I stopped the thought train with a squeal of brakes when he suddenly shifted his gaze to stare directly at me. “I like the other outfit better.”
Crap. I tried not to let him see how much that alarmed me. “Which one?”
“The one you had on before. With the, you know—” He mimed breasts. “And the stockings. The one with the apron.”
He still hadn’t told me to put it on. “Wouldn’t you like something a little classier?” Dumb question. I was surrounded by glossy photos of women wearing stupid smiles and strips of cloth no bigger than Band-Aids. Classy didn’t enter into it.
His dark eyes went hard. “I don’t give a shit if you like it or not. Just put it on.”
Well, that was direct. I had no room to maneuver. The peachskin pantsuit vanished, replaced with the Frederick’s of Hollywood French Maid Nightmare. Truthfully, I kind of liked the shoes, in a trashy, over-the-top kind of way, and I might not have minded putting the thing on to see the look in David’s eyes, but to see it in this kid’s… worthy of a shudder. Or two.
The corset top definitely lifted and didn’t separate.
I looked down at my bulging décolletage and saw I’d been given something new. A classy-looking upside-down pentagram tattoo, just over my left breast Unsettlingly close to where there’d once been the black stain of a Demon Mark.
I looked up. Kevin was sitting up in bed, watching me. He licked his lips and said, “Turn around.”
I did. All the way, back to face him.
“I thought you said I only had three wishes?”
I kept quiet. He wasn’t stupid. He knew I’d lied.
“You got any idea what my mom’s doing out there to your friend? He is your friend, right?” Kevin studied me with too-intelligent eyes, looking for sore spots. “More than a friend? You fucking him?”
“You’re way too young to ask that question,” I said primly. The Julie Andrews tone didn’t go with the blow-up doll outfit.
“You’ll tell me. You have to.”
“Why do you want to know?” I asked. Which threw him, a bit. “And anyway, how do you know how many wishes you get? Maybe it’s ten. Maybe it’s twenty. Maybe the next one is your last, and then I get to rip you into little screaming shreds. Care to try your luck?”
I smiled when I said it. Friendly. Warm. Inviting.
He pressed himself back against the headboard, where Miss July of 2003 was squashing her bare breasts together for his inspection.
“What’s the use of having you if I can’t do anything with you?” he asked. Petulant little jerk. “I mean, maybe I’ll just do it anyway. Wish for what I want most.”
“And what’s that?”
He hadn’t really thought about it. I hoped he wasn’t going to pop off with something stupid, like world peace, but I needn’t have worried; Kevin would never think about anyone or anything larger than the confines of his little self-centered universe. He finally came out with, “I want never to have to work for a living.”
I blinked slowly, thinking that over. Teenage thought processes were so different from adults… An adult would have asked for truckloads of cash, under the assumption that truckloads of money meant no more work. Which wasn’t unreasonable, as assumptions go. But Kevin had asked for something completely different.
“So, hypothetically, if you asked for that, you wouldn’t be disappointed if I made you a quadriplegic breathing through a tube?” His turn to blink. His mouth opened, produced silence, and closed again. “I mean, you wouldn’t ever have to work for a living, would you? Or I could just kill you. You’d never have to work for a living that way, either. Or, let’s see, I could kill everyone else in the world. Never have to work for a living that way, either. Or I could turn you into a big slobbering dog that your mom can feed every day—”
“Stop it!” He looked appalled. “You’re making it all—”
“—complicated?” I finished. “It is. You want a Djinn, you got one. But we’re not fuck-toys, Kevin. We’re older than you—” Even me. “—we’re smarter than you, and we have absolutely no problem in finding the wrong interpretations of every single wish you are stupid enough to utter in our presence. We’re dangerous. Get that through your head. You can dress me up like a doll if you want to, but you’ll never control me. I’m going to control you. So the best thing you can do is take that bottle and smash it, right now, before I get the opportunity to really hurt you. Because I will, Kevin. I’ll hurt you so bad it’ll make your mom at her worst look like Mary Poppins.”