Page 1 of Bewitched By the Djinn
Chapter
One
I’m haggling with Ernie over the price of a seventeenth-century music box when an antique lamp in the glass case under my elbows starts singing.
I glance down, skin prickling.
What the hell?
The lamp keeps singing, a siren song winding its way through my veins, the melody pounding a drumbeat in my blood.
Mine.
My limbs freeze. I can’t drag my eyes away from the lamp. This isn’t how my magic works. I have to set the intention first. I need an image, a clue, something the object touched or was near. Only then does the magic engage, like a well-trained bloodhound.
But this?
This lamp is calling to me out of nowhere. No prep, no plan. Just raw, uninvited, full-volume magic.
What does it mean?
“...and I’m not selling for less than that. I may as well toss it in the garbage.” Ernie’s gravelly voice breaks through my flustered shock.
I breathe slowly in and out through my nose.Play it cool, Cassie.“Can I see this lamp?” I tap on the counter with a finger, super calm, like I’m not ready to punch through the glass and grab it.
Ernie arches one of his caterpillar eyebrows. “Are we done with the music box already?”
“No, I just want to see this too.”
“Really?” He frowns so hard his salt-and-pepper mustache twitches.
On the surface, this is a basic Victorian-style lamp you could find in any dusty antique shop from here to Poughkeepsie. But Ernie doesn’t know what I know.
He doesn’t have a single drop of magic in his blood, poor guy. Just your normal copper, iron, and forceful opinions.
“Let me see it, Ernie.” I wave him along before the siren song turns into a scream.
“All right, all right, where’d I put the damn keys.” He scratches his chin—gray bristles rasping like sandpaper—then rummages behind the counter. “Moira! Where are the keys to the case?”
A voice screeches from the back, “In the drawer!”
“I looked in the drawer, they’re not in the drawer!”
“Are you looking in the one next to the one on the right? It should be on the left!”
Their domestic drama is usually the highlight of my week. But today? I’m one eye twitch away from smashing the case with a decorative ashtray.
I need. That. Lamp.
“Ah—here we go.” Ernie holds up a key and squints at it like he’s trying to decipher ancient runes. After approximately four million years, he sticks it into the lock and pulls the lamp out with all the reverence of someone passing over a microwaved burrito.
He plops it in front of me.
I pick it up as casually as I can, though my insides are doing cartwheels. My hands tingle instantly. This thing is stuffedwith magic. Overflowing with it.
It looks unassuming enough. A dual-light Victorian lamp with faded yellow glass and hand-painted roses curling along the domes. Dusty. Delicate. Harmless looking.
But it’s like it’s alive. The energy filling it is almost human. But that’s impossible.
