Read The Accidental Genie Online
Authors: Dakota Cassidy
The Accidental Genie (2 page)
A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE
I’ve totally run in a million different directions with djinn folklore. Some of it came from my love of the Disney movie
Aladdin
and the sitcom
I Dream of Jeannie
, and some of it was all just part of my imagination. A lot of it was pop culture’s take on genies. I’ve made my own rules (which shouldn’t surprise you) and created my own idea of what a genie’s world would be like. My intent is never to insult or offend anyone who celebrates a particular belief in any culture. My apologies in advance if I have. If I’ve gotten something wrong, any and all mistakes are mine.
CHAPTER
1
“Thank you for calling OOPS. We’re here to serve all your paranormal crisis needs. This is Wanda . . . er, Sloan Flaherty—werewolf at large. How can I help you?” His voice was bored and robotic as he read the greeting he’d been told to repeat if he had to answer the phones. To amuse himself, Sloan leaned back in his chair and threw his feet up on Nina’s desk with a sly grin.
Nina Blackman-Statleon, one of his sister-in-law Marty’s best friends, would gnaw his foot clear off if she caught him—which only made him smile wider. He loved to razz Nina, badass vampire and all round easily irritated female.
He waited for the person on the other end of the line to speak while he took great pleasure in peeling Nina’s sticky pads apart and making the shape of a Christmas tree on her desktop out of the assorted pink, green, and blue squares.
A female voice, rich with hesitance and a thread of what Sloan clearly pinpointed with his razor-sharp wolfie skills as fear, said, “Um, hello?”
Sloan fought a yawn. How he’d been talked into answering the OOPS phones while Marty and her friends went off shopping left him scratching his head. Those women could talk a man out of his penile implant given an hour and a couple of Nina’s imposing threats.
“Yeah. Hi. This is Sloan.” He cleared his throat, Marty’s warning still ringing in his ears
. If someone calls and they sound alone and afraid, remember to make a withdrawal from your sensitivity account, Sloan Flaherty,
she’d threatened followed by Nina, who’d said,
You fuck this up, and I’ll eat your arm clear off.
He straightened in his chair, injecting warmth into his voice. “How can I help you?” he purred, then cringed. Okay. That sounded just a little too 1-900-Sex-MeUp.
But the caller didn’t notice. The return answer was tinny and filled with static. “Is this for real?”
“Is what for real?” He popped a
Cheetos in his mouth, lifting the phone away from his lips to block out the abrasive crunch.
“This Out in the Open Paranormal Support?”
“Oh, it’s for real.” Sloan fought a snort. Maybe a little crazy but totally real. His brother, Keegan, hadn’t loved the idea of his wife, Marty, and her friends starting up a help line for those in need of support after a paranormal accident.
Each woman at OOPS, a vampire, werewolf, werevamp, and demon respectively, was the product of an accidental paranormal incident. That was how Keegan met Marty in the first place. While in werewolf form, he’d accidentally bitten her when she was walking her poodle, Muffin, fell in love, and eventually married her.
Then a cluster of coincidences happened, leaving Marty’s friends bitten and turned into shapeshifters, too. This had led the four women to believe there had to be others like them. Others who’d been turned, not necessarily with malicious intent but rather in a bizarre turn of events. Keegan didn’t think the stats on that were very high, and frankly, he’d agreed with his big brother at the time.
Nor had his brother believed any paranormal accident victim would actually call to ask for help from the operation the women had so carefully set up. But not even his brother, alpha male of their pack with a bossy streak a mile wide, could push Marty around when she set her mind to something.
So the four women, women Sloan was exposed to on an ongoing basis because his brother was married to one of them, had set up a cheap basement office on the off chance there’d be walk-ins. They also had a 1-800 number and website for global support.
Marty was a force when she wanted something, and she never did anything halfway, Keegan had explained with as much manly as he could muster for being so whipped.
What Keegan avoided copping to was the fact that he was totally besotted with his accidentally turned wife, and he couldn’t say no to her blue eyes and the pretty pout of her lips. There was no force to it at all, just mad love on both their parts. Mad love that made them both behave like complete idiots.
Sloan wasn’t a fan of complete idiot—or a commitment like marriage or anything that tied him to anyone for longer than the time it took to scope out a mutually satisfying, yet completely no-strings-attached arrangement. At least, that used to be the case. For the past year, he’d been rethinking his life plan.
