All right, not exactly. What she really wanted right then was to turn the Suburban around so she could go back and tell Zahrias that she’d screwed up, that she wasn’t really angry with him. Except…she was. Sort of. It was more that intellectually she could understand his reticence about approaching her, but her gut wasn’t quite ready to forgive him. And her libido seemed to want to tell both her brain and her gut to take a hike so she could fall into his arms again.
Goddamn it.
Jaw tense, she maneuvered her way out of downtown Santa Fe and got them headed north on Highway 285. The roadway here wasn’t quite as clear as it was on the 502, since the Los Alamos group used that highway to get to and from Española, but it was all right as long as she kept her speeds down below fifty miles an hour. And once they were back on the 502, she’d be able to push it up to sixty-five.
They were coming up to the turnoff for the highway. Off to the right was a casino complex, its parking lot still filled with cars that the Los Alamos scavenging teams hadn’t deemed suitable to acquire.
Julia slowed down to take the curve that led them back under the 285 and then west on the 502. In the seat next to her, Brent was watching the scenery go by with half-lidded eyes; he’d probably been on this route a number of times already, since he’d been one of Margolis’ chief vehicle-scroungers back when they were all scouring the area for every four-wheel-drive truck and SUV they could get their hands on.
A roaring sound filled her ears. Beneath her fingers, the steering wheel jerked violently. Julia tightened her grip and hung on, thinking they must have blown a tire. But no, the whole Suburban shuddered and seemed to leap up off the pavement, flying into the air even as she felt it tipping sideways, starting to roll. Black smoke surrounded them, accompanied by flames that blew up and out, hitting the roof and walls of the underpass.
We’re going to crash, she thought, quite calmly. Then a red-tinged darkness rushed up and swallowed her.
* * *
“You are looking quite thunderous today,” Dani remarked after Zahrias had let his brother into the house. “Weren’t you supposed to have dinner with Julia Innes last night?”
“I did have dinner with her,” Zahrias said heavily. She’d been gone less than half an hour, and already her absence weighed on him, making it difficult to think. Foolish, he knew. He had functioned quite well without her all these months, so what was the problem now?
The problem was that he had kissed her, and so now he knew exactly what he had been missing.
“From the look on your face, I would hazard a guess that it did not go well.”
Sometimes Dani could be too perceptive. But then, he had always been the one who enjoyed being around others, who liked understanding their moods and motivations. His was entirely too sunny a nature for a djinn. However, that nature had stood him in good stead when it came time to establish this mixed mortal/djinn community. The humans felt they could confide in him, for he did not seem quite so alien to them.
“It…did not go as I had hoped,” Zahrias replied.
“She does not share your attraction?”
“Not precisely.” No, that was not the problem at all. He knew well enough when a woman reacted to him, and Julia had been responsive, eager…until he confessed to her that he had kept himself from reaching out to her earlier because of the tragedies in his past.
Dani lifted a skeptical eyebrow. Although Zahrias did not have as many conquests in his past as other djinn his age might, he certainly had never lacked for female companions. “So is it that she doesn’t wish to be with you, or is it something else?”
Zahrias waved an impatient hand. Sometimes his brother could be too inquisitive for his own good. And the wound of Julia’s rejection was still too raw for Zahrias to want to discuss what had happened. Instead, he went to the sideboard and poured two glasses of wine from the bottle that sat there. Dani’s eyebrows lifted almost imperceptibly.
Clearly, the younger djinn had been spending too much time around humans. Yes, it might not yet be the hour for the midday meal, but the djinn did not follow mortal rules that governed when it might or might not be the proper time to imbibe. Alcohol affected elementals, true, but not to the same extent as it did humans.
“How does Lauren fare?” Zahrias asked. The question was an obvious deflection, and he knew Dani would see it as such, but he needed to move the discussion away from Julia.
