Day of the Djinn Warriors by P. B. Kerr Page A

like they’ve all been hiding from something in here.”
    John tried to get out of the way of these panicking ghosts, but there was no time. One of them, frantic to get out of the boathouse, ran straight through John, so that for a brief moment he was running for his life, too, which was a horrible sensation, and he heard himself cry out to Mr. Rakshasas. At the same time he had a blinding flash of the horror — the
horror
that this other ghostly being had suffered before its death 350-odd years before, and the misery it had endured ever since.
    The first time this happened it lasted only a moment. The second time it happened, it seemed to last forever….
    He was running through the damp forest for his life. The early morning spring air of the Hudson River valley was thick with the smell of gunpowder, wet underbrush, and the whoops of warlike Mohican Indians who had come upon the little party of Dutch fur-trappers out of nowhere. The Indians’ weapons were crude but effective: war clubs, bows and arrows, and tomahawks. Some of his party had fired their flintlock guns, but for most of them there had simply been no time, and insufficient distance to get off a shot. And now he himself was sprinting for his life although inwhich direction, he had no idea. The important thing was just to get away. To escape. To get far enough away from the Mohicans so that he could hide and then, under cover of darkness, find his way back to the fort again. His being just a boy would count for very little with the Mohicans. He ducked quickly under a tree branch and leaped over a small stream. Momentarily, he lost his footing and fell, but let himself roll on his back several times as he hit the ground, crashing down a steep slope, regaining his feet at speed, and then hurdling a fallen log with the agility of a running fox. Something hit the log behind him and he heard the shrieking, birdlike war cry of an Indian in close pursuit, letting the others know where he was and to come and help chase down the “white eyes.” They were closing in on him and all he could think about was the date. The twelfth of May, 1640. It was his fifteenth birthday. Would he ever have another? Would he ever see his mother in Amsterdam again? Crashing through some bushes, he found himself at the steaming bank of the great Hudson River. There was no point in trying to cross the glassy smooth water. It was much too wide. Besides, he couldn’t swim. Which way to run? Upriver or downriver? In the mud of the riverbank, he slipped, crawled under a bush, waded through some water, and then ran around the trunk of a thick tree straight into the outstretched, muscular arms of a large, painted Mohican. The strong-smelling Indian grabbed him by the wrist, grinning a wolfish smile made whiter by the black daub that covered the whole of his shaven head, and then clubbed him on the head with a pieceof brightly colored wood shaped like a pistol, which left him lying stunned on the ground. Looking up at the treetops, the half-naked Indian let out a series of triumphant piercing cries, and dragged him up the riverbank like a sack of potatoes, where he tied the seated boy quickly to a tall fir tree with thin strips of animal hide. Other Mohicans quickly arrived, howling loudly like a pack of excited timber wolves, their heads painted black like his captor, so that these almost seemed to have been stuck on the wrong bodies by some playful child. One of the Indians lit a fire. Another found a hollow log and started to beat on it rhythmically like a drum and to chant a tuneless song. Sensing the extreme desperation of his situation, he looked up at the blue, cloudless sky and began to say his prayers….

CHAPTER 8

WEDNESDAY’S ANGEL
    T hey had flown by whirlwind to a field outside Malpensa, which is located in the heel of the boot that is the map of Italy. And once there, using an ambulance that Nimrod had created using djinn power and with which they hoped to remove Faustina’s