Forsaken (The Djinn Wars Book 5) Read Free Page A

for entertaining, or much of anything else.
    Madison closed the shelter’s hatch behind her, making sure it was locked securely. The shelter had all sorts of failsafes in place to guard against radiation, chemical weapons, and biological contaminants, but none of that was really necessary now. There hadn’t been a nuclear attack; no one had rained down sarin gas or weaponized anthrax. That the Heat had been some kind of biological weapon, she was sure, but obviously she was immune, or she would have died more than a year ago along with everyone else she’d ever known or loved.
    Still, she followed all the procedures, locking the outer hatch, double-checking the decontamination filters before she headed into the shelter itself. The electric bike had a charging station just inside the final door, and she plugged it in before heading toward the kitchen. Her mouth was dry, maybe from inhaling too much of that dust.
    Just what the hell had that djinn been up to? The only destructive behavior she’d seen djinn indulge in before had been directed solely at humans. Even now, many months after she’d seen the man who was apparently Albuquerque’s only other survivor meet a violent end at the hands of those otherworldly foes, her sleep still rang with the screams of those who’d been brutally murdered.
    She opened the refrigerator in the kitchen and poured a glass of filtered water from the pitcher she kept in there. The first swallow made her feel a little better, but her heart was still beating hard, far more than the slight exertion necessary to pilot the electric bicycle would have required.
    When exactly had been her last djinn sighting? Sometime in March, she thought. Ever since then, Albuquerque had been a ghost town, and now it was early October. She knew she was the only person left within the city limits, or surely she would have seen at least a hint of another survivor’s presence.
    The only reason she wasn’t dead was the shelter where she now stood. Bunker. Whatever you wanted to call it, the place had been designed to withstand a nearby nuclear blast, chemical warfare, civil unrest, or any other of a long list of additional catastrophes. Madison had no real idea how much the shelter must have cost, but she knew it had to be a lot. Maybe more than a million dollars. One wouldn’t have thought a scientist at a government laboratory could afford that kind of extravagance, but Clay Michaels never had any children or anything much to spend his money on. From the street, his house had looked modest enough…if you didn’t know what was hidden underneath the backyard.
    Madison left the kitchen and headed toward the media room. Cable TV and streaming services were things of the past, vanished along with the world that had created them, but Clay had made sure that the shelter’s media servers were stocked with all sorts of film and television classics, as well as an eclectic assortment of music. In addition, he’d done a credible job of backing up a number of scientific journals and reference texts, along with what appeared to be a data dump from Wikipedia as it had existed right before the Heat wiped out the internet, in addition to databases from a number of noted universities.
    It was from studying those resources that Madison had eventually realized those human-looking but inimical creatures stalking the streets like a squad of angels of death were djinn.
    At first she’d had no real idea what a djinn even was. Genies were something from Aladdin, not men of intense beauty with doom in their eyes. But after entering keywords in a variety of combinations into the shelter’s database, she’d come to the conclusion that these entities had to be djinn. They had control over air, or earth, or fire. Probably water, too, but standing bodies of water were in short supply in Albuquerque. The strange beings could pop into existence from nowhere before they rained death upon any unlucky humans they might find.
    Her research