djinn wars 01 - chosen

by Christine Pope

  Turning away from me, Jason surveyed the horizon again. The wind picked up, pulling strands of heavy dark hair out of the piece of thin leather he had wrapped around his ponytail. His hair hung a few inches below his shoulders, and so far I hadn’t seen it in anything but that heavy tail down his back. That hadn’t stopped me from wondering what it would look like, sleek and loose over those broad shoulders.

  Which was exactly the wrong thing to be thinking. After I’d lost it the day we’d met, and he’d held me and comforted me, we’d maintained a careful distance between us. I hadn’t noted even a flicker of interest from him. Maybe I wasn’t his type, or maybe it was the far more stark fact that he’d lost not just his family, but his people, his entire way of life. He seemed to be bouncing back fairly well, but it was probably a little self-absorbed of me to think he’d be interested in any sort of romantic entanglements so soon after suffering that kind of shock.

  Besides, I wasn’t even sure whether I was interested in anything like that. Yes, Jace was extremely good-looking, and he had an easygoing way about him that I appreciated, after some of the high-strung guys I’d dated in the past, but our focus should be on survival first and foremost. Those other sorts of complications were pretty far down my list of priorities.

  And anyway, break-ups were bad enough when you had a decent chance of never seeing the other person again. I didn’t exactly have that luxury at the moment.

  Jace didn’t seem to have noticed my preoccupation, since he appeared to be absorbed in studying the far-off outlines of the Jemez mountain range. I noticed that he held something in his hand, a leather thong knotted through a hole in a smooth-polished black stone. His thumb moved over it, the motion reminding me of the worry beads sometimes used by Greek men.

  Then he said, “But I picked up something in my tire in Placita. I had a patch kit in my backpack, but it wasn’t just a nail that had blown the tire, but a sharp rock. I lost two nights there, trying to fix it, scavenging around to see if I could find anything to replace it with, but that was a no-go.”

  “No one there, either?” I asked, although I already knew what the answer would be.

  “No. Not a soul. I did some foraging to replenish my supplies, which was what delayed me even more. Or maybe I just wasn’t looking forward to that long, long walk.”

  It would have been that. Even with the part of the trip he’d shaved off by riding his motorcycle, he still had to have walked a good forty miles or so. Farther, actually, because it was still about fifteen miles from Nambe to the heart of Santa Fe, and then another five miles to this hidden fold of the hills where the compound was located.

  “But you did it anyway.”

  He nodded, then shoved the polished stone he’d been holding back into his pocket. “There was nothing left in Taos. I wandered there for about a day and a half — I was at the pueblo when the illness hit, and our healers couldn’t do anything to combat it. No one could. People were being told to stay at home, that the local medical center didn’t have the resources to treat that many victims at once. So…I stayed there and watched everyone die around me.”

  “And waited to find out when it would be your turn,” I said quietly.

  Finally, he shifted so his gaze fell upon me, rather than that far-off, jagged horizon. Those jet-black eyes, in their fringe of equally black lashes, were startled, but then he nodded in understanding. “Yes. That’s exactly what I did. But then after another day passed, and everyone was gone, leaving behind only dust, I realized I wouldn’t be lucky enough to join all my people in the afterlife. I was doomed to drift here, in a world I hadn’t chosen.”

  I probably wouldn’t have phrased it that way, but he was right — that’s exactly what it felt like. Being cast adrift on dark waters, paddling desperately, although you had no idea why you’d been pushed out onto that black ocean in the first place. “So you left then?”

  He nodded, and once again his attention moved back to the horizon, to the mountains that blocked his view of the place he had once called home. “Well, I went from the pueblo to my apartment. At least I’d had the motorcycle with me at the pueblo, so the trip didn’t take long. The whole way I didn’t see anyone, just cars left along the side of the road. Same thing at my apartment — it was a small building, only four units, but all the hotels were equally deserted.”

