Kitty Raises Hell

Ha, so it was the Band of Tiamat and not Roman who summoned the genie. Rick was wrong. Unless of course he wasn’t, and the two were working together. No time to think about it now.

“Well, Nick, since I’ve got you on the line, maybe you could help me out with that. I’m really curious about where you dug up this thing. Do you have some kind of grimoire of evil demons? You flipped through and decided this one looked like more fun than a plague of locusts? Or is there a mail-order catalog that will deliver underworld creatures to an address of your choosing? I have to tell you, if that’s the case I think you got ripped off, because their gift-card option sucks.”

He laughed, which aggravated me. I refrained from growling. I tried not to growl on the air.

Tina and Jules were watching me, wide-eyed.

He said, “I thought you’d learned during your visit here that these are powers you don’t understand, can never understand. You’re dealing with the consequences of trying to interfere with them.”

I groaned. “The consequences of saving my own life, you mean? And there is nothing more boring than the old ‘dealing with powers you don’t understand’ shtick. I think that’s a lame excuse used by people who don’t have any better clue what’s happening. Is that it? You and your priestess unleashed this thing, and that’s all you could do with it? You don’t understand it yourselves, and you can’t control it. Once it’s loose, you can’t stop it.”

That was a terrifying thought I hadn’t considered until now. I had entertained the notion that if I figured out how to placate the Band of Tiamat and its priestess, they might call off their demon. But what if it wasn’t theirs to control? Their cult was all about chaos. They might not want to control it.

He didn’t answer right away. A couple seconds of dead air ticked over, and I started to switch to a new call.

Then he said, “I thought you of all people could appreciate anarchy.”

“Anarchy only works when everyone’s sane,” I shot back. “I have another question for you: Where’s Odysseus Grant?”

Nick hung up.

Shit.

Deep breath, had to keep going. I could panic over what was happening to Grant in, oh—I checked the clock—about ten minutes.

“Well,” I said at my microphone. “I don’t know much about laying curses, but if any of you do know anything about laying curses, I know someone who needs cursing right about now. Next caller, hello.”

The woman spoke with an accent, something clipped, refined, Middle Eastern.

“Kitty, this thing that haunts you. You’re right. It is djinn.” She pronounced the word with a different inflection, and I could hear the different spelling. She was pronouncing it correctly.

“Go on,” I said, glancing at Jules and Tina. They were listening closely.

“The djinn are said to be fallen angels, or sometimes spoken of as a kind of person made up solely of spirit, where humans are made of matter. Among the djinn there is the ifrit. An ifrit is a spirit of fire, and it loves mischief. I think this is what has found you.”

There it was, the chill up my spine, the gooseflesh on my arms. The ring of truth.

“I think you may be right,” I said. “Now. How do I stop one of these ifrit?”

She hesitated. “This is a difficult thing. There is anger here, and vengeance. I risk drawing it on myself, if I help you more than this. He would know.”

“Wait a minute,” I begged, because my on-air sixth sense told me she was about to hang up. “If you know this much, you must know how to protect yourself. You know how to stop it.”

“I have only listened to your show for a little while, Kitty, but I can tell you understand much. That in every tale there is a grain of truth. The trick is to separate truth from tale.”

“You’re right, I’ve found grains of truth in a lot of tales. But how do you separate them?”

“Wisdom. Intuition. We are not so far from the times when the tales ruled us. Our hearts remember.”

“Maybe we can do this with twenty questions,” I said. “The bottle part—stuffing it back in the bottle. Is that true?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And how does one go about stuffing a djinn into a bottle?”

“You don’t stuff,” she said. “You coax. You lure.”

“All right. Makes sense. How do we do that?”

“Aren’t you a scholar of the arcane arts? Aren’t you versed in the principles of spells and curses?” Her voice had turned playful. I recognized teasing when I heard it.

“Only the kind of curses I’m not allowed to say on the radio.”

“Something had to call it to this world, to its current hunt. Learn what it was. Use that to banish him out of it. He will not be able to resist.”

God, who was this? She talked like the old vampires did, or the real magicians. Who needed conspiracy theories when these guys were around?

“May I ask you a question? What are you?”

She put a smile into her answer, and for some reason, I imagined her winking. “Let’s leave that another mystery, shall we?”

