Twisted Ginni by Nicola Rose
Phoenix
“Now you’re just teasing me.” The djinn rolled her eyes again. Eyes that were surrounded by deep, black circles. Eyes that made me uncomfortable. Eyes that stripped me bare, stirring up a storm inside.
And she’d only been with us a few minutes. This was a terrible idea.
“There’s no way you guys, with your open-mouthed gawking, nervous faces, and your shitty, dusty hovel, have anything to do with what’s coming.” She sighed dramatically, resuming her saunter around the room, kicking trash, and sending rats scurrying.
“We’re still trying to find our feet out here. It’s harder than we imagined.” I shouldn’t care what she thought, yet defensiveness prickled inside. I toyed with the leather bracelets around my wrists, trying to re-center my calm reserves. Not something that usually took any effort, but her presence had knocked me off kilter.
She was an It, not a she, and It belonged to us now. We’d use it for what we needed, that was all.
The demon-girl-djinn paused by Sam’s bag to pick through the contents we’d pulled out. Andras visibly bristled beside me. I needed to take control of this situation.
Time to test the waters. “Get over here. Stand before us.” I bit my tongue against the urge to add ‘please’ on the end. We’d been raised to take and never give, never show anything but authority — except to our parents — but manners and empathy were a constant war inside me. I never stopped wanting to be a good man, even if I wasn’t.
A fleeting flash of annoyance tensed her shoulders. “As you wish, Master,” she spoke with a posh English accent, moving before me, toe to toe, breathing in my face.
I couldn’t tear my focus from those freaky lips, plump and delicious, made over to look like teeth in a skull. I’d seen that face many times before…
White dress. Pleading eyes. Life slipping away in a pool of blood at our feet. Always the same, until the day it wasn’t the same. Not at all…
Stepping away, I pressed my palms into my eyes, pushing back unbidden memories. “Don’t call me that.”
“Master? I have to, it’s in my nature. Most men love it.”
“Is this a joke?” Andras finally spoke, mercifully pulling me from thoughts I didn’t want. “Your face? Trying to dig into our mental state? How did you even know that skull faces mean something to us?”
“I happen to like this face.” She shrugged, but I caught a hint of unease before she recomposed herself. “Dare to mock it, and I’ll cut your skin from your pretty face and turn you into a real walking, talking skull-head.”
Stunned silence once again consumed us. Andras didn’t even reply, which was alarming, because that meant he was bottling it up for later and I didn’t want to be near the detonation. He paced the room. Sam remained frozen, no tics, no muttering, nothing but complete focus on the djinn.
“Okay, let’s get on with it. Djinn, you will—”
“My name is Ginni.”
“What?”
“It’s Ginni Aadhya. I’d appreciate a little civility here; you can call me by my name, right?”
Sighing, I tried again. “Ginni… wait, how many wishes do we get? How does this work?”
“You didn’t research that first?”
“Did you read the book?” I turned to Sam. He ignored me.
“Nope, we didn’t.” I returned my attention to the demon. “Enlighten me.”
“You don’t have somewhere less… filthy that we can do this?” She picked up a stool and took a seat, swinging her legs back and forth.
“Not until you do the money part. Get us money.”
She laughed. “You think I can snap my fingers and ta-dah, stacks of money in a cloud of smoke?”
I tracked Andras, noting the body language, the increasing tension.
“Look, gentlemen, I might be a genie, but this is no fairy tale. I don’t do magic. I’m here in physical form, with physical limitations. You can’t ask me to conjure cash out of thin air, but you could ask me to rob a bank.”
“Well, that’s just peachy,” Andras mumbled.
“Fine. Rob a bank, then buy guns, whatever, I don’t care how you do it, just make it happen. Maybe you’d prefer a bomb? Do you have a preferred killing method?”
“A djinn cannot be ordered to take a human life, it’s forbidden.” She was all saccharine smile and doe eyes.
“This is bullshit!” Andras fumed. “What fucking use is she? Just put her back in the damned lamp and plug it up. We do this my way now.”
“I don’t actually live inside the lamp, you doofus!” Ginni laughed.
“Phoenix, I’m going to count to three. If she’s not gone I’m forcing her ass into that lamp even if I have to chop her into tiny pieces.”
Ginni smirked as she watched Andras pace the room.
“What’s up with this one?” She suddenly turned her focus on Sam, studying him with exaggerated interest, cocking her head. “Are you broken? Cat got your tongue?”
Andras was on her before I could blink. The smile didn’t leave her lips, even with his hand on her throat, pushing her backward until the stool tipped, balancing precariously.
“He doesn’t talk much,” I offered, cautiously approaching, wondering how best to defuse this whole situation.
“So stay the fuck out of his business,” Andras snarled in her face.
