by C. Gockel
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 understood 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 thou
ghts 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 after 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.
His hands had always been warm. Always, no matter how cold it might be outside, as if the weather didn’t affect him the same way it affected me.
“Can’t…breathe….”
I put my hand on his chest, felt his heart beating wildly within, felt him laboring to pull in a breath. Which he did, a short, shallow gasp. Better than nothing, but it didn’t explain what was happening to him.
Dutchie got to her feet, nose pointed toward the doorway. A low, penetrating growl emerged from her throat, and her ears flattened against her head.
What the —
I didn’t have time to complete the thought, because in the next second, the front door was flung open, and a group of seven men wearing parkas and heavy boots burst into the living room. Six of them carried guns, and the seventh some sort of strange device, no more than a little black box, really, with lights that seemed to flicker deep within it, as if buried under a layer of dark translucent plastic.
The scream that had been building in my throat died when one of the men with the guns stepped forward and said, “It’s all right, Ms. Monroe. We’re only here for him.” He pointed at Jasreel, who had taken a step backward, toward the hearth. Sweat was beginning to drip down his temples.
“Who — what — ” I swallowed, knowing I had to keep it together, at least until I found out what the hell was going on. I began again. “Who are you, and what do you want?”
He nodded at the men who flanked him, most of whom were large, burly types, the kind of guys who once upon a time probably could have been found drinking beer at some back-road dive bar. They went to Jasreel and surrounded him, then began dragging him back toward the man in charge and the other one, the one holding that strange box. He, unlike his compatriots, was slender, of average height, and wore wire-rimmed glasses. Despite the commotion around him, he didn’t look up from the box he held, kept his fingertips moving over the surface, as if controlling it via touchpad.
The leader, who held himself like a military man and had the short-cropped hair to match, said, “Ms. Monroe, we’re survivors from Los Alamos. We’re collecting as many of these scum as we can” — a jerk of his chin in Jasreel’s direction— “and are putting them on trial for crimes against humanity. Seems the least we can do, in the name of those who are no longer around to seek justice.”
My mouth was so dry it physically hurt to swallow. But somehow I forced myself to do just that, even as I sent an agonized glance toward Jasreel. He had gone pale under his olive-toned skin, his breath coming in short, labored pants. What the hell were they doing to him?
“He’s not guilty,” I managed to get out. “He hasn’t done anything wrong.�
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“Beg to differ, miss.” The leader of the Los Alamos gang gave a faint nod, and the four men holding him began to drag Jasreel out the front door.
“No!” I began to move after them, but another of the group, one of the two men flanking the guy with the black box, took me by the arm.
“I wouldn’t,” he said in a murmur. “Right now you have the benefit of the doubt, but….” He let the words die away, but I got his meaning. It was Jasreel these men were after, not me. The last thing I should be doing was provoking them.
I gave the fair-haired man, who seemed to be about my age or a little more, the faintest of nods, then held my position, just a few feet away from the guy in charge. “What proof do you have that he’s guilty of anything?”
“His nature is proof enough.” He gave another of those chin-jerks at the man with the black box and the two men with him. For the first time, the one wearing glasses looked up from his device, whatever it was, then gave a faint nod, right before they went out the front door. The blond one gave me a warning glance before he turned and took up the rear, as if to tell me that I needed to stay put and keep my mouth shut.
Fat chance of that. Instead, I followed them. As soon as I was outside, the chilly air seemed to bite at me, piercing the thermal shirt I wore, but I ignored the momentary discomfort. Parked a little ways down the drive were two Hummers, one bright yellow, the other red. Clearly, these were some of the vehicles “liberated” from Santa Fe and the surrounding area.
I could see Jasreel being bundled into the yellow Hummer and cursed mentally. What was I supposed to do? There were seven of them — all right, the guy with the box seemed peculiarly uninterested in his surroundings and kept fiddling with the device, whatever it was, so maybe he wasn’t much of a threat — but the rest of them were all big enough to take me individually, let alone as a group. And all my weapons were currently locked up in the gun safe.
The leader of the group paused and glanced down at me, seeming to really assess my appearance for the first time. He didn’t leer, but I could see the look in his eyes take on a certain glint. “You should come with us,” he said casually. “We’re trying to in-gather as many of the Immune as we can. You’d be safe with us in Los Alamos. We can protect you.”