Hidden: The Djinn Wars, #13

By Christine Pope

He's determined to destroy humankind…until her tiny spark of magic changes everything.

 

With her entire family wiped out by the Djinn-created plague called the Heat, there's no one left to teach Isla Dunbar how to use the magic tingling deep in her body. She lives among the other survivors in the thriving Los Alamos settlement, protected by an ingenious device that repels djinn reavers. But she's lonely. In fact, when it comes to hooking up, Isla would rather just die a virgin.

 

When she's tricked into wandering out of the safe zone, Isla is kidnapped by a threatening djinn determined to disable the Los Alamos device and wipe out the last of humanity. But Isla is just as determined to resist his intense interrogation — and the temptation of his dark eyes, golden skin, and shiver-inducing smile.

If Aamir al-Qadir thought he would intimidate Isla into giving up all she knows, he thought wrong. Her beauty and sass are distracting enough, but something about her catches him off-guard. She's no ordinary human, but a creature of untapped magic that makes her a prize for the power-hungry djinn.

 

Without conscious thought, Aamir's focus shifts from destroying Los Alamos to protecting the unusual woman who's stolen the one thing he thought impenetrable…his heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dark Valentine Press
• Release date: Mar 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224563951

Christine Pope

A native of Southern California, Christine Pope has been writing stories ever since she commandeered her family’s Smith-Corona typewriter back in grade school and is currently working on her hundredth book.Christine writes as the mood takes her, and so her work includes paranormal romance, paranormal cozy mysteries, and fantasy romance. She blames this on being easily distracted by bright, shiny objects, which could also account for the size of her shoe collection. While researching the Djinn Wars series, she fell in love with the Land of Enchantment and now makes her home in New Mexico.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Isla Dunbar paused in a clearing surrounded by ancient cottonwood trees and held her arms wide, soaking in the bright late-September sun, feeling the fresh breeze tug and play with the ends of her long brown hair. Lately, she’d found herself stealing away like this more and more, driven by a need to be alone and away from the daily work of surviving in a world that still felt new and strange, even though four years had passed since the time when everything changed.

If asked, she probably would have admitted that the work now wasn’t as grueling as it had first been when they’d all come to Los Alamos, thanks to the way the community’s leader, Miles Odekirk, had put his nimble brain to work to make their lives easier. The mountain town was now powered entirely by wind and solar, and most of the vehicles they drove were electric. They had heat and running water and plenty of food, thanks to the way the djinn-repelling devices Miles had created allowed them to expand out of Los Alamos itself and down into the Rio Grande valley where Española lay. There, they could grow the produce they needed without having to worry about attacks from the terrible beings who’d sent the world into ruin.

Some of the last words Isla’s mother had said to her were, We are coming to the time when the veil begins to thin, when the otherworld can start to seep into our lives. Catherine Dunbar had only been talking about the souls of those who had passed on and how many people believed it was easier to contact the dead at that time of year, but Isla reflected that her mother’s words could have also been referring to the djinn themselves, an alien scourge no one could have possibly expected.

So much of that terrible time was now only a blur to her, that hurried rush to survival as she fell in with other people from the Albuquerque area who’d survived the djinn-created plague — nicknamed the Heat, thanks to the horrible fevers it caused — that wiped out all but a bare two percent of the human race. Possibly, it was a good thing she couldn’t remember anything from those days very clearly, like the haze people said often blurred memories of childbirth pangs. Still, it hadn’t been so long that Isla couldn’t remember the world before, or the woman who’d promised to teach her so much…and who had perished in the Heat before much of that learning could be passed along.

She knew she needed to be alone like this because it was at these times that she thought she could almost hear the wind speaking to her, could sense the energy in the trees and the water and the very land itself. Her mother had possessed those gifts, and her grandmother before her, part of a line that stretched back hundreds of years. But Isla’s mother had always told her daughter she would begin to learn the craft once she turned eighteen and could truly understand what their magic meant…and how to use it wisely.

