Genie Knows Best (6 page)

Albert started to panic when the world around him stopped spinning. First, because the world
had
been spinning; second, because Samantha knew the truth; third, because he
didn’t
know where she and the genie were; and fourth, because when he tried to get his first look at where he was, he couldn’t see a blasted thing.

Pitch black and windowless. Soundless and airless.

Albert put his hands out in front of him, scared to take a step for what he might trip over. Or into. Or down.

He fumbled with the robe he was wearing, looking for his cell phone. He had it on him somewhere, and the screen would provide at least enough light to see by. Good thing he hadn’t crushed it.

Delving first into his pants pockets, then his jacket pockets, he finally found the phone in his breast pocket. His fingers brushed the coin there, and the fact that he bypassed gold for the phone showed how stressed out he was. Samantha and her damn charmed life were a pain in his ass.
She
was the one who’d gotten the genie.
She
was the one who’d gotten the first-class trip here—wherever here was—and he sure as hell bet the genie didn’t have her languishing in some dark corner.

The screen light was dim, but at least it cut through the blackness. A foot behind him was a wall. He scanned it, looking for a light switch, but didn’t have any luck. He raised the phone toward the ceiling but couldn’t see any light fixtures. Couldn’t see the ceiling either.

The floor, however, was hard-packed earth. And no giant chasm loomed in front of him, so that was a plus.

He took a step forward, then another. He shone the light around, but all he could see were a haphazard stack of steamer trunks with the locks broken off, a pair of earthenware jars that came up to his thigh, and a pile of someone’s laundry. Or bedsheets. He couldn’t tell, and he wasn’t exactly going to pick them up to find out.

Damn Samantha. If she’d married him months ago, he wouldn’t have needed to go after her. But no bank manager would let him touch a penny of Blaine money without a marriage certificate even though he’d been running the business for months.

Albert hated being at anyone’s mercy and that’s all he’d been since he’d started losing at the tables. Cold fear slithered up his spine. Henley hadn’t given him much more time. He needed to find Samantha, get his ring on her finger, and more importantly, his name on the joint signature card. Or find the genie.

He took another step, listening for something, some sound to tell him what was going on, but… nothing.

On the left was a weathered table that looked as if it’d been hand carved, and not in any antique way. It had no lamp on it, nor a phone. He flipped his cell over and looked for connection bars. No service, dammit.

He took another step and finally saw something: stars. Son of a bitch. He’d smashed into a wall.

His hands shot out as he started to fall back, and they latched onto something with enough surface area for him to grab hold of. A doorknob.

Both hands wrapped around the knob, Albert regained his balance, then looked around for his phone. It’d landed face down so its light was faint but enough to locate it. He dragged the phone toward him with his foot, giving a moment’s thought to the trashing the screen was going to take, but no way was he letting go of the knob.

Phone in one hand, Albert turned the knob with the other, wincing when the tumbler inside squeaked. He opened the door slowly, and the dim light in the room beyond blinded him for a few seconds until his eyes grew accustomed to it.

But how long would it take him to get accustomed to what he was seeing?

Holy
shit.

Albert shoved his phone into his pants pocket, rethought that, then shoved it back into his breast pocket with the coin. He needed room in the bigger pockets because he was about to become rich beyond his wildest imagination.

Well, no, that wasn’t true. He had a damn good imagination, and it’d take a lot more gold and jewels than what were lying chaotically around what looked to be a pawnshop. The stash was damn impressive, though. A man could retire on this kind of loot.

Without a rich girlfriend.

He wedged himself in the door opening, checked the immediate vicinity, didn’t see anyone, then slid through the doorway and along the wall like a shadow. A shadow with pockets, that is. And grabby hands that shoved as many priceless objects as he could fit into those pockets.

The emerald on the face of a small vase would be enough to keep him in luxury for at least the next twenty years. Coupled with a dagger with a ruby-encrusted hilt, the treasures should enable him to live the rest of his life in luxury.

