Forsaken (The Djinn Wars Book 5)

by Christine Pope

  Besides, she wanted to see if he’d wrought any of the same alterations on the interior of the Hotel Andaluz as he had on the surrounding landscape.

  Madison downed a couple of ibuprofen with the remainder of the bottled water before she stepped out into the hallway and shut the door behind her. At first glance, nothing much seemed to have changed. She’d never actually stayed at the hotel, but her friend Tory had gotten married here, and so Madison had been to one of the room parties thrown by the bridesmaids. Here were the same mirrors, the same antique sideboards, even the same little baskets of potpourri, although it had long since dried out completely and no longer gave off even a ghost of a scent.

  The sconces on the walls were dark, however. Instead, candles burned on the side tables, giving enough illumination for Madison to make her way down the corridor. When she reached the elevators, she paused. There had been electric light in her room; the candles seemed to be more an affectation than anything else. Even so, she didn’t think it a very good idea to risk using the elevator.

  The stairwell was well lit, though, and so it was easy enough for her to descend the eight flights of stairs to the lobby level. When she opened the door and stuck her head out, everything appeared to be deserted.

  What did you expect? she asked herself. Qadim’s still up in his suite, probably, and it’s not as if you have any friends who’re going to drop in.

  And she had to pray that Qadim didn’t have any friends, either, at least not the type who would come by unannounced. He seemed open and friendly enough, but she knew better than to expect all djinn to be like that. No, grim experience had taught her that they were the exact opposite of friendly.

  The lobby appeared relatively unchanged, too. There were the casbahs along the wall, where you could sit with a date and have a drink and some tapas. The waterfall still flowed in one, and the bank of votives in the other flickered with restless light. Some part of her relaxed slightly, relieved that this one part of the old world had endured. She wondered if Qadim had preserved it in this state because it reminded him of the world he had come from.

  Wandering past the little room that used to be the reception area, Madison came to the restaurant. Everything in here was immaculate, each table set with a small, healthy-looking succulent plant. She could almost imagine that the maître d’ was about to show up and show her to a table.

  But there was the view out the windows, one which should have been crowded with buildings on every side. Instead, she saw that artfully laid out desert scape, every rock and plant set exactly where it should be to create an ever-changing but harmonious vista. It was the sort of work that would have made most landscapers envious.

  “Good morning,” came Qadim’s voice, and she turned to see him emerging from the door into the kitchen.

  “Morning,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound too startled. “I hope it was all right for me to come down here.”

  “Of course, if you feel up to it.”

  “I do. That is, my shoulder feels much better this morning. Thank you again for setting it.”

  He offered her a smile. “I am glad you’re so improved. I was just seeing about breakfast. Would you like to come into the kitchen?”

  Most of the time she did what she could to avoid kitchens, but since he was the one doing the work…. “Sure,” she replied. “Does your djinn magic include brewing up some coffee?”

  “Yes. It should be about ready.”

  She followed him into the kitchen, which was smaller than she’d expected but spotlessly clean, with gleaming stainless-steel counters and appliances. The air was filled with the rich scent of coffee, and she sniffed appreciatively.

  “If I hadn’t gotten up early, would you have sent the smell of that coffee up through the ventilation system to wake me up?”

  A glint entered his dark eyes. “Now, that is an idea I had not thought of. But since you seem to be an early riser, perhaps those sorts of extreme measures aren’t necessary.”

  Madison almost protested that she wasn’t always up this early, then decided to say nothing. It didn’t really matter if they got used to each other’s rhythms or not; in a few days she’d be healed enough to go back to the shelter, and that would be the end of it.

  For some reason, that idea didn’t sound nearly as appealing as she’d thought it would.

  Qadim lifted the pot from the stove — no automatic coffeemakers for him, apparently — and poured a good measure of the rich brown liquid into a pair of heavy white stoneware mugs that were sitting on the counter. He handed one to her before saying, “I can get you cream or sugar if you require it.”

  “No, black is fine.” She blew on the coffee, which was far too hot yet to drink. Some cream would have cooled it down, but she’d learned to drink her coffee black a long time ago, and coffee with cream and sugar just tasted strange to her now.

  The djinn didn’t bother to wait to drink his own coffee, but lifted it to his lips and sipped right away. Higher tolerance for heat or pain? That made the most sense. She didn’t know if it would be rude to ask, however, and so put the question aside for the moment.

  “What would you like to eat?” he said next. “I’ll admit that I am not completely familiar with all your breakfast foods, but eggs are simple enough. Or perhaps I could make that thing called a Belgian waffle.”

  Something about the way he made the suggestion made her want to laugh. He looked completely serious, though, and so she said, her expression equally serious, “Eggs are fine. And toast, if you have it?”

  “I can have anything you want.”

  From someone else, that kind of comment might have sounded far too suggestive. But she didn’t think he was playing those kinds of games, and was merely being truthful.

