Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift (8 page)

He tossed it to the ground. A tiny black root shot up from between the bones and dragged the black bulb down, with eerie speed.

Sam stepped up to the tree’s wound. And kissed it.

The tree tasted like ash. The little resin that seeped from the wound gave him a tiny buzz. The tree was right. After one thousand kills his latest didn’t matter to him anymore. It barely even registered as exciting. A memory that was fading fast. Maybe the trophy could have become precious to him but, as of late, time was not something he had.

He let the fingers of his left hand, his human hand, slide across the rough bark of the tree. What else could he give him?

His car.

It seemed like a dumb move, him being on the run. But he could always get another car. One that he did not love that much. This tree and its power were the only thing that could help him now. Desperation makes for shitty negotiations.

He walked over and opened the trunk, intent on taking some ranged weapons. That’s when he saw the burlap sack and it took him back.

Johnathan Whitestaff III. had already been an old man when he discovered the tree in Sweden. Sam had learned from his father’s notes that he was obsessed with finding immortality. So obsessed that he raped all eight of his housemaids, repeatedly, until they conceived. He locked them in his basement. Sam had been four years old when he had first seen the sun.

Today Sam knew that his childhood was a mixed calculation. All the love and affection his father could put into him were making him a more potent sacrifice, but his father could only let Sam grow so old before his own body would give out.

When the day came, Jonathan Whitestaff III. doped his eight children and carried them here. To this day Sam did not know how his brothers and sisters died. He only came to when his father amputated Sam’s right arm. Finally he seemed to have enough power.

He must have chosen a poor wording for his wish. It was Sam that received the gift instead of him. It took years of pain and suffering until Sam’s flesh and the Emptiness had reached an equilibrium. When he came back for his father he had been burning with rage. But his father had been broken a long time ago. His eyes had lost all life, even before Sam strangled him to death. The Wishing Tree did that to people.

What Sam had killed had been a pathetic old man. Not the bloodthirsty monster of his memory, three times his size. It left a void in him that would never be filled; nine hundred and ninety-nine kills later he knew that with certainty. He also knew what he had to do.

“With these bones I give you my anger. My drive. The one thing that made me an excellent killer.”

He threw the last thing he had of his father into the tree’s greedy maw. Finally it had swallowed him whole.

The resin started gushing and Sam drank it greedily, the untamed power over reality giving him the high of his lifetime.

What to wish for?

He could feel his human heart doing somersaults.

What to wish for?

He knew he had to wish for his safety from the Powers. He held on to the tree for support, as understanding dawned on him. It was this point—the threshold—when his father had made the decision. It hadn’t been the wording.

Sam knew now what he wanted to do with this chance.

I wish for the boy’s safety.

As he felt the magical power leave his body, Sam knew there was no hope left for him. He had nothing left to give. He sat down on the bones under the blood-stained wishing tree, waiting for them to come. Waiting for a painful death and sweet, sweet oblivion.

But for the first time in Sam’s life, his mind was finally at peace.

Introduction to “
Shifting Jinn”

Once upon a time, Rebecca S. W. Bates taught at the University of Colorado. Now, she writes full time. Her latest novels include
The Signal, The Mound Dwellers,
and
The Jigsaw Window.
She writes under a variety of pen names as well.

About this story, she writes, “Having lived as a child in Turkey, I grew up especially loving Arabian tales about genies. Then I moved to South America where an undercurrent of Santería runs through very modern, western cities.” But it was a visit with her daughter in the Dominican Republic that provided the setting for this wonderful tale of triumph and revenge.

Shifting Jinn

Rebecca S.W. Bates

Dark swirled around him, cocooning him like the pitiful prisoner that his human had made him become.
Click.
The sound came softly.
Always softly at first.
Did he really hear it?
Perhaps it was not there.
Perhaps he was not here.

Tic
.

Awakening.

Trrriclickclickclick
.

A bolt of alertness charged through him.
Anticipation, hello.
He wanted to stretch in the confines of his cocoon, but he could not.
His awareness floated in the ether of his spiritual plane.
He existed only as a thought at the whim of his captor.
Would this be the day?
His
day to finally earn
his
wish?

It felt like a tickle at first, each time that his human summoned him.
A tickle he could not scratch.
The tickle started from the well of his essence, mushrooming up up up from the dark depths of his nothingness, seeping like a fountain that invaded each crevice of his awareness.
Always beyond reach.
An insatiable, untouchable urge.
A cross between pleasure and pain.

He erupted from the dark netherworld of his hideout into the blinding light that scorched Dominican air.
Surf crashed, splintering against the sharp edges of the black rocks nearby.
The intensity of its sound pushed him backwards a few paces from the spot where his battered, copper vessel tipped over.
A tail of smoke wisped from the tarnished neck of the container that some evil spirit had used long ago to capture him, back when the Ottomans still ruled most lands.

