Forsaken (The Djinn Wars Book 5) (13 page)

“An hour, then.” This time, he didn’t bother to leave the room before he dematerialized, or whatever it was that djinn did. He merely disappeared with a strange popping noise, as if air had rushed in to fill the vacuum he’d just created.

Madison let out a breath, then waited. There was always the possibility that he might have forgotten something and would come back for it. But a minute passed, and then another, and the hotel remained empty and quiet around her. All right. There wasn’t anything up in her borrowed room that she needed, so she could head out the front door and keep going.

Time to run.

T
he river flowed serenely
before him, some of the trees on its banks beginning to show bright hues of yellow and orange. He’d been studying the flora of this land, and so he knew the names of a few of them. Cottonwood, and sycamore, and acacia and manzanita and mesquite. Down here, the landscape was quite lush, a contrast to the sere desert that surrounded the city on all sides.

In his planting efforts, he’d made sure to use native trees and shrubs, specimens that could rely on the region’s meager rainfall to stay alive. But he enjoyed the fountain in the rooftop bar, and thought it would be pleasant to have a stream meander past the hotel, perhaps spill in a cascade to a pool below. To do that, he would need to divert some of the river’s water. Not so much that the alteration would affect it adversely, but just enough to provide some welcome moisture in the place he had decided to call home.

A water elemental could have called the water there, and it would have dug a new path to follow that command, but Qadim would have to dig that new, narrow tributary himself. Nothing that would be too terribly taxing, although having it traverse the mile or so that separated the location where he stood now from the Hotel Andaluz would most likely take him at least a day, possibly more. At the moment, he was only attempting to determine the best spot to have the water branch off and travel to the east, rather than heading due south as it did now.

As he walked up and down the banks, testing the soil, eyeing the rise and fall of the land, he couldn’t prevent his thoughts from returning to Madison. She’d seemed calm and quiet this morning, but he’d noted a certain tension about her.

And why does that surprise you?
he asked himself as he squatted down to take a handful of sandy loam in his hand.
No doubt she was sitting there and wondering if you were going to mention dinner, or whether you possibly might try to pick up where you left things the evening before.

He wished it could be that easy. But if she would not fall into his arms when she was flushed with wine and so obviously ready to let him kiss her, then he did not think she would be amenable to any advances made during the cold light of day.

With a sigh, he straightened and brushed the soil from his hands. The wind had picked up, and clouds were moving in from the west. He didn’t think it would rain, but the day, which had begun bright and cheerful, began to grow steadily darker, a fitting match to his mood. Over the years, he had grown accustomed to the contrariness of djinn women — his sister providing a prime example of their willful behavior — but for some reason he had not thought that human females would be the same. Madison, however, seemed determined to do precisely the opposite of what he wished. Yes, she was pleasant and good company, and yet she didn’t seem to have the common sense to know what was best for her.

A cloud passed over the sun. The sudden darkness made him think of Hasan, and Qadim frowned. He had reassured Madison that the air elemental would stay away, but now Qadim was not so certain. The mere thought of what might happen to her if Hasan should appear suddenly made Qadim’s blood run cold. He should have brought Madison with him here to the river, rather than leaving her there alone at the hotel.

His concentration was already in tatters, and so he decided he had done enough for now. He would return and make sure she was all right, and then decide whether he would come back here with her, or put off any improvements to the river until tomorrow. After all, the Rio Grande wasn’t going anywhere.

That settled, he closed his eyes and envisioned the lobby of the Hotel Andaluz, the high coffered ceilings, the wrought-iron railing that ran around the perimeter of the mezzanine. In the next instant, he stood in the center of the space, then glanced to the side, thinking he would see Madison seated in one of the casbahs with the book she had mentioned.

But she wasn’t there, not in the alcove with its small waterfall, nor the one with its wall of votive candles. He hurried over to the restaurant and on back into its kitchen, but she was nowhere to be found in either of those rooms. His heart began to speed up, but he told himself to remain calm.

For it is just as likely that she has gone up to her room to lie down,
he thought.
She did say that she was feeling better, but not all the way better. Perhaps sitting and reading in the lobby was not as comfortable as she thought it might be.

