His voice lowered. “Do you want me to leave?”
Did I? Rationally, I knew I should have ordered him out of the house the night before, but in that moment, all I’d been able to think about was him not following me to the bedroom.
“I — I don’t know,” I said at last, then added, as I saw hope flare in his eyes, “that is, I still have some questions I want to ask.”
Mouth thinning to a compressed line, he nodded. “You can ask me anything.”
Maybe, I thought, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get an answer I like. I sipped some coffee, letting the heat of it course down my throat and begin to thaw that lump of ice at my core. Who knew I could feel so cold, when before Jace had made me so warm?
“Jason Little River,” I said, bringing up something I’d been pondering while in the shower. “Is he just someone you made up, or is he a real person?”
“He was a real person,” Jasreel said. From the use of “was” and the way Jasreel’s mouth tightened as he said it, I had to assume that the Mr. Little River was no longer with us. “Everything I told you about me was true…about him, that is. He grew up in Taos, went to the university in Albuquerque, split his time between the pueblo and building his own business in town. He was also physically similar to me, and that made it much easier to hold the illusion of his appearance for extended periods.” A pause while Jasreel drank some of his own coffee, which I noticed was pure black. “Jace” had always taken milk, like me. “Jason Little River died two days after the Heat came to Taos. After he was gone, I took his appearance, and his motorcycle, and began the journey here to Santa Fe.”
That part didn’t make any sense. I decided for sanity’s sake that I’d leave aside the part where Jasreel clearly knew where and when the real Jason was going to die. “His motorcycle? What the hell for? Couldn’t you have just…I don’t know…materialized on my doorstep?”
Jasreel didn’t smile. Still in that same quiet, intense voice, he said, “I could have, but that journey was important for me as well. I needed some time to become Jason, to grow accustomed to being him. Showing up weary and footsore here made me more…believable.”
Something about that comment just made me angry, like he’d known I would fall for his act but decided to hedge his bets, just in case. “All right, you suckered me. So why lie in the first place? Why not tell me the truth?”
He set down his mug. I could see the anguish in his eyes, but all he did was ask quietly, “And would you have believed me? If I had to come to you as myself, told you that my race had destroyed mankind but also that you would live because I wished it, what would you have done?”
What would I have done? In that moment, I honestly couldn’t say for certain. When I’d found this place, guided here by the voice, I was thinking more or less five minutes ahead, only wanting to survive another night. I was tired, heartsore, drained. Could I have found it within myself to believe what he told me? Maybe, if he’d given me a little demonstration of that “floating above the ground” trick.
Whether I would have allowed him into my heart and my bed was an entirely different matter.
“I don’t know!” I flung at him. “All I do know is that you came here, and you lied to me, made me think you were someone else…made me love you…and now I have to reconcile that with the truth, with the way you used me — ”
Horrible, choking sobs rose in my throat after that, and I had to stop, to drop my mug on the counter and turn away from him so I wouldn’t have to look into that face, the face that used to be Jace’s and wasn’t anymore, tears rising up to blind me all over again. A mercy, because then I couldn’t see him clearly.
But I could feel him, warm fingers lacing through mine and pulling me against him, his voice rough with sorrow as he said, “Beloved, it was never my intention to hurt you. I thought perhaps it might be easier — ”
“Don’t call me that!” I gasped, pushing at him, trying to free myself. He resisted for a scant second, and then released me, backing away and holding up his hands as if to show he had no intention of attempting to touch me again. Angrily, I wiped at my tears with the back of one hand.
“Very well…Jessica.” He pulled in a breath, and I noticed how his chest rose and fell, as if he were struggling to gain control of himself. Could djinn experience an accelerated heartbeat, or difficulty breathing? One wouldn’t think so, if they truly weren’t completely tied to this plane of existence, or a physical body. But Jasreel was giving a good enough imitation of it now. Then again, he’d already proved that he was pretty good at pretending he was something he was not.
Looking a little less wild-eyed, he went on, “Jessica, I came to you as Jason Little River because I thought it would be easier for you. I thought we could grow to be comfortable with one another first, and then, when the time was right, I would tell you who I was really was, the truth behind the Dying. It was never my intention to hurt you. How could it be, when I swore an oath as I chose you that your life would be more precious than all the riches in the world to me?”
He took a step in my direction, and I retreated several feet toward the kitchen entrance. That stopped him, and he raised his hands again, almost as if he were as much telling himself to halt as he was showing that he didn’t intend to pursue me or reach out for me. As I stood there, halfway toward the dining room, I realized that poor Dutchie, like most dogs who hate hearing their people fight, had retreated under the little round table in the nook and was staring at us with worried mismatched eyes.
For some reason, seeing her reaction to our quarrel made me calm down a bit. Dutchie loved me, but I remembered that she loved Jace — Jasreel — too. And if she loved Jasreel, surely that meant he couldn’t be evil, or anything close to it. I’d seen the way she’d reacted to Chris Bowman, so I knew she wasn’t one of those dogs who indiscriminately liked everyone. Whatever lies Jasreel might have told me in order to ease his way into my life, I knew then that he’d told them out of a misguided attempt to protect me, to avoid frightening me.
