"Don't be stupid." Leaning down, he kissed my neck. Once he let himself fall into what he was doing, he leaned into me more, putting more of himself into each kiss as he eased his body between my legs. Feeling him starting to get turned on, I laughed.
I pushed at his shoulders when I felt his tongue in my ear.
"I thought you wanted me to get up?" I said. "Coffee, remember?"
"In a minute," he murmured, resting more of his weight on me. "One of us up at a time is probably safer... and I never got to celebrate with my girl post-show last night...”
His fingers slid into my hair, caressing it back from my face, and I shivered suddenly, looking up at him. A pain started in my chest. Without thought, I raised my hand to where it started. As I did, I felt it again, that feeling of presence, wound into a darker nausea in the lower part of my belly. For a moment, it was strong enough that I closed my eyes.
Jaden raised his head.
"What's wrong?" he said, frowning.
"Nothing." I looked up, caressing his face. "I'm probably just hung over."
But I was frowning too, feeling that presence skirt the edges of my awareness. I couldn't wrap my mind around it; it hovered like the faint trace of a scent, like having a name or a flavour at the tip of my tongue. I tried to understand, to pull it closer, but I couldn't.
Jaden kissed me again.
After a pause, I let the other thing go and fell into the kiss, wrapping my arms around his neck. Jaden's hands slid under the t-shirt of his I was wearing, pushing it gently up my body. His kisses deepened as he did it, growing more sensual as he tugged at my underwear.
Briefly, the pain I felt worsened. The presence behind it strengthened, too.
That time, I tried to ignore it.
Jaden sat up long enough to pull his shirt over his head. As he helped me to do the same, the pain slowly began to dwindle, fading further into the background. By the time he started kissing me again, I questioned if it had been there at all.
The tug of presence lingered, but only a little longer. A near-melancholy reached me in that silence; it reminded me again of floating in that golden ocean, that feeling of peace.
Before I could find a name for that, either, the memory slid out of my grasp.
Then the presence was gone, too.
REVIK
ALLIE’S WAR EARLY YEARS
In Memory of Chris Al-Aswad (1979-2010)
Who knew, better than anyone, that there are always moments of clarity
Even in the darkest of times...
ONE
SHE WATCHED HIM, her eyes riveted on the way he moved, the confident, almost heavy gait that still managed to be strangely feline as he walked at the back end of the auditorium. A faint sheen of sweat covered his face and neck, as it did pretty much everyone else in the room, herself included, despite how hard the fans worked in grating, circular motions over their heads.
Kali had been looking for him for months... years.
It was strange to be finally faced with him, and somewhat disconcerting. She was one of the few people alive who knew what he truly was, underneath that expressionless mask.
He seemed young to her still, despite what his life had encompassed already.
He was young, from Kali’s perspective, although she knew he might not feel it, nor would he appreciate her pointing out that fact to his face. Like most male seers, he was likely sensitive about his age. They all were, it seemed, when it came to the opposite sex. Male seers never seemed to get their stride with their sexual confidence until they’d hit the two or three hundred mark, at least, and Kali doubted, somehow, that he would be any different, despite who he was.
Kali used her sight to memorize every line of him, every structure and taste of his light, in the event he managed to lose her again before she got up the nerve to approach him... and before she determined a way to do so without him merely attempting to kill her for her troubles.
At roughly eighty-years-old, he had reached most of his adult height. Tall, even for a seer, like his father... perhaps 6’5” or 6’6”, utilizing human measurements. Despite her perception of his light, he looked old for his age, she noticed... physically, that is. Perhaps it had been the content of those eighty-odd years, but his face had a harder cast than most seers who have lived so long, she thought.
To the humans, he would look perhaps thirty.
Not older than thirty-five.
Not younger than twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
His black hair hung down in a ragged line, partly in his eyes now. Those same eyes shone in the dingy overhead lights, an indiscriminate pale that was almost completely colorless as he continued to case the room. The long hair fit the style of the current human fashion, of course, although he was clean-shaven, unlike many male humans in his rough age-bracket. Since he was blending with and passing as human, however, it didn’t surprise her that he chose to let his hair grow out.
Even so, she couldn’t help noticing that, on him at least, the longer hair still managed to make him look more warlike than the scraggly, softer look of the human ‘hippie’ contingent. Part of that might have been the lack of facial hair, and the hard, almost sharp planes of his face without anything to soften those lines, but Kali suspected that wasn’t all of it.
In the same way, the longer hair somehow made him appear more seer than not. Perhaps it simply contrasted too strongly with those same angular lines of his narrow face.
He wasn’t a handsome man, really.
His features fit together too inharmoniously for that. His large eyes stared, lamp-like from that tanned skin above the high cheekbones and a not-small nose. His narrow mouth formed a firm line above an even more firm and distinctive jaw.
He was attractive though, in his way. The strange silver lights Kali could see obscuring and darkening his aleimi took away from that attractiveness for her, but she knew the intensity of those same lights would undoubtedly have the opposite effect on others.