  “Sourdough toast, then,” she said. “And some fruit. Strawberries?”

  Strawberries were completely out of season. But that sort of thing shouldn’t matter to a djinn.

  Apparently it didn’t, because he only nodded and replied, “Simple enough. You can sit on that stool over there while I prepare the food.”

  Where she would be safely out of the way. She didn’t mind, though. Sitting off to one side was infinitely preferable to being pressed into service.

  She settled herself down on the stool. For some reason, she’d expected him to snap his fingers and have all the components of the meal magically appear on the countertops, but instead he went over to the refrigerator and pulled out a bowl of eggs, a stick of butter, and another bowl of strawberries. So maybe he had conjured them, but made them appear inside the refrigerator where they could rest comfortably until he had need of them.

  He went to work, breaking an alarming number of eggs into another stainless-steel bowl, whisking them, adding an exact amount of milk. Once he had that mixture going on the stovetop, he went to one of the large pantries on the other side of the room and produced a large loaf of bread, which he set down on the counter so he could cut off some slices.

  Really, he was so domestic in a completely ordinary way that Madison once again had a difficult time convincing herself he really was a djinn and not just another regular survivor like she was. His robes were still MIA; today he had on a pair of jeans identical to the ones she’d first seen him wearing and another T-shirt, this one in a dark khaki green. The sleeves of that T-shirt seemed in jeopardy with every movement because of the way his muscles strained against the fabric, and Madison had to force herself to look someplace else in the kitchen so he wouldn’t catch her staring. Jacob had been fit and athletic enough — he biked and ran, and the two of them would often spend their weekends hiking in the mountains around town — but he’d certainly never had muscles like Qadim’s.

  “So,” Madison ventured, thinking she’d better do something to fill up the silence, “why the fancy xeriscape?”

  “‘Xeriscape’?” Qadim echoed. He frowned slightly as he took in the unfamiliar word.

  “It just means landscaping for dry climates. Like what you’ve
done outside.” She made a vague gesture with one hand as she motioned toward what she thought was the front of the building.

  “Ah.” After dropping the bread he’d sliced into the toaster, he leaned against the counter and crossed his arms while he seemed consider her question. “This land will not support true greenery, and so I chose specimens I thought would survive here and still create a pleasing landscape.”

  “It is beautiful,” she said, eliciting a smile from him. “So is this your plan for Albuquerque? To get rid of the buildings and have plants everywhere?”

  “Eventually, yes.”

  That could cause problems for her. Clay’s house and the bomb shelter it hid were more than a mile from downtown, and so it would probably take Qadim some time to make his way over there. Still, what in the world would she do once he’d razed that entire neighborhood and planted it with wild grasses and cactus? His demolition efforts might not do much to the shelter itself — the door that protected the bunker was supposedly rated to survive a five-megaton blast only a mile away — but once the gazebo was gone, the metal door to the bomb shelter would stick out like a sore thumb.

  She decided to leave that problem aside to worry about later. Anything she said to dissuade him from expanding his planting efforts would surely lead to inquiries as to why she should care one way or another.

  “How do you get the plants to grow so fast?” she asked next, since that question had been bothering her ever since she’d first laid eyes on his handiwork.

  “A little djinn encouragement,” he replied, the glint returning to his dark eyes. He pushed himself up from the counter and went to tend the eggs. “It is one of the gifts earth elementals share.”

  “Handy.” Madison blew on her coffee one last time and then sipped some. By that point, it had cooled enough that she could manage a large swallow. Which she did, relishing the much-needed rush of caffeine to her nerve endings. “So what can the other djinn do?”

  Qadim made rather a show of pushing the eggs around in the skillet, and Madison wondered if he was going to answer at all. Then he said, “We all have a number of skills in common, but water elementals can also cause a spring to flow up out of the ground where there was none, or make a river change its course, while air elementals can make the clouds and the wind and the weather do their bidding.”

  “And fire elementals?”

  His face was in profile to her, but Madison could see the way he frowned. “You seem to know a good deal about us already.”

  “Not that much,” she said quickly. “I tried to look up a few things, after — well, after it was pretty clear that the beings who were hunting the streets of Albuquerque couldn’t possibly be human.”

  Something about his mouth tightened, but he only nodded. “Yes, I suppose that would have become obvious soon enough. Fire elementals can bring forth fire from the air and light a forge, but they can also hold back a fire before it consumes a forest.”

  Light and dark, yin and yang. Powers that could be used to heal…or destroy. It sounded as if the djinn might be more complex than she’d first thought, although Madison also had the impression that there was a lot more going on here than Qadim had told her. Now that she’d begun to get past her initial fear of him, she wanted to ask more questions. Why had his people destroyed humanity? What were their plans for the now-empty planet?

  And maybe the most pressing, and also the most frightening to her.

  Why am I still alive when everyone else is dead?

  “It’s ready,” Qadim said, breaking into her thoughts. “I have already set a table in the dining area. Go and sit down, and I will bring out our breakfasts.”

