So he thought he should be safe enough here for the interim. Or rather, he hoped he would be. Since he had also never encountered any of Khalim’s group during his time in the djinn world’s equivalent of a prison, he also guessed there was no one who could report him missing. All he had to do was live quietly here for a time, and then move out to the greater world when a sufficient span had passed.
The slight creak of the stairs told him that Jillian had finally deigned to come down to the kitchen. He had just finished pouring a cup of coffee for himself from the French press he’d found in the cupboard when she appeared in the doorway, looking diffident.
“Is that really coffee?” she asked, her voice a little too studiedly casual.
“Yes,” he said, careful to keep his own tone neutral. “Would you like some?”
“Yes, please.”
She came farther into the kitchen and waited a few feet away while he fetched another mug and filled it as well.
“I drink it black,” he said. “There is sugar, but if you wish for cream, I will have to summon it.”
“No,” she said hurriedly. “Black is fine. I got used to drinking it that way in college.”
She took the mug from him and wrapped both her hands around it, then blew on the liquid inside. Aldair took that opportunity to study her more closely. She’d put on some of the clothes she’d found in the master bedroom the day before; they didn’t fit her very well, being rather large, and he hoped she would be able to locate something else here in the little town, something that wouldn’t do so much to obscure her form. Even if he had no intention of doing anything about it, he would prefer to see her looking like a real woman, not someone made sexless by baggy garments.
No, he realized even the unflattering clothing was not enough to render her sexless. Not with that fall of warm brown hair, or those full lips, pursed now as she blew once again on her coffee. She must have washed her hair, because it still looked damp, although it had already begun to dry into long, loose waves. He had thought they must have come from some artifice, created by one of the innumerable devices mortal women used to alter the texture of their hair, but he realized those waves must be natural. And while it did not seem as if she wore any cosmetics, he saw she had no need of any, not with those long lashes, and the smooth creaminess of her complexion.
Then he realized he was staring, and drank some of his own coffee. No need for him to wait for it to cool down, since his kind could endure heat and cold far better than humans.
“I thought we could explore the town today,” he said. “I want to see what is here, what we can take for our own use.”
Something in her expression altered, although he could not tell exactly what it was. Perhaps she was merely relieved that he had not brought up the embarrassing events of the night before.
“That’s a good idea,” she said. “I don’t know how much we’ll find, but there’s got be some usable stuff in the shops and the restaurants. Some of those boutiques probably have clothes that will fit me.”
“Good,” he said.
He’d thought he had kept any kind of inflection out of his voice, but he couldn’t miss seeing the way her eyebrows lifted slightly at his remark. “What, the djinn fashion police don’t approve of baggy jeans?”
Refusing to be baited, he replied, “We believe clothing can be both functional and beautiful. Those jeans are anything but beautiful.”
She actually chuckled. “No, I guess not.”
They fell into a small silence after that exchange, but Aldair did not find the lack of conversation awkward. Rather, he was relieved that she did not attempt to continue their discussion. Jillian sipped her coffee, and he drank some of his as well. He had pushed aside the curtains at the kitchen window and so was able to see the yard beyond — overgrown, but lovely in its way, with cheerful yellow sunflowers waving in the morning breeze, and other flowers he didn’t recognize — tall spikes of orange blooms, and low, spreading carpets of pale purple — adding to the beauty of the day.
It had been a very long time since he’d seen a landscape he could consider remotely beautiful.
When Jillian spoke next, she did sound rather hesitant. “So…do djinn eat breakfast?”
“Of course we do. But I like to have my coffee first. Are you hungry?”
She nodded.
“There are chickens here. They seem to have survived well on their own, and have multiplied. So we can have eggs. There are components to make bread and such. I will assemble them shortly.”
“Just like that.”
He tilted his head at her. “Just like what?”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“For a djinn, it is. I will admit that there are some among us who find it amusing to make their food as you humans do, without the help of magic. But since we have these powers, I see no reason why I should not use them.”
“No, I suppose not.” Then she gave a rueful smile. “Just as well, I guess. I was never very good at cooking. Jack — well, let’s just say I was usually the one doing the washing up, not the meal prep.”
“You will not have to do that here,” he pointed out. “I can use my powers to take care of cleaning up afterward.”
“Handy.”
Was she being sarcastic? He shot her a sideways glance, but her expression seemed almost bland, as if she wanted to make sure he couldn’t see much of what she was thinking. Well, perhaps she was doing her best to guard herself after her breakdown of the night before.
He drained the last of the coffee in his mug, then set it down on the countertop. “Let me see about that breakfast.”
In a way, the whole situation was utterly bizarre. How could she have sat there at the dining room table with him, eating scrambled eggs and buttered biscuits — all of it the lightest and fluffiest and tastiest she’d ever had — and acted as if there was nothing strange about sharing a meal with a djinn?
Especially a djinn who had held her the night before as she sobbed into his arms.
Well, he seemed inclined to pretend that whole incident had never happened, and she was all too happy to follow his lead. They hadn’t spoken much, but had both eaten with good appetite. Not that surprising, since their small meal of bread and cheese at dinner wasn’t exactly the sort of thing that had a lot of staying power. And at the end, he’d made a small waving motion with one hand, and their dirty plates immediately gleamed as clean as if they’d just been sent through the world’s most state-of-the-art dishwasher, right before they all vanished back into their cupboards.
