It was hot.
After the chill of a London December, it felt unbelievably hot.
We gasped in the heat, unbuttoned our collars, and surveyed the wasteland surrounding us. Where were the green grasses we’d seen, the riverbeds, the apricots, the pungent spice fields and savory cooking fires?
Tom stumbled as he rotated around, turning, turning, taking in the entire panorama. He stopped and took a deep breath. He seemed to be filling his entire body with desert air from toe to top.
“Beats London, anyway,” he said. “Smell that air!”
The sky, the vast, enormous sky, from horizon to horizon all around, was the most breathtaking blue, except where the fiery sun baked down upon us.
Alice sat on a rock and shook sand out of her boot. “The air smells like emptiness,” she said.
Apparently here in Persia, the prohibition on showing one’s feet to boys no longer mattered.
“Better than soot,” observed Tom.
I looked for any sign of a far-off palace, but all I saw in every direction were a few scrubby trees, and low mounds covered with desert weeds and sand.
Mermeros sat in midair with his legs tucked beneath him and his arms crossed over his chest. The sardine tin spun beside him. I expected to see the djinni laughing and gloating at his triumph over my wasted wish, but he only watched the sky, following the movement of every bird with his piercing eyes. He seemed smaller here, somehow.
“I hate to complain, Mr. Djinni, sir,” Tom ventured, “but if this is your idea of an empire of splendor and majesty, it falls a little short of my expectations.”
Mermeros turned sharply toward Tom and bared his pointy teeth.
“Chattel should not speak unless ordered to by their masters,” he snapped.
I marched over to where Mermeros hovered. “Tom’s no slave,” I told him. “He’s a free English boy just like any other.”
Mermeros leered at me. The ends of his long mustaches bobbed. “He is an orphaned youth with no protector, awaiting purchase by a taskmaster, is he not?”
I was filling my lungs for a hot retort to this when Tom took my arm. “Forget it, Maeve,” he said. “Don’t waste your time on it.”
“Well, you’re right.” I shook his arm loose. “He has done a rotten job taking us to his father’s palace.”
“On the contrary,” said Mermeros, still scanning the sky, “I have brought you to the exact location.”
Alice and Tom looked at each other. Then they looked away.
I’d done it again. Botched another wish colossally. And now there was only one left. I hadn’t really considered Mermeros’s age, and how passing centuries would change his homeland. What was the matter with my brain?
Tom took off exploring. “Well, let’s look around then. What are you waiting for?”
Alice laced her boot back on and rose stoically to her feet. “Not for breakfast, I suppose,” she said. “Why not look around? We can fit in an hour or so of sightseeing before Miss Salamanca starts missing us. Your djinni can whisk us back in time, I’m sure.”
Mermeros laughed from deep in his stout gut. I didn’t like the sound of it.
“Not without a wish, I won’t,” he said.
His mad laughter echoed in my ears.
The true horror of what I’d done crashed upon me. I’d squandered all my wishes. I hadn’t thought carefully. Even for all my planning, I’d missed the most obvious details. I was out of wishes and out of luck. Unless I wanted to consign us all to a Persian exile, stranded in the desert, without supplies, money, or a knowledge of local language or customs, I’d be burning up my last wish in no time to take us safely home to England.
Mermeros’s sneering lips pulled back from his vicious teeth as he howled in laughter. He beat the air with his green fists. This was the moment where I should have kicked him in the sardine can, but I was too devastated. My cricket team. My escape from school, my travels around the world. All were lost forever.
I don’t cry. Maeve Merritt doesn’t cry. But my eyes wanted to grow wet. And I couldn’t blame the dust in the air.
An unearthly scream met our ears. A large bird flew toward us, low, swooping and bobbing over the ground like a rowboat riding an ocean swell. Its wingspan was enormous, and it dragged after it a long, drooping tail. It screamed again, and Mermeros began to tremble.
“It’s a peacock!” said Tom. “I’ve seen ’em at the zoo in the park.”
“But peacocks can’t fly like that,” said Alice. “Only very short distances. Like up to a tree limb.”
I watched the bird approach. Its vast wings scythed through the air, propelling it forward at an astonishing speed, despite the huge, dangling tail and the up-and-down arc of its flight. It was aiming straight at us.
“That’s no ordinary peacock,” I said.
“How do you know?” said Tom.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Like Alice said, they can’t fly like that. But also…it just feels different.”
Alice spoke up then. “Maeve, look,” she said. “Something’s happening to your djinni.”
Something was happening indeed—something I’d seen before, but she hadn’t. He shrank himself down to size in record time, dissolving into noxious smoke and siphoning himself back into his sardine can. The look on his face, before it vanished utterly, was one of pure terror.
The bird was nearly upon us now.
The tin leaped into my coat pocket. Coward.