  His shoulders lifted under the leather jacket he wore, although I wasn’t quite sure of the reason for the shrug. Dismissing his futile attempts to find any survivors? I didn’t know him well enough to guess.

  “Anyway,” he continued. “I could tell that staying in Taos probably wasn’t a good idea. It’s a small town…was, I mean…and the chances of finding anyone who’d lived through the Heat were pretty low. I packed what I could and left. I did see that one woman as I was heading out of town, but, as I said, she took off the second she saw me. Maybe she thought I was a ghost.” He did smile then, but grimly, just the slightest lift at the corners of his mouth.

  Or a rapist, I thought, recalling my own experiences. I didn’t say anything aloud, though. Whatever he might be, Jason Little River was clearly not a rapist. “And the wine?” I asked.

  “The La Chiripada tasting room was just down the street from where I lived. Since no one was around, I figured it wouldn’t matter if I liberated a couple of bottles. I had a feeling I might need a drink in the near future. Or,” he added, with a real smile this time, his expression warming as he looked over at me, “a peace offering.”

  I tried not to blush, but I wasn’t sure how successful I was at it. With any luck, he’d think the flush in my cheeks had come from the brisk wind blowing down from the north, and not the way he’d just looked at me. “Speaking of the wine,” I said, my tone probably too casual, “we should have something special to drink it with. Frozen tamales probably aren’t festive enough.”

  “You like rabbit?” Jace asked, a gleam in those black eyes.

  “I don’t know,” I replied uncertainly. I had a feeling I knew what he was going to suggest. “I’ve never had it.”

  “Well, time to change that.” He glanced over at the house, then back at me. “That is, assuming you have a .22 in that gun safe of yours.”

  At least he didn’t ask me to go with him. In the back of my mind, I’d understood that at some point I’d have to start eating game meats, but I wasn’t sure I could handle watching Jace shoot a fluffy little bunny and then expect to roast it or whatever a few hours later.

  He did take Dutchie along, saying she might as well start to learn what it meant to be an outdoor dog. I knew he was right; her days as a pampered suburban pooch were long over. Anyway, she was more than happy to go along on the hunting expedition, trotting off at Jace’s side without even a backward glance toward the house. I only hoped she wouldn’t scare off every rabbit in a five-mile radius.

  In the meantime, I had to scour the cookbooks that sat on the shelf mounted to the kitchen wall to see if I could find anything about cooking rabbit. Actually, that didn’t take me much time at all, because in addition to the standard Joy of Cooking and Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks, I found several specialty ones, including a title dedicated to cooking all sorts of game meats, starting with rabbit and quail and moving up from there.

  After that, it was a matter of poring over the recipes and deciding which sounded best — and one for which I had actually had all the ingredients on hand. I decided that the rabbit with mustard sauce variation sounded good. Since I’d already harvested some onions and garlic from the greenhouse a few days earlier, all I had to do was rescue the onion from the fridge and the garlic from the little terra-cotta keeper that sat on the counter.

  While I did that, I couldn’t help worrying that Jace would come back with a couple of rabbit carcasses and expect me to skin and dress them, his work as the he-man hunter done. I didn’t know the first thing about doing any of that. Hell, I could barely cut up a whole chicken properly. My mother showed me how to do it once, but I’d protested the whole
time that you could buy already cut-up chicken, so what was the point? Wasting a half hour on that sort of exercise just to save a dollar or so on the price of the meat had hardly seemed worth it to me.

  That had annoyed her, I could tell; she was probably flashing back to when she and my father first got married, when she was substitute teaching while trying to get a full-time position, and he was still a rookie right out of the Academy. Money had been tight. I understood that intellectually, but twenty-five years later, it seemed a little extreme to be worrying about a few cents a pound for chicken.

  But at least she had taught me to cook — not Cordon Bleu or anything, but how to make a roast and how to prepare a variety of potato dishes and lots of veggies, sauces, that sort of thing. I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about poisoning Jace if he did somehow manage to bring back a rabbit, even with Dutchie’s help.

