Page 57 of Mistaken

“I am Abdul,” he said simply. “I have no family name, for there is no one who came before me. Or rather, the elders were here, and I was intended to be something between them and the djinn, not quite one or the other. But the One who created me made a rare mistake, and you see how I turned out. In His mercy, I was not cast aside like some botched experiment and instead allowed to live. You may make your own judgment as to whether that was such a mercy after all, considering I was forever other, forever apart from mortal and djinn and elder.”

Was that the glitter of sympathetic tears in her eyes?

“I am so sorry,” she murmured, and he made an impatient gesture.

He did not want her sympathy…and he knew he did not deserve it.

“It is what happened,” he said, knowing his tone sounded far too harsh.

Should he leave it there? She must have felt something for him, or otherwise, he doubted she would have been so ready to offer her compassion, the gift of her generous soul.

He could remain silent, and perhaps that empathy might grow into something more, something that would forever bind her to him.

But as terrible as he knew he was, he also understood he could not do that to her. He would not allow her to remain here under false pretenses, believing he was the wounded party and innocent beyond doing whatever he must to protect his isolation.

“There is more,” he said, and now he knew his voice was a rasp, shards of glass and steel ripping at the words. “There is much more.”

She stared at him, but he noticed how she did not flinch, even now that she knew what his hood concealed. Perhaps he should have left it down, now that he no longer had anything to hide, and yet he could not quite allow himself to do that, to abandon the shield that had protected him from the world for so many millennia.

Before she could reply, he went on, “Do you know, Sarah Wolfe, how the Heat came to be let loose on the world?”

Something of the color in her face left her cheeks then, as if she had somehow begun to guess where this conversation was going, but her voice was steady enough as she replied, “A group of djinn released it. No one knows exactly how it all worked, but that’s what we’ve heard from the elementals in Santa Fe.”

“No,” Abdul said. The time had come, and he knew he had to say this as plainly as he could. “There was no group of djinn. There was only me.”

Now she was dead white, her dark brows and deep sea-green eyes looking like black holes in her paper-hued face. “That isn’t possible.”

“Oh, it is,” he returned. In a way, it felt almost good to speak to her now, to relieve himself of the burden he’d been carrying for so many years. The elders knew the truth of the matter, but no one else. “I will admit the destruction of mankind was not my idea, but rather a conversation held among the djinn for many generations. Then, when it became clear that this world would end in ruin if we did not step in, I realized I had the power to stop humanity. I had the skills required to create a disease that would eliminate the threat forever. And so I went to the elders with the plan, and they spoke to the rest of the djinn, and it was determined that they would go forward with this thing — and that those who objected would be able to save someone from among those who were immune. Because you see, I knew there would be a few survivors, no matter how effective the disease might be. The djinn never knew that only one person was responsible — if asked, they would say some group among them had created the disease and disseminated it among the human population — but none of them would ever be able to identify a single person who had been among that supposed group.”

Time seemed to stretch as Sarah sat there on the couch, staring at him. Her expression was still not one of horror, but rather of utter disbelief, as if her mind would not allow itself to grasp what he was saying.

He supposed that wasn’t so strange. When confronted with such great evil, the natural inclination was to refuse to recognize it, for otherwise, a human’s mind might begin to shatter.

They were so very weak, after all.

Sarah’s fingers tightened on the knees of her jeans. “You hated us so much?”

The question startled him. He hadn’t been sure she’d be able to speak at all, after being confronted by so many terrible truths, but he had assumed the first thing out of her mouth would have been condemnation.

He had earned it.

“I hated no one,” he said calmly, which was also true.

“But…you killed billions of people.”

Again true.

However, he did not mind being slightly pedantic in his response.

“Thediseasekilled billions of people,” he said. “I only created it. But I did so because there was no other way to save this world. You were rushing headlong into disaster with every passing year, and the few solutions you came up with to stop the destruction were half-measures at best and would have changed very little. We djinn had to step in, or there would have been nothing left for us to inherit.”

Her mouth opened, as though to offer some sort of response, but then she shut it again. Perhaps she had realized that any argument she made would have been a foolish one, because only a fool would have disputed what he had just said. Distasteful, of course, to cause so many deaths, and yet he certainly had not thought of another way out, and neither had the elders, or surely they would have arrived at a different solution to their problem.

Instead, Sarah pushed herself up from the couch, said in a small, calm voice, “I think I need to go to my room now,” and then walked away from him and toward the suite he had provided.

He did not try to stop her.

For a moment, Sarah paused at the entrance to theen suitebathroom, feeling her stomach churn and wondering if she was about to throw up. But then it seemed to subside, although she still knew she was queasy and off-balance, wishing with every atom of her being that she hadn’t just heard Abdul’s horrendous revelations.

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