“As well as can be expected,” Dani replied. From the glint in his eyes, he knew exactly what his brother was doing…but he would not argue the point. “She frets over being confined to her bed, but Miguel says that is what’s best for her. The pains she was experiencing have subsided, now that she isn’t moving around as much, and so everything should be fine.”
“Should” being the most important word in that sentence. Lauren’s partnership with Dani meant that she enjoyed the same robust health as the rest of the djinn, but even so, complications from mixed births such as these were not completely unknown. That was how Jasreel had lost his own mother, when she’d attempted to give another child to the djinn man who had claimed her. At least the universe had been kind and had granted Jasreel full djinn powers, thus ensuring that his father would take the motherless boy and raise him as one of their own, despite his half-blood status.
But Zahrias would not speak of such things to his brother. Dani knew Jasreel’s history as well as he himself did. Perhaps it was recalling how Jasreel had lost his mother that made Dani unusually tense now. The situation was quite different, though. True, Miguel was not a true healer, but he had spent the last six months reading about pregnancy and childbirth in the many books the mortals had left behind, and he was probably far better suited to deliver a child than the healers back in the time when Jasreel was born, so many centuries ago.
Zahrias handed one of the glasses of wine to his brother. “Since Lauren is the active, busy sort, I can see why she would chafe at being so confined. However, perhaps you should remind her that she will be very busy very soon, and so perhaps she should enjoy the quiet time she has now, even if it is being forced on her.”
A grin, and Dani lifted his glass. “Wise words, brother. I will be sure to tell her that.”
Raising his glass as well, Zahrias didn’t quite smile. Somehow he couldn’t find it within him to do so. Perhaps in a few days he would be more inclined, once the memory of Julia’s lips against his had faded. In the meantime, well, there was plenty of wine.
* * *
Her ears were ringing, and people groaned all around her. Julia opened her eyes, but nothing in the world seemed to make sense right then. After she blinked once or twice, she realized everything seemed wrong because the Suburban was on its side, the windshield a spiderweb of cracks, Brent Sanderson dangling next to her, held in place only by his seatbelt. Bright blood from a gash along his scalp obscured half his face.
“Brent?” she croaked.
He didn’t move. Shit.
Her fingers shook as she fumbled with the buckle of her own seatbelt. After a few abortive tries, she got it loose. Since she was already lying smashed up against the driver-side window, she didn’t have to worry about falling.
What the hell had happened? Her first thought had been a blown tire, but no tire should have erupted like that, with flame and smoke. Had there been some kind of explosive lying in the roadway? No, that didn’t make sense. Teams from Los Alamos had come this way before; they would have cleared anything dangerous.
Well, she could figure that out later. From the back seat, she heard more groans. “Eric? Nancy?”
Eric’s voice. “We’re okay. Banged up, but okay.”
Thank God for that at least. “Can you move?”
Nancy let out a soft moan. “I think my arm’s broken. And I dropped the device.”
“It’s okay,” Julia reassured her. “It’s got to be in the car somewhere. We can find it after we get ourselves out of here.”
“I can climb out through the passenger side,�
� Eric said then. “There’s glass everywhere, though.”
“Hang on,” Julia told him. The last thing she needed was for him to slice up his hands while trying to extricate himself from the vehicle. “The windshield’s already smashed, but I can push it out of the way.”
“Brent?” Nancy asked.
“He’s passed out, I think. His window’s broken, too — looks like some shrapnel or whatever it was got it. But I think he’s breathing.”
“Shit.”
“What happened?” Eric again.
Julia was about to tell him that she had no frigging clue when Nancy spoke again. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone hit us with an RPG or a rocket launcher or something.”
“That’s impossible,” she said.
It definitely sounded impossible. Julia could maybe believe it had been some kind of djinn attack — if it weren’t that Miles’s device should have kept any djinn in the area at least a quarter-mile away from them. Anyway, that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was getting out of the Suburban. She didn’t smell gasoline, but that didn’t mean much. It could still be leaking somewhere.