But his pockets—and his greed—were bigger than that, and he worked hard to fill both.

A crash and shattering glass outside the shop left his pockets half empty. Albert ducked and ran to the window at the front of the store. He wasn’t stupid; better half-full pockets than nothing. He plastered himself to the wall beside the window and dusted a smudge of grime from the glass.

Holy
double
shit.

It was chaos outside the shop, too. Utter and beautiful billionaire-making chaos. The hell with the trinkets in here.

He swept a bigger slice of dust away. Look at all those mythological creatures. One of them alone would earn him enough in sideshow admission fees to pay off Henley ten times over. Two of them would be twenty. Three, forty.

Albert’s brain was doing the math as fast as the bald leprechaun was stacking gold coins on the ground—a gold-counting leprechaun! He’d hit the freaking jackpot. But where was the genie?

Albert removed the crystal from his pocket again and waved it in the air. No glitter anywhere. Damn.

A ray of sunlight hit the crystal and prismed off at an angle in a solid beam of orange. The padded lid of the jewel-encrusted box it landed on burst into flame.

He changed the angle, and the beam hit a tiny Chinese gong with a
clang
, then bent in an undulating wave toward an intricate blown-glass vial. The liquid inside the vial started to boil.

He changed the angle again, and the light stretched out toward a large mirror—which cracked with a loud
pop
.

Not a good thing. Albert wasn’t superstitious, but the noise alone could do him in. He shoved the crystal back into his pocket where it was warm enough to burn a hole through it. Ah, the irony.

He backed up against the wall beside the window. The dragon was tossing gnomes into the air like a sea lion with its dinner. More gnomes were trying to catch them when they fell back to Earth. The centaur was trying to kill as many of the creatures as possible—that had to stop; those were his retirement plan!—and the leprechauns were falling over themselves tossing money at the bald one. Probably their bookie.

He liked those guys. He’d like them even more when people were tossing money at
him
to see them up close and personal—if he could just figure out how to get home from wherever the hell he was.

“Hey, guys! Cut it out! We have a guest!” something yelled, bouncing in front of the window. It looked like a yippy little dog with ears like a bat, but it had
yelled
. Not
barked
. That had to be worth a few mil at least.

He was going to be so rich if he could get out of here with one of them, but—

The thing bounced again, its face turned right toward the window. Shit! Had it seen him? Albert ducked. No need to be found and in the dragon’s firing line. He’d head toward the other side of the window.

“Seriously, you guys!” The dog kept bouncing while Albert timed his run to happen on the downstroke. “Samantha’s not going to want to hang out here if you’re acting like this.”

Samantha.
The dog hadn’t been talking about him.

Albert stopped mid-run and took a deep breath—and then another when he realized what else the dog’s words meant. She was here. Which meant the genie had to be, too.

Suddenly, all those mythical fairy-tale creatures and gold coins were no longer interesting. Albert stood up in the shadow on the other side of the window and raised himself onto his toes, just able to make out what he thought was the back of a human head beyond the dragon’s ridged back. It could be the genie—or it could be an ogre. With the looks of this place, anything was possible.

And then he saw Samantha.

Son of a bitch; she’d never dressed like that for him. The one time she’d tried, he’d had to make her change—not a good idea to put her on display when his ring wasn’t on her finger. But, hell, she’d never looked like that around him. Slim. Curvy. Half-naked. Sexy.

The genie must have bewitched her. That was a handy ability. Albert would be sure to take advantage of that little trick in the future. He’d be able to have any woman he wanted. Albert almost wrung his hands in glee, but first he had to capture that genie.

He crouched again and worked his way toward the back of the shop, picking up another trinket or two—okay, seven—along the way. He was going to need to keep a low profile and figure out some way to get that genie.

But get him he would. And if Samantha got in the way, well, that wasn’t a big deal. She was useless to him at this point anyway.

