“Not that I plan to do that forever,” she told me one day, a little more than a week after we’d migrated the colony from Taos. Dani had gone over to Zahrias’ house, and Lauren and I were having a little “girl” time, shopping in one of the stores on the main square, the kind of place neither of us probably could have afforded to frequent back before the Dying made consumer culture more or less irrelevant. “I’m hoping Julia might take over, if she’s willing.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised. From what I could tell, Lauren seemed to enjoy acting as Zahrias’ right-hand woman.
“Yes.” She hesitated, and then I saw her hand go to her stomach. It looked completely flat to me, but….
“Wait — you and Dani?”
“In November sometime, I think.” Another pause, and then she glanced around, even though we were the only two people in the store. “We haven’t told anyone else yet, since it’s pretty early, but….”
I recalled how Jace had said it could be difficult for djinn and humans to conceive children. Apparently not as difficult as he had thought. “Congratulations!” I said, hoping I sounded enthusiastic enough. “That’s great news.”
“Thanks.” Lauren was smiling, but her expression grew serious a moment later. “It’s kind of frightening, though. I mean, it’s not as if I’ll be able to see an ob-gyn or get an epidural when the time comes, or whatever.”
“You’ll do fine,” I told her. “We have Miguel, and EMTs get training in delivering babies. Besides, women were having babies for thousands of years before anyone invented epidurals.”
“Yes, but I have a feeling they didn’t enjoy it.”
I stared at her for a second, and then we both burst out laughing. True, those women who’d had to endure natural childbirth back in the day probably hadn’t enjoyed it, but they’d still survived, which was the important thing. I knew Lauren would do fine. Hers would be the first baby born to our little group here, but it wouldn’t be the last. Slowly, the community would grow, mortals and djinn mingling their blood, creating a new line of people to inhabit the earth.
Was that the intention all along…that this separation between the two races would slowly crumble away, until there came a time when no one could remember when only man was the ruler of this world?
Well, some would remember. Just because a few djinn were having offspring with humans didn’t mean there wouldn’t still be plenty of pure-blood elementals around to recall the days when they’d been exiled from the planet they coveted so much.
Still, it was a step. One in the right direction, I hoped. And maybe someday Jace and I would have a child of our own. Would there be play dates in this future I imagined, helicopter parents, other carry-overs from the paranoid time before?
God, I hoped not. This world was ours, and safe enough for now. Sooner or later we’d have to deal with Margolis, though. I couldn’t imagine Zahrias allowing the current state of affairs to continue indefinitely. That would be like living with a brush fire on the horizon at all times. It might look out of range for the moment, but you’d never know when a sudden wind could fan the flames and send it raging right in your direction.
For the moment, though, I was willing to let it go. We’d earned our small measure of peace.
To my infinite surprise, Lindsay and Miles had taken up residence in a house on Canyon Road, at the outer edge of the area where we’d all settled. Not to say they were shacked up together or anything, but, according to Lindsay, so they could continue their work together.
“It’s built with the bedrooms in two separate wings,” she explained quickly, since my eyebrows began shooting up into my hairline when she stopped by to tell me where she was living. “He has his, and I have mine. But the important thing is that the place has a huge five-car garage with a workshop area, so it makes a great lab space. The cars weren’t there when we moved in, though. I think it was someone’s vacation house.”
Like the one I was living in. Intellectually, I knew there had been people who could afford to have million-dollar-plus houses scattered in strategic vacation spots around the globe, but my brain still boggled a bit at the idea. And that wasn’t the only thing it was boggling at. “You and Miles, living together,” I said flatly.
“In separate wings,” she repeated, although I couldn’t help noticing the way her gaze wouldn’t quite meet mine. She lifted her chin and went on, “It just made more sense to be there together. Most of the time I don’t even see him until we go out to work in the garage. The lab, I mean.”
“Okay,” I replied. Methinks the lady doth protest too much passed through my mind, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to push it. And it was entirely possible the whole thing was innocent…living arrangements of convenience, as it were. At least on Miles’s end. I sort of got the impression it had only barely registered with him that Lindsay was even female.
Changing the subject, I asked, “Why is Miles even still pushing the research? I mean, we don’t have to worry about protecting ourselves from the rogue djinn any more.”
A lift of the shoulders, followed by a smile I thought was a little too indulgent. “I think he’d go nuts if he wasn’t investigating some scientific mystery. Anyway, he says he thinks he might be on to something — my screw-up actually may have had some benefit, because it has him going in a different direction, trying to see if a certain series of adjustments may be the key to blocking the powers of only the djinn outside its radius, not the ones within it.”
Several days earlier, I would have rejoiced at hearing that news. Now, though, I couldn’t help thinking Miles’s research was an exercise in futility. The rebel factions in the djinn world seemed to have been quashed, and I was pretty sure the elders wouldn’t allow any more of that kind of nonsense, no matter how loosely they might govern otherwise.
But pursuing his research did keep Miles off the street, so to speak, and who knows — tweaking the device might have some use in the future. “I’m sure Zahrias will be interested to hear that,” I told Lindsay. “Have you said anything to him about it?”