We could never outrun the peacock that was barreling straight toward us, so I pulled Alice down to the ground and threw myself over her. If it planned to attack, it would need to fight me first.
But it didn’t attack. Nothing happened. I raised my head and looked up.
The peacock had halted itself in the air, not ten feet away from us. It hovered, flapping its blue and green wings till fronds of sand rose in the air and lashed our faces. It was bigger by far, I was sure, than natural peacocks could grow to be. And I was positive that natural peacocks weren’t surrounded by a narrow halo of green light.
The sardine can in my pocket shuddered.
The peacock didn’t pay my friends a moment’s notice. It turned its head from left to right, fixing first one, then the other beady black eye upon me. It let out another piercing scream and lunged at me, halting midway. Again and again, it feinted toward me, but something arrested its movement. Whatever it was, I blessed it and silently urged it to keep up the good work.
Tom picked up a rock and took aim.
“Don’t.” I seized his arm. “It’s too beautiful.”
“It’s awful!” Alice cried. “It wants to peck your eyes out, Maeve!”
“Alice is right,” Tom said. “He’s a fancy fellow, but he wants you for lunch.”
The bird screamed once more, then snapped its great fantail wide, showing radiant swirls of green and blue and gold. Then it collapsed its fan, flapped its wings, and rose up into the sky. A final scream, and it vanished high above us in a puff of smoke.
Alice wrapped her arms tightly around her ribs. “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “I don’t know when I’ve ever been so frightened.”
“That bird felt evil,” Tom said.
I placed Alice’s fallen hat back on her golden braids and rubbed her shoulders. “It’s all right, Alice,” I said. “He’s gone now.”
Mermeros’s sardine tin fell silent and still. My own heart, which had been keeping time with its palpitations, relaxed also.
Tom looked around once more. “I say we should look around and explore a bit, while we can.”
“But then what?” Alice said. “We’ll need to get home eventually.”
My heart felt like a lump of lead. “We will,” I said. “I promise. I didn’t drag us out here just to leave us stranded.”
Tommy eyed me thoughtfully. “You’ve got more wishes left, right, Maeve?”
I hesitated, then nodded.
“How many?”
There was no getting around it. “One more.”
He whistled. “Say, that’s awful,” he said, “having to spend your last wish just to get back home.” He patted my shoulder. “But you’ll still have more fun. Now we know to be more careful when it’s my turn.”
I said nothing. I couldn’t. Alice watched me closely. She said nothing, but I knew questions were swirling in her mind.
Tommy looked around. “Anyway, I’m not sure I’d mind staying,” he said, “if there’s water and food to be found somewhere. This beats Mission Industrial any day of the week.” His smile cheered me up considerably. “As for dragging us, drag me anywhere, if it means another trip like that one!” He shook his head. “Flying over those mountains and cities! Like eagles, we were. Like falcons.”
Some of the terror of our peacock encounter seemed to slide off our shoulders.
“Mermeros said he brought us to the exact spot where his father’s palace once was,” Tom mused. “Hard to imagine there was ever a palace here, but maybe if we look around, we’ll find some clues to where it was.”
“Too bad we didn’t bring shovels,” I said. “We could have dug for buried treasure.”
“I doubt there’d be any treasure left to find, anyway,” Alice said. “Centuries must have passed since the palace was here. I’m sure the place has been picked over dozens of times by vandals and burglars and things.”
She was probably right, especially after five thousand years, and I knew it, but I set off marching. There must be some way I could salvage this wish—this pair of wishes—into something more than a lovely night flight. Some morsel of treasure, a token, some tiny souvenir, even, could at least help me prove to myself, in the years to come, that I really had mastered a djinni once and taken a magical trip. That I really had been to Persia.
Had anybody in the history of humankind ever wasted three wishes so badly?
We hadn’t gone four steps when we halted. Tom threw out a protective arm to block my path, and I did the same for Alice. The ground underneath our feet began to shake. Rivulets of sand began streaming down from an anthill-sized mound not three feet in front of us.
Alice’s eyes grew wide. “Earthquake?”
Tom pointed to the mound and shook his head. “Look.”
Something was happening. The mound shuddered, then buckled. Chunks of rubble caved out from underneath the mound. Something appeared—a rat, I prayed, or some other creature.
But it wasn’t a rodent. It was a paw. A huge, furry paw with fierce claws violently raking the earth.
What kind of animal could have a paw that big? I didn’t want to learn.
We stumbled back. A massive black snout poked out and sniffed the air. The paws redoubled their pace, and more clods of brown dirt collapsed away.
The earth growled at us. Alice made a terrified squeak.
“Whatever’s down there”—Alice’s voice faltered—“it knows we’re here.”
Mermeros’s tin leaped in my pocket.
