Forbidden (The Djinn Wars Book 6) Read online

  Forbidden

  A Djinn Wars Novel

  Christine Pope

  Dark Valentine Press

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  FORBIDDEN

  Copyright © 2016 by Christine Pope

  Published by Dark Valentine Press

  Cover design by Lou Harper

  Ebook formatting by Indie Author Services

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without permission in writing from its publisher, Dark Valentine Press.

  Please contact the author through the form on her website at www.christinepope.com if you experience any formatting or readability issues with this book.

  To be notified of new releases by Christine Pope, please sign up here.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Also by Christine Pope

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Jillian Powell put down the needle-nose pliers she held and peered inside the device that sat in front of her on the worktable. Miles had given her this task because he knew she had a steady hand and a keen eye, but right then it felt as if all her hours of staring into the jumbled mess of wiring inside the little box hadn’t accomplished much more than to give her a headache.

  Maybe it was time to take a break. Jillian glanced at the clock that hung on the wall on the other side of the lab. Nearly five. In the old world, before the Dying, it would have been almost quitting time, but Miles Odekirk didn’t have much of a clue when it came to normal work hours. He and his partner Lindsay seemed to spend most of their waking lives in the lab here at the Los Alamos facilities, although one would think Miles might want Lindsay to back off a little, since she was now nearly seven months pregnant and couldn’t spend hours and hours on her feet the way she used to.

  But Jillian didn’t really want to think about that. Seeing Lindsay’s obvious happiness — and Miles’s much more restrained anticipation — only served to remind Jillian of everything she’d lost when the Heat swept across the world and took everyone she’d known and loved with it. Some might say that the passage of time should have begun to heal that pain, now that the second anniversary of the Dying was only a little more than a month away, but instead that inner ache only seemed to grow sharper and sharper as the people around her moved on with their lives and began new ones…something Jillian didn’t seem quite able to do.

  Damn it.

  She got up from the stool where she’d been sitting, then went out of the lab and down the hall to what used to be the break room for this floor of the building. In there was a refrigerator with a pitcher of chilled water, and Jillian poured herself some, glad of the slight relief it gave her from the August heat. Los Alamos didn’t get nearly as warm as her native Albuquerque, but it could still be uncomfortable without central air, another amenity that had been lost forever when the old world had died.

  Well, actually, she’d heard that they still had air conditioning down in Santa Fe, since the djinn who lived there could keep those systems going without too much effort. Here in Los Alamos, the mere humans who populated the town had to get by with a combination of wind and solar, which meant being frugal with electricity. Tabletop fans on the hottest days, and ceiling fans in public spaces like restaurants and stores, but that was it.

  At least Miles and Lindsay had stepped out for a bit, since they had a meeting scheduled late this afternoon with Shawn Gutierrez, the leader of the Los Alamos community. Otherwise, Jillian was sure Miles would be giving her the evil eye right about now for taking a break of longer than a few minutes. Not for the first time, she wondered what would happen if she walked out of the lab, went to Shawn, and told him that he needed to find another work assignment for her. Realistically, she knew she’d never actually do such a thing. She was needed here in the lab, could provide a set of skills that not many others shared. Who could have guessed that her one-time — and somewhat silly and old-fashioned — needlepoint hobby would have lent itself to working with wires and circuits?

  Not that she actually knew what she was doing. Miles would give her a meticulously drawn diagram to follow, and she wouldn’t deviate from it. In the beginning, she’d helped to increase the community’s stockpile of his original devices, the ones that could repel all djinn from a certain area. Having more of the little boxes meant that the safe zone in Los Alamos could gradually be expanded. Now they had a large chunk of Española protected as well, which meant that workers from Los Alamos could come down from their mountain town into the lush valley where the Rio Grande flowed, grow more food there, and continue to scavenge any items that might help to keep their community prospering.

  The Chosen, those lucky few whom the djinn had selected from the survivors of the Heat to be their companions and lovers, could come and go basically as they pleased, but the djinn themselves had to avoid any place where the Los Alamos group operated, or face the effects of Miles’s devices.

  Miles’s goal was to modify the devices so they could keep the evil djinn — the ones who had plotted humanity’s destruction — away from the human survivors, but allow the benevolent djinn who were inside the devices’ area of effect to still have access to their powers. That way, it would be much easier to mingle with the good djinn who lived in Santa Fe.

  He’d been working doggedly for over a year now, and so far he didn’t have a lot to show for his efforts. Jillian could practically feel the frustration radiating from him most days, although she’d noticed that lately he’d done his best not to be too irritable around Lindsay…now that she could match him in the irritation department, thanks to those pregnancy hormones. But he’d come up with a new angle during the last few days, one he thought looked promising — which was why he needed Jillian, with her deft fingers and sharp vision, to do the actual assembly on the modified device.

