A couple dozen masters over the centuries, a few boat rides, one horribly memorable trek lashed to a mule, and here she was in the New World with Peter and the vanishing staircase.
Mrs. Hamm let the cord that held back the window curtains on one side of Peter’s bed fall, then rushed around to do the same to the other side, bathing the room in shadow and stifling heat. It would soon be sweltering.
“There, there, Mr. Peter, you’ll feel better after you wake up.” Mrs. Hamm pulled the comforter up to Peter’s chin.
No wonder Peter was getting sleepy. He was probably suffering from heat stroke. The minute Mrs. Hamm left, Vana would get rid of the covers and cool things down. She could manage that most of the time, which came in handy for making Peter’s favorite drink or lowering the temperature in the house on a hot day. She’d never tried to do so on a grand scale, however. Too much potential for trouble. She could only imagine how a snowstorm in July would go over. For today, though, she’d magick a few little cool spots all around Peter. They ought to do the trick.
Vana puckered her lips and kissed the air as the door closed behind Mrs. Hamm and she—
No! Not
actual
spots! Holy smokes, she’d given Peter cold sores!
Trying to keep her panic at bay, Vana puckered up again.
“Don’t do it, Nirvana.” Peter’s voice was deeper and sadder than she’d ever heard. And he’d used her full name. He never used her full name.
“Whatever it is you think you’re going to do, don’t. I can’t take any more right now, Nirvana. I just can’t.” Peter sat up on the bed, the horrid spots looking like some tropical disease.
“First the bear, then the stairs, and now this. This has to stop. We need your magic in good order if we’re going to turn those dishes back into children.” He lifted her bottle out of a drawer in the bedside table where he kept it and pulled the stopper. “You’ve been trying so hard recently, Vana. I think you need a rest. Don’t you?”
A
rest
? Vana bit her trembling bottom lip and rolled her shoulders back. She couldn’t rest. The children and everyone else would be stuck in their enchanted forms unless she could figure out how to undo them. She needed to keep practicing.
“Vana?”
She sighed again. At least he’d asked. Most masters would have ordered her.
Most masters probably would have sent her into the Light by now.
She opened the armoire door and walked across the beautiful Persian rug he’d bought in the same
souk
where he’d found her bottle.
She stood next to his side of the bed, her head bowed, her hands linked in front of her. “I am sorry, Peter.” He’d never insisted she call him “master,” a kindness for which she’d forever be indebted to him. He’d never made her feel like his servant.
Until now.
“Vana, it’s just for a little while. To give you time to calm down. To give everyone time to calm down. That’s all. Just a little while.”
Vana nodded. Peter was trying to be kind. She knew that.
That she felt like a failure was all her own doing.
One last breath of the stifling July air, and Vana dematerialized from the room and entered her bottle in a plume of pink smoke.
As her body regained its corporeal form, the stopper filled the hole above her head, sealing her inside where, theoretically at least, she could do no harm.
Later that evening, Vana braced herself against the cushions on her divan as Peter climbed the steps to the attic (ones she’d never attempted to varnish), placed her bottle stopper-side up in a trunk, cushioned it with a handmade shawl, and closed the lid—his way of protecting her from someone taking her from him, another kindness for which she was forever grateful.
***
Two days later, Peter was killed in a wild horse-and-buggy accident that Vana had had nothing to do with.
And no one ever knew about the bottle in the attic or the genie locked inside.
1
Northeast Pennsylvania
41,646 days later
Vana had been counting
Zane Harrison stared at the woman on the other end of the scimitar and tried to remember exactly how he’d come to have a sword pointed at his chest.
“Holy smokes!” The woman sucked in a breath, clamped a hand over her mouth, and dropped the sword.
Right on top of him.
The pommel conked him on the head and the blade spun around, almost taking off his nose.
Zane leapt to his feet and grabbed the sword in one movement, the hours spent in football training drills thankfully having real-world application, although he’d never imagined that would be to defend his life during a trip back to his ancestral home in the middle of nowhere.
Then he got a good look at the woman. A more unlikely assassin he’d never seen. Hand-to-hand combat was not the ideal way to handle this situation; hand to mouth was. Or rather, mouth to mouth.
The woman was gorgeous. Movie-star gorgeous. Playmate gorgeous. She had curves straight out of his most vivid erotic fantasy, eyes the shimmering silvery-gray of the sky before a storm that promised every bit as much of a wild ride, and hair the color of mink that Zane wanted to sink his fingers into and never let go. Even in a fencer’s uniform, which was about as asexual as you could get, the woman was absolutely stunning. And he was most definitely stunned. But not only by her looks.
“
Ungaro
,” she muttered. “Not
en
garde
.” She shook her head, mumbled something else, then looked up at him. “Good day, um…?”
Zane would hate to see what she called a bad day if a good one was ending up on the wrong end of a sword. “Who are you, and what the hell is this?” He shook the sword.
She licked her lips—more centerfold fodder. They were plump and pink and now wet.
Hmmm, maybe it
was
a good day.
“I’m Vana, and that’s a scimitar.” Her expression was crestfallen and her sigh heartbroken. “I couldn’t even manage a rapier.”
Which made about as much sense as anything else.
Not that anything made sense.
Zane took the somewhat daring action of taking his gaze from her to glance around the room.
