The Third Wish

Excerpt:
TEASER EXCERPT
A spicy, pleasant odor wafted into Bridget’s nostrils, rousing her. Still groggy, she urged her eyes open, then squeaked in alarm. The strange man knelt next to her, close enough that she could see his amber irises flecked with gold. His mouth was set in a line, his brow slightly furrowed.
Bridget looked around, uncertain, at first, about where she was. Then she remembered. She had slid down against the sandy wall, sitting with her legs stretched out in front of her. Clutching the knife handle, she jerked it up so the sharp blade tip was a few inches from the man’s neck. “Get back.”
He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. Then he smiled.
“You’re afraid.” His voice had a deep bass timbre that seemed to rise directly from his chest.
Bridget’s stomach flipped. The cadence of his voice was slow and confident, as though he sensed no threat from her. “You’re damn right. Now get back.”
“I’m not going to hurt you. I cannot. But I must help you.” He lifted a hand, and before Bridget could protest, laid it over the wound on her thigh. Bridget gasped. His fingers, cool and smooth, kneaded over the congealed blood, rhythmically tracking back and forth against the sensitive skin of her thigh, reaching under the hem of her cargo shorts and beyond the top of the laceration.
Bridget’s head buzzed. Her mind told her to fight back, flee, resist, do something, but she couldn’t. Paralyzed, as though in a dream, Bridget’s body resisted her urge to move. A heated tingling surged from the stranger’s fingers. He rubbed her leg in a spiral motion, moving upward into the tissue paper skin at the crease of her leg. The tip of his long middle finger skimmed against the cotton crotch of her panties. She drew a sharp intake of breath.
The stranger looked at her, his gaze steady on her face. His eyes creased slightly at the corners. He continued to massage Bridget’s thigh. The burning from the gash was replaced by a vibrating quiver that spread up from her leg, through the muscles of her vagina and into her belly.
“Unh.” Bridget heard the sound from her own mouth as though from far away. Her head fell back against the wall as the stranger reached up further through the loose cuff of her shorts. The heel of his hand rubbed against the wound, but his fingers slipped under the elastic of her panties and teased at her lips.
Bridget’s leg twitched. She realized she could move now, the hypnotic trance lifting. But pleasure overcame common sense. A deep relaxation took hold of Bridget, numbing her reactions. She closed her eyes, still not convinced the episode was occurring anywhere but inside her mind.
I’ll just rest for a minute.
The stranger’s ministrations were gentle and reassuring as though he knew what he was doing. Bridget’s leg no longer throbbed with pain. Tingling shot along her nerve endings with each pulse of his touch.
The stranger moved his fingers deeper and encountered Bridget’s glossy slickness. Bridget’s head snapped forward at the realization that her body was ready to succumb to this strange man. She stared into his strange golden eyes. He said nothing, but kept his hand on her.
A flush of alarm and desire washed over her. I can’t do this. Bridget pushed on his shoulders with all the energy she could muster. He was immovable. She threw herself sideways, away from him, and clambered to her feet. He remained crouched where he was, between Bridget and the only exit.
An electric prickling flowed along Bridget’s injured leg, and she held out her hand in signal for the stranger to stay back. She bent her head over her leg, running her hand up and down the spot where the laceration had been. The skin was completely smooth, the trail of blood down her leg hardening to a crust. It couldn’t be! The only remnant of his touch was satiny warmth deep inside her belly and radiating down both legs.
Bridget cursed under her breath. I let my guard down. She wasn’t dealing with some unexpected, albeit passionate, encounter. This guy was some sort of supernatural presence. Bridget’s guard went into overdrive. She whipped her head up and stared directly at the golden-eyed stranger. He hadn’t moved. “What the hell? What kind of man are you?”
He rose to his full height in one fluid movement.
Bridget straightened and fisted her hands in front of her. She took two more steps back so she was about two yards away from him. “Stay where you are.”
“To answer your question, I am not a man.” His voice held no inflection of emotion, and there was a slight clip to his words. “I am jinni.”

CHAPTER ONE
Bridget Devine dropped her orange backpack into the sand and placed her foot on the top rung of the twelve-foot ladder leading into chamber B-71. Fresh water, bandages, Neosporin, a notepad and pencils, along with her walkie-talkie, were inside the bag—basic supplies of an archaeologist in the field.
Bridget marveled at how quickly the particles of desert sand rushed to coat the Patagonia pack. A harmattan, the dry, parched wind that blew up from the northwest coast of Africa, had been pelting the University of Pennsylvania dig just outside of Jordan for three days now. The locals viewed the harmattan as a harbinger of evil. Bridget didn’t believe in superstition.