In the past, waiting for adulthood to begin to flex her magical muscles might have been a good idea. Unfortunately, the Heat had struck the world only a few months after Isla turned seventeen, and anybody who could have guided her along the same path those generations of Dunbar witches had once trodden was now gone.

If anyone of authority in Los Alamos had been paying particular attention to what she was doing, they probably would have told her it was dangerous to be out and about like this, so near the edges of what they deemed to be safe territory. But work crews had taken fluorescent landscape paint and marked the border of the land protected by the djinn-repelling devices, and because of that, Isla knew exactly how far she could go without stepping outside the safe zone.

True, some of those lines had become blurred with exposure to wind and weather and probably could have used a refresh. She supposed the people in her community might have gotten a bit lax lately, since several years earlier, the djinn elders had worked with those who’d once been reavers — elementals who considered it their sole duty to kill any human survivors who hadn’t been Chosen by djinn partners — to enact a sort of ceasefire. Ever since then, Isla hadn’t heard of a single incident where a human was killed by a reaver.

For all she knew, the devices Miles had invented weren’t even necessary anymore.

A snap of a twig made her pause and lower her arms. As she stood there, stock still except for the startled pounding of her heart in her chest, a yearling buck made his way across the clearing. For a second, he paused and stared at her out of large, liquid dark eyes, and then he continued through the dry grass before disappearing into the cottonwood grove.

Isla let out a breath.

You see? There isn’t anything here that can harm you.

Sure, packs of roving coyotes moved through the area from time to time, but they rarely interfered with humans, and it was too cold in this part of New Mexico to worry about javelinas, who could be ferocious if they thought they were being threatened. Still, if anyone in Los Alamos had known what she was up to, they probably would have given her a stern lecture about risking herself like this…not to mention anyone who had to come to her rescue.

Or maybe they wouldn’t even bother to rescue her at all. Isla knew she inhabited a strange space in the settlement, just because when she’d first come here, she’d lied about her age and told everyone she was eighteen rather than barely past seventeen. At the time, she’d only wanted to avoid being stuck in a classroom with the under-age survivors, most of whom were much younger than she was, and because of that, she’d been given her own place to live, had had to grow up much faster than she ever could have imagined. At any rate, she might have been one of the community’s younger members, but no one had ever looked at her as a child.

She was down here on the outskirts of Española because she’d come with a crew to gather the last of the beans and squash from the fields there. One of her fellow workers, a woman named Doris, had felt faint after working in the sun for a few hours, and the other members of their crew had taken her back to Los Alamos. Isla, though, had offered to stay behind and finish clearing the field, which was why she’d been left alone today. Other times, she’d used the pretext of going through Española’s abandoned houses to glean whatever useful items might remain as her excuse for being alone, but she knew that eventually, someone was going to call her out on her solitary behavior.

This time, though, she’d needed to be alone so she could think.

The night before, the town council — Miles and his wife Lindsay, Shawn Gutierrez, Nora Almeida, and Brent Sutherland — had called a meeting of all the survivors in Los Alamos so they could make an announcement. Or rather, while Isla knew the plan was probably mostly Miles’s, helped along with some advice from the djinn and Chosen in nearby Santa Fe, he had Lindsay do most of the talking, since he hated public speaking and did his best to avoid it whenever possible.

Lindsay, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any problem with leading the meeting, or maybe she took over at these kinds of gatherings out of love for her husband and nothing more. Isla still considered them an odd kind of couple, the tall, gawky scientist in his early forties and the model-gorgeous woman almost ten years his junior. Apparently, Lindsay had been Chosen, but her djinn companion had been killed by the reaver djinn, and later on, after she’d recovered from her grief, she’d hooked up with Miles Odekirk. Not the kind of person Isla would have chosen for herself, but love was weird.

Or at least, she guessed it was weird, judging by the books she’d read in the Los Alamos library and the behavior she’d observed in some of the members of their community. Again, she occupied an odd place in the settlement, with only one guy her own age — Matt Fellowes — that she could even hook up with. She didn’t like Matt, though. He was loud and brash and much more interested in chasing girls who were a little younger than he rather than Isla, who was a year older…and who he’d thought for a long time was two years his elder, thanks to the way she’d lied to everyone about her age.

