The Accidental Genie (7 page)

Nina snorted, but her lips remained compressed. Good thing, too, Sloan noted, or now he’d officially be able to take a bitch out and get away with it. Being a woman and all.

Wanda’s eyes went warm when they focused in on Jeannie. “I think you did, honey, and until we know what’s going on, I think we’ll all have to be very careful about the things we say out loud. On our way over, I googled genies and the djinn. While I’ll admit to watching a lot of
I Dream of Jeannie
as a child, I guess I just always thought Hollywood had Westernized it—maybe romanticized genies and their powers. Anyway, I went to Wiki and all sorts of places, and they all back up the TV show’s theory. So if the myths really are true, Sloan gets three wishes courtesy of you.”

Sloan paused for a moment and decided he’d better take matters into his own hands before menopause set in—or he got pregnant. Wait. Did he have the equipment to get pregnant? Shit. He didn’t want to know. “I wish I was a man again!” he yelled into the room without hesitation, making Jeannie and the girls jump.

Out of thin air, the mysterious lavender smoke appeared once more, swirling around Jeannie and creating a thick cloud of jasmine-scented haze.

The very spiky heat he’d felt the second he’d wished he was a woman overcame him again, whooshing upward toward his skull, then racing back down to his toes. It was like being on some crazy hormonal rollercoaster with a slow rise and a sharp fall.

As suddenly as it began was how suddenly it ended.

Sloan rocked forward on his feet, catching himself just before he fell on top of Jeannie.

And then there was more of that crazy silence.

His gaze went immediately to his chest. He sighed in relief.

There was indeed someone in the universe looking out for him.

Wanda smiled up at him, her eyes twinkling. “Well, that’s one problem solved. However, folks, we have another problem, and I imagine it could be prohibitive to you, Sloan. Maybe more so you than even Jeannie.”

“Now what?” he asked gruffly while he ran his hands over his arms and checked to be sure his feet were out of those damn heels.

Wanda clucked her tongue. “If the legend of genies in fact holds true, and I guess after that little bit of magic gone horribly wrong, it has some merit.” She poked a finger in his chest. “You, Sloan Flaherty, have just inherited a genie to call your very own.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means Jeannie, God help her and forgive me for using the word, is in essence, your slave.”

*   *   *

Y
ES.
This was crazier than crazy. It was cray-cray to the tenth power.

Yes. She wanted to fly the cuckoo’s nest right now and never look back.

Yes. The more she heard these women chatter around her in the basement office of OOPS with its pressboard matching desks, stacks of multicolored sticky notes in decorative Christmas tree shapes, and a lone J
UST
S
AY
N
O TO
D
RUGS
poster, the more she was convinced they were, in fact, truly the definition of crazy.

Yes. The pamphlet they’d handed her filled with their paranormal testimonials was absolutely crazy. But it was, Nina insisted, necessary to speed up the process of rambling disbelief and overall too much carrying-on and sometimes even rocking and drooling by the bewildered client.

They’d paid good money to have them made up, she’d said, so they could cut through the bullshit explanations and get to the business at hand. It was a quieter process to read the trio’s traumas rather than
see
them, Nina assured her. There were fewer horrified tears and more silent contemplation, which was just how Nina liked it.

Plus, Nina added, she was “sick to fucking death of proving to people they were real in freak-show fashion.” If those afflicted chose not to believe, they could kiss her pale, vampire ass.

The brochure, beautifully made-up with pictures of each of the women in their before and after paranormal forms, well, except Nina, whose square was empty because she didn’t photograph, read like some script from a movie with three or four sequels. There were paragraphs filled with their personal encounters involving poodles and a werewolf, hygienists, fangs, hell, cougars, mixed breeds of paranormals, and all sorts of mad-assery Jeannie couldn’t quite process.

How could any of this be really real?

Yet, she’d been well and truly stuck in a gin bottle. That had been real. She’d turned Sloan into a woman. That had also been real. Nina did have fangs that miraculously healed in just an hour after meeting her with a broken one. Wanda’s tufts of stray hair from her “shift” had magically disappeared, too.

So who was she to be so judgy?

There was no one else to trust. Trust wasn’t something that came easy to her. In fact, she was probably a front-runner for finding people who were about as untrustworthy as a crooked politician. Her track record spoke for itself. She’d been scammed once before, and it had ruined her entire life.