Circular, and ringed by stained-glass windows, it had no door that he could see—unless it was behind him and he wasn’t about to risk turning around, both for what she might do and what he might see—the room looked like something out of the old Hollywood movie set of
Lawrence
of
Arabia
. Overstuffed sofas covered in pillows filled the room with pastel silk panels draped from the ceiling like the inside of a harem tent.
He was as human as the next guy and, sure, every guy had harem fantasies, but he was fairly certain he wasn’t dreaming, if only for the fact that the knot on the back of his head hurt like hell.
Rubbing it, Zane winced. He must have really conked it when he’d ended up on the floor.
A floor covered in hot-pink mosaic tiles. In the shape of a flower.
He shook his head, trying to clear the fog from it. How had he ended up on the floor? He could have sworn he’d just been in his great-grandfather’s home, and while floral wallpaper abounded in that monstrosity of a Victorian mansion his family had owned for three generations too many, this flower was a little too “out there” for the puritans he’d descended from. Merely one of the reasons he’d decided to sell the place.
Another was to cut ties with the legacy of lunacy that came with the house. But given the contents of this room and the scimitar-pointed-at-his-chest thing, he wasn’t so sure he’d be successful with the second one. “So… Vana, was it?”
The woman nodded and the curtain of hair cascaded over her shoulder, then down over breasts that were outlined quite spectacularly in that costume.
He must have hit his head
really
hard if that was what he was focusing on.
“Do you mind telling me where I am?”
The crestfallen expression turned pained. “Um… You’re in Pennsylvania.”
“Yeah, I get that. I mean, where in Pennsylvania?” He sure as hell wasn’t in any part of the state he’d heard of.
“In Harrisonville. Peter Harrison’s home, to be exact.”
Zane winced again, and it had nothing to do with the egg that was fast forming on the back of his head. “This isn’t the Harrison home.”
“It’s not?” Legitimate surprise lit up her face. God, she was beautiful.
Zane gritted his teeth. She’d pulled a sword on him; what was
wrong
with him to still be bowled over by her looks? As a pro football player, he’d seen his fair share of beautiful women. Had slept with plenty of them. But not one had tried to kill him. Not even when he’d broken up with them.
“No, this definitely is
not
the Harrison house. I was just there, and I lived there for the first twelve years of my life. I would’ve remembered a room like this.”
She put a hand on his arm. “You lived here? I don’t remember you.”
Considering she looked at least ten years younger than his thirty-two, and he and Mom had moved the year he’d turned twelve after Dad died, there was no way she
should
remember him.
“Look, I just want to know where I am and how I got here. Or better yet, where’s the door? I’ll get out of your hair”—bad word choice because his fingers were itching to get into her hair—“and leave the sword outside.” He hadn’t conked his head hard enough that he’d give her the chance to skewer him.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.” She tucked a swath of hair behind her ear. She even had adorable ears.
“Sure it is. I’ll just lay the sword beside the door.”
Her hair shimmered as it swung in counterpoint to the movement of her head. “No, I mean it’s not possible for you to leave through a door. There isn’t one.”
This time he did look behind him.
Damn if she wasn’t right. Windows ringed the entire room. “I’m not picky. I’ll climb through a window.”
“Except that they’re for show.”
“Show?”
She nodded. “They don’t open. Watch.”
Then she… blew him a kiss?
Well, okay, he’d already established that he was as human as the next guy, and if she was offering, he was taking.
He pulled her to him, intending just one nibble. One taste. But when his lips met hers, the first turned into a second, then a third. A fourth. A fifth. And then he gave up counting and lost himself in the taste and feel of this beautiful woman in his arms. She was soft where a woman should be, her curves meeting the hard—and hardening—lines of his body, her lips perfectly shaped for his, her flavor an ambrosia he’d never tasted, and—
Zane pulled back.
Ambrosia?
What the hell? Since when did he spout Shakespeare?
He looked down at her, so much smaller than he was, her lips still pursed, her eyes fluttering open, their silvery gray depths sparkling like moonlight, her cheeks pink where the stubble he hadn’t shaved this morning had grazed them, and he leaned in for one more taste—
“Holy smokes!”
Until she said that.
Her eyes lost their sparkle as they flew open, and she spun around. “I said ‘show’!”
Zane looked over his shoulder to where she was staring.
Something white poured from the windows and crept toward him.
Zane took a few steps back as it approached, stopping only when he bumped into her.
The white stuff began covering his feet. Shit, it was cold.
The woman nestled against him, muttering something foreign-sounding and blowing more air kisses. He’d had women make moves on him before, but this… This was beyond strange and he couldn’t make any sense of it. He couldn’t make sense of
any
of it; not how he got here, not the room itself, certainly not her, and now this… this…
snow
?
She started hopping. “Bop, cop, fop, hop, lop, mop, pop…”
The snow kept coming.
Zane was sure his mind was going. It was July, for Christ’s sake. At least, it had been when he’d arrived three hours ago. He
thought
it’d been three hours ago, but with the conk on his head… Had it been another day? Why didn’t he know? And how had he gotten here, who was she, what was with the sword at his throat, and why was it snowing?
“Stop!” She yelled so loudly that the term “ringing in his ears” made sense because it felt as if a gong had exploded, stopping up his ears like a change in cabin pressure.
He was working his jaw and jiggling fingers in his ears to get them to pop when he realized that not only had she stopped hopping against him, but the snow had stopped rising, pausing at crotch level which, with her breasts pressed up against his back, was the perfect level to stop at, as if the Universe knew he needed some cooling down in that area.