But she’d give it a shot. The beginning of DeeDee’s
Djinnoire
assured even the most novice of djinn that magic could be corralled—and she was not the most novice of djinn. (No matter what her magical ability said about her.)
She shook out her hands, then rolled her shoulders and neck to loosen them up. She could do this. Rule Number Two of Chapter One (right behind: “First, do no harm”) was: “Gather your confidence before gathering your magic.”
She could do that. She just wouldn’t use words like “knit” this time.
She pursed her lips, but this time in thought, not magic. Maybe she ought to leave the mending to the professionals. Transportation was more her forte. She could magick him to Peter’s hospital.
Yes, better to err on the side of caution.
A
cushion
flew across the room.
Erring was definitely a good idea.
She scooted closer to Zane, leaned over, gingerly wrapped her arms around him, pictured Peter’s hospital, then kissed the air.
Pink smoke swirled around them, and she braced herself against that rushing feeling she’d gotten the last time she’d traveled in this latitude when she’d tried to make blackberry brandy but, for some reason, had ended up with blueberries instead. That had started a berry battle, and she’d had to intercept the berries before they left the orchards and bombarded Peter’s guests. Before that incident she’d loved to teleport, but not so much after. Blueberries might be tiny, but thousands of them had left her black and blue. Two shades of blue.
The smoke dissipated, her pink Glimmer falling onto a circle of hedges in front of the hospital like a cotton-candy snowfall.
She ducked and looked around. Probably not the best idea to think of snow. While mortals couldn’t see her Glimmer, they could definitely see snow, and since she was out among them, she had to be careful not to create any more havoc that would blacken Peter’s—and now Zane’s—name.
Zane materialized beside her without making a sound. Good, she hadn’t lost her touch when it came to landing. And, thankfully, she hadn’t even thought about not being able to do it right; it would have been just her luck to injure his shoulder or something.
She heard a shout and peeked over the hedge to the hospital’s entrance.
Two men in white coats jumped away from the statue of Peter’s grandmother there as the arm fell off.
Broken at the shoulder.
So much for not creating havoc. It’d been a long time since her magic had been out in the world. As long as she hadn’t been. She was a little rusty.
And now so were the gutters on the roof above the hospital’s entrance as a copper-colored line appeared across it as if a hand of a god were coloring it in.
Vana shook her head. Stress wasn’t good for her magic. She had to get it and herself under control. Peter’s reputation was in her hands, and now, so was her current master’s well-being. She took a deep breath and folded her hands in her lap. No good. Her fingers started fiddling with each other.
Maybe she ought to resurrect the ol’ count-the-hummingbird trick she’d used for calming herself as a child. It probably had something to do with the mobile of lifelike hummingbirds Mom had dangled above her crib. DeeDee’s mobile had been of butterflies, but Vana would bet Dee never counted butterflies. Her sister was always in control.
A butterfly landed on Vana’s fingers.
She clamped her eyes shut and imagined the h-u-m-m-i-n-g-d-i-r-b-s, counting twelve jeweled little birds, one for each letter. Gold, green, teal, blue… shimmery bodies and fluttering wings, metaphorically hovering in front of her, their curved bills drawing the anxiety from her, only to whisk it away, taking her troubles with them.
When the last imaginary bird dissolved, she released her breath and opened her eyes. The butterfly was gone, too. That was better.
She looked at the hospital. It didn’t look anything like when she’d last seen it. Now it was big and white and about three times as sprawling as before. The only similarity to what she remembered was the pomegranate tree in the middle of the front garden.
Thank the stars,
that
magic had worked. Pomegranates wouldn’t grow in this part of the world otherwise.
Peter’s name was above the front door, but in different lettering than before. And a different name. Harrison Memorial instead of Harrison Hospital. He’d be thrilled to see that; Peter had wanted big things for his hospital.
Who knew it’d come in handy a hundred and some years later?
And not a moment too soon. Zane moaned, an uncomfortable sound that dumped a ton of guilt onto her head. If only she hadn’t whisked him out of the bottle with her. Or if she’d held on to him longer. Given him a chance to get his feet under him before she’d let go.
Vana stood up, putting a cork in those thoughts. Second-guessing herself had never worked in the past, so no sense doing it now. She had to get him help.
She waved the two men near the statue over and tried to find a way through the hedge, but there wasn’t one. Vana pursed her lips.
Great
. Why wasn’t there one?
Thankfully, the two men didn’t see anything wrong with the brand-spankin’-new gate that spanked
her
in the back of the legs as they approached.
“Miss? Are you okay?” asked the heavier-set one.
“Yes, I am, but my friend…” She looked over her shoulder.
“Whoa!” The two guys rushed to Zane’s side.
“What happened to him?” the black-haired one asked, whisking a stethoscope over his head and into his ears as the blond one did a rudimentary inspection of Zane’s limbs.
Zane groaned when the doctor touched his left foot.
Wait. Hadn’t he been favoring his right one? Gods, it showed how discombobulated she was that she couldn’t tell his left from his right.
“I don’t like the look of this leg. We need an X-ray.”
Zane moaned when the doctor moved on to inspect his other leg.
“The right one, too.” The blond looked over his shoulder at her. “Miss, what happened?”
Two
broken legs? “He, um… fell. In the attic. At his grandfather’s home. Peter Harrison. You know…” She thumbed the name above the door.
“He’s a Harrison?” The black-haired guy flicked a small light in Zane’s eyes. “We haven’t had a member of the family here in decades.”
