ALLIE’S WAR SEASON THREE
BOOKS 5-6
by
JC Andrijeski
Copyright © 2014 by JC Andrijeski
Published by White Sun Press
Cover Art & Design by Jennifer Munswami at
J.M. Rising Horse Creations
www.facebook.com/RisingHorseCreations
2015
Ebook Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an official vendor for the work and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
SYNOPSIS
“They said that when the end was near, a Bridge would come…”
Books five and six in the gritty, unique, psychic romance and apocalyptic series, Allie's War, introducing Allie Taylor and her antihero guide, Dehgoies Revik.
In Season Three, we see the gang in New York, and the aftermath of everything Revik and Allie went through in the previous books to be able to work together again. In the process, they are trying to figure out who they really are, both together and separately, while being pursued by a new dark force, Shadow, as well as the Lao Hu in China.
In books Five and Six, Allie and Revik get a chance to work together as real allies and partners, and of course, that pretty much means their enemies are going to come at them that much harder.
Knight: Allie's War Book Five - A new power is rising in the human and seer worlds, and it turns out, they may have shaped history for Allie and everyone she loves.
War: Allie's War Book Six - Allie and Revik find themselves in the middle of the Displacement, in a locked down city and with one of their best friends now a sworn enemy.
Series Summary
The Allie's War series is a psychic romance set in a unique, gritty version of Earth populated by a second race of psychic beings called Seers. Its heroine, Allie Taylor, was marked "The Bridge" from birth, born to be the leader of the Seer race and the bringer of the next stage in humanity's evolution. Unfortunately, to many Seers, that means the death of just about every human on the planet.
She is helped and hindered, awakened and impeded by her antihero partner, Dehgoies Revik, whose on-again-off-again relationship with the dark beings known as the Dreng may destroy them both.
The series takes place in a modern version of our world at the brink of apocalypse and a dystopian future. It spans centuries along with the lives of its main characters, the Seers, and the wars they fight with themselves and their human allies and enemies.
Praise for the Allie’s War Series
“Highly Recommend!” ~ Escape Into A Book
“Word of advice…remember to breathe!” ~ The Cabin Goddess
“The sexual tension is scorching...” ~ The Muses Circle
“[B]eware; you’ll immediately want to dive into the next installment.” ~ The Indie Bookshelf
KNIGHT
Allie’s War Book Five
Dedicated to Garth
Prologue
DAY ONE
SHE WALKED UP to the night shift guard, flashing her badge, gripping the handle of the leather briefcase she carried a little tighter in her other hand. She saw the human glance up from his portable monitor long enough to give her legs a good, hard stare, but not much longer.
Giving her photo a perfunctory glance, he grunted, hitting the large red button on the console beside his chair to let her through, using the edge of one meaty hand. Even then, he noticed more about the way her cream-colored sweater hugged her upper body than he did the miraged piece of plastic she showed him.
The door buzzed, unlocking with a click.
She started to put her hand on the blood prick for the DNA scan, but he waved her off.
"Go on through, doc." His eyes returned to the portable monitor. "Thing's on the fritz."
Sometimes, these worms made it just too easy.
With a toss of her hair and another small smile, she walked through the open gate. Long, organic, sliding glass doors opened in the main building ahead of her, letting in two EMTs with a gurney, one of whom paused to speak with an ER doc who came out to meet an ambulance.
It was four o'clock in the morning.
For most of the hospital, it was the witching hour, eerie in its silence. Wards had only one or two nurses on duty, possibly a tech working several floors at once. Only in the ED, ICU and obstetrics had visitors and patients likely to be waiting through the night, most of the former dozing uncomfortably on wooden-frame chairs or sprawled out on the floor covered in their own jackets and using purses or backpacks as pillows.
The woman in the cream-colored sweater entered through the basement.
The lab lived down there, as did storage, x-rays, durable medical equipment and physical therapy. Comprised of the odds and ends of maintenance and administration, its mostly daytime staff emptied its corridors a good eight hours before. Storage, admin offices, the server room for the hospital's networked computer system, the massive power generators, water heaters, sewage access, air circulation, centralized heat and air conditioning, janitorial supplies, groundskeeping. Still, the floor wasn't totally deserted. The seer in the doctor's white coat raised her badge to several desk clerks as she passed through the dimly-lit corridors. Most barely glanced at it.
No one asked about the briefcase she carried.
Her employers thought through all of the logistics carefully...just as they did everything carefully, with not a single detail or contingency unexamined or unplanned for.
The seer slid her badge through a sensor door lock to the right of one of the heavier, metal maintenance doors. She kept the thoughts light, a feather touch. Even so, a warning ping made its way through the mobile construct.
That warning felt dense, electrically-charged, unambiguous.