Even now, she saw the eyes of human females noticing him.
A European reporter did a double-take on his face and then his lean, broad-shouldered body, measuring him with an openly appraising stare. Without seeming to know she’d done it, she wet her lips as she continued to look at him, her pupils dilating slightly as she once more flickered her gaze over him in his worn jeans and leather belt. The thin, black t-shirt he wore stuck to the lean muscles of his chest with sweat, making a dark mark from his neckline to about his sternum.
He wore a jacket, too, despite the suffocating heat, a thin leather sheath which told Kali he had at least one gun strapped to his side, if not more than one.
For his part, he barely seemed to notice the reporter, although Kali saw him return the appraisal in a furtive kind of rote, staring briefly at the human’s bare legs and noting the lack of a bra before he went back to taking the measurements of the room. As his mind returned to work, he slid back into the blank, work-face mask of a trained infiltrator, Kali noticed.
He disappeared inside that mask, and then back into the crowd, too, melting away from her view as he continued his ghost-like walk around the perimeter.
It unnerved her, even without her knowing why he was there, not precisely.
The year was 1974.
Nixon had just resigned as President of the United States in the wake of one of the worst political scandals of the Twentieth Century... at least that didn’t result in out-and-out war, apart from the wars that already raged in Asia. The war in Vietnam continued, seemingly without end, and now the Soviets were involved, too... although the United States had finally diminished their presence on the continent, preferring to throw money at the South Vietnamese army, instead.
Standing at a press conference in downtown Saigon itself, in a basement meeting hall down the street from the famous Caravelle Hotel, Kali felt old suddenly, in a way she hadn’t as long as she’d been alive. She’d finally found him.
The man who would be her unborn daughter’s mate.
&n
bsp; Even with what she knew, Kali found the thought chilling.
HE WENT BY the name Dehgoies Revik now.
In typical seer naming protocol, his given name, Revik, came after his family name.
Within the hierarchy of his current affiliation, however, meaning the group of seers who referred to themselves as ‘The Org,’ and that every other seer on the planet called ‘The Rooks,’ most called him by his family name of Dehgoies. The Org fancied itself a military organization, so adopted some of the less-familiar forms of address and affection, which may have been part of that preference to call him by his family name instead of Revik. Part of it was Dehgoies himself, however, Kali suspected. That military bent of the Org suited both his personality and his background, and thus, Kali suspected he thought of himself as Dehgoies more often than not, too.
He also likely didn’t want anyone getting much closer than using the slightly more formal version of his name implied.
Kali had researched the family, too.
The immediate, biological parents of Deghoies Revik were dead.
Kali learned that Dehgoies Revik himself had since been adopted by a cousin of the father, as well as that cousin’s non-bonded mate and their other two children, Whelen and Golire. The adoption occurred formally, and through the clan families themselves... which Kali knew most probably meant that the Council itself had been involved. They may even had pushed the adoption on the cousin in the first place, to clean up Dehgoies Revik’s clan affiliation issues, and (ostensibly, at least), to give him a new start.
Of course, Kali strongly suspected that the real Dehgoies Revik was dead.
She also strongly suspected that the adoptive family of the new Dehgoies Revik, the one who took their nephew’s place, did not want him.
That had likely been true even before he joined the Org.
Kali wondered how much the new Dehgoies Revik knew or remembered about any of those events or their aftermaths, however. Truthfully, she wondered how much the man she’d just witnessed at that meeting hall in Saigon knew about himself, period. She had detected more than a small amount of bitterness on both sides of that fabricated family line. From looking at the Barrier records, Kali strongly suspected that Revik’s new adoptive father constituted simply another ‘uncle’ in this Dehgoies Revik’s life... another alias and another lie he had to tolerate for the greater good, whether he knew the specific reasons behind that lie or not.
Whatever he knew or didn’t know, the current Dehgoies Revik seemed to sense from the very start that his new ‘family’ only resented his presence. While they didn’t abuse him outright, their silence seemed to speak volumes about their opinions around having been saddled with him and having to add him to the family name.
For the same reason, he did not look to them for anything in terms of emotional support, not even his adoptive siblings, who at least tried to understand him well enough to provide some means of love or connection in his life.
Then again, Kali wasn’t entirely certain that the ‘new’ Dehgoies Revik looked to anyone for those things... not specifically.
It made him strange for a seer.
Or stranger, perhaps.
It also gave her a much-needed reminder of the compassion she might have owed this being, regardless of who he’d let himself become.
Kali walked down the dusty street, ignoring the stares she collected as she made her way back to her own hotel. Most of those stares came from Americans and other foreigners, and not only because she was still in the district of Saigon that had been taken over by journalists, expats, diplomats and military contractors over the years.
