Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift Read online

  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.”

  Half...?!? The jiniri twisted and pulled and strained and raged, but her tether would not break.

  The challenger glanced nervously over his shoulder, but traffic whizzed past, ignoring any shadows in the almond grove, not wishing to interfere with any exchange. These shores were where boatmen landed, bringing in their catches from the sea, melding straightaway into the out-of-control traffic of the city.

  “No one is coming to your rescue,” the priest said as he lit the cigar and held the smoldering stick between them. It came alive with the vudu spell he kept in his smoke.

  The challenger coughed in the poisoned cloud and lifted one arm to reach inside his shirt. He scratched his chest, trying to draw the knife from its sheath that he kept hidden next to his heart—the jiniri knew. Being jinn, she could see what lay inside.

  But the vudu priest could not. He snickered with his misplaced confidence.

  Slowly, sluggishly, the challenger pulled the knife out, catching the last rays of the sinking sun. He pointed the tip at a crooked angle before the priest. “You will pay me for what is mine,” the challenger said. “You wish to pay with your life?”

  “I wish you’d put that away,” the priest said.

  He wished. He wished! The jiniri soared with a mighty leap. The tether binding her splintered apart as the challenger’s shaking arm slid his knife back into the sheath. Too late, the vudu priest realized his mistake. Swarthiness drained from his face, and the slash of his grin collapsed into an ooooh of dismay.

  Late!

  Too late.

  The vudu priest abandoned his altar in the almond grove and darted for the street, dodging the buses, the taxis, the trucks, this way and that. Across the street, he was as good as gone, disappearing into the cracks and holes of the rebar city.

  Along with the jiniri’s wings.

  If she were winged, as she was meant to be, he could not escape. But she wasn’t complaining. At least she was finally free. She picked up the vessel that had contained her for countless time and glared at the challenger. Sweat beaded on his lip. His eyes darted past her, behind her, to the sea, where a sputtering rumble sounded. She turned to look over her shoulder and saw a fishing boat approach, flirting with the rocky edge of the malecón.

  In that instant of her distraction, the challenger thudded into her, crashing her to the spongy ground, knocking the copper vessel loose from her hands. The fury that she’d kept pent-up too long during the tenure of her bondage fueled her with a strength greater than human adrenaline. She pushed him away and rolled out from under his pin.

  The fishing boat rocked in the waves of its wake. “Eh!” a man’s voice shouted.

  She flashed herself to the pair of men on the boat, and when they saw her curvaceous form, they forgot about steering the boat. It bumped against a rock.

  Perhaps the jiniri form could be useful after all.

  “Where’s the old man?” said one of the men on the boat. “We got the package for him. You were supposed to keep him here, waiting for us to deliver.”

  “I’ll take it to him,” said the challenger, picking up the jiniri’s vessel. “Give it to me.”

  “Give it back!” The jiniri lunged at the challenger, but he jerked the copper container away from her.

  “What the hell are you doing?” said the boatman with a grunt of disapproval.

  The challenger laughed with the same malice as the vudu priest had shown. “Being his assistant.”

  “Then give us proof of the spell he promised us.”

  He tossed the copper vessel toward the boat, missed, and it plopped into the sea, floating there. “Do you see any cops? You’re safe, man.”

  “What about her?” The boatman pointed at the jiniri.

  “She doesn’t count. She’s a woman.”

  Deep within, she felt the simmer of rage. She watched the last of her coppery prison sink under the waves. She no longer needed the vessel except as a symbol of her freedom. Without the symbol, she felt trapped.

  She would not be anchored here for eternity.

  “Come and find out,” she said. The well of her essence stirred, and the fire of her power seeped through her being, carried on her mango breath, tempting them in closer.

  “Don’t worry,” said the challenger. “You can bring the coca ashore. Who’s going to stop you? No one here. Man, this is the new corridor.”

  The boatmen snorted. “What coca? We’ve got puff fish. For the old man’s poisons.”

  “Lying assholes. I know what you bring.”

  “We can’t get anymore of anything if the Haitian doesn’t protect us with his spells. The seas are too dangerous.”

  “I’m telling you. Everything’s good. Plenty of buyers here. Plenty of bribes. No one gets caught.”

  The jiniri arranged her new body in a provocative stance as the boatmen tied up their boat and waded ashore. Already the shadows of dusk were advancing. She held out her arms to the boatmen. “Come closer,” she whispered with her mango breath. She didn’t need the poisons of the puff fish for power as the vudu priest needed for his. Her power came from the council of spirits that she accessed through the well of her essence, deep within her entity.

  The boatmen came closer, unable to resist her. Perhaps she would rethink the meaning of power. Jinn power surged from her body and smothered the humans with her charm.

  They froze, drained of all human movement.

  Perhaps if she were human she would feel guilty for the ease of overpowering them. She thought not. They succumbed to their own weakness. Three pillars of frozen humans stood idle before her, powerless as long as she breathed her jinn breath into them. They waited to be devoured by her own whims. She searched their bodies and stripped them of their knives, their guns, and their bags of powder. The net of puff fish she left to dry on the rocks. She ripped open the packet of powder and sprinkled it onto the rocks surrounding the fish. Already the waves were scouring the rocks clean, returning the bounty to the earth.

  Where it belonged. Not with humans.

 
That was enough. She’d finished with these humans, but her work was not done. Today was the day that her wish would be granted, and the day was quickly slipping away.

  She turned away from the sea, away from the malécon, and headed to the street, fading into the traffic as the men regained their senses. “Eh!” they shouted.

  But she was gone, having slipped past the killing machines of the streets, past honking horns. On the other side of the street, she faded into the shadows splitting concrete pillars of rebar. A pile of loose rebar heaped beside the dirt path that rimmed the street. She picked up one of those metal poles that bent like a whip. A woman alone on the streets needed a little protection. And after dark, the streets of the city weren’t fit even for a jinn.

  She sniffed the air and caught a whiff of sweat, fart, and dead fish mixed in one. The vudu priest had come this way. She followed his trail down the path, over a broken wall, through a drainage pipe, past walls topped with rolls of barbed wire, searching for a hole, any kind of hole to let her into the underbelly of the city. Bars kept her out.

  The air pulsed, softly at first. Had she heard it? Was she here?

  She’d already gotten—and granted—her wish. Her will was free again.

  Not the click tic click of dominoes but a thrum. A merengue beat. The air came alive, pulsing first with the drums, then with voices. She followed the rhythm. It felt like an undertow pulling her in. She should be able to resist it.

  She could not.

  She was not tethered anymore. Had her tether severed, even to her home far away in the east? To her essence of jinn?

  The beat sucked her in. The side street that she followed lost its darkness at an intersection of colored lights and hypnotic rhythm.

  Like most street corners, this one had a neighborhood colmado, where a handful of people snapped their fingers to the beat, drank Presidente, the local beer, smoked cigars, and swapped stories.