Samantha took Kal’s hand to get out of the Mercedes as the second dragon—the wyvern—waddled into view. She was glad for Kal’s strength and magic because, while dragons might be second nature to him and the talking fox, she hadn’t quite jumped on the mythological-creature bandwagon. It was all too fantastical, which was probably why the arrival of neither a second dragon nor a flying car was of enough interest to stop the fracas.

Neither was poor Dirham.

“Guys!” he yelled, still bouncing, this time on the sidewalk beneath a tattered awning. “Come on! Stop this! This is really immature of you. We’ve got company and—uh oh!” Dirham’s last bounce ended with him landing with a
splat!
on the ground, his legs splayed out to the sides as he glanced at the newcomer.

The wyvern spit out the large toothpick he’d been gnawing on. At least, Samantha hoped it
was
a large toothpick and not someone’s femur. The object landed on a leprechaun—the bald one counting his coins.

“
Loscadh
is
dó ort
, Festwick. Can’t ye see I’m countin’ me gold?”

“What I see is that you’re looking a little plumper than when I last saw ya, Seamus.” The wyvern’s tongue snaked around his beak in direct counterpoint to the swish of his tail, and neither looked good for the frazzled Seamus.

The leprechaun bounded to his feet, his gold scattering. “Yer not Festwick.”

“At least your eyesight’s not gone, though your brains are. Perfect for a dunghill, I’m betting. Oh, wait. That’s your area of expertise, isn’t it?” The wyvern flicked a coin with his talon and it landed in the middle of the fight.

“Here we go,” Kal groaned.

“What do you mean?” Samantha slid a little closer.

“If there’s one thing that gets leprechauns’ attention faster than a good fight, it’s a piece of gold they don’t have to work for.” Kal guided her back behind the car. “Watch.”

Sure enough, the leprechauns who’d been holding back a band of gnomes turned tail and leapt into the fray, bodysurfing over that rabbit thing with the horns and the dozens of hairy whatevers. The fight escalated, Gaelic being hurled even louder than Orkney and company’s grunts, and more hats, shoes, a shillelagh or two, and someone’s belt buckle went sailing onto the sand.

And then Maille rose to her back legs, her gaze locked onto the wyvern like a heat-seeking missile. “You!”

Kal cursed, then waved his hand. A shield appeared in it. “Duck!”

He pulled Samantha down with him, but she needed no urging. A roar roiled through the air, the dragon’s fire sucking every bit of oxygen from it, and the shield lit up like a beacon.

Gnomes and leprechauns scattered everywhere, most of them, it seemed, determined to get under the shield with her and Kal.

A loud crack was followed by a
thwack
, and glass shattered somewhere.

“Nice, Maille,” sneered the wyvern. “Bad enough you can’t keep our dwelling clean, but now you go clutter up the town. Such as it is.”

“Don’t get all high and mighty with me, you sniveling wyvern. What are you doing here, Bart? Last I checked, I had a restraining order against you.”

“Which expired as of three a.m. Greenwich today, so here I am. We’ve got lots to discuss, so why don’t you come give us a kiss, sweets.”

“Over my dead body.”

“That can be arranged.”

Kal handed the shield to Samantha. “Hold this. And don’t come out until I say it’s safe. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

Hung up on that last part, Samantha needed a few seconds before she could respond. But what was the right response to that statement anyhow?
Okay, but don’t get burned by dragon fire
?
Don’t let it crush you in its beak
?
Watch
out
for
the
talons
?

Thanks
for
caring
about
me?

Samantha shook her head. She shouldn’t read anything into what was a normal comment; no sane person wanted to get caught in dragon crossfire.

Except, apparently, Kal.

He marched between the two dragons, who had squared off like gunfighters at the O.K. Corral, as if he were fireproof.

Samantha hoped, for his sake, that he was, but she wasn’t especially looking forward to finding out.

“Enough, Maille. Bart,” Kal said.

“Get out of here, djinni. You’ve done enough damage, and this is none of your business.”