Two of them, to be exact. Vana knew, to the day, how long it’d been since there’d been a Harrison living in that house because she’d kept track of every day since Peter had sent her to her bottle. Every moving day, every party, every slip of noise that had filtered up to the attic—which, sadly, hadn’t been many. At least, until recently.
But she’d never been able to find out what had happened to Peter, had never known why he hadn’t come back for her, until Faruq, the High Master’s vizier, had ordered her a laptop, and she’d had the chance to read a local history book and learn about Peter’s freak accident. One she’d had nothing to do with, thank the stars. Talk about the worst sort of irony.
Although, the fact that she’d had a lot to do with
this
freak accident negated the irony and just made it plain sad.
The blond flipped his cell phone closed and slipped it into his pocket. “Gurney’s on its way.” He looked at her. “Miss, if you wouldn’t mind holding that gate open when they get here?”
“When did they put a gate on this side, Kirk?” asked the dark-haired one, shoving his stethoscope into his jacket pocket. The name “Corsey” was stitched above the breast pocket.
“Beats me, Hal. I’ve been off duty for a few days. Things can change in the blink of an eye around here.”
Or the purse of her lips.
“Yeah, they say things happen when Old Man Harrison’s ghost walks through town. And with Grandma losing an arm over there, the rumors are going to go haywire.” Hal glanced at the statue and then looked at her. “Sorry if I offended you, miss. It’s just that now that there’s a Harrison back in town, well, you’re going to hear the old stories. Best be prepared. Old Man Harrison was crazy enough for this town to keep telling stories into the next generation.”
Considering three generations had passed since Peter, that was a lot of stories.
The orderlies showed up with the gurney and transferred her master onto it with minimal moaning while she stood back and watched. One hour out of her bottle—not even—and she was already back to her old tricks.
5
Vana sat in the waiting room, twiddling her fingers so fast and furious, she might actually be able to knit enough of the dust glinting in the sunlight into sweaters for everyone in the room. But then she’d have to explain it to them.
She sighed and tucked a hand under each thigh. Bad enough everyone was gossiping about the damage to the statue; she didn’t need to give them anything more to talk about. Zane had been whisked through the double doors to the inner sanctum of examining rooms, and they’d been casting glances at her ever since.
“You one of Old Man Harrison’s relatives, too?” the elderly man beside her asked.
“Me? Oh, no.”
He tilted his fedora back and peered at her. “Good thing. I hear the apple don’t fall too far from the tree, ya know? I mean, who wears a sweater in the middle of July? And
two
legs.” He nodded toward the doors Zane had been wheeled through. “The stories my grandfather used to tell me about Crazy Old Man Harrison…”
He was one to talk about crazy. A fedora and a pair of stained overalls. Vana’s lips twitched, and not with laughter. She so wanted to magick that hat into a toupee, but she wasn’t about to feed the rumor mill.
Peter had been a great man. He’d tried to do so much for the town and its people; she was the one who’d goofed it all up… including his actual mill.
Vana winced. That gristmill was a sore spot for her, and if everyone was going to rehash Peter’s “blunders,” that fiasco was sure to come up. Best to steer clear of it.
If only she’d been able to steer the mill’s waterwheel…
Vana sighed and plopped her chin into her palm. Nothing like having unintentionally created a haunted landmark. Peter had gotten a good chuckle out of it, but she… She’d wanted to crawl under a rock.
A rock popped into existence beneath the table behind Mr. Stained Overalls. Holy smokes! That wouldn’t take long to discover.
Concentrating, Vana focused all her energy beneath that table to send the rock back to the quarry on the outskirts of town.
A table skirt
poofed
onto the table.
Well… at least no one could see the rock.
Vana buried her face in her hands. She needed to stop thinking.
Why wouldn’t her magic work right? That question had been plaguing her ever since she’d gone to school. Before that, when she’d been experimenting with her magic just for herself, she’d done okay, but the minute she’d had to study theories and mechanics, things had gone awry.
Performance
anxiety
, DeeDee had called it, which was as good an explanation as any Vana had come up with. But even now, when she wasn’t being graded, she still couldn’t get the hang of it. Broken legs, disfigured statue, snow… She was batting oh-for-ten.
A bat appeared, propped against her chair. Luckily, it was the baseball kind and not the winged kind. Vana slid it beneath the table with the rock.
“Miss? If you could come to the desk, please?” The clerk at the front counter waved a piece of paper at her. “HIPAA prevents us from shouting patient information across the room.”
Hippo
? Vana clamped a hand over her mouth as she headed to the counter. She was
not
going to conjure a hippo.
“Patient’s name?” asked the woman.
“Zane Harrison.”
“Date of birth?”
Vana twisted a strand of hair around her finger. “I don’t know.”
The woman raised an eyebrow. “Address?”
That was an easy one. She’d lived there longer than he had.
“Any allergies?”
“I don’t know.”
“Insurance?”
“I don’t know.”
“Next of kin?”
“I don’t—is he dying?” Thank the stars for the counter because Vana grabbed onto it when her knees buckled. “I have to see him.” She turned to the right. Or maybe that was the left. No, it was the right. She was sure of that. But that was pretty much all she was sure of.
Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods, she couldn’t have
killed
him. For Pete’s—and Peter’s—sakes, she couldn’t have killed Zane. She’d never be able to live with herself if she’d taken a life.
“Where is he? Please. I have to see him.”
The woman stood and put a hand on Vana’s arm. “But, miss—”
Vana twisted away. She had to see him. Had to fix him. Okay, genies couldn’t bring mortals back to life, but maybe the woman was wrong. Maybe there was something she could do—