All Nixie would have to do was snap her fingers and Luminesa would have no choice but to follow her, but that wasn’t the way Nix worked. She, more than anybody, knew what it felt like to have your will stripped from you.
Drumming her fingers on the countertop, she sighed. “I wish I could say I was just here for a nice meal and drink, but the truth of it is, I’m a genie on a mission.”
The girl stopped smiling, she blinked a few times, and then finally Nixie began to read the truth dawning on her.
“Ah, I see.”
“Do you?” She cocked her head.
Luminesa thinned her lips and tossed a dishrag over her shoulder. “I wondered when it might happen, truth be told. Josiah’s been after me nigh all his life.” She sighed with a soft shake of her head. “I’d heard the rumors that he’d found hisself a genie.”
Nixie grabbed her cold hand when she stopped talking. “He hasn’t asked me to make you fall in love with him. Besides, I couldn’t even if he asked. His last wish was merely to see you again.”
“He is a cruel man.” Luminesa stepped back, rubbing the wooden grain of the already gleaming countertop with aggressive strokes. “Though I do not fear him, you should know that. We grew up together, he and I.”
That shocked Nixie. Luminesa looked half Josiah’s age. Granted, inhabitants of Kingdom aged at a ridiculously slow pace, meaning Josiah and Luminesa were likely several thousand years old by Earth standards.
“I would not have guessed it.”
“No, I’m sure not. His hatred has aged him quickly.” Taking a tankard, Luminesa tapped the ale spigot, filling it to the brim before pushing it back toward Nix. “On the house.”
“Thank you.” She smiled and tipped the mug in thanks, then took a tiny sip. The apple-tinted drink went down smoothly. Cold and delicious. “This is wonderful.”
“It’s a family recipe.” But not to be deterred, Luminesa returned back to the subject of Josiah. “I will go with you, but you must know, no amount of riches will make me change my mind where Josiah is concerned. I’ve quite made up my mind to remain single forever. I love my life and do not wish for a man to come in and spoil all that I’ve worked for.”
“Well, I can say, with some authority, Luminesa, that not all men are as mean-spirited as Josiah. They are not all bad.” Nixie recalled Eric as she said it.
“Genie you might be”—Luminesa patted her hand—“but you are young. We live long lives here in Kingdom, long enough to see love turn to hate, kindness to cruelty. Over and over, even with those we thought so highly of once.”
Her voice drifted off as she stared over Nixie’s shoulder, clearly remembering something painful. Whether Luminesa was speaking of Josiah himself or someone else, Nixie had no idea.
She gave the girl a tight smile. “I suppose you are right.”
“Will you go with me?” Luminesa asked with a tightness to her voice.
Nixie grabbed her upper arm. She couldn’t. The moment she delivered Luminesa to him she’d be forced back into her bottle; her time with Josiah would be at an end. “This is his final wish, so I will be forced back into my bottle and sent only God knows where. But if you like, I can return in the morning.”
Luminesa squared her shoulders. “As I’ve said, I do not fear him. I know him well, but I am sure I will shatter the last of his hope tonight and that I do not relish.”
“I will return in the morning, Luminesa, I promise.”
Her smile tightened around her eyes. “Then let me ask my friend if he would mind watching my tavern whilst I am gone. And then we can go.”
*
Nixie strolled through the tent with Luminesa tight at her heels.
She’d imagined the place to still look like a den of inequity, but Josiah had cleaned things up. The harem was out of sight. He’d even washed up. His hair was still wet and his cheeks rosy.
The pair of trousers he wore were a size too tight and the cream blouse tucked into it just a tad too baggy, making him look a little like a bloated marshmallow with red fur, but it was a marked improvement from earlier.
“Luminesa,” Josiah said in a tone of voice Nixie had never heard him use before. He held out his hands. “I am rich beyond imagining, my love.”
The moment he spoke those words the magic of the bottle surrounded Nixie in a glittering purple fog, wrapping tightly around her like a band and dragging her back to the only home she’d know for the next forty-nine and a half years.
Although it wasn’t all bad. She wasn’t squished into something no mortal body could survive, as she’d once feared she might be.
Her lamp was a beautiful burnished bronze with etchings of gardens and flowers embedded upon the sides. But it wasn’t the outside that was most appealing; it was what she’d been able to do with the inside.
There weren’t many freedoms afforded her as a genie, but one of the few was that she could decorate her home any way she wanted to. She’d recreated her mother’s glass encased gardens in the high-rise building they’d owned in downtown Chicago.