The few men in town who were in their twenties had already found partners by the time she was ready to think about possibly pairing off, and there was no way she could be interested in the ones who’d been mere boys when she first arrived here. Maybe she was only three or four years older than they, but it just felt gross, especially when she could remember them all too well from the time when she’d first arrived and they’d only been thirteen or fourteen and had seemed even younger.

Miles and Lindsay’s announcement had been that it was finally time to expand the human community and create a new settlement of survivors, since Los Alamos had been growing over the past few years and now numbered almost fifteen hundred residents. While the surrounding lands could definitely support that many people, if the town kept expanding at that rate, it would become more and more difficult to sustain everyone.

The idea of creating a new settlement had been bandied around for a while, but Isla honestly hadn’t thought anything would come from all the talk. But then Lindsay said the town council had decided on a place called Redlands in Southern California, which had once been an agricultural center and would allow them to grow the kinds of crops they couldn’t cultivate in northern New Mexico’s much harsher climate.

The location they’d selected sounded awfully far away. However, Isla guessed the town had been partially chosen because it wasn’t too far from the spot where the djinn elder Idris had settled with his own human partner, and she figured Miles and Lindsay and the other people who’d selected the place had thought the new settlement would probably be safer with someone like that keeping watch…just in case.

At the meeting, Lindsay had said they were looking for around two hundred volunteers to leave Los Alamos and settle in California, and that everyone should take some time to think it over and decide what they would like to do.

Which was why Isla had been particularly glad of an excuse to escape for a while so she could do her own pondering.

At first, the idea had sounded positively exciting. The climate here in Los Alamos and the surrounding countryside was just enough harsher than Albuquerque that she thought moving to California might be a welcome change. Yes, her prospects for romance there would probably be just as dire as they were here, but at least she could be perpetually single in sunshine and warm temperatures.

On the other hand, Los Alamos was at least a known quantity. She couldn’t say she exactly loved her life here, but it was safe, and she had a few friends, people she would miss if they decided to stay in New Mexico rather than volunteer to be part of the new settlement. Her world would contract that much more.

And although she wished she could have the luxury of feeling sorry for herself, she knew she was a very lucky person. At least she still lived and breathed and walked the surface of this beautiful world, unlike the countless billions who had perished four years earlier.

The cottonwoods rustled in the breeze, and she tilted her head to look up at the sky. Would it be so effortlessly blue in California? Would the flat-bottomed clouds she loved so much form there as well?

And would she have this sense of magic just around the corner, just barely out of reach? Not for the first time, she thought if she could focus enough, believe enough, those powers would come to her, even if she didn’t have anyone to train her in the ways of the Dunbar witches. Her mother had told her those ancestors had come to this land more than a hundred years ago and had settled here because New Mexico had its own magic, even if it was utterly unlike their native Scotland.

What if that kind of magic didn’t exist in California?

Driven by a sudden impulse, Isla knelt to scoop up a handful of the sandy earth, then let it trail through her fingers so the breeze could catch it, swirling dust that disappeared as it blew away from her. Deep within, she felt an odd tingle, something that seemed to tell her this land wanted her here.

Isla straightened and rubbed her hands against the legs of her jeans so she could brush the dust from her palms. A slight residue remained, as if to remind her that New Mexico would never let her go.

Well, that seemed to decide things.

She would stay.

Aamir al-Qadir faced his two brothers, who had come at his summons as soon as he heard the news. They were not in the large house Aamir had been given in the western Colorado mountains, but in a place called Red River, not quite a hundred miles from the settlement of djinn and their Chosen in Santa Fe.

He had selected this lodge because it wasn’t so far from Los Alamos that it was inconvenient and also because it was the sort of place that might be easily overlooked. No djinn lived anywhere near here, which meant Aamir and his brothers could do what they needed to without any interference from those who might disagree with their actions.

