Marked (The Secrets of the Djinn #1)

by Lamer, Bonnie

  The doctor looks back at me. “How are you doing?”

  “Probably not the best time to ask me that,” I say as tears from pain slide down my face.

  The sound of crunching metal swings my head around to look out the back window. Brielle made it through the last light unscathed, but our friends in the silver car got t-boned by a Chevy pickup. I’ve never been so happy to see an accident in my life. That goes against the Hippocratic Oath that I’m going to take someday, but I don’t care. A tiny flash of guilt about the safety of the person who hit them is easily pushed aside by my selfish desire to survive the day.

  Chapter 8 - Hideout

  “I assume you have a bat cave somewhere?” the doctor says.

  Brielle looks at him trying to determine whether he’s mocking her or not. She goes with not. “Yeah, it’s not that far from here.”

  “And those things won’t follow us?” I ask and there’s a lot more fear in my voice than I care for. Then again, those creatures were a lot scarier than I care for as well.

  “Nah, they can’t pick up our scent in their human form. Besides, my place is surrounded by a sine wave emitting 18,000 Hz at all times. Their heads would explode if they tried to penetrate it.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?” I ask. I hate to admit it but I’m in awe. Not only does she know these monsters exist, she knows their weaknesses, too.

  Taking a corner way too fast since we’re not being followed anymore, she says, “A friend taught me about them.”

  “Interesting friends you have,” the doctor says. I notice he’s still holding onto the panic bar; I’m not the only one fearful of Brielle’s driving. “You said something back there I don’t understand. If it’s against genie law to show themselves to humans, why did they show themselves to us?” Oh. Good point.

  Brielle sits a little straighter in her seat but doesn’t turn to look at him. “Because I, and now her,” she gestures with her head towards me, “are B*DG 'D,F.”

  “For those of us who don’t speak that language, will you please translate?” the doctor says drily.

  “We’re djinn killers. For the djinn, it’s only acceptable to show their true forms to us if they happen to be trying to kill us.”

  Wow. I bet the doctor’s sorry he ever met either one of us. A djinn killer. It wasn’t my mind playing tricks on me; I really did see a monster before he changed to human. Wait, something isn’t right here. “But the djinn that I hit showed himself to me before I killed him.”

  Brielle looks vaguely uncomfortable and she keeps her eyes firmly on the road. “Yeah, I’m not really sure what’s up with that.” Well that’s just peachy.

  “I assume since they showed themselves to me, I have made my way to their shortlist of who to kill?” the doctor says. He’s a lot calmer about all of this than I am. Or maybe he’s in shock.

  “Pretty safe assumption,” Brielle responds as she pulls over to the side of the road, takes a small remote from the visor and punches in a series of numbers longer than the national debt. When a garage door across the street opens, she whips the jeep to the left and we practically fly into the garage. I don’t think she even looked for other cars on the road. Once in the garage, the jeep stops so abruptly that I hit the back of the seat in front of me. The overhead door is already closing when we pass under it.

  “Fuck that hurt! Do you have that thing on a timer?” I ask, watching the door just barely miss the back of the jeep.

  “Sure do. You can never be too careful when running from the djinn. Some of those assholes are too stupid to run from the sine wave and I’m not a fan of cleaning djinn guts off the garage floor.”

  Yuck. I’ll take her word on that one. “You don’t by any chance have a place I can lay down, do you?” I ask, trying to rearrange myself on the seat again. I hate to be whiny but it’s getting really difficult to hold myself upright.

  “I need to examine your wounds before you get too comfortable. I may have to clean them out,” the doctor says. Yippee. Can’t wait.

  He opens his door and gets out of the jeep. Opening my door, he carefully scoops me up into his arms again. I don’t have the energy to argue about anything at the moment and walking again is completely out of the question, so I don’t fight him about it.

  “This way folks,” Brielle says. She has walked around the jeep and is standing in front of an open door. “Welcome to my humble abode. I don’t get a lot of company. Actually, you’re the first ones I’ve ever had over so don’t expect everything to be neat and tidy. I like to keep things out where I can see them. Sometimes I have to grab things quickly and if they were in a closet or a drawer or somewhere, that would take too much time to find them.”

  She’s rambling again. Miss ‘I can kick djinn ass’ is nervous about what we’ll think of her apartment. If it has a soft surface I can lie down on, it’ll seem like heaven on earth to me. “Who has time to clean when the djinn are trying to kill you,” I quip through a yawn. That actually earns me the first smile I’ve seen from her.

  “Alright, come on in. Don’t step on anything.”

  I see what she means when the doctor carries me over the threshold into a large studio apartment. The room is a mess. There are clothes and wires and weapons everywhere. In the middle of the mess, there’s a half circle desk with three high-tech computer monitors and various other electronics I don’t recognize. In front of it is a worn leather desk chair. As I look around, I notice that everything in the room has seen better days; the computers being the exception.

