Panting, that hot water still beating down on my head, I tried to block it out of my mind. Pain wound into my light, behind the shield I still wrapped around myself as I sat on the dirty tile floor. I fought back every emotion I could, everything that wanted to boil up to the surface, to touch me in any way.
He hadn’t kissed me…maybe he couldn’t because of the mask, but his eyes grew soft at the end. I’d seen stars in his light, that denser blackness.
As he left with Feigran, he spoke to Dalejem, not me.
“Don’t worry, brother,” he’d said. “You’ll get your turn.”
Dalejem hadn’t answered him, but I’d felt his anger, a deeper helplessness that touched me if only because I felt the genuine emotion behind it.
I tried to force that out of my mind, too.
I knew Dalejem had watched Dragon fuck me.
I knew he’d seen me lose control.
I had no idea how it had looked to him from the outside…or what he’d felt from me. I hadn’t felt judgment on him; I hadn’t felt anything on him, truthfully, not about that. But like Balidor, Dalejem was Adhipan trained. I doubted I would know what he felt, not unless he chose to tell me. So far, he hadn’t.
He hadn’t said anything about it at all…directly, at least.
Instead he’d argued with me about operational priorities around Brooks. He’d informed me that I needed to see a medical technician before I met with her. He’d argued those two things for half of the drive back to that farmhouse…he’d also argued that I had to contact Balidor right away and let him know what happened, and I could tell he didn’t only mean that we had a rogue telekinetic on the loose. When I disagreed, he told me I was in shock.
When I argued the same could be true of him, he told me he didn’t matter…that I was the one who’d been hurt.
That was the closest he came to acknowledging what happened to me, directly at least. Although he’d obviously had zero qualms about telling the others.
Wincing, I tried to force that out of my mind, too.
I couldn’t, though, not at first.
Knowing he’d probably told them for operational reasons didn’t help; nor did it remove the feeling of betrayal I’d felt when I came out of that farmhouse and realized they’d all been talking about me. Dalejem and I may have fought, but I honestly hadn’t thought he actively disliked me until that moment. Since the op in NORAD, I’d reassessed that impression, leaning towards the operational thing again, but truthfully, I had no idea what he was thinking.
I hadn’t known how to ask him that either, or even if I should.
Either way, I didn’t want to talk about the thing with Dragon with any of them. I honestly didn’t see the point. I barely remembered the act itself. I had no idea why he’d done it, or what he wanted from me. Whatever he’d done to my light, I couldn’t explain my reaction to any of them. I wasn’t the kind of person who felt like talking solved much anyway.
Besides, there was only one person I really wanted to talk to…and he was the one person I couldn’t talk to right then.
But I couldn’t start thinking about Revik again.
I had to get out of there. I’d been lying on that floor too long already. The thought of having someone find me like this, sprawled out naked in the showers, got me moving again.
When I pulled myself up off the tile the second time, the pain in my leg shot up to my back. I ignored it, fighting myself upright in another burst of effort and straining arm muscles, my light halfway out of my body as I struggled to control my mind.
For a long moment, I didn’t think I’d be able to do it.
I could feel the part of me trying to run away.
I could feel the part of me that would do anything…anything…to get away from this.
But I couldn’t…I knew that, too.
Hurry, Allie… The words echoed there, hurting me. Hurry, baby…please…
I stood outside his door for longer than I should have.
A lot longer maybe, given that anyone could have walked down that hall. Anyone could have seen me there…with their eyes, I mean, since I had such a stranglehold on my shield I doubted even Balidor could have seen past it at that point. I continued to grip that shield obsessively, mostly so the person inside wouldn’t know I was there.
Well, not until I’d decided whether to knock.
I did knock though. Eventually.
Rapping hard on the door with my bruised knuckles, I dropped my cloak just enough that he’d know who it was, even as I slid a more military-esque flavor into my aleimi.
His absent summons told me he wasn’t asleep at least.
In that bare second before I reached for the door handle, I honestly wasn’t sure if that relieved me or not.
Swinging the door inward, I walked in without speaking only to stop short, startled to find him in bed. His mattress didn’t look much better than mine. It definitely appeared to sink too low where he sat up near his pillow, his back against the bent wooden backboard that leaned on the wall. He wore a dark green T-shirt that might have been military issue but that I suspected wasn’t. For the first time I noticed he had a tattoo on his arm, of the Sword and Sun.
Of course he did.
Feeling my jaw clench slightly, I returned my gaze to his face, only to find him staring at me with his green, violet-ringed eyes.
They shocked me a little, after the duller contacts.
“Esteemed Bridge?” Dalejem said. He kept his voice carefully polite, verging on businesslike. “Can I help you? I was about to turn in.”
I averted my gaze, making an awkward sound.
It was maybe supposed to convey humor, but if so, it didn’t quite come off.
“Yeah,” I said, folding my arms even more awkwardly before I realized that was weird and dropped them back to my sides. “…I’m not surprised. About the turning in, I mean.”
