djinn wars 02 - taken

by Christine Pope

  At that implied threat, both Mitch and Butch seemed to noticeably deflate. “We were just kidding — ” Butch began, and Dan cut in,

  “Well, I kind of doubt Jessica and Evony thought it was funny. So you should probably just go back to your own table.”

  They hesitated for a few seconds, exchanging hangdog looks, and then they slouched off, grumbling under their breath. By some unspoken agreement, Julia slid over on her side of the booth so Dan could sit down.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “Mitch is all right until you get about three or four beers in him, and then he gets mean. But now he’ll have a couple more, and he’ll swing back to being all friendly before he passes out somewhere.”

  “Margolis is going to cut him off if he isn’t careful,” Julia said, then picked up her glass of wine and took an over-large swallow. It seemed as if that exchange had shaken her just as much as it had shaken me. Even though the two guys were gone, and we had Dan here as a buffer in case they decided to come back, my heart didn’t want to stop pounding.

  “Well, that’s between Mitch and Captain Margolis, I guess.” Dan shifted in his seat and flagged down the waitress, then ordered a Guinness. “Hope you don’t mind me horning in like this.”

  “Not at all,” I said, my voice shaky with relief, while Evony added,

  “We’d never turn away a knight in shining armor.”

  He chuckled at that, but I noticed the way his gaze shifted immediately from Evony to me, and I felt my cheeks grow warm. In other circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have minded the attention, but now it was just a reminder that I was here for Jace, and only Jace.

  Julia seemed to notice the tension, because she said, “Have some fries, Dan. I think you’ve earned them.”

  A chuckle, but I noticed he didn’t say no. He reached out and snagged a few of the truffle fries, munching on them in silence until the waitress came back with his stout.

  I waited until he’d taken a long pull at the beer before asking, “Do a lot of people feel that way? About Evony and me, I mean.”

  From the way he hesitated, I could tell he really didn’t want to answer me. A quick flicker of his hazel eyes under the thick dark blond lashes in Julia’s direction, and she shrugged. Then he said, “A lot? I don’t know. I mean, you just got into town, but even so, word spreads quickly enough. It goes a long way that Captain Margolis welcomed you here, because most people are willing to follow his lead.”

  “But not all of them, apparently,” Evony said, her tone sour. She drained the rest of the beer in her glass, then sighed. “Should’ve ordered another one while the waitress was still here.”

  “No problem,” Dan told her. He raised his hand and flagged down the server, told her Evony needed another drink, and thanked her as she hurried off to the bar.

  “Wow, you really are a knight in shining armor.”

  “Not really. Stacy and I have known each other since Albuquerque. We met just a few days after…you know.”

  Oh, did we know. Those hellish days when the Heat burned through the population had begun to turn hazy and dark in my memory, though, like a bad dream you’ve tried very hard to forget. Even so, I wanted to hear what it had been like for other people, for those who’d had to find their own way out of the mess, the ones who didn’t have the guiding voice of a djinn guardian to lead them to safety.

  “So are you….” I let the words trail off, since I had a good idea that he wasn’t with Stacy, but I didn’t know what else to say.

  “No,” he replied, and I felt rather than saw his gaze rest on me, since I had glanced down and was pretending to be focused on swirling the wine still left in my glass. “She was scared and alone. I guess some guy had tried to attack her, and she ran away. I had to convince her I wasn’t going to do the same thing, but then we looked out for each other after that. A few days later, we ran into a bigger group of survivors. Margolis’ group. That’s how I met Julia.”

  “So you were with Margolis from the beginning?” Evony picked up a truffle fry and popped it in her mouth.