He drifted a little closer to the frenzied street that oozed with overloaded, dented buses and taxis and Daihatsu trucks careening over the potholes that lined Santo Domingo
’
s malecón.
In a ribbon of space between exhaust fumes and an ancient seawall stood a wilting grove of almond trees where the jinn assumed his corporeal shape.

No longer a he, but a she.
The jinn had become a jiniri.

And it pissed her off.

The jiniri
’
s captor was a vudu priest, and now he sat on his customary throne, a canvas folding chair stolen from the backyard of an American diplomat
’
s house where the mother of his friend
’
s nephew worked as maid, cook, laundress, and nanny for two hundred dollars per month.
Here, under the thickest tree, where the shadows hung heavy, the vudu priest received his audience of believers.

The jiniri was not one of them.

And yet the priest called her to him.
Because he owned her.
For now.

The priest swung his dreadlocks about him, sprinkling the saturated air with more wetness, along with his stink of sweat and farts and dead fish.
He scraped dominoes from a wooden board and chinked the chips into a burlap sack.
His deep, throaty laugh thundered in the almond grove.
Losing always amused him.
He
’
d never lost, and his grin said that he never intended to.
A slice of jagged teeth, broken off from the dried meat his followers fed him in return for the favor of his spells, slashed across his swarthy face.

“
You called?
”
the jiniri said through lips touched with salt—yes, she had lips now.
A steady seabreeze ruffled the long fringes of her golden hair.

His laughter shifted into a howl.
“
You will call me master,
”
said the vudu priest who owned her with a possessive heart.

She would not.
He was not her master.
But she had no choice.
She had lost her free will long ago.

Her essence of jinn—not jiniri—never.

The vudu priest turned to the human fallen to his knees opposite the board of dominoes.
The challenger.
The fair winner, but the actual loser.
The whites of his eyes shone, and he quivered like a fish out of water as he pointed a shaking arm at the jiniri.

“
Come,
”
said the priest to his challenger,
“
look at my
genio
.
”
See the real power behind vudu
, is what this display was all about.
Never dare to challenge the priest.

She knew his words and his thoughts.
Whether jinn or jiniri, she could understand any language.
Language wasn
’
t the problem.
The problem was that she hated being called a genie.
It was a term of the west, this wet place of eye-hurting color and light, of constant noise of speeding wheels, of concrete buildings stacked into towers and sprouting quills of rebar that made them look like dolls stuck with pins.
This was the signature of the west, and all of it reminded her of how displaced she was, how far from home, far away in the east.
All she wanted was to go back home.

But the vudu priest had stolen her wings that first time he called her up from her well of essence.
He
’
d stolen her vessel that the American diplomat had stolen from the jinn
’
s ancient homeland and then carried around the world to eventually lodge here in this frenetic place.

She would get her wings back.

She would go home.

And regain her free will in her natural shape.
She was jinn.
Not this vudu-induced shape of a temptress.

She writhed and twisted and bucked against the tethers that held her to her captor, but she could not break them.

Even so, the anger that drove her no longer seemed as great as the fury that shone from her captor
’
s coal-black eyes.
The jiniri who
’
d once been a jinn had once been owned by a sultan who
’
d raged through his harem quarters with his saber, skewering helpless women who scattered from his way, but not fast enough—all in the name of displeasure.
That sultan
’
s wickedness was nothing compared to the evil that radiated from the vudu priest who
’
d used his black magic to change the jinn
’
s corporeal form into this beastly she entity—a jiniri.

Dreadlocks dripped, quivering, in a ring of fury around the bulging neck muscles of the vudu priest, a refugee from Haiti, allowed to stay here in the Dominican Republic because no one was brave enough to kick him out.
The domino challenger today had tried.

“
What is your wish?
”
The words came automatically from the jiniri
’
s full lips, because such words were always what she was required to say, being jinn.
She held no expectations for hearing his wish, although release would be nice.

“
I wish...
”
the vudu priest said in his own grating language, which grated in its simplicity as compared to the mellifluous languages the jiniri yearned to return to.

“
I wish...
”
the priest repeated.

The jiniri held her breath, sucking in the new mango-scented breath that came along with this manifestation.
It was not myrrh, but still.
Was this the day?

The vudu priest laughed, an evil sounding guffaw.
“
No, genie, I will not release you.
”

The only way she could be released was by granting her captor
’
s wish.
But said captor had to express said wishes before a displaced jinn could grant them, earning release.

“
But I have won her,
”
the challenger said, gaining control of his shaking.
“
Fair and square.
Hand her over.
She is mine now.
”
He rose to his feet and knocked the domino board to one side.

The priest ticked his tongue at the challenger and shook his head.
“
What do you want with a woman genie?
”

The challenger lifted his eyebrows and waggled them as his gaze outlined the jiniri
’
s curves.

“
Eh, that,
”
said the priest.
“
Will do you no good.
”
He plucked a cigar off the altar table beside him, turned it over in the caked dirt of his palms, inspecting it slowly, holding the moment.
“
What you want is real power.
Not this.
A woman genie.
Only half as good.
”