When I glanced over that time, he was watching me, the scrutiny in his emerald eyes close to overt. I saw him hesitate, as if about to say something, then thinking better of it.
He waited.
Rubbing my face with a hand, I massaged my bare arm next, conscious of the thinness of the white shirt I wore. I fought with whether or how to ask him, trying to remember if there was some formal way I’d never used.
It never occurred to me to whip out the consort stuff, and probably wouldn’t have, even before it crossed my mind that he might be insulted.
Fighting back and forth for a few seconds more, I finally exhaled in a sigh, then reached for the front of my shirt and began unfastening the buttons. I didn’t do that in a particularly seductive way either. I couldn’t even really look at him until I was about halfway done.
When I did glance up, I tensed, stopping.
He was staring at me.
To say his expression was…shocked, to say the least, might not do it justice. He looked like he was having a borderline panic-fear reaction.
It struck me suddenly that maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe I’d made a big mistake.
When I paused, his eyes flickered up, meeting mine.
That shock gradually bled into something else as I watched, something I didn’t even know how to identify at first.
Then his light exuded fury.
Cold, unbridled fury.
“Get the fuck out of here,” he said. “Now, Esteemed Bridge.”
His voice was low, but I couldn’t mistake the emotion in his words. I felt the anger, but something else lived there, too. I realized in a kind of shock he was on the verge of tears.
When I didn’t move, that fury turned hotter in his eyes.
“Get the fuck out!” He pointed at the door. “Now, goddamn it!”
Before I could move, or even tear my eyes off his face, Dalejem had thrown back the covers. Then he was on his feet, walking towards me with fast, purposeful strides, that threat and fury and violence seething off his light. I couldn’t help but notice he was nothing but lean muscle, wearing only the green shirt and black
boxer briefs. I flinched when he caught hold of my arm, stepping back in alarm, but he only gripped me harder.
I wasn’t really afraid of him.
Even so, the intensity there completely blanked my mind.
I was still staring at his eyes, at the near-tears I saw there, the emotion that bled off his light as he refused to meet my gaze.
He didn’t look at my face at all but continued to walk as he held my arm, steering me roughly towards the door. Bending down when we reached it, he grabbed the handle in his free hand. Without so much as a glance at me, twisted it and yanked the door away from the frame. Before I could take a breath, he’d already shoved me roughly through the opening.
I stumbled, losing my balance. I nearly fell against the wall.
I doubt he saw that, though.
He was already closing the door.
I just stood there in the corridor, half bent over, my shirt half-undone, breathing hard, adrenaline spinning through my veins…as the door slammed in my face.
I was still standing there when he flipped the lock.
20
WHO’S NEXT
Something’s happened. You need to get out of there, baby––
I know, he sends softly. Dragon.
The silence deepens.
I fight to keep the rest from my light, not wanting to know if he knows. I am distracted though, pulled by other thoughts shifting and twisting in the higher areas of his light. I feel something there, something that grits my teeth, but in a different way that time.
Gods, I send. You think he’s a part of this, too. What they did to you, the trigger––
We can’t talk about this. Not even like this.
A more laden silence falls between us, a held breath.
I think you’re probably right, he sends then.
Feeling the flavor of his light, I exhale in that high place.
Chandre?
Yes. The word falls away, a whisper the silence stretches. Baby, is that why? Is that why you kissed her?
Yes.
I feel heat on him, more pain than I can stand. It slides out of his control and I draw back, fighting to control my own light, to remain in that place.
Allie…the other thing…
I’m working on that. I’m working on it, okay? It’s not easy. I fight to keep the rest from him, to pull it back. There’ve been…complications. I can’t use the person we’d originally planned.
Confusion, then alarm whispers through his light.
Why not?
I’ll figure it out. Don’t worry about it, Revik, I’ll figure it out…
The silence lengthens.
I know it’s hard, he sends, softer. I know it is, but hurry, wife…please.
Pain slides through me, worsening in that silence.
I want to come home, he sends. I want to come home…
I fought my mind back on line, rubbing my eyes with my fingers.
I sat at the head of a long table, in a dimly lit conference room at Langley. I could feel eyes on me, but I’d been feeling that for days now. Even so, it was difficult to ignore the stares I felt flicking on and off in my direction. Most of those stares came from my own people, of course…meaning those I’d come here with from Mumbai and then Denver.
And yeah, despite my paranoia, none of them were really a cause for concern.
I knew they weren’t reacting to anything that mattered. It was more that they could feel the other thing, meaning the lingering tension in the construct we all shared.
And there was the Dragon thing of course. I’d been cornered multiple times now. By Chandre…Neela…Talei, who seemed to have taken what occurred more personally than anyone else for some reason. Jorag even tried to talk to me. His sheer incompetence in the trying touched me as much as anything any of the others said.
I didn’t want to know how many in our other camps knew by now.
