djinn wars 01 - chosen by Christine Pope Read Free Book Online Page B

now I finally had someone I could ask it of. “Dad…why isn’t anyone helping? Why are we being left to deal with this alone?”
    A long pause, during which he stared down at his glass of water without meeting my eyes. When he did look up, I almost wished I hadn’t been watching him, waiting for his response. Never in my life had I seen such an expression of despair on my father’s face. Despair…and fury.
    “Because there’s no one to help, Jess. What’s happening here in Albuquerque — it’s happening everywhere. New York. Los Angeles. Washington, D.C. and London and Moscow and — everywhere.” His hands, his big, strong, capable hands, now somehow looked limp and broken as they rested on the counter. “There’s no answer at the CDC. Tried calling in the National Guard for help, and nothing. The only good thing about the whole situation is that people are getting sick so quickly, they don’t have time to get into trouble. The fever makes them incapable of violence, of looting. Most collapse where they stand. That’s why I said that Devin was lucky — you got him into bed, and he’s sleeping. The fever doesn’t have him hallucinating and having convulsions or seizures, like I saw happen with some people today.”
    “So…that’s it?” I whispered. “We all just sit back and wait to die?”
    He scrubbed his hand over his face and glanced away from me. “I don’t know. There’s no way to treat this thing. Either you get it, or you don’t. Or rather, I have yet to see anyone who hasn’t caught it, but…you’re not sick.”
    “Yet,” I said flatly, then drank some water.
    “Usually, you’d be sick by now, since you’ve been around infected people.”
    “You’re not sick, either,” I pointed out, and he gave a grim nod.
    “I keep expecting to be, but….” Deliberately, he picked up his glass and drained the water. “I don’t know. It’s possible we could have a hereditary immunity. I just don’t know.” His fingers tightened on the glass, and for a second I thought he was going to pick it up and hurl it at the wall, do something to express the frustrated anger I saw in his eyes. Instead, he let go of it and pushed it away. “The problem is, I don’t know anything.”
    Neither did I, except that I didn’t feel sick, and my father didn’t appear to have any symptoms, either. Maybe there really was something to that notion of hereditary immunity. In looks and build, I favored my mother, with my almost-black hair and dark eyes, traits she claimed came from a great-great-grandmother who was full-blood Ute, while Devin and my father were more alike, hair still dark but not as inky as mine, their eyes a lighter, warmer brown. So why my father and I were the ones with no symptoms, I couldn’t begin to guess. Obviously, appearance didn’t have much to do with this particular quirk of heredity.
    “I don’t know anything, either,” I said. “But I guess I’ll start with checking on Devin.”
    “And I’ll look in on your mother.” My father got up from his stool, and I followed suit.
    Once I was upstairs, I could tell there hadn’t been any real change with my brother. He didn’t even seem to have moved, but still lay there with one arm flopped over the side of his bed, eyes tightly shut. In fact, he was so still that I went over and laid two fingers against his throat, worried that I wouldn’t feel a pulse. It was there, but thready and fast, which couldn’t be a good sign. His hair, cropped short for football season, was damp with sweat.
    Something about that thought, the realization that he should be off at football practice right now instead of lying here, fighting a disease so mysterious and strange that it didn’t even have a formal name, made the anger rise up in me again. This shouldn’t be happening. He should be with his teammates, getting sweaty because his coach had made him do a hundred push-ups for being a smart-ass yet again. And an hour from now, we should all