djinn wars 02 - taken

by Christine Pope

  But we moved forward, the tires crunching through the snow as we slowly made our way down the incline to the front gate. The padlock I’d put there was still in place, and I glanced over at Evony. “So you really did climb over.”

  “Well, what else was I supposed to do?” she inquired, sounding exasperated. “It’s not like I packed some bolt cutters along with a change of underwear.”

  Despite our current situation, I couldn’t help smiling. “I guess not. Luckily, I’ve got the key.”

  Leaving the engine idling, I got out of the Jeep and went to the gate, then pulled the key out of my coat pocket and unlocked the padlock. It was a little stiff — not that surprising, considering the sub-freezing temperatures — but eventually I got it open and unwound the chain, then pushed the gate open. Afterward, I knocked as much snow off my boots as I could before getting back in the Cherokee and pulling through. Then I had to go through the process all over again to secure the property. By then, I could barely feel my toes, even with the thick socks I was wearing under my boots, but no way was I going to leave that gate standing open while I was gone. That would’ve looked like an open invitation to come onto the property.

  I’d thought that it wouldn’t be all that difficult to get down the track that eventually joined with Upper Canyon Road, but the snow had fallen so thickly that the trail’s outlines were all but erased. True, there was wire fencing that delineated the property to one side, but I couldn’t see it all that well. More than once I could feel the Jeep starting to slip down into the rutted gully on the side of the road, and I had to brake carefully and then steer us back so we were more or less in the center of the lane.

  Beside me, Evony was looking pale under her olive skin, the fingers of her right hand clutching the “Jesus handle” in the roof above her. She didn’t say anything, though, as if she knew that speaking would only break my concentration.

  And I needed all of it. Eventually, we inched our way down onto Upper Canyon and the going was a little easier, just because along that street there were houses, and the snow drifts hadn’t completely obscured the outlines of the road. Even so, I didn’t dare go over twenty miles an hour, just in case we hit a patch of ice or something. Although it felt as if we were never going to get there, we finally did reach the center of town and then begin heading north. I took side streets, following the map, because I didn’t want to get on Highway 84 at all, not even for the couple of miles it took to get to 503, which would lead us up along the first leg of the High Road.

  The clock on the dashboard showed that it had taken us more than an hour just to go that far, a journey that usually only took fifteen minutes, if that. It looked like I hadn’t been too out of line in saying this little trip of ours might consume most of the day.

  But so far it seemed that, despite the deep snow, if I just maintained a steady pace of fifteen or twenty miles an hour, the Cherokee would keep chugging away and not give me too much trouble. I had plenty of gas; Jace had helped me siphon a bunch on our last trip to town, and so that was one thing at least I didn’t have to worry about.

  Evony lifted one of the bottles of water. “Want some?”

  I nodded, but didn’t take my eyes off the road as she untwisted the cap and handed it to me. A long pull at the water told me how thirsty I actually was, and I drank some more before putting the bottle in the cup holder and returning my hand to the steering wheel.

  We’d been quiet so far, but I knew Evony and I couldn’t spend the entire trip to Taos in complete silence. Anyway, a few things had been nagging at my mind, and as long as I didn’t allow the conversation to distract me too much, it should help to pass the time.

  “Did Natila tell you a lot?” I asked Evony then. “About the djinn, I mean.”

  She tilted her head slightly to one side. Along with the knitted cap, she was wearing a pair of round wire-rimmed, smoke-lensed sunglasses, giving her the look of a goth snowbunny. “She told me some things. Like, have you noticed how you heal much faster now if you get hurt?”

  I nodded, recalling the way the sprained wrists and bruised knee from my encounter with Chris Bowman in Albuquerque had gone back to normal within a day. “What about it?”

  “It’s part of being Chosen, I guess. We heal more like djinn than regular people. And we’re not just Immune — we’ll never get sick again. No flu, no colds, no nothing.”

