djinn wars 03 - fallen (30 page)

Looking at the bed probably wasn’t a good idea. I turned away from it and toward Aldair, who had just waved his hand, coaxing the glowing coals in the fireplace to more brilliant life. Flames began to lick up along the wood stacked inside, sending the aromatic scent of burning applewood throughout the room.

I’d more or less forced myself not to think about Jace up to that point, since I knew that would destroy my fragile composure more quickly than anything else, but the wood smoke made me think of him, the way his clothes had smelled that first time he’d held me in his arms. Only as a friend back then — and barely that, since we’d only just met — and yet even in that moment, I’d known somehow that he was destined to be much more. What was he doing now? Were Zahrias and Julia doing their best to calm him down? Maybe they were all occupied in gathering their belongings for the move to Santa Fe. Surely it would be easier now that they had their powers back. For all I knew, the djinn would merely blink themselves down to what used to be our state capital and set up house from there. No muss, no fuss.

And would they let Miles go? But then, I doubted he would want to go back to Los Alamos. Not with Margolis in charge.

I wanted to distract myself with thinking about such things because that way I wouldn’t have to think about why I was here. Who I was with.

But pretending to inspect the furnishings would only last me for so long. Aldair seemed content to stand there and watch me, which in itself was creepy enough. What would happen when he decided he’d had enough of merely watching?

I turned back toward him. Those blue eyes met mine, and it took a physical effort for me not to look away. He had the upper hand here; we both knew it. That didn’t mean I intended to act like a victim.

“Dinner?” he said, still with that half-smile playing around his mouth. A wave of his hand, and the table placed up against the far wall and draped with a dark blue silk cloth was suddenly heaped with food — what looked like a roasted goose, although I’d never had goose before, and bowls of rice and vegetables and a basket of bread. There was also a decanter made of what looked like gold encrusted with lapis and turquoise.

If I’d been sitting down to this meal with Jace, I would have been enchanted. As it was….

“Oh, you didn’t have to go to all this trouble just for little old me,” I said.

His lips pressed together, and I could see his eyes narrow. Then he said, tone almost too even, “It was no trouble. Sit.”

It wasn’t a request. Since I didn’t want the situation to flare into open confrontation this early in the game, I did as he said and pulled out the chair closer to the fire, then sat down. He followed a few seconds later, taking the chair opposite me.

At first I was glad he’d chosen that seat. Better to have him across the table from me than right by my side. On the other hand, now he was able to stare directly into my face.

“So where did all this come from?” I asked. “Do you djinn have some sort of eternal take-out place where you can just blink in anything you need?”

“No.” He picked up the decanter of wine and poured a good deal into the goblet that sat next to my place setting. Like the decanter, that goblet appeared to be gold, with lapis and turquoise inset in the base. I probably could have hocked one of those things and used it to pay for my entire college education. “We imagine what we want, and it simply…manifests itself.”

“Handy. So why didn’t the djinn back in Taos do the same thing?”

“You would have to ask Zahrias that. He is a great lover of order.” A curl of the lip, and Aldair added, “Perhaps he thought the practice too chaotic.”

I supposed I could see that. With everyone magicking into existence whatever they wanted at the time, it might have gotten a little crazy. But maybe that was why, at least at the beginning, Zahrias hadn’t been too concerned about using up their stores of food. Why would he, when he and the other djinn could quietly zap a few sides of beef into the resort’s freezers whenever things were getting low?

As logistically interesting as all that might have been, it didn’t do much to solve my current predicament. I picked up my goblet and allowed myself a sip. Maybe it was drugged…and maybe it wasn’t. For some reason, I got the impression that Aldair wanted me awake and aware for all this.

The wine was good. Faintly spicy, which made me think it was probably a shiraz. I supposed if you were going to blink in wine from nowhere, you might as well make it a decent vintage.

Aldair drank as well, still watching me. Feeling sort of like a butterfly pinned on a pad, I asked, “Are you going to tell me why now?”

One eyebrow went up. “Why what?”

