Disclaimer: The Bartimaeus Trilogy is the property of Jonathan Stroud

A/N: Thank you all for your reviews! Nari: Your review made my day. *hugs*! Edgestrife: Up until now, I've been representing footnotes with a different devise for each story I write. This time I decided to use square brackets, mainly because I wanted to be able to use round brackets without people assuming it's a footnote. Are the square brackets too annoying? Dyingimmortal, Tane, joeylejoker, Measuringtape, Allendra, and Lisette (Nice to see you, Lisette!) thanks for leaving your comments. Last but not least, thank you to Lady Noir, my awesome beta, for her corrections on this chapter.

The physical appearance of my latest master did little to inspire fear or awe. Not that any of the magicians of present-day England were particularly impressive, but the specimen in the pentacle opposite me was a noteworthy example of just how far London had fallen from power.

For one thing, he was practically a kid. I'd say seventeen at best, and so skinny that he almost disappeared when viewed from the side. The exertion of the summons had left him panting for breath, stringy red hair plastered to the pale freckled skin of his overly large forehead. He stared at Ptolemy with watery bug-eyes, as though he hadn't expected his spell to work. I knew for a certainty that I could make short work of him and be done with it. I had things to do, like finding out where Kitty had gotten to, for instance.

The kid cleared his throat. "Bartimaeus, right?"

Ptolemy tapped his foot impatiently, not dignifying the question with a response. The boy's eyes followed the motion of the bare brown toes, and he suddenly frowned.

"What, pray tell, is that?" He pointed accusingly at the floor beneath my feet. I glanced down. A murky grayish substance, half liquid, half gas, ebbed and flowed around my ankles. Was I leaking essence or something? Wait, no. That wasn't mine…

"Oops, must have had an accident," I said quickly, kicking Kitty's essence out of sight behind me. [1. It would seem that she'd been sloshing between my toes all along, while I had been fretting about her wellbeing. Of course, in hindsight it made sense that she was having trouble holding a form. She'd had little opportunity to practice.] "You know how things are; it's a long trip from the Other Place, and when you've got to go…"

The kid held up his hands. "I don't want to here about it! Do I need to get you house-trained or something?"

"What you need to do," I folded my arms across my chest in an intimidating manner, "is to release me. I'm way out of your league, kid. And even if I wasn't, you'd still be well advised to send me on my way. If I'm not mistaken, there's a national injunction against summoning me. Something about services rendered to humanity? Ring a bell?"

"I'm aware of your exemption from servitude, yes. However, I thought today you could make an exception. You see, I'm a recent member of the police department – hired on the strength of my magic education, you understand. These days there aren't many of us who can still craft a proper summons. So anyways, they've saddled me with my first case, and I'm suddenly in need of a relatively powerful spirit. The problem is: I'm terrible."

I blinked. "Come again?"

"I'm terrible. I can barely keep a mouler under control. I can't count the number of times I've nearly killed myself. My master tried to cover it up when I applied to the police, but the fact is I'm just no good at any of this."

I threw up my arms with a hopeless roll of my eyes. "What a thing to admit to a djinni! What are you, a half-wit? Have you got the faintest idea what we to do to bunglers like you?"

The boy winced. He'd probably had plenty of opportunity to experience exactly what spirits liked to do to incompetent magicians. "Just hang on and let me explain," he said. "There's a reason I chose to summon you in particular–"

"Yes, yes, I know all about it. You heard the story about Kitty, Nat and I; assumed I was a happy, fluffy, human-lover who wouldn't hurt a fly; and figured I'd leave you alone if you summoned me, right? Well, I'm afraid you're out of luck pal, and if you're counting on living another second you'll release me right this minute, because–"

"Stop!" The boy cried. "Just let me explain, alright?" I paused mid-rant and gave him a glare that set him quivering in his ratty tennis shoes. The boy paled and cleared his throat. "Yes," he said meekly, "I know the story about Mandrake and Ms. Jones. Who doesn't? And if you'll only listen for a moment, that's the reason you're here. The case I've been assigned to is the Kathleen Jones murder case."

Murder. Kitty had been killed then. I sensed the grayish slosh behind me grow restless at the news.

"The Kathleen Jones murder case," I repeated. "Kitty was murdered?" The boy nodded.

"And they assigned you the case?" Hesitant, the boy nodded again.

"You. A spotty-faced kid with zero field experience and pathetic magical ability, in charge of investigating the death of a national hero and worldwide celebrity?"

Wide-eyed and pasty, the boy gave a barely perceptible nod.

"Do you have a name, kid?"

"J-James Bostwick, sir," he stammered. I rocked back on my heels and looked him over.

