Release the Djinni Read online

  Release the Djinni

  Jenny Schwartz

  Niki is a djinni granted freedom by a young boy’s innocent wish. It is a freedom that scares her and she retreats far from her Persian home to the cool, ivory tower detachment of Oxford. But when the young boy is kidnapped and even his guardian angel can’t find him, Niki, with her half-demon powers and untried heart, is the only person who can save him. But can she save herself from falling in love with an angel?

  “Release the Djinni” was originally published in the Dare collection, which is no longer available. A paranormal romance novella of mystery, heartbreak and redemption.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Want More?

  Prologue

  Light, excited footsteps raced past the shop. High boys’ voices floated back.

  “You’re tagged.”

  “Hamid runs like a girl.”

  “Last one to the fountain is a rotten egg.”

  The footsteps and cries faded. From the shop’s inner room, through the beaded curtain, men’s voices could be heard again, rising and falling in scholarly discussion.

  Eight year old Farhoud sighed and his tight grip on his well-worn crutch relaxed. He limped across to the darkest corner of the room where the dust lay thick and shadows hid secrets. The shop was familiar to him because his father visited often.

  Amin Ganji, the shopkeeper, preferred to trade in manuscripts and his beloved leather-bound books. The junk in the front room was from the shop’s previous owner and decades later Amin hadn’t cleared it out. Indeed, he added to it sporadically, buying from peddlers. The curios satisfied straying tourists’ romantic notions of how a Persian bazaar should look. They searched for treasure among the battered tin and copper ornaments, the pottery bowls and blunt knives.

  Farhoud sat on the floor. One benefit of his father’s absent-minded scholarship was he never minded—never noticed—dirt. Their laundry was done in grim disapproval by a weekly cleaning woman.

  Dust stirred, then settled. Farhoud sneezed and began moving pots. This space below the bottom shelf was his private archaeological dig. Tourists’ romantic souls and sanitized hands avoided its rubbish heap appearance. He’d found a Roman coin here last week, a copper as. He’d shown it to Amin, who let him keep it.

  The coin sat in his pocket, a good luck charm and private treasure. It encouraged him to greater efforts. He couldn’t run and play, but he could dig. He whistled under his breath.

  A terracotta pot, grey with dust, was nearly as wide around as the span of his arms. He pressed his good foot against it and pushed. The pot grated along the floor, tipping then settling back as it ground over a bump.

  Farhoud panted before flipping onto his stomach and wriggling into the gap he’d created. His head and shoulders cut off most of the dim light from the shop. He groped blindly, with his nose and mouth pressed into his sleeve in an attempt not to breathe in the thick dust. His small fingers touched a smooth, cool object. Excitement shivered down his spine. He wriggled forward another inch and gripped the object.

  Carefully, he drew back to study his prize.

  Amin kept the shutters on the front windows at all times. What light sneaked in, came through the open door and the high barred window on the eastern wall. But the inadequate lighting was enough to draw a gleam of purple from Farhoud’s discovery.

  It was a glass bottle, perhaps as long as his forearm and just as skinny with a tulip bulb base. The stopper was firmly in place and unchipped.

  “Wow.” He wiped the bottle with a corner of his shirt.

  It was like finding a princess among a herd of cows. Although he amused himself investigating the junk in the dark corner of the shop, he knew it was just that—junk. But this bottle was something else, something special. It was elegant.

  He glanced at the beaded curtain. Behind it, his father and Amin sat talking in the inner room, discussing whatever it was his father had found in the manuscript he’d bought from Amin last month. They enjoyed their weekly gossip, even if it was of people and places centuries dead. Neither man cared much for the current world, its people and problems.

  Farhoud should show the bottle to Amin and he would, but first…

  The stopper was made of glass and looked like a flower, though it was no flower he’d ever seen. Maybe it was a flower from paradise? He curled his fingers around it and felt the pattern press into his sweaty palm. He pulled.

  There was a moment of resistance.

