djinn wars 03 - fallen

by Christine Pope

  I stared at her, and had no answer.

  Chapter Thirteen

  By the time we got back to the main floor and had wandered toward the dining area, it was empty. Obviously, whatever announcement Zahrias had gathered everyone to hear was long over. Just as well, probably. I didn’t know whether Julia was up to facing that many strangers at once. It would probably be better if she met them gradually, rather than in one big group.

  I was explaining to her how we’d marked off the perimeter of the safe zone, making it easy to come and go within its boundaries — and also making it easy to go down to the plaza and “shop” for clothes and shoes and jewelry — when we ran into Jace and Zahrias, who had just turned a corner in the corridor that led to Julia’s room.

  “How are you faring today, Ms. Innes?” Zahrias asked politely. He had the cane with him but didn’t seem to require it at the moment, since it was looped over one arm.

  “Julia,” she said quickly. I couldn’t help noticing the way her gaze swiftly tracked from the bare muscled chest revealed by his robes, then up to his face, as if she was embarrassed to be caught staring.

  No worries, Julia, I thought. If I weren’t with Jace, I’d probably be staring, too.

  Zahrias didn’t appear to detect anything odd about her response. He said, “It seems as if you’re recovering very rapidly.”

  “I am,” she replied. “Thank you so much for the care you’ve given me, and for taking me in.”

  “It’s the least we could do. You rendered a very great service to Jasreel and Jessica, and so we must repay the debt as best we can.” He glanced over at me. “Everyone has been informed about Rafi. The farewell will be tomorrow morning.”

  “How did they take it?” I asked.

  A grim smile touched Zahrias’ lips, and I saw the way he and Jace exchanged a single charged glance, one that seemed to say, This isn’t over yet.

  But the djinn leader only replied, “As well as can be expected. At least, after what happened to Rafi, none of them are demanding that we send more of our people for assistance.”

  No, I supposed they wouldn’t. Nothing like seeing one of your own die horribly to turn you off from wanting to attempt the same thing.

  There wasn’t any way to turn the conversation toward lighter topics, not really. But I figured I might as well try. “Miles was grumbling about not having Lindsay to assist him.”

  “She’s in no shape for that,” Jace said. I could tell from the downward droop of his mouth that he was very worried about her, possibly because he’d seen how Evony had reacted when she lost her djinn lover. “And she’ll decide when she’s ready, and not have Miles pushing her into something she’s not emotionally equipped for.”

  “I don’t think that’s what Jessica meant,” Julia said, coming to my rescue. Or maybe it was a little of Miles’s rescue, too. He’d seemed irritated that he wouldn’t have Lindsay to assist him, but at least he hadn’t made any noises about putting pressure on her to come back to the lab right away. “It sounded like Lindsay was valuable in his research, that’s all.”

  “I know.” Zahrias’ tone was heavy, and although he didn’t look precisely worried, he was probably trying to calculate how much Lindsay’s absence would delay the work being done in the lab. “She seems to be a strong young woman, so let us all hope that she finds herself able to resume her work sooner rather than later.”

  Jace nodded, but I could tell he wasn’t all that hopeful. Maybe he had more evidence on which to base that assessment — after all, I hadn’t seen Lindsay yet today, so I had no idea how she was bearing up.

  Then Zahrias turned to Julia. “You’ve come to us at a difficult time, a time of grief. I am sorry for that. Perhaps you will sit down to dinner with the three of us this evening?”

  I had to keep my mouth from dropping open. Never — and I mean never — had I seen Zahrias joining the community for the evening meal…or any meal, for that matter. It seemed that he always took a tray in his rooms. Why, I wasn’t sure, except that everyone ate with their partners, and seeing all that togetherness when he himself was alone might be too much to take. Once or twice I’d considered asking Jace about it, but I had a feeling he didn’t know for sure, either. Or maybe he had his suspicions, and didn’t feel comfortable sharing them with me.

  At any rate, I just stood there as Julia smiled and said, “Thank you, Zahrias. That’s very thoughtful of you.”