  She almost protested and offered to help, then realized she wouldn’t be of much use to him with her arm in a sling. So she slid off the stool and took her coffee with her one good hand, saying, “All right.”

  He’d chosen a table by one of the windows. Madison sat down, trying to ignore the pang that went through her as she remembered the last time she’d eaten here. It was right after Jake had been offered the teaching position in Bellingham. They hadn’t fought, but the tension was already thick between them. He’d wanted her to come with him to Washington, saying she could just as easily find work at the college there.

  Part of her had really wanted to go, to try living someplace green and damp and with the ocean nearby. But she knew she’d never leave her father alone in Albuquerque. True, by then she wasn’t living at home anymore. Still, she’d been only ten minutes away from the house where she’d grown up. And she was the only family her father had in New Mexico. Everyone else was either in California or in Illinois, thousands of miles away. Even more than ten years later, her father still mourned the loss of his wife. If Madison left, too, he wouldn’t have anyone.

  She didn’t want to reflect on the irony of her staying, just to have him leave her when the Heat took over the world.

  Qadim approached the table then, hands laden with plates of food. Somehow he also managed to keep a grip on his coffee cup with two of the fingers of his left hand while he lowered the plates to the tabletop.

  “Sorry I couldn’t help more,” Madison told him as he took the seat across the table from her.

  “It is fine. The important thing is for you to be careful of your arm. There is no point in you hurting it again, just to help me do something I can manage very well on my own.”

  Any other apologies would have been belaboring the point, and so she just nodded and picked up her fork. One bite was enough to tell her these were probably the best eggs she’d ever had — light and fluffy, and with exactly the right amount of salt. Judging by the dinner she’d eaten last night and the food set before her now, she was going to be extremely well fed during the time she was here. Good thing she’d dropped around fifteen pounds over the last year, between spending a lot of time in the home gym Clay had set up in the shelter, and not being all that interested in the nourishing but bland food with which the shelter had been stocked.

  She helped herself to some more eggs, then set down her fork. Across the table from her, Qadim had been similarly occupied with eating the main part of the meal before it got cold. He seemed to sense that she wanted to say something, though, because he also put down his fork and gazed at her expectantly.

  “Why?” Madison couldn’t seem to get out more than that one word.

  The djinn didn’t ask her to explain herself, however. He reached for his mug but then paused, as if he knew he had only meant to drink the coffee as a way of delaying his reply. “That is…rather a difficult topic for breakfast discussion, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Is it?”

  Again he hesitated. “I want you to know that I had no part in what happened, save perhaps by inaction. I suppose there are some who would say I was complicit because I did nothing, but I would still argue that is not the same as actively seeking the destruction of your kind.”

  Her stomach churned, but she ignored it and instead reached for her toast, thinking that might help to calm things down. She’d asked, after all. So she would listen to what he had to say, no matter how much it might hurt.

  Qadim seemed to be waiting for some sort of response, though, and so she said quietly, “Just tell me what happened. Why it happened.”

  At least he didn’t blink, watched her with a steady gaze, dark eyes sorrowful. This close, she could see the thickness of his lashes, the way their shadow made his eyes seem almost black, as if there was no real difference between iris and pupil.

  “That is a tale with its beginnings back at the very creation of your people. The djinn were the first race created by God, but he cast them aside when he created Man and gave this world over to your race as their own. The djinn were banished elsewhere, to a place we think of as the otherworld, when we refused to acknowledge the superiority of God’s new creation.”

  Was he really talking about God as if He actually existed and had done all these things? Madison couldn’t detect an
y hint of irony in Qadim’s tone, so apparently he meant for her to believe what he was telling her.

  Since she didn’t quite trust herself to speak, she only nodded.

  “We resented mankind but could do nothing to change our situation. As the millennia wore on, we became more dissatisfied with our lot. The otherworld is not like this world — we djinn can survive there, but it is a harsh place. A faction began to grow among the djinn, one that called for the destruction of mankind so we could take back the world that had once been ours.”

  A few sips of coffee helped to steady Madison somewhat. Fingers wrapped around the mug she held, she said, “So…somehow you cooked up the disease that killed everyone?”

  “Some of the djinn did, yes. And then they set it loose upon the world.”

  “And none of you did anything to stop it.”

  A curious expression flitted across Qadim’s features and then was gone. Madison couldn’t say exactly what it was, however. Regret? Annoyance? Anger?

  Maybe a little of all three.

  “There were those who made their disagreement with the decision known. And so another decision was made, so that the protesters would be able to save one each of the Immune, and — ”

  “Wait,” she broke in, heart beginning to beat a little faster with terrible hope, “you mean there are more people like me out there? People who survived the Heat?”

  “There were,” he allowed, then stopped.

  “What do you mean, ‘were’?”

  “They were hunted down, just as you saw people hunted down and killed here in Albuquerque.”