Em followed me into the living room. I stopped, and she bumped into my back. Standing in the middle of the room was a life-sized statue of Emily made of multicolored glass rock. Rockslide even included the ridiculous backpack. It was just as she’d looked when she came into the apartment.

“That’s unreal,” Em said.

“True,” Rockslide said, “tis only a facsimile. I do not have the power to bring thee to life.”

“Yeah,” I said, “he either doesn’t understand modern English, or he’s a savant at trolling.”

Em didn’t say anything else. The way her face reflected in the facets of her fake face disconcerted me. It looked like she was looking into some kind of infinite fun-house mirror.

“So, Rockslide,” I said. “Why’d you make that?”

Rockslide trembled, and the orange fluid that always leaked from him flew around the room. If he kept this shit up, I was going to rename him to Marmaduke. Where the fluid landed, new growths of stone formed.

“Thy realm is filled with so many wondrous things,” he said. “I thought, perhaps, I might copy some for mine own abode.”

He pointed to the larger rocks in the room. It was fucking crazy. I could tell that they were being shaped into replicas of my sofa, coffee table, lazy chair, and for some damn reason, the T.V. The fucking demon was copying my whole house.

“Ok,” I said, “I get it, you like my stuff. But why did you make a copy of Em?”

“Em?” Rockslide said.

“Emily!” I said. “You know, the woman here in this room!”

Both Em and Rockslide jumped at the volume of my words. I knew I was being fucked with. There was no way the fucker could be this dense.

“Now,” I continued, “why did you make a statue of her?”

Rockslide shifted like a toddler caught in the cookie jar. “I thought thou might wish to visit my home if I made it more like thine own. You spend a great deal of time with Emily Anderson, so…”

“Wait,” Em said. “You wanna have a sleepover?”

“And,” I added, “you thought a statue of Em would make me want to come over? Just get a PS4 dude, and I’m there.”

Em swatted me. “Why not just invite me to come over too?”

Rockslide’s eyes lit up. Like, literally, they lit the fuck up. “Wouldst thou wish it? Thou seemed ill contented when last you visited.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “When all this shit with Haliniel and Jinn is done, we’ll come over and chill.”

Rockslide looked at his smoldering statues and rocks. He raised his head to me, a frown marring his terrifying face.

“Not literally chill,” I said. “For fuck’s sake, I meant to hang out.”

Rockslide looked around. “Out of where?”

“You know what,” I said. “It’s time to get you caught up on the lingo. You ready to learn about Netflix?”

It took a while, but I finally figured out how to route my internet from the real world to this one. To be fair, it was Emily who figured it out. I connected a thread woven of pretty much every color in existence to the end of the internet cable in the real world and connected it to my Abued, then joined another one to the back of my T.V.

I looked at the data being transferred through my magic cables. It shocked me to see how much internet traffic looked like the threads of chance that made up the world.

I loaded up Scrubs and a few other shows and put them on shuffle. I doubted Rockslide would understand the concept of linear television. He seemed utterly amazed by the pretty flickering images, and when I turned the sound on, he was entranced.

“He really does seem like a child,” Em said.

“In a lot of ways, he is,” I said. “He’s been trapped in his domain for a long time. He wasn’t even really sentient.”

“No?” Em said.

“Think of it as Windows 3.0 versus Windows 10. His entire existence revolved around waiting to be commanded. There was no intuition or personality.”

“So, what’s different now?” Em said.

I looked at Rockslide. He sat in front of the T.V., enraptured by the shows. Unlike Haliniel, nothing he’d done so far hinted at any real animosity toward humans. He despised the Malak, but that was probably because he’d been indoctrinated to hate them from his very inception. After all, the war was really between the Shaytan and the Malak. Humans were, at best, a tool, and, at worst, a distraction. It was likely he’d never interacted with humanity before Em and me. Even his language hinted at second-hand knowledge.

