Oracle's Moon (Elder Races #4)(6)

The giant panther morphed into the upright figure of an angry man, and finally she came face-to-face with the Djinn she had met when he and his two companions had knocked on her door.

The form he wore this time was tall, somewhere close to six and a half feet. Long, raven black hair was pulled back from an elegant, pale face. That face had all the same things that a human face had, two eyes, a nose and a mouth. It was even lean-jawed and handsome, yet somehow it was clearly not a human face. His strange eyes were the same in every form he chose to wear, crystalline and diamondlike. He had a lean, graceful frame that matched his face, and he wore a simple black tunic and trousers, and a fierce, regal pride.

This, as much as anything, was his real physical form. At least it was his go-to form. At his essence, he was a spirit of magic and fire. No physical form could contain him in his entirety. His Power filled the house.

My gods, there’s so much of him, she thought as she stared up at his sparkling, angry eyes. What a calamity he is. Standing in front of him, she felt absurdly young, very small and stupidly, excessively fascinated.

“I offer you a gift beyond price, you foolish creature,” he said between his teeth. “And you throw it back in my face.”

“What do you think you’re offering me?” she asked. “I wake up and I find you with my kids in their bedroom. And I’ll say this again: without my permission. Do you realize how offensive that is? Maybe you don’t. Maybe that’s something Djinn would do all the time. You know what, I don’t care. And I’m not even going to get into all the wrong lessons you were teaching them. Wait a minute, yes, I am. You were a talking cat with children who are much too young to differentiate between that and reality.”

His eyes narrowed. “What nonsense are you spouting, human?”

“What do you think is going to happen the next time Chloe sees a black cat?” Grace demanded. “Do you think she’s going to say to herself, oh this is not like the freaky black cat that talks to me and lets me yank its tail and poke it in the eye? No. Do you know what she’s going to try to do? She’s going to try to talk to it and pull its tail and maybe poke it in the eye. And you know what that cat is going to do—because it’s a real goddamn cat? It’s going to scratch her. It might bite her. Cat bites are filthy things. Usually the puncture wounds go deep, and they get infected. And then suddenly, I’ll be taking a confused, crying four-year-old girl to the ER for a three-hundred-dollar doctor’s visit to get antibiotics, all because of your ignorant arrogance!”

He regarded her with a supercilious expression. “Do all your thoughts proceed in such a fashion?”

“What are you talking about?” Grace blinked, thrown off balance. “Do my thoughts proceed where?”

He gestured with a long hand. He made it look impossibly graceful. “To conclusions of disaster, of course. No doubt there will also be brain-eating parasites in the cat bite, or perhaps a troop of rabid monkeys will escape from a nearby zoo and cut a path directly for your house.”

She stared. “You think I’m making this stuff up? That cat bite happened to me when I was little. I have the scars to prove it. Do you know what I caught Chloe trying to do yesterday? She was climbing on top of the kitchen table. She thought she could jump off and fly like Clark Kent, because we had just watched an old movie rerun with Christopher Reeve, and if Superman could fly, she thought she might be able to too. Maybe she wouldn’t have broken her leg if I hadn’t caught her, but she probably would have hurt herself somehow.”

The curve of his elegant mouth turned cruel. He looked around the living room, his gaze cold and judgmental. “How unfortunate then for your children that you choose to nap in the daytime instead of watching out for them the way you should.”

She flinched as if she’d been slapped, and she looked around the living room too. Her textbooks were stacked on the coffee table. Toys littered the floor. A basket of unfolded laundry sat on the floor by the armchair. Chloe had spilled some of her pretzels on the area rug in the living room then walked over them. Crumbs were everywhere.

Grace thought of the tangle at the back of Chloe’s head that she still hadn’t brushed out. Embarrassment and fury clogged her throat so that she couldn’t speak. After a moment she managed to whisper between clenched teeth, “You have no idea what you’re talking about. You have no real understanding of me, my kids, or any of the issues we face. That lack of understanding alone makes you dangerous to us.”

“How dare you?” He thrust his angry face close. “I would never cause harm to a child. The whole reason I stayed was to protect them!”

His rage curled around her, manifesting as black smoke. She felt as though she stared into an inferno.

She would not flinch. She would not.

There was simply no point in trying to reason with him. They were too different from each other, and he was too arrogant to listen to anything she said. She dug down deep and found enough composure to say, “I get that you don’t mean us any harm. Thank you for staying this morning to make sure Chloe and Max were protected. If you don’t wish to petition for a consultation with the Oracle, I’m telling you now to leave my house.”

He scowled and opened his mouth, clearly intending a scorching reply, but a small, sad voice beat him to it. Chloe said, “No more fighting. Don’t be mad anymore, okay?”