Her spirit quailed at the thought of having to limp back to Santa Fe for help, but first things first. She dumped her useless wallet and cosmetics bags and the other items from her purse — miraculously, it was still wedged next to her on the seat — and then used the empty leather bag to wrap around her hand so she could punch the windshield out of the way. Maybe it would have been better to kick it out, but with the angle she was lying at, she didn’t know if she could have gotten enough leverage. Anyway, the shattered safety glass did fall away after her second blow, landing with a crunch on the pavement.
Climbing out past the steering wheel was trickier than she’d thought, and she knew she’d picked up a few more bruises along the way, but eventually, Julia was able to push her way through the windshield opening. She landed on her hands, skinning her palms. Could have been worse, though. At least she hadn’t cut them on any broken glass.
She bit back a moan as she straightened, feeling wrenched muscles protest the movement. No doubt tomorrow she’d be one big walking bruise. But at least she was still alive.
A strange, acrid scent hung in the air below the overpass. Smoke, yes, but with a weird chemical tinge to it. Julia didn’t think she’d ever smelled something like it before. Well, she’d have to worry about that later.
The Suburban lay on its side like some prehistoric monster felled in combat. From that angle, it seemed impossibly tall to her. There was no way she could climb up there to free Brent, or help Eric out his window. Maybe if she could grab the axle somehow, pull on it so the SUV would fall back down into its normal position. A maneuver like that would jostle everyone inside, and Julia winced at what it might do to Nancy’s broken arm, but she didn’t know what else to try. She couldn’t leave them as they were.
“You all still doing okay in there?” she called out.
Eric and Nancy answered in the affirmative, but nothing from Brent. This was bad.
Biting her lip, Julia began to circle the Suburban, looking for the best angle of attack. It was probably crazy to think that she could tip over a three-ton beast like that when she weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds wringing wet, but she had to do something.
Glass crunched behind her and Julia whirled, a wild hope racing through her that Zahrias had somehow been watching over them, was even now approaching to offer his assistance.
But that hope died a horrible death as her gaze met that of Richard Margolis. He held a semi-automatic pistol in his hand, the business end pointed directly at her heart.
“Hello, Julia,” he said.
Chapter Seven
No. This was impossible. Margolis couldn’t be standing there only a few paces away, a gloating smile on his thin lips.
But yet…there he was.
“You look surprised,” he said. “You really shouldn’t be. You knew about the National Guard armory in Santa Fe — after all, you helped me set up an expedition to retrieve guns and ammunition there last fall.”
Her brain and her mouth didn’t seem to want to work in concert. Surely she should say something — anything — but her thoughts just kept chasing around each other. Margolis is here. Margolis is here. He couldn’t be here…
…and yet he was.
“What you didn’t know,” he went on in that same conversational tone, “was that the armory also had a cache of shoulder-launched missiles. The hardest part was finding one that wouldn’t completely destroy the vehicle you were driving. I didn’t want that, of course.”
Of course.
The Suburban shifted, and Julia saw why in the next second — Eric must have heard her talking to Margolis, and so had pushed himself up into the passenger-side window, ignoring the broken glass. What he hoped to accomplish, she wasn’t sure.
And in the next second, it didn’t matter, because Margolis had lifted the gleaming gun he held and shot off a quick round, hitting Eric squarely in the head. His body slumped over the window opening, blood from the wound in his temple mingling with the blood that spilled from cuts inflicted by the window’s shattered glass.
Inside the SUV, a woman cried out in despair and rage.
Julia wanted to scream as well. But for some reason she could only stand there, stricken and immobile, as if Margolis’ stare had been that of a gorgon, turning her to stone forever. Smiling at her lack of reaction, the commander walked past her and approached the front end of the upended Suburban. He grasped the bumper with his free hand and pulled, hard. The SUV tipped back over into a more or less upright position, although two of its tires noisily collapsed as soon as the full weight of the vehicle landed on them. Barely a second later, another gunshot rang out, this time coming from within the vehicle. Nancy might have been mourning the loss of her lover, but her grief hadn’t slowed down her reaction time.