That made sense. He blinked himself up to the hallway on the ninth floor, then went to the door of her suite and knocked.

Nothing.

“Madison?” he called out, and waited for the reassurance of her reply.

But she did not answer. Frowning, he knocked again. “Madison!”

Silence.

He touched the door’s handle and pushed it open. A quick glance told him she was not on the bed — it was neatly made, the pillows plumped and pushed up against the headboard — and neither was she sitting at the table by the window.

The bathroom door was ajar. Qadim knew she would be quite angry with him for interrupting her in such a private place, but he had to know. He pushed the door open further, only to see that the bathroom was just as empty as the rest of her suite.

Where had she gone? His heart seemed to skip a beat as he considered the very real possibility that Hasan might have discovered her. There was no evidence of any kind of a struggle here, but that meant very little. The air elemental could have captured her and blinked away in the next instant so he could toy with her elsewhere, perhaps back on his lands in Chama.

Cold sweat breaking out on his forehead, Qadim forced himself to leave the suite and go back downstairs. Perhaps Madison had gone into one of the meeting spaces, or the small office that had once served as the reception area for the hotel. After all, he had not made a very exhaustive search of the ground floor.

But he could not find her in any of those places, either. When he paused outside the casbah where he’d thought to find her reading, however, he saw what he had overlooked previously — a small piece of the hotel’s cream-colored stationery. Written on it were two words in graceful handwriting he didn’t recognize but which had to be Madison’s.

I’m sorry.

Hasan had not taken her. She’d run away.

Rage flamed through him, and he had to resist the urge to release that anger in a shockwave he knew would damage the hotel. He drew in a breath, then another, willing himself to remain calm. Perhaps, for all his restraint, he’d still intimidated her, had made her think that he would end up forcing her somehow, even though he could recall nothing he had said or done which would have given her that impression. He had to remind himself that she’d been alone and frightened for more than a year, that she’d had no contact with another living being until their paths had crossed a few days ago. That didn’t excuse her rudeness, but at least he began to understand it.

Very well, she’d gone. But where?

Back to where she’d been hiding all that time before he found her. He’d caught up with her before she’d gone to ground last time, and so he didn’t know the specific house that had been hers, but he could recall that street of modest-appearing dwellings all too well.

In the next instant he had materialized there — and none too soon, for he heard the slam of a door somewhere up ahead and to the right. Jaw tight, he ran in that direction, toward a two-story house with a large mesquite tree growing in its front yard and not much else.

The front door was unlocked. He threw it open and stalked inside. “Madison!”

No answer. Not that he’d really expected one. He paused in the foyer, noting the plain furniture and lack of decoration, and how the few items there appeared to be thickly covered in dust. From what he’d seen of Madison, she seemed to be a neat and tidy person, and he doubted she would have allowed herself to live in these conditions.

From the backyard, he heard a metallic clang. Forgetting the disorder he’d just seen around him, he hurried through the house and out the sliding glass door in the back, breaking its mechanism in his haste to see what had made that hollow clanging sound. The backyard was nearly covered in rosebushes, and at the center of those rosebushes was an incongruous gazebo, its white paint beginning to fade from the merciless desert sun.

Some kind of strange scrabbling noise was coming from beneath the gazebo. As he stared at it, he noticed that there was an opening in the latticework at its base. Had Madison gone
under
there?

Qadim couldn’t see any sign of her, and so it seemed that indeed was where she’d gone to ground. There was no way he would suffer the indignity of attempting to fold his nearly two meters of height into such a confined space, and so he raised a hand and sent a shockwave forward that caused the flimsy structure to splinter outward in all directions, raining debris on the roses and knocking a flurry of loose petals to the ground.

Only…there was no Madison hiding beneath the gazebo. Instead, Qadim saw a round metal door set into the very earth itself.

If that indeed was where she had secreted herself for all those months, no wonder that Hasan or any of his brethren had been unable to find her. Qadim went to the door and pulled on the strange round handle, but it wouldn’t budge.