  Which also meant she should get off her ass and get back to work. It wasn’t as if anyone would be waiting for her back at the little two-bedroom house she’d been given for her own.

  And whose fault is that? she asked herself as she put her water glass down next to the sink in the break room and headed back to the lab. If you’d really wanted to be with someone here, you could have.

  True enough. People were pairing off all over town. Lindsay’s baby wouldn’t be the first child born here, nor the last. Jillian had been approached quite a few times, in ways ranging from Brent Sanderson’s nervous request asking if she’d like to go to Pajarito’s for a drink, to Mitch Kosky’s half-drunken assumption that naturally she should be thrilled to be on the receiving end of his not-so-welcome attentions.

  She’d gently turned down Brent, who was a sensitive soul and someone she did like very much, if not in a romantic way, and had informed Mitch that she didn’t think she’d ever get over her dead husband. He hadn’t seem
ed too convinced by the excuse, but he had left her alone after that.

  Those words weren’t even a lie. Not really. Jack was in her thoughts nearly every day, even when she tried to tell herself it was time, that no one could blame her for trying to reclaim that part of her life when almost two years had passed since his death.

  Tears stung her eyes, and she blinked them away, forcing them back where they’d come from. She couldn’t work on Miles’s damn device with blurry vision. Anyway, it was stupid to be so upset now, after so much time had gone by. Everyone around her had lost someone. Everyone. She wasn’t special.

  Luckily, Miles and Lindsay still hadn’t reappeared. The lab was unoccupied. Jillian sat down on her stool and picked up the pliers in her right hand, then grasped the box with her left. The diagram Miles had provided lay off to one side, and she stared down at it for a long moment so she could commit the complex pattern to memory before she made another attempt. Two days ago, she’d completely fried the circuits in one device because she’d made a bad connection. Yes, the labs here had more components in their storehouses than one might have guessed, but that didn’t mean she could be careless.

  Jillian pulled in a breath and grasped the fine-gauge copper wire with the pliers, threading it down to the exact spot on the circuit board that Miles’s diagram had indicated. At the last second, though, her hand trembled slightly, and the wire touched the circuit just a fraction of an inch to the left of where it was supposed to go. With a curse, Jillian yanked the wire back…and then the box itself began to slip from her left hand. Desperately she scrabbled at it, knowing if it hit the hard linoleum floor, the delicate touch screens that covered its surface would shatter. Her fingers closed on the little box, and she was about to breathe a sigh of relief — until she realized that in her frenzied attempt to grab the device, one finger had pushed down on the power button located on the bottom.

  A spark jumped from the exposed wiring to the pliers she held. And then a wave of coruscating, blinding light surrounded her, stealing the breath from her throat so she couldn’t scream, couldn’t do anything except maintain a death grip on the device while the world disappeared in a flash.

  She was falling, plummeting into a dark limbo that seemed to press down on her lungs and made her stomach feel as if it had lodged somewhere in her esophagus. At first she thought she must have been knocked off her stool by the blast, but it shouldn’t have taken this long to hit the floor, should it? And then when she did finally land, dropping the device and pliers she held on impact, what she felt under her fingers was rough, gritty sand, not cool linoleum.

  Blinking, she raised her head…and then wished she hadn’t. The sky wasn’t a sky at all, but an ever-shifting maelstrom of colors that flashed in and out of existence, colors she couldn’t even begin to name, angry, searing, leaving nightmarish after-images flaring on her retinas. All around were jagged rock formations, some of which were marred by what seemed to be caves. To her confused eyes, those openings looked like dark, hungry mouths.

  Her breath caught. Or rather, she realized she couldn’t breathe, that when she tried to pull air in through her nose, it seemed to lodge somewhere in her throat and never make it any farther than that. Her lungs ached, were on fire.

  She couldn’t even scream. No air. The alien landscape spun around her, a red haze beginning to blur her vision. Somehow she found the strength to inch herself toward the device, instincts screaming at her that it was the reason she was here, her only means of escape. But it had fallen so far away…a yard at least. Under these conditions, it might as well be a mile.

  No strength. The red haze began to shift to darkness, and she knew her body was giving in, every cell in her being shutting down from lack of oxygen. She would die here…and she didn’t even know where “here” was.

  Maybe she’d be with Jack soon.

  Then, improbably, there came the sound of swift footsteps on the hard-packed sand. Someone knelt next to her, was grasping her by the shoulders and lifting her from the ground. She blinked in shock, saw impossibly blue eyes boring into hers.

  No, that couldn’t be right. Jack had brown eyes.