I doubted he was being deliberately obtuse. No, this was just more of his toying with me. “Why me? I’m no one in particular. There were plenty of girls there in Taos prettier than I am, if all you wanted to do was deprive some djinn of his Chosen.”

He didn’t answer at once. Instead, he drank some wine, then sat back in his chair, goblet in his hand as he languidly swirled the liquid within. “It’s true. I didn’t want you because of you. I wanted you because Jasreel wanted you.”

Some women might have found such a statement insulting. Since I didn’t give a good crap what Aldair thought of me, it was almost a relief to know that he hadn’t chased after me because of some insane otherworldly lust. I leaned forward and set down my goblet. “Why do you hate him so much?”

I honestly wanted to know the answer. Jace was one of the warmest, most generous people I’d ever met, human or djinn. What he possibly could have done — real or imagined — to have engendered such animosity in Aldair, I couldn’t begin to imagine.

A single blink. Then he said, “You are a direct little thing, aren’t you?”

It was my turn to lift an eyebrow. At five foot eight and a bit, I really wasn’t used to being referred to as a “little thing.” “I don’t see the point in beating around the bush. So again…why?”

“He’s my brother.”

If I’d had a mouth full of wine, I probably would have spat it out. As it was, I still felt as if someone had just kicked me right in the stomach. “Your…
what?
”

“Half-brother, actually.” Aldair sat up straighter and then set down his goblet. Tone off-hand, he said, “You should have some of this. It’s going to get cold.”

He picked up a bone-handled carving knife and two-pronged meat fork, then began working away at the goose. A large chunk of breast meat landed on my plate, and he then put more or less the same amount on the plate in front of him.

Whether he was delaying the conversation on purpose, I didn’t know, but I supposed he was right about one thing — this was some beautiful food in front of me, and I really should eat some of it, if for no other reason than to keep up my strength. And while it was quite possible that I shouldn’t be feeling overly relieved — for all I knew, Aldair still planned on taking me to bed out of spite if not actual desire — I found I couldn’t quite prevent myself from relaxing a little. It didn’t seem as if he intended to drag me over to the bed by my hair, which I feared was more or less exactly what had happened with Martine and Khalim.

I ate a few bites of goose, which was rich and strange and delicious, followed by some wonderful rice dish spiced with cinnamon and accented with nuts and golden raisins. Figuring that should satisfy Aldair for the moment, I asked, “Half-brother? Same mother?”

“Hardly.” He poured himself more wine. From what I could tell, the djinn had a far greater capacity for alcohol than us weak humans, but even so, I worried what he would be like if he kept drinking at that pace. “Same father.”

At the time, I’d been so frightened and distracted that I hadn’t been paying much attention, but now I recalled the words of the oath that Zahrias had made Khalim swear. In that oath, he’d called out the names of the interested parties, and Jace and Aldair had seemed to have the same surname. Maybe I’d brushed it off, thinking “al-Ankara” was the djinn equivalent of “Smith” or something.

Aldair continued, his tone so studiously casual that I knew it was anything but, “His mother was a mortal.”

Good thing I’d just set down my fork, or I might have dropped it right in my lap. “He’s half
human?
”

“Yes.” The cruel smile was back, just before he swallowed some more wine. “Ah, it appears he neglected to mention that particular detail to you.”

He sure had. All I could do was sit there, mind spinning. And then I remembered that conversation I had overheard in the courtyard, when Rafi and the two other djinn who wanted to make a break for it had confronted Zahrias. When referring to Jace, Rafi had said that he was “not precisely one of us.” At the time, the remark had mystified me, and then so many other things had happened immediately afterward that it had completely slipped my mind.

But now I understood. Jace was other because he was half human.

As I stared at Aldair, not sure what to say, he went on, “But that is our Jasreel, isn’t it? He withholds information as he deems fit. It seems he even lied to you, his Chosen, the woman he has sworn that he loves above all others. Surely you can see that he isn’t quite the paragon you believe him to be.”

That remark was enough to spur me to speech. “Not telling someone something isn’t the same as lying to them.”