  There’s an old flowery couch against one wall with heaps of clothes lying on it, and a large battered table with flaking paint on the opposite wall with an array of weapons on top. The weapons range from pistols and knives to broadswords and maces. Where in the world did she find a mace outside of a museum? I notice some of the pistols have orange tips. From what my dad taught me before he died, that means they are air guns, paint guns or water guns. Which seems odd considering how dangerous the djinn appear to be.

  In a corner of the windowless room, there’s an unmade king size bed. A lovely, lovely sight. It looks so inviting. As the doctor makes his way across the room to it, I get jostled around a lot because he’s trying not to step on anything. The pain is getting more unbearable with each step. I want to jump down from his arms and run to the bed and its promise of comfort, but that’s not about to happen; I wouldn’t even be able to lift my legs high enough to traverse some of the piles of stuff.

  “Set her down on the bed,” Brielle says taking a seat at her desk. “I have some work to do anyway.” I believe she is telling me not to get too comfortable. What, when she’s done working I’ll have to lie on the floor? Bitch. Okay, bitch that just saved my life.

  The doctor sets me down as gently as he can on the bed. It still hurts like hell but at least he’s trying. “After I check her wounds, I think we both deserve some answers,” he says to Brielle. I wholeheartedly agree.

  “What’s there to tell? The djinn wanted her dead and she’s not dead. End of story,” Brielle snaps, her face in a severe sulk as she stares intensely at her computer screen. She’s pissed about something all of a sudden. I can’t see what’s on the screen because she’s using the monitor that doesn’t face the bed. I’m sure that’s on purpose.

  “Not good enough and you know it,” I say. I roll up a piece of sheet and bite down on it while the doctor unwinds the gauze covering my arm. I groan in pain as the soiled gauze takes a few layers of skin with it as its being removed.

  “Remarkable,” he says. “Everything we’ve been through today and your wounds actually look better than before.” He reaches up to the bandages on the left side of my face and peels them back. I whine in pain again as every hair along my hairline comes with them. “My god,” he whispers.

  “What? What’s wrong with my face?” I ask, panicked. My vanity is suddenly kicking my fear and pain sensors’ asses. I don’t want to look like a monster the rest of my life.

  He chuckl
es and shakes his head. With the tip of his finger, he slides it gently from my temple to my lips. “There is nothing wrong with your face. Nothing at all.” I don’t think that’s a medical diagnosis. Now I’m in pain and uncomfortable.

  Sensing my discomfort and remembering that he’s supposed to be acting like my doctor, he straightens up and squares his shoulders. “Other than redness and a mild rash, your face has almost completely healed. Have you always been able to heal this rapidly?”

  I shrug. Mistake. “Ow, son of a bitch,” I grumble over the pain caused by the movement of my left shoulder. “I don’t know. I’ve never been hurt before.”

  Puzzlement washes across his face. “You mean you’ve never been sick before?”

  I’m in pain, not stupid. “No, I mean I’ve never been hurt before.”

  He doesn’t believe me. “No bumps or bruises, no knee scrapes as a child, no broken bones?”

  “No,” I say more forcefully. “I have never been hurt before.”

  “Well, aren’t you little miss perfect,” Brielle grumbles without looking up from her typing.

  “How could you have gone through life, especially childhood, and never suffered a minor injury of any kind?” the doctor asks.

  “I’m not clumsy, I guess.” Why is he all over my case about this?

  His response is to have his eyebrows meet in the middle of his forehead. “I did not mean to bring up a sensitive subject. I simply have never witnessed a patient heal this quickly. You have no idea the extent of your injuries when you were admitted the night of your accident.”

  I close my eyes and breathe through a wave of pain. “Can we talk about something else,” I gasp. “Like pain meds? I think that would make a great conversation.”

  Regret washes over his face. “We should have let the security team do their job and kept you in the hospital.”

  Brielle snorts. “Yeah, that would have worked out well for her.”

  The doctor turns to look at her. “You said they weren’t as powerful when in human form. If that is the case, it seems that a well-trained security team would have been able to stop them.”

  Without bothering to look away from her computer screen, she says, “That’s not the kind of thinking that will keep you alive. And there’s some Tylenol in the bathroom.”

  There’s a bathroom? I could use one of those. I crane my head to look around for it and immediately regret it when the motion pulls on my wounds. I’ll just have to pee later because it hurts too much to move at the moment. Hopefully my bladder won’t explode.

  “Do you have any type of antiseptic?” the doctor asks. I expect her to say no. Rudely.

  “Yeah, I get banged up a lot. There’s some clean bandages and stuff in the medicine cabinet.”

  “Dangerous business fighting monsters. Should we call you Buffy?” I ask.