  Until they did return, I wasn’t about to get anything started. I assembled the ingredients on the kitchen counter, went down to the cellar to get some potatoes, and then found a tablecloth and some matching napkins on one of the shelves in the laundry room. This would be the first time we’d sat down at the dining room table, as his first few nights here, Jace had eaten with me at the little breakfast set in the kitchen nook. For some reason, that had felt safer to me. There was a certain ritual associated with sitting down to a real meal at a dining room table.

  Maybe I was making too much out of his going rabbit-hunting. It wasn’t as if we wouldn’t be eating a lot of that sort of thing in the future, if it turned out he really was handy with that .22. Then again, making an occasion out of it might make us both feel a little better about our current situation.

  That thought seemed to reassure me, so I went ahead and finished setting the table, completing the setup with the long wrought-iron candleholder that had been sitting on the sideboard. It held five pillar candles, and would provide plenty of light.

  Candlelit dinners? I asked myself. Boy, you really are asking for trouble.

  I decided if Jace asked, I’d say it was a good way to save energy.

  He returned an hour or so later, Dutchie bounding along beside him, and a very messy bundle of rabbit dangling from a bag in one hand. So he had done the butchering for me, probably guessing that asking me to handle that particular duty would have damaged my delicate sensibilities.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking the bundle from him. “I found a recipe with mustard sauce. Does that sound okay to you?”

  “Sounds great,” he replied. He was windblown, but looked far more relaxed and happy than he had when he was telling me about how he had left Taos. Getting out in the fresh air and away from the house seemed to have done him a world of good. “I need to get cleaned up. Can you manage things from here?”

  In another world, I might have complained about having to do the typical female thing of cooking, now that he’d bagged his bunnies. Actually, though, I was just grateful that he even had the ability to go out and get us food. He knew how to hunt; I knew how to cook. It seemed a pretty fair division of labor from where I stood.

  The bundle of rabbit parts was a little bloodier than something I would have gotten from the supermarket, but I wasn’t so squeamish that I couldn’t handle it. I rinsed everything off and patted it dry, then sprinkled the pieces with salt and pepper while warming up some olive oil in a pan. As the rabbit was browning, Jace returned to the kitchen, face and hands looking freshly scrubbed, and asked if I needed help peeling the potatoes.

  Okay, so much for my worry about thinking he was going to sit on his ass and watch a DVD of Die Hard or something while I labored away in the kitchen.

  “Yes,” I said. “Thanks.”

  He went to work, being sparing with the water, for which I was grateful. So far it seemed as if the well could manage just about anything we threw at it, including daily showers for the two of us, but it never hurt to be careful. I used to take long, hot showers, the kind that would basically kill all the hot water in the place by the time I was done, but once I got here, I retrained myself so the whole procedure only took five minutes. Not the easiest of tasks at first, but things did get sped up when you didn’t have to worry about shaving your legs.

  I risked a glance at Jace, thinking I wouldn’t mind having to go back to the whole leg-shaving thing if the situation warranted it. But that day seemed far off — if it ever came at all — so in the meantime, I was pretty sure my five-minute showers were safe.

  Neither of us spoke, but it was a companionable sort of silence, him peeling the potatoes, me working away at the sauté pan, following the steps of the recipe. He did stop to ask whether I wanted the potatoes sliced or cut up or whatever, but since I was planning on mashing them, he didn’t have to do much besides quarter them and put them in a pot of cold water.

  “Don’t you need milk for mashed potatoes?” he asked.

  “There’s evaporated milk in the pantry. It won’t be quite the same, but I think it’ll be okay.”

  I could tell by the way his brows drew together that he wasn’t exactly thrilled by the idea of evaporated milk, but he didn’t say anything, only went over to fetch the box and then mix up a batch for me. Well, if it was that big a problem, the next day I’d send him off in search of any stray goats that might be wandering the area, looking for a home. Dutchie would probably be ecstatic at the prospect of that sort of expedition.

