Authors: christine pope

djinn wars 02 - taken (36 page)

“He has gone,” Zahrias said flatly.

This morning, the djinn leader had summoned both Jace and me to his conference room. That summons had come a bit earlier than I would have preferred, considering our activities of the night before. I fought back a yawn as Jace asked,

“Aldair?”

“Yes. He did not appear at breakfast this morning, and when I sent Lauren to check on him, his suite was empty, his things missing.”

That made me blink the sleep out of my eyes and focus more closely on Zahrias. “Wait — you mean he just took off? Where would he go?”

Neither of them said anything at first. Then, the words coming slowly, as if he really didn’t want to utter them, Jace replied, “He would have gone…to them.”

“Them?” I said blankly.

“The other djinn,” Zahrias responded. His tone was neutral enough, but a flicker in his eyes told me he was less than pleased by this turn of events.

“Can he do that?”

The djinn leader’s brows pulled together. “He has free will. He can do what he likes.”

Jace added, “It is not as if any of us was forced to be here. We chose this life, chose to save what we could of humanity. But that choice does not preclude returning to the others, for whatever reason. With his Chosen gone, and no real candidate for another anywhere close by, Aldair had no reason to stay here.”

On the surface, I supposed that made sense. But I couldn’t quite reconcile having enough belief in your convictions to rebel against what the majority of your race wanted, only to turn around and decide they weren’t so bad after all. It was like a conscientious objector of the ’60s putting down his flowers and picking up that M16 because hey, maybe shooting at innocent Vietnamese villagers wasn’t as bad as he first thought.

“So…what are you going to do about it?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Zahrias said. “Even if I wanted to, I could not have stopped Aldair, and I most certainly don’t have the authority to go after him and force him to come back to us. We can only hope that his leaving will be the end of it.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

The two djinn exchanged a glance. They were silent for a time, for so long, actually, that I wondered if they were sharing a subvocal conversation the way Jace and I so often had.

At last Jace said, “I am sure all is well. We have an agreement with the other djinn, and Aldair going to them changes nothing at all, except that you and I will not have to skulk in our suite in an attempt to avoid him.”

He sounded breezy and unruffled, and yet I wasn’t sure I quite believed him. Something had passed between Jasreel and Zahrias, some unspoken communication neither of them wanted to share with me. Fine, I’d let it go for now.

But I wouldn’t forget.

A day passed, and then another. I began to think that my worries had been for nothing. After all, Aldair was gone, but nothing had happened. Lindsay continued to tinker with the box — or rather, conduct minor experiments with it.

“I know one of these days I’ll have to open it up and really start trying to figure out how it works,” she told me one morning, almost a week after Aldair had left. “But I’m so scared I’m going to screw it up that I keep coming up with new ways to procrastinate.”

“Well, that’s understandable,” I replied. We were alone in the “lab” that morning, as Aidan had gone out on a hunting expedition with several other people in the Taos group, and Jace and Zahrias were having yet another of their “talks” in the conference room. For all Jace’s claim, once upon a time, that he and Zahrias really weren’t friends, his behavior seemed to tell a different story.

It was all right, though. Even though I loved him more with every passing day and wanted to be with him as much as possible, I also knew there was a point where you could be with a person too much. Hanging out with Lindsay gave us both a chance for a little separation here and there. I would’ve done the same with Evony, but every single friendly overture I’d made to her had been rebuffed. At least she’d begun venturing from her room now and then, and even ate in the dining hall a few times, but she always did so at the table where Lauren and Dani sat. From all appearances, Lauren was her new best friend. I couldn’t say it didn’t hurt. On the other hand, at least she was being friendly with someone, even if that person wasn’t me.

Lindsay sighed and set the box down on the workbench next to her. “Oh, yeah, everyone’s been very understanding. But I know I should be doing more. It’s just — I was good at what I was learning. I knew one day I’d make a great mechanical engineer. That thing, though?” She cast a baleful glance at the little black box. “It’s so far beyond anything I’ve ever worked with, I don’t even know where to start. I feel like one of those guys at Roswell who was asked to reverse-engineer a crashed alien spaceship.”

“You believe in that stuff?” I asked, surprised. She’d always seemed way too level-headed for any of that UFO conspiracy crap.

“No,” she replied, reassuring me. “I just meant it as a hypothetical example. You know?”

I nodded. A shadow seemed to pass over the sun right then, darkening the light beyond the window, and I couldn’t help glancing outside. We’d had a forecast for several clear days in a row, which was part of the reason why the hunters had gone out today.

“What is it?” Lindsay asked, appearing to note my distraction.

“I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t expecting it to cloud up, but it feels like it’s getting darker.”

“Hmm.” Probably glad of the chance to ignore the box for a few minutes, she hopped off the stool she’d been sitting on and went over to the door, cracking it open so she could peer outside. Good idea, since the windows in the auto repair shop weren’t exactly what you could call clean.

But then she said, “Oh, my God,” and something in her tone made me get off my own stool and go see what she was looking at. As I stood in the doorway and craned my head upward, every drop of blood in my veins suddenly felt as if it had turned to ice water. The breath caught in my throat, and I had to grab hold of the doorjamb to keep my knees from giving out right then and there.

The skies above us swirled in shades of black and gray and livid purple. But those weren’t clouds…not exactly. As I tried to focus, I could see shapes in those strange formations, see them moving in distinct patterns. And while I stared, they began to wheel and pivot, moving toward us, gaining resolution.

Those weren’t clouds. Those were djinn, an entire army of them.

The others. They shouldn’t be coming here. There was a truce. An agreement.

But agreements were made to be broken, apparently.

“Shut the door!” I screamed at Lindsay, even though I knew a door would hold back a djinn approximately the same way a sheet of tissue paper would hold back a rampaging bull. Even having that flimsy door protecting us seemed better than standing out in the open like a couple of targets just waiting to be hit.

She obeyed without question, running inside and slamming the door. Then she locked it. Terrified green eyes fixed on my face. “It’s — it’s
them,
isn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“But — ”

“I know. I don’t understand, either.”
Aldair,
I thought frantically.
It must have something to do with Aldair.

What had he told them?

At the moment, it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that thousands of angry djinn were about to descend on an unprotected population.

Unprotected….

My gaze fell on Miles Odekirk’s device, and I ran to it and picked it up, then turned it over in my hands.

“Jessica, what are you doing?”

“Saving us,” I said, and pushed the button to activate it. I knew that Lindsay had kept it set at the level where it would cover the greatest area and yet still deprive the djinn of their powers. The automotive shop we occupied now was about a quarter-mile from the resort where most of the Taos contingent was congregated, and so we should all be covered, theoretically speaking. Yes, the device would also affect our own djinn, but better weak and tired than dead.

Or at least, I had to hope they would all feel that way.

From overhead there came a horrible shrieking noise. Still holding the device, I hurried to the window and peered out through the dirt-grimed glass. The hordes above us seemed to be retreating, moving back out of range of the box’s area of effect. They grew smaller and smaller, and as they went, daylight returned.

“Holy shit,” Lindsay breathed. “It worked. They’re gone.”

“Yes,” I said, fingers clenched around the device, the sharp edges biting into my flesh. “But for how long?”

She looked at me soberly, and didn’t reply.

It was a question neither of us wanted to answer.

The Djinn Wars will continue in
Fallen
, due out in early June 2015. To be notified when future titles in this series and others by Christine Pope are released, please sign up
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