He didn’t bother to call her name this time. He knew she wouldn’t respond, but would wait down there to see if he would give up and go away.

Unfortunately for her, he was not the type to surrender easily.

The door was metal, and metal was of the earth. Which meant he could order it to do as he wished.

Once again he wrapped his fingers on the handle, only this time he sent forth the command to its very component atoms, telling them that they must obey his will. And at once the handle began to turn, and in the next moment he was able to lift the door and see inside.

A drop of about a meter and a half, and a smoothly planed dirt floor that sloped downward. Qadim lowered himself into the opening, then stooped so he could close the door behind him. He realized now that the gazebo had been placed there to provide protective camouflage. The wooden structure was gone, but he saw no reason to advertise the presence of the door it had concealed, just in case any unfriendly eyes might be looking down from above.

He had to walk three or four meters before the floor had sloped enough for him to be able to stand upright. All along this strange little corridor were metal lockers that he assumed must be storage compartments of some sort. At the end of the hallway was another door, this one set into the rock itself. It, too, had one of those strange circular handles, but again he was able to command the metal to do as he asked, and it opened inward. Now he stood in another hall, albeit a much shorter one. In the background he could hear an odd humming noise, although he couldn’t tell precisely where it originated. And then there was yet another door, although this one had a normal-looking doorknob on it, as if it had been decided that if a person had gotten this far inside, he was meant to be there.

So far he had seen no sign of Madison. She must have retained enough presence of mind to keep locking the doors behind her in the hope that they would be a sufficient deterrent to prevent him from pursuing her. Clearly, she still didn’t understand much about how his powers worked.

When he opened that final door and stepped through, it was as if he’d walked back into a suite at the Andaluz, or at least into a very well-appointed home. To one side was a large piece of furniture with hooks to hold coats or hats; a puffy-looking jacket hung there, along with a knitted cap. On the other wall was quite a fine painting of the Rio Grande gorge at sunset. Yes, he supposed that if one were to live underground, then having a number of landscapes hanging on the walls might be a good way to pretend that they were actually windows, that the person hiding there wasn’t living like a mole.

The foyer area continued into a hallway, and opening off that hallway were various rooms, all well-furnished and spotlessly clean. In one bedroom, he saw an easel and a half-completed painting of the Sandia Mountains resting on it. So Madison was an artist? She’d never mentioned that.

Because you never asked her,
he thought then.
You never asked her anything about her life before.

He would have to remedy that lack.

“Madison!” he called out, taking care to keep his tone as gentle as he could. “I know you’re here. Please come out.”

Still more silence, but a listening one. She had to be in here somewhere.

He kept moving forward, peering into the rooms on either side as he went. All of them were empty. In the last one on the left, though, he saw something that gave him pause — a sketchbook lying open on the low table in front of the couch.

The charcoal sketch in that book was of him.

The sight was so surprising that he felt himself compelled to move forward and pick up the sketchpad. The picture was a quick study, but in a few lines she had captured the hawkishness of his profile, the way the wind had caught his hair and blown it away from his face.

Seeing the sketch heartened him. For one thing, he thought Madison had made him more handsome in the picture than he was in reality. For another, surely she wouldn’t have sat down to draw him at all if she hadn’t found something compelling about him. Her fear had caused her to run away, true, but that didn’t mean some sort of attraction didn’t exist within her, even if she was doing her best to push it away.

Well, he would have to figure out a way to make her understand that she had nothing to fear from him.

He set down the sketchbook and continued down the corridor. Not that he had much farther to go; beyond the room where he had found the sketch was only the kitchen, which was also empty. The hallway ended there.

Flummoxed, he stood in the middle of the kitchen for a moment, surveying the space. It was small but well laid out, with stainless steel appliances and a concrete floor. In the wall opposite was a door, one Qadim assumed must lead to the pantry.

He really didn’t think Madison had squeezed herself in there with the canned soup and boxes and bags of dry goods, but he told himself he must look, since she seemed to have disappeared otherwise. When he opened the door, though, he could only stand there with his mouth slightly agape, staring at the world he had just uncovered.