Genie Knows Best (Magically Ever After Book 5), page 17
Mortification and Guilt were neck-and-neck for the lead.
“Did Albert know about the safe, Samantha?” asked Kal.
Oh, yeah. Albert knew. He was shrewd. He paid attention and was an opportunist—and she’d provided the biggest opportunity of all.
She explained about Albert’s determination to open her father’s safe, and they all arrived at the same conclusion: Albert not only knew about the safe and its contents, but he had to have a good idea of what the items were. Which meant he could know about Kal. And that upped the stakes.
Albert was going for the big prize. That’s what he’d had his eye on all along. Her money was nothing compared to what a genie could give him.
And she’d thought she couldn’t feel any worse than when she’d overheard him on the phone? Boy, today was just full of surprises—and it’d barely begun.
She grabbed the lantern. “But you can’t be his genie without the lantern, right?”
“Exactly.” Kal tied a knot in the sheet he’d wrapped around his waist. “Which means that if he knows what he’s got, he’ll come after it and me—and you—too.”
“So what do we do? Should I wish—
Kal leaned over and kissed her. Short and sweet—and definitely to the point.
There would be no more wishing.
Semantics. Right.
Somehow she had to figure out another way to get Kal to grant her wishes so she could stop Albert. If only she hadn’t wished to stop saying “I wish” in the first place.
She braced herself for another kiss, but, apparently, he really couldn’t read her mind. Pity. Right now that would be a welcome trait. Maybe if she phrased it a different way… “Kal, I want you to—”
“I want you, too, Sam.”
“Yes, but I desire you to—”
“I desire you, too.”
She puffed out a breath. “Kal. I’m trying to get you to bring Albert here.”
“You need to wish it, Sam.”
“I was trying to.”
“Oh.” He touched her cheek, his gaze intense but inscrutable, and Mortification and Guilt started being eclipsed by the always-capricious, never-logical, Lust.
Well, the Oracle did say the mistakes of the past were destined to be repeated unless one learned from them. Samantha might have been slow on the uptake when it came to Albert, but those days were behind her—and so was last night.
She took a step back.
Kal looked at her a moment longer, then tugged on the knot he’d tied in the sheet and tossed the excess over his shoulder like a kilt. “Actually, we don’t want you wishing him here. If he has the amulet, he’ll bring it with him and it has properties above and beyond genie magic.”
“Yeah, I heard of a guy once who wanted to go to the moon,” said Dirham, taking a seat next to Lexy on the bed. “Unfortunately, he didn’t specify which moon, and let me tell you, he did not end up on a rock in outer space.” Both foxes shuddered. “It wasn’t pretty, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.”
“Yes, that was a lesson to all regarding the use of a goddess’s power,” said Lexy.
But to Samantha, the idea of Albert with his face pressed against someone’s moon was extremely satisfying. “So what do we do? Should I wish—”
Kal kissed her again. Half as short, and still as sweet.
But not productive.
“Kal, I think you might want to hold off on all the kissing. We have more important things to do now,” said Dirham. “No offense, Samantha. I mean, you’re pretty and all, but this is Kal’s future we’re talking about. His career. His reputation. He’s worked too hard to re—”
“Dirham.” Kal tapped the fox in the snout. “Let’s keep the focus on what’s important right now. We have to figure out some way to get the amulet from Albert.”
“We could always take it from him,” said Samantha. Nothing would give her greater pleasure. “After all, it is rightfully mine.”
“That’s true.” Lexy said, tapping the side of her mouth. “The Djinn Code states that whatever the djinni owns is yours as well, so that includes his crystal. I’m not certain about the amulet because, technically, it belongs to the goddess Mayat, but since it was among your father’s possessions, I believe you do have the right to use it. But Kal cannot steal anything. Genies and their magical-assistance assistants don’t steal.”
Mortals, however, did. Samantha straightened. Albert had taken enough from her.
“I’ll get the amulet back, Kal.” It was the least she could do.