“Not yet,” she replied. “Miles has been seeing some interesting results, but he’s not ready for field tests. For one thing, he’s not sure any of the djinn would even consent to them.”
That didn’t surprise me. I wasn’t a djinn, but even I could relate to wanting to avoid any further interruption of my powers after I’d finally gotten them back. “Well, maybe not right away. But after things have calmed down a little….”
I let the words trail off. Had they calmed down, really? It seemed that way, and yet I still couldn’t shake the feeling that we weren’t quite as safe as we thought we were. What if another group of djinn decided Khalim & Co. had had the right idea? Would we always have to be on our guard against another attack? If that sort of thing kept up for any length of time, maybe the elders would finally decide they were tired of fighting our battles for us and would let things run their course.
Lindsay wasn’t looking all that hopeful, so it seemed as if her thoughts ran along more or less the same lines as mine. All she said, though, was, “It’s possible. Anyway, we’re a little ways out from that yet.”
We’d been sitting on the patio, enjoying a rare day of temperatures that reached into the upper 60s. She got up from her chair then, adding,
“I should get back. I just wanted to drop by and let you know what I was up to. It seems like the djinn have some way to communicate with one another, but we mortals stuck out there on the edge have to resort to the old-fashioned ways of getting the word out.”
I hadn’t thought of that, but she was right. It did appear that the djinn could silently relay messages to each other when necessary, even if that communication wasn’t as detailed or intimate as what they shared with their Chosen. But people like Lindsay and Julia could only drop by to talk, since of course there was no phone service, no email, no texting…and probably never would be again, unless Miles decided to move on to telecommunications once he was done with refining the d
jinn-repelling devices.
Maybe I should have left it alone, but I found myself compelled to ask as I got up from my own chair, “Lindsay, do you know what you’re doing?”
A shrug. “Do any of us?”
Good question. I didn’t have an answer for her, so I only offered her my own lift of the shoulders.
“That’s what I thought.” She hesitated, head raised to watch the breeze move the branches of the still-bare trees. That same breeze touched a few loose tendrils of her hair and waved them around her face, although most of it was pulled back in a ponytail. “I’ve been thinking a lot, the past few days. About Rafi and me, I mean.”
“It must be hard for you.”
She smiled, but the expression wasn’t one of fond remembrance. Instead, it looked almost bitter. “That’s the problem. It really isn’t. I keep feeling like I should miss him more than I do. When he was around, I felt…I can’t really describe it. As if I was the most important thing in his world, and so he should be the most important thing in mine. Sometimes it was hard to concentrate. In a way, I felt relieved when I had to pitch in and really use some of my training and talents to get things done. It was almost as if a fog had lifted from my brain or something.”
Her words sent a little chill through me. I couldn’t help recalling Aldair’s words, although his was not a voice I particularly wanted echoing around in my head.
When a djinn comes to a mortal woman, he is sure to make himself irresistible.
So had Rafi cast a glamour on Lindsay as well, to ensure her cooperation? It was beginning to sound that way.
I couldn’t tell her of my suspicions, though. What would be the point? Rafi was gone, and what he might or might not have done was now in the past. Lindsay seemed to be focused on the future, whatever that might turn out to be. If that future included Miles sometime down the road, who was I to judge her? He’d loved someone once; Julia had told me he’d lost a wife and young child to the Heat. It wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility that he might someday love again. And after seeing the way he’d broken down in the lab over his guilt at Natila’s death, I knew he wasn’t quite the robot he wanted us all to think he was.
Somehow I managed to summon what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “It’s okay, Lindsay. We all cope in our own ways. It sounds like you’ve been doing okay.”
And I hoped to God she would leave it at that. It was better that she was moving on.
She nodded. “I have been, actually. And I have the work to thank for that. Speaking of which, I really do have to get going. Maybe you can stop by and see what we’re working on. I think Miles might like that.”
I wasn’t so sure, but I didn’t bother to contradict her. “Sounds good,” I said. “Mind if I bring Jace along?”
“Not at all. I’m really hoping that we’ll have made some decent progress in the next day or so. Then Jace will have something good to report to Zahrias.”
“I hope so, too.”
She smiled and departed soon after that, leaving me thinking. It really did sound to me as if Rafi had put the djinn whammy on her, so to speak. And if that was the case, how many more of the Chosen in our group might have been victims of the same sort of coercion?
That’s a serious can of worms, Jessica, I told myself. You sure you really want to open it?
Not really, but my parents had imparted to me a pretty strict sense of right and wrong. I didn’t think I could let this alone. Jace would have told me the truth — if he had all the facts, and I didn’t know if he really did. After all, he’d spent most of his time after the Dying by my side, and had distanced himself from the community at Taos so he wouldn’t have to be near Aldair. He probably hadn’t been around enough to really analyze the interactions between the djinn and their Chosen.
But Zahrias had.
Since Jace was off with Dani and a few others, scouring the area for livestock, I knew I still had most of the afternoon open. I’d asked him why they were even bothering, since Aldair had made it sound as if the djinn could conjure food out of thin air. At the question, Jace had frowned and said, “No, it has to come from somewhere. We do not have the ability to conjure matter from nothing. True, we could ‘blink’ a head of cattle here, and use that to supplement our diets. But sometimes it is simpler to have the resources we need here at hand.”
