The detective marched into the house, lit cigarette in one hand, cup of steaming Starbucks in the other, and announced, “I can’t decide if I want something to happen to prove I’m not nuts, or if I don’t want anything to happen because of the mess it would make,” she grumbled. “But if I hear my boss humming the I Dream of Jeannie theme one more time, I’ll kill him.”
Daaaaa-dum, da dum da dum dum . . .
“Great, now you’ve got it stuck in my head,” I said. The music was way too jolly for this situation.
“American television,” Jules hmphed derisively.
Everyone took their places. Hardin, Gary, and their people waited outside. Ben was stationed near the door of the parlor with a fire extinguisher. Jules was waiting outside the circle in the parlor. Tina and I were by the front door. Playing bait. That was the plan: Announce our presence, summon it, like had happened the other times, then piss it off enough that it would stumble into the trap.
“I still don’t like this,” Ben muttered for the umpteenth time. “I don’t like you putting yourself in the way of this thing.” His expression had gone taut and snarly. He was pacing back and forth along the wall like a wolf in a cage. I didn’t point this out to him, since I was doing the same thing.
“I’m not putting myself in the way of anything, yet. Besides, I’m beginning to think it’s way too smart for us,” I said. “It’s probably not going to come anywhere near here and is off killing people somewhere.” Hardin had one of her people in touch with the 911 dispatchers. If there was any emergency in the city that had anything to do with fire, we’d hear about it when they did.
We really needed to come up with a djinn detector. Something that would tell us exactly where it was, so we could go after it. Because that sounded like a good idea.
Jules shook his head. “All the evidence suggests that this thing is tied to you and has been watching you. It won’t stop now.”
“Since when did you know so much about it? I thought you were the rationalist in the bunch,” I grumbled, unfairly. He was only trying to help.
“Even magic follows rules,” he said.
This was true. Vampires burned in sunlight, silver was poison
to lycanthropes, and the right spells controlled a demon like this djinn. All that was fact. Rational. Just a whole different kind of rational.
“Right,” Tina said, brushing her hands on her jeans. “Let’s get started.”
She retrieved a box from a bag shoved in the corner: the Ouija board again. I wasn’t sure I was ready to call this part of the plan rational. She set it up on the floor inside the open front door, within sight of the gap in the protective circle. Sitting cross-legged before it, she gestured me to join her. We sat with the board between us.
Ben stalked menacingly behind us, fire extinguisher in hand.
Tina rubbed her hands before setting her fingers on the planchette. I didn’t want to touch it. I knew I’d feel some kind of spark, an electric shock, and I wasn’t sure I could handle it.
She didn’t look like a medium performing a séance. She had none of the closed eyes, relaxed breathing, and meditative stance that were supposed to happen. Hunched over, braced and glaring, she looked like someone preparing to do battle.
“Come on, come on,” she murmured but wouldn’t say what she was thinking, what she was doing to call this thing besides sitting there, glaring at the board. I figured it was more likely to burst into flames than talk to her.
Nothing happened.
We waited. The house creaked, a normal sound of old, settling wood, something shifting in a breeze that rattled outside, shushing through vegetation. To tell the truth, I had almost forgotten that the house was supposed to be haunted. This might have been spooky if I wasn’t so worried about the djinn.
“What’s happening, Tina?” Jules asked in a hushed voice.
“Nothing is happening,” she answered around gritted teeth.
I started pacing. “It’s too smart for this. It’s not going to walk into our trap.” But if it wasn’t here, where was it? What part of the city was it burning down this time?
Frustrated, I went to the front door. My pacing carried me right through it. Ben called after me, a warning. I didn’t stop. I went to the end of the walk and looked up and down the street.
The breeze picked up, and I caught a scent.
That scent was now so deeply buried in my memory that I’d never associate it with anything else. Years from now, the barest hint of it would bring all this to the front of my mind: fire, fresh ash, smoke-tinged air, sulfur, brimstone.
The shrubs around me—overgrown, climbing, tangled, and dried out from a hot summer—ignited. Towering flames appeared with no warning, no opening spark or ember, and roared into the sky. I was caught in the inferno.
Strangely, my fear was an undercurrent, buried. Because what I was mostly thinking then was gotcha.
The quiet, late-night world erupted with noise. Sirens from down the street came to life, and behind me Tina was yelling, “Kitty, get in here, get behind the line!”