I was angry with him, and I was scared, almost as scared as the night my father died, but in that moment, I knew I didn’t hate him. Some part of my soul wouldn’t allow me to hate him.
He’d brought me a Christmas tree. That could have been another manipulation, but I didn’t think so. He’d done that because he knew I wanted it, wanted some part of my life to feel normal, even when hardly anything in it was normal anymore.
Maybe something in my expression shifted. I couldn’t say for sure, but it must have been enough to give Jasreel some hope, because he said, “Do you still wish for me to go?”
I didn’t…but I also didn’t know how I could begin to process all this with him around all the time. “I don’t know,” I replied. “A minute ago, I would have said yes. But — ”
“But?”
It was time to take a deep breath of my own. “I suppose I want some more answers. What was that — the other djinn saying about the Immune?”
If he was disconcerted by my change of subject, Jasreel didn’t show it. He could have simply been relieved that I was willing to go on talking, even if the topic of conversation had moved away from the two of us and where our relationship currently stood, and on to something more neutral.
“His name is Zahrias. He is the leader of our group in this — sector, I suppose, is the best word for it. The region is not quite analogous to your state of New Mexico, but close enough.”
“So this Zahrias came here to, what, warn you?”
“More or less.” Jasreel shifted, and I could tell he’d been about to step closer to me, but had pulled back at the last second. “In general, we djinn are able to look in on human affairs with very little interference. If we suddenly can’t do so with the group at Los Alamos — ”
“Lo,” I said, and he stopped and shot me an inquiring look.
“What?”
“That was the transmission, wasn’t it?” Another spark that could be fanned to anger. Now I thought I und
erstood what I’d heard so briefly on the ham radio. Voice tight, I said, “The people — the Immune — were transmitting from Los Alamos. And you…cut it off.”
“Yes,” Jasreel replied, sounding resigned. “And yes, I disrupted the signal. Only because I wanted more time alone with you. Until Zahrias came to see me, I didn’t know the group there was any kind of a threat. I only knew they must be Immune, and so their time on this earth was limited.”
I decided to put that anger aside to be dealt with later. “So they’re a threat just because you can’t spy on them?”
“It’s more than that, Jessica. The Immune simply should not have the capability to keep us from looking in on their doings. And now that some of the Chosen have disappeared, the ones who volunteered to go where we could not — well, you can see how that would be very troubling.”
From his perspective, I supposed it was. For myself, I was more intrigued than anything else. What were they doing at Los Alamos that would allow them to evade djinn surveillance? I didn’t know much about the town, except that it was still a place for research and had quite a few government contractor–type businesses. We drove up there once when I was in high school, more to go someplace off the beaten path than for any other reason, and it really did feel like I’d just walked onto the set of that TV show Eureka, the one about a town populated by mad scientists.
But I figured the probability of discovering the truth about what the Immune in Los Alamos were doing was roughly the same as waking up to discover this had all been a terrible dream, so I moved on to my next question. “And the djinn? The ones from this sector, I mean. Zahrias made it sound as if they were all holed up somewhere.”
Jasreel gave me an incongruous grin, as if that mental image amused him. “Djinn do not precisely ‘hole up,’ but they are using Taos as their base of operations.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised. A touristy little town didn’t seem like quite the right spot for a bunch of supernatural villains to be hanging out. “Why Taos?”
“Since its population was small to begin with, it did not have many survivors, and the one or two who were left were….” He let the sentence trail off, but I got the gist.
“Disposed of?” I volunteered.
A grim nod. “Yes. Also, because it was a travel destination, it has accommodations for a number of people, restaurants with good stores of food, and so on.”
“They have power in Taos?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
I wondered exactly what he meant by that, but I decided the day-to-day logistics of keeping Taos going under djinn occupation weren’t my top concern at the moment. “And because the Immune in Los Alamos are up to something you can’t figure out, Zahrias wanted you to leave here and go to Taos.”
“Exactly. You and I have been safe on this property, hidden from the world. It’s exactly why I chose this place as our sanctuary, our haven. But if what Zahrias says is true, then it might be best if we left and took refuge with the other djinn and the Chosen in Taos.”
Crossing my arms, I said, “That’s assuming I would go with you.”
Now the expression he wore was one of resignation. “I will not force you. I can say that it would be safer. But that is your decision to make.”
Oh, thanks for putting it back on me, I thought. But hauling me off to Taos without so much as a by-your-leave would have made me far, far angrier. Jasreel was treating me as a peer now, giving me equal say in what we should do next. I could tell that Zahrias’ news about the Immune in Los Alamos had Jasreel worried. For myself, I didn’t think I had that much to worry about. After all, they were human beings. I was one of them.
Or…was I? Maybe they would look on me as some kind of co-conspirator, a betrayer of my kind. Of course, I hadn’t known Jasreel was djinn, but I had no idea whether that kind of excuse would wash with them or not.
“Let me think about it,” I said. “I have to go gather the eggs.” That had always been my chore, just as watering the goats and lugging their pellets from the garage to the feeding trough he’d built next to their lean-to was Jace’s — Jasreel’s — job.
