“Linx,” I repeat.
Before my eyes, the man who was E. M. Heddle starts to transform. He grows taller and broader. Thick hairs sprout from the top of his head and flow back in waves like water. The whites of his eyes go whiter, so white they practically glow. And his pupils turn red—which is incidentally the same color that his skin has become.
I pull the puppy closer, onto my lap, and bury my face in its silky tan fur.
“Don’t be scared,” Linx tells me. His voice has changed, too. It sounds as deep as the ocean. “I’m not going to hurt you. You believe me, right?”
I look up. There in front of me, Linx looks more like a monster than a man. But I find myself nodding anyway, almost involuntarily, like I’m in a trance.
“That’s good,” he says. He stretches his arms out, as wide as a pterodactyl’s wingspan. “Whoa, it feels good to be out of Heddle’s body. It was getting a little cramped in there. Those of us in the thirteenth have always been a bit bigger than average.”
Understatement of the year. Next to Linx, the guy cleaning up the chapel was practically the size of a toddler. “Did you say the thirteenth family?” I ask.
“Indeed,” Linx says. “But I bet your uncle Max told you there were twelve genie families.”
“You know Uncle Max?”
“Max and I go way back,” Linx says. “Way back to the womb. So I know he has a tendency to lie when he needs to. Tell me this, Zack, has Max ever lied to you before?”
“No,” I say. But as soon as the word is out of my mouth, I remember—he lied about how we were related, and he lied about being a genie, and he lied about my being one, too.
“Ah, Zack. Really?”
“Uncle Max loves us a lot. After my dad died, he . . .” I let my voice trail off. “Anyway, like I was saying before, my sister and I just want to go home.”
“Here, Zack, catch.” Linx throws me a doggie treat. The puppy laps it from my palm, licking each of my fingers like they’re lollipops. It’s hard to tell just what is real. But this dog certainly feels real. “You still haven’t named him. It’s not right for a dog to go nameless.”
I shake my head. “I can’t think of any.”
“Titan? Flash? Goliath? Hercules?” Linx suggests, and I shrug. “Well, you think on it. In the meantime, I have a story to tell you. Years ago, years and years ago—before you were even a figment of your parents’ imaginations, before your parents were figments of your grandparents’ imaginations, and centuries before that—the thirteenth genie family was the most powerful genie family in all the world, and I was the most powerful genie.”
Linx pauses for a moment and smiles, like he’s remembering fondly.
“Mortals would find my bottle and rub it,” he goes on. “But as you know, merely rubbing a genie bottle is not enough to summon a genie.”
“I didn’t know that,” I tell him.
“Mmm, it seems that uncle of yours is a little behind in your education. Allow me to enlighten you—as a rule, only a man in distress can get a genie to emerge.”
“Trey isn’t a man,” I say. “He is a boy—a kid, like me.”
“My dear Zack,” Linx says. “Trey was most certainly not ‘like you.’ But I see your point—a man, or a woman, or a child must be in distress, and rub the bottle at that very moment. And when that happens, the magic kicks in.”
“Trey said he rubbed the bottle before,” I remember, out loud. “But today was when Shaggy and Buzz—these other kids—were attacking him in the chapel. So that’s gotta be what made the difference. He was in distress.”
“Precisely. You’re catching on fast. And then you popped out of the bottle and Trey made his wish and you—”
“And I messed it all up.”
“Nonsense! You interpreted his wish, that’s all. Back when I was granting wishes, I prided myself on my creativity when it came to wish interpretation. For example, there was a man who’d never had as much money as those around him. He made a wish to be richer than all of his neighbors, and I banished him to Antarctica, where he was certainly the richest—he didn’t have any neighbors! Unless you count the penguins and the whale seals. Another time a woman with a rather unfortunate face wished that people would think she was beautiful. I turned her into a rose, and people certainly exclaimed over her beauty after that.”
“That’s not what they meant,” I say.
“Are you sure about that? Were you in their heads?”
“No, but anyone could tell,” I say. “Like I could tell Trey didn’t really want me to turn him into Quinn—and Quinn sure didn’t want me to split her into two and drag her here.”
“You know, Zack, you remind me of myself, when I was young. I think you may take after me. You worry about other people, and not having control. I have so much to teach you. And lesson number one is that control is what being a genie is all about. You can make things happen, simply by force of will.”
I’m shaking my head. Because I don’t know how to make anything happen.
“I worked to empower the genie community,” Linx goes on. “Not just the thirteenth family, but all genies. Genies like you. That’s all I was trying to do until someone stopped me. He would’ve killed me, if he’d had the chance.”
I suck in my breath. Words echo in my ears: I’ve only come close to killing someone once.
“You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?” Linx asks.
“Uncle Max,” I whisper.
“Yes. He turned everyone against me. And then, with the force of the other families behind him, he banished me and my entire family here, to the thirteenth parallel, for a few dozen centuries.”
“Centuries?”
“You have no idea how hard it’s been, being up here,” Linx says. “We have a window down to the world, but we can’t access it.”
“How did you escape?”
“It was you.”
“Me?”
“You see how powerful you are. You broke a force field that had the strength of twelve genie families, by providing the portal for me to break through.”
“Portal? My bottle? You came through my bottle?”
Linx reaches behind him and produces my scuffed-up green bottle. The bottle I’d been bummed out to get for a birthday present. Now I’m so happy to see it! I worried I’d never see it again! I reach for it, but Linx holds it back, too far for my fingers to grasp. “I wasn’t supposed to lose sight of it,” I explain. “Uncle Max said bad things would happen.”
“It allowed me to come back. Nothing bad has happened, has it? You have a puppy. Would you like another?” Before I can answer, a chocolate-brown Lab trots across the floor. “Two dogs in one day. That’s not so bad for one birthday boy, now is it?”
“What about Quinn?” I ask. “We’re twins, you know. It’s her birthday, too. And I think all she wants is to go back home.”
“Are you really worried about what Quinn wants right now?” Linx asks. He’s got the bottle hovering just above his flattened palm. It’s spinning slowly, around and around, and the way the light from the stars is hitting it, it seems to be changing colors. “When has she ever been worried about you?”
Somewhere, deep in the background, I think I can hear a phone ringing. But I’m not sure. I can’t quite make the sound out. It’s like when you wake up and you sort of remember your dream, but not enough to actually know what it was about.
“Watch this, Zack.” Linx snaps his fingers, and the bottle shines bright green, like an emerald. Brighter and brighter. There are claps of thunder and then lightning flashes striking the bottle. Linx cackles, and I squeeze my eyes shut. But even with them closed I can still see the brightness of the bottle hovering above his hand. And then it starts to dim. I open one eye just a slit, and the bottle is glowing like a night-light.
“Power,” Linx says. “It means I can take all the light from all the stars in the world and put it here in this bottle. And with a wink of my eye, I can disperse it again, throughout the sky. I can make the sky explode within a storm, and just as quickly I can make the storm dissipate.”
“Holy smokes,” I whisper.
“Without power, I’m just as helpless as young Trey, being beat up by the bullies. Your uncle was my bully, Zack. He took away my power. But you’ve given it back to me. And in return, I’m willing to grant your dearest wish.”