She squinted and cast a final glance across the dunes. Through the tan-hued wind, the campsite in the distance was barely visible. Her colleagues were enjoying a leisurely lunch, and Bridget relished the thought of two hours of solitary work. A sudden swirl of air pelted sand into her face. She ducked her head and clambered down the ladder.
Yesterday had been busy on the dig, leaving no time to sweep up. The floor was littered with slivers from the two-by-four crossbeams that supported the sandy walls of the chamber. Bridget stepped over pieces of spare wood and walked to a corner of the twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot space, where two shovels and a smaller cache of tools rested against the wall. She knelt alongside a mound of displaced sand, eager to begin where she had left off the day before.
Bridget reached for a small trowel at the rim of the freshly dug hollow. An image flashed inside her mind of her own trowel with its comfortable rubber grip stowed away in the backpack at the top of the ladder. She turned toward the entrance, then shook her head. The backpack wasn’t going anywhere, and she could use the tools here.
She worked in a focused silence. She was vaguely aware of rivulets of sweat that crept from her hairline at the back of her head down her neck and back seeping into the cotton tank she wore.
An hour later, Bridget had excavated a two-foot mound of sand from the ottoman-sized cavity. The next plunge of the trowel collided in a teeth-grating scrape of metal on metal. Her heart rate accelerated. She stopped to push back the hair from her forehead with the back of her hand as she set down the trowel with her other hand.
Tapping her fingers over the solid surface she’d hit, Bridget sought the edge of the object. When she found it, she carefully dug her fingers along the packed grains of sand and extricated the thing out of its womb of heavy sand.
Palming a seven-inch metal object, her hand trembled. Sitting back on her haunches to inspect it, Bridget exhaled slowly. This was the culmination of everything she had worked for, a potential relic from the ancient world that she had pulled from the earth herself. A gurgle of girlish excitement rose in her chest. “Yes!”
A sudden gust from the harmattan outside swept down the ladder and sprayed sand across the floor.
Bridget stood. Her legs prickled with the sensation of pins and needles from too much time in one position. She cupped her hands around the boat-shaped vessel. The dull golden brown patina appeared to be copper, its glint muted by the desert sand.
Bridget would have guessed it was an oil lamp, but there was no opening for the deposit of oil on the convex surface. A nipple of metal protruded from the center of the object. She brought the copper piece closer to her face and noticed the nipple was actually the small outline of a lid. She pushed at the nipple with her thumb, but the lid was tight.
Indistinct swirls of characters decorated the copper circumference. For an instant, Bridget’s heart stopped.
Hieroglyphics! Possibly Sumerian?
A valuable alloy of copper and arsenic had been being crafted in Uruk more than three thousand years ago. Professor Borowski, who had organized this dig, recently established a trade link between this area of Jordan and ancient Sumer. Flutters of anticipation raced through Bridget’s stomach. A giggle rose in her throat.
A find like this could be my promotion ticket to Associate Curator.
Unexpectedly, the artifact shook in Bridget’s hands. Shock instantly stilled her excitement. She gasped. The previously fastened lid cracked open, and a scorching blast of air assailed her nostrils with the scent of eucalyptus and warm skin.
Bridget dropped the metal object and fell back against the mound of excavated desert sand. A stab of pain pierced the inside of her thigh, just below her panty line. She glanced quickly around the chamber. She was alone, but a strange, sensual odor filled the small space. Tiny hairs along the nape of her neck stood on end.
She scrambled to her feet and winced as the pain in her leg pulsed. Bridget reached up under the hem of her cargo shorts and ran her fingers over her inner thigh. A jagged fragment of wood protruded from the thin skin.
“Damnit!” Bridget tugged on the rough spike, ripping the flesh of her thigh. Hot blood squeezed out onto her fingers. Bent at the waist, she pressed her fingers against the gash. Bridget scanned the floor for her backpack, and her stomach lurched. Stupid. She remembered she’d left it at the top of the ladder with the tube of Neosporin that would come in handy about now.
Small scrapes and cuts became nasty quickly in the heated air of the desert, and all the archaeologists were similarly equipped with first-aid items. But none of her colleagues was here now.
Bridget untied the blue, cotton bandana she wore around her neck and held it against the gash in her leg. Her fingers were sticky with blood, which flowed in a maroon sheen down her leg and collected in her sock. When she looked up, the room appeared to teeter. Bridget breathed in through her nostrils and out through her mouth in an effort to reclaim her equilibrium.