  A nod. “We usually dine at seven. But I think Jasreel and Jessica will come and show you where to go.”

  It wasn’t a question. And it was a subtle message — join me for dinner, but don’t expect me to come pick you up at your room. This isn’t a date.

  All right, I was pretty sure Zahrias had never gone on a “date” in his life, but that still seemed to be the emotional vibe I was getting.

  “We’d be honored,” Jace said. At the same time, his dark gaze flickered toward me, just for a second. It seemed I wasn’t the only one picking up on a little bit of something here.

  Not that I’d be one to judge. Julia was drop-dead beautiful, and Zahrias had been alone for a long, long time.

  And now you’re being a crazy matchmaker, I scolded myself. Just because he extended an offer of dinner doesn’t mean he intended anything else by it except trying to make Julia feel at home here.

  Very true. Still, this was one dinner I very much looked forward to.

  But there was the rest of the day to get through before that. I saw Julia back to her room, although we stopped briefly on the way to make a detour at the resort’s gift shop, which had a collection of paperback books that we’d turned into a sort of lending library.

  “I don’t know if there’s anything here you’d like, but it’s something to pass the time,” I told her.

  “‘Pass the time,’” she repeated in musing tones. “It’s been a long while since I had an empty afternoon to fill up. Being able to just sit and read sounds like heaven.”

  “I guess it depends on what you like,” I said. If she preferred highbrow literary fiction, I feared she’d find pretty slim pickings among what we had to offer, since most of what was on hand was vacation reading sort of stuff — mysteries and thrillers and romances.

  She plucked one of the mysteries off the rack. “This should keep me occupied.”

  I should have guessed that she wasn’t exactly the bodice-ripper type. Then I shivered. No, Julia had experienced her own real-life bodice ripping. I doubted she’d want to be reading about it. Anyway, that term was kind of unfair. Back when I’d had time, I liked to read romances, interspersed with a variety of other genres, and the true bodice-rippery stuff had pretty much gone out of vogue.

  “Jace and I’ll come get you a little before seven,” I promised her as I dropped her off at her room.

  “Looking forward to it,” she replied, then thanked me and shut the door.

  So was she looking forward to it on general principles…or because of the company she’d be sharing?

  I had a feeling I was letting my mind play with an attraction that probably didn’t even exist because it helped to distract me from everything else that was going on. After that I went back to my suite, where Jace was waiting for me.

  “Zahrias giving you a spare moment to breathe?” I teased, even as I went to him and wrapped my arms around his waist.

  “One or two,” he replied. His lips touched the top of my head, and a little thrill went through me. I wished we could sink down on the bed and lose ourselves in one another for an hour or two. That wouldn’t happen, though. We needed to go check on Lindsay, and expending Jace’s fragile energy reserves for a little bit of afternoon delight probably wasn’t the best idea.

  He seemed to pick up on what I was thinking, because he let out a breath and then stepped away from me, although he held on to my hands. “Ah, Jessica, it’s times like these when that damned device seems almost to be doing more harm than good.”

  “You don’t really mean that. We need it. And it isn�
�t as if you’ve been neglecting me…it’s okay if we have to scale things back to once a day for a while.” Anyway, when I stopped to think about it, I realized that we’d mostly fallen into a pattern of lovemaking only one time each day back at the Santa Fe house. We’d simply been too exhausted by all the work that needed to be done. Or rather, I’d been too exhausted. At the time, there hadn’t been a device hampering his vitality, forcing Jace to conserve his strength, but he’d had to act like any other regular mortal who’d get tired by a day spent looking after the animals and tending the plants in the greenhouse and helping out with whatever else needed to get done around the place.

  He took my hands and lifted first one to his mouth, and then the other. A shiver went through me at the touch of his lips against my skin, and I began to wonder if I should rethink my position on no afternoon lovemaking.

  But then he let go of me, saying, “You’re right, of course. Let’s go see Lindsay.”