The seer stripped her thoughts, leaving only the mechanics of her feet moving one in front of the other as she passed through the anonymous, gray-painted maintenance door. A turn of her head, the brushing back of her long hair, the concentrated putting on of surgical gloves after she removed them carefully from her pockets, blowing on the opening at the wrists...each of these remained discrete, mindless movements that would never add up to a complete picture if she kept her thoughts focused carefully on each one its own right.
Despite the protection the construct afforded her, she couldn't get sloppy. No seers watched the site now, but once the panic started, infiltrators from SCARB and other government agencies would scour every millisecond of the Barrier records before and after the event.
So would the Seven, and the rest of that bitch Bridge's entourage.
Unlocking the vent covering leading to the primary ventilation shaft up from heating and cooling, she set the briefcase at her feet. It took only a few seconds more to get the covering off the shaft, and now she wasn't even watching her own movements. The map for every step she took from this moment forward had already been scripted to her through the construct.
Four, large ventilation covers stood at the corners of the room. Two led to the main shaft down to the air conditioning system, the other two, to the heater housed in the same sub-basement. She didn't think about this...nor did she think about the water distribution system, which took up most of the center of the room, looking oddly anachronistic with its turn-wheel hubs and blue and white painted pipes disappearing into the ceiling, floor and two of the walls.
Once she had the vent cover propped against the wall, she squatted smoothly, set
ting the locked, leather briefcase on the cement floor, the handle facing towards her. The flow of air through the ventilation shaft grew significantly louder without the cover to mute the sound, but white-static hums, clicks and gurgles from the air ducts and the water distribution came from the walls and floors already, so the additional noise barely registered.
Using both a Barrier key and a physical one, she unlocked the lock on the leather briefcase. Inside sat four vials of midnight blue liquid and what looked like a small bottle of hairspray, each lying in a cut-foam indentation matching its size and shape. She took out the hairspray-looking bottle and broke the plastic seal. Instinctively, she held her breath, although she knew her own DNA would render her immune to the deadly agent. Aiming the nozzle directly into the wide ventilation shaft, she squeezed off four healthy sprays.
Replacing the canister in the foam cut-out that matched its shape, she re-attached the ventilation cover and moved to the next.
It was brilliant, really, initiating the contamination before the air reached the scrubbers on the higher floors. They would assume contamination occurred somewhere past the scrubbers, if they made a connection with the mechanics of the hospital at all, and didn't attempt to trace it back to a specific patient or ward. By the time they figured out the scrubbers were useless against the engineered contaminant, it would be too late.
She moved from segment to segment of the room, her mind exuding that softer static. In the foreground, a clutch of song lyrics got caught in a loop in her light. She let them remain, filling up that dead-thought space.
As she spun the handle on the first wheel to open the connecting point to three of the main water pipes, the seer hummed. By the time she closed it, placing the first of the empty vials carefully in a plastic bag and locking it back into the foam indentation at the bottom of the case, she sang aloud, albeit softly and under her breath.
"Never fire and back to earth...
We taste it, feel it, pretend we don't...
The time has come, and their end too...
It comes hard, not soft...
And She does too...
But the wheel has turned, and so've I...
So now we'll all bring the end of times..."
“My heart was broken long ago...
Too far back, the elders know...
The books are dust, the prophets dead...
Our time won’t come before the end..."
1
BANK JOB
HE SAID HE’D never robbed a bank before.
I believed him, but for some reason, it struck me as sort of funny. After all, my husband, Dehgoies Revik, was like, public enemy number one to the humans, in terms of international terrorists. His name and face probably had a place of honor on every law enforcement feed in the United States, as well as those in Europe and South America and wherever else.
The only thing that kept them from coming after us more directly, I suspected, was that a lot of them thought he was dead.
They thought I'd killed him.
"Alyson...jesus."
He pulled away from my fingers, averting his eyes when I gave him a puzzled look. Seeing the hardness come over his features, I retracted my hands and then my arms, fighting not to react to his light sparking and sliding back and forth behind and in front of his shield.
"What?" I said.
I lowered my hands to my sides, open-palmed. I didn't really think about it being a seer gesture until I saw his eyes follow my fingers, a faint smile coming to his lips.
"What did I do?" I said in English.
"Nothing." He looked in the mirror, shaking his head. "You didn't do anything."
I felt my cheeks warm slightly. "Well, I must have done something."
Glancing back, he clicked at me softly, raising an eyebrow. Then he finished doing what I had started to do for him. Hooking the straps of his vest on either side of his ribs with his fingers, he tightened them with two quick pulls, bringing the organic armor flush against his body. I couldn't help noticing he was wearing the ring I'd given him, the one that had once belonged to my human father. He gave both straps an additional test tug before he locked them in place around his ribcage on either side.