A handful of quieter stares originated from Vietnamese pedestrians, too, as well as locals riding by on rickety-looking bicycles or motorcycles that might have been more accurately described as collections of spare parts held together by a ripped up seat, duct tape and handlebars. The occasional bicycle-drawn rickshaw tottered past on rusted, bent rims, as well, but cars remained relatively rare, and most of them looked to be driven by foreigners and the military.
The straw hat Kali wore made it easier to hide her own Asian-splashed features, but she looked too white to escape notice here, even apart from her height, which stretched a good five inches taller than the majority of human, Vietnamese women she had encountered. Her dark brown hair might have helped to camouflage her, too, if not for the fact that it hung in loose curls down her back and contained lighter highlights from the California sun, further calling out that she didn’t belong here, that she wasn’t one of them.
Kali had done her best to minimize the impact of her hair and figure, wearing the same simple dresses with slits up the thigh and clog-like sandals as the locals, but she doubted that helped much, either. Even the way she walked was distinctive, to the extent that she had to remember to walk at least like an American human woman while here, if she couldn’t quite imitate the Vietnamese gait well enough to pass yet.
Her eyes drew stares, too... a light green, they barely allowed her to pass as human, and wouldn’t have, most likely, if the humans here knew more about seers. Combined with her height and her ‘incongruous’ Asian features, she likely would have been marked as seer by anyone who did know much about seer physiological traits... including other seers. Right now, too few ordinary humans outside of China and Tibet knew what to look for in identifying seers from their own populations, however. Too few for this to be a big risk for Kali herself, anyway, at least not yet.
Kali wondered how much longer that would be true, too.
According to her dreams, not for very much longer.
Kali wished at times she didn’t dream so much... or so vividly.
She wished so many of those dreams didn’t come true.
She also wished, in a quieter, more secret part of her mind, that she’d allowed Uye to come with her for this, as he had very much wanted to come.
Uye had remained behind in California, instead, after a fair bit of argument and strong words between them, most of them involving Uye expressing various manifestations of his personal fears for her safety. She and her bonded mate had been living on the west coast of the United States for the past twenty or so years, and remained quite happy and peaceful there. Unlike most places they’d lived in the last one hundred or so years, they were also rarely bothered by the local humans, despite the encroaching communes up the coast, and more and more immigrants from the eastern United States. It remained a part of the country where eccentricities were still honored, even protected, as being private and no one’s business outside of an individual’s own home.
That would change, too, Kali knew.
For now, however, California had been a haven for the two of them.
A quiet one, with beautiful trees, a freshwater stream in the backyard, blue skies on most days, high clouds and temperate weather, green grass, moss and ferns in the redwood forest behind their house, goats and chickens in a small coop and barn. They currently owned a large cabin in the Santa Cruz mountains, in a hillside town about thirty minutes inland from the town of Santa Cruz itself and under some of the quietest lands and most beautiful trees Kali had ever known.
The land remained wild enough still that they could even be relatively self-sufficient, only venturing to town for staples and to poke their heads out for a view into the human world and its doings, including via the occasional newspaper or magazine.
Even at home, they got some limited television, which kept them from losing track of the wider world altogether. Enough to have some eyes into the world, when they were in the mood for that kind of thing, even if they weren’t always attentive to all of the details. Being unable to associate easily with their own kind, she and Uye had been forced to improvise over the years.
Uye had tolerated a lot, really, in deciding to remain with her, Kali knew. She loved him all the more for the fact that he never complained about that fact, although the isolation must weigh on him at times, even within the general peace of their existence overall.
Despite his normally easygoing nature, however, Uye had hated the idea of her coming to Asia alone. She could feel through the connection that they shared that he would have much rather if she hadn’t come at all... much less without him.
Kali suspected that would have been true even if the war had not been taking place.
Truthfully, she suspected the war had very little to do with his misgivings at all.
Uye knew the moment when she began doing the Barrier work to prepare for this visit. He’d helped her as much as he could. He’d researched, read and witnessed almost as much about her quarry as Kali had herself over the years, and most of what he’d found and seen made Uye do his usual thing he did when he was angry, which was grow quiet and bite his lip a lot.
He’d been horrified at the idea of Kali being alone with this young seer, even for an errand such as this, even though both of them knew it to be necessary. He’d been half-convinced Dehgoies might hurt her simply for his own perverse pleasure. Uye hadn’t trusted anything about their daughter’s one-day mate, whatever Dehgoies Revik remembered or did not remember about his own past. Kali strongly suspected that if their daughter had actually been born yet, Uye would have reacted even more strongly. He might have even tried to thwart this direction in her timeline, futile though his actions would likely be.
As it was, Kali could tell Uye was keeping his reactions about their daughter’s very probable future very carefully in the abstract.
What Kali and now Uye knew about Dehgoies Revik could get both of them killed, of course. Kali was so accustomed to living below the radar at this point, she scarcely gave it a thought before coming, but now that struck her as a real risk, too. Saigon was crawling with operatives of the Org. They wouldn’t know anything about Dehgoies either, of course, but they were tapped into a network that knew a great many things, and that might figure out her true identity anyway.
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