  The dog had definitely latched on to Jace. Maybe she’d been more bonded with Mr. Munoz, back in Albuquerque. Or maybe Jace was one of those people whom dogs tended to love. I didn’t know, and in the end, it didn’t matter. Jace was Dutchie’s new best friend. It didn’t bother me as much as I thought it might have, simply because Dutchie had proved herself to be a decent judge of character. If she liked Jace, it must mean he was okay.

  It was dark by the time dinner was ready. Jace and I carried the various platters and bowls to the dining room table, and I brought out some matches I’d found in the kitchen so I could light the pillars in their wrought-iron holder. Without my asking, Jace turned off the overhead fixture, so all we had was the candlelight. It danced off the heavy glass goblets, the dark bottle of cabernet that sat waiting to be drunk. The walls in this room were a warm parchment yellow, and seemed to reflect the glow of the candles and multiply it.

  “Wow,” Jace murmured. “I hadn’t expected to see anything like this ever again.” Then he shook his head. “Wait — I don’t think I’d ever seen anything like this before, either. It looks beautiful, Jessica.”

  “Thanks,” I said, my tone almost shy. Now that I was with him in this intimate space, would he take all this for more than I had intended, as some sort of seduction or something?

  Well, there wasn’t anything I could do about it now. I pulled out my chair — obscurely glad that he hadn’t offered to do it for me — and sat down. A second later, he followed suit, lifting the cloth napkin I’d set out and placing it in his lap. Then he raised the bottle of wine, which he’d already opened back in the kitchen, and poured some of the cabernet into my glass first, and then his.

  “I think we should have a toast,” he said.

  “What should we toast to?” Not being dead seemed the obvious choice, but it seemed crass to voice the thought aloud.

  He seemed to think about it for a moment, his glass a few inches off the tabletop. The candlelight gleamed against his raven-dark hair, and again I wondered what it would feel like to run my fingers through it.

  “To sanctuary,” he said at last.

  I was definitely on board with that. Even if nothing ever happened between Jace and me, we had found a quiet haven here, a place to shelter from whatever might be going on outside in the world. “To sanctuary,” I echoed, raising my glass as well and clinking it against his.

  A brief silence fell as we both swallowed some of the wine. It wasn’t as heavy as the Montepulciano I’d drunk a few days earlier. I could taste the fruit in it, and thought it was probably a good choice to go along with the sharpness of the
mustard sauce I’d made for the rabbit.

  Then we both dug into the main dish, which turned out to be excellent. I wasn’t sure why I’d avoided rabbit before this, because I found myself liking the taste.

  Good thing, too, I thought, because you’re probably going to be eating a lot of it in the future.

  And the mashed potatoes actually were fine, even with the evaporated milk, and there was fresh bread and butter and roasted carrots. It really was quite the feast, especially considering I’d had to work with what was available in the cellar and the greenhouse. No more popping down to the grocery store to get that one special ingredient.

  “This is…amazing,” Jace finally said, after making some serious inroads into the food on his plate. “Were you a chef or something?”

  “Hardly.” I took a sip of wine to cover my embarrassment, cheeks flaming. I really needed to get this blushing thing under control one way or another. “My mother taught me how to cook. That is, she pointed out that it was mostly following directions, at least for the basic stuff. So…that’s what I did tonight. Followed directions.”

  “It’s still pretty incredible.” Expression thoughtful, he drank some of his own wine. “So what did you do? Before, I mean.”

  “I was getting my master’s at UNM, so I T.A.’d a couple of courses. English — a lot of paper grading, mostly.” I broke off a piece of bread but didn’t eat it, just sort of rolled it between my finger and thumb. “What about you?”

  “I graduated from UNM four years ago, then came back to Taos.” He looked at me directly then, as if studying my features, and it was difficult to remain as I was, to not glance away. “We must have been there at the same time, but I guess there wouldn’t have been much overlap. You’d have been a freshman when I was a senior.”

  I could have sworn his expression was somewhat regretful, but I didn’t want to read too much into it. That way only lay disappointment.