djinn wars 02 - taken

by Christine Pope

  But I didn’t, mostly because there was no way to do that sort of thing while sitting across from someone in a booth in a restaurant. It would have also attracted way too much notice, which was something I knew neither one of us wanted.

  “You didn’t…have someone like that?” I asked, my voice tentative. I seemed to recall her making a very oblique reference to a “we” when she and I first met, but she’d never said anything like that since, in contrast to a lot of the other survivors, who seemed to invoke the memories of their lost loved ones quite often, as if to keep those memories from beginning to fade away. It was harder to keep your anger alive if you had started to forget.

  “Not like that,” she replied, then drained the rest of her wine. A lift of her hand, though, and Stacy was back over at our table, carrying two little carafes with refills for both of us. Neat trick.

  “Then…like what?”

  Julia’s expression hardened. “Let’s just say that not everyone is angry with the djinn for wiping the board clean, so to speak. For some of us, it was like a ‘get out of jail free’ card.”

  I blinked at her, again not sure I was hearing her correctly. “You mean, you’re glad they killed all those people?”

  “No, of course not. It was terrible. Horrible. It’s just….” She let her sentence die away into silence as she reached out to pour more wine into her glass. “In my case, they did me a favor. I was too scared to leave and didn’t see any way out. Then the djinn just sort of…took care of it.”

  It didn’t take a master’s in English to read between the lines of that particular story. Julia’s was an old, sad one, the kind of thing my father had seen way too often. He always said the domestic abuse calls were some of the worst.

  “Your husband…hit you?” I asked, barely above a whisper.

  She shook her head at once. “No. That is, one time. The problem was, I knew it wouldn’t be only the one time if I stayed. It was a question of when, not if. And he wasn’t my husband. He was my fiancé. Sort of made it worse, in a way. I mean, we weren’t tied together legally. But he was one of those smooth-talking, controlling types. And I was stupid.”

  “You are not stupid.” Hell, no. Julia Innes was one of the most capable women I’d ever met. Unfortunately, as my father had said more than once, being with an abuser had nothing to do with how smart or capable you were. It was all about having someone in your life who was trying to control you, who knew how to push all the right buttons. That was another reason why I’d felt so stupid about my ex-boyfriend Colin cheating on me. I should’ve seen the signs. At least he wasn’t abusive, just…indifferent.

  “I do feel stupid. I had a condo, one I’d bought with my own money after busting my ass for five years as a paralegal. He told me to sell it, since I was moving in with him anyway. So I did, and I put the money in our joint account.”

  “He spent it?” I asked, aghast, my mind going to the obvious conclusion.

  “No.” Not looking at me, she said, “It wasn’t about the money with him. He was a lawyer. He had plenty of money. He just didn’t want me having anything of my own. The one time he hit me, it was because I’d gone shopping for a car without him.” Her hand went up to her cheekbone, as if feeling the spot where her fiancé had hit her. Still staring down at the tabletop, she added, “The Heat came along only a few days after that. And Julia’s little problem was solved.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Her shoulders lifted. “He went early, and I was glad he was dead. And then I was guilty for feeling glad, especially when it turned out almost everyone else was dead, too. I didn’t mind the hand of God coming down to smite Ian, but I certainly never wanted anyone else to get hurt. I didn’t have too much time to brood over it, though, because then Captain Margolis came along, and I could concentrate on living from day to day, on helping the other survivors.” At last she raised her head and gave me a weary smile. “So there’s my dirty little secret. It’s far worse than yours.”

  “I don’t think you can beat yourself up too much for that,” I said gently. “I mean, I probably would have felt the same way if I’d been in your situation.”

  “Ah, but you wouldn’t have been in my situation. I’ve been watching you, Jessica. You’re tough. The first time a guy like Ian tried to pull that kind of crap on you, you would have walked out.” She ran her fingers up and down the stem of her wine glass, gaze still not quite meeting mine. “But I don’t have that kind of strength.”