“Oh, it isn’t?” At last Aldair speared some goose on his fork and ate a hearty mouthful, staring at me the whole time.

I supposed I should be glad he was sending some food down to soak up the wine he’d drunk, but right then I was too flaring with righteous indignation to bother. “No, it’s not. I’m sure he would have told me when the time was right. We had very little time together after I learned he was a djinn, because the Los Alamos people came along with their stupid device. And even once he’d been rescued, we had so many things to deal with — ”

“You are very good at defending him, Jessica,” Aldair cut in. To my dismay, he poured himself yet more wine. So far he wasn’t showing any signs of being particularly intoxicated, but, as they say, the night was still young.

“I’m not defending him,” I began, then stopped myself. Actually, I was. To me, the reasons why Jace might not have revealed that particular tidbit about his past may have sounded valid enough. Aldair, on the other hand, was a much tougher crowd. At any rate, I didn’t see the point in arguing that one particular detail. I wanted to know more of why such animosity existed between the two brothers.

Blue eyes gleamed knowingly, but he didn’t speak. It seemed obvious enough that he thought he’d scored a point there.

Maybe he had. I wasn’t about to waste my energy on playing games. I wanted the truth, or at least Aldair’s version of it.

“So Jace’s mother was a mortal,” I said. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re out to get him. What, did your father dump your mother for a human?”

His dark brows drew together. Right then, although otherwise they didn’t look at all alike, I thought I could see the faintest hint of a resemblance between Aldair and Jace. Voice hard, Aldair replied, “No. My mother and father had been apart for many years before my father settled his attentions on a mortal woman.”

Some trace of surprise must have showed on my face, because he smiled thinly and said,

“We djinn are not like mortals in this respect. Our lives are so long that we know we won’t spend the entirety of them with any one partner. My mother and father had their time together, and went their own ways when I was a young man, just into my majority.”

So Aldair was the elder of the two. It would have been hard to tell for certain, as apparently once the djinn reached adulthood, their aging processes were so slow as to be nonexistent. Both Jace and Aldair appeared to be in their late twenties, or early thirties at the very most.

“But then my father must have this mortal woman he spied, and he took her and had a child with her. I had very little to do with any of that, as I was an adult and living my own life.”

“So what was the problem?” I asked as I picked up a piece of bread and broke off a piece. There was no butter, instead a dish of olive oil for dipping. “I mean, if you were off somewhere else, what difference did it make if your father had a child with a new woman?” I didn’t say “wife,” since in none of these revelations had Aldair mentioned wives and husbands. Those conventions seemed to be a bit looser in djinn society.

Aldair’s face darkened with anger, and once again he picked up his goblet and took a large swallow of wine. Of course I couldn’t tell him to slow down. And one would have thought that decanter might be getting low by now, but I had a sinking feeling that it would keep refilling itself at the djinn’s whim.

“Our father,” he said, the “our” dripping with distaste, “took a fancy to his little half-breed. Bestowed property upon him that should have been mine, showed him favor that I’d never had myself. And why? Merely because the brat took after him, whereas I had always favored my mother.”

“Well, that’s hardly Jace’s fault,” I pointed out in a reasonable tone. “Sounds like your beef should be with your father.”

At that remark, Aldair shot me a look of such ill-disguised ire that I shifted backward in my seat. Not that putting a little more space between us would do anything to help me in the long run. I was pretty sure that even if I got up and ran out of the cabin right then, he’d blink himself in front of me before I even had a chance to, well, blink.

“He should never have been born,” he snarled. “And even when such abominations do happen to be conceived, they should be left to rot here in the mortal world, and die without ever knowing their birthright. But because my father cherished his half-breed son, and made sure that his djinn blood and powers came to the forefront, he lived in our society, and took from me that which should have been mine.”

“And so you decided to take something of his from him,” I said slowly.

Eyes glittering like shards of sapphire, Aldair nodded.

“Problem is,” I continued, “I’m not Jace’s. I’m not a piece of property. I’m with him because I love him. I’d love him no matter who or what he was. Because he’s
Jace
. So even if you think you’ve won…you really haven’t.”