djinn wars 04 - broken Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  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

  If You Enjoyed This Book…

  Also by Christine Pope

  About the Author

  BROKEN

  A Djinn Wars Novel

  CHRISTINE POPE

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  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

  If You Enjoyed This Book…

  Also by Christine Pope

  About the Author

  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.

  BROKEN

  Copyright © 2015 by Christine Pope

  Published by Dark Valentine Press

  Cover design by Lou Harper

  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.

  Prologue

  Santa Fe, New Mexico

  One year after the Dying

  The voice came to him in the darkness, just as it had for the past few weeks. He’d kept a careful count of every day, every agonizing twenty-four-hour span, drawing each one in a line of blood so he could never forget. Some people might have wanted to forget, but he held his captor’s wrongs close, kept them always in the forefront of his mind so that one day he’d be able to repay each of those wasted days in the blood of his enemies. They hadn’t wanted him to know how long he’d been held — the stinking djinn had taken away his watch, his belt, anything he might have found useful. Maybe that hadn’t been their idea at all, but a suggestion from one of the human turncoats they were shacked up with, since the selection of confiscated items seemed to indicate a familiarity with human technology.

  At any rate, his meals came at regular intervals, and he was allowed to go outside to get fresh air every once in a while, and those data points provided enough information that he had never lost count of the weary days. The last time his guard had taken him out to the sheltered street that backed up to the U.S. Marshals’ building, the breeze had felt brisker, the air cooler, and so he knew the year was winding down toward autumn, exactly in line with his calculations.

  Even so, he couldn’t exactly recall when the voice had started speaking to him. Not right away; he knew that much. He’d spent many nights in dead silence, alone with his thoughts, trying to figure out what he could have done differently, which traps he could have avoided so he wouldn’t end up here.

  The most obvious solution would have been to kill that troublemaking bitch, Jessica Monroe. If it hadn’t been for her scheming — aided and abetted by the djinn here in Santa Fe — Margolis would still have Miles Odekirk working for him, and Julia Innes would still be safely under his thumb.

  Julia. It had been so long since he’d been with a woman that the thought of any female flesh might have been enough to get him to stiffen…but she’d been the best. She hadn’t fought, but he still could sense the defiance in her cold silence as he pounded into her, taking her body for his own. The almost palpable waves of her hatred had been the ultimate turn-on.

  You can have her back, the voice said.

  When he first heard the voice, Margolis thought he was going crazy from the isolation. But he didn’t feel crazy…and besides, the voice said such reasonable things to him, things that made sense. Surely if he was crazy, he wouldn’t have manufactured such a logical companion for his solitude.

  I can? Margolis thought back at the voice. Even from the beginning, he’d realized he needed to refrain from speaking out loud. There was no chance of his escaping from this cell, not in this high-security vault under the U.S. Marshals’ building in Santa Fe, but that hadn’t kept the town’s inhabitants from keeping a guard on him night and day, just a few steps away from the door to the cramped chamber that now made up his world. Sometimes that guard was djinn, sometimes a well-armed human. Either way, he wasn’t getting out any time soon.

  Yes, the voice replied. Julia Innes will be delivered to you — along with anything else you desire — as long as you do exactly what I say.

  Margolis didn’t like taking orders — he’d been the one to give orders after the Dying took away all other established authority — but he figured obedience was a small price to pay for being free of this jail cell and having Julia once again. He inhaled deeply, recalling the sweet scent of her long, silky hair, the warm perfume of her flesh.

  Then he sat upright on his cot, blood seeming to thrum through his veins as he contemplated the prospect of freedom. A return to power, and Julia his. That was enough to give a man hope.

  Tell me what I have to do.

  Chapter One

  Julia Innes pushed away the mound of paperwork on her desk and stood, then went to the window of her office, which overlooked Los Alamos’ main street. It was a bright early fall day, the sky blue, a few puffy white clouds scudding by. The slender aspen trees in the planters spaced along the sidewalk were just beginning to turn gold.

  Looking at the trees and their reminder of the turn of the seasons, she realized that the Dying had struck exactly one year ago. September twenty-sixth. The world had been upended, and the few survivors of that hideous plague were still trying to put the pieces back together. Whether they’d been entirely successful or not, she wasn’t sure.

  Oh, they’d definitely made progress. The residents of Los Alamos had been thrilled to have her in charge. Or maybe they’d just been so glad to have Margolis gone that they didn’t care who else led them. And bringing Miles Odekirk, their resident genius, back with her to this stronghold of the Immune had also helped. After all, it was Miles’s devices that had ensured their ongoing protection from the rampaging djinn, those otherworldly beings who had been so systematic about purging the world of the few humans the Dying had spared.