  I forced aside the disappointment that wanted to flood through me. Instead, I nodded. “Yes…maybe she’s tired of visitors by now, but I don’t want her to think I’ve completely bailed on her.”

  As we walked left the suite and headed toward Lindsay’s rooms, my feeling of uneasiness began ratcheting back up. She’d never been the overly emotional type, from what I could tell, but I didn’t know if she’d ever suffered a loss like this before. Of course, she had to have lost family and friends in the Dying, but losing a lover, especially one who had vowed to spend what could literally be eternity with you…that had to be an extra level of pain you couldn’t actually prepare yourself for. Certainly Evony hadn’t been able to deal with it. Not really.

  When we got to Lindsay’s suite, though, she sounded composed enough as she called out, “Come in.”

  Jace and I looked at each other, and then I steeled myself as we let ourselves into her rooms.

  They were large, also done in a Southwest style like the suite Jace and I shared, with a kiva-style fireplace and tile floors and shades of tan and terra-cotta and turquoise blue. A fire was crackling in the hearth.

  Lindsay sat at the table by the window. A notebook, its pages covered in the same sort of cryptic symbols and diagrams that I’d seen on Miles Odekirk’s laptop, was open on the tabletop in front of her. She didn’t seem to be looking at it right then, though; a pen lay across the right-hand page, and instead she was staring out the window at the fluffy white clouds racing across the blue sky, driven by a wind that meant we could have some weather again tonight.

  She might have spent most of the night crying — her eyes looked puffy, the lids reddened — but otherwise she seemed composed enough. Certainly she wasn’t crying now.

  “You can sit down on the bed,” she said, again in that almost too-calm voice. “There aren’t enough chairs.”

  Jace and I complied. At least the bed was made, so sitting there didn’t feel too intrusive.

  “How — how are you doing, Lindsay?” I asked, since I could tell Jace was waiting for me to speak.

  A shrug. The afternoon light cast a halo around her hair, and she continued to stare out the window without turning toward the two of us. “I’m okay. I keep telling everyone that. It’s — I told him it was stupid. I told him not to go, but he did anyway. He was like that, you know. Always wanting his own way. We butted heads a lot, but I still loved him.” She hesitated then, and I could see the way the muscles in her jaw tightened, as if she was fighting back tears. “That is, I think I loved him. I’d never been in love with anyone before, except a couple of stupid high school crushes that didn’t really count. I didn’t have time for that sort of thing. So…now he’s gone, and I’m trying to remember what it felt like to be with him, and…I can’t.”

  I wished I knew her well enough to go to her and put my arms around her, give her a hug. Unfortunately, Lindsay had never really been the type for physical displays of affection. Every time I’d seen her with Rafi, they hadn’t been touching. It wasn’t as if any of the djinn seemed all that inclined toward physical displays of affection, but I’d still seen them holding hands from time to time, leaning in for a kiss when they thought no one was watching.

  “It’s all right, Lindsay,” Jace said soothingly. “You’re probably still trying to work through what happened.”

  “That’s what everyone says.” With an impatient gesture, she flung back her hair and then got up, walking over to the hearth so she could spread out her hands and feel the fire’s warmth. “And I think I miss him, but we’d spent so much time apart lately that I can’t even tell that for sure.” At last she turned around and faced us, her back to the fireplace. “But anyway, I’m not going to be a total mess. I’m not like Evony.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, realizing after the words left my mouth that they’d come out a bit sharper than I’d intended.

  “Oh, come on, Jessica. You saw the way Evony acted after she lost Natila. She totally lost it. I mean, it’s all right to grieve, but she went sort of overboard. It wasn’t as if she and Natila were this couple who’d been together for years and years and had never known anything else. They’d only been with each other for a few months.”

  I didn’t exactly bite my tongue, but I reminded myself that Lindsay had just suffered a huge loss and probably wasn’t thinking clearly. To my utter relief, Jace stepped into the awkward silence that followed Lindsay’s last pronouncement.

