“How long have there been djinn?” she asked abruptly, setting down her fork.
He hadn’t been expecting that line of inquiry, but he supposed it was harmless enough. “Since before man,” he replied.
“So there were djinn while we were still running around looking like apes?”
When she put it that way…. “In a sense, yes.”
Now Amber frowned. Her fingers were wrapped around the stem of her wine glass, but she hadn’t yet lifted it to take a drink. Gaze fixed on him, she said, “What do you mean, ‘in a sense’?”
He held back a sigh — it was a question that required a complex answer, and he was not sure even he could correctly articulate what had occurred so long ago. Still, he thought he should make the attempt and replied, “You evolved from those creatures, but you were not yet what anyone could