  Niki wound her black hair into a tight knot and secured it with a pencil before sinking down cross-legged onto a crimson floor cushion.

  Within the pale walls of her bottle, she’d collected color: bright book jackets on wooden shelves, turquoise curtains framing trompe l’oeil windows, elaborately patterned rugs from Turkey and gleaming, honey-gold Baltic pine furniture. Gilt-framed mirrors reflected the light and color, and gave an illusion of space and liveliness.

  It was an illusion, a sumptuous fantasy, and not one she’d consciously created. She preferred the classical restraint of the white tunic and trousers she wore. But over the centuries she’d gradually acquired this collection of riotous color, each beloved object contributing to a puzzling, passionate whole. It wasn’t her, and yet, who else could she blame?

  She frowned. Introspection was dangerous when one lived alone. Who knew what darknesses hid in the depths of the soul, particularly her cursed soul? It was far safer to concentrate on scholarly puzzles. They hurt no one, and fortunately, she had just such an amusing distraction at hand. She reached for her notebook.

  Despite her long life, she’d never met an Etruscan while that pre-Roman civilization lived and flourished, so now the fragments of their recorded language presented a challenge. She aimed to translate an Etruscan love poem into Farsi.

  “Lemon.” Inspiration struck and Niki tugged the pencil from her hair. “Lemon of my delight.” She scribbled rapidly as her hair tumbled down her back. “The Etruscans certainly weren’t poets. A lemon to describe love? Perhaps love gone sour.” She smiled wryly. Love was a foreign country, one where she never ventured.

  But “lemon” was the right translation. She had the word from a chicken casserole recipe copied off an ancient pottery bowl. If the word meant lemon there—and there was an illustration to prove it did—it had to mean lemon in the context of the poem. She smiled. One never knew where knowledge would spring from.

  And to think—if she’d let him—Louis Napoleon would have destroyed all those precious stone and pottery fragments, simply to increase the value of his own Etruscan collection.

  “Men.” Selfish, greedy and illogical.

  She glanced around her prison. She was better off here, concentrating on her scholarship. Oh, not the love poetry, that was just for relaxation. Her important work was the development of a theory of dark energy, the astrophysical conundrum of what must exist for the universe to work, but which couldn’t be observed.

  At a certain point, philosophy, science and art all met in a striving to open new doors. Niki found it stimulating.

  But even a dedicated scholar needed down time. And food.

  Damn, she’d forgotten to eat again. No wonder “lemon” had popped into her mind. A case of inspiration via the stomach. Perhaps hummus and flatbread with fresh tomatoes, basil and olives? or did she need a proper meal, maybe the chicken casserole that had inspired her? There was a modern Tuscan recipe she could use. The internet was a marvelous resource for recipes as well
as scientific papers. She might be trapped in her bottle, but she did keep up with some modern advances, and she actually liked to cook, enjoying the mingling of—

  Tingsha.

  The reverberation hummed, tingling in Niki’s fingers and tautening her muscles. Hunger vanished, swamped by anxiety. The compulsion kicked in a second later. It had been decades, but she recognized the pull. Someone had taken the stopper from her prison-bottle and with it came her compulsion to serve.

  “Damn Solomon to the deepest hells.” She couldn’t fight the compulsion, she’d learned that centuries before.

  Unwilling and unprepared, she landed on the dirty floor of a curio shop. Dust puffed up, coating her toes as they peeped from the front of her leather sandals. She brushed at her white tunic with its delicate embroidery of huma birds. Those mythological creatures, birds of paradise that never touched the earth but whose shadow brought happiness, were decidedly out of place here.

  She grimaced as she looked around.

  The shop walls were of crumbling clay brick and lined with old and uncertain shelving which was in turn piled with junk. More junk littered the center of the room with narrow paths for customers to weave between tables, trunks and chairs, to pick up and examine a mess of pots, lamps, leather satchels and tins. In the nearest corner of the maze, a phonograph pressed its trumpet to the belly of a toppled footstool. A rolled rug pushed up against both.

