Magic Gone Wild Read Online Free

so it blended in with the snow, which hopefully would prevent the mortal from freaking out.
    “Why can’t I move?”
    Well, freaking out more than he already was.
    Normally, she’d try to whisk the snow and bunny away, but she didn’t want to tempt Karma by attempting too much. Instead, she went with something light and easy. A little puff of a kiss managed to transport her pendant off the pouffe beside her bed and into her hand. She dangled the pink tourmaline in front of her, swinging it side to side. “You’re getting sleepy. Verrrry sleepy.”
    “Are you serious?” At least that got him to stop struggling. The sword, however, was still swaying. “Who do you think you are, Freud? Snow White?”
    She dropped her arm. If she was Snow White, that must make him Grumpy. Which wasn’t helping matters.
    She kissed the pendant into a shimmer of pink Glimmer and sighed. “I told you. I’m Vana. Short for Nirvana.”
    “Nirvana? Seriously?”
    She didn’t kid about her name. Nirvana Aphrodite. It was a mouthful—and a lot of pressure. As if her parents had set her up to fail. Poor DeeDee, her twin, had the unluckier name of Aphrodite Nirvana, but she certainly hadn’t failed. No, DeeDee had the winning thing down pat. Enough for both of them, which balanced the cosmic scales.
    At least, that’s what Vana kept telling herself. She’d tried telling it to her parents, but they hadn’t bought it. Not their daughter. No sirree.
    “Ahem. Yes, my name is Nirvana. Nirvana Aphrodite, and, before you say it…” She held up her hand, knowing what he was going to say the minute his mouth opened. Over the past eight hundred years she’d heard it more times than she cared to count. “I do know I have a lot to live up to.” Her name was only one of a long list.
    “Your parents were either hippies or Greek scholars.”
    “Something like that.” The fact that her mother actually had been a scholar in Greece—ancient Greece—would probably fall on the TMI list should she choose to reveal it.
    She’d learned a long time ago not to. People tended to believe the genie thing once she poofed a couple of items into existence—gold typically being the first choice—but the whole immortality issue usually freaked them out.
    Go figure. It wasn’t as if they had to deal with immortality, since they tended not to live longer than it took her to age a few months, but when she started talking about Galileo and da Vinci as contemporaries, mortals looked at her as if she had two heads.
    The one time she’d managed to duplicate her own head on her shoulders—not on purpose, of course—hadn’t exactly been her best moment.
    “So Nirvana—”
    “I prefer Vana.” Fewer expectations to live up to that way.
    And fewer to fall short of.
    He arched an eyebrow at her. It gave him kind of a rakish look, like d’Artagnan. That was a major compliment ’cause that guy had been a babe . There was a reason the story of the king’s most famous Musketeer had been passed down through the ages, and without much fictionalization. D’Artagnan had had enough charisma to fill a ballroom and the looks to go with it. She’d swooned into his arms like half the female population. What a time to have been in France.
    “Fine. Vana. What’s going on? Why can’t we move? Where are we? Why is there snow?”
    Vana fiddled with the knickers of her fencing uniform. Ugh. So far from Ungaro’s designs it wasn’t funny, and the uniform didn’t even keep the snow off her legs.
    Ah, snow. Cold. That could explain it.
    “Well, um, I think, on account of the snow, that we’re, uh, frozen in place.”
    His other eyebrow went north, too.
    Okay, that wasn’t going to fly—
    Ah, but she was about to.
    Her magic kilim glided out from under the snow, shook itself off like a puppy, whisked her off her feet, and zipped her over to him.
    “Care to hop on?” First time today the magic had gone her way.
    “What the hell? Hop on ? A carpet? A flying carpet?