“And the crystal,” Dirham added. “You can’t forget the crystal, right, Kal? We need that, or you won’t be able to let the High Master know that—”
“That Samantha’s my new master. Yes, Dir, I’m aware of that.” Kal scratched his chest and Samantha fought to keep from staring. “Kharah. This is not what we need.”
No, what Samantha needed was to take back control from Albert. Take back her pride. Her ego. Her autonomy.
Yet she’d taken Kal’s from him.
The apology was on her lips, but she didn’t want to slash his dignity by apologizing in front of everyone for something so personal. But when they were alone again… “So what should we do?”
Kal swiped a hand over his jaw. “If Albert knows what was in that safe, he’s going to make the connection between magic and the amulet. He’ll be here eventually because, for all the amulet’s mystical powers, the travel charm is easy to figure out. All he has to do is place it next to his heart and wish to go somewhere—and he doesn’t need specifics. Wishing to find us is about all it will take to get him in the general vicinity. We need to stay on our toes.”
“Oh, I’m always on my toes,” said Dirham. “It’s how I roll.”
Samantha finally found something to smile at. Dirham was the perfect comic relief in a situation that was by no means funny.
“All right, then. Let’s get dressed and be on our way.” Kal held up his hand, fingers ready to wave. “I know you can’t make a wish, Samantha, but since I’m responsible for your comfort, I can conjure clothing for you. Is there anything specific you would like to wish for?”
Her first response had nothing to do with clothing, but turn Albert into the lizard he is, didn’t fall under the Seeing To Her Comfort category. Plus, she’d like to think she was a better person than that.
Still, she could enjoy that mental image. “No, whatever works for you.”
Kal waved his fingers. Apparently he was quite fond of the harem outfit. For both of them. His included another vest that didn’t close across his washboard abs, and hers, well, at least the sari-type top was comfortable. And it was teal, which was a good color with her hair.
“On, and don’t forget this.” Kal picked up the necklace the Oracle had given her and held it out.
Actually, she wouldn’t mind forgetting it and everything it represented. “How about you hang on to that for me?”
“You’re sure?”
“Definitely.” She’d rather not have another anchor around her neck; Guilt was enough of one.
First chance she got, she was going to apologize.
Then someone pounded on the door, guaranteeing that wouldn’t happen anytime soon.
“I know you’re in there, Kal,” came an angry growl that Samantha didn’t recognize. “Open up or I’ll blow the damn door down!”
Chapter 22
Kal yanked the door open, hand at the ready to either wave it for magic or punch someone in the face. No one threatened his master and got away with it.
Maille and Bart stood there: Bart, ready to smash the door with his puny fists, and Maille with her arms crossed and tapping one toe.
“Good gods, Bart, you were full of hot air even before you took the wyvern form,” she said, her eyes blazing at her mate. “How in Al-Jaheem do you think you’re going to blow anything down with how you are now? Planning to huff and puff?”
Bart got in her face. Too bad he was two inches shorter. “Don’t start with me, woman. It’s your fault we’re here.”
Dirham leapt off the bed and stood on the threshold. “Uh, guys? Is there something you need? We’re kinda in a hurry.”
Two sets of seething black eyes turned his way, and the little fox backed up behind Kal’s legs.
“A hurry?” Maille screeched, advancing into the room. “You’re not going anywhere. Not until you help us.”
Kal stepped forward, blocking her. She might not have the capability of breathing fire in her human form, but those talons were still lethal and she already held one grudge against Samantha. “What’s the problem, Maille?”
“Maille’s the problem, Kal.” Bart threw up his hands in disgust. Hadn’t taken him long to remember how to use them.
“Stuff it, wyrm,” Maille snarled at Bart, then looked at Sam. “The problem is that we need her wishes.” Some of the fire went out of her bluster. “Someone took one of our hatchlings.”
Bart uncrossed his arms and massaged the back of his neck with one hand. “Laszlo. The youngest.”
For a moment, silence reigned.
