djinn wars 01 - chosen (37 page)

He seemed to recognize that I needed some time alone, because he didn’t protest, only said, “Of course,” and went to get his neglected cup of coffee. I realized then that I’d only had a few sips out of mine. Oh, well. I didn’t want to have to go past him to retrieve my mug, so I wrote it off as a loss and went to put on my coat and gloves.

The djinn didn’t try to follow me.

The cold air was bracing, but it didn’t do a lot to clear my mind or settle the thoughts that kept racing through it. I gathered eggs mechanically, placing them in the basket with practiced care, the familiar stink of the henhouse around me. Glancing down, I realized it would need to be shoveled again soon. If I asked Jasreel to do it, would he? He’d handled the distasteful chore ever since my one disastrous attempt to handle it, but that was back when he was still trying to convince me he wasn’t anyone except a guy from the pueblo, someone who was used to taking on a good deal of manual labor.

Maybe he can just wave his hands and have all this bird poop and dirty straw magically disappear
, I thought.
That would be convenient.

Problem was, I didn’t know if his powers — whatever they were, exactly — worked that way.

But even as I pondered such trivialities, my thoughts kept dancing around the real question, the one I didn’t know if I could ever answer.

Can I forgive him?

Because it wouldn’t be simply forgiving the lies he’d told me. To a certain extent, I could understand why he’d done that. If he’d been watching me for some time, studying me before he made me his Chosen, then he would have known I wasn’t the type of person who watched the skies for UFOs or believed in ghosts or any of that other “woo-woo stuff,” as my friend Tori used to put it. A djinn? I probably would have burst out laughing — if I hadn’t unloaded my shotgun into him first, just to be safe. True, if I’d done that and he’d survived unscathed, then maybe I would have started to believe in his supernatural origins.

No, forgiveness would have to go far, far beyond that. He’d protested that he couldn’t stop the Dying, couldn’t have kept his people from unleashing their terrible virus on the world. Maybe not; I’d seen this Zahrias, the de facto leader of my little part of the world, and if he was any indicator of the type of people the djinn had running things, then I could understand how pleas for mercy would have fallen on extremely deaf ears. Even so, many would say Jasreel still was guilty by association. It was the djinn who had done this terrible thing, and he was a djinn.

All right, most people would probably think that way. But I wasn’t a lot of people. I was me. I had to make this decision for myself, based on what my heart and my gut and my mind told me.

And what they were telling me was that Jasreel loved me. He couldn’t save everyone, but he could save me. And he had. He’d saved me, and he’d shown, day in and day out, that he cared for me. In little things, like always making sure he helped clear the table, even though the dishes were my bailiwick, and properly sorting his dirty clothes into the correct bins in the laundry room so I wouldn’t have to do it. Bigger things, like that Christmas tree and the aforementioned mucking-out of the henhouse.

The biggest of all…watching over me, keeping me safe, all along knowing that we weren’t precisely equals, that he was a being of vastly more power and experience. And yet he had never talked down to me, never discounted my suggestions, always took me seriously. If that wasn’t love and respect, what was?

Well, it sounded as if I’d answered my own question.

Feeling lighter by roughly a hundred pounds, I headed back to the house and let myself in the back door, through the mudroom. I scraped off my boots, set down the basket of eggs before I took off my jacket, and then went into the kitchen. Jasreel wasn’t there, but I noticed that he’d cleaned out his coffee mug and put it on the dish drain. That wasn’t just sucking up, either; he always cleaned up after himself.

“Jasreel?” I called out, the syllables of his proper name feeling strange on my tongue.

“In the living room,” he replied.

I wondered what he was doing there. Figuring I’d find out soon enough, I headed in that direction. He was standing in front of the fireplace, which we had going pretty much twenty-four/seven these days. In his right hand he held a log, so it appeared he’d gone in to stoke up the blaze. Dutchie was lying next to him, patting at his leg with one paw. Obviously, someone thought it was time for a belly rub.

Smothering a smile, I said, “So….”

“So?” He set the log on the fire and turned toward me, disrupting the dog’s pant-pawing. She gave me a disgusted look and rolled away from Jasreel, toward the hearth.

“So…I’ll go to Taos with you. If you think it’s for the best.”

An expression of such joy spread over his face that, for an instant, all my doubts and worries deserted me. Surely no one who could look like that would ever mean me any kind of harm. He came to me and cupped my cheeks in his hands, turning my face up toward him.

“You’re sure?”

Was I? His fingers were warm on my face, reassuring, strong but gentle. No one had ever touched me like that. No one except Jace…Jasreel.

I nodded.

He bent and kissed me then, and it was the first time I had kissed this version of him, the first time I had felt the contours of this particular mouth, the taste of this tongue. Not so very different from “Jace,” but different enough that I had to remind myself that it was still him, still the man who had kissed me before, who had made love to me on those cold winter mornings and stood laughing in a field after a billy goat knocked me on my rear end.

But then I felt his body go rigid, and he took a step away from me, one hand going to his throat.

“What is it?” I asked, reaching out to hold on to his fingers. They felt like ice.

His hands had always been warm. Always, no matter how cold it might be outside, as if the weather didn’t affect him the same way it affected me.

“Can’t…breathe….”

I put my hand on his chest, felt his heart beating wildly within, felt him laboring to pull in a breath. Which he did, a short, shallow gasp. Better than nothing, but it didn’t explain what was happening to him.

Dutchie got to her feet, nose pointed toward the doorway. A low, penetrating growl emerged from her throat, and her ears flattened against her head.

What the —

I didn’t have time to complete the thought, because in the next second, the front door was flung open, and a group of seven men wearing parkas and heavy boots burst into the living room. Six of them carried guns, and the seventh some sort of strange device, no more than a little black box, really, with lights that seemed to flicker deep within it, as if buried under a layer of dark translucent plastic.

