Jack and Djinn (The Houri Legends, #1)(47)
Jack woke with a start. He was lying down, his face pressed against a cold, hard, gritty surface. He was shivering, the air around him chilled by silence. He rolled over onto his back, his head throbbing, his eyes crusted shut.
He was outside somehow. He pried his eyes open to see the night sky above him, black shadows of clouds illuminated by a crescent moon. Where was he? Jack struggled to a sitting position and looked around, a string of curses tumbling from his mouth. He was on a rooftop, the flat, gravel-strewn surface of an office building of some sort, twisting barrels of air-conditioning fans sprouting from the roof and cable TV satellites angling at the sky.
He stood up and brushed his knees and elbows free of gravel, picking bits of rock from where they were embedded in his face. He stretched his stiff muscles and went to the edge of the roof, looking for landmarks to indicate his position. The obvious question of how he had gotten there was nagging at him, but he refused to answer it yet. He suspected the truth, but wasn’t ready to face that weirdness just yet.
Dozens of stories below him was an empty street, a few parked cars on the side, yellow lines stretching in either direction. Other office buildings rose up around him as far as he could see, except to the east, where he could just make out the Detroit River, sparkling in the moonlight. He was downtown.
He turned in place, examining the skyline, recognizing a few buildings. It was quite a view, actually, way up here. Jack cursed again and sat down with his back against the half-wall at the building’s edge.
The dream hadn’t been entirely a dream, then, it seemed. Miriam had demonstrated more than once that she possessed some rather unique abilities, but they’d always happened when he was with her. He’d dreamed about her before, but those dreams had been…different. He might have wished they were real, but they hadn’t been. Those dreams were nothing more than lovesick wet dreams. Whatever he had experienced after he passed out in his apartment tonight had been far more. But what, and why?
He pushed aside his obviously mistaken ideas of real versus impossible and tried to reason through this conundrum with an open mind. There was something else. Something nagging and familiar, subtle, and just beneath the surface of the obvious. What was it?
Jack’s mind wandered to the dream that had landed him here, thinking of the stream of glowing dust that had connected him to the dream-Miriam, and he realized with a rush of excitement what it was nagging at him: Beneath the flames, subsumed by the heat and the flickering fire and the glimpses he’d gotten of Miriam’s glorious body, beneath all that was that same golden magic-sand, covering his whole body as if he’d bathed in it, a coating of dust that led from him to Miriam. He’d seen it before, too; once when he’d laid his bike down to avoid hitting her, she’d healed him. He’d been unconscious for most of it, but when he first came to consciousness, he’d cracked his eyelids open to see Miriam facing Ben, her body alight, and trailing from her to him, the skein of golden magic.
Maybe there was a connection between them all the time, present but not always visible? Jack’s eyes popped open, and he looked down at himself, disappointed to see just himself, plain old Jack in ratty, paint-splattered, grease-stained jeans and an Irish Football Association T-shirt. He closed his eyes again, and this time visualized himself as he was at that moment, but with a river of glowing gold stretching out from his body, and he pictured that stream of gold reaching out over the city to wherever Miriam was.
Some instinct in Jack told him she was hurting, needing him. Maybe it wasn’t instinct, maybe it was the connection that bound them, the as-yet unspoken love between them. He summoned the image of her magic again, envisioned it floating across the city to plunge into him, showing him Miriam.
He opened his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief: The skein was there at the center of his chest, stretching out across Detroit, skirting some buildings and spearing through others. He lifted a hand and waved it through the amorphous stream of particles, like sunlit dust floating in an afternoon window; his hand came away coated with it again, as in his dream, and he touched his fingers to his tongue and tasted Miriam.
He saw her again, in his mind. It was disorienting: He saw the city beyond him, a few streetlights flickering, silent streets like a maze, and over that he saw Miriam, still slumped against the car window, the trickle of blood now dried and crusted. Jack saw a male hand on a gearshift, caught glimpses of a neighborhood passing by through the car window. Something told Jack he was seeing Miriam in real time.
Gramps had always told Jack that he had the second sight, too. Perhaps that was the reason he could see the magic now. Jack never wanted to believe in Gramps’ visions of the future. It was freaky and unnatural, and Jack would rather just deal with what he could see and understand. Now, though, with all that had occurred with Miriam, he simply couldn’t pretend everything was totally normal anymore.
He had to find Miriam and help her, and the only way he’d be able to do that was if he allowed himself to believe in the second sight, and that he had it, and that he could use it.
Jack closed his eyes yet again, and focused on Miriam’s face.
Chapter 16
Miriam
Three days earlier
Miriam woke up slowly. First came the sensation of consciousness, accompanied by a wave of confusion, and then the familiar nausea and pain. Her head was throbbing, and she had no idea where she was. The last thing she remembered was getting in Ben’s car, and then…what? She had a vision of Ben’s hand lashing out, something silver in his hand, then nothing. He’d hit her, apparently, and knocked her unconscious.