The Girl and the Genie (29 page)

“Please, Jack, I need you,” Emily cried.

Nothing.

Emily raced down the mountain, nearly losing control of the car half a dozen times. When she saw what must’ve been Stone’s two thugs driving towards her, she gunned the engine even more. Somehow she shot past them without them blocking her path. Her knuckles were bone white as she gripped the steering wheel but she was going to be okay. There was no way they’d be able to catch up to her now. She started laughing somewhat hysterically as she realized she was safe. She glanced at the speedometer and saw that the car was going eighty miles per hour, which was way too fast for the road. It was a miracle that she hadn’t driven off the mountain yet. She tapped on the brakes and realized that they didn’t work. Derek had cut the brake lines or drained the brake fluid. Whatever he did, the brakes no longer worked. This was his plan all along. Leave the car keys in plain sight and send her barreling down the mountain with no way of stopping.

“Please, Jack! Please, please, please!” Emily cried.

A quick glance at the odometer showed the car was now going over ninety miles an hour and speeding up. At that moment, Emily took a tight turn too wide and drove off the cliff. The car seemed suspended in the air for several heartbeats before it started to descend quickly. She squeezed her eyes shut not wanting to see where she was going to crash.

She didn’t die like she expected. Instead there was a dizzying whirl of motion, similar to when Jack had sent her from Minnesota to her apartment. With her eyes still squeezed shut, she heard Winston growling fiercely. She opened her eyes and saw that she was back in her apartment, sitting on her bedroom floor. Jack was there, grim-faced, refusing to look in her direction. And he wasn’t alone. Mitch was there with him.

Chapter 30

Mitch Connelly stood gloating at Emily, his lips twisted into a piggish, self-satisfied smirk. He looked heavier and unhealthier than when Emily had seen him last, his skin oily and his hair greasy. He was also holding the genie’s lamp.

Winston, with his fangs barred, charged Mitch, who brought his foot back with evil intent as if he were planning to boot the Bulldog across the room. The genie waved his index finger and Winston disappeared.

“Why’d you do that?” Mitch demanded angrily.

“I was protecting, you, Master,” Jack said in a shallow, flat voice.

“I didn’t need your protection. I was going to kick that ugly dog to death. I’ll do it later then.”

A cold fury was building up within Emily. It was bad enough the evil that she’d just survived, but to have this nitwit break into her apartment and steal her genie’s lamp!

“Jack,” she said, “you know he’s not the rightful owner of the lamp. Please do something about it.”

Mitch laughed at that. “There’s nothing he can do. How I came to possess the lamp doesn’t matter, only that I possess it. Isn’t that true, genie?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Jack, please! You can’t let this happen!”

The genie refused to acknowledge her, his eyes cast downward.

“Months ago I heard the two of you from your bedroom,” Mitch said with that same smugness. “As crazy as it seemed I couldn’t get rid of this idea that you actually had a genie. So I went searching for you all over New York. And then when I saw your picture in the paper, I knew that you used a wish to meet that actor. And today I found out where you lived. You want to know how?”

Emily didn’t give him the satisfaction of guessing. She just stood staring at him coldly. He only waited a few seconds before telling her that he found out from her mom.

“That’s right,” he said. “I called her up, telling her I was a friend of yours and how happy I was to see you get involved with that Derek Cole character, and you want to guess what she told me? That you married him yesterday! So of course I had to ask her where I could send a wedding gift, and she gave me this address. Brilliant of you leaving the lamp hidden in your room unguarded like you did. I got to thank you for that.”

Emily saw that she was defeated. There was nothing she could do to get the lamp back. Mitch could gloat all he wanted, and there was nothing she could do.

“Okay, you stole the lamp from me. Fine. Just get out of here and leave me alone.”

“Uh uh,” Mitch said. “I used one of my wishes to bring you and that ugly dog back here for a reason. You see, I only expected three wishes, and certainly not the nine I’m getting. There are only two wishes I truly want. To be the wealthiest person alive. And the most powerful. I’m going to have fun with these other seven wishes. You figure into one of them. So does that bitch Sally.”

Emily felt a dread creeping up her spine. “I’m leaving,” she said.

