djinn wars 01 - chosen (38 page)

In a minute or two, I’d have to go inspect the gate and see if what they’d done was anything I could fix. In a minute or two, I’d have to take Dutchie back into the house and lock up, and pray that no unfriendly eyes had seen me in my current vulnerable state.

Right then, though, I could only stand there in the driveway and feel the icy tears roll down my cheeks, stinging in the bitter wind that was blowing down from the north. Jasreel was gone.

I turned so I faced west, in the direction the vehicles had disappeared. And although I knew he couldn’t hear me, I still sent the words out to him, letting them ride on the wind.

I will find you…beloved.

Turn the page for a sneak peek at the next book in The Djinn Wars,
Taken
, due out in April 2015.

Sneak Peek: Taken

I don’t know how long I stood out in the icy air, feeling the wind whip at my loose hair, tears seeming to freeze on my cheeks. Overhead, the sky grew darker and darker, a bruised-looking mass of clouds building from out of the northeast.

It was Dutchie who brought me back to myself, stirring me out of my frozen misery. She thrust a cold, wet nose into one palm and whined, her head cocked to one side. I forced myself to look down. The dog didn’t look particularly troubled, although I could tell she wanted to go back in the house. Some time would have to pass before she realized that Jasreel hadn’t gone off with those men just to shoot dinner. After all, Jace often disappeared for hours to go hunting, and he didn’t always take Dutchie with him. Most of the time, but not always.

“Okay, girl,” I told her. We did need to go inside. I had to regroup, figure out what to do next. Standing out here in the freezing air and making myself sick wasn’t going to do any of us any good.

Before I went inside, though, I walked down to the gate and inspected the mechanism. As I’d feared, a few wires were hanging out of the box that controlled it, which meant the gate was now basically useless. I didn’t know the first thing about electronics, or soldering, or whatever else I’d have to do to fix it.

But there are manuals and all kinds of equipment here at the compound, so don’t give up before you’ve even gotten started.

That sounded great. Except right then I wasn’t sure I could even summon the energy to feed myself later that evening, let alone teach myself enough about wiring that I could actually manage to repair the gate and not blow myself up in the meantime.

Shivering, I pushed the gate shut. It was heavy, and I had a feeling the next morning my muscles would let me know about the way I’d overexerted them, but closing the gate at least gave the illusion of security, if not the real thing.

“Come on, Dutchie,” I said, and began the weary trudge up the hill to go back inside the house. She trotted along next to me, looking a little worried, although that might have been me projecting my own emotions on her.

What in the world was I supposed to do now?

One step at a time. Up the hill. Inside the house. Close the door and lock it. The thugs from Los Alamos must have picked the lock or used the black box to open the door or whatever, because the lock did still work.

And now I was — well, I wouldn’t say I was exactly feeling better, but at least I wasn’t inviting incipient frostbite. Around me, everything looked familiar, unchanged. The fire still crackled in the hearth, and the air was spicy with the scent of the Christmas tree that stood in the corner.

The tree. I went to it and inhaled its fragrance, reached out to touch its soft needles. Jace — Jasreel — had brought me that tree. He’d brought it because he loved me.

That was all it took. The tears I’d forced back returned with a vengeance, coursing down my cheeks as my fingers clenched so tightly on one of the popcorn strands surrounding the Christmas tree that it broke, sending soft white kernels falling to the floor.

Shit. I dropped to my knees, attempting to gather them all up. What if that was one of the strands Jace had made? I had hardly anything left of him, and now I’d just broken something he’d created.

You don’t know that,
I tried to scold myself.
You made twice as many as he did, since he was eating almost as much as what ended up on the tree.

Unbidden, a smile came to my lips, even through the tears. I remembered him sitting on the couch, dark eyes guiltily shifting to me as at least one kernel went in his mouth for every one he strung on the thread I’d given him.

How could he be so human? Were the djinn really all that different from us, or had he perfected the guise of humanity better than most of them?

I didn’t know, and right then, I didn’t care. The only thing I knew was that I loved him, and he’d been taken from me.

Rage began to build in me at that thought. Well, that was right on schedule, wasn’t it? First denial, and then anger. But I didn’t want to come to acceptance, once the fury had burned its way through me. I’d never accept the way the gang from Los Alamos had stolen Jasreel from me. They had no right. He’d done nothing, had done what he could to prevent the Dying. And when it was clear that he’d been overruled in that debate, he’d somehow chosen me from all the survivors, had made sure I would be safe.

The djinn were responsible, but not all of them. It seemed clear enough to me that was a fine point of distinction the Los Alamos people didn’t want to make. Much easier to lump them all together and assign them a blanket designation of guilt, right?

I turned away from the tree and went down the hall to the guest bathroom so I could splash some water on my face and blow my nose. Dutchie followed partway but stopped outside, since she knew she wasn’t allowed in the bathroom.

The simple actions helped a little. Not completely, but at least I felt as if I had a slightly stronger grip on my emotions. Crying wasn’t going to change anything. I wouldn’t feel bad for having a temporary meltdown, but on the other hand, I knew I had to get myself together and figure out what to do next.

It was only a little before noon. Strange how my life could be changed so utterly before the day was even half over.