  “Never?” I couldn’t help sounding incredulous. Not that I would turn down the chance to never suffer from a head cold again, but I didn’t see how that was possible.

  “Never.” She’d gotten herself some water, too, and drank from the bottle she held before continuing. “Nice perk, huh? But that’s not the best part.”

  I waited, since Evony was clearly enjoying dragging this out a little for dramatic effect. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure how much better it could get than never getting sick again, or healing from bumps and bruises in what appeared to be a miraculous fashion.

  Clearly not put off by my silence, she said, “I hope you like being — how old are you, anyway?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Cool. I’m twenty-two. Anyway, I hope you like being that age, because that’s what you’ll be for the rest of your life.”

  Despite my determination not to take my eyes off the road, I couldn’t help darting a quick glance at her after that remark. “What?”

  Her lacquered lips curved up in a smile. “You heard me. You’ll be — well, I guess ‘immortal’ isn’t exactly the right word for it, because it’s not as if we can’t be killed, but we won’t age.”

  “At all?” I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around that concept.

  “Not according to Natila.” Evony drank some more of her water, then said, “It sounded as if the djinn wanted to make sure their Chosen would stick around and always be the same as they were when their djinn first selected them. I mean, what’s the point of picking someone to save if you’re just going to watch them age and die in what seems like the blink of an eye to you?”

  I supposed that made some sense. As with so many other things about that strange race of elementals, I really hadn’t had time to think about it. I’d barely had a chance to get my brain around the notion of Jace being a djinn at all before he was taken from me. “So are the djinn immortal?”

  Evony’s nose wrinkled as she appeared to consider my question. “More or less. I mean, they certainly don’t age, and Natila didn’t say anything about them dying of natural causes. Not exactly. She sort of hinted that they could be killed, but I don’t think it’s easy. That is, according to what Natila said, if those assholes from Los Alamos think they can just round up a bunch of djinn and put them in front of a firing squad or something, they’re going to find they’ve made a big mistake.”

  Just the mere thought of Jace facing down a group of grim-faced survivors holding rifles made me shudder, but if what Natila had told Evony was right, then even multiple gunshot wounds might not be enough to kill him. That knowledge should have reassured me — well, I supposed it did, a little. On the other hand, if there were people at Los Alamos who were smart enough to figure out how to trap a djinn on this plane of existence, then maybe they were also smart enough to find a way to kill one of the elementals. I knew I couldn’t take that risk, that I couldn’t rely on the djinns’ supposed invulnerability.

  Instead, I told Evony, “I guess that’s something,” and then was silent for a moment, slowing us down even further as Highway 503 began to climb its way out of Nambe, the first hamlet on the High Road. The snow had well and truly stopped for the moment, but the skies remained gray, and I couldn’t be certain that the flurries might not start up again. Unfortunately, it didn’t snow all that often in Albuquerque, and definitely not heavily like this, unless some kind of freak storm was passing through.

  So far we were doing okay, though, and I prayed that being cautious would be enough to get us up and over the passes, and into Taos. Fingers still wrapped tightly around the steering wheel, I co
mmented, “You’d think the djinn would number a lot more than twenty thousand if they’re supposedly immortal. I mean, humans were overrunning the earth, and we only had an average lifespan of seventy-five or something.”

  A shrug as Evony stared out the windshield at the snow-covered landscape passing by. “I don’t know for sure. I got the impression that sometimes they did die from time to time, for whatever reason, and that was when a new little djinn would come along. But it was rare.”

  “And…with people?” I ventured then, asking a question that had been hovering in the back of my mind ever since I’d learned Jace wasn’t precisely human.

  Evony shot me a sidelong glance from under her lashes. “Are you asking if humans and djinn can make little half-breed babies?”

  “Well….” It was probably a stupid thing to ask. After all, it wasn’t as if Evony and Natila would’ve been reproducing together, unless djinn biology was very different from ours.

