djinn wars 04 - broken (27 page)

He nodded. “What about this one?”

The cylinder in question was about two feet long. “Does it have any kind of rating listed?”

After peering at the label, he said, “Looks like twelve hours under normal circumstances. If you exert yourself a good deal, it won’t last quite that long.”

Would she be exerting herself? Good question. She really had no idea what travel on the djinn plane even entailed. Maybe they’d just blink in and out until Jace could track down the elders. “Twelve hours is a decent chunk.”

“Well, you take that one, and I’ll take a second one, just to be safe. We can always pop back here if you start to feel off, but obviously it’ll work out better if we can just stay there for as long as possible.”

She had to agree with that. If they still hadn’t located the elders, even with twenty-four hours’ worth of oxygen….

“Sounds good,” she told him. “Let’s get one of these hooked up.”

They dug around and eventually found connector hoses and a couple of cannulas still in their sterile wrappings.

“Have you ever used one of these?” Jace asked as she wrangled the tubing and the cannula and eventually got everything attached. He’d already slung the spare oxygen canister over his left shoulder.

“Of course not,” she replied. “I’ve been in the hospital once in my entire life. Appendectomy. And even that was no big deal, since I caught it early. I barely even have a scar. Anyway,” she added as Jace’s eyebrows began to lift, “no need for oxygen. But how hard can it be?”

To prove herself right, she fitted the cannula into her nose. It felt strange sitting there, but probably much better than having a full-on mask would have. She turned the valve on the oxygen tank and inhaled through her nose, not too deeply, but enough that she got a decent hit off it. The weight of it hanging from her shoulder would take some getting used to, and it did hamper her mobility somewhat. But it could be the only thing standing between her and slow asphyxiation.

“I think it’s working,” she said.

“How does it feel?”

“Well, right now it feels like I’m going to get high on this oxygen if I keep breathing it. But I suppose I’ll feel different when we get to the djinn world.”

At those words, his expression sobered. “Julia, if you start to feel strange at all,
tell me.
It’s just Miles’s educated guess that the oxygen levels are different on that plane, but it still could be something else entirely. I’ll get you back here right away if you think something is off.”

“Don’t worry — I’ll tell you.” Since he didn’t appear entirely convinced, she went on, “Really, I don’t have a death wish. I want to help get Zahrias out of there, but I also want to make sure I’m here to enjoy him when we do get him back. Okay?”

Jace seemed to relax a little after she delivered this speech. “Okay.” He shut his eyes and appeared to be concentrating on something. What, Julia wasn’t entirely sure, but she figured he was reaching out to that unearthly plane and attempting to determine where the elders might be.

A nod, and then he was pulling her against him, holding her tight. The embrace startled her at first, but she remembered a second later that a djinn had to hold a mortal that close to be able to blink them in and out of reality. She still didn’t like it very much, but at least she understood the reason for it.

His arms tightened further, and then the world as she knew it disappeared.

Chapter Fourteen

Colors that had no name swirled behind her eyelids. She felt alternately blasted by heat, then cold. After a moment that could have lasted forever or taken no time at all, Julia felt solid ground beneath her feet.

Jace’s voice came to her ears. “We’re here. You can open your eyes.”

Cautiously, she cracked her eyelids. She didn’t know what she was expecting — some sort of scene out of an otherworldly Arabian Nights, with djinn flying around her on carpets and palaces with fantastic domes and minarets on every side, but what she saw couldn’t be further from that mental image.

The sky hurt to look at. It wasn’t any one color, but shifted from red to blue to green to a sort of bruised purple with yellowish overtones. The light came from everywhere and nowhere. There wasn’t a sun or stars or moon. A brittle wind pulled at her hair, but she had no real sensation of the temperature. It wasn’t cold or warm, but somewhere in between.

And the landscape appeared utterly barren, undulating hills of some dark soil from which nothing grew. Off in the distance, she spied a range of jagged shapes that might have been mountains.

Somehow she retained enough of her faculties to breathe in through her nose, to pull some precious oxygen into her system. At last she managed to say, “You — your people
live
here?”

A bitter smile touched Jace’s mouth. “It is quite the garden spot, isn’t it? Truthfully, we do not venture outside our homes all that often. But you see now why we pull all the raw materials for our food and our houses from your world. Except for a few sheltered gardens, nothing truly grows here.” He paused then to glance around, keen dark eyes taking in the empty landscape. “This way.”

Julia wondered how he could possibly know which direction to go, but she didn’t ask, only followed him as he headed toward that range of distant mountains. They couldn’t be his destination, could they? That kind of walk would take hours. She thought of the frighteningly finite supply of oxygen in the tank, and how it was getting lower with every breath she took. No way would she have enough if they really did have to hike all that distance, even counting the backup Jace was carrying.

At least the gravity felt marginally lower here. Not enough to give her any sense of euphoria, though, not when she had to measure her oxygen consumption so carefully. As she walked, she tried to pay attention to her breathing, to see if anything felt off or strange. So far, she wasn’t noticing anything. Yes, it felt strange to have that cannula shoved into her nostrils, and the air here had a strange acrid quality to it that burned at the back of her throat, but that was the only real discomfort she was currently experiencing.