“Are you one of them?” I said, impulsively. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? A djinn? Can djinn even use the phone? What—”

But I was talking to air, because she finally did hang up.

From the corner, where they were stationed with their laptop, Jules and Tina were looking back at me. Their eyes gleamed, and they smiled. They’d found something, then. Maybe now we had everything we needed to stop this.

But first, the show. “All right, faithful listeners. I’m about at the end of my time with you tonight. I have to say, some days I finish off the show feeling more confused than I did when I started. Just when I think I’ve encountered everything there is to encounter, something like this comes along and smacks me upside the head. But that’s a good thing. It keeps me on my toes. Until next week, be careful out there. Look under the bed one more time before you go to sleep. This is Kitty Norville, voice of the night.”

And that was it. I was done.

With the credits still rolling in the background, Matt came out of the booth. Fuming, he pointed at me. “There’s no way you can convince me that I Dream of Jeannie is after your ass.”

I blinked. “I wouldn’t do that. This thing’s a little more with the flaming death and less with the cute blond nose wiggle.”

“I think the nose wiggle was Bewitched,” Ben said.

I rolled my eyes. “Details. So what is it? What have you got?”

Tina and Jules had been writing and making sketches on a pad of paper. Jules said, “Your caller was right. Some symbols, some basic principles, are the same in nearly every culture. The circle, for example, as a symbol of eternity and protection. She seemed to be suggesting that any sort of banishment spell ought to work on this thing.”

“So we’re back to exorcisms,” I said.

“Sure,” Tina said. “But we’ve seen this thing before, we’ve seen what it can do. Jules and I have a spell that ought to work.”

“Custom banishment,” I said. I almost said it wouldn’t hurt to try, but it could. If we didn’t succeed in trapping it this time, what would it do next when it lashed out? Why did I get the feeling the djinn—the ifrit—listened to the radio and knew we were up to something?

“We’ll need some of your hair,” Jules said with a perfectly straight face.

I stared.

“Just a strand or two,” he said quickly. “Nothing terrible.”

Using something personal like someone’s hair was a common bit of spell lore from all over the world. I found the end of my ponytail and pulled out a few hairs, wincing. “Should I even ask?”

“The thing’s after you—we’re just going to make sure it knows you’re around.” He smiled as he stuffed the strands into a plastic bag.

Tina tapped a pencil against the table. “The thing I can’t figure out is what kind of bottle we need to use. I mean, it seems kind of gauche to use just a plastic soda bottle or something. Like maybe we ought to use something all glass and fancy.”

“Don’t use plastic,” Jules said. “It’s not sturdy enough. Those oil lamps, like you see in the Aladdin story, are made of brass, right?”

“So what do we do?” I said. “You have a plan, right?”

Jules took a deep breath. A “here goes nothing” breath. “We’ll go someplace we know the thing’s been before—Flint House. We use components we know affect it—your potion. Something of yours because it has a connection to you—your hair. Build a trap, set the bait, and there you are.”

“So it’s a plan,” I said hopefully.

“It’s something,” Tina said.

“Then let’s get going.” The sooner we got started, the sooner we’d find out if it worked. Or not. I didn’t want to think about that.

“I swear, this job gets more surreal every week,” Matt said, wandering back to the safety of his booth.

Chapter 21

Tina and Jules rode in the Paradox PI van with Gary to pick up a few supplies. They were still debating about what kind of bottle to use: clear, opaque, plain, decorated, screw top, corked. Something without cracks, I told them jokingly before we parted ways. They didn’t think that bit was funny. Ben and I drove together to Flint House.

Hardin called, not five minutes after the show ended.

“You’ve got a plan. I want in on it,” she said.

I sighed and started to argue with her, because the last thing I wanted was another person in the line of fire. Trouble was, she’d keep pestering me until I told her, or she’d sic a patrol car on me. She’d probably already dug up the trail of accident reports from all our adventures this week and could check those locations as places we’d likely turn up again. The thought of arguing with Hardin made me tired.

Then again, another ally in the fight was always a good thing.

“Any chance you could get a fire truck on the scene?” I asked. “Just in case?”

She paused. “I do not like the sound of this.”

“When do you ever?”

I told her where we were headed without going into too much detail about what we’d be doing there. Hardin promised me a fire truck.

“Hardin, right?” Ben said after I’d hung up. “Don’t tell me the cops are going to be there.”