djinn wars 03 - fallen

by Christine Pope

  I kind of had my doubts, too. Taos wasn’t exactly what you’d call a hub for electronics supply stores. But I decided there was no point in my being rude to him in return. To be fair, he might not have even realized he was being tactless. His social eptness was right up there with Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory.

  “Well,” I said sweetly, “why don’t you make a list, and we’ll see what we can do. Zahrias wants to make sure there isn’t anything holding you back.”

  At that comment, he pushed himself off the stool where he’d been sitting and stood. Right then, I noticed that he was actually quite tall. Not as tall as the djinn, of course, but tall enough that he made me feel short, which I certainly wasn’t. “What’s holding me back,” he gritted, “is being hauled away from my proper research, stuck in a basement with a hopelessly unqualified graduate student, and being told to produce something from nothing.”

  I heard Lindsay suck in a breath, but I didn’t dare look over at her. No, I needed to keep my attention focused on Miles Odekirk. If I let him intimidate me now, I’d never be able to negotiate with him from a position of strength.

  “Lindsay,” I said evenly, still holding Odekirk’s icy gray stare and thinking he’d been damn lucky that his glasses hadn’t gotten broken during the confrontation with the djinn on Highway 68, “would you mind giving Dr. Odekirk and me a few minutes?”

  “With pleasure,” she replied, then slammed her laptop shut and got up. Her footsteps clanged up the metal stairs.

  “All right,” I said, after I heard her close the door with a bang, “now that you’re done insulting the person who managed to keep the lights on and the freezers running, maybe we can get down to business.”

  “And what business is that?” I could see one eyebrow arch up above the edge of his rimless glasses, but that was the only alteration in his expression.

  I crossed my arms. “Miles, I’m pretty sure you have at least a couple of Ph.D.s. And I know Lindsay and Zahrias were very explicit in what they told you we need you to do for us. So do you really need me to explain it to you all over again?”

  No response at first. But after a longish pause, he turned away from me and stared down at the assembled components on the worktable. “No,” he said. “But I think none of you understand what you’re asking of me.”

  “Probably not,” I told him. “I’ll admit that my grasp of quantum mechanics is pretty shaky. If that’s even what we’re talking about here.”

  “It is…and it isn’t. Your graduate student was correct in one of her assumptions about the device I invented. It does detect the wave signature peculiar to the djinn and disrupt it. My work at the labs already involved that sort of thing, so I — ”

  “You were looking for djinn?”

  At the interruption, his expression turned waspish. “Of course I was not looking for djinn. They were a fairytale, a myth. But my work — my classified work, which I will not discuss further — required research into various sorts of wave signatures. Both during and immediately after the Heat struck, my instruments picked up a signal I’d never seen before, and I began tracking it.” He hesitated then before turning away from me completely. His back to me, he went on, “I was…preoccupied for a few days there. But the instruments I’d left running continued to take measurements, and after a while, I returned to analyze the data that had been collected.”

  As he stood there, fiddling with the components on the work table, long clever fingers sorting through the wires and circuit boards, I realized why he didn’t want to look at me. Because during those “few days” he’d just mentioned, his wife and child had died. He’d lost everything, and still found it within himself to return to the labs, to the work that took up so much of his life.

  Did I dare tell him that I was sorry? Or would he see that as a ploy, my way of trying to show him that I empathized with his losses? Because I did feel sorry for him then, seeing the slump of his shoulders, hearing the slightest tremor in his voice, the one I could tell he was trying so hard to conceal. I’d lost my whole family, true…but I’d never lost a child.

  However, I guessed he wouldn’t want to hear words of condolences from me. Bad enough that he should be taken captive. Admitting to grief now, in the face of someone he considered an enemy?

  I knew he would never do that.

  Ignoring the awkward pause, I cleared my throat and said, “So how did you make the leap from finding an energy pattern you didn’t recognize to figuring out it was being generated by a race of people who weren’t supposed to exist?”