“When it puts my master in danger, it is,” said Kal, much more calmly than Samantha’s pulse rate. “You two need to take this someplace else.”

“I’m not going anywhere with him.” Maille crossed her arms, her green talons tapping her scales.

“Trust me, sweets, I’m not all that keen on it, either. I’m here for one reason only.” Bart spat, barely missing the back end of a gnome who was sticking out from under a twisted hunk of metal that looked to have once been a mailbox.

Maille exhaled a stream of smoke that dried up the spittle but also sparked the gnome’s pants. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Ow! Put it out! Put it out!” The gnome, hopped around, swatting at his butt with his pointed hat, and his Mini-Me leapt off his head.

Wayne kicked some sand onto the gnome and his little doppelgänger to put out the sparks.

“Sure you do, sweets.” Bart swaggered down the street. “And might I suggest you clean up that mess? Oh, wait. You don’t clean. Half the reason I moved out in the first place.”

Maille didn’t budge. “And the other half was Laverne. Don’t give me your holier-than-thou crock, Bart. Your conscience’s as black as your scales. And your name.”

Samantha groaned. Black Bart. For a dragon. Maybe this
was
the genie version of the O.K. Corral after all. The dry, dusty road could definitely pass for a cowboy town, well, except for the white sand instead of dirt. The drooping white tepee building took the place of a swinging-door saloon, and rather than a general store or local jail, vacant storefronts with shattered glass were the norm on Main Street.

The bundles of loose sand and debris that rolled by could pass for tumbleweeds, and the unicorns were this reality’s version of cowboys’ noble steeds. All this place needed were hitching posts, a couple of outlaw
wanted
posters, and an assayer’s sign to look like an old-time Wild West town. Or, with all the white, dusty, dilapidated buildings, a ghost town.

And considering everyone who lived here, Samantha wouldn’t have been surprised to see a few ghosts—though the satyr trotting out of a building through the bottom half of a set of swinging doors was a bit unexpected.

“Khaled!” The satyr skidded to a halt in front of them and adjusted the hat on his head—a cowboy hat. Seemed to be a theme: he wore a holster around his waist—if a goat
had
a waist—and a silver star hung from a ring of laurel leaves around his neck. “Boy, am I glad to see you. It’s been a long time—”

“Oh, puhleez.” Maille huffed another puff of lavender smoke. “Give it a rest, Stavros. We’ve had it with you and your orders. That badge is strictly for show.”

“Now see here, Maille—”

“Enough!” Kal nodded at Orkney, who slammed his foot down. The ground shook—at least a five-point-six on the Richter scale—and everyone bounced a good ten inches off the ground. The gnomes went higher.

Samantha shook her head when it stopped rattling. What had happened to her nice, safe little world? Sadly, she knew what had happened to it: it’d been more of a fairy tale than this place, and she’d closed the book on it without reaching the happily ever after part.

“You two need to sit down and discuss this like rational adults,” said Kal.

“That’d mean he’d have to be both rational
and
an adult,” said Maille, pointing her pointed snout in the air, “and
brat’s
nothing but a whiny little hatchling.”

“This from the female who’d cry big ol’ dragon tears when she didn’t get her way.” Bart bared daggerlike teeth that had nothing shiny about them, as if he used them for the very purpose Samantha had a sinking feeling they’d been designed for—as evidenced by that toothpick she suspected hadn’t been a toothpick. “Let’s talk about mature,
Mailleficent
. And hatchlings, too.”

Maille blasted him with an UZI-like succession of fireballs, but Bart managed to leap out of the way.

The building behind him wasn’t so lucky. The first spinning ball of fire hit the left front corner, and the structure that had already been listing to the right now groaned to the left. The next half dozen took out the orange roof tiles, which slid off and crashed to the ground, the shards breaking the front windows and making everyone near them dive for cover.

But not Samantha. She stood up. This was B.S. If she’d wanted domestic drama, she would have stayed home and confronted Albert. She’d wished to get away from all her troubles and Kal had been good enough to oblige her. No way was she going to spend her time in this magical place listening to the marital woes of dragons. What good were genie wishes if she didn’t avail herself of them?