“Excuse me?” Ginni’s voice wavered as she struggled for air. “He’s the fuck that pulled me all up into your business. If I want to engage with him, then I will, and you’d be wise not to try and stop me.”
Andras shoved hard, releasing his grip so that the stool continued tipping and she fell back. Her arms flailed, there was a pop of smoke, and she was gone.
Disappeared before our eyes.
A sigh of relief escaped me. Maybe she wouldn’t come back.
Poof!
She re-materialized, making a show of fixing her pretty blue-black hair. “As I said, if I want to, I will.” Shooting Andras a scorned look, Ginni sauntered back to Sam.
“Oh yeah?” A slow smile crept onto Andras’s face. “How about I command you not t—”
“N… n… no!” Sam stirred to life, back from his lost place. “D… d… don’t fucking do that! Don’t fucking make those decisions for me, you shithead!”
Ginni positively radiated delight, eyebrows raised. “Well, hello there, Sam. Nice to meet you now you’re awake.”
“How’d you know our names?” I asked. “And I thought you couldn’t do magic? What’s with the disappearing trick?”
“I might have a few tricks in my arsenal.” She shrugged.
“So, you can get us what we need?”
“With a little time—”
“We don’t have time.”
“Sure you do. The third lunar eclipse in the Blood Moon Prophecy isn’t foranother few days, right?”
Time froze. Fear gripped me, stealing the breath from my lungs.
The first eclipse darkened the sky. She bled at Andras’s feet as a brief thrill of power erupted in my veins. Heinous demons clawed at the void, impatient to be set free. My body slick with crimson life, drained from one and passed to me. I fell to my knees at the crack of a whip over my shoulder. “You will be strong,” my father yelled through a phoenix mask, and the crowd stirred to a horny frenzy, delighting in my pain, in murder, in what was still to come. “Hear me, Phenex, Prince of the Night, and all twenty of your Legions. My son will be ready. His body and soul yours to claim.”
“What do you know about that?” I whispered.
“Not much. But you mentioned the apocalypse and I wish I could dismiss it as fantasy, as you being one of the many deluded religious fanatics, but there has been whisperings throughout the realms of something big going down. Or rather, rising up. Let the fun and games begin, eh?”
Cold certainty came down on me. We’d opened a bigger can of worms. This djinn would break us, right when we needed our focus the most.
“You know what? Sam wanted her, he can deal with it. I’m out.” Andras headed to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“For a walk. I need air.”
The atmosphere immediately relaxed as he left. I physically straightened as some of the weight lifted from my shoulders. Being the voice of reason was my thing, but since running, I felt like I was losing myself more than when we were there. Andras’s perpetual rage was a constant weight bearing down on me.
“You never answered how this works. How many wishes?” I turned back to Ginni, who was engaged in a silent stare-off with Sam.
“You’re stuck with me for a year. You get as many wishes as you like in that time. No limit. And no, you don’t actually have to say ‘I wish’, although the intent must be there. You can see how confusing it could get otherwise. Those little quirks in language and speech would be a nightm—”
“A year?” I choked on the surprise.
“Careful, try to contain that excitement, dude. I know it’s hard, I struggle too.” She twirled black hair around her finger.
“We won’t need you for that long.” After taming my own wild hair behind my shoulders with a band, I moved around the room picking up furniture, straightening the place out as best I could. Anything to keep from looking at her a moment longer because there was voodoo in her, sucking me in, liberating something in my chest that had no business getting out.
It made no sense.
I hated demons. And she was an arrogant bitch.
I want to feel her skin…
We should have read the damned manual.
“Tough. You got me,” she said. “Look, Phoenix—”
“I never told you my name.”
Continuing to avoid her gaze, I focussed on Sam, who shivered silently in the freezing cold. He’d done what he always did, shrunk back inside himself, somewhere safe from horrors. It could be days before he came back out. I grabbed a blanket from the meager possessions we ran with and tried to tie it over the broken window.
“I’d be a pretty shitty slave if I didn’t know the names of my masters. Learned that mistake long ago,” she muttered, and I couldn’t help turning this time, finding her rubbing a spot over her wrist like it hurt.
“You’re not a slave. I’m not comfortable with that.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have summoned me, Master.”
If she said master one more time in that delicious accent I’d snap. “Stop.”
She was suddenly behind me, hands on my shoulders, tits pressed into my back, and I couldn’t—
Then she was gone, retreated, shaking her head, still twirling a lock of long hair through her fingers as I stared after her with longing and loathing.
“Fine. Should we come up with a plan, then? What’s the first thing you want? It’s usually sex, so you’ll be pleased to know I’m wearing my best undies.”
Sam coughed, surprising me. I thought he was gone.
“We need money.”
“That’s not a command.”
“Get money, lots of it. Be quick.”
“As you wish,” she smiled. And disappeared into smoke.