys from the side table and turned to his gun cabinet. She stumbled a little as she got to her feet, the dizziness fading, the pain easing more slowly. Wearing the kind of sleek business outfit he liked for public display, a single-piece minidress and matching jacket, she took his arm when he proffered it. He was still in his robe, but the laser sighted 81

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hunting rifle in his hands nullified any hint of unpreparedness in his aspect. "Take me to him," he said. Drawing him after her, she stepped from here to there. "Haven't got it yet, eh?" Alex aimed the rifle. The sight's red dot centered on Joss's horrified face, on the bridge of his nose. He had seconds to live, and she gazed on him from Alex's side, taking every instant of him that she could into herself. To remember him. No fool, he did not beg and plead with either of them. He dodged at once, and the rifle's flat snapping crack tore an inch-wide hole in the wall behind him. The shouts of alarm outside did nothing to faze Alex, who re-aimed and fired again. This time Joss went down without grace, leaving a smear of blood on the stucco behind him. She looked down at where he had fallen; the shot had taken him in the slender wing of one collarbone, breaking it, tearing a bigger hole in the back of his shoulder. He clapped his hand to the wound, unstoppable freshets of blood spilling from it. He couldn't seem to get up again, a broken bird. "That's got you," Alex said in tones of great satisfaction. People approached the little house at a run, but he kicked the door closed, and none of them would be in time; and she would have to stop them anyway. She looked into Joss's eyes, their gray paling to no color at all in his pain and shock. The red pinpoint of the laser danced just above one of his eyebrows. No more time, she thought. Into the bottle with you. 82

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"Zasharad," he whispered, and his free hand opened, an inviting gesture. She thought later that if she hadn't been thinking about the bottle just then, she'd never have understood. But it was her bottle, and she could bring it to her if she wanted. If it happened to appear in midair above his hand and smack down into his waiting palm, that was in no way against her Master's orders. Alex saw it, saw the weak fingers close over it, saw the little rill of Joss's blood running down his forearm puddle against the lead and gold neck with her name written on it. He could have shot him then, but he was already spinning toward Sharadzi, who took just one misleading step toward the wounded man on the floor. Something was tearing; it was her duty, or her heart, or her friend's life shredding itself away. "Stop!" Alex commanded her, the rifle swinging up toward her, despair and bitter icy fury in his eyes. He did not expect her to obey, believed that she belonged to Joss now and hated himself for not thinking of this beforehand. She froze in place, blood, breath and bone stopped utterly at his command, and he had no time for surprise before Joss lunged, scrabbled, flopped himself to his feet and struck him over the head with the little glass bottle in his hand. Alex fell, grunting, more annoyed than hurt, but the rifle clattered out of his hands. He was groping for it when Joss knelt, businesslike, on his back and his arm lifted and fell again, the bottle smeared with his own blood, unbreakable. Sharadzi, her duty clear, stood motionless as Joss pounded her Master, again and again, the bottle slowly crushing in the 83

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bones at the back of his head. His command held her until nothing held her, until everything went away, silence and cold, nothing at all. Time did not pass in the bottle. She fell out of it, ungainly, crying out in relief as the bleak nothing ended, overjoyed to find herself falling to a shag carpet of multiple shades of blue and green. The unmistakable smell of a good hotel surrounded her, and she half lifted herself against a carefully made bed in hues that nearly matched the carpet. She closed her eyes. Some policeman or the workmen from the marijuana farm might have picked up the bottle as Joss collapsed, dying from his gunshot wound, or even simply unconscious. Someone was kneeling beside her. "They had to peel it out of my hand," he said, amused, and she drew a wracking breath. "Sharadzi?" "He told me to stop," she said. "I couldn't protect him." She hunched over her stomach, her arms wrapped around herself. She couldn't look at him. "It's over now," he said, and his long slender fingers trailed over her face. He took her taut, bent body in his arms as best he could. "The farm guys buried him. He's in Brazil; there'll never be a case. I've got you back in the States now. We're home. We'll be all right. You're not going back in the bottle." She lifted her face slowly, making herself relax, and looked into his gray eyes. "Master," she said, and the joy of being in the world came flooding back, as she looped her arms around him. "Master." She melted against him, pressed her face into 84

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his bandaged shoulder, and heard him sigh as she eased the pain there. "Always call me Joss," he said. She heard the tremble in his voice and put up her fingers, shaking, to touch the coolness of his tears. "Joss," she whispered. Five hundred years. None of them, not one master, had ever asked her to call him by his name. Powerless powers, Bottled brightness Not gods, not angels Fire and fury at beck and call. With light eye and unbreaking heart They walk the iron changes of the world Untouched, untouching Ever and never in a single breath. SONG OF THE DJINN, by Ray Carroway (under a pseudonym); republished posthumously [Back to Table of Contents]

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About Kathleen Brandt Born the daughter of an anthropologist and a preacher/storyteller, Kathleen inherited a love of art and craft from previous generations. She is a single mother living in Colorado and handcrafter of kaleidoscopes, woodturning and jewelry, among others. Raised on fantasy, science fiction and a hugely eclectic reading base, she has a tendency to ignore genre lines, and her work includes fantasy, science fiction, horror, humor and erotica. Frequently within the same piece. Email: [email protected] Website: asherose.wordpress.com [Back to Table of Contents]

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