  I hated to see her continuing to rake herself over the coals for something that really wasn’t her fault. In a way, she was giving this former fiancé of hers power still, even though he was months dead. “You can’t blame yourself. My father was a cop, and he saw way too much of this kind of thing. He always said abusers were crafty and clever, and way better at manipulating people than they had any right to be.”

  “Sounds like you were lucky in your father. Mine was an abusive bastard, and I always swore I’d never be like my mother.” Another one of those tired little smiles, so incongruous when contrasted with the polish of her appearance. Unlike most of us survivors, who went around in jeans and boots and sweaters and jackets more notable for their warmth than their sense of style, Julia almost always wore skirts, albeit with high-heeled boots. You could take the girl out of the law office, and all that. “And then Ian came along, and I got trapped right in the same goddamn cycle.”

  “I think you would’ve left,” I told her. “You just ended up not having to make that decision, because of the Dying.”

  “I appreciate your confidence in me.” Despite those words, her expression appeared far from convinced. Lowering her voice, she added, “And I won’t tell anyone about — about him.”

  “Thank you.” I could tell she wanted to leave the subject of her past for now, so I asked, also in an undertone, “Do you know how many of those devices Miles has made so far?”

  She hesitated, eyes flicking up toward me, slightly wary now. “Why?”

  “I think you know why.”

  Another long pause, her manicured nails tapping on the tabletop. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  “Neither do I,” I said at once. It was the simple truth. Just because I wanted to get Jace out of here didn’t mean that I intended to leave a trail of destruction behind me. “Really, I’ve got nothing against anyone in Los Alamos. I’m sure they thought they were doing the right thing when they took Jace and Natila. This isn’t about revenge.”

  “That’s…noble.”

  “It’s the truth.” Then, as her expression still appeared to be more than a little dubious, I added, “Well, okay, if the opportunity arose to give Captain Margolis a little grief, I might not pass it up.”

  Her lips compressed. “I can’t blame you for that.”

  I’d been wondering exactly what the nature of their relationship was. “He hasn’t….” I began, then stopped myself. Did I really want to force her into making revelations she’d rather were kept hidden?

  But to my surprise, one corner of her mouth gave an ironic lift. “God, no. That is, I’m sure he wanted to, but that was one area where Ian actually turned out to be useful. When Margolis tried to put a move on me, I told him I was mourning my fiancé, and he let it go. I’m certainly not trying to defend his behavior, but at least he’s not into forcing women. I think he’d prefer to think of himself as some sort of post-apocalyptic Don Juan.”

  Shuddering, I took a sip of wine in an attempt to get the bad taste out of mouth. “Yuck.”

  “That about sums up my feelings on the subject. Some people aren’t quite so picky, but it’s their choice. Or maybe it’s not much of a choice when it comes down to getting a nicer place to live and a better food allotment.”

  Somehow that seemed even sleazier than out-and-out seduction. “Seriously?”

  She shook her head — at my naïveté, probably. “Why else would someone like Stacy be living in what used to be a half-million-dollar house? She’s a nice girl, but she didn’t ha
ve any real skills to contribute to the community. Not like you and the tutoring, or Evony with the car-repair know-how. By all rights, you should have the nicer house.”

  “But — ” I wasn’t a complete idiot; I understood that all sorts of sordid sexual crap used to go on in the workplace all the time, a good deal of it much worse than putting out so you could get a nice big house handed to you on a silver platter. “But he’s old enough to be her father!”

  “Since when has that stopped anybody? Besides, not all of us were lucky enough to be with lovers who looked like Greek gods or something.” She paused then. “Well, actually, maybe not Greek, in your case. Native American gods, I guess.”

  I shot her a pained look, mostly because I didn’t know how exactly I should be reacting. Anyway, there were a whole hell of a lot of intermediate steps between Richard Margolis and Jace when it came to looks. Dan Lowery, for instance. He was very attractive, although I hadn’t noticed Stacy paying any particular attention to him. Did Margolis expect fidelity from his conquests, even though he himself was running around like a dog in heat? I had to hope for everyone’s sake he was using condoms.

