He barreled into the door of the cabin, not bothering to knock, not even calling out. He dropped Docia straight to the floor, knowing the element of surprise would be fleeting but crucial to gaining control over whoever was in the house.

It wasn’t until he was inside the house that he realized it was pitch-black inside.

“Oh shit,” he said.

“Yeah. ‘Oh shit’ is right,” declared a defiant female voice, right before she flung a ball of mystic green energy straight at his head.

But this wasn’t the red-tinged energy of a Templar. It was something else completely. And as he dodged the opening volley, as she dissolved into smoke only to reappear elsewhere behind him, he knew exactly what she was.

“Wait! I’m not here to hurt you!”

“Then you’d have knocked, now, wouldn’t you? I knew it! I knew it wasn’t safe here anymore with a bunch of Bodywalker Templars running loose in the valley!”

“We’re not Templars!” Vincent insisted as he dodged a second, far more wickedly accurate volley of energy balls, only to have the energy change into little winged dragons that immediately set on him, chomping through both legs of his pants and one arm. The fourth one heading for his other arm he sent batting away, like a line drive over third base, and this time she had to duck to be missed. “We’re their prisoners!” He reached up to rip off one of the eager little lizards, its razor-sharp teeth like needles in the meat of his thigh. He grabbed the head of the thing and flung it, too, in her direction. This time, though, instead of dodging it, she leapt up and caught it. She held the little thing to her chest.

“Oh sure, you big fat stupid bully! I’ve heard that before!”

“Really? What, are we dropping like flies on you or something?” Docia said, trying to sound sarcastic through chattering teeth. She reached up for the little dragon latched on to Vincent’s other leg and grabbed it by its head. “Knock it off or I’ll break its little neck!” She grabbed tight to prove it, and Vincent ground out a vicious curse as the teeth dug deep into him.

“Jesus Christ!” he spat.

“No, wait! Don’t hurt her!”

“Don’t hurt her?” Docia and Vincent echoed in differing levels of disbelief. Vincent’s was obvious, since he was the one suffering; he assumed Docia simply couldn’t figure out how the little beast was obviously a her.

“If you didn’t want her hurt,” Docia said, shivering, “then you shouldn’t be using her and her friends like watchdogs.” She struggled to her knees and then gently pried the dragon’s teeth out of Vincent’s leg. She looked at it, inspecting it, just shy of lifting its tail to look for private parts, Vincent could only assume. “It’s kind of cute. What is it? A dragon?”

The dragon squeaked as if she’d insulted it, spitting at her in a garbled combination of chatter that, when run together like that, sounded like cussing. Then the little booger showed its teeth at her and made a production of licking Vincent’s blood off its lips and making yummy sounds.

“It’s a dragonlet. Dragons are like, three tons heavier than an elephant. Duh.” The dragonlet’s owner rolled her eyes because, clearly, that ought to be obvious to anyone. “Now, can I have her back?” She held out one hand, the other continuing to cradle her first catch to her breast as one might a kitten. And, like a kitten, it began to purr. Loudly.

“Call the other one off of Vincent first.”

The cabin owner twisted her lips to the side, clearly nibbling on the inside of them as she fretted between getting her pets back and letting Vincent possibly have the opportunity to get the upper hand.

“Seriously, if you think these little rats would have stopped me if I didn’t want to be stopped, then you don’t know a damn thing about Bodywalkers.” Vincent felt the need to point out.

“Shh!” Docia said, elbowing him in his kneecap.

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” Vincent ground out.

Docia got to her feet, and Vincent could honestly imagine how difficult a task that had to be for her. He watched her step across to the other woman, and it took everything inside him not to scream at her to stop. But when he saw the bloody footprints she was leaving behind on the wood-plank flooring, he didn’t have the heart to countermand her efforts.

“Here she is,” Docia said, holding up the dragonlet. Its wings flapped, the spiky little fingers at the crested points of those wings wiggling toward the safety of its caretaker. Docia handed it over without remembering, it seemed, to make the other woman call off the last of the little monsters still dug into his arm. Vincent pulled his forearm up to his nose and glared into the dragonlet’s glassy green eyes.

“Are you having fun?” he growled at it. “And you do realize I can snap your scrawny little neck, right?”

The gnawing stopped, at least, but that didn’t keep it from surreptitiously licking the blood it had drawn from its lips with a rapid little forked tongue.

“How do you know it’s a girl?” Docia asked about her recently abandoned charge, eaten up with curiosity.

“Oh!” The little blond woman, barely an inch over five feet, he guessed, and maybe a buck five soaking wet, smiled puckishly. “The girls have an extra joint on the top of the wing. Right here, see?” She gently stretched out the wing of the new acquisition, counting out the joint bumps along the ridge of it aloud. Then she cuddled that one close and compared the wingspan of the first she’d been holding. “See? Three on the boy. Four on the girl.”

“Oh!” Docia giggled as the male took offense to being fondled and clambered up the young girl’s arm and under the flounce of thick blond corkscrew curls.

“I’m seriously considering adding a joint in this thing’s wings if you don’t get it off me real soon,” Vincent groused, shaking his arm in hopes of dislodging the beast. No such luck. And he could appreciate that Docia was making far faster ground than he had been able to manage thus far, so he didn’t want to do anything the blond Djynn might consider a threatening act. Still … that didn’t mean he was above verbal warnings.

“SutSut!” the Djynn called, snapping her fingers. The dragonlet disconnected itself from Vincent, and to prove it wasn’t impressed by his threats, it blew a fork-tongued raspberry at him before flying off with what could only be labeled a flounce, its tail so high in the air that Vincent could see parts of its anatomy he could happily have gone through life without seeing. “But don’t think you can try anything,” the Djynn warned. “I’ll break every window in this house and leave you to freeze while I go spend the day in my canteen.”

