Chapter 7: A Fantastical Tale

After a huge English breakfast, Holly settled down in the room Nimrod had allowed her to use while they stayed in London, to read her new copy of Arabian Nights. As in every other room that Holly had seen, there was a cheerful fire burning in the grate. Holly thought this to be somewhat strange, it being quite warm outside because of the season. All the same, she found that she liked the fire's presence in her room, and sat in a big, squashy red armchair right beside it and opened her new book.

Holly found that whatever mysterious thing had enabled her to ace her exams had also dramatically improved her reading skills. Where before, Holly would have taken (probably) three weeks to read such a heavy book as the Arabian Nights, Holly managed to read it in less than four hours.

Holly wasn't quite sure what had caused her to become suspicious of the book. Perhaps it was the way that whenever she folded down a corner to keep her place, it had righted itself by the time she looked back, with no indication that it had ever been folded in the first place. Whatever the reason, Holly began to experiment. She tried to tear a page out, but the binding was like iron. She attempted to throw it in the fire, but it just sat among the flames, looking quite unharmed. Frowning, Holly left it there, and lay on her bed, feeling tired.

She must have drifted off for a while, because the next thing she knew was hearing a knock at her door and Cas calling to her.

"Hol! Are you even awake?" He said. Holly groaned, and sat up, rubbing her eyes.

"Yeah, come in!" She called back. Cas entered, carrying his own copy of Arabian Nights.

"Hol, there's something weird about-" he began, but then he saw Holly's book still in the fire, looking quite unharmed. Holly checked her watch. It was now 5:30 in the afternoon.

"It's been in there for a few hours," she commented. "You'd think it would have burned up by now." Carefully, Cas put his own book down on the armchair, took the fire tongs from their hook by the grate, and dragged Holly's book out of the flames, placing it, just as carefully, on the hearth before tentatively feeling the cover.

"No way!" he said incredulously. "It's completely cool! Here, feel it!" Holly got up and went over to feel the cover of her oddly undamaged book.

"You're right, Cas. And it's not been turned to ashes at all! It's exactly like it was when Nimrod pulled it off of the shelf, if a bit less dusty." Holly told her friend.

At that moment, Mark poked his head around the door. "What are you two up to?" he asked them. Holly looked up.

"Have you... er... found anything weird about your copy of Arabian Nights?" she asked her brother. Mark looked around carefully before nodding.

"Now that you mention it, yeah, I have. Is it just me or could you not put it down either?"

"How do you mean?" Holly asked.

"I mean that at times, I felt like I was physically unable to stop reading. Doesn't that sound weird to you?" Mark said.

"You're right, Mark. I actually kind of felt like that sometimes, too. Holly? What about you?" Cas asked.

"I wasn't reading it long enough to notice anything of the sort." Holly replied shortly.

"How long did it take you to read it?" Mark asked incredulously.

"Less than four hours, not much more than three." she said. "Why?"

Mark shook his head. "There is something seriously weird going on here, you know that? A couple weeks ago, there wasn't anything on this earth that could make you read a book that size. And now, well, you read it in record time. That seems a bit fishy to me."

"Fishy how? Can you explain what's been going on?" Holly turned on him.

Mark shook his head again in defeat. "No, no I can't."

A soft knock came at Holly's door, and they all turned to see Philippa standing in the doorway, waiting for them.

"Hi," she said. "Are you coming down for dinner?"

"Yeah," Cas answered, for all of them. "We've got some questions to ask your uncle."

"Just wait a sec," Holly stood up, stretching. "I need to brush my hair. I'll just be a minute."

"We'll wait." Philippa smiled, and waited with Cas and Mark while Holly found her hairbrush, made herself look somewhat presentable, and finally rejoined the others. Philippa then led the three downstairs to the dining room, where Nimrod and John were waiting, apparently having a very animated conversation, Nimrod already carving up what appeared to be a whole, roast goose. It took Holly a few seconds to drag her attention away from the lifeless stare of the goose and realize that both John and Nimrod were speaking in Arabic, apparently without any difficulty. Holly frowned. She only kind of knew how to speak Arabic, and even Mark, who had been learning for the whole of his 22 years, had issues from time to time. John and Nimrod, however, spoke the language perfectly.

"Hi," Holly began tentatively, also in Arabic. "I didn't know that you speak Arabic so well, John. You could have helped me with mine."

"Uh, yeah." John answered a bit guiltily, reverting back to English. "I learned it when I visited Iraq when I was twelve. I would have told you, but it feels too much like bragging."

"Nonsense, John." Nimrod said, also in English. "In any case, come, all of you, and join me at my table." Holly, Cas, Mark, and Philippa sat in the four remaining seats. Holly eyed the spread with some excitement. She had never before seen such a fantastic array of delicious-looking foods. Along with the goose, there was mashed potatoes, green beans, a ham, rolls, seemingly made more out of air than actual bread, and what seemed to be lamb and roast venison. "Go on, tuck in." Nimrod encouraged. "There will be plenty of time to talk after we are all well and truly stuffed. And we have such things to discuss! I can explain to you, or, rather, try to explain, what you, Holly and you, Castiel, are, and speak of a mystery that has been baffling me for quite awhile now." The twins nodded, but Holly glanced at her brother and Cas. A mystery? What she and Cas were? That sounded intriguing.

After they had all (Nimrod included) finished off nearly all of the truly excellent food that had been provided for them to eat, Nimrod sat back into his seat, lit a cigar, and began smoking it with obvious relish. Mark made a face and waved the smoke out of his face, but Holly and Cas stared intently and almost hungrily at the glowing ember at the tip of the cigar, and the smoke it was generating.