As I looked down at her, Dutchie gave me a half-hopeful tail thump.

“Close enough,” I told her, going to fetch a cupful of food from the big bag of dry food in the pantry.

Feeding the dog helped me to calm down that much more. Jasreel was gone, but I still had Dutchie to take care of, and I needed to take care of myself, too. I needed to be in the very best fighting trim possible so that when I went to bust out Jace, I wouldn’t have self-sabotaged by moping around and not eating, or drinking too much, or whatever else I felt like doing at that particular moment.

Although my appetite had completely deserted me, I made myself eat some leftover sausage and baked macaroni. I remembered sitting down and having that meal only a few nights earlier, recalled the way Jace and I had laughed and plotted and planned for the coming spring, how we’d realized we should make another foray to Home Depot to scoop up any seeds and other useful gardening items that the gleaners had left behind.

Well, now at least I knew who those gleaners were. The people from Los Alamos.

How many of them were there? The leader of the group had said they were trying to in-gather as many as they could, but that meant nothing to me. New Mexico hadn’t been a densely populated state even at its peak. Altogether, there were probably a few thousand survivors of the Dying, but how many of those had the vengeful djinn picked off before they could make it to this supposed haven in Los Alamos?

I wasn’t sure I wanted to guess, but between that and the inevitable disease and accidents that occurred after any great cataclysm, I estimated maybe a thousand were still alive. Of those survivors, I doubted all of them would have made their way to that small town, built on several plateaus nestled in the Jemez Mountain range. So possibly…five hundred? Six hundred?

That didn’t sound like a whole lot, but it was still five hundred of them up against just me.

Trying not to sigh, I forced down the leftovers, ignoring Dutchie as she settled near the base of the chair and waited to see if I’d have any scraps to give her when I was done. I also tried to ignore the thoughts that swirled around in my brain, telling me that Jace had been wrong and that the Los Alamos crew was going to execute him just as soon as they cleared space on the hanging tree or whatever they planned to use to rid themselves of their captured djinn.

Could
you even execute a djinn? That is, Jace had definitely felt real enough; I’d kissed him, touched him, made love to him. His body certainly seemed human, at least in every aspect that mattered to me. Some of that could have been subterfuge, but not all; when he’d given up his assumed identity of Jason Little River, Jasreel still looked human, just different from the young man I’d first come to know.

But he’d made mention of being trapped on this plane by the device the man in the glasses had been carrying, which meant Jace had the ability to move from this world to others, planes of existence I could barely begin to imagine. So maybe that body was real while he was here, but changed into something else when he wasn’t on the corporeal plane?

Just trying to figure that out made my head hurt. I’d never believed in ghosts and spirits, psychics and channeling and all that stuff. I believed in what I could see, could touch. Well, I’d seen Jace floating above the living room floor, so I knew he wasn’t an ordinary man. And I’d touched him, so I also knew he was real. Ergo, there were things in heaven and earth that certainly had never been dreamt of in my philosophy…at least not until the Dying changed the world irrevocably.

I threw Dutchie one last scrap of sausage that I’d saved specifically for her, then went to rinse off my plate. As I did so, my brain kept working away at the problem. The leader of the group from Los Alamos had said that Jace would be put on trial for his supposed crimes. Would that trial be real, or at least a facsimile of real one, with a prosecutor and a defense attorney and all that? Or would they dispense with the niceties, declare him guilty after a sham trial, and string him up anyway?

The thought crossed my mind that I could go to Los Alamos and offer myself as Jasreel’s defender. Never mind that everything I knew about courtroom procedures I’d gleaned from watching episodes of
Law and Order
or, even more improbably,
Drop Dead Diva
. Even that might be better than the so-called “defense” Jace would get from whoever in Los Alamos was assigned to his case. If they assigned anyone at all.

After going back out to the living room, I pushed the curtains aside and peered out. The sky still looked lowering, but the snow, if it was coming at all, hadn’t made an appearance yet. And although I’d shut the gate, I hadn’t secured it. Until I could attempt to make repairs, I really should get out there and lock it up with some chain and a padlock or something.

First I made a detour to the office and woke up the computer so I could take a look at the security feed. As I’d feared, even though the cameras on the rest of the property seemed to be working fine, the one that overlooked the front gate was dark, so it had to have been disabled at the same time the main mechanism was circumvented.

Well, at least I had eyes on the rest of the compound. That was better than nothing. Also, I was able to scrounge the chain and a padlock — still in its clamshell packaging — from the storage area in the basement, and that made me feel…well, not better, but at least slightly reassured.

I pulled on my coat and scarf, but not my gloves, since I needed full use of my hands. Once I was outfitted, I went back outside, Dutchie bounding along at my heels, and headed down to the gate, which I secured to the wall as best I could by looping the chain around the steel frame bolted to the adobe. When I pulled on it, there might have been the slightest amount of give, but overall, it seemed sturdy enough. No, it wouldn’t stand up to someone driving a Hummer through it, and if you were determined enough, you could probably still climb up and over the gate itself, but I thought it should deter anyone out for some casual looting. If such a person even existed; for all I knew, I was taking precautions for nothing.