  Time hadn’t altered the clutter, merely rearranged details. The shop appeared much as it had six decades ago when she’d hidden herself here. Only dirt had been added—and a boy.

  He sat on the floor, cradling her bottle. His eyes and mouth gaped in a witless stare.

  Niki experienced a twinge of relief. A boy’s three wishes were easily fulfilled. Then she could return to her bottle and studies, to her own highly satisfactory, well-organized and solitary world.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  From the open shop door came a cold wind and the noise of the busy bazaar. She summoned a shawl and wrapped the long-fringed cashmere around her. The warmth was welcome. In her bottle, she ordered a perennial summer. In the real world, it was late winter.

  “I’m Niki. I’m a djinni.”

  “A djinni? Like in Aladdin’s lamp? Did you really come out of the bottle? How?”

  “No, not like Aladdin. He was just a story.” But she forwent the scientific and metaphysical explanation of the nature of her spirit-body and the manipulation of mass for a different, true story of magic that a boy would believe. “A long time ago Solomon called the djinn out of the desert and used a curse to bind us to the service of humanity. Whoever owns the bottle we live in can command our powers.”

  “Oh. I don’t own your bottle.” He placed her bottle and its stopper on the floor, releasing them reluctantly. “It belongs to Amin.”

  “The bottle belongs to whoever holds it and removes the stopper. That is how I’m summoned. So now that I’m here, you can make three wishes.”

  Excitement banished the caution in his dark eyes. “I can? Can I wish for anything?”

  “Well, not impossible things…” She tried to imagine what a boy might wish. “Like turning the ocean into lemonade. I can grant you a fast horse or enough candy to rot your teeth. As long as your wishes are realistic, I’ll fulfill them.” And then I’ll go home. I’ll be sure to hide the bottle better, this time.

  “Realistic.” The boy pushed the bottle another inch away. “Yeah, some things aren’t possible. We just have to live with them.” It sounded as if he were quoting someone, before he burst out passionately. “But I don’t think you should have to live in a bottle.” His chin jerked up. “It’s not fair. Everyone should be free to do what they want. You should be free. I think Solomon was wrong to curse you. He was mean. Curses are wicked…I wish you were free.”

  “No.” She flung out a hand to stop the spate of words, but too late.

  The bottle splintered into shards of glittering amethyst and all the belongings she’d gathered through the centuries to entertain and comfort her solitude spilled into the already crowded shop.

  “Duck tongues and turtle soup,” she swore and lifted a pile of turquoise curtains off the boy.

  He coughed loudly. Being so much closer to the floor, the stirred up dust had filled his lungs.

  She pulled him up and sat him on a high shelf. There were men’s voices from behind the beaded curtain and a bazaar full of curious people just beyond the open door. She had only instants in which to remove her belongings and herself before she caused a vulgar sensation. She shuddered. She needed privacy to adjust to this disruption in her life. Rage curdled in her soul at the boy’s interference. However well-meant, it was yet another example of a human altering her fate without asking. What was freedom but the right to choose one’s prison?

  “To me.” She waved her arms, gathering up her belongings. If she didn’t look at the boy, she wouldn’t rage at him. It was beyond her to thank him. “The Blue Palace.”

  She landed in its main hall—and received another shock. “Hades blades.”

  Unlike the curio shop, the Blue Palace had definitely changed with the decades. The first sign was the marble hotel desk and uniformed porters. The hall rattled with too many people, too much technology and overwhelming, echoing noise. She vanished with her belongings before people could do more than blink and disbelieve.

  She reappeared in an empty suite of rooms. Her belongings thudded around her. She dropped back into her favorite chair, dizzy.