  “I guess they can,” Evony said, her tone amused. “I mean, that wasn’t going to be an issue with me and Natila, which was just fine by me. I spent enough time around my little nieces and nephews and my cousins’ kids to know I sure as hell didn’t want any. Screaming and poop and…no, thanks.”

  I decided it was better not to comment on that. Someone like my mother — or even my friend Tori — would’ve probably argued that Evony couldn’t possibly make that kind of decision when she was only twenty-two. But if that was how she felt about the subject, then that was her decision.

  “It’s happened over the years, though. Not often,” she went on, shooting me another one of those sideways glances. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought she’d guessed about all those nights I hesitated over my little packet of pills and wondered whether I should just quietly stop taking them. “But a few times. So if you want to rescue Jace and have your little white picket fence and two point five kids or whatever it is these days, you should be able to manage it.”

  “The house doesn’t have a white picket fence. It has an adobe wall,” I pointed out, and she only shrugged again.

  “Whatever. You know what I mean.”

  I supposed I did. Right then the road began to climb more steeply, though, and I felt the Cherokee’s tires slip. Shit. They caught before I could start to really worry, but I dropped my speed again, this time crawling along at something like ten point five miles per hour.

  “Do we need to put on the chains?” Evony asked, the look of amusement slipping off her face as if it had never been there.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “We’re doing okay right now. Besides, I don’t even know where we would stop.”

  That was nothing more than the truth. You kind of needed a clear space to put on chains, and it was just pure, virgin snow as far as the eye could see, covering the highway, mounded slightly higher on the western side of the road because of the way the wind had been blowing. The junipers were rounded blobs with some dark green showing underneath the snow, and slightly lower bumps and protrusions that had to be rocks or smaller bushes. At any rate, there certainly wasn’t a nice clear “chain up” area where we could pull off and get the chains on.

  “True.” She surveyed the snow-covered landscape and shook her head. “That is one metric shit-ton of snow.”

  Probably more than just one, I thought, but I only gave her a grim smile and continued with our plodding forward motion. What else could I do? I wasn’t about to turn around…not that I was sure I could even manage such a feat, since it would’ve required crossing back over the deep, deep ruts we’d already cut in the snow. The best thing to do was just keep moving.

  Luckily, I wasn’t moving too fast, or I might have missed the turnoff onto State Road 98. The sign was half covered in snow, but I caught sight of it just in time and eased the Cherokee over, glad that at least this new stretch didn’t seem too hilly. Well, the road did undulate, but with gentle rises and falls, not anything too taxing.

  I didn’t let myself get complacent, though, and maintained our low speed. A quick glance at the clock told me it was now almost eleven in the morning. That made me blow out a worried breath, since we’d been on the road for more than two hours and were less than a quarter of the way to our destination. At this rate, we’d be lucky to make it to Taos before dark.

  The last thing I wanted was to be navigating snow-covered mountain roads after nightfall. What if we missed a turn and went off the highway? What if we plowed into an elk that had decided to amble across the road?

  Yeah, and maybe the Cherokee will get attacked by a pack of wolves, too, I mocked myself, but I couldn’t quite banish the worry just by deriding my fears.

  Those worries did lessen somewhat as we made it along 98 without any problem, and then turned right onto 76. The highway began to climb again, but the snow didn’t seem quite as thick here, for whatever reason, and I murmured a silent thank-you under my breath for that.

  “Are we there yet?” Evony quipped as we passed a sign saying we were entering Truchas, whatever that was.

  “No. Barely halfway.”

  Her grin faded, and then her eyes widened and she said, “Wait — weren’t you supposed to go left back there?”

  My first instinct was to hit the brakes, but I knew that would only end in disaster. Instead, I let us slow to a crawl and then came to a stop in a narrow little street bordered on either side by houses, half of which seemed to double as artists’ studios, judging by the signage. “This looks like the main street to me,” I said in irritation.

  Without replying, Evony picked up the map from where it was lying half open on the console that separated the front seats. A frown pulled at her brows. “Well, it’s the main street of Truchas, according to this map, but it’s not the highway. See? It jogged to the left back there.”