"Well, now that we have all satisfied ourselves, I shall begin. Castiel, Holly, listen closely to what I am about to tell you. It is very important that you listen to me, because, I assure you both, I am in complete earnest. Now, are either of you followers of the Islamic religion?" Nimrod blew a smoke ring that was, impressively, shaped like the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

"Mark and I are Muslim, yes." Holly told Nimrod, looking at the already fading smoke ring in admiration. Nimrod nodded approvingly. "Cas is Catholic, though."

"Then you may have already heard some of the story I am about to tell you. Now, when the world was created, the higher power, (we needn't go into who or what exactly this 'higher power' is just now,) made three sorts of beings with a higher intelligence than the rest of creation. These were the angels, made of light, the human beings, made of earth, and the djinn, made of fire. Yes, I did say fire. Now, for the purposes of this discussion, we are mainly concerned with the last group of beings, the djinn. You've all read the Arabian Nights I gave you, correct?"

Holly, Cas, and Mark all nodded. Nimrod blew a smoke ring that was shaped like an old oil lamp, like Aladdin's magic lamp.

"So you doubtless remember the tale of Aladdin and the djinn in the lamp. Well, what I am about to tell you in relation to this will doubtless cause you some pause, but please, believe me. Djinn are quite real. I am a djinn, John and Philippa are djinn, and you, Castiel and Holly, are also djinn. There. The djinn is out of the bottle, so to speak." Nimrod smiled again and waited for what he had said to sink in properly.

"What?!" Cas and Holly burst out in unison, both feeling quite similarly alarmed. But subconsciously, Holly was already accepting this as fact. She had heard her father's stories of how he escaped from Afghanistan because of that English djinn. Her father even spoke English with a very English accent, not generally something that would have necessarily happened if he had learned the language in a more conventional way.

Mark was shaking his head. "That's impossible," he said, frowning. "Holly's my sister- if she were a djinn, as you say she is, then wouldn't I be a djinn as well?"

Nimrod sighed. "It pains me to inform you of this, but I highly doubt that Holly is actually your sister by blood. Her true djinn parents probably hid her away in hopes of protecting her from... something. And the same goes for Castiel. When Fiona Murphy, the best djunior djinnfinder in New York told me that there were two teenaged djinn with mundane parents, of course I was quite intrigued." he explained.

"You mean, Dr. Murphy is a- a what? Is she a djinn, too? But she's just the doctor I go to for my claustrophobia!" Cas protested.

Holly cradled her head in her hands as though she was in some pain. "This is too much it's making my head hurt. You've got to be joking!" She complained.

"No, Holly, I am not joking. And Fiona Murphy, a djinn? Certainly not. She is very human. Fiona is merely a mundane woman who knows of the djinn and how to find them before they get their wisdom teeth out and begin granting wishes unconsciously. And incidentally, intense claustrophobia is typical of djinn. It comes from so many of us being captured by wise men and stuck in bottles."

Holly suddenly remembered something and looked up again, this time at her brother. "Mark! D'you remember, the day I got my wisdoms out, you told me that you wished I was naturally smart?"

"I did, didn't I? And you sort of, well, you looked for a moment as though you had lost something. And then you went and aced all of your exams." Mark recalled.

"And she did, as you put it, 'lose something'. Whenever we djinn grant a wish, a bit of our power goes out to grant that wish." Nimrod nodded.

"Oh! I forgot to tell you guys about the last day of school! I passed Terri and her cronies after my geometry exam, and they didn't even say hi to me. Didn't you wish that they'd leave us alone?" Cas said excitedly, and Holly nodded thoughtfully.

"Yes, this phenomena is what we djinn call 'subliminal wish fulfillment.' It's when a djinn, usually a djunior djinn, hears a wish that they just would dearly like to come true, for the sake of the person making the wish." Nimrod explained. Cas's excited smile melted away.

"If you're really a djinn," he began suspiciously, "can you grant wishes and stuff?"

"Yes indeed. And more. How would you have me prove myself to you? I believe my niece and nephew insisted that I make a rhinoceros appear in the room."

"I remember that!" Smiled John. Philippa frowned.

"Yes. But I don't think a rhino is in order here. I don't much like rhinos." she said. She turned to Holly. "They're a lot bigger and more mean-looking than you might think."

"I believe you." Holly assured her friend.

"What would you suggest, Mark?" Nimrod appealed to him. Mark thought carefully, looking around the dining room.

"All right," he said, once his careful examination of the room was completed. "How about a three-foot-tall olive tree, in a black and orange urn depicting Odysseus' journey in the Underworld- and if you could make it appear on the table in front of- let's see- Holly, then I think that I'd be convinced." For whatever reason, Nimrod's earlier comment about Xenia was still on his mind, and by extension, the epic poem The Odyssey. It was making him have flashbacks to his own freshman year of high school, flashbacks that generally involved being reviled quite viciously as a nerd for actually enjoying the book.

Nimrod puffed again on his cigar, muttered something, and a second later a large Grecian urn, depicting Odysseus' journey through the Underworld, complete with a wizened looking three-foot-tall olive tree appeared with a thump, right before Holly.

"Oh!" Holly jumped at the suddenness of the olive tree's appearance.

"And I can make it vanish as well." Nimrod said, blowing a smoke ring shaped like the urn. A moment later, both the tree and the urn were gone. "Are you quite convinced?" He asked them. Mark nodded, as did Holly and Cas.

"Yes, Nimrod." Mark said, eyes wide with amazement.

"Now for the mystery I mentioned. I must warn you, this may contain a strong element of danger. However, every good adventure should, isn't that right, John?"

John nodded, grinning in anticipation.