  “Almost,” Julia said, although I could tell she wasn’t thrilled to be revisiting this part of her past. “After my — well, once I was alone, I waited a day. I kept thinking help had to arrive, even though deep down I knew that wasn’t going to happen, that if anyone was going to show up and provide some assistance, they would’ve done it before then. There wasn’t any electricity, no phone service. My townhouse complex was completely deserted. I had a vague idea of trying to head downtown to the city center, since I thought if there was anything left, that might be where people were gathering. I didn’t get even a quarter-mile before I ran into Richard Margolis and his group. He already had about twenty people with him.”

  The number surprised me. I wondered how Margolis had managed to get together such a large group so soon after the Heat had done its work. But, whatever my personal feelings about him might be, I could tell he was a force of nature. Maybe those survivors had been drawn to him the way iron filings were drawn to a magnet.

  “Let me guess…they were all hot chicks,” Evony said sourly, and Julia gave an unwilling laugh.

  “Not really. The group was about fifty/fifty men and women, and they even had a couple of kids with them. Laurel, who’s ten, and Oliver, who’s nine. You’ll meet them tomorrow, Jessica.”

  Dan lifted an eyebrow at that, and Julia explained how she intended to put me to work as a teacher, since I’d been a T.A. at UNM. He looked impressed, and I felt myself blush again. This was getting ridiculous.

  Stacy arrived with Evony’s replacement beer and asked if we wanted more food. Since I didn’t even know what was available, I hesitated. Dan said, “They have burgers tonight, and chicken enchiladas, right?”

  “Yeah. And zucchini lasagne if you don’t want meat.”

  Eating meat wasn’t an issue for either Evony or me, so we both ordered burgers, while Dan and Julia asked for the enchiladas. Stacy made a note of everything, inquiring if the rest of us wanted a second round of drinks, which we all did. Frankly, even with Dan sitting with us, I still felt a little on edge, and I wondered if ordering more wine was such a good idea. Too late now, though.

  Evony got right back on track after Stacy left. “So how many people did you have by the time you left Albuquerque?”

  Julia and Dan looked at each other, and he shrugged while she said, “Not quite a hundred. We commandeered a bunch of SUVs and trucks, and headed north. Margolis had gotten hold of a ham radio and started searching for other survivors, and he made contact with Miles Odekirk in Los Alamos. There were about sixty survivors with him, and he told us it would be safer if we came here, since this town is so defensible.”

  “Was that an issue so early on?” I asked, surprised. “I mean, how did he know?”

  “At that point, I don’t think he wasn’t really talking about the djinn, just the possibility of some survivors not exactly being upstanding citizens. By the time we got here, though….” Julia reached out and snagged a fry for herself, although I got the impression she did that more to stall than because she was really all that hungry.

  “What?” Evony’s eyes were intent on Julia’s face, and I guessed she had posed the question to see whether the other woman would really answer it.

  “Well, he’d started to formulate some theories, that’s all.” Julia shrugged, and I could tell from the way she wouldn’t really meet Evony’s gaze that she didn’t intend to elaborate.

  All right, so it seemed as if Julia’s willingness to play hostess and answer our questions did have its limits. Fair enough. I supposed if I were in her position, I probably wouldn’t be discussing how our one and only scientist had not only managed to figure out that supernatural creatures were behind the Dying, but had actually come up with a way to stop them, or at least keep them at bay.

  Evony seemed to pick up on that, too, because she dropped the subject and instead reached for her beer.

  An awkward silence fell. I drained the rest
of the wine in my glass, since I knew more was on the way. Then I asked, “What about you, Dan?”

  He appeared taken aback. “What about me?”

  “What did you do…before?”

  Unlike Julia, who seemed particularly disinclined to discuss her past, he relaxed, saying, “I was a personal trainer.”

  Well, that explained the muscles, which were obvious enough even under the hoodie and T-shirt he wore. “No shit.”

  A grin. “No shit. And an Eagle Scout once upon a time, believe it or not. Margolis thought he’d hit the jackpot with me, especially since he was having to herd a bunch of former office workers through the apocalypse.”

