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a little come on gesture with my hand. "Be thou bound to my service."

Patrick leaned forward on the arm-thumb?-of the plastic chair, and I wondered how it would feel to sit in a chair that was shaped like a hand. Like having your ass grabbed by a giant, maybe.

"Be thou bound to my service," Lewis finished, and something changed.

It wasn't immediately evident to me what it was. I mean, yes, I knew, but it started at some cellular level and worked its way up. Fast. I felt odd, then I felt weird, then I felt out-and-out funky.

Chapter Thirteen

And then I came apart in a silent explosion, mist swirling, and somehow I could still see, but not with human eyes, and not in the human wavelength . . . not on the aetheric level, but definitely accessing some of that plane to do what I was doing.

And then the wave crested, and I felt myself being turned inside out, torn apart, remade . . . reborn.

Into myself. Only . . . different. Better. Faster. Stronger.

Dissolving.

"Hey!" I yelped, but by that time my body had given up the flesh. I was a thin gray mist, moving faster, being sucked in by a gravitational force so huge I might as well have been a dust speck moving toward a black hole.

Which was the little perfume bottle in Lewis's hand. I plunged into that tiny, tight container, squeezed like Concentrate of Djinn, and no matter how hard I tried to leak back out again, it wasn't happening.

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.