Awoken Page 5

  He realized that Jordan was now staring at him, her gaze bright and direct. Perhaps the coffee was beginning to take effect. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” she replied. “That is, I suppose I’m just trying to get past how human you seem.”

  Human? Was she trying to insult him on purpose? He drew himself up and said, “I am far from human.”

  “Oh, I know. I mean, you’re kind of too perfect to be a human. It’s just that I didn’t have the opportunity before now to really look at one of you up close. I was trying too hard not to die the last few times I’ve had a run-in with a djinn.”

  The “perfect” comment mollified him somewhat — but not enough. “I doubt a human could do this,” he said, pushing up the loose sleeve of his robe to reveal his left bicep, where she had shot him. After having an entire night to heal, the flesh had knitted itself together. There was no remaining trace of her attack on him.

  Jordan’s eyes widened slightly. “That’s…impressive.”

  “And the reason why such attacks will never succeed.” He drank some of his coffee, then asked, “Where were you before Pagosa Springs?”

  “Colorado Springs. It’s my hometown.” Her full mouth went tight again, as though she was trying to repress an unpleasant memory. “I was living there after college. Then the Dying happened.” Her gaze shifted away from him as she added, “You djinn happened.”

  He wanted to tell her that it was humanity’s fault. Perhaps the djinn would never have intervened if it weren’t that the world they’d desired for so long had been teetering on the brink, so very close to the point of no return. Something about the pain in her lovely features stopped him, however. Ignoring her last comment, he said, “But you were driven from Colorado Springs.”

  “Yes. About two months after the Dying. It was around the beginning of December. A real great time of year to be slogging across Colorado.”

  The brittle tone was back. Well, if it helped her to manage her emotions, then he would ignore it. Part of him marveled that the two of them were sitting here at all, having a fairly reasonable discussion. Then again, he hadn’t given her many options. It wasn’t as though she could simply get up from the couch and walk out of the house.

  At any rate, what she’d just said was true enough. Winter could come early here in the high country. He wondered who he had angered to be given this spot, rather than a homestead somewhere in the tropics, or even along one of this world’s many beaches. Yes, the area around Chama was beautiful — he could have been inflicted with an ugly cityscape such as Albuquerque, the way Qadim al-Syan had — but the environment here was also harsh, demanding much of its residents.

  “Would you like some breakfast?” he asked her. He couldn’t help wondering whether her slenderness had something to do with short rations. She seemed healthy enough, but there was a tautness to her throat and jaw line that spoke of too many days of privation, even after a good meal and a night’s sleep in a real bed. Perhaps a few more decent meals would make her look less strained.

  “I — ” For a second, it seemed to him that she might demur, might act as though she didn’t require any more food from him, but then she seemed to shrug and said, “Breakfast sounds good.”

  Hasan wasn’t sure why he should be so pleased that she had answered him with the truth, but, paradoxically, he was. “Then let us sit down, and we can continue with our conversation.”

  “Don’t you need to get anything from the kitchen?” she inquired, a look of confusion passing over her face.

  “Oh, no,” he assured her. “Djinn have no need of kitchens.”

  It wasn’t exactly like I Dream of Jeannie, but it was close. All Hasan had to do was snap his fingers, and there on the oak table in the dining area appeared, not the pancakes of her first dream, but a plate of fruit, and another stacked high with bacon, and bread so fresh Jordan thought she could see steam rising from the basket where it rested. She’d sworn off bacon back in the day, but the aroma was so tantalizing that she knew she wouldn’t be able to resist it now. Her dinner of fish and rice and vegetables now seemed very long ago.

  So all she did was utter a polite thank-you as Hasan deposited some food on her plate, then waited while he did the same for himself. The whole time, she had to do her best not to stare at him. Hard enough when she was sitting here next to a djinn — well, at his left hand anyway, since he sat at the head of the table and so they weren’t right next to each other — and trying to pretend as though every instinct in her brain and body weren’t telling her to bolt.

  Did he harbor any ill will about the way she’d shot him? It didn’t appear so. Then again, she’d be the first to admit that she didn’t know much about djinn and their capacity for playacting. On the other hand, the wound had basically healed so you couldn’t even see where the entry point had been. She’d done more damage to his robes, actually; she noticed that the ones he wore this morning were a dark sapphire, with a wide border of silver. He sat there and ate, seeming to ignore the way the sleeve on his one arm remained pushed up. Possibly that was intentional. Those hanging sleeves could definitely get in the way while you were eating. Jordan did her best to look away as well, but it was difficult. She kept wanting to stare at the place where she’d shot him, to see if she could find any physical evidence of the injury she’d caused.

  Or maybe she was just trying to avoid staring at the arm itself, with its smooth brown skin and the impressive amount of muscle that flexed and unflexed as he lifted his mug of coffee, or picked up his knife to spread some butter on a slice of bread. All right, she’d seen guys with those sorts of muscles when she was still at college, but she had to admit there hadn’t been any particularly impressive specimens among the survivors at Pagosa Springs.