The crackling static on the other end of the line grew louder, recapturing his attention. “Can you explain what exactly it is that you do? I mean, I googled the words
paranormal
and
help
, which was just a wildly random lucky guess in terms of my predicament, and a total shot in the dark in my panic. You guys were second only to the show
Paranormal State
. Did I miss something somewhere? OOPS came up as a help line for people who’ve had paranormal
accidents
. I can’t seem to make the connection between being haunted and the word
accident
. How does something like that happen by accident? Either a ghost wants to haunt you or it doesn’t. There’s so much room for interpretation here.”
Leave it to Marty, part owner of Bobbie-Sue Cosmetics and their marketing guru, to have OOPS all up in Google’s business, with ads for their service and mega tags galore. It was to be expected that when the average human heard the word
paranormal
, their television-saturated minds went instantly to ghosts and Melinda Gordon. “Uh, well, I’m told they specialize in what’s called a paranormal crisis.”
“They?”
“Us. Sorry.
Us
.” Marty would kill him if he scared off a potential client. He wouldn’t worry so much about it if not for the fact that Marty could nag a dead man to death. Add Nina, Casey, and Wanda to the mix, stir, and being nagged to death was no longer just an expression of speech—it was a real possibility.
“I can’t get to the OOPS site for more information. My phone just won’t download it. I was lucky to nab the phone number before it crashed. So I’m sort of going in blind.”
That was probably because Marty had more shiny on that site than Tiffany’s. Only Lover of All Things Decorated Marty would have a site designed with pictures of sparkly vampires enclosed in a red circle with a big X over it. Nina the vampire said it was to reassure those who thought they might have been turned into vamps that they wouldn’t sparkle in the sunlight—a fear that was common these days, according to her.
“Are you still there?”
Yeah. Sloan looked at his watch. Unfortunately, he was still here. “Sorry. Yes. I’m still here.”
“So can you define a paranormal crisis for me? Does it mean you have ghosts in your house or dead people making your walls bleed? You know, the disembodied voice that tells you to
Get out!
Is OOPS like
Ghostbusters
? Because I’m not sure that’s what I’m in the market for.”
How did you define the kind of crazy that was paranormal? “First, before we go any further and waste not just my time, but yours, I have to ask you some questions.”
“About?”
“About whether you’re really in crisis or not.” Because according to Nina, crisis was a matter of fucking opinion and just because you liked a raw T-bone, it didn’t necessarily qualify you for an induction into Werewolf U.
She breathed into the phone, long and shaky. “Oh. Of course. Fine. Ask away. It’s not like I’m going anywhere. Maybe ever from the looks of things.”
Sloan smoothed out the crumpled paper questionnaire the women had so carefully designed to determine if they were really talking to someone who’d been accidentally turned or a crackpot fuckwit, as Nina called them, who was just messing with them because they thought it was LOL funny to ask Marty if she would eat their algebra teachers. “First, do you have any bite marks on your neck or anywhere on your person, for that matter?” Experience with Nina’s sister Phoebe had taught him neck bites weren’t the only way to create a vampire.
There was a stirring on the other end of the line and then she replied, “Hang on. I’m digging out my compact because the mirror in here is cracked. Oh, it’s so disgusting and dirty here. Thank God I had my purse with me when this happened.”
Silence prevailed, broken only by the sound of what he thought might be beer cans crashing together. He was very familiar with that melodic tone. Very. “Okay. I’m looking and no. No bite marks on my neck or anywhere.”
Sloan checked off
no
in the “Signs You Might Be a Vampire” section. “How about sudden and excessive hair growth?”
“I’m not sure how to answer that because it’s pretty personal in nature, don’t you think?”
Sloan dragged a hand through his hair, gritting his teeth. “Look. I’m just doing my job, and what I mean by excessive and sudden hair growth is like the hair on your legs.”
“No. No sudden and excessive anything, for which you’d hear me express my undying gratitude, but I’m not sure if what I’m experiencing is the lesser of two evils. Whatever that evil happens to be.”
Sloan flicked the pen top in impatience, hoping to get this over with quickly. Where the hell did those women go to shop? Sri Lanka? “Moving right along. Horns?”
“Like the kind on a bike? You know—toot-toot? Or the kind in a symphony orchestra?”
“No. No bikes. No orchestras. No toot-toot. I mean the kind on your head. Like the devil. You know, evil-evil?”
This time, whoever she was, she let out a small gasp of unmistakable horror. “No! No horns. What the heck kinds of questions are these, anyway?”