  “I’m out of practice.” She hadn’t expended so much power since she’d taken Monsieur Monet around the world in eighty days and that was over a century ago. He’d been a nice old man, a Jules Verne fan and amusing in his enthusiasm. She hadn’t tried to trick him out of his three wishes. He enjoyed Japan and the American Wild West. She’d been less impressed with the hurrying, scurrying, dirty end to the nineteenth century. She’d had to push a broken steam train over the Rockies so that Monsieur Monet met his eighty day deadline. She flexed her arms at the memory.

  And now, add in the dislocation of losing her home to the effort of collecting and transporting all her belongings—when had she acquired a beach umbrella and a set of bagpipes?—and she decided she’d earned her dizziness. She clicked her fingers for sweet mint tea and inhaled the familiar scent. Her hands trembled as they curved around the glass.

  Fear was an ugly word and she refused to admit to it. She was simply faint with exhaustion. As for the cold, crawling sensation along her spine, it was shock for the abrupt change in her living circumstances.

  She rose and walked to the window. Gardens surrounded the hotel, surrounded in turn by a high privacy wall. She flung open the window and heard only the distant hum of city traffic. The garden below was winter quiet, life dormant. Waiting.

  In her prison, she’d missed having a garden, missed having windows that opened to mountain breezes and sea zephyrs, to night time whispers of jasmine and damp, newly turned earth. Perhaps she could find peace outside her bottle. Perhaps. She sipped the mint tea and tipped her face to the cool brush of the wind.

  “Get the damn bags,” a strident Australian voice ordered.

  “Yes, sir. I am, sir.”

  “And don’t drop them. Hell, you’re only a kid. You can’t carry them all. You’ll have to come back for the rest.”

  Niki shut the window and put the glass of tea on the sill before she spilled it. God, there was slavery everywhere. Exploitation. She pressed her hands to her face as the blood receded. People were terrifyingly cruel, casual in their abuse. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—put herself in a place of ever again being used.

  She couldn’t be. The knowledge jolted through her. The boy’s free wish had broken Solomon’s curse. He had destroyed her home, but also freed her from the threat of slavery. She was her own master. When she retreated from the world this time, it would be forever. No one could call her back.

  Free, owing no one service.

  She flashed back
to the curio shop in the Isfahan bazaar.

  A stuffed lion cub, fur molting and one eye missing, stared at her from the top of a steamer trunk.

  The boy had gone.

  A bead curtain rattled and an old man blinked at her over the book he held. One finger marked his place in it. “May I help you?”

  She looked around the shop. Her bottle had been safe in the dusty junk for decades. She’d been safe. Security had been freedom enough for her. She didn’t even know why she’d returned or what she’d thought to do if the boy was here. “No. I was looking for someone, but…I’m sure he’s fine.”

  Chapter One

  An apple wood fire crackled in the hearth. The aromatic scent filled the Oxford study. It was one of the pleasanter discoveries Niki had made in the last unsettled weeks. She shifted her chair so she could toast her feet more comfortably. The papers she was studying rustled on her lap. Outside, the grey rain of England tapped on the tower windows and ran in rivulets to pour down the old stone gutters and iron pipes.

  It was so different to Iran, but then, Iran no longer matched her memories. Palaces had become hotels, or worse, housed government ministries. She had tried three anyway, desperate to establish a peaceful retreat once more. But restlessness had her moving on, uncertain what to do with freedom. All she wanted was to continue the life she had carefully nurtured within the constraints of Solomon’s curse. She’d learned contentment in withdrawal. If she couldn’t have it in Iran, then she’d try elsewhere.

  Paris had also changed, and not for the better. Lord, was all the world a tourist park? And so she had come, finally, to the changeless and chill, scholarly embrace of Oxford. The dreaming spires, the musty books, the distant voices of students, she lived above them in a tower room with gentle spells of misdirection and forgetting so that the busy town hurried on without her.

  Finally, tentatively, she thought she might find peace. The dancing flames flickering from the apple wood held memories of desert camp fires with the stars in endless array overhead. She saw old dreams in them and caught glimpses of forgotten faces and mythical creatures.