They are going ahead with their plans, he informed Omar and Jamal, who sat on the divan across from his. The house had once been a rich man’s hunting lodge, with dark-paneled walls and equally dark, heavy furniture, and the three djinn, in their flowing robes of dark silk and linen, looked entirely out of place there.

The new settlement? Jamal inquired. He was the middle brother, and, like the other two, tall and black-haired, with night-dark eyes. A frown pulled at his brows as he added, How do you know this for sure?

Because word came to me through Mahmoud, Aamir replied. Of course, he has no idea what we are planning and therefore saw no reason to watch his tongue.

No, as far as Mahmoud al-Saqir and the rest of the djinn were concerned, they were all one big happy family. Once upon a time, the situation had been quite different, but after those who had dedicated themselves to ridding the world of the plague’s few survivors had decided they wanted to lay down their swords, most of the djinn wanted nothing more than to live their lives in peace.

Not Aamir and his brothers, though. They had kept their silence because they knew their views were no longer popular, and yet he had thought if the Los Alamos community could somehow be eradicated, then the rest of the djinn would understand how necessary it was to be rid of the scourge of humanity. Yes, there would always be Chosen, but Aamir considered them a breed apart. Like the djinn with whom they had partnered, those special examples of humanity would be forever young and healthy and beautiful, and would have no need to spread their stain across the globe.

The filth in Los Alamos were an entirely different breed of human, however. Already, they had spread from their mountain town into the river valley just beyond, where they grew crops to sustain their ever-increasing numbers. He’d known almost from the beginning that they would not be content to claim only that patch of land…and now his suspicions had been confirmed.

Where are they going? Omar asked, a light of curiosity in his deep brown eyes.

To California, Aamir said, knowing how heavy his voice sounded. It had been just like them to choose a destination where interference would be difficult.

Omar’s mouth tightened, and Jamal settled against the back of the couch, his expression similarly grim. It seemed clear enough to Aamir that they had both grasped the uncomfortable significance of the new settlement’s location, how it would be far too close to Idris’ demesne in the former Huntington Library to allow them to be easily attacked.

They must never reach their destination, Jamal declared, and Aamir nodded.

Yes. We will have to intercept them somewhere on the road before then.

His two brothers exchanged an uneasy glance. While all three of them were of the same heart and mind when it came to the eventual fate of the interlopers in Los Alamos, it seemed clear to Aamir that the younger two had their doubts about how such a thing might be accomplished.

Surely they will have some of those damned devices with them, Omar said.

The little black boxes that were the bane of djinn-kind. When he had first heard of them, Aamir hadn’t believed such a thing could even be possible. How could a human invention destroy a djinn’s power? His people were like the elements they controlled, eternal, powerful. Surely no piddly device could change that.

Except it could. Aamir did not understand the deviltry involved that would sap a djinn’s powers and render him — or her — even weaker and more ineffectual than a human being, but he could not argue that such a thing existed, not when he’d heard from far too many of his fellow reavers exactly what it felt like to walk into a device’s area of effect. At once, a djinn’s powers were taken away, and beyond that, one was left with barely enough energy to walk or speak. It was no wonder that, once a djinn had experienced the effect those little black boxes had on their kind, they made every effort to stay far, far away.

They will, Aamir said calmly, since he had already considered the conundrum from all angles. But because those devices are made by humans, there must be some way to subvert them, to destroy them. Once we have determined the best way to render them useless, then the humans will be defenseless.

Many others of our kind have attempted to discover their secret, Omar responded, jaw still tight with worry. No one has ever succeeded, for to get close enough to meddle with them is to ensure that our powers are rendered useless.

True enough, but Aamir refused to let past history dissuade him. A solution existed for every problem, and that meant they only needed to discover it for themselves. In fact, he’d already begun to formulate a plan.

We must take one of the Los Alamos humans and pry the device’s secrets from them, he said calmly, although he knew how audacious those words must have sounded to his brothers.