Mitch laughed at that. It was an ugly, cruel laugh. “You won’t get very far,” he told her. “You might as well listen to this.” Keeping his eyes on Emily, he told Jack his wish. “I want her to obey my every command. She’ll be powerless to refuse me and she will have sex with me every way that I demand. And when I’m tired of her—”

The dread became full-blown fear. “Jack, please, you can’t do this!”

Mitch raised his voice to talk over her. “And when I’m tired of this bitch,” he yelled, “I want her sent to this whorehouse that a buddy of mine frequented near Bosnia. This is a place where she’ll be chained up and fucked by every sweaty guy who wants to pay five bucks for her pussy, mouth or ass.”

There was something insane burning in Mitch’s eyes. Emily fell to her knees begging Jack not to do this, but the genie refused to look her way. Instead, he simply said, “Very well.” Then he held out his fist to Mitch. “Fist bump on it?” he asked.

“Hell, yeah,” Mitch said.

When his fist hit the genie’s Emily saw that it really was like a thousand black mambas being unleashed. Mitch fell to the floor in a heap, his body jerking violently as if he were being bitten a thousand times. For a brief moment there was only horror and excruciating pain in his eyes, and then they were blind to his rapidly approaching death. With each deadly spasm, his body became more emaciated and his skin grayer, as if every drop of fluid in him was being drained. When the spasms stopped, there was only a twisted dried thing left that didn’t resemble anything that could’ve ever been human.

Jack had closed his eyes during this. His color had paled and his chest heaved as if he were hyperventilating. When he got his breathing under control, he opened his eyes again and smiled weakly at Emily, devastating pain flooding his eyes.

“I’m so sorry, Miss Mignon,” he said. “More than you could ever imagine. Once this detestable creature took possession of the lamp there was nothing I could do. All I could hope was that I could trick him into touching me. If the natural law of genies didn’t prevent me from doing so, I would’ve sent him to hell far earlier than I did.”

“I know,” Emily said, a heaviness weighing deep in her chest. She thought about what Mitch had wanted to do to her, and her legs weakened and she thought for a moment she would collapse to the floor. Somehow she made it to the bed and fell onto that instead.

She had just enough strength left to prop herself up into a sitting position, and she looked at Jack with a bleak and heartbreaking smile. She told him that Mitch was the second person who had tried to hurt her that day. “Derek only wanted to kill me,” she said, “which I guess was better than what this monster wanted.”

“What do you mean?”

“He married me so he could kill me for the insurance money,” Emily said with an air of hopelessness. She then told the genie the whole story. Surprisingly, her eyes stayed dry throughout, and she realized it was because she was too numb to cry. Jack’s expression turned exceedingly grim as he heard what had happened.

“Miss Mignon, please reclaim the lamp. You need to make a wish so that I can clean up this mess. Let me destroy all legal documents regarding your wedding and get rid of that insurance policy, and do whatever else I need to do to make all of this go away.”

Emily nodded. She felt a little stronger than before. Her legs rubbery, she got off the bed and made her way to where Mitch had dropped the lamp. After picking the lamp up, she asked Jack to clean things up for her.

“As you wish,” he said. Jack gave a disgusted look at what had once been Mitch, and waving an index finger, Mitch’s remains vanished. He waved his index finger again and Winston reappeared. The dog growled for several seconds before realizing that Mitch was no longer in the room. Then he waddled over to Emily and gently pushed his head against her leg, whimpering softly. Emily dropped to her knees and hugged the dog tightly while he fought to lick her face. Jack watched for several seconds, then vanished within his usual puff of blue smoke.

Chapter 31

When Jack popped back into the room, he told Emily that everything had been taken care of. “All records of your marriage have disappeared, and that actor won’t be bothering you or anyone else ever again. And no, I wasn’t the one to kill him.”

He explained then that Derek and two companions were by the side of the mountain road looking down at the burning wreck caused by the Mercedes, when one of his companions—a baldheaded and brutal looking individual—received a cell phone call. It turned out that the insurance policy that the actor had taken out had somehow changed to leave Stone the beneficiary in the event of Derek Cole’s death.

