At last she said, “And if I lose?”
“Then you’ll stay here with me.”
She didn’t blink. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“What do you think it means?”
A long silence. Her eyes scanned his face, at last flaring wider with a sort of wary shock. “Do you mean humans and djinn…?” And she stopped there, looking awkward for the first time since he’d met her.
“Yes,” he replied simply.
“Jesus.” Another pause, and then she asked, “Then why kill us?”
A good question, one he wasn’t sure he could answer adequately. Djinn had widely varying opinions of the human race, although a good many of them believed mortals were a scourge on the planet that should be eliminated, a belief that had led to the development of the deadly fever that killed so many of them. He hadn’t subscribed to that belief, but un