  That was an uncharitable thought. They’d all been doing what they had to in order to survive. Several of the town’s resorts had exercise rooms, but no one seemed too interested in using them. It seemed an indulgence when they had to work so hard just to find enough to eat, to wander all over town to find the houses with solar water heaters, or with propane tanks that hadn’t yet been depleted so they could cook a hot meal. At first they’d tried to stick together at one of the hotels, since some had argued it was safer that way, but it hadn’t taken long before everyone had begun to drift off to their own places. Not too far — there were sufficient available houses in one neighborhood that they all ended up living fairly close to one another — just enough to retain some semblance of privacy. Jordan wondered if her choice of a house at the edge of the occupied zone was what had saved her. It was easier to run when you weren’t in the thick of things.

  She realized Hasan was watching her, and she quickly reached for her own coffee to cover up her distraction. Both the coffee and the food were crazy good, better than she would have had in a restaurant, just like what she’d been given the night before. How the djinn had accomplished all this food prep with only a snap of his fingers, Jordan wasn’t sure. Magic, she supposed.

  Did she dare challenge him for staring at her? Maybe he hadn’t spent much time around humans. Probably not, except to hunt them down and kill them.

  At least he hadn’t been one of the djinn who’d committed the massacre at Pagosa Springs. She was sure of that. Those five had been big and brawny, built like bouncers. Hasan was well muscled, but he didn’t look like someone who knocked down brick walls in his spare time. Jordan knew he was strong, though; the hot water of the shower had kneaded away some of the soreness, and the excellent mattress had helped as well, and yet her muscles still ached from the way he’d tackled her the day before. This morning while getting dressed, she’d found a whole new complement of bruises to add to the ones she’d accumulated on her journey down here.

  “How is your food?” he asked.

  So polite, as though he’d asked her to have breakfast here in his isolated hunting lodge, rather than making her a prisoner in everything but name. However, since she wanted to go on breathing, she knew now was not t
he time to make snarky comments. “It’s excellent,” she replied. “Better than anything I’ve had in a long time.”

  “You had no cooks among you in Pagosa Springs?”

  “Not really. We had to scrounge everything we couldn’t hunt, or get from the river.” The hunting hadn’t been so great, either. Jordan would have thought if you gathered together a dozen or so people who’d spent most of their lives in Colorado, you’d have at least one or two who knew how to kill and dress a deer. Not so much. The first attempts had been bloody messes, to put it mildly. Over time, they’d gotten better, but theirs wasn’t exactly what you could call a well-oiled survivalists’ encampment.

  And they couldn’t take the risk of cultivating food, fearing that even small cleared areas might attract the djinns’ attention. Jordan’s botany classes had helped in that at least she knew which plants that grew in the area were edible and which were not, but it wasn’t the same thing as growing fields of squash and beans and corn. By the end of each summer, even she had been sick of dandelion greens.

  Hasan nodded. In the bright sunlight, she could clearly see the deep blue glint of his eyes, almost the same sapphire color as the robes he wore. Such a contrast to his warm-toned skin, and the black hair that fell back from his brow and hung to his shoulders. If she hadn’t known better, she would have said he must be part Native American, with those high cheekbones and that long, sculpted nose. But he wasn’t.

  He wasn’t human at all.

  She shivered, and set down her coffee mug so she could pick up another slice of bacon. It was warm enough inside the house, but the food would get cold if she didn’t eat it in a timely manner. And as weird as it was to be sitting here with a djinn, Jordan knew she had to eat the good food, keep up her strength. Hasan had warned her about trying to escape, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t make the attempt if the opportunity presented itself.

  “Do you know why it happened?” he asked then, and she blinked at him. Handsome features almost expressionless, he added, “That is, why you would be set upon now, when your group had lived in that one location for so many months.”

  It was a question that had plagued her ever since she grabbed her bug-out bag and headed south, knowing she couldn’t help the people who’d become her friends over the past eighteen months, that the only thing she could do was get away as quickly as possible, and pray the djinn were too preoccupied to notice her fleeing into the cover of the trees. Why Hasan was asking her about it, she didn’t know. Stockpiling ideas in case he wanted to go on his own human-killing spree? She doubted he’d find many victims to help him fulfill such a plan; she hadn’t seen a single person — except the djinn himself — since she’d left Pagosa Springs.

  “I’m not sure,” she said slowly. Should she lie, or attempt to be truthful? It was so hard to know what to do when you were dealing with a being of unknown powers and abilities. Could a djinn detect a lie? Probably better to tell the truth, just in case. She’d only seen the smallest hints of his anger and didn’t want to know what he would be like if she truly upset him. “A few days earlier, some of the guys in our group had ranged farther west than they usually did when on their hunting trips. I suppose they might have gotten out of our ‘safe zone’ and stumbled into a spot where a djinn might see them. I just don’t know. Everything was fine…and then it wasn’t.”

  She hadn’t been looking for sympathy in Hasan’s face, which was a good thing, because she sure as hell didn’t detect any. His head tilted slightly to one side, as if he was considering a simple logic puzzle and nothing more. “Perhaps,” he said. “It depends on how far west they traveled. But they might have stumbled into Danya’s territory.”

