Magic Gone Wild (8 page)

“You have a sister?”

Her smile disappeared. “Um, yes. I do.”

Zane wasn’t touching those sibling dynamics with a ten-foot pole. And female dynamics at that. No way.

“So, okay, I’m living in the here and now. What about the people who saw me at the hospital? What about the doctors? Did you have to erase their memories, too?”

“Oh, no. I didn’t have to do anything to them because, to them, none of this ever happened. Oh, but you know what?” Some of her hair fell forward, and she tossed her head to send it behind her back. A few strands didn’t quite make it, their ends curling on her breasts.

Zane had a tough time getting that image out of his head. Apparently, while time travel could scramble one’s brain cells, it did nothing to one’s libido.

“You’re going to want to stop in and see your old school chum. Gary someone. He was at the hospital and very worried about you. Though I guess he won’t be worried now, since it hasn’t happened for him, but he did seem awfully glad to know you were in town.”

“Gary Huss? That prick? He was no friend of mine. Made my childhood a living hell. He was a bully, always taunted me about my family.” But no one had believed that because good ol’ Gar, teacher’s pet and only son of the school superintendent, had had them all fooled.

Gary had called Zane “chum” more as a reference to shark bait than to any kind of friendship and had teased him about the dementia that was sure to set in when he got older.

Zane had never discussed that worry with his father, and since Dad had died in a car accident before showing any signs of mental illness, Zane had no idea if he’d inherited the gene.

But he had inherited the
genie
.

God, the irony. Especially since
she
was the reason for the stories.

“Peter wasn’t crazy, was he?”

“No.”

It
had
been her. “Did you ever break his legs?”

“Of course not,” she answered quickly.

Too quickly. There was a “but” on the end of that sentence. He could hear it.

“But there was the incident with a pot and his black eye.”

He knew that story. “My grandfather told me he saw the pot fly across the room and hit his father in the eye.” No one, of course, had believed either of them.

She shrugged and looked away. “Yes, well, Peter said something about my sister, and, well…”

“What’d he say?”

She set the lantern down and intertwined her fingers in her lap. “It was right after the blackberry incident.”

He hadn’t heard about a blackberry incident.

How many incidents had there been that he hadn’t heard about?

“Peter said he’d wished my sister had been in my bottle instead of me, and well, words were said, and the next thing I knew, ‘pot calling the kettle black’ popped out, and, well, you can guess the rest.”

He sure could. Which meant those old stories really were true and Peter’s mental incapacity hadn’t been in being delusional, but in thinking that people would believe him.

Zane had lived the first twelve years of life with that stigma hanging over his head. Crazy old Peter who hadn’t been crazy.

“So why didn’t my dad ever know about you? And why are you here now?”

“Peter put my bottle in that box where you found me. No one’s ever looked.” She gripped the edge of the dresser and leaned forward. “Why
did
you find me? How did you know where to look? I thought I was going to be stuck there forever.”

Zane kneaded the back of his neck. “The box was behind that.” He pointed to a painting of Peter. “I wanted to see what he looked like, and when I moved the painting, it knocked the lid from the box and the stopper from your bottle.”

She smiled. “And the rest is history.”

No, “the rest”
explained
history. Unfortunately he couldn’t explain it to anyone else. Not without parading Vana in front of them, and did he really want to do that?

Marlee, his publicist, always said that there was no such thing as bad publicity, but after what he’d gone through with the media speculating that his injury was career-ending and the big controversy of him not being signed as the starter, he didn’t believe her. Vana hitting the news would be a really bad idea—

And then a bird—a hot pink bird that looked like a cross between a turkey, a peahen, and a flamingo—popped in out of nowhere like a firecracker, with sparks and flames shooting in all directions, cawing Vana’s name.

Zane didn’t think that would go over well, either.

8

“Vana, you’re never going to believe what happened!” Merlin, the phoenix who’d been keeping her company throughout the past centuries,
poofed
onto the mirror with his usual burst of sparkly orange fire, though this time he’d paired it with fuchsia feathers, his colors as changeable as his moods. “There’s a Harrison back in town.”

Merlin did
obvious
in so many aspects of his life.

“Yes, Merlin, I know.” She let go of Zane’s arms (reluctantly) and held out her hand as Merlin’s perch. “Master, allow me to introduce you to Merlin Pendragon. Merlin, Zane Harrison.”

“A talking bird?” Zane’s mouth fell open. “You’re kidding, right? And Merlin? I thought merlins were smaller, and as for Pendragon… Delusions of grandeur much?”

“Where do you think your kind got the story?” Merlin fluffed his breast feathers, and a shower of pink sequins fell like
peri
dust onto her arm. “And no, I’m not a merlin, though I must say, I do appreciate the honor of having a species named after me. I’m a phoenix, you know. And not just
any
phoenix, mind you. I’m the First Lieutenant of the Third Order of Pyre. Pretty spiffy stuff, if I do say so myself.

“You should be thanking your lucky stars—which are Vega and Rigel, by the way—that you’re meeting me. Do you know how many mortals go their entire lives without seeing a phoenix?” He struck a pose, one orange-and-red-striped leg stretched out beneath an open wing. “So, Mr. Negativity, are you sufficiently impressed?”

Zane looked anything
but
impressed. Disbelieving, stunned, maybe even a touch angry… And, with his gaze on the ceiling, praying.

Great. She did not need him invoking the gods. One word from Saraswati to the High Master and it’d all be over. She’d be whisked right back to Al-Jannah, the djinn capital city, to be reprimanded for all her transgressions (of which there were plenty) and possibly stripped of her status.

