djinn wars 02 - taken

by Christine Pope

  But that was all in the future. For now, I only wanted to be with Jace, think of Jace. I pushed myself up on one arm so I could kiss him again, and he seemed to understand, because he bent and brought his mouth to mine. Then it was just the two of us, the world shut away for the moment, so we could find healing in one another.

  Right then, it was enough.

  Chapter Seventeen

  We stayed in our suite for hours, exploring one another, reacquainting ourselves with the way the other person touched, kissed, caressed. I’d been so caught up in the heat of our reunion that I hadn’t even stopped to think that I hadn’t taken one of my birth-control pills for several days now. They’d been left behind, along with the rest of my belongings, at the Los Alamos house.

  I told Jace, and added in halting tones, “But maybe it doesn’t matter — maybe djinn and humans can’t have children?”

  At once he folded me into his arms and kissed the top of my head. “It is a very rare thing, but it has happened several times over the centuries. Also, among djinn, a conscious choice to have a child must be made. It is not something that happens by accident. So you need have no fears on that account — we would have to decide together to have a child, and even then….” He left the words trail off.

  “I don’t have fears,” I protested, although as the words left my mouth, I tried not to think too hard about what that unfinished sentence meant. Was he trying to say that we might not have children, even sometime in the future, when the time was right? Better to leave that alone for now. My tone firm, I added, “I’d love to have a family with you, Jace. Only…maybe not just now.”

  A blazing smile, and he kissed me again, this time on the mouth. “I could wish for nothing more. And we will make that decision together when the time comes. For now, though, you need have no worries about becoming with child unexpectedly.”

  His kisses were enough to have me pull him close again, our bodies joining once more. It seemed that no matter what I did, I could never get enough of the sensation of his flesh against mine. Eventually, though, it was time for us to emerge, if for no other reason than it was almost past dinnertime, and we needed to see what we could scrounge from the kitchens.

  “And I’d better check on Evony,” I told Jace after I’d gotten some food and fresh water for Dutchie. Luckily, the dog was used to our intimacies, and had slept by the fire through the whole thing, occasionally opening one eye to see whether we were done yet. “I don’t want her to think we’ve abandoned her.”

  He only nodded, his expression somewhat distracted and grim. I could tell he was thinking that Evony probably wasn’t much in the mood to talk to me.

  It seemed he was right, because when we stopped at the door to her suite and knocked, the only response I got was a muffled “go away.” Turning toward Jace, I sent him an imploring look.

  He took the hint and said to the door, “Evony, we just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  A long silence, during which I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and wondered how long we should wait out here before carefully tiptoeing away. But then the door banged open and Evony stood there, looking tear-stained and tragic. “No, I’m not all right. So glad you could stop in and check on me once you were done with your afternoon-long fuck-fest.”

  The door slammed shut again. I stayed rooted in place, shocked, even as one hand slid up to my neck, to the telltale marks Jasreel had left there. I’d been provided with clothes and a few toiletries, but no makeup other than some lip gloss, and so I hadn’t really been able to cover up the marks he’d made on my throat.

  Not wanting to leave things where they stood, I lifted my hand to knock again, but Jace caught my wrist in gentle fingers.

  “Leave it for now, beloved,” he said. “The wounds are very fresh for her, and they will take time to heal. I’ll make sure someone comes to check on her, bring her something to eat.”

  “One step ahead of you,” came Lauren’s voice, and we both turned to see her approaching down the corridor as she pushed a room service cart in front of her. “I don’t know if she’ll eat any of this, but I thought we should make the gesture.”

  “Thanks, Lauren,” I said, then hesitated before asking, “Have you talked to her?”

  “Just briefly. I wanted to tell her again that she had a safe place here, that she didn’t have to worry about not being a part of our settlement just because — well, just because she’d lost Natila.” Lauren’s shoulders lifted, and she shook her head. “That actually didn’t go over too well. She’s grieving, I know. So right now, I just want to make sure she at least eats something, and I suppose the rest will start to mend eventually.”