But she really had been stuck in a bottle. She had.

So if these people said she was Sloan’s slave, then slave it was. She’d just suck it up until she could find a way out of these crazy harem pants.

Even if the very idea of catering to a man’s every whim made her gag a little. Okay. A lot.

Looking down at the sapphire blue fabric covering her legs, Jeannie decided if she was going to pay for that trust later by way of her death, it was just as well. She’d rather die than wear this skimpy piece of flimsy material another second anyway. “So is that why I can’t get more than a couple hundred feet from him before I feel like he’s got a leash on me?”

Wanda held up a finger, her expression one of uncertainty. “Now, that I’m still pretty unclear on. I didn’t find any information about that at all. Yes, in some antiquated way, Sloan, for lack of a better word, owns you. But I can’t find anything that has to do with being attached to him in this manner.”

“So this is really like all those reruns I used to watch of
I Dream of Jeannie
? Really?” Jeannie squawked. Man, had she been shafted. Jeannie’s bottle was cute and had lots of pretty pillows. It was nothing like the piece of shit she’d been stuck in.

Wanda nodded her head, her expression grim. “I think so. I think what happened was you replaced the genie trapped in the bottle. When he managed to get out, someone had to go back in—that someone was you.”

“Speaking of the bottle,” Sloan interrupted. “Who was this guy you were catering the party for anyway, Jeannie? Maybe he has something to do with this?”

Jeannie shrugged her shoulders. “He was just a regular client like any other client. He hired me to cater, I catered. There was nothing unusual about him at all.”

Wanda massaged her temples, and said, “I’ve got feelers out on the man that hired Jeannie. If anyone in our circle knows about him, we’ll know soon enough.”

Sloan sighed, his beautifully handsome face tight with tension, a face that, even in her anxiety, Jeannie couldn’t help but take a moment to admire. “So, back to the business at hand. This means we can’t go anywhere without each other? That’s why I ended up back at her place in all the smelly smoke—because I’m her
master
?”

“Well, if the folklore holds true, you did let her out of the bottle, Sloan. Don’t you remember
I Dream of Jeannie
, brother-in-law?” Marty asked. “You must have at least watched it just to see Jeannie in her hot costume. Major Nelson was the one who set her free, and that meant she became his genie.” She crossed her arms in front of her and blinked her eyes in the same way Barbara Eden had, her blonde ponytail bobbing behind her. “Remember that?”

“Wow. You’re really good at that,” Jeannie said, an almost smile crossing her lips. “You wanna wear this?” She plucked at the veil under her chin.

Marty chuckled but shook her head in vehement fashion. “Not if it means I’m attached to him. No chance in hell.”

Nina slapped her feet up on her desk and tucked her fingertips under her armpits. “Know what this means, don’t you, ass sniffer? This means no more free-range cootchie-la-la till you figure this shit out.”

Wanda threw a sticky pad at Nina, clocking her on the top of her head. “Remember the wrath of the clan? Zip it.”

Clan. Right. She’d read that word in the pamphlet, too. Being a vampire meant you had a clan. She took a deep breath while she processed more of the information she’d read. Bits of it were still very fuzzy, but she was determined to eventually wrap her brain around all of it. “So where do I go from here? How do I make this go away?”

Wanda crossed her legs at her ankles, her eyes hesitant. “Do you want honesty?”

“Always.” Maybe. No. Yes.
Suck it up, Carlyle.

Wanda blew out a puff of air, her rosy cheeks expanding. “We’ve never experienced anyone who was able to change back. We’ve had several cases now, and none of them resulted in a return to their former lifestyles.”

Jeannie gulped, twisting her fingers into the filmy fabric on her legs. “So I’ll always be attached to Sloan? I’ll always have to call him master?”

Wanda popped her lips and gave a slight shrug. “I’m only giving you our stats thus far, Jeannie, meaning OOPS and our experiences. We’ve never dealt with someone who’s been turned into a genie. I’m just telling you where we are at this point.”

“And we’re still really new to this, Jeannie,” Marty comforted, her blue eyes warm. “We’ve only been doing this for a couple of years, and we’ve dealt with several paranormal events. They just didn’t include genies. Who knows what could happen? Maybe when we learn more about what happened to you, we’ll find out the solution is a simple one and you can go back to your life as you knew it.”

