A Demon Lady With Love Read online

Chapter 1

  I Scream Of Genie

  Dying really sucked.

  That’s right. You heard me. I said dying sucked.

  The night it happened to me I was sneaking across the golf course to see my ex-girlfriend. Something was bothering her and guys like me have a Knight-To-The-Rescue complex where toxic girls are concerned. I knew I shouldn’t have been walking through the dark woods at eleven o’clock at night. Not for somebody who had dumped me three months earlier for a pre-law school student who had . . . what was it that her mother had called it?

  Oh yes. Prospects.

  I on the other hand had the projects.

  Her mother (and every one else living in the country club) seemed to have it in for me, which was why I had to sneak through the woods that separated my trailer park from her manicured paradise as a buffer zone of sorts.

  They thought I was trailer park trash.

  Liz constantly told me we were too different. Maybe her family’s distaste for me came down to the fact that my family ate hamburger helper for dinner on paper plates and sipped coke from red solo cups. Families like hers ate in dining rooms where wainscoting was the norm and food came with French subtitles like chateaubriand and coq au vin. The first time I had dinner with her family and asked what we were eating, I thought they cleared their throat at first.

  I suspected there was something more to it than that, though. But I had never been able to put my finger on it even from the start. Social events with them were just tres magnifique. Describing how it felt to be around them is hard. Have you ever been in a crowded room when someone farted? I never felt like the person passing the gas.

  I always felt like I was the fart.

  Liz’s mom nearly threw a party that she was shut of me after my graduation. I was too poor for anything but a no-name state school and Liz never lost a chance to brag about her acceptance into Duke. As I snuck out of the woods and onto the open sea of smoothly cut grass, I had to ask myself, why did she want to take time out of her sorority dreams for a guy like me who was a slow ride to nowhere for her?

  “I just need to talk about something,” she told me in an agitated voice over the phone an hour earlier.

  I lied to her. “I’ve got something important to do.” I just didn’t feel like being her diversion of the moment because she didn’t have anyone else to occupy her attention.

  “Jack, please. This is big.”

  Was it the inflection in her voice that changed my mind or the fact that a part of me still had feelings for her? A cynical sort of person might think that it was the fact that she was a one hundred fifteen pound platinum blond with piercing blue eyes and a perfectly shaped B-cup breast line that was perkier than a debutant on crack.

  I didn’t get a chance to find out, though. As I came around the ninth green, I caught the unmistakable glimmer of something highly reflective by the edge of the rough. I had to be pretty observant whenever I was on the course because every time security saw me, the first thing they did was chase me with clubs brandished like war hammers, modern versions of yuppie Vikings in lime green polos and (I kid you not) watermelon pink khakis.

  Lucky for me no country club denizens of Jotunheim came berserking across the green in frenzied hordes. Something did catch my eye, though. A brass colored object winked at me in the starlight.

  How odd.

  I slowed and stopped. This golf course was kept about as immaculately clean as a music diva’s bed sheets, and by the end of each day the country club grounds looked as virginal and pristine as Miley Cyrus when she was still Hannah Montana. Which meant someone must have dropped the thing afterhours. Curious, I walked over to it, and when I got close enough I saw that an antique oil lamp sat upright and polished like a well-tended museum piece on the flat expanse of closely cropped grass.

  People didn’t just drop something like this on the ninth green. As I drew closer I suddenly became certain that all was not as it should be on the ninth hole of the Holly Downs Country Club golf course.

  Looking around, nothing stirred. Not even the crickets trilled their nighttime serenade from the cover of manicured shrubs. All around me the night wrapped the world in a dark, humid, and still, July blanket. Something nearby waited to pull the cover back and spring out at me.

  I felt it there, waiting.

  I was afraid of the thing on the ground, but I ignored my instincts and reached down to pick the lamp up. As soon as my fingers touched its smooth surface, I winced. The thing was cold. So cold that it burned my fingertips. As I quickly drew my hand back, my fingers brushed against its surface, drawing from it a disconcerting shriek. I fell back as gouts of angry, almost liquid-like smoke billowed out of the lamp’s fluted top.

  All thoughts fled from my mind as I sat too dumbfounded to move. I knew I should have backed away, but all I could do was sit there on my butt with my mouth hanging open catching flies while the lamp vomited its contents into the air. The vaporous cloud swirled maddeningly before me, spinning and elongating around and around in concentric rings like a coiling snake composed of the stuff of a nightmare gas.

  A great light flared suddenly and I screamed, shielding my eyes with my arms as the blinding flash sizzled its way past my eyeballs and into my skull. I do not remember losing consciousness and falling over, but when I came to, my head was ringing like struck bell.

  I inhaled the sweet scent of recently cut grass and immediately noticed a silver light glittering above my body. I sat up, looked at the source, blinked and rubbed my eyes.

