Tina and Jules were watching me, wide-eyed.
He said, “I thought you’d learned during your visit here that these are powers you don’t understand, can never understand. You’re dealing with the consequences of trying to interfere with them.”
I groaned. “The consequences of saving my own life, you mean? And there is nothing more boring than the old ‘dealing with powers you don’t understand’ shtick. I think that’s a lame excuse used by people who don’t have any better clue what’s happening. Is that it? You and your priestess unleashed this thing, and that’s all you could do with it? You don’t understand it yourselves, and you can’t control it. Once it’s loose, you can’t stop it.”
That was a terrifying thought I hadn’t considered until now. I had entertained the notion that if I figured out how to placate the Band of Tiamat and its priestess, they might call off their demon. But what if it wasn’t theirs to control? Their cult was all about chaos. They might not want to control it.
He didn’t answer right away. A couple seconds of dead air ticked over, and I started to switch to a new call.
Then he said, “I thought you of all people could appreciate anarchy.”
“Anarchy only works when everyone’s sane,” I shot back. “I have another question for you: Where’s Odysseus Grant?”
Nick hung up.
Shit.
Deep breath, had to keep going. I could panic over what was happening to Grant in, oh—I checked the clock—about ten minutes.
“Well,” I said at my microphone. “I don’t know much about laying curses, but if any of you do know anything about laying curses, I know someone who needs cursing right about now. Next caller, hello.”
The woman spoke with an accent, something clipped, refined, Middle Eastern.
“Kitty, this thing that haunts you. You’re right. It is djinn.” She pronounced the word with a different inflection, and I could hear the different spelling. She was pronouncing it correctly.
“Go on,” I said, glancing at Jules and Tina. They were listening closely.
“The djinn are said to be fallen angels, or sometimes spoken of as a kind of person made up solely of spirit, where humans are made of matter. Among the djinn there is the ifrit. An ifrit is a spirit of fire, and it loves mischief. I think this is what has found you.”
There it was, the chill up my spine, the gooseflesh on my arms. The ring of truth.
“I think you may be right,” I said. “Now. How do I stop one of these ifrit?”
She hesitated. “This is a difficult thing. There is anger here, and vengeance. I risk drawing it on myself, if I help you more than this. He would know.”
“Wait a minute,” I begged, because my on-air sixth sense told me she was about to hang up. “If you know this much, you must know how to protect yourself. You know how to stop it.”
“I have only listened to your show for a little while, Kitty, but I can tell you understand much. That in every tale there is a grain of truth. The trick is to separate truth from tale.”
“You’re right, I’ve found grains of truth in a lot of tales. But how do you separate them?”
“Wisdom. Intuition. We are not so far from the times when the tales ruled us. Our hearts remember.”
“Maybe we can do this with twenty questions,” I said. “The bottle part—stuffing it back in the bottle. Is that true?”
“Yes,” she said.
“And how does one go about stuffing a djinn into a bottle?”
“You don’t stuff,” she said. “You coax. You lure.”
“All right. Makes sense. How do we do that?”
“Aren’t you a scholar of the arcane arts? Aren’t you versed in the principles of spells and curses?” Her voice had turned playful. I recognized teasing when I heard it.
“Only the kind of curses I’m not allowed to say on the radio.”
“Something had to call it to this world, to its current hunt. Learn what it was. Use that to banish him out of it. He will not be able to resist.”