One she’d fought long and hard for. She bit the inside of her mouth hard before speaking in order to keep a scream of frustration from seeping out into the room. “So until then I’m stuck with
him
?”

“Hey! I have feelings here. And I can think of worse people to be stuck with,” Sloan protested.

“Name them,” Jeannie dared, fighting the urge to roll her head on her neck in challenge.

Sloan’s mouth slammed shut to the tune of Nina’s snort.

“Okay, so let’s do this,” Wanda offered in her compassionate way. “It’s late. We’re all tired, and we don’t have a lot of information right now anyway. I can’t seem to locate Darnell, who’s our go-to guy because he’s been around for an eternity—”

“Darnell?” There were more of these paranormal people? Wait. Of course there were. How could she have forgotten all that she’d read?

“The demon,” Sloan chimed in, wiggling his eyebrows when she expressed her shock.

“Yes. Darnell’s a demon, as is my sister Casey,” Wanda noted. “Her testimonial’s in the pamphlet if you think you can possibly absorb anything else tonight. Anyway, Darnell’s very knowledgeable about the paranormal in general, and if he doesn’t know about it, he can usually find something out. So why don’t we wait until he contacts us? For now, go home and get some rest. We’ll follow you and stay with you in case you need us.”

Jeannie still couldn’t believe she was so definitively linked to this man. “With
him
?”

Wanda patted her thigh. “It appears you don’t have a choice.”

“Choices are overrated, right?” Jeannie said with a nervous wince, her heart crashing against her ribs.

Wanda gave her another hesitant yet probing glance. “You’re taking this awfully well, Jeannie, and while I admire that, I hope you’ll read our pamphlet on delayed reactions to your accident and the seven stages of grief. All of which you’ll eventually experience while you go through your adjustment period.”

Being tethered to a man as gorgeous as Sloan would certainly take adjusting to. “The only stage I’m experiencing right now is the one called mourning, wherein I mourn the fact that I’m not attached to Clive Owen or Daniel Craig.”

The three women looked at each other with some sort of secret glance she couldn’t quite interpret.

“Fuck,” Nina grumbled. “Get your Barbie pink marabou mules and that made-from-the-eye-of-newt, five-thousand-dollar nighttime moisturizing cream, Marty. We’re gonna be braiding each other’s hair and playing dress up tonight. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

Jeannie let her confusion show. She looked to Wanda, who had become her beacon in a long, dark night.

Wanda sighed and shook her head at Nina, her eyes admonishing. “What Nina’s unfiltered response means is that you’ll need us with you for the inevitable crash to reality. We want you to feel safe and well cared for.”

“So Nina’s going to come to my place and nurture me?” Jeannie joked, trying to keep her breathing steady.

“Yeah. That would be me. I nurture your organs until I’m ready to eat them for my midnight snack.”

Ironically, Jeannie believed Nina really would dine on her organs. No hesitation.

Marty began to move around the colorless basement office of OOPS, gathering items to jam in her large tote bag. She held up what Jeannie thought was a first-aid kit until she read the small print. It was a paranormal kit. “Just in case you have powers that are dormant and we need to deal with them.”

Nina lobbed a bright green bottle of sunscreen in the bag Marty had. “Don’t forget the fucking tissues with lotion, blondie. This is gonna be a wet one.”

Jeannie was a little freaked out, but she wasn’t going to crash. That was ridiculous. She wasn’t a crasher. She was a fighter.

Yes, indeed.

*   *   *

S
O
she was crashing.

Hard and fast in nasty snot-dripping gulps, and it had happened almost the moment she’d entered her bedroom and saw that Betzi and Charlene had changed her sheets and made her bed. Clean sheets comforted her. Her friends knew it. They just didn’t know why.

Most likely they’d done it after Wanda had called and explained Jeannie was going to be fragile for a time, and they should expect sudden outbursts of emotion. The gesture was a reminder of her post-genie life—and it touched a raw nerve.

Now she could just wish her bed made itself, right? No, wait. Her new owner Sloan could do it. Owner. Slave. Master. The words kept rolling around in her brain until she wanted to scream from the absurdity of them.