“The paranormal kind. Next up, any burning in the tips of your fingers or the urge to eat rodents?”
She choked out a cough, her next words angry and clipped. “Clearly, I’ve made a mistake. I thought you helped people in paranormal crisis? Is this some kind of joke? Because if I’m wasting my cell battery on some joke, I have to warn you, I have a bit of a temper, and I have a black belt in karate. If we ever meet in person, you’ll regret being so cruel when I’m in so much trouble!”
She’d begun to sound a little frantic, for which he realized he was responsible. Sloan tried to add a nurturing tone to his voice. The tone Wanda said was very important to the newly turned. “Again, I’m just doing my job. Please remain calm. If I don’t determine whether you’re pranking me or not, my sister-in-law will see my head roll. I’m in enough trouble with my pack already. I don’t need her adding to it. If you knew what Marty, that’s my sister-in-law, was like, a steamroller disguised in designer shoes I can’t pronounce the makers of, you’d understand where I’m coming from. So how about we determine what exactly the issue is with you so I can go back to my Cheetos and you can extend the life of your cell battery?”
“Your pack? Did you say
pack
?” Disbelief littered her words.
“You bet’cha. I meant my werewolf pack. I’m part of a pack.” Not that this woman would believe what he said. The girls had warned him proof might be necessary. Which blew if he was going to have to shift. He didn’t have a spare set of clothes.
“I think you’re one smoke short of a pack, mister. Listen, is there someone else I can speak with?”
“For the moment, I’m all you’ve got, lady.”
“Damn.”
“Ditto.”
She sighed in crystal-clear irritation. “Fine. Ask away.”
Sloan’s lips thinned, his nurturing tone all but drying up. “So no burning in your fingertips?”
“Not unless you count the itch to kill the man who did this to me. No. No burning.”
“No desire to eat small animals or their larger counterparts—like maybe a moose?”
A long rasp of a sigh came before she answered, “No. I don’t want to eat big game.”
Sloan squinted at the questionnaire. Well. That was that. She didn’t fit any of the profiles the girls had laid out. Their time here was done. “All right, then, seems you’re not anything we’ve ever heard of. You don’t fit any of the profiles I have listed on my form. Looks like you’re cleared for takeoff. No crisis. Have a great, non-paranormal day.” Good luck. Later. He prepared to hang up, but her desperate cry stopped him cold.
“Wait!” she screeched into his ear.
Fuck.
“For?”
“Even though I don’t have any of the issues you listed, I do so have a crisis!” she cried in exasperation.
Sloan pictured a woman stomping her feet in a childish rage and fought a devilish grin. “Well, you don’t have any of the issues we have experience with. That means you’re not a vampire, werewolf, demon, or a cougar, or any derivative thereof. Seriously, lady. If you’re not any of those things, what else is there?”
“You can
really
turn into one of those . . . those things?” she squeaked.
“Or a combination of them. We’re called shapeshifters, among other things.” Many other things.
“Shut the front door,” she muttered. “Do you mean you shift like those creatures on that show
Supernatural
? That’s disgusting! They’re all so horrible and—and gooey!”
Sloan sighed. Yes, those creatures on TV were disgusting, and they’d given all paranormals a bad name.
Thank you,
Sam and Dean Winchester.
“What you’ve seen on TV isn’t exactly an accurate or fair depiction of who we are. In fact, it’s a little overblown. We’re not all bloodthirsty human hunters. As a matter of fact, you didn’t even know we existed until I told you we did because we keep a low profile and live peacefully amongst you. No gooey. No disgusting.”
She was sarcastically contrite when she replied, “Oh. Of course. I’m sorry. It was incredibly insensitive of me to think you’d be remotely like those vicious savages on a TV show. Where are my paranormal manners?”
Sloan clenched his teeth, fighting to keep his professional hat on. The one Casey said he’d better not let slip because Nina had done enough of that to last them all their eternal lifetimes combined. “Anyway, that still brings us back to square one. You don’t have any of the outlined symptoms we specialize in. So I don’t think OOPS can help.” And the Cowboys and the Giants were playing. There was a six-pack and some beef jerky to buy. Gotta go.
Her gasp was of outrage mingled with the static that kept coming and going over the connection. “You’re just going to blow me off? Well, I’m sorry I’m not hairy enough to meet your stringent criteria for a paranormal emergency. What kind of outfit are you running here? I thought this was supposed to be a help line for people in crisis?”