“I gave him a name,” I said, finally. “You’ve read The Dresden Files; names have power. But, instead of giving people the ability to do things to you, I think the real power of names is that they are the basis of our identities. You can say a gem is a gem, and it doesn’t mean anything, but the second you say it’s a diamond, or emerald, or whatever, everyone knows exactly what you’re talking about. When I named Rockslide, he became an individual and not just a Shaytan.”

“So,” Em said, “when you called him Rockslide, you installed a shitload of updates?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “And now he’s figuring out who he is. Which, apparently, is a rock sculpting rock with an affinity for getting on my nerves. Speaking of getting on my nerves, where’s Rawlins?”

“He went home,” Em said.

“Good,” I said. “Maybe that means the whole being assigned to us thing is bullshit.”

Em shook her head. “No, there’s a squad car parked across the street. But, at least he’s being obvious about watching us.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Let’s go get some work done.”

We walked the few steps to my office, and Em laughed when I opened the door.

“Now, this is more what I expected,” she said, gazing at the nerditude on display. “Oh, I left the books in the living room.”

I watched her walk out, but didn’t think for a second she forgot the books. My guess would be she just wanted another look at the statue. Hell, I didn’t blame her. Rockslide captured her essence pretty well. I succumbed to a bit of jealousy. I mean, I named him, right? It passed quickly, though, once I remembered the whole point behind him doing it was to please me. I was warming up to the idea of having Rockslide fawning over me.

“God, these things are heavy,” Em said, coming back into my office. “Thanks for the help, by the way.”

I jumped to her side and took the weight of the bag. It actually was pretty damn heavy, but being the manly man I was, I only whined a little when I dragged the bag to my desk.

“Quit it,” Em said. “I’m the one who had to lug them up the stairs, then pack them back up to bring them in here.”

“You shouldn’t have dumped them out then,” I said.

“Bite me,” she said.

I cleared a space on my desk, and Em started unpacking the books. They looked old, but not Lord of the Rings scrolls old. She arranged them in an incomprehensible order and stood aside, smiling.

“You look pleased,” I said. “What are they?”

Her smile faltered. “Books on genies, dummy. I scoured every antique book store I could find for these.”

“Do they have any good information?”

Em bit her lower lip. “Well, I haven’t gone through most of them. That first one,” she pointed to the largest of the books, “is the one that described the Abued. But it’s hard to read. It was translated from an old Arabic tome, and the language is…funny.”

“Arabic?” I said.

“Yeah, all the names and stuff you’ve told me had a middle-eastern feel. So I went looking specifically for anything that might have originated from the middle east and a few Egyptian ones as well.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “One of the memories I got mentioned Anubis, and Rockslide all but admitted his overlord was called Osiris at one point. Even the Alharan Almuqadas are probably the pyramids at Giza.”

“Let me check something,” Em said. She typed something into her phone and started reading furiously. “So, they speak Egyptian Arabic in Egypt, but standard Arabic is still the official language. They’ve been speaking it since about the seventeenth century.”

“That meshes with what Haliniel said,” I said. “The chosen update their speech with the times, but they sometimes get stuck in the past. Like Rockslide and that ghetto Shakesperian English.”

“What’s crazy,” Em said, still reading on her phone. “is that Djinn are prominent figures in at least two mythologies, Islam and Egyptian. Even Muhamad feared his revelations might be the influence of Djinn. Based on your memories, the entire Egyptian mythos might have its origins in the Muqadas Nasi.”

“This is fascinating,” I said, “but it doesn’t really matter. I’ve got a date with a soon to be pissed of Malak, and I’d like to know how to not die.”

“But,” Em said, “can you die? I mean, you’re pretty sure Jinn isn’t dead, and you pumped a whole lot of whoop-ass into her.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “The way I think it works is that when a Jinn is killed, their spirits get recycled. So the power is never lost, leaving the balance unchanged. Alqanun don’t have that luxury because we’re created outside of the balance. It’s almost paradoxical. Our existence fucks the Universal Probability, but our sole purpose is to safeguard it. Let’s see if any of those books tell us how to kill a god.”