  “Everyone grieves in their own way,” he said, and although his tone was gentle enough, there was an underlying note of steel in it that said he’d prefer if Lindsay didn’t make any more disparaging remarks about Evony.

  Since Lindsay was a smart girl, she got it. I saw her swallow, and then she said, sounding chastened, “Sorry. I didn’t — I guess I’m sort of angry with myself. It’s as if I keep thinking I should be screaming and crying and wearing sackcloth or whatever, but I’m just…numb.”

  “You should be doing what works best for you,” I told her, my anger ebbing as quickly as it had come. “No one should tell you the right way to grieve…not even yourself.”

  She nodded, and for the first time I saw the glitter of tears in her eyes. They didn’t fall, though.

  “Um…Miles sends his condolences,” I offered. It was an utter lie, but she didn’t need to know that.”

  Surprisingly, her mouth quirked a little. “He does? And I suppose in his next breath he was asking when I’d be back to work?”

  That hit a little too close to the mark. “Well….”

  The faint twitch of her lips turned into a full-blown smile. “It’s all right. I’d be worried if he hadn’t. And you know — I want to. Just sitting around here in my room isn’t going to change anything. If I’m working in the lab, at least I’m doing something.”

  “I’m not sure if you should rush into that,” Jace began, but she held up a hand.

  “I’m not rushing into anything. But I think it’ll feel good, getting back to work. And I plan to, after the farewell tomorrow. So you can tell Miles that if you see him.”

  I opened my mouth to tell her that the only guarantee of my seeing Miles was if I went directly to the lab, since he never ventured out on his own, but then I stopped myself and just said, “Sure. I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear that.”

  “I don’t know if Miles is ever ‘happy’ about anything, but the news might make him slightly less cranky.”

  It had to have been tough, working next to him day after day when he was more or less in a perpetual state of annoyance. But then I remembered the way his voice had broken when he spoke of Natila. I doubted Lindsay had ever seen any such signs of doubt or guilt in him. She probably would have had far different opinion of Miles Odekirk if she had.

  That had been a private scene, one I wasn’t sure I would share even with Jace. I did know it would color all my future dealings with Miles, since I’d seen a side of him I doubted many people had.

  “Well, here’s hoping,” I said.

  Lindsay shook her head.
“I wouldn’t hold my breath. But I don’t think I’d even mind his crankiness. At least I wouldn’t get this feeling that I was walking on eggshells around him.” I watched as she paused for a moment, clearly trying to work out the best way to phrase the words she had rolling around in her mind. “And — thanks for coming by. Really. I appreciate it. But I think I need to be alone for a while. Everyone’s been coming over, and I know they’re trying to be kind, but….”

  “But your thoughts need space to breathe,” Jace said, and her reddened eyes brightened a little.

  “Yes, that. Exactly that. Thank you, Jace.”

  He rose from the bed, and I followed a second later. “If you need anything — ” I began.

  “I’ll let you know,” she broke in. “Thank you again. And if you see anyone heading down the hallway in this direction, could you please head them off at the pass for me?”

  “Consider it done,” Jace said.

  She offered us another smile, and we let ourselves out. By then it was almost five. Time for Dutchie’s walk. I was glad of that, because it would give Jace and me the chance to get out of the resort, breathe some fresh air.

  We had it down to a ritual by then, so we were able to go back to the suite and get the dog saddled up — so to speak — while remaining in our own thoughts. I had to wonder what Jace thought about Lindsay’s reaction to Rafi’s death. Would he consider it disrespectful that she wasn’t openly mourning? I didn’t think so, but….

  “Sometimes the strongest people suffer the worst,” he told me as we walked down Kit Carson Boulevard, Dutchie at the farthest end of her retractable leash while she sniffed happily at the sidewalk. What she was smelling, I wasn’t sure, as I hadn’t seen any sign of other dogs since coming here. Back when all this started, Jace had reassured me about all the ownerless pets, saying the animals would be taken care of, but what did that mean, exactly?