  The stranger put his hand on the back of her neck and placed his mouth on hers. For a single startled second, she wondered incongruously why he was trying to kiss her. But then a welcome gust of air — real air — filled her throat, and she gulped it down, sending the stranger’s breath into her oxygen-starved lungs.

  And again. And again.

  Those eyes remained fixed on hers. After he had shared half a dozen breaths with her, he said, in a deep, rough voice, “Who are you? How did you get here?”

  Jillian shook her head. Although he’d brought her back from the brink, she knew if she opened her mouth, she’d release some of the precious, life-giving air he’d provided. Instead, she pointed at the box.

  The stranger looked over at it, his heavy brows pulling together. “One of those things? I thought they were only for repelling djinn.”

  So he knew what the device was. And, although her brain was still befuddled from a lack of oxygen, she realized, looking at the man before her, that he probably wasn’t an actual man at all. He was too perfect, from those startling blue eyes to the straight, elegant nose and full, sensual mouth. By all rights, he should be dead in this place, but he looked healthy and strong, muscles sculpted and full beneath the tatters of the clothing he wore.

  He had to be a djinn.

  Jillian opened her mouth to respond to his words, but immediately choked again on the toxic air. And at once he pressed his lips to hers, so she might take his breath. It flooded through her as she clung to him, knowing that without him she would die.

  “Don’t speak,” he said. “I’m going to get the device.” After gently letting her go, he rose to retrieve the box, along with the pair of pliers that lay next to it. Then he came back and put both items in her hands. “Make it work.”

  Easy for him to say. She didn’t even know what the hell she’d done to have the device propel her from the lab to — well, to wherever the hell this place actually was. Maybe the djinn plane, the place some of them referred to as the otherworld? Possibly, although she knew the djinn actually lived there, even if they did prefer Earth, while this hellscape didn’t seem like a place where anyone could live and survive.

  But somehow the man — the djinn — before her had managed to do that very thing.

  She lifted her shoulders and shook her head, trying to make him see that he asked the impossible of her. Apparently he understood well enough, because his full mouth compressed, and his brows pulled together.

  “If you don’t make it work, you’re going to die here,” he said. “I can’t keep you alive indefinitely. Understand?”

  Oh, she understood all too well. In fact, the burning sensation had returned to her throat and lungs, telling her that the last breath he’d given her was just about spent. Tears leaked from her eyes, although that could have just been the toxic atmosphere beginning to work on them as well.

  He muttered something under his breath, and once again gave her his version of mouth-to-mouth. She swallowed the air gratefully, then turned the box over so she could inspect the button on the bottom. As far as she could tell, it was still switched on. So it must have been the combination of it being powered and the wire touching exactly the wrong place on the circuit board that had caused it to malfunction so spectacularly, to send her through space into this other dimension.

  She grasped the wire with the pliers and began to move it toward the circuit, then paused and glanced up at the stranger. The chances of this working were roughly a million to one, but if by some act of God she was able to reverse the effects, she didn’t know how she was supposed to bring him back with her. Which was clearly what he expected.

  For a second, he only stared down at her, face hard but blank. Then he nodded, as if he suddenly understood the reason for her hesitation. He moved closer, wrapped his arms around her so his chest was to her back. “Go ah
ead,” he said.

  Her hand shook, and she willed it to be still. Another mistake could land them God only knew where. But it was so hard to concentrate with the air scorching her eyes, the stranger’s breath rapidly running out in her lungs.

  Not to mention his body pressed against hers. No, there was absolutely nothing sexual about the contact, and yet…it had been so very long since a man had held her like this. She’d forgotten how good it could feel.

  Crazy.

  She couldn’t pull in a breath, so she held hers as she guided the wire to what she sincerely hoped was the same place that had caused the reaction the first time around. The stranger’s arms tightened against her, as if he braced himself for what was to come next.

  This time, she knew what to expect — or at least she thought she did. Still, she couldn’t help gasping as light exploded all around them. That gasp sent the djinn world’s poisonous air into her lungs, and she began to cough and cough, eyes streaming as she almost lost her grip on the device.

  But then the stranger’s hands were closing on it, holding it against her so there was no chance of it being lost. He clung to her as they tumbled through darkness for what felt like an eternity. Something was wrong. It hadn’t taken this long the first time. An initial blast, and then she had fallen on the surface of that alien world.

  At last, though, she felt warm, damp air against her cheeks. Light flowed around them, but not the harsh, glaring light of the malfunction, but sunlight. Blue skies partially obscured by big gray-white clouds.

  And then she and the stranger fell into the middle of an ordinary two-lane road. He let out a grunt as she landed on top of him, but he didn’t relax his grip on her, or on the device. The impact was enough to start her coughing again, however, and she struggled to pull away from him so she could bend over and cough up the last of the toxic air she’d inhaled before they left.