That reply made me wonder where exactly Aldair had gotten that goose from, and then I decided I really didn’t need to know. It seemed clear to me that our community wanted to be as self-sustaining as possible, and I thought that was probably the smarter choice in the long run.
Now, though, I had an opportunity to speak to Zahrias alone.
I didn’t hunt up Lauren and request an audience or anything. No, I just walked down the street to the mansion Zahrias had taken for his own, then went up and knocked on the front door. Lauren might have been there, or maybe not; she tended to spend a good deal of time out and about, talking to people, making sure everyone had what they needed.
When the door opened, Zahrias stood there, not Lauren. His eyebrows lifted slightly, but he sounded civil enough as he asked, “What can I do for you, Jessica?”
“Can I talk to you about something?”
To my relief, he didn’t even hesitate. “Of course.”
Stepping aside, he let me in. I’d been to his house once or twice before, so by that point I was past staring. Even so, it still required a conscious effort to keep myself from gawking at the art hanging on the walls, the enormous ceilings, the floor of patterned slate. Someone had dumped a ton of money into the house. No wonder Zahrias had taken it for his own.
He led me through the foyer and off into a smaller space most likely intended as a sitting room or study, although it was furnished with only two love seats covered in bone-colored leather. In the art niches on the walls, priceless Russian icons stared at us with blank eyes.
After we’d both sat down, he asked, “What is it?”
Now that the moment had come, I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake in confronting Zahrias with this. Our lives were just settling down into something resembling normal patterns. Did I really want to disrupt that tranquility, just because of my own crazy suspicions?
But then I thought of the Lindsay and how she’d felt as if she was in a fog when she was around Rafi, and I knew I couldn’t let it go. “This power of glamour you djinn have,” I said abruptly. “How many used it on their Chosen?”
Zahrias didn’t even blink. “Some did in the beginning, to ease the transition with their partners. Others, like Jasreel, never needed to. But I can assure you that the ones who utilized that power only did so in a limited fashion. None of them are using it now.”
“What about Rafi?”
The djinn leader was far too disciplined to sigh, but he did hesitate for a few seconds. Then he replied, “Rafi…did not choose wisely in his partner.”
My eyebrows lifted. “Excuse the hell out of me? Lindsay is amazing!”
Zahrias actually smiled. Well, his mouth lifted. Those dark eyes with their amazing fringe of lashes looked more than a little grim. “I did not intend any slight toward Ms. Adarian by my comment. What I meant was that Rafi desired her for her beauty, and paid little attention to her mind and heart. His mistake, because we’ve all seen that she has an extraordinary mind. And when she would not bend to his will as he desired, he…ensured that she would.”
“By casting a spell on her.”
“That is a very crude way of putting it. Djinn do not precisely cast spells. They exert their will on their environment, and those around them, when necessary.” Zahrias shifted on the couch then, one of the few signs of unease I’d ever seen in him. “I know that he did not use the glamour consistently, which was why they quarreled from time to time. That was her way of trying to resist, although she had no idea of what she actually was resisting.”
I crossed my arms and sent him what I hoped was an intimidating frown. “And you didn’t stop him?”
Unfortunat
ely, Zahrias didn’t seem at all affected by my scowl. Tone mild, he said, “It was not my place to interfere in Rafi’s relationship. I am a steward for this community, true, but that does not extend to meddling in the personal lives of my people and their Chosen. Rafi selected Lindsay, and although I thought his choice a poor one for a number of reasons, I could not interfere.”
“Even if he hurt her?”
This time, it was Zahrias’ eyebrow lifted that lifted. “Did he?”
The answer was no, he hadn’t. At least, Lindsay had never mentioned any kind of abuse, and I’d certainly never seen any signs of it on her. The worst that could be said for Rafi was that he’d been entirely too controlling, on a number of levels.
“Well, no,” I muttered.
“So you see.” Zahrias placed his hands flat on his knees, smoothing the silky fabric of his dark trousers. “While I understand your concern, believe me when I say that no others of my people are now using their powers to coerce their Chosen in any way. They are all together because they wish to be, just as you wish to be with Jasreel.”
“He never used that glamour on me,” I said. “Not even in the beginning.” And then I held my breath, wondering if Zahrias would contradict me, and what I would do if he did.
But he didn’t. “No,” he said. “Jasreel chose to let you learn to love him. At the time, several called him a fool.”
“Did you?” I inquired, my tone a challenge.
A thin smile. “Let us say that I chose to reserve my judgment. And a good thing, too, since events have amply shown that he was actually very wise in that decision.”
I still wasn’t used to Zahrias paying me anything close to a compliment. About all I could do was offer a silly little nod. Not quite looking at him, I said, “I hope so.”
He began to lift a hand, as if to wave off my false modesty, and then paused, his entire frame going still. The color drained from his face.
“What?” I demanded, looking around wildly, trying to see what had set him off. “What is it?”
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