  Oddly, my question seemed to have steadied him. He shifted back around then, a circuit board held between thumb and forefinger. Over and over he turned the board, as if he’d never seen such a thing before. Without really looking at me, he replied, “It was, as you say, a leap. But all things of this earth share a certain commonality, and I saw nothing of this wave form in the patterns I was detecting. The way it coincided with the Heat…as a scientist, I can tell you that I don’t believe in coincidence. There’s a meaning in all patterns, if we only know where to look for it.”

  “So you figured out it was the djinn?”

  “At first, I didn’t know what name I should give them. In my mind, I always referred to them as ‘the others’ — because they certainly were other, whatever else they might be. And that was what I called them when Richard Margolis and his group of survivors came to Los Alamos. It wasn’t until I saw one for myself that I realized which name truly belonged to them.”

  His words puzzled me. I frowned, trying to piece together the chronology. So he hadn’t actually known what sort of being Natila was until he saw her in person? But how would he have even known who — or what — he was hunting when he ventured forth, device in hand, to see what it would do?

  I asked him as much, and Miles shook his head.

  “No. That’s not who I mean. I saw one not too long after the Dying, a few days after the commander came to town. This was before I’d perfected the device. I’d already been working on something similar, although it was intended for an entirely different purpose. So I shifted my focus to something that would disrupt the energy signature I’d detected.”

  “So…where did you see this djinn?” I supposed it was possible one had come poking around Los Alamos before Miles had his device functional; in my mind, I imagined it as a place utterly off-limits to djinn from the beginning, as soon as the Heat had struck, but of course that wasn’t true.

  “Partway down Pajarito Road,” he replied. After setting down the circuit board he’d been fiddling with, he leaned up against the worktable and crossed his arms. Even his glasses couldn’t entirely conceal the dark smudges under his eyes. Had he been sleeping much since coming to Taos? It was such a personal question that I didn’t dare ask. I could imagine why he wouldn’t, but he needed to understand that we meant him no harm. We only needed his help.

  Still with his eyes not quite meeting mine, he went on, “I used to walk a good bit…after. It was the only way I could find my focus, and the weather was still good enough then. So I was walking out on Pajarito, getting some fresh air, and I saw a woman. She was a good fifty yards or so away from me, and I began to call out to her — until I realized she was not actually standing on the road, but floating above it.”

  “So that’s why you didn’t seem too surprised when I told you that I’d seen Jace and Zahrias doing the same thing.” At the time, I’d thought Miles had looked pleased by that particular tidbit just because it was evidence of their djinn natures, but now I realized it was probably more because it had only reinforced something he’d already seen.

  “Precisely.” He straightened up then and made a minute adjustment to the glasses on his nose. “And although it can be quite windy around here, that day the weather was relatively calm…which was why I couldn’t understand why her hair was whipping around as if in a strong breeze.”

  “Air elemental,” I said, and he nodded.

  “Apparently. Also, you’ve lived a
mong them. You know how they look human…but not entirely.”

  “They’re too perfect.” By then, I was used to the djinn, to their almost unearthly beauty, but I could only imagine what Miles Odekirk must have thought, seeing that strange woman and her wind-tousled hair, and knowing no human could float off the ground like that, let alone be so uncannily lovely.

  “Yes.” He was silent then, brows drawn together. When he spoke, he sounded more tired than anything else. “She saw me — I could feel her eyes on me. At that distance, I couldn’t tell for certain, but I think she smiled. And then she disappeared.”

  “Now you see her,” I remarked. If that had been me, taking a solitary walk in an attempt to shake off my grief, and I had seen something like that…what would I have done? At least I’d had the opportunity to get to know Jace before discovering what he was. If I’d simply witnessed some strange being floating off the ground and then winking out of existence, I probably would have freaked out.

  Miles, however, didn’t seem to be the freaking-out type.

  “I went back to the lab, noted that another of those strange energy signatures had appeared, this time in extremely close proximity, and realized the woman and the energy pattern had to be connected. Then I went to the library and did some research, trying to match what I had seen with accounts in some of the books there on the supernatural and the occult. And I realized the strange woman must have been a djinn.”

