djinn wars 01 - chosen (25 page)

One thing we didn’t have to worry about was the goats escaping the compound. They might come through and eat the ornamental plants in the garden area directly off the back of the house, but there was no way even the most ambitious goat could jump a seven-foot-high solid adobe wall.

Jace did have to teach me to milk the damn things, which at first scared me to no end, since I was sure I was going to end up with a hoof in my face the second I put one of my unpracticed hands on the animal’s teat.

“You can just do it, you know,” I told him, hovering nervously in the background as he sat down to give me a demonstration.

“Oh, no,” he replied. “Equal division of labor on this farm.”

I made a face but didn’t argue. It was true; I might have done most of the cooking, but he did the hunting, and even cleaned out the chicken coop when my one foray into doing so proved I didn’t have the world’s strongest stomach. In return, I happily did his laundry. At least that way I was able to learn that he favored dark-toned boxer-briefs over tighty-whiteys.

“It’s not that hard,” he went on, his voice almost too coaxing. “Just watch.”

He placed his thumb and forefinger near the top of the doe’s teat, squeezing it, and then exerted pressure with his remaining fingers on the lower part of the teat. A thin stream of white liquid emerged and went into the glass jar he’d set beneath it. “See?”

“Oh, yeah. Easy peasy.”

“Actually, it isn’t. You have to exert a good deal of force. But that’s okay. She wants to be milked.” He did it again, and I watched his long fingers squeezing against her flesh. For a second, I had a brief flash of those fingers cupping my breast, squeezing, and I had to force the thought out of my mind. No way was I going to let myself get turned on by watching Jace milk a goat. He glanced up at me. “You want to give it a try?”

I really didn’t. To stall for time, I responded with a question of my own. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

He appeared to consider, then said, “I don’t know how to play the violin. Now come over here and start learning how to milk this goat.”

Heaving a sigh didn’t really seem appropriate, given the situation, so I waited while he got out of the way and then sat down on the old packing crate we were using as a milking stool. I did take a breath, though, before placing my fingers more or less in the same position Jace had put his.

“Good,” he said, watching my hands, not my face. “Now squeeze with those two fingers while using the rest to push the milk out of the teat.”

Oh, boy. I squeezed, tentatively at first, and the goat, who we’d named Aster because of the little star-shaped mark on her haunch, shot me a look of pure irritation over her shoulder. But at least she hadn’t kicked me.

“Harder than that,” Jace instructed me, but his voice sounded more coaxing than annoyed.

I definitely didn’t want him annoyed with me. This time I squeezed harder, exerting so much pressure that I was certain Aster was going to step on my foot in protest. Instead, milk squirted into the bottle, and she seemed to relax slightly, letting me do what I needed to do.

After letting out a little exhalation of relief, I went back to milking her. More and more milk kept squirting out, but within five minutes, the fingers of my right hand were aching like you wouldn’t believe. I tried switching to the other hand, but couldn’t get the angle right. After another minute, I sat back, shaking my head. “I can’t do any more.”

“It’s okay,” Jace said. His hand dropped to my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “It’s going to take some time to develop those muscles. I can finish up.”

That was probably my signal to relinquish the packing crate to him so he could sit down, but I found I didn’t want to move. Not with his warm hand on my shoulder, the pressure of it somehow delicious, even through the flannel shirt and heavy canvas anorak I wore.

He seemed to realize that as well, because he moved his arm, breaking the contact. At the same time, attempting to cover up the awkwardness of the moment, I got to my feet.

“Thanks, Jace. I’ll just get back to the house, then.”

Grinning, he asked, “How’s the butter project coming?”

“Good. I’m just about to break out the mixer and have at it.”

Making butter had turned out to be a bigger task than I’d expected, but after some trial and error, I’d gotten enough buttermilk ready to go so I could move on to the next step. At least we had power in the house, and the kitchen had come equipped with a fancy stand mixer. Much better than having to stand around with a butter churn the way they did it in the bad old days.

We’d made the decision to use a good deal of the milk for making butter and cheese, since neither Jace nor I was what you would call a big milk drinker. Both of those projects weren’t exactly what you’d call user-friendly, but it was sort of amazing how much extra time you had on your hands when you weren’t spending half the day chatting with your friends on Facebook or whatever.

I still hadn’t decided whether that was a good thing or not.

A week after that, I stood at the window in the living room, looking out over the drive, past the wall to the landscape beyond. Heavy clouds blocked the sky, and I wondered how much we would get out of the solar panels today. We had a backup generator, but we hadn’t needed it yet. I was glad of that — the procedure to switch over from the solar collector to the electric generator didn’t sound all that simple. But the oven ran on propane, so I’d still be able to use that, even if we decided to dial back on our power consumption for the day. All the heat came from the various fireplaces and the wood-fired stove in the sitting room, so the interior temperature of the house wouldn’t be affected, one way or another.

Anyway, it wasn’t the possible loss of power that had me staring out at the brooding vista. What with one thing or another, I hadn’t been paying that much attention to what day it was, although I’d dutifully marked off each one on the calendar in the office, just so I wouldn’t completely lose track of time. But today, when I’d picked up the Sharpie to draw that thick black line, I’d paused and frowned at the date I was crossing out.

