djinn wars 02 - taken (5 page)

It definitely seemed like the worst the next morning after I got out of the shower, dried my hair, and wandered into the kitchen to take a look at what the storm had wrought. It was actually still snowing, but very lightly now, feathery flakes drifting this way and that, but not accumulating all that fast. The visibility didn’t seem to be too bad; even so, the drifts piled against the henhouse and the goats’ shed looked several feet high.

Grimly, I set about getting the coffee going and mentally preparing myself to trudge out into all that snow to take care of the animals. I’d have to give them enough feed to last a few days and hope they wouldn’t gorge themselves on all of it right away. There wasn’t much I could do about that, though. I’d do my best to make sure they were cared for, but the chickens and goats needed to meet me halfway.

It was only after I’d shoveled my way across the yard and fed the animals, then dragged myself back into the house and knocked my boots clean of snow, that Evony finally made an appearance. Just like the day before, her makeup was perfect. Today the sweater she wore was bright cobalt blue, and I blinked a little at the unexpected shock of color.

“Is that coffee?” she asked, heading straight for the coffeemaker and the mug I’d set out. It was my mug, but I didn’t bother to stop her. I knew better than to get between a woman and her caffeine. Besides, there were plenty of mugs to spare.

“Yes, and I have fresh eggs for breakfast, and toast. No bacon, though.”

“I’ll live. Cream?”

“In the fridge.”

She went to fetch it, doctored her coffee, and then took a sip. “That’s good. Better than what we were living on.”

“The guy who built this place left some pretty awesome supplies behind.”

“Apparently.” She sipped again. “So what’s the plan?”

I’d been pondering that very subject while I showered. Yes, it was Christmas Day, but obviously the survivors at Los Alamos didn’t seem to pay too much attention to holidays. For all I knew, they were patrolling the main highway that led north from here. If that was the case, the last thing I wanted was for them to figure out that we’d left our sanctuary here in Santa Fe and were heading for Taos.

“I think we should take the High Road,” I told her.

Her response was immediate. Eyebrows raised, she replied, “In this weather? Are you nuts?”

“Maybe,” I said evenly. “But I doubt we’ll run into anyone if we go that way, so while the road itself might be more dangerous, there’s a much lower risk of interference.”

Evony shook her head, eyes narrowing under their cat-eye liner and heavy mascara. “Have you ever actually
driven
the High Road?”

“No.”

A sigh, accompanied by a roll of her eyes. “It’s narrow. It’s twisty. It goes way up high where the snow will be even worse. And I guarantee there’s no one left to plow the damn thing.”

“I have chains,” I said calmly. Not that I was actually feeling all that calm; just the thought of heading out in this weather was giving me a queasy, fluttery feeling in my stomach, but I knew there was no question of staying put. “And a shovel, and an ice scraper. Anyway, I’m not planning on tearing through there at fifty miles an hour or something. If we go slowly, we should be okay.”

To say Evony looked dubious would have been an understatement. But then she let out another breath and nodded. “Well, it’s not like the main route up 84 would’ve been all that great, either. How long do you think it’s going to take?”

I really had no idea. Digging around in the office, I’d found maps of the area, so I knew the route was not quite sixty miles. On a good day, you probably could have driven from Santa Fe to Taos in about an hour and a half. Now?

“At least half the day, I’m guessing. We’ll pack food and water and other supplies.”

She swallowed some more of her coffee, then said, resignation clear in her tone, “Okay. But let’s have those eggs and toast first. I like to do all my crazy shit on a full stomach.”

“Crazy shit” was definitely one way of describing it. “Sheer insanity” might have been another, but I just couldn’t risk those men from Los Alamos discovering what we were up to. Evony and I packed our things — or rather, I packed mine, while she zipped up her weekender bag and waited for me to get ready. Enough food for two days, just in case we got stranded somewhere, and a pallet of bottled water, and then the traveling dog dishes for Dutchie and a couple of gallon baggies filled with her food.