  Only not all of the djinn sought vengeance and death. Some of them were friends, allies….

  She wanted to shut her mind down before it finished that thought, but too late.

  Lovers.

  Not for her, of course. And she really didn’t want to think about that. She shouldn’t be thinking about that. Hadn’t she already spent the last six months doing whatever she could to drive him out of her mind?

  Zahri
as al-Harith, leader of the djinn and Chosen community that had first resided in Taos, and then had moved down to Santa Fe at the orders of the djinn elders, whose word seemed to be law…except when it wasn’t. Julia still hadn’t quite figured out the dynamics of djinn society, and she supposed it didn’t really matter. After all, she wasn’t Chosen. She’d never have to deal with any of the elders directly.

  But Zahrias was a different matter. She knew how foolish it was to allow him to occupy her thoughts. He’d never given her the slightest encouragement, had never said one word to her that wasn’t neutral and polite and purely business. Never given her even one glance —

  No, that wasn’t true. If he truly had been all business all the time, then she would have had much more success in finding a way to push him from her mind. But there had been a look or two, quiet, smoldering, glances that she couldn’t make herself forget. It was those glances that prevented her from allowing herself to put him out of her mind, or at least make herself think of him only as the leader of the community in Santa Fe and nothing more.

  Because they still had contact from time to time. True, she’d had no reason to speak to Zahrias directly, but Miles had installed a ham radio in Julia’s office so she could communicate with Jessica Monroe at the house she shared with her djinn lover Jace. The radio also came in handy for the times when Julia needed to speak to Lauren, Zahrias’ assistant. Not that Lauren was going to be assisting him for much longer; she was due any day now, the child she was having with her own djinn partner about to make his or her entrance into the world.

  At any rate, Julia was in contact with the Santa Fe group enough to know how they fared — not that there was all that much to report. The world had been quiet for the past six months. Maybe there were still survivors being hunted in other regions, other continents, but she had no way of knowing for sure; the radio remained silent, except for the limited bands the Santa Fe and the Los Alamos communities shared. Sometimes the echo of that emptiness would come to her in the depths of the night, when she couldn’t sleep. What if the small band of survivors here in Los Alamos were truly the only people left alive in the world who weren’t Chosen or djinn?

  The thought chilled her. Unfortunately, Julia knew there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. If it weren’t for Miles Odekirk, she and everyone else in Los Alamos would also be dead. But his devices hummed away, keeping all djinn from encroaching on the little mountain town. He and his girlfriend Lindsay had built enough of the innocuous-looking boxes that the community was well-protected. There were even enough extra that foraging parties could take a device with them when they went down into Española, looking for supplies.

  Girlfriend. Julia wasn’t sure she even wanted to explore the irony of that situation. Even Miles Odekirk, the weedy, antisocial physicist, had somehow managed to get partnered up, while she was still alone. One of her duties was keeping track of the supplies in Los Alamos, and who got what in exchange for the work vouchers they used instead of money. It hadn’t exactly escaped her attention that Lindsay Adarian, Miles’s girlfriend, had been acquiring a new box of condoms once a month without fail. Julia couldn’t help wondering how they had time to use up so many, considering they seemed to spend most of their time in the lab.

  Her phone rang then, and she moved quickly so she could pick it up. Even as she did so, she couldn’t help marveling at this supposed commonplace, that here in this post-apocalyptic world, they still had phones — well, in this building, at least — and electricity and running water.

  When she spoke, she made sure she sounded brisk and cool. No way would she ever allow anyone to know that she’d been staring out the window and brooding over her current lovelorn state. “Julia here.”

  The caller was Natalie Ortega, the woman who oversaw the town’s radio dispatch system. “Hi, Julia. You said you wanted to know when Sue Nichols went into labor. Brian just called me to let me know they were headed for the medical center.”

  “Thanks, Natalie. And Ellen’s been contacted?”

  “She’s already at the medical center.”

  “Great. Thanks for the update.”

  “Absolutely.” Natalie hung up then, and Julia slowly replaced her phone’s handset in the cradle.

  Sue and Brian’s child would be the first baby born in Los Alamos after the Dying. Julia knew that people had been quietly pairing up for some time, but no one else had seemed too interested in repopulating the earth; Lindsay and Miles were definitely not the only ones going through boxes of condoms with some regularity. So far Sue’s pregnancy had been completely uneventful, and Ellen O’Donnell, the nurse practitioner who was among the Los Alamos survivors, had said she didn’t anticipate any problems. She’d delivered quite a few babies, and besides, they had the facilities at the town’s medical center to ensure that everything went well. This baby would be born in a clean, modern hospital. No worries at all.

