Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions

“The Ancients have sent an awful lot of ifrit after me,” Lawrence answers, shoving his hands into his pockets, “and not one of them has asked as many questions as you. Or studied me the way you do. Or wrecked a chance for me to hang out with a guy I honestly like. So what are you really trying to do? Single-handedly wreck my love life?”

“You have a love life?” I ask genuinely.

“Oh come on,” Lawrence says, rolling his eyes. It’s cold out, and cloudy puffs of air emerge from his mouth as he turns to face me. “What do the Ancients want to know? I’ll tell them. I don’t care.”

“Okay . . . they don’t want anything,” I begin slowly. “It’s me. I’m . . . researching love.”

Lawrence gives me a withering look. “The Ancients didn’t send you? You’re messing around in my life to research? You’ve got to be kidding.” The withering look has transformed to frustrated. I speak before it becomes angry.

“Look, you don’t understand. Jinn loving Viola changed things for us, it raised questions. No one understands what it means, if we should be allowed to come here when we aren’t summoned, if we shouldn’t—no one knows anything anymore. I’ll make a deal with you: help me fall in love, and I’ll report back to the Ancients that you don’t need an ifrit guard anymore. You’ll be totally free of us.”

Lawrence’s eyes widen, and he laughs. Loud. He turns his head to the sky and laughs animatedly. I glare at him, fold my arms, and wait till he’s done. When he finally turns back to me, his face is red.

“I don’t see what’s so funny.” I really don’t—I can’t read Lawrence’s wishes, his hopes, his desires, the way I can read those of most mortals. Apparently Jinn taught him how to hide them from us.

“That’s the thing about you guys,” he says, waving a hand at me. “You just don’t get it. People here don’t work the way people work in your world. You can’t analyze and rule and make decisions. And you can’t make someone fall in love.”

“Sure we can. I can make anyone love you, if I want,” I remind him. He gives me a dark look, an almost threatening one, and I press my lips together apologetically.

“That’s magic,” he finally says, and we continue walking toward his dorm. “Not love. And remember—that’s rule number four. You promised.”

“How am I supposed to know the difference between magic and love if no one will show me?” I complain. “You said you have a love life. Are you in love?”

Lawrence grimaces, but doesn’t answer. I repeat the question.

“No,” he finally says. “I’m not.”

“But you want to be.”

“Sure,” he says, opening the door to his dorm.

“With . . . Jeffrey? The guy from tonight?”

Lawrence sighs as we walk down the hall. He doesn’t answer.

LAWRENCE

Of course I want to be in love. Maybe with Jeffrey, maybe not, but with someone. That’s the problem when your best friend is in the middle of her own fairy-tale romance. It means you know that sort of love is real. It means you’re even more aware of how you’ve never been in love, how you’ve never felt sparks or fire or anything other than plain, ordinary lips when you kiss someone.

We walk into my room and Juliet collapses into my desk chair, spins around once with her legs pulled up to her chest. “Could you ever be in love with me?”

I snort before I can stop myself. “No. Sorry.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not attracted to you. Or to girls in general,” I explain.

“That doesn’t make sense though. The storybooks say love knows no obstacles.”

“That’s why they’re shelved in ‘fiction,’ Juliet.”

She doesn’t seem to understand, but nods anyway. “Do you think someone will love me?”

I had a joke all prepared, but it gets caught in my throat. I turn to look at her, eyebrows knitted together. All the power in the world, and jinn are the most naive creatures I’ve ever met.

“I’m sure someone could,” I answer.

She doesn’t seem as certain. Juliet spins around in the chair again, then picks up the ends of her long hair and stares at them. I recognize the look on her face—the one Jinn used to wear when he’d dismay over how he aged while in this world. She scrutinizes how long her hair has grown—a millimeter at most, I imagine—then looks back up at me.

“Some of the Ancients think Jinn was a one-time thing. That mortals won’t love jinn, not normally. That we’re not meant to understand love like you do.”

“Is that what you think?”

“That’s what I’m researching,” she says pointedly. “Come on, help me. Please? I’ll help you. Tell me who you want.”

“No,” I say sternly, quickly. I’ve been under the influence of magic before, been forced to love someone. I’m not at all interested in doing the same to someone else.

“Not like that,” she groans. “But I know what they want. I can tell you what they’re wishing for.”

I stare at my hands. What they want. She can solve the mystery, the thousands of questions that plague me not only about Jeffrey, but about every boy I come across. Are they after me because I’m just the first gay guy they met at college, or because they want what I want?

A love story.

I shouldn’t do this. Viola and Jinn would tell me not to do this.

“How am I supposed to help you?” I ask Juliet cautiously.

“I need to kiss someone.”

“Kiss someone?”

“That’s how it starts. With a kiss. That’s what I need to do.” She seems a little embarrassed, and looks at the floor.

“And you think that’ll help you understand love?”

“You have a better idea?” she asks pointedly, and I shake my head. I suppose I don’t.

“You realize you’ll have to let them see you? That you’ll have to break all sorts of protocols? Won’t the Ancients be furious?”

She nods, looks out the window. “The Ancients don’t have all the answers.”

JULIET

My kind don’t sleep here. Lawrence is curled in bed—he told me not to watch him sleep. I think he knew I was still here, just invisible, but he didn’t say it out loud. I don’t know why I’m staying here, save for the fact that Lawrence feels safer to me than the outside world. I’m a little afraid to go out there without him. Some researcher I am.

I look at the pictures lining his desk. Him and Viola, him and Jinn. I remember Jinn telling me that his favorite times with Viola are when they lie down in bed together and talk and kiss and whisper. Seeing one of my own kind in a photograph, looking so mortal, so imperfect . . . it confuses me. I don’t even understand the appeal of love, if it can make you so flawed. Jinn’s hair is too long, the skin on his arms dappled with an uneven tan. But his right hand is locked firmly in hers, his left arm slung around Lawrence’s shoulder. He was a wish-granter when they met, a servant.

Now he’s a lover. I think that’s what might really bother the Ancients the most: that Jinn chose this world. Chose a mortal. Over Caliban, over beautiful, perfect, ageless Caliban. Maybe it’s like the fairy tales—maybe Jinn kissed Viola, and it broke a spell that made him like the rest of us jinn, a spell that made him not believe in love or fate or romance. It broke the Ancients, broke Caliban itself, broke all the rules.