"Well, Jimmy my friend; it seems you're going to need all the help you can get."

oooooooooooooo

Kitty did her best to refrain from speaking as Bartimaeus and the young magician casually discussed her recent demise. The last thing she wanted was for Bostwick to discover that he had inadvertently summoned two spirits to his side. The boy seemed innocuous enough, but it was better safe than sorry wherever perpetual enslavement was concerned. Thus, she held her tongue and tried to concentrate on the bizarre sensation of being utterly formless.

"I'd like you to accompany me to the funeral this afternoon," Bostwick was saying. Idly, Kitty wondered how much time had past since her death. It must have been quite some time ago if the funeral was already being arranged. She let her essence spread over the ground, a thin coating of steaming silver liquid that stopped abruptly at the pentacle's edges.

Would the pentacle contain her, or did it only bind Bartimaeus? With a surge of curiosity, she let herself trickle over the intricate chalk symbols and onto the unmarked wooden floor beyond.

"Please remain in this room until I come for you." She heard Bostwick say. The gangly boy made a quick gesture to release the djinni from the pentacle, then stepped over Kitty with a grimace of distaste, and left the room.

As soon as the door clicked shut, Bartimaeus leapt from the chalk circle and crouched down beside her drifting form.

"Kitty, stop that! He's going to notice a creeping puddle sliding all over his floor!"

She drew herself up into a semi-solid silver mound. "I was able to leave the pentacle," she mused, ignoring Bartimaeus' objections, "so I must not be included in the spell."

The djinni grimaced and stuck out his tongue. "Yeah, yeah, you're very lucky. Unlike some of us poor, abject, slaves."

"But why? I was dragged here too. If your master summoned me, then shouldn't I be bound to serve him too?"

"Yes, if he summoned you. Which he obviously didn't." The Egyptian boy sat back on his heels and eyed her speculatively. "That kid definitely wasn't expecting you, so there's no way he called you here. My guess is that the Other Place expelled you after your host, i.e. moi, disappeared – just as spirits are expelled from Earth when their Masters are killed."

"I see. When you were summoned, my link to the Other Place was severed and I was sent back."

The Egyptian boy nodded approvingly. "You've got it. And now you're back home, just as free as when you were alive."

"Alive," Kitty repeated somewhat dejectedly. "I still can't believe I'm dead. Why would someone try to kill me?"

"Are you kidding?" The djinni stared at her with a raised brow. "You've got more enemies then I can count. Let's see," The djinni held up a hand and began counting off on his fingers. "There's the dispossessed magicians who blame you for the fall of their empire, the hard-line rebels who think you sold out by working with a magician, the foreign leaders who see you as the only thing preventing the total collapse of their enemy nation, the politicians who see you as a political rival, the commoners who are scared by your frequent promotion of djinn rights, not to mention all of my enemies who hate you for associating with me…"

"Okay, okay, I get the picture!" Kitty had sunk lower at each new item on the list, and was now spread flat over the floor like a metallic pancake. Bartimaeus looked down at her sympathetically.

"Poor you; everyone's on your back and here you are, all blobbish and disembodied. Why don't you try taking a proper form?"

"I'm not particularly good at it, as I'm sure you remember," Kitty grunted.

The condescending twist of the djinni's mouth told Kitty he remembered quite clearly and fondly, and if she'd had proper arms, she would have slapped that knowing smirk right off his face.

"Well," Bartimaeus replied, "I'm afraid you don't have much choice any more. Your body's gone and you have to make do. You're practically a spirit now, in fact. No one is going to hand you a form on a silver platter; you've got to make one yourself."

"Far easier said then done," Kitty sniffed.

"All it takes is a little concentration. Remember how you used to look and focus your essence into the shape."

Kitty tried, she really did. She could see her old face in her mind's eye, hovering before her like a spectre. She even managed to pull herself into a basic bipedal form that rather resembled a starfish, but no matter how hard she tried to hold it together, the shape melted like jell-o in the hot sun and her essence ran in sticky silver rivulets through the shallow ruts in the floorboards.

"This is hopeless," she moaned.

"Nonsense, you almost had it a moment ago. All you need is a little practice."

The Egyptian boy's head suddenly perked up at the approach of awkward adolescent footsteps that echoed softly down the hallway.

"Oops, looks like we're out of time." In a blinking, the djinni was rifling through the contents of the shabby desk in the corner, and unscrewing the lid of a small bottle of paste.

"Get in," he ordered, dumping out as much of the stringy white contents as possible.

"What?" Kitty balked.

"Now!" He swept up the silvery essence through the mouth of the bottle, and suddenly Kitty found herself in the smallest, stickiest space she had ever been crammed into in her life.

Her vision was cut off abruptly as Bartimaeus slipped the paste bottle into the back pocket of Ptolemy's pants, just as the door creaked open.

"Alright," Bostwick's voice was difficult to discern through the bottle's thick glass walls. "Let's go. We have a funeral to attend."