Her gaze fell on the metal artifact she’d been inspecting when the blast of air startled her—a blast of air that seemed to come directly from the vessel. Bridget limped over to the piece. A tingle of anxiety started deep in her stomach when she noticed the lid was off and something seeped from the dark interior. An inexplicable chill gripped her chest.
Bridget took a step backward, away from the copper artifact that was now swathed in an eerie mist that spread like spilled honey from the round opening. Her leg burned and her breath came faster. The mist grew into an opaque vapor that slid from the upended vessel and undulated into a hazy, grayish blue puddle on the dirt floor of the chamber.
Rising in a thin vertical line, the haze began to fill out and assume a two-dimensional shape that was pointed at top and wide at the bottom, like a hologram of a pyramid. Sparkling flickers of electricity snapped in the air around it. Traces of the eucalyptus scent were overwhelmed by the heady odor of sandalwood.
This is crazy. There can’t be anything alive in here.
Bridget had been part of Professor Gideon Borowski’s dig for eighteen months, and, in all that time, they’d uncovered only desiccated remnants of life. No organisms! No vapor! Adrenalin surged through Bridget’s veins, escalating her breathing. The coarse echo of her hoarse rhythmic breathing was the only sound in the chamber.
Bridget instinctively pulled a penknife from the clip on her belt and swung it in an arc in front of her as she backed toward the ladder. The miasma in front of her crested to a cylinder several inches taller than she was. Vaguely aware that her tiny blade would be useless, she shot a glance toward the ladder, several feet away. She had reached the boundary of the wall that ran perpendicular to the ladder.
There’s nowhere to go.
The ferocious pounding of Bridget’s heart joined the clamor of her breathing. She’d heard of blasts of putrid air released from ancient vacuum-sealed rooms, of unexplained spontaneous dust storms, of heat stroke overcoming diggers. This was different. The shape wasn’t random. It seemed to be in control of its movements.
Bridget blinked. The figure now appeared solid and had taken on a golden hue. The golden hue of Mediterranean skin. She stepped backward and stumbled. She remembered her voice too late, and a yell for help froze inside her throat.
A tall, solid figure of a man stood before her. Midnight black hair reached to his broad shoulders. He stood well over six feet tall, with the prominent, articulated muscles of a Greek Olympian. The oddest thing about him was not the fact that he was naked, but that he seemed completely unaffected by it.
Bridget stood frozen in place. This is a vision. This has to be a vision. A hallucination brought on by the heat, by the loss of blood. Shocked but curious, Bridget submitted to the hallucination theory and let her gaze course over the strange man before her.
The man stood with his feet firmly planted in the dirt, yet he seemed in constant motion. He clenched and unclenched his fists and shifted his weight lightly from foot to foot. Cords tensed in his neck, and the muscles of his biceps and abdomen rippled beneath the skin. The striations of his calves and thighs were powerfully apparent.
Bridget skipped her gaze over his midsection where a long member hung between his legs. His body was hairless. His abdomen, carved and powerful, flared up to bulky shoulders. Raised tattoos of strange hieroglyphs swirled in a pattern across his chest. He wasn’t lithe and slender as Bridget momentarily imagined a creature of mist should look. He was solid and robust.
Bridget raised her gaze to his face. She sucked in a breath upon encountering a magnificent countenance—square and impassive like the marble bust of a Phoenician king—staring back at her. Black curls hung loose around his face and brushed his shoulders. He shook back the hair from his forehead, revealing more glyphs along his hairline.
Bridget pressed her back against the wall. The burning pain in her leg reminded her of the injury, and she looked down at her leg. She held the bandana loosely in her hand and absently noted that it was soaked with her blood. Bridget’s head buzzed, and whirling black-and-white dots smothered her vision.

~~~

A spicy, pleasant odor wafted into Bridget’s nostrils, rousing her. Still groggy, she urged her eyes open, then squeaked in alarm. The strange man knelt next to her, close enough that she could see his amber irises flecked with gold. His mouth was set in a line, his brow slightly furrowed.
Bridget looked around, uncertain, at first, about where she was. Then she remembered. She had slid down against the sandy wall, sitting with her legs stretched out in front of her. Clutching the knife handle, she jerked it up so the sharp blade tip was a few inches from the man’s neck. “Get back.”
He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. Then he smiled.
“You’re afraid.” His voice had a deep bass timbre that seemed to rise directly from his chest.