Then a collective gasp filled the room. Samantha plopped onto the bed next to Lexy, Dirham sat on the floor, and Kal let Maille into the room. He hadn’t known Bart and Maille had a clutch together.
He quickly did the math while pulling out a chair at the table. Dragon gestation was a little over fifteen hundred years, one of the reasons they were an endangered race. They couldn’t afford to lose even one hatchling. “Sit down, Maille. Tell us what happened.”
The dragon sat and her bravado crumbled. Bart, too, looked shaken as he leaned against the doorframe, an emotion from the wyvern that was as surprising as the fact that he’d reproduced.
“I woke up this morning to their chirruping. All fifteen—fourteen of them. Laszlo was missing.”
“He didn’t fly away?”
“He can’t fly. He’s newly hatched. Give him a few days to catch up.”
“Just a little surprise my dear ol’ mate waited fifteen hundred years to spring on me.” Disgust laced Bart’s voice, and Kal couldn’t say he blamed the wyvern. To have children and not know it, then to find out when one was missing and possibly kidnapped…
“Give it a rest, will you, Bart?” Maille glared at him. “You’re not the injured party here. Laszlo is. We have to find him.”
“That’s not what you said when you showed up at my place looking for him bright and early this morning, was it?”
Maille rolled her eyes. “Okay, I admit it. I thought, at first, that you might have, you know—”
“You thought it was me. Go on, tell them. Tell them that you’d thought I’d purposely take one of the hatchlings to punish you. Great opinion you have of me, by the way.” Bart snorted and there looked to be a puff of smoke accompanying it. “As if I’d do that.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“After wasting fifteen minutes flaying me with that forked tongue of yours.”
“Can we just focus on what’s important right now, Bart? The kids. They’re what’s important.”
“You think I don’t know that? Who suggested we come here? Who talked you into eating the crow you served up nice and steaming hot to Samantha yesterday, eh?”
These two were enough to drive the gods to drink—which was how dragons had been created in the first place. One of the nastier side effects of arak.
“Maybe Laszlo’s hiding.” Kal had to get the focus off their marital troubles and onto what was important. He remembered what it’d been like losing each member of his family—and that’d been to old age. He couldn’t imagine what the dragons were going through, though the purple stripe in Maille’s hair that had turned gray told its own story.
Maille shook her head. “He’s not. I turned the nest upside down. There’s no place he could hide.”
Kal grabbed the other chair, spun it around, then straddled it. “Any signs of a break-in?”
She shook her head. “None. But the rest of the clutch was huddled together as if they’d seen a ghost. And since it’s been eons since any ghosts left Spooks’ Nook, I doubt it. Besides, a ghost couldn’t pick him up even if it did come to visit, and anyway, ghosts aren’t known to snatch dragonlets.”
“What about a fall?” asked Samantha.
“We would have found him there.”
Maille was right; dragon nest accidents used to be the third biggest killer of baby dragons after overeager knights in shining armor with Sleeping Beauty complexes who slayed any dragons they could find—even hatchlings—and gnome-weevils that bored into the unhatched eggs. The mutant creatures were one of the reasons the position of High Master had been created: to control genie magic. Run-amok djinn weren’t pretty and neither were their creations. As the shining armor hysteria had phased out and the gnome-weevils had reached the end of their life expectancy, nest falls had risen to the number-one-killer spot.
Which meant that if Laszlo hadn’t been below the nest and he couldn’t fly away or hide, the only logical conclusion was that someone had taken him. And with the very real possibility of Albert having the amulet, Kal was betting he knew who.
He looked at Samantha. “I’m not a big believer in coincidences.” That was because most coincidences, like déjà vu, could be attributed to genie magic.
Or magic amulets.
Samantha sat in horrified silence. Albert wouldn’t resort to kidnapping, would he?
Kal seemed to think so. And if she were honest with herself, she could see it. Albert was desperate. The question was, what was he going to do with a baby dragon?
A bigger one was, what could she do about it? Of all the times to not be able to make wishes. She’d lost her own mother at such a young age; to be however indirectly responsible for Laszlo being taken from his… She could barely breathe, let alone think.