  “What did she look like?” I asked, curious. She couldn’t have been one of the Taos group — Miles Odekirk wasn’t exactly Chosen material. Anyway, they were all paired up.

  “Beautiful, I suppose. As I said, she was some distance away. Her hair was red, coppery. She wore blue, if I recall correctly, but I don’t remember any details, except that the fabric seemed to be filmy and floated easily on the air.”

  The description could have fit any one of a number of djinn women, but again, she couldn’t have been from the Taos group. One of the others, wanting to see the Immune close up? It didn’t sound as if she’d made any threatening gestures, or had attempted to harm Miles. So maybe she simply had been curious. I had to remind myself that there were many, many djinn out there — the majority, actually — who weren’t part of the One Thousand or one of those opposed to them. Neutral parties. Possibly this djinn woman had been one of them.

  Miles shrugged, and went back to sorting the bits and pieces on the worktable. “After that, I finished my first prototype for the device. I’d actually intended it solely as a barrier, something to protect the people in Los Alamos from these beings, these djinn, as we now knew them.”

  With a lot of people, I would have suspected they were telling me that sort of thing because they thought it was what I would want to hear. What? I never meant any harm…I just wanted to protect the survivors. The pain and suffering my device causes was only an unfortunate side effect.

  But I didn’t think that was the case with Miles. He was brilliant, no doubt about that, but he also didn’t seem the type to lie to make himself look better.

  “So how did you discover that you were hurting them?” I asked.

  His jaw tensed, and I could see the muscles working in his throat. Now that he was in Taos and his own clothes had been left behind, he was dressed like most of the guys here — fleece pullover worn over a T-shirt, jeans, sturdy hiking-style shoes. To me, he looked a lot less intimidating. Funny how a lab coat and a tie could get your hackles up.

  “When we captured Natila,” he said. Once again, his gaze shifted away from me. “It was Margolis’ idea to get her, and Jasreel. He said it was too dangerous to have them in such close proximity to us, away from the rest of their kind. Rogues, he called them. I’ll admit I was intrigued by the opportunity to see one of these creatures close at hand.”

  “They’re not creatures,” I broke in. “They’re people. Different from us, but….”

  “I know that now,” he said. “I didn’t then.” Right then, he did look up, and I could see the lines of guilt etched on his face. Voice tight, he went on, “I wasn’t expecting Natila to react to my device the way she did. Margolis was…pleased by that. He said it was our new weapon. And when we came to your home to collect Jasreel, he made sure that I kept increasing the intensity. It didn’t matter if the size of the field shrank when I did so, as we were only concerned with one djinn at that particular moment.” A long pause. “I am sorry about that. And about Natila. At the time, she was only a test subject to me. And now….”

  “Now, what?” I demanded. “Hindsight is twenty-twenty, isn’t it? If you were so sorry about killing her, then why cut her up afterward? Why not let her have some dignity in death?”

  He winced, but I also noticed how he straightened, this time not looking away from me. The gray eyes were fixed on mine, pleading. “Because it was what Margolis wanted, and even I wasn’t in a position to gainsay him. Not really. Yes, he needed me to make the devices, but I also needed him to make sure I had the materials and equipment I required at the lab. I know that’s not a very good answer, Jessica. But that was my situation.”

  It would have been easy to hate him. He’d as much as admitted to being bullied by Margolis, and because of his weakness, an innocent woman had died. Maybe even two, if you counted Evony. I sort of doubted she would have been quite as motivated to pull that final kamikaze move of hers if Natila had still been around.

  But hate didn’t serve much of a purpose, did it? The rogue djinn who’d hurt Aidan and murdered Clay and kidnapped Martine were full of hate, and to what purpose? We hadn’t done anything to them, except have the impertinence to be born human…to have djinn who loved us.