Bridget’s stomach flipped. The cadence of his voice was slow and confident, as though he sensed no threat from her. “You’re damn right. Now get back.”
“I’m not going to hurt you. I cannot. But I must help you.” He lifted a hand, and before Bridget could protest, laid it over the wound on her thigh. Bridget gasped. His fingers, cool and smooth, kneaded over the congealed blood, rhythmically tracking back and forth against the sensitive skin of her thigh, reaching under the hem of her cargo shorts and beyond the top of the laceration.
Bridget’s head buzzed. Her mind told her to fight back, flee, resist, do something, but she couldn’t. Paralyzed, as though in a dream, Bridget’s body resisted her urge to move. A heated tingling surged from the stranger’s fingers. He rubbed her leg in a spiral motion, moving upward into the tissue paper skin at the crease of her leg. The tip of his long middle finger skimmed against the cotton crotch of her panties. She drew a sharp intake of breath.
The stranger looked at her, his gaze steady on her face. His eyes creased slightly at the corners. He continued to massage Bridget’s thigh. The burning from the gash was replaced by a vibrating quiver that spread up from her leg, through the muscles of her vagina and into her belly.
“Unh.” Bridget heard the sound from her own mouth as though from far away. Her head fell back against the wall as the stranger reached up further through the loose cuff of her shorts. The heel of his hand rubbed against the wound, but his fingers slipped under the elastic of her panties and teased at her lips.
Bridget’s leg twitched. She realized she could move now, the hypnotic trance lifting. But pleasure overcame common sense. A deep relaxation took hold of Bridget, numbing her reactions. She closed her eyes, still not convinced the episode was occurring anywhere but inside her mind.
I’ll just rest for a minute.
The stranger’s ministrations were gentle and reassuring as though he knew what he was doing. Bridget’s leg no longer throbbed with pain. Tingling shot along her nerve endings with each pulse of his touch.
The stranger moved his fingers deeper and encountered Bridget’s glossy slickness. Bridget’s head snapped forward at the realization that her body was ready to succumb to this strange man. She stared into his strange golden eyes. He said nothing, but kept his hand on her.
A flush of alarm and desire washed over her. I can’t do this. Bridget pushed on his shoulders with all the energy she could muster. He was immovable. She threw herself sideways, away from him, and clambered to her feet. He remained crouched where he was, between Bridget and the only exit.
An electric prickling flowed along Bridget’s injured leg, and she held out her hand in signal for the stranger to stay back. She bent her head over her leg, running her hand up and down the spot where the laceration had been. The skin was completely smooth, the trail of blood down her leg hardening to a crust. It couldn’t be! The only remnant of his touch was satiny warmth deep inside her belly and radiating down both legs.
Bridget cursed under her breath. I let my guard down. She wasn’t dealing with some unexpected, albeit passionate, encounter. This guy was some sort of supernatural presence. Bridget’s guard went into overdrive. She whipped her head up and stared directly at the golden-eyed stranger. He hadn’t moved. “What the hell? What kind of man are you?”
He rose to his full height in one fluid movement.
Bridget straightened and fisted her hands in front of her. She took two more steps back so she was about two yards away from him. “Stay where you are.”
“To answer your question, I am not a man.” His voice held no inflection of emotion, and there was a slight clip to his words. “I am jinni.”
Bridget’s breath caught in her throat. She knew the legends of the jinn. In this part of the world, and especially here in Jordan, many people still believed that jinn roamed a parallel realm to humans. Just as angels were formed of light, and humans from the earth, the jinn were supposedly forged from fire. But those were just legends, superstitions.
Bridget shook her head. “Wait. Tell me. Who are you?”
He hesitated, then spoke slowly, as though instructing a child. “I am Ashura-Goreem, one of the jinn, created from the smokeless flame. Forged by the Creator before humans were even a thought. I am Ashura-Goreem, who raised up Eriba-Marduk of the Bit-Yakin tribe to become the first Chaldean monarch of Babylonia.
“I am Ashura-Goreem, emissary from the land of Jinnistan, come to build the temples of men. Honored and then betrayed by Eriba-Marduk and his necromancers. Cursed to dwell in this miserable amalgamation of metal for nearly three thousand years.”
Bridget’s mind scampered over his words as he spoke, struggling to make sense of them. Jinnistan was a legend, a fictional land of the jinn. But the Chaldean empire, the Bit-Yakin tribe, and Babylonia were real⎯ancient empires long since passed to dust. Bridget had studied the Babylonian era for her doctoral thesis. Was he mixing myth with ancient history, or were the legends of Jinnistan real as well?