As she’d said, handy.
Now they were venturing out into the town, the air warm and friendly as it touched her still-damp hair, ensuring that it would finish drying soon enough. By late afternoon, temperatures would probably be downright hot, but Jillian resolved to enjoy the morning’s mildness while she could.
From off in the distance, she heard the clucking of chickens. It sounded as if a whole flock of them had congregated somewhere behind one of the buildings. So Aldair hadn’t been making that part up. She wondered how the chickens had survived all this time, since she knew coyotes roamed these hills.
Something else was roaming the streets of Madrid as well. They hadn’t gone more than a hundred feet or so before a smallish black and white dog came bounding up to them, tail wagging, ears flying, mouth open in a happy doggy smile. Astonished, Jillian bent down to scratch the dog behind the ears, and he promptly nudged her knee so she wouldn’t stop.
Aldair paused and looked back at her. “It seems you have found a friend.”
“I guess so.” She fondled the dog’s ears, feeling his fur soft against her fingertips. Amazing that he was in such good shape — he didn’t appear to be hungry, or dirty or mangy. Maybe regular soakings from the late-summer monsoon storms had helped to keep him clean. “I’m just surprised he managed to survive here for so long. A dog this size, you’d think the coyotes would have gotten him.”
Her heart twinged at that thought. W
hat had happened to all the cats and dogs and other pets when all their masters perished during the Heat? In Los Alamos, the residents had taken in the abandoned animals, but there was no one here in Madrid to have done the same thing. Miles had once estimated that approximately .002% of the world’s population had survived the Dying, which meant that, statistically, Madrid was just too small for any of its residents to have lived. The animals here would have been on their own.
“We made sure they would be safe,” Aldair told her, and she looked up from the dog to meet the djinn’s hard blue eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that the animals were innocent. They have been provided for. I am not saying that some haven’t perished from old age or disease or accident in the time since the Dying, but we have made sure that they would continue to flourish, just as they did when they had human masters.”
Jillian tried her best to wrap her mind around that idea. So the djinn thought nothing of wiping out nearly all of mankind in one fell swoop, but they had done what they could to protect the animals left behind? In some ways, the two behaviors seemed completely contradictory, but then, from what she’d heard, djinn didn’t always act the way one might think they should. She supposed she should be glad they could show that much mercy at least.
And when the Heat struck, she and Jack had still been mourning the loss of their little dog Alfie, a chihuahua-mix rescue who’d died only a few months earlier. At the time, Jillian hadn’t known whether it was better that she didn’t have to worry about Alfie’s fate after the Dying, or whether it might have helped to have a dog to focus on. She’d missed him, but she hadn’t quite come to the point in her life in Los Alamos where she was ready to take on a new dog.
Well, it looked like a dog had found her, for better or worse.
“Do you mind?” she asked Aldair. “I mean, it looks like he’s glommed on to me. Is it all right if he sticks around?”
“I don’t mind if he stays with you,” he said, then added, to her surprise, “I like dogs.”
If asked, Jillian would have said that she didn’t think Aldair seemed like a doggy person in the slightest, but she wouldn’t argue. Not when it meant she could keep the dog with her. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so trapped here if she had a dog to focus on. He trotted along at her side as she followed Aldair, who had resumed walking briskly toward town. Now they passed an art gallery on one side, and then a cluster of smaller shops across the street, an eclectic mix of more galleries, clothing boutiques, even a chocolate shop.
Of course, none of the chocolate would be edible anymore. Too bad, although Jillian realized Aldair could probably magic up some chocolate, if she asked nicely. Surely djinn had to like chocolate, too. How could anyone not like chocolate?
He paused in front of the Mine Shaft Tavern. “This was the bar, correct?”
“Bar and restaurant,” she said.
“Then it could have some items we might use.”
A long, sloping ramp led up into the bar. Jillian followed Aldair, and the dog followed her. She would have to come up with a name for him. He wasn’t wearing a collar, so he didn’t have any tags to let her know what his real name might be.
Aldair opened the door to the Mine Shaft. Inside, it was so dark that the place might as well have been inside a mine, just as its name indicated. And even though she couldn’t see much of anything, Jillian detected a faint odor of decay, probably from failed refrigerators. Her nose wrinkled. She didn’t much like the idea of going in there, but she also didn’t want Aldair to know that the place had her spooked. Back when she’d first come to Los Alamos, she’d been assigned to one of the details that went around the town and swept away the dust of its former inhabitants and cleaned out the refrigerators and freezers of any contents that had spoiled. That hint of decay she’d detected was enough to bring back all those horrible memories.
A wave of Aldair’s hand, and the lights flared on, even as the ceiling fans overhead began to turn lazily, churning at the thick air. Across the room, a jukebox came to life, playing a twangy country-western song, something Jillian didn’t recognize.