  But I didn’t mention Dan, mostly because I’d never seen him pay any particular attention to Stacy, either, whereas he was on the verge of being just a little too friendly with me. If I brought him up at that point in the conversation, I had a feeling the best I could expect from Julia was a very knowing look, and I did not want to go there right then. Or at all, if possible.

  “Maybe,” I allowed. “And I don’t want to judge anyone.”

  “Good.” She sat up a little straighter, then said, “Three.”

  “Three what?” I asked, confused as to where that had come from.

  Her eyebrow went up at an ironic angle, and then comprehension dawned as I went back and picked up an earlier thread from our conversation. There was my answer. Miles Odekirk had somehow managed to build three of those goddamn boxes.

  “Does he — does he use all of them at once?”

  “I don’t know. There’s the one at the justice center, obviously. And I think he has one deployed on the edge of town to extend the coverage they provide.”

  So the field each device generated had its limitations. “Do you know what the range of the boxes is?”

  “Not exactly. I think it depends on how high it’s dialed up. The higher the setting, the smaller the field.”

  “You think they’d take that into consideration when they’re playing their little torture games with it,” I said bitterly.

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure Dr. Odekirk’s had words with a few of the guards, but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. And now that he has three of them online, he’s not as concerned about it, I suppose.”

  Julia’s tone was subtly disapproving. Whether that disapproval stemmed from the way the guards were treating Jace, or Miles Odekirk’s apparent indifference to their cruelty, now that there were enough devices to adequately protect the town, I couldn’t be sure.

  I sat back in the booth, considering her words. She’d been fairly open with me, but I didn’t know if I was brave enough to ask her whether she would help me free Jace and Natila. It was one thing to believe the community’s treatment of their djinn captives was unfair, and quite another to risk everything she’d built here on what I had to admit to myself was a long shot. Also, Evony and I had someplace to go. I knew Zahrias would give us a place to stay in Taos, if we managed to make it there. But Julia was no one’s Chosen, and although I would certainly plead her case and ask that she be given sanctuary, I couldn’t guarantee that Zahrias or the other djinn there would be willing to take her in.

  “I can practically hear the gears turning from over here,” she remarked, picking up her glass of wine.

  “That bad?”

  “Basically.” She sipped some chardonnay, then set down the wine glass and gave me a very direct look. “I can’t promise you anything, Jessica. I was watching the two of them today because of a fluke, but I don’t get guard duty very often.”

  The two of them. I’d been wondering if I should ask if the missing Chosen were being held along with Jace and Natila, but Julia’s comment seemed to indicate that she’d only been guarding the two djinn and no one else. Instead, I inquired, “Margolis doesn’t trust you?”

  “I’m not sure it’s a matter of trust, more that he’s got plenty of people willing to play soldier, and my talents are better utilized elsewhere. Or at least I’m pretty sure that’s what he would say if I asked to babysit the djinn on a regular basis.”

  Captain Margolis’ purported views on the subject didn’t surprise me, but the tone of Julia’s remark did. I hadn’t even needed to ask the question — she knew what I wanted. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem as if she was in a position to give it to me.

  “And there’s probably no use in appealing to Dan,” I said, half to myself, but Julia picked up on the comment immediately.

  “Um, no. In general, asking a guy who has a thing for you to assist in a jail break for your current lover isn’t recommended.”

  “Dan doesn’t have a thing for me.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Have you spent five minutes around him? He’s always staring in your direction with this moony expression on his face, but trying oh, so desperately to look casual. We might has well all be back in high school.”

  Right then, I kind of wished I was back in high school. All the angst of those years felt like a cakewalk compared to where I was now. Voice steady, I said, “I think you’re exaggerating just a bit.”

  “Mm-hmm.” But maybe she could tell I was starting to get annoyed by her pursuit of the topic, because she abandoned the subject, saying, “All I know is that if you’re going to try something, it shouldn’t wait too long. Miles isn’t going to stop building those devices, and the more he has, the harder it will be. Luckily for you, they’re not something he can just whip out in a few days, or even a week. But he is getting faster at it. Practice makes perfect, I suppose.”