“It must’ve been a surprise to this Mr. Stone when a copy of this policy appeared on his desk,” the genie said. “But he has a bigger surprise in store. Unbeknownst to him and his two employees, a video recording was made that captured him ordering his men to dispose of that actor, as well as them beating Derek Cole to a pulp and tossing his body over the side of the road. A copy of that video recording has already been sent to the police.”

“What happens next?”

The genie frowned. “Miss Mignon, you should be okay,” he said. “The police might discover you went to Colorado with this man, but I’ve gift wrapped them with this actor’s murderers. There’s no reason for them to bother you. The tabloids might be another story, but they’ll lose interest eventually.”

“I don’t mean with Derek,” Emily said. “I mean with us. I’ve now used up all nine of my wishes.”

Jack showed a guilty smile. “I have a confession to make,” he said. “I never granted your wish to marry that man. I knew it would be disastrous, so I hoped if I postponed granting it you would change your mind. Then when I found out about his drunken proposal to you, I tried bluffing you that I had granted your wish thinking this man might leave you alone. It was actually quite a shock to me when you summoned me to that hotel suite in Las Vegas and I found out you had married him anyway. So, you still have one wish remaining. And hopefully you won’t use it to make another foolish one regarding romance.”

Emily started crying then. A painful, sobbing cry that wracked her whole body. Jack watched on helplessly, his expression showing his extreme discomfort.

“You don’t get it,” Emily said when she could.

“Miss Mignon, I’m at a loss to know what you mean.”

“About why I was making those wishes.” She looked up at him with a heartbreakingly sad smile. “It was because I was miserable, and the reason I was so miserable was because I had fallen hopelessly in love with you. I think it happened almost from the start. You don’t know what it was like for me sitting in the den with you all those evenings and knowing the distance that separated us. That if you were to touch me—even just to wipe away a tear—I would die. So I was desperately trying to find someone else to be in love with.”

“Miss Mignon,” the genie started.

“Do you have any feelings for me?” Emily asked.

Jack looked away from her. “I’m a genie,” he said.

“But if you were a man?”

He turned back to her to meet her gaze. “If I were a man there would be nothing in heaven or hell that would keep me from you,” he said.

“So there you have it,” Emily said, her smile turning all that much sadder. “The one person I truly, deeply love, and there will always be a million miles between us.”

Emily caught a fleeting shadow in the genie’s eyes.

“What?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“No, there’s something. What is it? Can you be made human again? Is that something I can wish for?”

Jack hesitated for a moment before nodding.

“That’s all I need to do?”

Jack’s expression turned severe. “It won’t happen instantly,” he said. “I need to travel first to a barren area near Mongolia that no man has ever seen, and there are rituals that need to be performed, but yes, afterwards I’ll be a man again.”

“Then I wish you to be a man again!”

Jack smiled pensively. “Very well,” he said. He hesitated for a moment, then added, “Miss Mignon, I don’t know how long it will take, but I will come back to you. I promise. There’s nothing of this world that will stop me.”

With that, Jack disappeared within a violent explosion of blue smoke.

Chapter 32

The police never contacted Emily about her involvement with Derek Cole, and they really had no reason to, given the video recording they had of Cole’s murder. They arrested the mob boss, Mike Stone, as well as his two underlings who were caught doing the deed on the video recording. Stone’s lawyer tried to argue that the video recording was a fake, but he didn’t get far with that even though the source of the recording remained a mystery.

The tabloids never identified the mystery girl with the English Bulldog. They tried for two weeks, running the photos they took of Emily when she left St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but none of Emily’s friends or co-workers ratted her out, and once Stone was arrested for Derek Cole’s murder the tabloids moved their attention there.

Emily called her mother after Jack disappeared and told her she ended up not marrying Derek. The story she gave her mother was that she went to Las Vegas with Cole, but once she saw that he was involved with dangerous people she called off the wedding and took a flight back to New York. It was a lie, but as far as she was concerned it would be far better for her mother to hear that than what really happened. When the news broke the next day about Cole’s murder, Alice Mignon called her daughter right away to tell her how relieved she was that Emily had done what she did.