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“Er, now what?” Ben said. He had a new extinguisher, but like the rest of us, when confronted with the humanoid figure, he could only stare.
The thing spoke, in Arabic I assumed, the same clipped language from the video. Though I couldn’t understand the words, I understood the emotion behind it: anger. The djinn raised a fist, gestured, its whole body lurching with the motion of its tirade. It ranted at all of us, looking back and forth between us. Like we’d kicked its dog or walked on its lawn.
The stories, the lore, said that djinn were like people in all ways but what they were made of. They had families, jobs, their own societies, all invisible to us. They felt all human emotions, love, grief, joy, anger. They prayed. This was a person standing before us. I may not have understood that until now, when it was yelling at me in rage.
I couldn’t go soft on it. This thing had killed Mick.
My job wasn’t over yet. This barrier wouldn’t hold it forever. If it didn’t burn down through the floor, it might go up through the ceiling. The whole house might burn down around us. We had to finish this, which meant I had to distract it while Tina and Jules worked.
I called, “Hey, shut up a minute! I’m not finished telling you off! God, what a jerk.” I didn’t know if it understood English. But the same way I recognized its anger, I was pretty sure it recognized mine. Sure enough, it turned. Were those yellow shadows within the orange flames its eyes? The spots flickered at me, as if blinking.
It may not have understood me. I was guessing not, since it fired back a stream of Arabic, probably with as much rudeness as I’d flung at it. We should have brought along a translator. I was a little sad that we couldn’t talk this out. Not that we ever had a chance of that.
I didn’t wait for it to finish before continuing. “I don’t understand why something as powerful as you would let yourself be controlled by a bunch of idiots like the Band of Tiamat. Even if they are run by a vampire.”
It chuckled. The light sound, like sparks crackling in a piece of wood, couldn’t be anything else. It was a condescending laugh, clearly suggesting I didn’t know what I was talking about. True enough.
I focused on it. To even let my gaze flicker to the others to check their progress would be to draw attention to them. But it wasn’t like I’d ever had a problem running my mouth off at someone before.
“I think you can’t possibly be such hot shit if you let yourself get trapped with a little bit of paint.”
It roared, starting softly and letting the sound grow. The sound turned into a word.
“Bitch.”
Note to self: Never assume a person speaking a foreign language can’t understand what you’re saying.
Tina started yelling, “Thus by a spark the power that binds you is destroyed. Be banished now and never bother us henceforth!”
It was a formal, archaic, and definitely mystical speech, exactly the sort of thing found in a magical grimoire, and I had no idea if Tina had found the chant in such a place, or if she made it up, or if she was channeling some other spirit, some other power that she’d called on to help us here.
She held a bottle—she’d finally decided on the kind used to hold powerful acids in a chemistry lab, pint-sized, made of thick brown glass with a heavy rubber cork—over the edge of the boundary, its mouth pointed toward the djinn. Jules put a lighter to a small bundle of hemp tied up with my hair, which he held over the mouth of the bottle with a pair of tongs. The fibers lit immediately, glowing hot red and sending up a tendril of black smoke.
Tina repeated the chant, with variations but with the same meaning, commands of banishment, of release. The djinn turned to look, the flames surrounding it swaying in another direction, sparks licking out behind it. Jules blew on the smoke from the burning hair, so it drifted forward and mingled with the flames writhing around the djinn.
An odd thing happened.
The line of smoke from the burning hair shifted direction and began to move into the jar, as if sucked in by a tiny vacuum or draft of air. The flowing smoke began pulling the djinn with it.
Realizing what was happening, the figure inside the flames flinched back, flailing its arms, like a swimmer fighting against a riptide. It shouted with its furnace-and-flamethrower voice, begging while it gasped.
A burst of light threw me to the floor. I curled up, covered my face with my arms, convinced something had exploded and the house would now fall down around us, killing me, Ben, everyone. Our rapid healing wouldn’t help us if our whole bodies fried first. My nose was dead, unable to smell anything, unable to tell me where Ben had fallen. I thought I had seen him for a split second, holding the fire extinguisher up as a shield, flung away from the circle as I was, a silhouette against the atomic flare. The sound—this must be what the inside of a star sounded like, a constant nuclear explosion times a thousand.
At least, that was what it felt like to my senses. Like the world had ended, like the djinn was ending it with his final scream, with blasts of fire.
Then it all went away, and I sat up and looked.
I had a feeling the room had been still for some time, it was so quiet. No fires burned anywhere, not even on the floor, which had been roaring with flames. The acrid stench of soot and sulfur, which should have been overwhelming, had faded. I could almost taste a hint of freshness, as if someone had opened a window.
The circle drawn in blood on the floor was gone. The djinn was gone.
Jules and Ben were picking themselves up off the floor, brushing off their clothes, shaking their heads as if dazed. Tina, however, knelt at the edge of where the circle had been, one hand clutching the bottle, the other hand clamped tightly over the cork, locking it shut. Far from being dazed, she held the bottle straight-armed, tense before her, staring at it in a panic.
“You got it?” Jules asked finally. “It’s in there?”
She nodded quickly. She had it and was obviously afraid to let it go, in case it escaped.
“I can’t believe that actually worked,” Ben said.