Some of them were in the room now, meaning hooked into our construct via the virtual link. Luckily, most of them were pretty distracted at the moment.
Too distracted to notice any tension on our end, or to give me those well-meaning but cloying concerned looks I still seemed to be getting from most of the infiltrators currently sitting physically at the table with me at Langley.
Leaning back in my chair, I assessed the virtual space with my light, occupying my mind by looking for holes in the construct we’d thrown together in order to have this meeting at all. The construct itself appeared to be pretty solid. We’d piggybacked on an old Langley construct that was still being maintained by local CIA seers––which helped––but I’d needed it broken off and protected from the main intelligence complex, too, for obvious reasons.
I still hadn’t figured out how or if we could loop Brooks into some element of these discussions. I’d been meeting with her privately, of course, and some of those got pretty heated. But to say our alliance was “tentative” at this point would be generous.
I especially didn’t know how to include her in terms of the main subject matter of this meeting…which was some combination of what the hell do we do about Dragon and how the hell do we go about hunting the rest of Shadow’s network seers.
I’d pulled Balidor in to help with the construct end of things.
I wanted him to help me run the meeting too, along with Jon and Wreg and a handful of others who happened to be halfway across the world right then. They’d already been briefed. Initially only on the bare bones of the horror show I’d brought them, namely that I’d lost Terian…again…and that I’d unleashed a highly trained murderous telekinetic onto the world who’d already taken it upon himself to attack a human military complex.
Now a few of them knew more than that.
I wasn’t sure how few, but I’d been explicit this time at least about asking people to keep some of the more graphic details to themselves.
To their credit, it was all so off-the-charts bad, no one bothered to state the obvious around that, or lecture me about my own stupidity in letting Dragon out in the first place.
But yeah, I could feel the pall over the group.
I could feel emotion in their lights, even via the virtual-slash-construct space.
I could feel the whispering layers of fear and depression about Dragon, about losing Feigran for the fifth or sixth time, and about so much human death…in addition to most of them still reeling from having lost Revik. I think Revik was still the big thing with most of them, honestly. I didn’t know if they blamed me for that too, but some part of me felt like they did. Maybe they didn’t even know they blamed me…but yeah, I strongly suspected the question lingered there, in some of their minds at least.
Either way, I’d managed to crash any superficial hope they might have harbored around the whole “well, at least it couldn’t get any worse” thing.
Needless to say, no one dared to say that now. Not aloud at least.
I glanced around at a few faces, watching Jon, Balidor, Neela, Jax, Wreg, Anale, Chinja, Yumi, Holo and Maygar stare up at the images on the screen as we showed them recordings of what happened at the NORAD complex. It was strange seeing them sitting around the table in the VR-enhanced space; I had to remind myself they weren’t really there. I could feel their lights, strongly in a few cases, so it wasn’t always easy.
I couldn’t feel where they were, though, which was all that mattered.
Gasps left some of them here and there, especially when we showed them the footage from the main gates of the complex. Some of them were from how much Dragon looked like Revik. Some were from what they actually saw him doing. Glancing up at those same images, I found it hard to believe we’d left Colorado two weeks earlier.
In some ways it felt like it had been a lot longer than that, decades maybe; in others, it felt like we left yesterday.
I felt eyes on me again. Hard, insistent.
Feeling from what part of the table that stare originated, I didn’t look over.
I felt my skin warm though, which was a
lmost worse.
At least I knew I wouldn’t be getting concerned looks from him.
I’d made sure Dalejem and I weren’t alone in the same room since that night I’d showed up at his door. For the most part, it hadn’t been difficult. That first week or so he’d seemed to be avoiding me too; the few times we’d been forced to interact, it had been easy enough to sidestep all but the most impersonal types of exchanges.
I was deep in meetings with Balidor and Wreg for the vast majority of those two weeks anyway, so I didn’t see much of anyone apart from that, not before we finally came to a few key decisions. At that point, I crashed, sleeping for almost twenty hours straight.
Now we were here.
Today, however, he seemed determined to communicate…something…to me.
I had no idea what his deal was, but I was getting ready to do something really fucking childish, like maybe throw my mug of crappy instant coffee at his head.
Or maybe send him back to Asia.
More and more, that was feeling like a really good idea.
I knew it was my fault.
I mean…clearly…I’d caused this problem.
And yeah, maybe Dalejem hadn’t handled it all that well, but that was besides the point. I’d done this. I could own that and still think I should send him back to my parents and Balidor. If he still wanted to do something for Revik, he could help protect our daughter.
I told myself it was a practical decision, even though I knew it wasn’t, not entirely. But given that neither of us seemed to be capable of working with the other one now, or even having a civil conversation…I supposed it didn’t really matter.
The practical thing existed, whether it was my primary motive or not.
I’d have to find someone else though.
Contemplating that was harder.
I’m not going back to fucking Asia, a voice muttered in my head. Not unless I bring you with me…so you can just forget that whole idea, Esteemed Bridge…
Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine Page 39