Something dark seemed to hover in the air, closer than the mountains, but still far enough away that she couldn’t make out any distinct features. Julia frowned at it. The shape was all wrong for any kind of airplane. Then she wanted to laugh at herself. What the hell did the djinn need with any kind of aircraft when they could instantly transport themselves from place to place whenever they wanted?

As they approached, Julia could see that the shape wasn’t natural at all, but a construct that looked like the sort of Arabian Nights palace that she’d originally imagined — except that it was floating at least a hundred feet in the air. She sent Jace a questioning glance, and he nodded.

“Yes, that is our destination.”

It was beautiful, with its towers of pale stone and banners in blue and purple. From this distance, she couldn’t see any sign of life, but then, if she lived here, she probably wouldn’t spend much time out of doors, either. If the interior of the palace was anywhere near as striking as its exterior, then you’d get a much better view by staying inside.

They climbed a rocky hill in order to get closer to the floating palace. Julia did her best to avoid breathing hard, but she had to give herself enough air to get up that incline. “If you knew where we were going,” she said, trying not to pant, “why didn’t you take us there directly?”

“That’s not how it works.” Unlike her, he didn’t seem at all winded. Usually she would have said she was in decent shape, but something about the air here, even with the assist from the oxygen, seemed to suck the strength right out of her body. “All I had was a general idea of where the elders’ palace might be. Once we were here, we still had to track it down. Besides,” he added, giving her a searching look, as if to confirm for himself that she was managing all right, “it is considered very rude to suddenly appear in another djinn’s home, even if you know exactly where you need to go. This way, they’ll know we’re coming.”

“I suppose that’s a good thing?”

His expression was calm, betraying nothing of what might be going on behind those dark eyes. “I would think so, yes. They came to our aid last spring.”

That was true. The elders definitely didn’t seem pleased by anyone who went against their edicts, and so Julia had no reason to believe they would feel any differently now. And even though she hadn’t exchanged a single word with the one redheaded elder, Julia thought she might have liked the djinn woman, if they were ever able to deal with one another socially. There had been a decidedly un-djinn-like twinkle in her eyes, one that seemed to indicate she wasn’t unsympathetic to the mortals’ cause.

When she and Jace came closer to the palace, Jessica wondered how the hell they were supposed to even get in there. Since he’d said it wasn’t polite to simply blink into a djinn residence without an invitation, there had to be some other way of getting inside. Or maybe the very fact that the building just kept floating there was a subtle sign that they weren’t in fact wanted.

As she watched, however, a gate at the front of the floating structure opened slowly, and from that gate issued a long red streamer. No, not a streamer, but a narrow carpet worked in shades of red and deep blue.

She looked over at Jace. A certain tension around his jaw line seemed to lessen slightly. “That’s our invitation,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He headed toward the carpet, while Julia followed, trying not to frown. That long rectangle didn’t look very stable. And they were expecting her to walk on it?

But the second her foot touched the intricately woven runner, the carpet stiffened, feeling as solid as if it had been poured out of concrete instead of knotted wool. Eyes wide, she stayed slightly behind Jace while he walked up the carpet as if he did that sort of thing every day. Well, maybe he had, back when this world had been his home.

Even though that magical carpet seemed sturdy enough, she tried not to look down at it as they climbed up to the front entrance of the palace. She’d never been that great at heights, and to be steadily ascending on something less than two feet wide was just a little disconcerting.

After a few minutes, though, they reached the gate and passed through the walls of the palace. Now the ground underfoot was solid marble, a soft rose color shot through with gold. Julia didn’t have much time to admire it, however, because a tall, handsome djinn with thick brown hair and blue eyes approached them and said, “They are expecting you. This way, please.”

All very polite. Julia couldn’t help feeling ill at ease, however. The splendor of her surroundings cowed her, and even though she knew it had been practical to come here in her jeans and hiking boots, she felt small and shabby. Yes, Jace was dressed very much the same, except for motorcycle boots instead of the sturdy lace-ups she had on, but he didn’t seem to be aware of any discrepancy between his appearance and the palace around him.

But at least he’s a djinn,
she thought.
He doesn’t care about looking out of place because this is his world, his people.

Or at least they used to be. He’d been pretty clear about where his loyalties now lay.

The brown-haired djinn who’d been leading them stopped at a high, arched doorway. Spreading a hand toward the arch, he said, “They will see you inside.”

Jace murmured a word of thanks, then strode forward, chin high. Julia did the best she could to look similarly confident, although she had a feeling the cannula in her nose somewhat lessened that impression.

The room must have been some sort of audience chamber, but she was relieved to see that there was no audience, only five djinn seated on the dais at the far end of the room. Three men, two women, one of them the redheaded djinn Julia remembered. They didn’t stand or make any word of greeting, but only sat there in a set of matching carved chairs, watching as she and Jace approached.

“Elders,” he said, stopping a few feet from the dais, and then pressing his hands together and bowing from the waist.

“Jasreel al-Ankara,” said the oldest of the group, a djinn who actually had some streaks of silver in his dark hair. His gaze moved to Julia. “Julia Innes.”