  But Julia couldn’t help worrying. If anyone had asked, she would have shrugged and said that she was the appointed leader of the town, so it was her job to worry. But her concern had deeper roots than that. True, everyone here was immune to the djinn-caused plague that had wiped out so much of the world’s population. However, what if the baby wasn’t immune? What if it got sick the moment it emerged into the world?

  Borrowing trouble? Maybe. Even so, Julia felt as if she couldn’t stay here in her office and wait patiently for the news, good or bad. She knew Sue’s labor could take hours, and there wasn’t much point in going to the medical facility right away. On the other hand, she also knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate if she didn’t go.

  She gathered up her purse and headed out, passing the empty reception desk. With a twinge, she remembered how Jessica Monroe had once sat there, answering the phone, doing the busywork generated by Captain Margolis’ obsessive need for control. But Julia didn’t want anyone manning that desk now. Yes, she had people who worked for her, but she answered her own damn phone, and her assistants had their own offices where they could perform their tasks at their own pace and without being disturbed.

  Anyway, Richard Margolis was the last person she wanted to be thinking about right now. She’d been more or less successful in shoving him to the more remote corners of her mind. He was only an unpleasant episode in her past, something not worth dwelling on. The djinn in Santa Fe had him safely locked up. He couldn’t hurt her or anyone else ever again.

  The breeze caught at her hair as soon as she headed out into the parking lot, swirling the long, dark gold strands around her. Occasionally she’d thought about cutting it — having her hair so long really wasn’t all that practical — but she hadn’t yet been able to bring herself to bite that particular bullet.

  It was just far enough from the municipal center to the medical facility that she drove rather than walked. There were a couple of cars in the parking lot — Ellen’s Subaru, and a big old Blazer that Sue and Brian shared. The couple were among the first of the Los Alamos survivors to pair up; neither of them had been married when the Dying hit, Sue divorced and Brian a bachelor, and so they didn’t have the loss of a significant other to overcome before they felt themselves ready to move on.

  Julia also spotted Shawn Gutierrez’s red Chevy pickup, and frowned. Why would he be here?

  Former fireman, she reminded herself. He was the only other person in the community with any kind of medical training. It wasn’t too surprising that Ellen would want him here.

  His presence would make things awkward, though. For the past few months, he’d been subtly attempting to see if Julia had any kind of interest in getting together with him, even though she hadn’t been exactly encouraging.

  And that was completely stupid of her, because Shawn was not only extremely good-looking, but a very nice guy to boot. She should have jumped at the chance to erase the last bits of her attraction to Zahrias. Instead, she’d spend two months politely but consistently shutting him down.

  She allowed herself the faintest of sighs
as she pushed open the front door to the medical center and went inside. Only a few of the overhead fluorescent lights were on, just enough to see her way to the stairs so she could head up to the obstetrics ward on the second floor. Yes, they had electricity here in Los Alamos, but Miles had drilled into everyone the need for conservation. They relied mostly on solar and wind, and had backup generators for the days when those resources failed them. That meant only turning on the lights they really needed.

  The obstetrics ward, on the other hand, was completely lit up, and looked bright and cheerful, with its warm oak-laminate floors and softly painted walls. Julia heard voices coming down the hallway to the left, so she went in that direction and then paused outside the door.

  Sue was already in bed, gripping Brian’s hand and panting furiously. Ellen had apparently just finished checking her blood pressure, since she was in the process of taking off the heavy black cuff when Julia peeked in. On the other side of the room, Shawn Gutierrez looked on, although he didn’t seem to be actively involved at the moment.

  His eyes met hers, and she made herself gaze steadily back at him and lift her eyebrows. He nodded in reply to her unspoken question, then murmured something to Ellen before stepping out in the hallway to join her.

  “How is she?” she murmured.

  “Fine,” he replied. “Vitals are good. Contractions are coming about two minutes apart, so we don’t have too long to wait.”

  “That seems…fast.” Oh, who was she kidding? She didn’t know jack about childbirth or contractions or any of that stuff. She’d been an only child, and her former fiancé had made damn sure she didn’t have any close friends, so she’d never been around anyone — except in the most casual of circumstances — who’d been pregnant.

  But Shawn nodded. “It is pretty fast. This baby wants to be out in the world, looks like.”

  “I guess that’s a good thing?”

  Sue moaned loudly from inside the hospital room, and Julia tried not to wince.