He seemed to recognize that I needed some time alone, because he didn’t protest, only said, “Of course,” and went to get his neglected cup of coffee. I realized then that I’d only had a few sips out of mine. Oh, well. I didn’t want to have to go past him to retrieve my mug, so I wrote it off as a loss and went to put on my coat and gloves.
The djinn didn’t try to follow me.
The cold air was bracing, but it didn’t do a lot to clear my mind or settle the thoughts that kept racing through it. I gathered eggs mechanically, placing them in the basket with practiced care, the familiar stink of the henhouse around me. Glancing down, I realized it would need to be shoveled again soon. If I asked Jasreel to do it, would he? He’d handled the distasteful chore ever since my one disastrous attempt to handle it, but that was back when he was still trying to convince me he wasn’t anyone except a guy from the pueblo, someone who was used to taking on a good deal of manual labor.
Maybe he can just wave his hands and have all this bird poop and dirty straw magically disappear, I thought. That would be convenient.
Problem was, I didn’t know if his powers — whatever they were, exactly — worked that way.
But even as I pondered such trivialities, my thoughts kept dancing around the real question, the one I didn’t know if I could ever answer.
Can I forgive him?
Because it wouldn’t be simply forgiving the lies he’d told me. To a certain extent, I could understand why he’d done that. If he’d been watching me for some time, studying me before he made me his Chosen, then he would have known I wasn’t the type of person who watched the skies for UFOs or believed in ghosts or any of that other “woo-woo stuff,” as my friend Tori used to put it. A djinn? I probably would have burst out laughing — if I hadn’t unloaded my shotgun into him first, just to be safe. True, if I’d done that and he’d survived unscathed, then maybe I would have started to believe in his supernatural origins.
No, forgiveness would have to go far, far beyond that. He’d protested that he couldn’t stop the Dying, couldn’t have kept his people from unleashing their terrible virus on the world. Maybe not; I’d seen this Zahrias, the de facto leader of my little part of the world, and if he was any indicator of the type of people the djinn had running things, then I could understand how pleas for mercy would have fallen on extremely deaf ears. Even so, many would say Jasreel still was guilty by association. It was the djinn who had done this terrible thing, and he was a djinn.
All right, most people would probably think that way. But I wasn’t a lot of people. I was me. I had to make this decision for myself, based on what my heart and my gut and my mind told me.
And what they were telling me was that Jasreel loved me. He couldn’t save everyone, but he could save me. And he had. He’d saved me, and he’d shown, day in and day out, that he cared for me. In little things, like always making sure he helped clear the table, even though the dishes were my bailiwick, and properly sorting his dirty clothes into the correct bins in the laundry room so I wouldn’t have to do it. Bigger things, like that Christmas tree and the aforementioned mucking-out of the henhouse.
The biggest of all…watching over me, keeping me safe, all along knowing that we weren’t precisely equals, that he was a being of vastly more power and experience. And yet he had never talked down to me, never discounted my suggestions, always took me seriously. If that wasn’t love and respect, what was?
Well, it sounded as if I’d answered my own question.
Feeling lighter by roughly a hundred pounds, I headed back to the house and let myself in the back door, through the mudroom. I scraped off my boots, set down the basket of eggs before I took off my jacket, and then went into the kitchen. Jasreel wasn’t there, but I noticed that he’d cleaned out his coffee mug and put it on the dish drain. That wasn’t just sucking up, either; he always cleaned up aft
er himself.
“Jasreel?” I called out, the syllables of his proper name feeling strange on my tongue.
“In the living room,” he replied.
I wondered what he was doing there. Figuring I’d find out soon enough, I headed in that direction. He was standing in front of the fireplace, which we had going pretty much twenty-four/seven these days. In his right hand he held a log, so it appeared he’d gone in to stoke up the blaze. Dutchie was lying next to him, patting at his leg with one paw. Obviously, someone thought it was time for a belly rub.
Smothering a smile, I said, “So….”
“So?” He set the log on the fire and turned toward me, disrupting the dog’s pant-pawing. She gave me a disgusted look and rolled away from Jasreel, toward the hearth.
“So…I’ll go to Taos with you. If you think it’s for the best.”
An expression of such joy spread over his face that, for an instant, all my doubts and worries deserted me. Surely no one who could look like that would ever mean me any kind of harm. He came to me and cupped my cheeks in his hands, turning my face up toward him.
“You’re sure?”
Was I? His fingers were warm on my face, reassuring, strong but gentle. No one had ever touched me like that. No one except Jace…Jasreel.
I nodded.
He bent and kissed me then, and it was the first time I had kissed this version of him, the first time I had felt the contours of this particular mouth, the taste of this tongue. Not so very different from “Jace,” but different enough that I had to remind myself that it was still him, still the man who had kissed me before, who had made love to me on those cold winter mornings and stood laughing in a field after a billy goat knocked me on my rear end.
But then I felt his body go rigid, and he took a step away from me, one hand going to his throat.
“What is it?” I asked, reaching out to hold on to his fingers. They felt like ice.
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