  Then I blinked again.

  And rubbed my eyes again.

  And said something no one should ever say around their grandmothers, kindergarteners, or nuns. Ten feet above my body a disco ball spun merrily, scintillating rapidly enough to induce an epileptic seizure.

  A chipper baritone chimed at me with a relaxed drawl that was so southern it could have seasoned a pot of collard greens like freshly fried fatback. “Well hello there young fella!”

  “Holy hell,” I gasped without thinking. “I died and went to the seventies.” Indeed, floating in front of me was a short man dressed in a poorly fitted Elvis wig—the kind you see on tacky Vegas street performers. He sported a cheap white polyester suit covered in rhinestones throwing off an effect nearly as psychedelic as the disco ball. “Mom was right,” I said in amazement.

  “Come again, son? Stop cryin’ like a hound dog and make a little sense for the King, alright?”

  “Sh-she told me that I was going to clog up my arteries and die like my Papaw if I kept eating fast food. I just thought I had more time before that happened.”

  The stranger guffawed and slapped his knee. “You ain’t dead yet, little man!”

  That made sense. It explained why I hadn’t seen my life pass before my eyes. “So . . . um . . . what’s going on?” I choked out as I stood up and brushed myself off. I moved back warily, because there was something about the man aside from his felonious disregard for the law of gravity that I did not like. “Who are you? WHAT are you? Some kind of genie or something?”

  The man gave me a sly smile, the kind a cat offers up to a mouse before eating it. “And what if I were? You gonna make your first request?”

  I shook my head to see if the world returned to normal and backed off a few more steps to buy some time. The world didn’t seem in any kind of hurry to reassert the normal rules that it abided by only a few moments before when people did not float, and the seventies ended a proper thirty-five years and six presidents earlier.

  With a flick of his head, the floating man cleared several loose strands of hair from his face and floated closer. Somewhere in the back of my mind my instincts went on high alert, and my subconscious voice suddenly spoke up, shouting in a robot’s voice, Danger Will Rob
inson! Danger Will Robinson! Heeding the wary voice of my inner robot, I stepped back a few more paces and gestured to his costume. “He’s dead, you know?”

  The Elvis impersonator screwed up his face with a scowl and waggled his finger at me. “I’m a fan, bubba. Good music never dies, and you haven’t answered my question.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m a guy who has everything he needs.”

  “Try me.”

  “Don’t rush me; we haven’t even had our first date yet.”

  The floating man flashed me an avaricious smile that was too full of teeth for my liking. Where were the country club Vikings when I needed them? “Silly child, you must make me a request.”

  I didn’t have enough time to pause and doubt my sanity. Things were going from bizarre to threatening too fast for me to think clearly. “Fine then,” I told him. “Go away.”

  The genie-Elvis impersonator gave me a sly smile, nodded his head, and said, “Done.”

  I stood there with my hands open . . . waiting. “Ummm, you’re not gone yet.”

  “You didn’t say when I had to go away,” he responded mischievously. “And you’ve only got a few more wishes.”

  I racked my brain trying to remember everything I had ever read about the genies in the past. Liz and her parents might have called me trailer park trash, but I read voraciously. I graduated from the high school academically gifted program for a reason.

  I held my hand out in a gesture for more time. He wore an aggrieved expression. “Tick-tock tick-tock.”

  “I thought your kind had kings and stuff like that. Won’t they be mad you’ve shown yourself? After all, no one has seen one of your kind since—what, the 600’s?”

  The genie’s face went from indulgent to angry. “I have to work for a different regime now.”

  “Workplace harassment sucks,” I offered hopefully.

  The genie’s face contorted as if he were lifting a heavy weight, and he said something that grabbed my attention. “You’re taking too much time! I have other places I need to be!”

  I may not be the fastest car on the road, but my brain was beginning to recover from the initial shock when it came to a screeching halt at the intersection of Get-Me-The-Hell-Out-Of-Here Street and What-WAS-That-Lamp-Doing-On-The-Ninth-Hole Avenue. And I wasn’t taking in the scenery.

  “You were supposed to meet me here!?” I exclaimed.

  The genie gritted his teeth and his voice grew sinister. “Choose or I’ll change your nuts into golf balls,” he said.

  “I’d rather croak than have some perv mess with me like that,” I blurted out without thinking. I should have thought my words through much more carefully.

  The genie looked at me with a growing expression of delight. “Hmmm . . .” he mused. “Since I can’t just kill you or keep you alive, I think this way might be more fun.”

  “Can’t just kill me?” I started saying. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” But before I got any more words out, that’s exactly what he did.

  He gave me my request.

  He killed me, but he didn’t just kill me. And I was about to find out the difference.