Heat Stroke(45)

Shock was being replaced by an all-over warm feeling of fury. Man, I didn’t like this. I so didn’t like this.

Lewis said, after what seemed like half a millennia, “Come out, Jo.”

And the negative pressure holding me in the bottle eased. Bam, just like that. I blew out of there fast, swirled around him like a cloud of angry bees, and folded myself back down into flesh again.

It took some concentration, but this time I managed to do it pretty fast—just a fraction of a second between skin and clothes. Kind of like one of those tip-the-pen-the-clothes-come-off sort of things. Lewis looked a little surprised, and then he looked a little smirky, and then a second later he remembered he was a gentleman and pretended he hadn’t seen a thing.

“You okay?” he asked. I looked down at myself and was relieved to find I was still pretty much the same person, only I’d acquired a more down-home wardrobe of blue jeans, sturdy shoes and a denim shirt. Work Djinn. I was ready to fetch and haul out on the construction site.

“I’m good,” I said absently. I was busy trying to reset the outfit to something less—literally—blue collar, but unfortunately that now seemed to be outside of my control. Lewis’s doing, whether he knew it or not. Great. At least I knew what turned him on, now. Sturdy women in sensible shoes.

“You okay?”

“You just asked me that.” I looked up at him, puzzled.

He gave me a little tilted half-smile. “Exactly. You okay?”

Oh. Rule of three. I felt the compulsion kick in, and heard my mouth say, “Hell no, you idiot, I’m not all right! I died less than a week ago, David’s being held prisoner by some bad-ass Djinn with delusions of godhood, and I just got my butt stuffed into a bottle! By you! With crappy clothes!”

He heaved a big sigh of relief. “You’re okay.”

“Sure. Fine. Whatever. Let’s do this thing.” I was more than a little unnerved, because I damn sure hadn’t meant to say any of that. Well, okay, maybe the part about crappy clothes, but the rest of it was dealing-with-it stuff. So the compulsion thing actually worked. Interesting. “Give me an order. Something small.”

“What’s the use of that?” Patrick asked. I’d forgotten all about him, but there he was, still sitting on the hand, arms folded, watching me with those crystal blue eyes and bad-Santa leer. He’d seen the same flash-peek-show that Lewis had, he just in no way imagined himself a gentleman. “If you’re going to do it, do something productive. Let her really get her feet wet.”

Lewis considered that for a few seconds, then waved a hand around vaguely at Patrick’s porno theater-circus tent apartment. “Okay. Redecorate this place.”

Patrick came up off the hand like he’d been goosed, but it was too late.

Talk about something happening.

Power slammed into me—rich, thick, golden, unstoppable. Lewis’s potential. I now had access to everything Lewis had, everything he was, everything he could be. The amount of energy stored in him was unbelievable—enough to destroy cities, level mountains, reshape the face of the earth.

It was more than enough to do a Trading Spaces on Patrick’s apartment.

I started at one end and swept through it like a color-coordinating storm. The carpet morphed into a neat champagne beige. The walls turned light cream. The statues disappeared altogether in a swirl of mingled body parts, gone to bad-plaster heaven.

The porn tribute to Michelangelo was replaced by a nice mullioned ceiling, with gold accents. I added a wine red accent wall and replaced a black velvet painting of a pneumatic-breasted naked girl with a Mondrian. I didn’t think I’d just stolen an original, but hey, I was new at it.

Furniture. The banana couch turned to dark leather, butter soft, with manly little brass studs on the legs. Lewis’s platform shoe chair became a matching armchair.

I made Patrick’s plastic hand chair disappear completely, along with the tacky chrome coffee table.

“Stop!” Patrick sounded absolutely horrified. “What are you doing?”

“Public service,” I said, and added a nice brick fireplace with an art-deco brass screen. And a little china vase holding matches next to it. I turned to Lewis. “Any special requests?”

He was squinty-eyed with glee. Truthfully, so was I. Damn, this was fun… unlimited power crackling at my fingertips. I could do anything. Anything.

“I think she’s got the hang of it,” Lewis said to Patrick.

Patrick walked helplessly in circles, not knowing which way to stare; every new revelation brought an additional flinch of despair. I fought the urge to spitefully add a copy of Great Homes to the new deco-styled cherry wood table because no, that would just be rubbing it in. “Yes. I think… she might have.”