  “Great,” I muttered. I had a sudden vision of one of those damn things being handed out to everyone in Los Alamos, creating a field so vast that no djinn could ever hope to escape it. All right, that was probably exaggerating the situation just a bit, but I would take Julia’s words to heart all the same.

  Whatever move I made, I would have to do it soon.

  But even though I promised myself I wouldn’t let the matter lie, I wasn’t given much of a chance to formulate any kind of plan. The day after that, while I was off trying to teach a group of kids who looked as if they’d rather be building snow forts or going snowboarding the importance of subject/verb agreement and why plants are green, apparently a large group of guards, directed by Captain Margolis, showed up at the justice center and hustled Jace and Natila away. They weren’t going far, but they might as well have been spirited off to Alcatraz for all I could do to save them.

  They had been taken to the lab facility.

  “Why?” I whispered to Julia, feeling the cold clench of despair in my gut after she told me what had happened. The whispering wasn’t strictly necessary, as the commander was still up at the labs, but for some reason, I couldn’t help myself. The timing had to have been a coincidence, although I couldn’t help wondering whether someone had overheard our conversation at Pajarito’s and ratted us out. No, that couldn’t be it. Otherwise, I probably would have been locked up in Jace’s former cell, and Julia would have at least been questioned, if not held as well. But here we both were, collating reports for Margolis as if this was just another afternoon at the office.

  “I don’t know why,” Julia responded, also in hushed tones. “I didn’t have any advance notice. Around ten this morning, I saw a white van pull up out front, along with a couple of trucks and that yellow Hummer they use whenever they want to look intimidating. There were about ten people in uniforms, and they all came inside and went straight to the detention area, then came back out again a few minutes later. Or at least I assume they w
ent to the jail, because when they came out, they had two people with bags over their heads with them.”

  Shit. Shit. The only two people in Los Alamos who could possibly be on the receiving end of that kind of treatment were Jace and Natila.

  “And then they drove off. It looked to me as if they were heading toward the labs, as there isn’t anything else in that direction.” Julia paused then and gave me a sorrowful look. “I’m so sorry, Jessica. Here, maybe you would’ve had a chance. But at the labs?” Her shoulders lifted, and she reached out and gave me an entirely unexpected squeeze on the hand. Yes, we’d been friendly, but this was the first time she’d ever touched me, and I was moved by the gesture. Because of her past, it probably wasn’t easy for her to reach out to another person. “You’ve been there. That facility is huge. They could be keeping your friends almost anywhere.”

  “Do you know it well?” I made sure to keep my tone as calm as I could. Now was not the time for me to lose it, even though inwardly I was fuming in a mixture of frustration and rage, and mostly just wanted to scream at the injustice of it all.

  “The lab?” she asked, then shook her head. “No. I mean, I went up there once or twice with the commander so I could take notes during his conversations with Miles, but he stopped taking me a while back.”

  “Did he say why he didn’t have you go with him anymore?”

  “No.” A brief pause then, as if she were stopping to puzzle it out. “In the beginning, when we were still communicating with other groups, Miles was trying to get the word out about the devices he’d created, and Margolis wanted me there to keep a record of those conversations.”

  That explanation made another question pop into my head. “Could other people make the boxes as well? They look sort of…complicated.”

  “Most people, no. But the group in L.A. had someone with them who’d worked at JPL — you know, the place where all the rocket scientists hang out in Pasadena?”

  I nodded. Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t have paid JPL or rocket scientists any particular attention, but my father had loved all that stuff, and if there was a launch or coverage on the news of the Mars Rover landing or whatever, he’d stop to watch it if he had the time. Remembering that about him made a little pang go through me, and right then I missed him so much that the longing might as well have been a physical pain. It was different from my need for Jace, although no less strong. I had to believe that my father would have understood why I had to rescue the man I loved, even though he was not precisely a man at all. Love was love, in whatever form it might take.