  That was very close to what Jace had said as well, but I couldn’t help wondering. Was Evony’s the sort of loss you could ever come back from? My bond with Jace was so intense, so intimate, that I couldn’t imagine ever recovering if I somehow lost him. But that wouldn’t happen. I’d come close to having him taken from me — too close — but he was with me now, and here in this stronghold of the djinn, neither Margolis nor Miles Odekirk could do anything to hurt him.

  But because I didn’t want to discourage Lauren, I only nodded and said, “I hope so.”

  Her expression was somber. “Me, too.” Then her features lightened a bit. “The hordes have gone through, but there’s still some food left over. Phillip’s keeping it in warming trays for all you stragglers.”

  “Thank you, Lauren,” Jace said. “Come, Jessica — I have a feeling it would be better if we weren’t here when Lauren attempts to coax Evony out.”

  I couldn’t argue with that logic. After flashing a quick smile at Lauren, I followed Jace down the hall toward the restaurant. He seemed to know where he was going, prompting me to ask, “You’ve been here before?”

  “Yes,” he said briefly. After I slanted him an inquiring glance, he added, “Zahrias designated this hotel as the group’s gathering place, should it turn out that it wasn’t safe or feasible to have our people scattered all over town and in some of the outlying neighborhoods. So we all spent some time here. But this has always been the place he intended to stay, even though most of the others chose to live in various houses or hotel suites in and around Taos.”

  “Oh,” I replied, thinking it over. “So did you have a house picked out here?”

  Jace shook his head. “Not really. I’d thought I could stay with you down in Santa Fe. At the time, it seemed safe enough, although Zahrias thought me strange for not wanting to be with my own kind. Eventually, perhaps, but I wanted time alone with you.”

  Time we’d had, although not nearly enough. Those days with Jace — even though I had thought he was Jason Little River back then — had begun to take on a hazy, idyllic quality, giving them a perfection I knew couldn’t be quite accurate. We’d worked hard, spent long days looking after the animals and preparing food and doing the thousand and one things life in this post-Dying world required. But we’d had each other, and that had been enough. I would have been very happy to live a long time without any intrusions from outside.

  The outside had intruded, though, and now here we were. I reflected there were worse fates than to be relegated to a luxury suite in a five-star resort for the rest of my days, but even so, I wanted to go home.

  Home. Funny how a house I’d lived in for just a scant three months now seemed like the only home I could imagine. But to me it was home, because Jace had been there with me.

  As Lauren had said, the restaurant that the djinn colony now used as a communal dining room was mostly empty by the time we arrived. It seemed the djinn weren’t the demonstrative type; the few who were still there — accompanied by their Chosen — only nodded briefly at Jace before returning to their meals.

  After we’d gotten our own dinner, which was herb-roasted chicken and wild rice and a wonderful vegetable dish of sautéed mushrooms and red onions and asparagus, Jace and I sat down at a secluded table off in a corner. Because live trees and plants were used
as natural dividers in the space, I almost felt as if we were eating on a patio on a mild summer day, rather than indoors in the dead of winter. I was so looking forward to spring and summer with Jace — maybe we would be home in Santa Fe by then. But first things first.

  I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Okay, I wasn’t exactly expecting a welcome-home party with balloons and stuff, but you’d think people would look a little happier to have you back.”

  He poured me some wine from the bottle he’d snagged. “Believe me, they are all relieved that I’ve returned safely. However, it’s not our nature to indulge in public displays of enthusiasm. And some are grieving for Natila.”

  “Only some?” I inquired, then took a sip of chardonnay.

  Some people might have looked away, but Jace met my gaze squarely. “Djinn society is not as different from human as some might wish to believe. Let’s just say that there are those who didn’t approve of Natila’s…tastes.”