  At that remark, Julia gave him a pained glance, and he added quickly,

  “No offense.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, appearing to relent. “We were a bunch of office workers, for the most part. I mean, wasn’t that what most people were before all this happened?”

  Especially survivors from a place like Albuquerque. Even though we were in New Mexico, it wasn’t exactly the wild, wild west.

  “So you came up here to Los Alamos,” I prompted.

  Dan said, “Yeah, we came up here, and Margolis more or less took over. No one seemed to mind — it wasn’t as if he was turning people out of their homes, after all. We cleared out enough houses for us all to have someplace to live, and then we got on the ham radio and started broadcasting, urging any survivors who could hear us to come to Los Alamos, that we had power and food and housing. And they did come.”

  “At least until a few weeks ago,” Julia added. The strain was clear in her voice as she went on, “We had a steady trickle for a while, always a few people a day, sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty, traveling in groups. But around mid-December, they just stopped. That’s when we lost contact with Las Cruces as well.”

  I didn’t say anything. There was no need to. As much as I loved Jace and wanted him free, I couldn’t defend the actions of the other djinn, the ones who thought human beings were lower than insects. Those djinn were murderers, plain and simple, even though they probably looked on themselves as exterminators. The problem was that Julia and everyone else here in Los Alamos thought Jace and Natila and all the djinn in Taos who had saved their Chosen were just as bad, and I didn’t know how I could ever begin to convince them otherwise.

  You don’t have to right now, I told myself. You don’t even know where Jace is being held yet, or where Miles Odekirk keeps those damn boxes of his, or…or, well, much of anything at all.

  That wasn’t exactly true, though. I now knew approximately how many people were living in Los Alamos, and I knew they had power but no phones, and I knew they were an island of safety in a sea of darkness. And whatever I had to do in order to save Jace, I couldn’t compromise their fragile refuge. I couldn’t leave them open to an attack by the dark djinn, the ones who wanted all humans dead.

  Our food arrived, and Julia shifted the conversation to more innocuous topics, like how the power had never gone out here in Los Alamos, and so the frozen and refrigerated food at the grocery store and the various restaurants around town had never been compromised.

  “It helped a lot,” she said. “Plus, we foraged everything we could from the abandoned houses. There was some waste, of course, just because there were only a few hundred of us, and food here for thousands of people, but we were better off than most survivors.”

  “That’s for damn sure,” Evony remarked. “I was living off cocktail peanuts down there in Española for a while.”

  Everyone chuckled, which I’m sure was what she’d intended by the comment, and then we all fell silent for a while so we could eat. It was a more companionable silence, unlike the awkward one from earlier in the conversation, though, and I realized then that I liked these people, or at least what I’d seen of them so far. Yes, Julia clearly wasn’t ready to open up about whatever it was that she’d left behind in Albuquerque, and Dan’s apparent interest in me could turn out to be problematic. For now, though, I told myself to be grateful that Evony and I had been given a welcome here, even if it wasn’t an open-armed one from the entire population.

  Baby steps. And the next one after this would be attempting to find out exactly where they were keeping their captured djinn.

  Chapter Ten

  I wasn’t given the chance to do any Nancy Drew sleuthing, however, because the next day Evony and I went to see Julia at the justice center so we could officially be given our work assignments.

  “We can always use servers at the restaurants, and also people to help with stocking the supermarket, keeping track of the food supplies,” Julia told Evony, whose expression was an odd mixture of mulishness and resignation. “But if there’s anything else you can do — ”

  “I can work on cars,” she offered.

  Julia blinked in surprise, and I shot her a startled glance myself. Evony certainly hadn’t mentioned that particular skill set to me.

  Seemingly amused by our shared astonishment, she said, “My brothers were always wrenching on their cars. Custom cars were a big thing in Española. I can swap out a radiator with the best of them. Although I’ll admit I don’t know as much about all the computerized crap on the newer cars. We had classic muscle — Camaros, Impalas, a Barracuda. That kind of stuff. Still, a brake pad is a brake pad, you know?”

