Read Online djinn wars 02 - taken by Christine Pope - Free Book Online

arguing with Zahrias on his home turf didn’t feel like a very good idea. I shrugged, then closed the rest of the gap between us so I could take the glass of wine from him. We didn’t touch, but despite that, I could practically feel the heat radiating from his skin. Jace had always been warm, but this was different, something like a fire that seemed to burn along Zahrias’ veins. Maybe it had something to do with the kind of elemental he was.
    I took a sip of the wine, and, to my surprise, it tasted familiar. Possibly the djinn or their Chosen had been doing a little raiding of the La Chiripada tasting rooms as well. Either way, it was lush and velvety on my tongue, and felt awfully good sliding down. Only problem was, that wine was hitting an almost empty stomach. A protein bar and a couple handfuls of chips weren’t really enough to do much good when it came to soaking up alcohol. I knew I’d have to pace myself.
    “So,” the djinn leader said, once he seemed to realize I wasn’t going to drink more than those first few cautious sips, at least not for a little while. “Tell me what happened.”
    The last thing I wanted to do was relive those horrifying moments when Jace had been taken from me, but if Zahrias could offer me any insight, anything that might help me in getting Jace back, then I knew I had to relate everything I remembered.
    “We were going to leave,” I said. “I was just finishing up a few chores, and then we were going to pack up and head up here. But we ran out of time. It seemed — that is, all of a sudden Jace…Jasreel,” I amended, once I saw the way Zahrias’ brows pulled together at the use of the nickname, “couldn’t seem to breathe, and then these men burst into the house.”
    “How many?”
    “Seven.” I didn’t even have to stop to think about it. The scene was burned into my brain cells. “One of them was holding a black box about so big” — I gestured with my hands to indicate a cube roughly ten inches square — “and seemed to be controlling it by touch pad or something.”
    “What was this box?”
    “I don’t know. That is, I assumed it had to be some sort of device designed to affect a djinn. It certainly seemed to be hurting Jace.” I had to stop then and take a sip of wine to ease the sudden dryness in my throat.
    Zahrias’ expression darkened further, if that was even possible. “You say ‘assumed,’ ‘seemed.’ So you don’t know for certain.”
    “No,” I replied. I had a feeling that lying to this hard-faced djinn was not a good idea, so I wouldn’t offer him anything other than the truth, or at least the truth as I’d experienced it. “Whatever it was didn’t affect me, probably because I’m just a regular mortal.”
    “As to that,” Zahrias said, “you are not a regular mortal any longer. Not now that you’ve been Chosen.”
    Evony’s revelations from the road came back to me, and my mouth went dry all over again. True, no regular mortal could heal as quickly as I seemed to now, and according to her, I would also be twenty-four in looks and vitality until the day I died…whenever that might be. So I supposed Zahrias was right. There wasn’t anything normal about me. Not anymore.
    But I didn’t want him to see how much pondering that strange new future upset and worried me, so I said evenly, “True enough. But I guess it didn’t affect me because, although I’ve been changed somehow, I’m still not a djinn.”
    He seemed to accept this, taking a drink of his wine and studying my face. It was hard not to flinch, or blink and look away. Doing any of those things would have been a sign of weakness, however, so I kept my chin up as best I could and hoped that would be enough.
    It seemed to work; Zahrias gave the faintest of nods, then asked, “What happened next?”
    I described the scene as best I could — the way Jace had been hauled off, the unexpected joy of hearing his voice in my mind, even though that unspoken conversation