  “Ah.” In my mind, that explained a lot. At the very least, it told me why Natila had lingered with Evony in Española, rather than coming back to Taos right away. A quick glance at the few couples remaining in the dining area told me they all seemed to be straight, although I knew I recalled seeing a few male same-sex couples at the Christmas gathering more than a month earlier. “And what about the guys?”

  Jasreel’s mouth twitched. “Well, I suppose one would say they are more tolerated. They are greater in number, for one thing — Natila was the only female djinn in this group who had a taste for women.”

  That would make things difficult. And all that much worse for Evony, who had no hope of finding someone else as long as she remained here. Did she know? Had Natila told her that she was the only one of her kind in the Taos settlement? No wonder Evony acted as if she didn’t have much to look forward to. Here, she really didn’t.

  And even if there might have been future prospects for her in Los Alamos, it wasn’t as if she could have stayed there. Not after what happened to Natila.

  My expression must have sunk, because Jace reached across the table and took my hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “It will be difficult,” he said gently. “You will need to be her friend, even if she pushes you away. I have to hope that eventually she will — ”

  “She’ll what?” I cut in, my tone bitter now that I understood the true extent of Evony’s loss. “Get over it? Switch sides so she can get laid? I know — we can get her to hook up with Aldair. Maybe that’ll cure her of the gay.”

  Something in Jace’s features shifted subtly. “You’ve met Aldair?”

  “Yes,” I said. The other djinn was a subject that would have come up eventually, so I figured I might as well tell Jasreel the truth. It wasn’t as if anything had happened between us…even if Zahrias had hoped it might. Not that he seemed to have a vested interest in my or Aldair’s happiness…more that he just didn’t appear to like loose ends. “Zahrias was trying to play matchmaker with the two of us, until I told him I wasn’t interested.”

  I’d thought Jace would show some sign of surprise at this revelation, but instead he nodded grimly and said, “I suppose that was to be expected.”

  “Um…excuse me?” Something wasn’t tracking here. True, Jace had known that a group of the Chosen had gone missing, but he’d never indicated that he knew who they were, or which djinn they’d been associated with.

  He smiled then, but it was a mere upturn of his lips, not anything that reached his eyes. “Back…before, when those of us in the One Thousand were making our selections as to who among the Immune would be our Chosen, Aldair and I had a bit of a run-in.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we both chose the same person. You.”

  There was an answer I hadn’t been expecting. I sat back in my chair and stared at him blankly. “You…what?”

  Jace still wore a smile, but now it seemed amused rather than ironic. “You’re surprised by this?”

  “Well, yes.” This was the first hint I’d gotten that the selection of a djinn’s Chosen wasn’t a pure soul-to-soul connection. True, Aldair hadn’t looked all that broken up about losing the woman he’d picked. Was that because she’d been his second choice?

  “It has happened once or twice.” With a shrug, Jasreel reached for his glass of wine and drank a large swallow.

  “So…how did you solve the problem?” Although I was discomfited by the realization that I could have been with Aldair all this time, rather than Jasreel, I couldn’t help quipping, “What, did you two fight a duel over me or something?”

  But Jace’s smile abruptly disappeared. “Not exactly. However, we did have to engage in a…contest of wills, for lack of a better term. If two djinn need to seek a resolution on something like this, then their talents are pitted against one another.”

  I had a wild vision of Jace and Aldair flinging gusts of wind and tornadoes and whatever other wind-borne mayhem they could think of at each other. And all because of me? Of all the survivors, there wasn’t anyone else Aldair could have chosen?

  Well, obviously there was, or she wouldn’t have been around to volunteer to go and spy on the Los Alamos community. Whether she’d put herself forward for that venture partly because things weren’t rosy between her and her djinn lover, I had no idea, but the idea seemed plausible enough.

  Right then, I was just very, very glad that Jace had proved himself to be the stronger of the two. The thought of two men fighting over me seemed completely far-fetched, but I could tell Jace wasn’t joking about any of this.

  I let out a sigh. “This could be awkward.”