Bridget shook her head trying to clear the confusion rushing in on her. She lifted the knife. Like an unexpected breeze that swept across the floor, the jinni instantaneously materialized next to the artifact, a foot from where Bridget stood. She flinched at the unexpected movement, dropping her knife onto the ground.
He nudged the vessel with his toe so it rolled against Bridget’s boot. He lifted his arm, his hand cupping her chin, and inclined his head. His face hovered just inches from hers. A warm scent of eucalyptus engulfed her.
“The vessel is yours now. All the legends are true.”
Bridget dared not move her head, too aware of his touch and afraid of how her body would react. Her breath pumped shallow and steady through her parted lips. Her heartbeat thrummed inside her ears.
“Three wishes? Are you telling me that I have three wishes?” Bridget tilted her head, the question whispered from her as she realized the implications of what he’d said.
He nodded once.
“But my leg…”
“Not a wish.” His voice was hushed. “There are things I can do for you...” He traced a finger across her cheek and pushed a strand of hair behind her ear.
Her breath came more quickly, the proximity of his body and the heat emanating from it pushed against Bridget’s resistance. She glimpsed the ladder over Ashura’s shoulder and a wave of rebellion against the inexplicable feeling of submission surged in Bridget.
She tilted her head away from him, but kept her eyes on his face. “You don’t have to…”
His jaw clenched. For an instant, his gaze hardened. “Oh, but I do. I am your servant.”
Bridget shrugged him off and stepped back. “Servant? Oh, no. I don’t want you…a jinni…anyone…for a servant.”
“But you do want a wish.”
“No. I—” Bridget blinked and shook back the heavy plait of her hair that had fallen across her breast. She looked around the room as though waking from a daze. Her gaze found the burgundy stain of blood in the dirt where she had fallen⎯her open knife on the ground, its blade crusted with sand. The metal container at her feet. Everything was real.
Bridget moved her gaze to Ashura-Goreem. He looked as substantial as she felt. His strange golden eyes played over her face as though he was trying to read her thoughts.
Bridget had traveled the world and dug up primordial graves cluttered with bones. She had survived the bite of a scorpion. She had been one of the first archaeologists to enter a four-thousand-year-old burial chamber and smell the thin, stale air. Was anything possible? Even this?
Bridget became an archaeologist because she was fascinated by how much of the past remained hidden. Civilizations buried their histories and their secrets beneath the rubble of time.
There was always something more to be excavated or uncovered. And she had seen this creature materialize right in front of her. The possibility of a wish was too tempting to discard. Bridget thought of the one plea she would make to the universe if she could. “My mother.”
The slightest upturn of a smile tugged at the corner of the jinni’s mouth. “Speak it.”
“She has cancer. I wish…I wish my mother was well again.” As soon as the words left her mouth, Bridget held her breath, anxious for what might happen now. She watched Ashura-Goreem’s face. But instead of smiling or clapping or swirling into a vortex of some sort, he did nothing. His dark eyebrows tightened, forming a crease above the bridge of a long, straight nose. He exhaled a sustained breath. His face relaxed. “So it is.”
The familiar engine growl of Dr. Borowski’s Jeep carried into the chamber. Bridget glanced at the ladder. She leapt sideways to get around Ashura-Goreem and had one booted foot poised in midair when a yank on her forearm halted her momentum.
Ashura-Goreem gripped her arm and pulled her against him. Bridget leaned away from him and pushed at his chest, but it was like pressing against a stone wall.
Without intending to, she inhaled a lungful of his skin and sandalwood scent. Lightheadedness returned, but she fought against it. Bridget shook her head. Her legs twisted against his. The firm mound at his midsection pressed against her abdomen. In response, Bridget’s own body betrayed her with a wave of desire. She squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself to resist the urge to submit to this strange creature. Her lips tightened across her teeth. “Let go of me.”
Ashura-Goreem leaned down and nuzzled the top of her head as he spoke in a harsh whisper. “When the Creator formed the jinn from the smokeless flame, He forged the angels from light. But you, humans, he molded from the clay of the earth. You have two wishes, creature of dirt. Make them and free me.”
Bridget’s heart skipped. The shadow of desire fled in the new realization that she confronted an ancient force so far beyond her understanding that it triggered a primeval response of fear. She yelled, “Down here! I’m down here!”
Ashura-Goreem released his hold, and Bridget dashed for the ladder. She was halfway up before she dared to peek over her shoulder. The massive and mysterious jinni was gone. Only the round metal vessel remained, its lid unaccountably in place.