  She deigns to look up at me. “Buffy didn’t have my skills.” I’m not sure if she’s kidding or not.

  Leaning back in her chair, she looks at the doctor. “What’s your name anyway?”

  He stands up from the bed. “Roman. Roman Palis.”

  “Roman. That’s a pretentious name,” she responds. So much for ‘nice to meet you.’

  “I’m sure my parents gave it to me simply to annoy you someday,” he says drily. “Medicine cabinet you said?”

  “Yeah, the bathroom’s over there.” She nods her head to towards the back of the room. She watches him as he picks his way through her crap. When he disappears into the bathroom, she says, “He’s trouble.”

  What the hell is she talking about? “You mean the guy who just helped save my life? Trouble’s not the word I would use to describe him right now.”

  She looks at me thoughtfully. Maybe a little disdain mixed in there, too. “My friend didn’t tell me until now that he wanted me to keep you. I thought this would be a grab and dump and we’d each go on our merry way when the coast was clear.”

  “Who wants you to keep me?” She makes me sound like a stray mutt she found on the street. I can see her mind working, trying to figure out how to get rid of me without pissing off her friend.

  “You must get hurt a lot. The hospital supply closet isn’t as well stocked in bandages as your bathroom is.” Roman is picking his way through the clutter again. His hands are full of bandages and bottles and tubes of antiseptics. My pain is about to get worse. I hope he brought the Tylenol™ as well.

  But his appearance isn’t going to distract me from what Brielle just said. “Who wants you to keep me?” I ask again.

  Roman realizes he walked into a tense situation. “What am I interrupting?”

  “Ask her. She’s the one keeping secrets.” I sound like a cantankerous old woman. Amazing what pain will do to you.

  Brielle sighs and rises from her chair. She comes over and flops down on the end of the bed, causing my body to jiggle painfully. Roman gently sits down next to me, more conscious of how painful I am when jostled.

  “Fine, here’s the deal,” she begins. “This guy contacted me about a year and a half ago. He said he knew how my parents died. Long story short, he told me they were killed by the djinn.”

  Roman lifts my arm and sets it on his lap so he can begin to clean my wounds. I try to distract myself. “And you believed him?” I ask Brielle.

  She shakes her head. “No freaking way. I thought he was a nut job.”

  “What convinced you otherwise?” Roman asks. He pours some peroxide on my wounds causing me to hiss sharply. Peroxide. Really? Doesn’t he know it can impede the healing of road rash? I’m going to assume he didn’t have a better option.

  “He sent me information. Scanned images of ancient texts. I have no idea where he got them. He won’t tell me. But they explained that the djinn live behind a veil and can cross over into our world.”

  “Behind a veil? What does that mean?” I hiss as another hit of peroxide scalds my arm.

  “It’s like there’s a curtain separating their reality and ours.”

  Not helpful. “Like a veil. I got that part. How is that possible?”

  She sighs again. “That doesn’t matter. It only matters that they can step through the veil into our world.”

  “And nobody notices these demonic looking things just walking through this veil into our world?” Roman asks.

  “Did you miss the part about how they can’t show their true form to humans?” she asks this college educated man as if he’s too stupid to understand. “Besides, they don’t all look like that. Some of them always look human.”

  “Then how do you know they’re djinn?” I ask. After the peroxide pain, I don’t flinch at all as Roman puts antiseptic cream on and wraps my arm in gauze.

  “He tells me. He can see the djinn. And what they’re going to do.”

  Roman looks at her. “You haven’t really explained who he is.”

  Brielle’s cheeks turn red. “I don’t really know. I’ve never actually met him. But he sends me all kinds of information and he can see into the future. Not far into the future, only like a few hours, and if something bad is going to happen like what happened to my parents, he contacts me. And yes, I trust him. I know you were going to ask that next. I trust him because he hasn’t been wrong once in the whole time we’ve been together.” Her face turns a brighter red. “I don’t mean together together; I mean as long as we’ve been partners.” If her face turns any redder, she may require amputation from the neck down for lack of blood flow.

  Roman takes pity on her. “What kind of information did he send you about Skye?” That’s the first time he’s referred to me by my given name. I don’t know why but a brief, stinging pain shoots through me. Like being shocked by static electricity.

  A flash of anger crosses Brielle’s face. It’s fleeting, but it was definitely there. “He’s never asked me to save someone before. Usually, he tells me where the djinn will be and I catch them, bind them with copper and cast them back behind the veil.”

  “You don’t kill them?” I as
k. I’ll admit it, I’m surprised. Especially considering her arsenal.

  She shakes her head. “No. You have to understand that when djinn die here, they revert back to their human form. Some magic thing that was put in place eons ago. The police would never believe that I wasn’t actually murdering real people.”

  Good point. They’d think she was a whack job and lock her up for good. “Did you say you bind them with copper?”