“I’m not going to— Canteen? You’re a Djynn attached to a canteen?”

“Well, sure.” She pointed to the metal canteen with its wide, flat bottom and large circumference. “It can’t break, unlike bottles and such. And it’s really hard to rip that sucker open.”

“You’re a Djynn?” Docia asked, sounding fascinated. “Like … a genie?”

“If you make an I Dream of Jeannie reference, I’ll turn your skin blue for a week. And don’t think I can’t do it,” the Djynn warned hotly. Although Vincent didn’t find her very threatening now that he got a good look at her. It might be the Hello Kitty pajamas, but he was pretty sure the Cookie Monster slippers with their googly eyes robbed her of all her street cred.

“No. Of course not. I just … I never met a Djynn before. Hell, I only found out there was such a thing less than an hour ago,” she admitted.

“I’m surprised you’re meeting one now,” Vincent said dryly as he looked around the entryway, great room, and kitchen combination carefully, assessing the cabin for any further threats. “Djynn don’t usually live in houses.”

“Please.” The Djynn rolled her eyes. “What generation are you living in, anyway?” She turned away and went scrounging behind one of the couches for something, and the three dragonlets made a game of hide-and-seek in her hair. She came up with the fourth dragonlet, who was moaning a bit dramatically, a wing draped over one of its eyes. “Poor MutMut,” she cooed at it, giving it kisses of comfort on its head.

“What’s your name? Or … can’t you tell me?” Docia frowned. “I heard a story once where a genie loses its power if its name is given up.”

“Djynn. Not genie!” She huffed out a breath. “And that’d make it hard, wouldn’t it? Going around calling each other ‘Hey, you!’ all the time.”

“I suppose it would,” Docia agreed.

“Docia, would you please sit down,” Vincent said, moving cautiously toward the kitchen. The minute he moved, however, all four dragonlets perked to attention and glared at him. They even gave off spitting little growls. He held up his hands in submission. “Her feet are bleeding. I’m just going to get something to clean them up a little.”

“My name is SingSing,” the Djynn said, frowning at Docia. “And you really should sit. Just don’t get blood on my furniture. You have no idea how hard it is to get blood out of piled silk.”

Docia sat down and Vincent could tell she was trying not to find something funny. Honestly, the girl had a face like an open book. She didn’t have the slightest idea how to mask what she was thinking.

“SingSing, couldn’t you use magic to … I don’t know … fix something like that?”

“Oh, right,” SingSing snorted. “Like I’m going to waste my precious magic on getting a stain out of the sofa.”

“You say that like magic is finite,” Docia noted.

Clever girl, Vincent thought. He was beginning to see why she had been chosen for a Blending of such import. It was also a shame about the whole Menes thing. She was starting to grow on him. In more ways than one.

He fetched some paper towels from the roll, then ran some water into a bowl, making sure it was just warm enough but not too hot to shock her frozen feet.

“Djynn magic is finite,” he told her. “Actually, a lot of it is attached to certain things. Like the dragonlets. She probably gets a lot of magical store from them. Most Djynn have some kind of mascot.”

“Not just any kind of mascot,” SingSing snapped in his direction. “It’s not a frickin’ football team.” She turned to Docia and smiled warmly, making it clear whom she liked in the room and whom she did not. “And don’t call them familiars, either,” she warned Docia with a stern finger. “They’re called nikkis. The live ones, anyway. If it’s an inanimate magical resource, we call it a niknak. Get it? That’s where the word came from, a long time ago, you know. Niknaks. Only, you spell it differently. I mean, what’s with the ‘k’ thing, anyway? Oh, you know it’s there in the beginning and the end, but you can only hear it in the end and not the beginning. Seriously?” She eyeballed Docia as if she’d have the answer to the American English lexicon. “Anyway, you can call either one, animate or inanimate, a nik and you wouldn’t be wrong. These four little guys are all niks. I have more powerful niknaks, of course.” She glared at Vincent to make sure he got that not-so-subtle message. “But we hide our niknaks all over so no one can find them. It’s kind of like a treasure hunt sometimes between Djynn. We’re always trying to hunt down more and more powerful niks. And once another Djynn touches the nik, it’s theirs. Kind of sucks. That’s why we don’t usually throw our nikkis at other Djynn.”

Vincent knelt at Docia’s feet, lifting them onto his thighs to rest, then inspecting the left one first.

“Yeah, but you didn’t think twice about throwing them at me,” he pointed out.

“Well, I panicked,” SingSing admitted sheepishly. “It’s been a while since I’ve even seen another Night-walker. Face-to-face like this, anyway. I was so mad when those Templars showed up in the valley, you have no idea. I know I should pack up and go, that it’s the safe thing to do, but this is …” She frowned and her head dropped forward.

“This is your home,” Docia guessed gently, her hand touching the Djynn female with compassion. It made Vincent tense up to see her do it. Djynn were not to be trusted. That was the first rule Ramses had ever taught him about them. Never trust them. Their craving for niks was like a disease; they were obsessed by them, and they just couldn’t help it. They would do anything, screw over anyone they had to, to acquire their next nik. The more powerful the nik, the more willing they were to sacrifice someone else. This Djynn had stopped fighting them only because he had threatened her niks.

“Well, it has been, anyway. And now thanks to you people I have to get the heck out of Dodge. This sucks supremely, I just want you to know that,” she said, pointing angrily at him.