Page 52 of Mistaken

Of course, he could not allow her to know anything of what he had been thinking. No, she must only believe that he was pleased with the work she had done this morning but was now perfectly content to stop and have lunch, and then go for an afternoon ride.

If he could continue to make her think she was of very little consequence to him, then perhaps she would never be frightened away by the force of his desire.

Both men looked bruised and haggard, José Padilla with his ankle in a cast and Shawn Gutierrez with his left arm in a sling. Miles and Brent had picked them up at the mile marker they’d indicated, then brought them back to Los Alamos. Despite his injuries, Shawn had been upset about having to leave his truck behind; Brent had taken a look under the hood, determined the cause of the problem was a blown fuel injection system, and promised to get it fixed once he was able to find the parts and have the truck towed to a garage in Española that they’d been using as a satellite motor pool location.

Now they were all sitting in the conference room at City Hall, where they’d been joined by Nora Almeida. With the entire town council in the room, Lindsay hoped they’d be able to get some answers as to what exactly had happened to the two men.

“We’re not sure what it was,” Shawn said. “We didn’t really see anything.”

“Nothing at all?” Miles replied, voice sharp. “How could you be dropped some fifteen miles from where you started without being able to see a single bit of what was happening to you?”

José made an impatient gesture. “There was this crazy wind that came out of nowhere. I mean, the weather had been rough that afternoon, lots of thunder and rain, but things kind of died down after sunset. But then we heard some kind of weird popping sound — ”

“That we think was probably the truck getting zapped out of there,” Shawn cut in, and the other man gave him an annoyed look.

“Yeah, maybe it was the truck. Anyway, the next thing we knew, this wind came along and blew down the tent, and then somehow it got wrapped around us and we were flying through the air — ”

“You wereflying?” Lindsay asked. Maybe it had been rude to interrupt José like that, but she was having a hard time believing any of this.

Shawn started to shrug, then winced, remembering too late the arm that had just recently been popped back into its socket, thanks to the first aid delivered by Ellen O’Dell, Los Alamos’ resident nurse practitioner. “Well, maybe ‘hurtling’ is a better word. It’s not like we were controlling any of it. But something wrapped that tent around us and then basically threw us fifteen miles.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Miles’s eyes met hers, and Lindsay gave a very small shake of her head.

None of this made any sense. She knew that djinn could do some crazy stuff, but she’d never heard of any of them pulling a stunt like this one.

Then again, they weren’t necessarily dealing with your regular garden-variety djinn here. If the elders were the ones who’d drop-kicked Shawn and José some fifteen miles or so, then Lindsay supposed all bets were off…even as she really didn’t want to consider the implications of the elders acting in such an openly hostile manner

Nora’s plump, friendly features were troubled. “I understand why you thought you needed to try again to find Sarah,” she said. “But after what happened last night, I don’t think we can risk it anymore. Who’s to say what might happen if we keep sending people to rescue her?”

Not anything that Lindsay wanted to contemplate. Everything she’d heard about the djinn elders seemed to indicate they were a calm, measured group whose biggest failing was standing back and choosing not to interfere even when a lot of the people involved might have preferred a little assistance. For them to do something as crazy as bundling José and Shawn up in a tent and then tossing them more than a dozen miles seemed very out of character.

On the other hand, if there was one thing she’d learned about the djinn over the years, it was that they were full of surprises.

“We’re not going to keep sending people,” Miles said, his voice flat. Although he much preferred to let everyone on the town council have an equal say in the decisions they made, there had been several occasions when he’d used his position as first among equals — as the man who’d created the invention that had kept them all alive for so long — to lay down the law.

“Whatever’s going on with Sarah Wolfe, she’s going to have to rescue herself.”

Chapter16

Even though Sarahhad only been at Abdul’s house for three days now, they’d already fallen into a sort of routine. Practice in the morning — maybe extending into the afternoon, depending on how she felt about where her voice was that particular day — and then some kind of outdoor excursion, whether a trail ride like this one, or their exploration of the labyrinth the day before.

Today, a strange lightness had settled over her, as if some part of her recognized that nothing about this was going to change and she might as well make the best of it. Not that doing so was terribly difficult, considering the way her djinn captor had done everything he could to make her stay here as comfortable as possible.

And she’d sungPhantomagain. True, the easier of Christine’s solo pieces — she still didn’t know for sure whether she would be able to get through “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” without at least choking up, let alone sobbing outright — but still, that was a massive mental hurdle she hadn’t believed she’d ever be able to clear.

With Abdul’s help, though, she’d made her way through “Think of Me,” had even been able to summon the detachment to identify the problematic passages and run through them again and again until she was able to sing them to her usual perfecting standards.

That was a leap she couldn’t ignore…and she doubted she would have ever gotten there if it hadn’t been for Abdul’s support.

Today there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky, so she didn’t think they’d have a repeat of the afternoon before, when pouring rain had chased them out of the labyrinth. In a way, Sarah was a little sorry about that. Somewhere deep down, she knew she wouldn’t mind if he took her by the hand again…or even did a little more than that.

But he’d been all business the entire time, so she understood he would only be her accompanist and cheerleader, and she had to be okay with that. If he’d cared about having a human partner, a Chosen, then he would have selected someone way back when the decision was made to inflict the Heat on the world, and he would have joined the other conscientious objectors in Santa Fe or one of the other djinn/Chosen communities scattered around the globe.

She told herself it was fine. In a lot of ways, this was a dream existence for her — no unending mindless work, the ability to practice as much as she liked and to spend the rest of her days out in nature or reading or whatever else seemed to be the best use of her time at any particular moment.

Even though she knew she was content…for now…she couldn’t quite stop herself from wondering why no one from Los Alamos had ever come looking for her.

It seemed his removal of the two interlopers from the campground at Abiquiu Lake had done the job, because the days that followed were quiet, with no sign that anyone else from Los Alamos intended to come sniffing around, looking for their lost explorer.

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