  I could feel myself scowling as well as I took the map from her and looked where she had pointed. Sure enough, 76 lay behind us. We were on 75, whatever that was. Not anyplace we wanted to be.

  “Well, shit,” I growled.

  “Just turn us around. It’s not that big a deal.”

  Easy for her to say. The street was so narrow that the only way I could accomplish the maneuver was to pull into a driveway and then back out. And the snowdrifts looked awfully deep.

  But sitting here in Truchas was really not an option, so I sucked in a breath and began turning the Cherokee, using the extra space in the driveway to our left to get us pointed in the right direction. All went okay until I put us in reverse so we could angle back onto the actual street. I heard a horrible grinding noise, and the Jeep shuddered but didn’t move.

  “Crap,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I think we’re stuck.”

  Evony winced. “Are you in four-wheel drive?”

  “Of course I’m in four-wheel drive!” I snapped. “I’ve never been out of it since we left the house!”

  “Oh.”

  She didn’t offer any helpful advice after that. Telling myself to remain calm, I took my foot off the brake and gave the car a little gas. More grinding. With my luck, I was heating up the snow so it was melting and turning to ice under the tires, which would only make matters worse.

  I let off the gas and shifted into neutral, letting the Cherokee idle while I thought. Maybe it was time to break out the snow shovel I’d packed in the cargo compartment so I could try to dig out the piled-up snow beneath us. Obviously, the drifts filling up that driveway had proven to be too much even for the Jeep.

  Hesitating, I glanced quickly over at Evony. She was staring ahead, frowning, and didn’t seem to want to meet my eyes. I could guess the reason why, too — she had an idea of what was coming next and didn’t want to be the one to have to stagger out in the snow and start digging us out. Well, neither did I, especially since it made more sense for me to be the one behind the wheel. I had no idea whether she even knew how to manage a four-wheel drive.

  I supposed it couldn’t hurt to try one more time. If that didn’t
work, then I supposed one of us would have to get out and start digging. We could always flip a coin to see who got shovel duty.

  Holding my breath, I took the Jeep out of neutral and into low gear, then applied as much gas as I dared. Again the tires ground against the snow and ice.

  “Shit,” I muttered under my breath, adding a second mental curse at myself for missing the turn-off and stranding us here.

  And then — well, I couldn’t say for sure exactly what happened, except that I felt something almost like an enormous hand shoving the rear of the Cherokee, and all of a sudden we were moving forward, leaving the snow-piled driveway behind us. I blinked, shocked at the abrupt change in our status, but recovered myself enough to apply a little more gas, getting us up to the fifteen or so miles per hour I’d been driving the entire trip.

  “You did it!” Evony exclaimed, looking relieved beyond measure that she wouldn’t have to get out and shovel the back tires after all.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  The problem was, I didn’t think I actually did have anything to do with getting us unstuck. That shove had felt far more like something Jace might have done. However, I knew he couldn’t have, not locked up and with his powers stripped from him.

  Exactly who…or what…had decided we needed a nudge to continue on our way?

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.

  Chapter Four

  The light was just beginning to fail as we came down the mountain and into Taos. And as the day died, snow started to fall once again, lightly at first, then more thickly as we headed toward the center of town.

  During the last half of our drive, Evony and I hadn’t spoken much. I was shaken after the incident in Truchas, my mind working at the way the Cherokee had been more or less magically freed from the snow. And Evony seemed to pick up on my unease and stared moodily out the window, only drinking water from time to time, and eventually digging a protein bar out of the supplies we’d brought with us. At least she’d been willing to take care of Dutchie, getting some food into her portable bowl and tipping some water into another container for her to drink. At the time, I hadn’t wanted to stop, had only wanted to keep crawling along the mountain road at our glacial seventeen or so miles per hour. Some part of me was scared that if we paused for anything, we’d get stuck in the snow, and there might not be an invisible hand this time to give us a much-needed push.