October 31
^st
.

“Something wrong?” Jace asked, coming into the living room. He looked a bit surprised, and I supposed I couldn’t blame him. We didn’t spend much time in there, beautiful as the room was. Usually we were either in the kitchen or the family room, or, more rarely, the office.

“No,” I said, then paused. “It’s Halloween.”

“And?” His expression told me he wasn’t particularly impressed by that piece of information. “Did you want to go trick-or-treating or something?”

“Ha,” I replied. My trick-or-treating days were long behind me, although Elena and Tori and I had still gone out on Halloween, mostly as an excuse to get dressed up and go to bars. I’m not going to lie — the year before, we all did variations on the “sexy” something, me as a witch, since it suited my long near-black hair, Tori as an angel, and Elena…well, I still wasn’t entirely clear what her costume was supposed to be, except that it was black and red and sparkly, and showed way more leg than I would ever have dared. Needless to say, we didn’t have to buy any of our own drinks that night.

“It’s not the trick-or-treating,” I said slowly. “It’s more…I don’t know. Like the date is telling me it’s been more than a month since…well, since.”

The light of humor in his dark eyes abruptly disappeared. “You’re right. I guess I hadn’t really thought about it, what with everything we’ve been doing.” He closed the distance between us, coming to stand next to me in front of the window. So close, and yet…and yet, he might have been a million miles away. I knew I didn’t have the courage to reach out and take his hand in mine, to feel the reassurance of his touch. Then he shifted so he was halfway facing toward me, his gaze fixed on my profile. “I have an idea.”

“You do?” I didn’t dare move, didn’t want him to see any of the yearning currently pulsing within me. I wished it could be different, but I just wasn’t brave enough.

“Tomorrow’s the Day of the Dead.
Dios de los Muertos
.”

“And?”

He smiled, but it was a grave, quiet smile. “I think there are a lot of dead who need to be honored.”

Chapter Thirteen

We’d been meaning to go back into town anyway, but had been putting it off for one reason or another. Well, today we had a mission.

I drove, of course, since I still felt hinky about letting Jace get behind the wheel of my father’s Cherokee. This time we went to a place we’d avoided, the Albertson’s grocery store near the center of town. So far, we’d either had everything we needed on hand, or we hunted or foraged for it. Although there were items we could have used from the store, neither of us thought it a very good idea to go in there, not with all that food spoiling inside.

Neither did we know for sure what it would be like now, after having the power cut off for more than a month, but it was the best place we could think of to get some of those saints’ candles for our Day of the Dead observance. Maybe Santa Fe had a Hispanic grocery store somewhere, but I remembered the Albertson’s because that’s where the girls and I stocked up on booze when we came to stay at Elena’s parents’ timeshare.

I pulled into the parking lot of the Albertson’s, then reached down and pulled the bandanna I had wrapped around my neck up and over my mouth. Jace did the same. We looked like we were there to hold up the place, but it seemed the best solution, since we didn’t have access to any surgical masks.

“Ready?” he asked.

Probably not, but it was too late to back out now. Besides the candles, there were a number of nonperishable goods we wanted to grab — paper towels, toilet paper, rice, flour, sugar, spices. Of course Jace didn’t know the store at all, but I had a hazy idea of where some things were located, based on my previous visits here. I’d just have to hope it would be enough to get us in and out as quickly as possible.

“Ready,” I said, my voice muffled by the bandanna tied over my mouth.

We got out of the Cherokee and headed toward the entrance to the store. Shopping carts had been abandoned in haphazard order in front of the building, and we each grabbed one. We also both held big crank-operated flashlights, part of the emergency supplies at the compound, since my experience inside the Walgreens in Albuquerque had taught me that those little pen-sized ones really didn’t cut it when you were trying to carry out a salvage operation.

The glass in the door had been broken out and lay scattered all over the place, so it was a good thing that Jace and I both wore heavy hiking boots. Shards of glass crunched underfoot as we pushed our way inside, flashlights bobbing this way and that.

It was fairly cold that day; the outside temperature reading in the Cherokee had put it at around forty-six degrees. Maybe that was a good thing, as it kept the smell from being too overwhelming, even with my nose covered. Oh, it was definitely there, something sickly sweet and yet acrid at the same time, but not so overpowering that I couldn’t ignore the odor. It did seem to catch at the back of my throat, and I found myself breathing shallowly, pushing the cart grimly ahead while Jace cut off to the right to canvass that side of the store.

Some people might have said that was foolish, to separate like that, but since neither of us had seen another living soul in weeks, we decided it was a risk we were willing to take. This way we could be in and out more quickly.

As I moved along, panning my flashlight over the shelves, I could again see evidence of looting, of items that had been taken. Breakfast cereals seemed to be popular, for some reason. The vitamin aisle had also been almost cleaned out, although I found some bottles of multis that had been left behind. The same with the paper goods — a lot had been taken, but not all. I grabbed what I could, stacking big packages of toilet paper and paper towels in my shopping cart.