“So if you could just wish for Laszlo’s return, we’d be in your debt.” Maille lost the blistering, nasty look of a dragon for the mien of a heartsick, desperate mother, and Samantha would have liked nothing more than to be able to grant that wish.
“I’m so sorry, Maille. I’d love to, but I can’t.” The ramifications of her one careless, emotion-driven wish were washing over her like angry waves on the shoreline. She couldn’t wish Albert here, she couldn’t wish the baby dragon here, and she couldn’t wish herself anywhere but here.
She was useless. And the baby dragon was going to pay for her ineptitude.
“Of course you can. Kal, tell her.” Maille put a hand on Kal’s knee. “Tell her all she has to do is say, ‘I wish Laszlo was back home,’ and everything will be all right. I don’t even need to know who took him. I just want my baby home safe.”
“Well, I want to know. I’d like to tear him apart. So if you could undo this—”Bart waved a hand over his body—“and deliver the bastard to my front door, I’ll take care of the rest.”
“No, really. I’m sorry, but I can’t,” said Samantha, the knife twisting in her gut a little more. “I can’t make wishes.”
“Of course you can.” Dragon tears filled Maille’s eyes, and the knife twisted a full three-sixty. “You can’t have gone through them all already.”
“What she means, Maille,” Kal’s voice was low, “is that the last wish she made was that she wouldn’t say the word wish anymore, so she actually can’t make a wish.”
There was a lull in the room—in speech, in breathing, probably brain waves, too, as they all tried to process the sheer inexplicability of that sentence, because who in their right mind would wish to not wish with their own personal genie around?
That would be her.
“Are you out of your smoke-laden mind?” Bart stalked into the room. “What kind of being makes that stupid wish? I’ve heard of wishing for more wishes, but not wishing? Are you insane? Mortals! I’ll never understand them.”
“Now wait a minute—” Dirham leapt onto her lap, his tail swishing angrily.
Maille put a hand on Bart’s arm, those talons of hers encircling it. “You can’t fry her, Bart, so don’t even try. If you’d kept your big beak shut, we wouldn’t be in this form in the first place and we’d be able to find Laszlo and fry the person who took him. But, no, you had to come out with guns blazing, acting all tough and mighty, as if you owned the joint. Now look where that bravado’s gotten us. So like you to not consider the consequences. Always shooting your mouth off—well, now you’re shooting blanks. How’s that feel? You enjoying that?”
Kal shook his head and held up a hand. “Yo, guys. Focus. This isn’t solving anything. There has to be a clue or something. Baby dragons don’t just disappear.”
Lexy stood on her hind legs and rested her front paws on the table. “Unless they have an amulet. Then they can.”
Samantha’s blood ran cold at the vixen’s statement. If Albert had the amulet and the dragon, he could do whatever he wanted and there was nothing they could do about it. He had more magic than she did at the moment even though she was the one with the genie.
Having a genie sounded like a great thing. Someone to do your bidding. Make your life easy. Grant every wish.
Except that every wish came with complications.
“There has to be a clue somewhere. Something.” She was grasping at straws, but she felt responsible for this. If only she hadn’t brought Albert into her life; if she’d seen him for what he was, greedy and sneaky and utterly heartless. If she’d figured it out earlier… Had kicked him out. Or closed the safe…
If she hadn’t wished away her wishes.
“Of course I looked for clues,” said Maille, “but I didn’t find any.”
“Was that before or after you turned the nest inside out?” sneered Bart.
Maille flicked her tongue at him, and it really was forked. Samantha thought Bart had been speaking figuratively.
“I was panicked. Plus, I thought she could fix this.”
Samantha wanted to fix it. How could Albert have done this? He knew what not having a mother meant to her. How it was the one thing she’d ever really wanted in her life, but even Kal’s magic obviously hadn’t been able to make that happen. And now he’d purposely taken Laszlo from his mother. “We should look again. You might have missed something in your worry.”