The scream that had been building in my throat died when one of the men with the guns stepped forward and said, “It’s all right, Ms. Monroe. We’re only here for him.” He pointed at Jasreel, who had taken a step backward, toward the hearth. Sweat was beginning to drip down his temples.

“Who — what — ” I swallowed, knowing I had to keep it together, at least until I found out what the hell was going on. I began again. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

He nodded at the men who flanked him, most of whom were large, burly types, the kind of guys who once upon a time probably could have been found drinking beer at some back-road dive bar. They went to Jasreel and surrounded him, then began dragging him back toward the man in charge and the other one, the one holding that strange box. He, unlike his compatriots, was slender, of average height, and wore wire-rimmed glasses. Despite the commotion around him, he didn’t look up from the box he held, kept his fingertips moving over the surface, as if controlling it via touchpad.

The leader, who held himself like a military man and had the short-cropped hair to match, said, “Ms. Monroe, we’re survivors from Los Alamos. We’re collecting as many of these scum as we can” — a jerk of his chin in Jasreel’s direction— “and are putting them on trial for crimes against humanity. Seems the least we can do, in the name of those who are no longer around to seek justice.”

My mouth was so dry it physically hurt to swallow. But somehow I forced myself to do just that, even as I sent an agonized glance toward Jasreel. He had gone pale under his olive-toned skin, his breath coming in short, labored pants. What the hell were they doing to him?

“He’s not guilty,” I managed to get out. “He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“Beg to differ, miss.” The leader of the Los Alamos gang gave a faint nod, and the four men holding him began to drag Jasreel out the front door.

“No!” I began to move after them, but another of the group, one of the two men flanking the guy with the black box, took me by the arm.

“I wouldn’t,” he said in a murmur. “Right now you have the benefit of the doubt, but….” He let the words die away, but I got his meaning. It was Jasreel these men were after, not me. The last thing I should be doing was provoking them.

I gave the fair-haired man, who seemed to be about my age or a little more, the faintest of nods, then held my position, just a few feet away from the guy in charge. “What proof do you have that he’s guilty of anything?”

“His nature is proof enough.” He gave another of those chin-jerks at the man with the black box and the two men with him. For the first time, the one wearing glasses looked up from his device, whatever it was, then gave a faint nod, right before they went out the front door. The blond one gave me a warning glance before he turned and took up the rear, as if to tell me that I needed to stay put and keep my mouth shut.

Fat chance of that. Instead, I followed them. As soon as I was outside, the chilly air seemed to bite at me, piercing the thermal shirt I wore, but I ignored the momentary discomfort. Parked a little ways down the drive were two Hummers, one bright yellow, the other red. Clearly, these were some of the vehicles “liberated” from Santa Fe and the surrounding area.

I could see Jasreel being bundled into the yellow Hummer and cursed mentally. What was I supposed to do? There were seven of them — all right, the guy with the box seemed peculiarly uninterested in his surroundings and kept fiddling with the device, whatever it was, so maybe he wasn’t much of a threat — but the rest of them were all big enough to take me individually, let alone as a group. And all my weapons were currently locked up in the gun safe.

The leader of the group paused and glanced down at me, seeming to really assess my appearance for the first time. He didn’t leer, but I could see the look in his eyes take on a certain glint. “You should come with us,” he said casually. “We’re trying to in-gather as many of the Immune as we can. You’d be safe with us in Los Alamos. We can protect you.”

For a second, I actually considered it. Not because I wanted to go with this bastard and his crew, but because that way I’d be closer to Jasreel. I’d still have to figure out some way to free him, but I thought attempting a rescue would be a lot easier if I were nearby.

No, beloved.

The words were barely more than a gasp in my mind. I couldn’t speak aloud, not with the leader of the band of thugs standing close by, so in desperation I tried to respond the same way. Amazingly, it seemed to work.

But I want to stay with you!

You will be…better able to help me if you stay away from them, and free.

How?

You will need assistance…and you will not be able to get it if you come with me to Los Alamos now. I do not think they intend to kill me right away.

And that’s supposed to be reassuring?

Yes, beloved.

I had to ask.
How are we doing this?

The bond between us. They have trapped me here on this plane, cut off my powers, but I can still speak to you thus. At least —

But then the thought-speech abruptly broke off, and I realized it must have been because they’d finally hauled Jasreel into the Hummer and shut the door behind him. So our mental connection was limited — by space, and by physical barriers.

Luckily, the entire exchange had taken place in less time than the blink of an eye.

“Thanks for the offer,” I told the leader, my tone as casual as I could make it, as if I hadn’t just held a desperate mental dialogue with their captive. “But I’ve got goats and chickens to tend. I think I’ll stay right here.”

His eyes narrowed. “You sure? It’s not safe for a woman alone.”

And I’d be so much safer in Los Alamos. Right.
Evenly, I replied, “I’ll take my chances.”

A long hesitation, and I worried that he might try to force me into the other Hummer. But then he shrugged and said, “Door’s always open. Come find us there when you’re ready.”

I nodded, and he seemed to take that as the conclusion of our conversation, because he signaled the three men still waiting outside to get in the red Hummer. Immediately afterward, he crossed to the vehicle and climbed in the passenger seat. A slap on the door, and both vehicles moved off, heading down the drive and out through the gate, which I noticed was standing wide open. They must have shorted out the mechanism or something, although that should have triggered the alarm system. Then again, I didn’t know what the black box the weedy-looking man had been holding could do. Maybe it could simultaneously short out the alarm and somehow trap Jasreel here in this world, with no hope of escape. Or maybe one of the men in the Hummers had just stepped out and clipped a couple of wires.