And that could
not
happen because not only would she be a failure in the (overly critical) eyes of her parents, as well as a joke in the djinn world, but she’d let Peter and the children down. And none of them deserved that. The children had been so innocent in their transformation and Peter had been so kind to her, believing in her when no one else had.

“Uh, what’s the matter, big guy?” asked Merlin. “Cat got your tongue?” He nodded Zane’s way and said behind his raised wing to her, “Why is it so hard for mortals to believe in us? They’re all for aliens and loch monsters and conspiracy theories, but show ’em a real, live talking bird and they dumb up.”

“I’m not ‘dumbing up,’” said Zane, shaking his head and glaring at Merlin.

Good. Vana always preferred mortals who accepted magic; it gave them a starting point for conversation instead of the mortal merely staring at her as if she had a big wart on her chin like some witches she knew.

She’d have to hold off mentioning the children, though. Merlin was enough of a surprise for now. She’d release them when Zane wasn’t around. Children could be quite exuberant, especially when they’d been tucked away nice and safe and invisible in the armoire in the attic for a hundred years. When she’d caught them dancing in Peter’s study during that last party, where anyone could have found them, she’d magicked them to the attic, planning to let them out once the party was over. Only, the bear had shown up and, well…

“Merlin and I have known each other for about five hundred years,” she said to get her mind off that fiasco. “He kept me company while I was hanging out in my bottle.”

“Actually, Van, it’s 567,” said Merlin, tossing back the moussed-up pompadour on his forehead that was starting to droop in the late-afternoon humidity. “Remember the years in Rio?”

Merlin had inspired the themes for Carnival when they’d been there.

“Wait. Hold on.” Zane held out his hands. “How much am I supposed to put up with today? A genie isn’t enough? Two broken legs don’t cut it? Time travel? No?” He raked his hands through his hair. “Now I have to buy into a talking myth named after a myth?”

“And what, exactly, would you call Vana, then, oh Great Bestower of Nicknames?” Merlin propped his bent wings on his flanks.

Vana shushed him. The bird never could tell when mortals were on overload. When
he
got like that, all he had to do was burst into flame and rebuild himself, but no other creature on earth (or off it, for that matter) had that same stress reliever. Sometimes Merlin, who was almost as narcissistic as Narcissus, forgot that.

Vana turned toward the attic doorway. “How about we go downstairs and I’ll make us something to eat? I bet we could all use some food, and it’s been eons since I’ve had someone to cook for.”

She tossed Merlin into the air, the beads woven into the ends of his tail extensions clattering on the hardwood flooring as he took flight, and she tugged Zane’s arm. “Come along, master. I promise you, Merlin doesn’t bite.”

Not with his beak, anyway. His words, on the other hand, were a whole other story.

***

Zane brushed the corner of his mouth in case he was sporting some of the potato latkes Vana had whipped up with the lamb stew for dinner. It’d taken her three tries before the bullwhips had stopped showing up with the food, but the effort was worth it.

“So why were you in the bottle, Vana?” He tried ignoring the talking phoenix perched on the chair beside him. He wasn’t sure which freaked him out more: that phoenixes were real, or that the bird could speak. “I would’ve thought Peter would’ve wanted to keep you with him at all times. A lot of people would be after you if they knew.”

She finished the last bite of her latke and washed it down with some sweet mint tea. “Well, after the incident with the stairs—”

“Incident, Van?” asked the phoenix. “That was a bit more catastrophic than an ‘incident.’”

Yeah, it was the fact that the bird talked.

“Go on, Van,” Merlin chortled. “Tell your new master about the stairs. It’s one of my favorite stories.”

She turned a shade of pink softer than the color of her smoke, and Zane wanted to hurt Merlin for hurting her. He reached for her hand to keep from punching the feathered bully. “That’s okay, Vana. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s all right. It’s not as if everyone doesn’t already know it. Well, everyone back then.”

Right.
Then
. Zane still hadn’t wrapped his brain around the fact that she was
eight
hundred
and twenty-nine years old. As of two weeks ago.

“I was trying to repair the bottom of the staircase because of an earlier, er, mishap—”

“I tried to tell you bear claws weren’t the best kind of pastries to conjure, but you wouldn’t listen,” said Merlin, bolting back another latke.

Vana pursed her lips but kept going. “As I was saying, I was trying to varnish the stairs, but instead, they vanished. Peter was understandably upset with me.”

“Understandable? Really?” Merlin shook himself so hard he started molting. “Seriously, Van, you deserved better than that. For all your shortcomings, it wasn’t as if you did it maliciously. Not like Mr. Hornswager, or whatever his name was. Hunting that bear down during the party… Thank the gods I was in Antarctica that day or I would have fried myself to a crisp. It still burns me up.”

Zane stuck a latke in the bird’s face. Vana was feeling bad enough already.

“Hey, thanks.” Merlin scarfed it down.

“Yes, well.” She fiddled with her fork. “Peter suggested I take a break inside my bottle, and he put it out of the way for safekeeping. Unfortunately, he died shortly thereafter and I ended up stuck. I used to hear the family, though. The parties, the holidays, people stomping up and down the stairs.” She had a soft smile on her face, and for a moment Zane forgot that she was a genie.

Until the bird ruffled his feathers, sending sequins cascading into the stew, and the whole illogical reality of the situation returned with a rush.

“So you were here all along when I was growing up?” he asked, scooping the floaters out of the dinner and onto a dish towel Vana handed him.

She nodded. “I remember hearing the birthday parties in the backyard. I used to try to imagine what it’d be like to know Peter’s family. He was a good man. Had everyone’s best interests at heart.”