As she looked around, she sort of wished the lights hadn’t come on. Because she spotted four or five piles of the ominous gray dust ranged along the base of the bar, as if those victims of the Heat had decided they would rather spend their final moments here having a last drink before the deadly fever overcame them altogether.
Aldair appeared not to notice, or possibly he just didn’t care. He walked over to the bar and surveyed the contents of its shelves.
“Throwing a party?” Jillian quipped, and he turned partway toward her and gave her a sour look.
“Of course not. But it is good to know what is here, even if we don’t intend to use most of it.”
That was for sure. She’d never been one for hard alcohol. She and Jack had mostly drunk wine, unless they went to a ballgame or something, where they’d always order beer. True, their wine consumption was mostly of the box variety, or Trader Joe’s cheaper offerings, but she still had preferred it over mixed drinks.
Aldair looked over at the jukebox and waved his hand again. Abruptly, the music shut off.
“Not a country-western fan?”
He frowned. “Hardly.”
Then he crossed the room and went out the door that led from the bar to the mining museum, a kitschy little space separating the bar from the restaurant itself. The dining area was small, and overflowed into an outdoor eating area on a deck.
The djinn surveyed all this with his arms crossed, his expression unsmiling. Jillian waited a few paces away, her new dog at her side. She could tell Aldair was less than thrilled with what he had found, but really, what had he been expecting? They were basically in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t like you were going to find a Zagat four-star restaurant in tiny Madrid, although The Hollar’s food had been damn good.
He stopped in the middle of the deck and looked around. From here you could get a fairly decent view of the main part of the town — the only part of the town, Jillian thought, since basically Madrid consisted of this tiny stretch of Highway 14 and not much else. There were a couple of side streets, and then outlying homesteads like the one they currently occupied, but this was mostly it.
The wind caught at Aldair’s longish hair, ruffling it around his face. Jillian had never met a djinn before him, so she didn’t know if they tended to wear their hair long, or whether his had been cut shorter and then grown out during his time in exile. If asked, she would have said she wasn’t much for long hair on men, but something about it suited him, suited the high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes and sensual mouth.
Really, he was kind of ridiculously good-looking. But then, all djinn were supposed to be, weren’t they? That was why the people they’d selected as their Chosen were also extremely attractive, she supposed…they had to match.
“There are more shops down that way,” she said as she came up to stand next to him. “And I think maybe a coffeehouse or something. I don’t remember how many more restaurants there are besides this one and The Hollar — that’s across the street — but I know there aren’t many.”
“The coffeehouse should have some supplies we could use,” he said, still staring down the street. The wind also played with the hem of the open silk robe he wore, making the fabric shimmer like sunlight on water. Finally, he glanced down at her, and his mouth pulled into a slight frown. “And weren’t you going to look for something else to wear?”
“Yes,” she replied, acutely aware of how shabby she must look in contrast to his djinn-ly splendor. “Why don’t you check out the coffeehouse, and I’ll head over to one of those shops across the street. I think there was some kind of a boutique that might have something.”
He nodded. “That should do.”
Without another word, he strode across the deck and then took the steps that led down to street level. Jillian shrugged and followed suit, the dog at her heels, tail wagging the whole time.
Her recollection had been correct — there was a place called The Heavenly Boutique just a few doors down from The Hollar. When she stepped inside, Jillian couldn’t see any of that terrible dust, and she let out a sigh of relief. In fact, it still smelled good in there, probably because of the open baskets of potpourri that sat on the antique dressers being used as display items. The potpourri was pretty much used up by this point, but she could tell it had done its work for as long as possible.
A brief look around told her the clothing here was probably more what Aldair would have liked — romantic tops, flowing skirts, lots of pretty scarves. And a lot of high-end soaps and body lotions, that sort of thing. She’d have to pick and choose, since there was a limit to how much she could carry. No, none of these clothes were exactly practical, but she doubted she would be doing much manual labor while she was here in Madrid, either.
But what about if you have a chance to make a break for it? she asked herself as she took a few items into one of the dressing rooms. Are you going to walk twenty-five miles in wedge sandals and a gypsy skirt?
Well, probably not. But she had the jeans and T-shirts she’d gotten out of the master bedroom back at the house, and there were the clothes she’d been wearing when the lab accident had turned her world upside down. There must be a laundry room at the house; she’d just run a load when it seemed appropriate.
In the meantime, there was something almost decadent about being able to choose the things she liked here without having to look at the price tag and worry how she’d ever be able to afford it. The world didn’t work that way anymore. Maybe some people would have called this sort of casual appropriation looting, but really, how could it be looting when you weren’t actually taking it from anyone? At least now these beautiful things would get a chance to be enjoyed.
She decided on a long, flowing skirt in a shade of dark teal, accented with silver sequins, and to go with it a lacy white camisole top. The wedges she’d first spotted probably weren’t the most practical thing to wear around here, because of the uneven ground and complete lack of sidewalks in Madrid, and so instead she went with a pair of flat natural-colored leather sandals with silver beadwork. Hanging from one of the open wardrobes was a large beaded purse, and she pulled that down so she could load it up with some of the choicer-looking soaps and lotions, along with a few more changes of clothing.
Forbidden (The Djinn Wars Book 6) Page 6