  “Of course,” Julia replied, typing away furiously as she apparently was updating Evony’s information in the database. “This is great news. We didn’t have any mechanics — a few people who can change oil, that kind of thing, but nobody with much specialized knowledge. Do you mind if I put you on shift at the motor pool?”

  “Not at all. Anything’s better than getting beers for assholes like the gruesome twosome from last night. I have a feeling they’re ass-pinchers.”

  Her expression didn’t change — not really, except for the slightest compression of her lips, here and gone so quickly that I could barely detect it — but I could tell Julia was not thrilled by the profanity. “That’s great. Thank you, Evony. We’re using the auto repair shop on Knecht Street. It’s not too far from here, but I’ll have someone drop you off.”

  “Maybe they should take me home so I can change first,” Evony said, looking down at herself. She was wearing one of her tight sweaters and a pair of dark jeans with boots, not exactly the sort of attire designed for crawling around under cars.

  “No, I don’t want you ruining any of your good clothes. You can pop by the Goodwill store first and see if you can find something that will work.”

  Evony didn’t seem too put out by that suggestion. It would give her a chance to do some “shopping,” even if it wasn’t for anything terribly interesting.

  “And Jessica, we’ve been tutoring the children in the library. It’s more central, and it seemed silly to put them in a classroom when there’s so few of them.”

  “Eight, right?” I said. On paper, that didn’t sound like a lot. But I still wasn’t looking forward to keeping eight kids of various ages and interests and skill levels occupied.

  “That’s right.” The smallest shadow of a smile appeared on Julia’s features, as if she had noted my reluctance and was somehow amused by it. “Nora Almeida has been tutoring them, but she’ll be glad to have a pro take over. Still, she’ll walk you through it. And it’s not really that bad — we only have the tutoring sessions from nine to noon, so it’s not as if you’ll have to keep them occupied for an entire school day.”

  Well, thank God for that. I could probably survive three-hour increments, even if some of the kids turned out to be hooligans. Then I was ashamed of myself for expecting the worst when I hadn’t even met the children in question. These were kids who’d lost their families, their entire world. I should be glad of being provided with the opportunity to give them a little stability.

  Only…I wouldn’t, not really. I was only planning to be here long enough to find Jace and Natila, and then I’d be gone. Unfortunately, the most impactful lesson I’d
teach those kids would probably end up being one about abandonment.

  I’d just have to worry about that when the time came, though. When Evony and I had come to the justice center this morning, we’d been escorted straight upstairs to see Julia. We certainly hadn’t been given the chance to do any snooping around, not even to look at the building directory to see if there were jail facilities located anywhere inside. And it wasn’t as if I could pop on the Internet to do some investigating of my own….

  “That all sounds fine,” I said firmly, hoping that Julia hadn’t noticed the way I paused before I replied. “Can I walk there from here?”

  “No, you’d better drive.” She opened a desk drawer and pulled out a car key fob, then handed it over to Evony, addressing her next words to her. “Since you two are going to be working in different sections of town, I figured you might like to have your own transportation. There’s a Toyota truck down in the parking lot that’s yours. The red one with the off-road package.”

  Evony’s eyes glowed at the prospect of having her own wheels. “Thanks, Julia. I appreciate it.”

  “No problem. I’m glad we had something available you could use. I’ll call over to the motor pool to tell them that you’re coming, but if you have any questions or concerns, just let me know. Oh, and I’ve set both of you up with vouchers at the grocery store and at the restaurants around town, so you don’t need to worry about that, either.”

  I admired the way Julia could be so brisk and efficient, so cool, as if she was merely setting up a typical job placement for someone, not trying to fit square pegs in round holes after the Dying had effectively destroyed the ways we used to all categorize ourselves. For all I knew, this was her own way of coping, of pretending the world was still normal.