  “It could, if Aldair decides to be difficult. I suppose we should do our best to stay out of his way as much as possible.”

  Precisely how easy that would be, with all of us camping out in this resort, I had no idea. At least I hadn’t seen any sign of the other djinn since Jace and I had come here, so maybe it wouldn’t be horribly difficult. I hoped.

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said. “And if we’re really lucky, maybe things will settle down enough that you and I can get out of Taos soon, and go back to Santa Fe.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Jace replied. “I will wish for that as well, but unless we know for sure that Margolis’ people won’t try to hunt us down there, it will be safer for us to remain here.”

  True enough. I didn’t know how much of a blow we’d dealt to Miles Odekirk and the Los Alamos colony as a whole by taking one of the devices, but I hoped it was significant enough that they wouldn’t be thinking of going on any more djinn-hunting expeditions in the near future. There was also the possibility that we could attempt to reverse-engineer the box, figure out a way to make its powers affect the other devices so they were useless against us.

  Yeah, right, I thought. And after that, we’ll build a rocket ship and fly to the moon.

  Actually, for all I knew, the djinn could fly to the moon without the aid of any technology. They weren’t quite of this world, and I still didn’t have a very clear idea of everything their powers entailed. Maybe someday soon, Jace would explain all that to me.

  Now, though, he was watching me with worried eyes, clearly concerned that I would try to pursue the idea of getting away from here and going back to Santa Fe. As much as I wanted that, though, I knew he was right. We wouldn’t be safe there.

  I smiled at him, then reached out to lay my hand on his where it rested on the tabletop. “Well, I guess that means the best thing we can do is spend a lot of time in our suite. That way, we won’t have as much of a chance of bumping into Aldair.”

  And I was gratified to see Jace return that smile, this time with his dark eyes lighting up at the prospect of all those hours alone with me. He twined his fingers with mine and squeezed gently.

  “I think, Jessica, that I would like that very much.”

  We did spend a good deal of time in our suite, but not all, because Jace and I were called in to brief the engineering team — for lack of a better word — on any insights we could prov
ide as to how Miles Odekirk’s devices functioned. It wasn’t a lot, but at least Jace had been in close proximity to one of the things for weeks and lived to tell the tale, and I’d seen Julia and Miles operate it, although that was a little bit like saying I knew how to drive a race car just because I’d watched the Indianapolis 500 with my father on a few occasions.

  “I figured out some of the basic mechanics,” Lindsay Adarian said, turning the box over in her hands. She was about a year older than I, and had been getting her master’s in engineering when the Heat cut her education off at the knees, just as it had mine. Zahrias had put her in charge of this little task force, an appointment her consort, an earth elemental named Rafi, hadn’t seemed too thrilled about. However, around here it seemed that Zahrias’ word was law, and so Lindsay was spearheading the effort to delve into the device’s mysteries. “But how it does what it does?” She lifted her shoulders, and her dark blonde hair slipped down her back. Like every other Chosen I’d met, she was gorgeous, her warm skin echoing the shade of her hair, and her eyes a startling green. “I don’t have any idea. This is an order of magnitude beyond anything I was studying. This Miles Odekirk must be a genius.”

  “That’s one word for it,” I muttered, and Jace sent me a warning glance before saying,

  “Jessica told me that this Los Alamos place was a center for research, some of it quite advanced. So it makes sense that Dr. Odekirk would be able to invent something quite outside the scope of your studies.”

  Amazing that Jace could still be so formal, so correct when referring to Miles Odekirk, the man who’d concocted a series of increasingly painful “tests” to be used on his captives and who had overseen the death of a fellow djinn. Although maybe that wasn’t exactly the truth. I’d gotten the impression that Margolis had engineered that particular piece of torture, and Miles Odekirk had gone along with it so he could observe the effects of the waterboarding. Then again, he hadn’t seemed too broken up over Natila’s death, more intrigued that he would have a dead djinn to study.