I went out to the garage and got out the Jeep, then backed it up as close to the rear entrance of the house as I could so we wouldn’t have to haul our stuff too far through the snow. Evony seemed to be keeping any further observations to herself, and silently helped me load the back of the vehicle. Dutchie, excited at the prospect of a road trip, took one last pee in the snow next to the vehicle, then jumped into the back seat without any coaxing and sat there, tail wagging.

Neither Evony nor I were anywhere close to that eager. In silence, we climbed into the Cherokee after I locked the back door to the house and made sure it was secure. Now that they had Jace, I didn’t think the Los Alamos gang would be coming back here anytime soon, but that didn’t mean I intended to leave the house open, an easy target for anyone who might wander by. All right, the chances of that were extremely low, given how off the beaten track it was, but in the few months I’d lived there, I’d come to love that house. I wanted it to still be okay when I came back, whenever that might be.

And I hoped — oh, how I hoped — that I’d be able to bring Jace back here soon, and we’d be able to continue with the lives the djinn-hunters from Los Alamos had interrupted.

Biting my lip, I put the Jeep in neutral and cautiously shifted into 4-Lo. The snow had stopped falling, and so I’d decided to try driving without the snow chains at first. If the going was too hard, I could always stop and chain up at the side of the road. I hoped not, though, mostly because I’d only helped my father put chains on the Jeep once, and I wasn’t exactly familiar with the procedure. Maybe Evony would be of some help, but I couldn’t count on that. She didn’t exactly seem like the outdoorsy, four-wheeling type.

But we moved forward, the tires crunching through the snow as we slowly made our way down the incline to the front gate. The padlock I’d put there was still in place, and I glanced over at Evony. “So you really did climb over.”

“Well, what else was I supposed to do?” she inquired, sounding exasperated. “It’s not like I packed some bolt cutters along with a change of underwear.”

Despite our current situation, I couldn’t help smiling. “I guess not. Luckily, I’ve got the key.”

Leaving the engine idling, I got out of the Jeep and went to the gate, then pulled the key out of my coat pocket and unlocked the padlock. It was a little stiff — not that surprising, considering the sub-freezing temperatures — but eventually I got it open and unwound the chain, then pushed the gate open. Afterward, I knocked as much snow off my boots as I could before getting back in the Cherokee and pulling through. Then I had to go through the process all over again to secure the property. By then, I could barely feel my toes, even with the thick socks I was wearing under my boots, but no way was I going to leave that gate standing open while I was gone. That would’ve looked like an open invitation to come onto the property.

I’d thought that it wouldn’t be all that difficult to get down the track that eventually joined with Upper Canyon Road, but the snow had fallen so thickly that the trail’s outlines were all but erased. True, there was wire fencing that delineated the property to one side, but I couldn’t see it all that well. More than once I could feel the Jeep starting to slip down into the rutted gully on the side of the road, and I had to brake carefully and then steer us back so we were more or less in the center of the lane.

Beside me, Evony was looking pale under her olive skin, the fingers of her right hand clutching the “Jesus handle” in the roof above her. She didn’t say anything, though, as if she knew that speaking would only break my concentration.

And I needed all of it. Eventually, we inched our way down onto Upper Canyon and the going was a little easier, just because along that street there were houses, and the snow drifts hadn’t completely obscured the outlines of the road. Even so, I didn’t dare go over twenty miles an hour, just in case we hit a patch of ice or something. Although it felt as if we were never going to get there, we finally did reach the center of town and then begin heading north. I took side streets, following the map, because I didn’t want to get on Highway 84 at all, not even for the couple of miles it took to get to 503, which would lead us up along the first leg of the High Road.

The clock on the dashboard showed that it had taken us more than an hour just to go that far, a journey that usually only took fifteen minutes, if that. It looked like I hadn’t been too out of line in saying this little trip of ours might consume most of the day.