"I can't exactly deal with you doing that right now," he said finally, glancing at me again.
"I was dressing you," I said, exasperated. "Not un-dressing you."
His jaw tightened, but he smiled a little when he glanced back at the mirror.
"Funny."
His eyes remained on the mirror when he pulled a black shoulder holster over the armor, donning it like another vest. I watched as he velcroed that in place as well. Glancing back, he looked over my similar outfit, and handed me a few more 9mm magazines off the metal shelf.
"Do you have a coat?" he said.
I patted the one I'd laid on the metal table behind him. "It's armored. Just like you said."
He nodded, but I saw a faint worry in his eyes. It vanished in a matter of seconds, and I smiled, seeing a different expression flicker across his features. He bounced on his heels slightly, but I wondered if he even knew he was doing it. My smile stole a bit wider when I saw him going through another pile of ammunition, his eyes concentrated.
I'd never met anyone who enjoyed field ops as much as he did...not even his first lieutenant, Wreg, another career military infiltrator. I'd seen that when Revik was Syrimne, living in those mountains with the rebels, but if anything, it was more obvious now. As Syrimne, he'd been hiding in a sense, behind a wall of light that wasn't really his own, playing at being the military commander without really showing a lot of himself in the role.
Now that I could read his subtler expressions again, he looked taut as a bowstring to me, despite the carefully neutral mask he wore. It wasn't fear. His light felt focused, concentrated...at least when he kept it away from mine.
More than that, he felt like he knew who he was.
The fact that it was just the two of us seemed to have heightened that reaction somewhat. Either that, or he'd been even more stir-crazy than I'd realized, being locked indoors and under observation for longer than his type-A with a capital "A" personality could handle. I could see the gears turning in his head as he went over all the things that might change en route or go wrong once we were on the clock. He looked charged, though, almost happy, despite our odd little back and forths that still seemed to happen whenever we were alone.
Seeing him like that, so open and so himself, made it really, really hard not to touch him. But I'd been having that problem for weeks now.
We were in the storage room under a seer-run, five-star hotel in Manhattan called The House on the Hill. It had been named after the Old House on the Hill in Seertown, India, of course, but most humans thought it got its name from its location at the top of Fifth Avenue and its already famous, panoramic view of Central Park. Then again, most humans didn't know the hotel was owned and operated wholly by seers, more than half of them living off the grid.
The House on the Hill had become our base in the past months, and while I was pretty comfortable here by now, it still struck me as a strange place to hide, even when trying to hide in plain sight, like we were now.
Revik muttered, "He's going to blame me, you know."
I looked over at him.
"Who?"
He rolled his eyes in exaggerated seer fashion. "Who do you think?"
"Balidor?" Thinking about this, I snorted, shaking my head. "No, he won't. In fact...not hardly. They already think I'm corrupting you."
"Corrupting me?" Revik turned over my words, his face holding an unfeigned surprise, even as the German accent grew more prominent again. "What does that mean? Who does?"
Shrugging, I gestured vaguely with a hand, stuffing the magazines he handed me into a zippered pocket on the vest I wore.
"...All of them."
"All of who?"
I sighed, touching his arm before I'd thought about what I was doing. I took my hand away when I felt him flinch.
> "They all do. 'Dori. Vash. Wreg even gave me a 'talking to' the other day..."
"Wreg did? About what?" Revik was still glancing up at me periodically, even as he pulled out another gun, checking the clip and then the chamber. I recognized the gun that time; it was one of his desert eagles. So he must have brought that one down with him from his room. When I didn't answer him right away, he nudged me with his shoulder, playfully that time, but with enough behind it that I knew he wanted my answer.
"...Allie?"
I sighed, tightening the band holding my hair back before I let my hands flop back to my sides. "Both Wreg and 'Dori told me to lay off you," I admitted. "They think I'm taking advantage...that you're too vulnerable to me right now. Only with Wreg, I'm not sure what he was telling me to do. If he was telling me to leave you alone, or to do something else..."
Revik continued to look at me for a moment, then glanced down at the gun he still held in one hand. Pushing the safety into place with his thumb, he flipped it around with his fingers and passed it to me, handle-first. He watched me slide it into a thigh-holster. I saw his eyes still running over my appearance, looking for gaps, things I'd forgotten, or maybe just giving himself space to think. Realizing I was watching him look, he glanced away, frowning a little as he looked over the small arms table again.
Grunting softly in belated amusement, he slid an arm into the long coat he'd brought, flipping it around his back once he had his other arm hooked in the opposite sleeve. He pulled it over his chest to cover the armor and the holster.
Allie's War Season Three Page 1