  “Okay,” I said, after a brief, awkward silence. “I’ll admit that Margolis is a scary son of a bitch, and maybe there wasn’t much you could do to challenge him. But now — right now, there’s a lot you can do to help us. We have to come up with some way to have your device repel the djinn who wish us harm, but not affect the ones who are part of our community. The ones we love.”

  I said that last word deliberately, and with extra emphasis. Miles needed to know that none of us were here because we’d been coerced or frightened into being with our djinn. They were part of us now, and if anything happened to them, I feared we wouldn’t be long for this world, either.

  He was silent for a long moment, clearly pondering what I’d just told him. How much could he even understand of the bond that connected the djinn and their Chosen?

  But he’d loved a woman once, loved her enough to marry her and have a child with her, despite his obvious devotion to his work. Surely he could reach somewhere inside himself, move past his grief, and see that causing more hurt just because he had suffered wasn’t the solution.

  Then he said, “I don’t know if I can do it. What you’re proposing — it would require a fundamental modification to how the device works, and even though I’m the one who created it, I still don’t completely understand everything about what it does.”

  His words made my heart sink. Then again, he hadn’t said no. He’d only said he wasn’t sure. Those were two entirely separate things.

  “But you’ll try,” I told him, my tone firm.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I will try.”

  Chapter Nine

  I bumped into Lindsay as I was leaving the lab and told her that Miles had agreed to do what was necessary to modify his device. Her eyes widened, and she said,

  “Seriously? When he’s been scowling in there for the past day and a half and telling me it isn’t possible?”

  “Yes. I mean, he’s still not sure exactly what he’s going to do or how long it’s going to take, but — ”

  “It’s still a start,” she cut in. “And better than anything I’ve been able to accomplish. You must be some kind of miracle worker.”

  I gave an uneasy laugh. “I don’t know about that.”

  “Well, I do. Too bad they didn’t have you working at the United Nations or something.”

  After deliver
ing that remark, she moved past me and headed down the stairs into the lab, chuckling slightly. Well, I was glad I could cheer her up, if nothing else. I’d have to see how long her good humor lasted, though. She and Miles didn’t exactly get along very well, although maybe now that he really did appear to be focusing on a real solution for us, the tension might ease itself slightly.

  I decided that I’d better go see Zahrias and give him a status report. To my surprise, he wasn’t in his audience chamber cum conference room, although that was where he’d been last, listening to Jace and Dani and the others give their reports about the raid on the Los Alamos labs. Maybe they’d wrapped it up already; my own convo with Miles Odekirk had taken longer than I’d expected. I knew Zahrias must have his own suite somewhere in the resort, but I’d never been there, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to intrude in his private space.

  Luckily, I was saved from having to seek him out. Just as I was turning to go back down the corridor, Lauren came around the corner.

  “Looking for Zahrias?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Is he in his suite?”

  “No — since the sun came out, he’s been sitting down in the courtyard. He says the sunlight helps his energy levels a bit.”

  That made sense. On some level, he was a being of fire, and so being exposed to the fires of the sun might help counteract some of the effects of Miles’s device.

  “Is Jace with him?”

  “No,” Lauren said. “I think he went to go see how Aidan and Lilias were doing.”

  It was just like him to check on them once he was done speaking with Zahrias. Aidan still wasn’t up and around, since Miguel had apparently told him to take it easy until the antibiotics ran their course. And I had no idea whether many of the other djinn had stopped by, but somehow I doubted it. None of them liked being reminded that their Chosen were now as vulnerable as they were.

  The sun seemed to have come out with a vengeance while I was talking to Miles. I blinked at the glare as I emerged into the courtyard. This was the first time I’d actually set foot out here, and my breath caught at the quiet beauty around me. Yes, many of the trees were bare, but their limbs were still graceful, while the evergreens kept the area from appearing too desolate. A small creek chattered through the clearing, burbling over smooth-worn stones. Despite the brightness, the air was still quite chilly, which was why Zahrias had a heavy cloak wrapped around him where he sat under a little pergola, its vines also winter-bare, even as he tilted his face upward to drink in the sun’s rays. Leaning up against the stone bench where he sat was a cane.