Unfortunately, the bullet went wide and slammed into the concrete wall of the underpass, spraying dust everywhere. Still moving calmly, Margolis went around to the driver’s side and fired again, and that was the end of Nancy’s attempt at vengeance.
“That’s better,” Margolis said. Then he moved forward so he was even with the front seat, and peered inside and frowned. “Your friend doesn’t look so good.”
It couldn’t be possible that Margolis actually cared about Brent’s condition — not after what the commander had just done to Eric and Nancy. At last Julia found her voice. “Leave him alone.”
“That wouldn’t be very Christian, would it? The man looks concussed. Probably suffered brain damage from that head trauma. The best thing to do would be to put him out of his misery.”
God, she needed to get her mind working again. Thinking desperately, she said, “Captain, that’s Brent Sanderson. You know Brent. You were friends.” Well, they had been, once upon a time before Brent realized what kind of a person Richard Margolis actually was. But she didn’t think it would be a good idea to mention any of that. The former commander didn’t seem to be firing on all cylinders, so to speak. Maybe he wouldn’t remember that Brent had given up on him, had lent his support to Julia instead.
Margolis’ head swiveled toward her. He stared at her for a moment with flat, dark eyes, then said, “I don’t have any friends.”
Blam!
The pistol roared again, but Julia didn’t bother to cover her ears. Trying to deaden the sound wouldn’t change what she’d just seen. Brent was dead. How could Brent be dead? He was one of the good guys. He was supposed to continue his not-quite flirtation with Norma Gomez, the town’s teacher, and then one day start a family with her. He couldn’t be sitting there, still strapped into his seat, with dark blood trickling from a bullet hole in his head.
Julia jammed her fist into her mouth to keep herself from screaming — or maybe it was simply to push back the bile she felt rising in the back of her throat. In mute agony, she watched as Margolis stuck the pistol into the waistband of the camoufl
age pants he wore, then began digging around inside the SUV. What the hell was he up to?
A minute later, Julia saw what he’d been prospecting for. He backed out of the Suburban, left hand clutching a small dark box not much bigger than his palm.
The djinn-repelling device they’d carried with them.
“There,” Margolis said. “Gotcha.” He turned it over, then pressed the switch on the bottom to turn it off.
Julia’s voice finally reasserted itself. “What the hell are you doing?”
The commander smiled. “Keeping a promise.”
The ground rumbled beneath her feet. Julia wanted to run, but where could she go? Margolis could drill her between the shoulder blades before she got ten feet away, and even if she somehow managed to evade his shots, there was no running from a djinn.
And then the roadway seemed to erupt in a geyser of dirt and broken asphalt. Standing before them was a tall, black-haired djinn Julia had never seen before, his dark eyes flashing as he took her in.
Julia thought she had seen the face of evil before — certainly in Margolis’ features when he leered down at her just before violating her as she lay in her cell below the municipal center in Los Alamos, and again when the rogue djinn Khalim had invaded Taos and attempted to take the town for himself. But something about the gloating expression this new djinn wore made Julia want to quail in fear, to cover her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at him anymore.
“I did as you asked, Qadim,” Margolis said. “Can I have her now?”
* * *
The waiting was, as the old saying went, the hardest part. Dani had drunk perhaps two swallows of his wine before he seemed to go rigid, eyes widening. Then he had exclaimed, “It is time!” and blinked out of the room, wine glass still clutched in his hand.
Zahrias knew they would not remain in the home that Dani and Lauren had taken as their own. Miguel had made it clear that the baby needed to be born in the hospital, where he would have access to any specialized equipment or medicines he might need. So Zahrias went there as well, blinking himself into the waiting room of the maternity ward. Dani was nowhere in evidence, which meant he must be in the delivery room with his Chosen.
djinn wars 04 - broken Page 9