  “Danya?”

  “A djinn woman. She was given the lands in the southwestern part of Colorado. I can imagine that she might not have been pleased to have humans entering her demesne.”

  Did Jordan dare ask exactly who had “given” this Danya her new stomping grounds? Clearly, the djinn had settled themselves around the area — and around the entire globe, for all Jordan knew — but who was calling the shots?

  Probably better not to risk it. At the moment, Hasan’s expression was mild enough, but she had a feeling he wouldn’t be very happy if she started asking too many questions. Maybe later.

  No, there wouldn’t be a “later.” She had to get out of here, head toward Los Alamos. And if that promised refuge turned out to be a mirage, no more a haven than Pagosa Springs had been, well…she’d deal with that when the time came. Anything had to be better than being trapped in a house with a djinn out in the middle of nowhere. “So Danya had her brute squad come after us?”

  Hasan shrugged, then reached for the carafe so he could pour himself more coffee. “We do not have servants here, as you can see. No need, when we can do everything we require for ourselves. So it is not as much that Danya would have a household guard to protect her and her lands, but that she might have called in a favor from some friends.”

  “I guess she didn’t want to get her hands dirty, huh?”

  “No, Danya is not the sort to exert much effort, not when she can have others do it for her.”

  Something about that reply made Jordan sit up a little straighter in her chair. “You know her?”

  “We are acquainted, yes. The djinn community is not so large that most of us don’t have at least a passing acquaintance with one another.”

  His reply was innocuous enough, but something about the way he looked away from her, was almost too casual in how he lifted his mug of coffee, made Jordan think that Hasan and this Danya had a closer relationship than mere acquaintances. Not that she would have cared one way or another — which djinn was sleeping with which djinn didn’t matter to her at all — except if Hasan and Danya were close, maybe he’d think Jordan was a bit of unfinished business that his lover would like taken care of.

  Her heart gave a nervous thump, and she also reached for her coffee, taking a larger swallow than she’d intended. The hot liquid caught at the back of her throat and made her cough.

  Hasan sent her a curious glance. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she replied. “Just swallowed wrong.”

  “Ah.” He drank again, then put down his mug. Something seemed to occur to him, and he shifted in his seat so he could look at her more directly. “I will not tell her, if that is what worries you.”

  “Tell who what?” Jordan asked innocently.

  “I will not tell Danya that you are here. We have not spoken in some time.”

  “Oh. I — I really hadn’t thought about that.”

  His blue eyes glinted at her. “Perhaps. I just wanted you to know that I will not speak to Danya, whether or not she was the one who instigated the attack on your camp.”

  “Well, um…thank you.”

  They lapsed into an awkward silence after that as Jordan looked down at her plate and did her best to finish off the fruit and bread that remained. Yes, she was very glad she’d somehow survived this so far, but she couldn’t quite figure out what Hasan’s game might be. Was he simply curious about her? Or did he have some nefarious plan up his sleeve?

  As soon as she had finished, he said, “You are done?”

  She nodded.

  “Good. Then you will go back to you room. I have business to manage.”

  What that business might be, Jordan had no idea. As much as she dreaded the thought of being locked up in that room again, the last thing she wanted was to antagonize him. And besides — if this “business” required him to leave the house, then maybe she would have a chance to escape. It was a long drop from her room to the ground, but she’d risk it.

  She pushed her plate away and stood, and Hasan rose from his chair as well. Clearly, he intended to go with her upstairs, although she knew there was no way she’d be able to give him the slip while he was anywhere nearby. The whole time she was walking up the stairs, she was uncomfortably aware of his presence behind her — the soft, heavy tread of his foots
teps, the rustle of the silken robes he wore, even what seemed to be a faint drift of cologne or incense or something sweet-smelling that hung on the air like the ghost of a scent. Against her will, she recalled her dream from the night before, of his arms around her, the warmth of his body next to hers.

  No. She needed to tell her brain to leave that memory viciously alone. It didn’t mean a thing. The man following her up the stairs wasn’t a man at all, but an elemental, fey and dangerous. She could never let herself forget that.

  As soon as he opened the door, she practically fled inside. Hasan didn’t speak, and she was grateful for that. She had no idea what on earth she could say to him.

  Even though it was still unfamiliar to her, the room she’d been given now felt like a sanctuary. She closed the door and briefly contemplated tucking the ladder-back chair that stood off to one side of the room under the doorknob, then realized that flimsy piece of furniture certainly couldn’t hold back a djinn.

  Instead, she went to the window and pushed the curtains open, letting in a flood of sunlight. There. That was better. It was a lot harder to be afraid with a cheerful sun beaming in, sending its warm glow over the oak floor and the rustic pine furniture and the diamond-pattern quilt on the bed. When she went to the window seat and looked outside, all seemed calm enough, with only a light breeze whispering in the tops of the aspens and the cottonwoods, and rustling in the dry grass.