But so far it seemed that, despite the deep snow, if I just maintained a steady pace of fifteen or twenty miles an hour, the Cherokee would keep chugging away and not give me too much trouble. I had plenty of gas; Jace had helped me siphon a bunch on our last trip to town, and so that was one thing at least I didn’t have to worry about.

Evony lifted one of the bottles of water. “Want some?”

I nodded, but didn’t take my eyes off the road as she untwisted the cap and handed it to me. A long pull at the water told me how thirsty I actually was, and I drank some more before putting the bottle in the cup holder and returning my hand to the steering wheel.

We’d been quiet so far, but I knew Evony and I couldn’t spend the entire trip to Taos in complete silence. Anyway, a few things had been nagging at my mind, and as long as I didn’t allow the conversation to distract me too much, it should help to pass the time.

“Did Natila tell you a lot?” I asked Evony then. “About the djinn, I mean.”

She tilted her head slightly to one side. Along with the knitted cap, she was wearing a pair of round wire-rimmed, smoke-lensed sunglasses, giving her the look of a goth snowbunny. “She told me some things. Like, have you noticed how you heal much faster now if you get hurt?”

I nodded, recalling the way the sprained wrists and bruised knee from my encounter with Chris Bowman in Albuquerque had gone back to normal within a day. “What about it?”

“It’s part of being Chosen, I guess. We heal more like djinn than regular people. And we’re not just Immune — we’ll never get sick again. No flu, no colds, no nothing.”

“Never?” I couldn’t help sounding incredulous. Not that I would turn down the chance to never suffer from a head cold again, but I didn’t see how that was possible.

“Never.” She’d gotten herself some water, too, and drank from the bottle she held before continuing. “Nice perk, huh? But that’s not the best part.”

I waited, since Evony was clearly enjoying dragging this out a little for dramatic effect. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure how much better it could get than never getting sick again, or healing from bumps and bruises in what appeared to be a miraculous fashion.

Clearly not put off by my silence, she said, “I hope you like being — how old are you, anyway?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Cool. I’m twenty-two. Anyway, I hope you like being that age, because that’s what you’ll be for the rest of your life.”

Despite my determination not to take my eyes off the road, I couldn’t help darting a quick glance at her after that remark. “What?”

Her lacquered lips curved up in a smile. “You heard me. You’ll be — well, I guess ‘immortal’ isn’t exactly the right word for it, because it’s not as if we can’t be killed, but we won’t age.”

“At
all?
” I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around that concept.

“Not according to Natila.” Evony drank some more of her water, then said, “It sounded as if the djinn wanted to make sure their Chosen would stick around and always be the same as they were when their djinn first selected them. I mean, what’s the point of picking someone to save if you’re just going to watch them age and die in what seems like the blink of an eye to you?”

I supposed that made some sense. As with so many other things about that strange race of elementals, I really hadn’t had time to think about it. I’d barely had a chance to get my brain around the notion of Jace being a djinn at all before he was taken from me. “So are the djinn immortal?”

Evony’s nose wrinkled as she appeared to consider my question. “More or less. I mean, they certainly don’t age, and Natila didn’t say anything about them dying of natural causes. Not exactly. She sort of hinted that they could be killed, but I don’t think it’s easy. That is, according to what Natila said, if those assholes from Los Alamos think they can just round up a bunch of djinn and put them in front of a firing squad or something, they’re going to find they’ve made a big mistake.”

Just the mere thought of Jace facing down a group of grim-faced survivors holding rifles made me shudder, but if what Natila had told Evony was right, then even multiple gunshot wounds might not be enough to kill him. That knowledge should have reassured me — well, I supposed it did, a little. On the other hand, if there were people at Los Alamos who were smart enough to figure out how to trap a djinn on this plane of existence, then maybe they were also smart enough to find a way to kill one of the elementals. I knew I couldn’t take that risk, that I couldn’t rely on the djinns’ supposed invulnerability.