She left the shield in the care of the rabbit thing. Miraj, someone had called him. She could see when, with those antlers, he might seem to be a mirage if he was seen hopping around, out of context, in the desert. Here in Izaaz, however, he was just part of the scenery.

“Samantha, no!” Dirham hopped to his feet and bounced along the sidewalk.

Kal spun around. “Sam—”

“It’s okay, Kal. I just wanted to say that I wish you could make these two sit down and talk things out.”

“I like the way you think.” He smiled at her, which warmed her in a far better way than the way the dragons were looking like they wanted to.

“You didn’t.” Maille’s eyes were so black that Samantha thought she ought to feel cold, but with a fire-breathing dragon glaring at her, that was next to impossible.

“Ha! Kal’s actually got himself a smart one. I like that.” Bart hacked out a laugh, then ended up choking. Not surprising, given his blowtorch imitation a few minutes ago.

“See how much you like it when we’re stuck at a bargaining table for eternity, thanks to her.” Maille’s beak curled back in the center, those shiny white teeth now as menacing as Bart’s yellowed ones.

And then Bart’s face turned yellow. His mouth dropped open for a second, then snapped shut. “Oh,
imigh
sa
diabhal
! She didn’t!”

Kal laughed. “You heard the lady.”

He waved his hand and the two dragons disappeared in a trail of orange glitter.

“You didn’t put them in the Forum, did you, Kal?” asked Orkney. Samantha still needed to find out what he was.

“What’s wrong with the Forum?”

“Ooh! Ooh! I know! I know!” Dirham bounced over like a gazelle on a pogo stick. “Maille blew the roof to bits a couple of months ago.”

Orkney didn’t say a word.

“You’re not fooling me, Ork.” Kal shook Orkney’s shoulder. “Wake up and answer the question.”

The ogre let out a little snore.

The satyr hiked his holster. “We haven’t, er, gotten around to fixing it yet.”

Kal glanced at the lopsided tepee building. “Like a lot of things around here.”

“Well, uh, things happen, and people, they don’t want to pitch in.” The satyr shrugged. “Pretty soon they’re all too busy.”

“Too busy or too lazy?”

Samantha had been aware of a low hum behind her, and when she turned around, she found, interestingly, that everyone had disappeared. Probably went back into whatever hole they’d crawled out of.

Stavros looked like he wanted to join them. “It’s difficult to explain.”

“Try.” Kal’s voice brooked no argument.

The satyr scratched the sand and the spurs on his hooves rattled. “Apathy,” he said.

“Appetizers?” Dirham’s ears perked up. “Cool! I’m hungry.”

“Apathy, Dir, not appetizers,” said Kal.

The bounce went out of the fennec. “Oh. Bummer.”

“I’ll see what I can rustle up for you, little guy.” The satyr patted Dirham’s head. “Unless you’re in a hurry?”

Dirham’s big brown eyes couldn’t be any more pathetic as he looked at Kal. “Please, Kal? Just a little nibble? You know how much I need to keep my strength up.”

Bouncing as much as he did had to use up a lot of energy.

“I’m not the one you have to ask. Sam’s calling the shots.”

Sam? No one called her Sam. Her father’s stipulation when her mother had wanted to name her Samantha had been that no one was to shorten it to Sam because Sam was “a boy’s name, and I didn’t have a beautiful daughter to give her a boy’s name.” But she liked how it sounded coming from Kal.

She was beginning to like a lot of things about Kal.

“Samantha?”

Ah, well, it’d been nice while it’d lasted. She nodded. “You said we have all the time in the world, so sure. Why not?” She nodded at the satyr. “Lead on, MacDuff.”

“You mean Stavros, Samantha,” Dirham piped up. “That’s his name.”

Samantha didn’t answer. Semantics. Her whole new world was being governed by semantics.