In a burst of dirt and rubble, the beast sprang from the hole. Long forelegs landed, braced to fight. Snapping jaws wove low to the ground. Quivering hackles bristled.
“A wolf!” Tom gasped. “Run!”
But we stood frozen, unable to move. The huge creature didn’t spring for the kill. It only held us in the gaze of its smoldering amber eyes.
The taste of bitter dread hung in my mouth. Still, the creature made no move. It paced back and forth with a slow, deliberate gait.
We waited for the end.
And waited.
Would these be my last breaths?
Perhaps not?
Since it didn’t plan to rip my throat out immediately, I took a more careful look at the beast. It was gigantic, fully as tall as me, and covered with thick brown fur tipped with gold, and something more. Was it only golden fur? I squinted against the sunlight.
It was more than sunlight. An aura of gold light surrounded its body. What on earth? Despite the heat, my skin felt cold and prickly.
Without warning, the monster lunged for me. I fell backward in terror. But before it could reach me, something held it back. It skidded to a stop, threw back its head, and howled.
“It’s your djinni, protecting you,” Alice said. Her skin looked gray and ashen.
I had my doubts. Mermeros’s tin rattled a staccato beat against my thigh.
Tom stood between us and the creature, brandishing his rock weapon once more.
“Here! Get back! Get on with you!” he yelled.
Black lips peeled back from the wolf’s yellow teeth in a deadly snarl. Its low, rumbling growl seemed to shake the earth.
A scream from far away reached our ears. The peacock? The wolf’s ears pricked. It sprang away, loping in long, graceful strides, until, with a burst of gold, it vanished.
Mermeros’s tin went limp and still inside my pocket.
“Did you see that?” Tom cried. “It just disappeared!”
“Like the peacock did.” My legs felt weak, and I sank to the ground to catch my breath.
“What a marvelous animal,” Tom said. “So powerful. The way it ran.”
Alice sank down beside me and fanned her face. “You must be mad,” she said. “It was nothing but horrible.”
“Only because it wanted to eat Maeve.” Tom grinned. “You can’t fault it for that.”
Tom’s eyes twinkled at me. I laughed in spite of myself and, for good measure, kicked sand at his shoes. He laughed and hopped nimbly aside.
Now that I could catch my breath, I tried to think what to do. Persia didn’t seem to want us around. After two near misses like this, shouldn’t I give up and take my friends home?
Alice stood up and brushed the sand off her skirts. “Well, come on, then.” She reached out a hand to hoist me to my feet. “Time’s ticking, and the day will only get hotter. Let’s explore while we can.”
Good old Alice. I took her hand and stood up.
We set off, with Tom leading the way and Alice behind me, clutching my elbow. Midstride, a strange sensation passed over my body, a sort of buzzing in my teeth.
“What was that?” I asked.
Tom shrugged. “I don’t know. I felt it, too.”
I thought I heard Mermeros’s voice sound a faraway warning in my ear, like a whining mosquito.
Alice caught up to us, then paused when she felt the jolt. “Oh! How strange.” She cocked her head. “Such a perplexing place!”
“It’s probably just the heat,” I said. “The sun and air take some getting used to, I’m sure. Let’s keep moving.”
Tom reached the hole the wolf had created. He knelt and poked his head inside.
“Oh, Tom, don’t,” Alice said. “What if that’s a wolf’s den, and there are more of them down there?”
But Tom ignored her. He pulled himself up and fished in his knapsack for a candle and matches. He quickly lit his candle, lowered it down into the hole, then poked his head and trunk down in after it. I was surprised that the hole was deep enough for him to do this; from above he was a pair of legs abandoned by its own torso.
“Maeve, you need to see this,” he yelled. I barely heard the muffled echoes. He pulled himself upright, then poked his feet down the hole. “I’m going in. Come along after me. The drop’s not far. You won’t get hurt.”
And before we could say anything, he disappeared.
I peered over the edge. His flaming-red hair reflected off the small patch of sunlight that had followed him down.
I bent further down and saw light from Tom’s candle wavering on faraway walls. This was no mere fox’s den. There was a room down there!
I lowered my feet into the opening.
Alice seized my arm. “Maeve, say you won’t do anything so foolish as this,” she pleaded. “We are in Persia. The wilderness. Suddenly a wolf leaps out of a hole in the ground, and you decide you want to go down that hole?”
Tom’s voice came echoing up from the chamber below. “You have to see this place!” he called. “Both of you! Bring my sack so we can light some more candles!”
Alice sighed and sank to her knees. She took a long look at me, then shook her head.
“I could no more stop you than I could grant a magical wish,” she said. “I’ll stay up here and keep watch. Don’t be long down there.”
I squeezed her hand, grabbed Tom’s sack, turned toward the darkness, and jumped.