Indeed, Jamal sat up a little straighter, brow furrowed as he grasped the knees of the loose linen pants he wore. And how, pray, do you intend to accomplish such a feat? If you get anywhere close to any of them, one of their devices will render you all but useless…and certainly in no condition to attempt a kidnapping.

On the surface, his brother’s words would have sounded persuasive enough. However, Aamir had been pondering this puzzle for quite some time, prodding it from one angle and then another, and he thought he had devised a way to make sure one of those foolish humans all but stumbled into their grasp.

"My intention is to have them get close to us, he replied. Have you not noticed how they have marked the edges of their territory with garish paint so none of them runs the risk of crossing over into areas that are not protected by their devices?"

Both Omar and Jamal nodded, as a knowing gleam entered the youngest al-Qadir brother’s eyes.

So, Omar said, you plan to move some of those lines so they will pass beyond the field of protection and therefore will be easy prey?

Precisely, Aamir said, pleased that his brother had so easily comprehended the gambit. Once we have them in our grasp, then we can question them about the devices — how they work, what can be done to disable them.

Although Omar seemed on board with all this, Jamal wore an expression that could only be interpreted as dubious. There are a great many of the devices, he pointed out. Do you really think you will be able to disarm enough of them to make a difference?

Once one goes down, the rest will follow, Aamir responded. He had thought through this and believed his plan to be a sound one. For as soon as the device nearest us is inoperable, our powers will return, and we can use them to destroy the rest.

Jamal rubbed a finger over his chin, his expression thoughtful. I had not thought of it that way, he said after a brief pause. But yes, with Omar and me controlling the earth and with you bringing fire, we would be able to utterly destroy Los Alamos.

And a most satisfying sight that would be, to watch as the very mountain caved in and took the town with it, while he brought his cleansing fire to destroy anything that might be left following the cataclysm. Such ruin would teach the humans what it was to invite the wrath of the djinn. One might have thought they would have learned such a lesson after the plague destroyed the vast majority of them, but Aamir was willing to reteach it if they needed further education.

However, it seemed Jamal was not done with his questions, for he ventured, And what do you think the elders will do once they learn we have gone against their edicts and destroyed Los Alamos?

Before Aamir could reply, Omar broke in, saying, There have been no edicts, no commandments. It is not their place to tell us what we can and cannot do when it comes to ordinary humans. Chosen are a different matter, of course, but just because peace has prevailed these past few years, it does not mean the situation must always continue in such a way.

Precisely, Aamir returned. Some might view the people in Los Alamos as the particular pets of the Santa Fe djinn, considering how the two communities are far too friendly with one another, but they are not guaranteed any kind of protection. And I also believe that once we are rid of the vermin, then those reavers who have been peaceful these past few years…Mahmoud and the others…will realize we have done them a great service. For when we embarked on our crusade to rid this world of humans, there were supposed to be no exceptions made.

Beyond the Chosen, of course, Jamal replied, and Aamir nodded, although he knew his expression must have been tinged with annoyance.

Of course, he echoed. That goes without saying. All djinn were free to save one human, as long as they were willing to be bound to that human for all time.

A distasteful exception, to be sure, but one that the One Thousand — those djinn who had protested the destruction of humanity — seemed very willing to make. Aamir could never understand the impulse to take a human into one’s bed when there were plenty of willing and far more attractive djinn for such liaisons, but he allowed that the elementals in question had the free will to make such a choice.

At any rate, he went on briskly, for he saw no reason to waste more breath on the concept of Chosen and their djinn, are we in agreement?

As one, Jamal and Omar nodded.

Then I will analyze the best place to move the border markings, Aamir told them. And I will let you know when I have one of their humans in hand.

His brothers seemed content with that plan. Another nod, this one of acknowledgment, and then the two of them blinked out of existence, going back to the homes that had been bestowed upon them by the elders.

As for himself…well, he had work to do.

Chapter 2

Of all the various tasks she was assigned to help keep Los Alamos running, Isla thought she disliked assembling the djinn-repelling devices the most. It was necessary work, of course,