'Fuck you, bitch.' The kid was scared, but he obviously wasn't going to cooperate.
'Friends have all things in common,' I said. The spell would make the kid trust me, feel like he could tell me anything.
'I…I…' the kid stammered. 'The voice…it said…' His eyes rolled back in his head and his body jerked once. Then the kid died. A thin line of blood trickled out of his nose.
I swore and quickly dropped the wallflower spell over us. I pushed the kid over in the seat and checked his jeans. No wallet, no ID, nothing. I went around to the other side of the car and checked the glove compartment. A few parking tickets and some CDs, but that was it. I dropped the fingerprint spell on the car and walked away. The wallflower would last for maybe fifteen minutes. With a little luck, I'd be out of the area before someone noticed him and called the cops.
I'd recognized the magic on the kid immediately. I knew the smell of that black juice, and anyway, I'd run into vampire compulsions before. Fred was onto me.
When I got back to my condo, I went directly to my office-really just the second bedroom where I have a desk for my laptop-and fired up the TV.
I have two televisions in my house. The first is a forty-six-inch plasma bolted onto the wall in my living room. The second is a little thirteen-inch Zenith black-and-white that I've had since I was a kid.
One of the first real lessons Rashan had taught me when I joined the outfit was that a sorcerer needs a familiar. A familiar is a minor spirit the sorcerer binds to herself, a spirit that aids her when there's a big job to be done. The familiar's most useful role is to flow a little extra juice on the sorcerer's behalf, allowing her to work with magic that would otherwise be above her pay grade.
Rashan taught me how to summon a familiar spirit and then took me into the desert to perform the ritual. Traditionally you bind the spirit into an animal or an inanimate object such as a jewel, a lamp, a skull or whatever. I didn't have anything like that, so I brought my TV.
And that's how a jinn wound up in the Zenith. There are three things worth mentioning about this. First, I scored pretty high on the familiar-summoning final exam. Most sorcerers come up with a minor spirit with less intelligence than a mouse. The familiar is really nothing more than a spare set of batteries. I got an unimaginably ancient and powerful earth spirit-been around since the dawn of time, knows more about magic than I could learn in, well, do the math.
Second, while I might have hoped for a friendly genie in the Barbara Eden mold, what I got was Mr. Clean. That is, he looks like Mr. Clean, with the bald pate, the bushy eyebrows, the gold earrings, the rumbling voice and the steroidal musculature. His name is Abishanizad. I call him Mr. Clean.
And finally, genies cannot, in fact, grant wishes. At least Mr. Clean can't. Or won't. I tried.
I hit the power switch on the Zenith-this ancient artifact didn't come with a remote control-and the spirit appeared on the screen in all his thirteen-inch black-and-white glory.
'What do you want, mortal? Still wishing for a larger bra size?'
'I was fourteen when I made that wish. Let it go.'
Mr. Clean is my familiar, but I don't think he's particularly satisfied with the arrangement. He's arrogant, overbearing, sarcastic, sexist and generally unpleasant. Then again, ancient earth spirit, unfathomable power, dawn of time-it could be worse.
'What do you want? I have things to do.'
'Like what? You live in a TV.'
'Springer is on.' No wonder he's always in a bad mood.
'Tell me everything you know about possession. It's really important.'
'It's nine-tenths of the law. Can I go now?'
'No, I mean the other kind.'
'Oh. You don't have enough time.'
'For what?'
Mr. Clean sighed, and it sounded like the Santa Ana winds wheezing in from the desert. 'For me to tell you everything I know about possession,' he said.
'How much time do I need?' I said, checking my watch.
'You'll be dead before I get to the good parts.'
'Oh. Okay, how about I ask you specific questions, and you answer them as best you can in terms that a puny and barely sentient mortal woman can understand?'
'Fine. It is not an insignificant request,' he said.
And so the bartering began. This is why I don't call on Mr. Clean more often. If there's a downside to having a jinn as a familiar rather than an extra set of batteries, this is it. Everything I ask of him is a favor he says I'll have to repay in kind someday.
The key, here, is someday. I won't have to do a favor for him immediately, and in fact I won't have to repay the favors for as long as he remains my familiar. So the exchange is never a simple 'I'll do this for you if you do that for me' kind of thing. The price is set in hypothetical terms of the sorts of tasks I might someday do for him when he's no longer my familiar. It's kind of like using a credit card when you're not really sure how much you're spending or when you'll have to pay it back.
'What are we talking here?' I asked. 'Like, I could visit you one day and rake your sand dune.'
'I don't live in a sand dune. It's not that kind of desert.'
Really, it's exasperating. 'Well, what then? How about a Hershey bar with almonds? You like those. I'd bring you one-all you'd have to do is ask.'
'One Hershey bar, one question,' he countered.
'I'm probably going to have a lot of questions, but I'm not sure how many.'
'You could bring me a Hershey bar once a month.'
'Once a year, duration proportional to the number of questions.'
'Done,' said Mr. Clean, crossing his arms. 'Ask your questions.'
On the surface, this looked pretty cut-and-dried. Unfortunately I hadn't just agreed literally to bring Mr. Clean a candy bar once a year. I'd agreed to do some similar service, a favor of like magnitude. It was like throwing in a player to be named later in a baseball trade. Of course, there's absolutely no way for me to keep a precise record of these transactions. I figure I'll just try to weasel out of anything unpleasant if and when the time comes.
'I need to know how to protect a victim of possession.'
'What kind?' asked Mr. Clean.
'A guy. He's young, gorgeous, he has these little dimples when he-'
'No, monkey brain, I mean what kind of possession.'
'There's different kinds?'
'Demonic, ghostly, spiritual-benevolent and malign, to name just the most common instances.'
'My bad guy channels juice from the Beyond and rolls with a spooky mummy jar, so I'm thinking ghostly possession.' I described the ritual murders.
'If the entity is channeling juice from the Beyond, it is not a ghost. A ghost is juice from the Beyond, but it has no power to manipulate that medium. In other words, based on the evidence you have presented, you are precisely wrong. The entity is not a ghost, but it could be a demon or spirit.'
I ignored the insult. 'A demon-like a fallen angel?'
'A demon is not a fallen angel. The Fallen do not possess people. They are angels. They can manifest in the earthly realm and smite cities. Don't you read?'
'So if a demon isn't a fallen angel, what is it? Because I'm pretty sure I've always heard-'
'A demon is one of the Firstborn.'
I just waited. Sometimes I can't bring myself to give him the satisfaction of vocalizing my ignorance. Plus, by baiting me into asking stupid questions, he was angling for more candy bars.
Mr. Clean sighed-again with the wheezing. 'The Firstborn were the pre-Adamic race created and given dominion over the earth. The one created before humans.'
I tried to let it sink in and basically came up empty. 'Sounds like heresy to me, baldy.' Sometimes I throw in an insulting nickname, just because. 'You're lucky-back in the day, they'd have your chestnuts roasting on an open fire for that.'
