Dragon: Bridge & Sword: The Final War (Bridge & Sword Series Book 9)

by JC Andrijeski

  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.

  I couldn’t, though.

  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, at least, since I had such a stranglehold on my shield I doubted even Balidor could have seen past it. 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?” 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 folded 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, Dalejem 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 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 off my fingers, 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, he 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.

  37

  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 Feigran’s right. You think he’s a part of this. 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 keep it simple, businesslike. 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, gods. But hurry, wife. Please.

  Pain slides through me, worsening in that silence.

  I want to come home, he sends, softer. 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.

  Despite my paranoia, none of those stares 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.

  There was also the Dragon thing.

  I’d been cornered multiple times now. By Chandre and Neela. By Talei, who seemed to have taken what occurred personally 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 those seers 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 the 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 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.

  It looked pretty solid, despite our hurry to put it up.

  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, for obvious reasons, so that took up most of the previous few days.

  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, but most of those discussions were still pretty heated. As a result, I’d decided to wait on having larger, joint strategy meetings until things were a bit more stable between us.

  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, I only really filled them in on the bare bones of the horror show I’d brought them, namely that I’d lost Terian––again––and 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 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.

  I could feel the pall over the group, though.

  I could feel emotion in their lights, even via the virtual-construct space.

  I could feel the whispers of fear and depression about Dragon, about losing Feigran for the fifth or sixth time, 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 the majority of them.

  I didn’t know for sure 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 I strongly suspected the question lingered in at least some of their minds.

  I’d definitely 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 the table, 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 those gasps 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 almost 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 he 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 okay, 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.

  Then again, given that neither of us seemed capable of working with the other one now, or even having a civil conversation, I supposed it didn’t really matter what my reasons were.

  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.

  I didn’t look over.

  My jaw hardened to granite, though.

  I managed to keep my thoughts stripped of emotion when I answered.

  You’ll follow orders, brother.

  We’re going to talk about this, he sent, his light sparking with heat. Today, sister.

  No. We’re not.

  The hell we aren’t––

  I blanked my mind, shutting him out deliberately.

  That time, when I glanced back at the table, I saw Balidor looking at me quizzically. His light gray eyes darted briefly to Dalejem, just enough that I could feel he’d caught some flavor of the undercurrents of our exchange.

  I ignored that, too.

  Folding my arms, I sank deeper in my chair, sipping my crappy coffee as I waited for movie hour to end, my feet planted firmly on the floor.

  Once the recordings finished, I figured the real questions would start.

  They didn’t, though.

  Instead, when the last segment finished and the lights rose slightly around the table, an even heavier silence fell over the room.

  I glanced around
at faces, a little worried that time.

  I caught Jon staring at me, elements of my worry reflected in his hazel eyes. He looked worried about me, though. I didn’t let myself think about why that might be.

  I knew smiling at him wouldn’t go over, so I made a slight gesture of reassurance with one hand along the table, along with a promise we’d talk later.

  I meant it, too––for the most part.

  There was a lot I couldn’t tell him right now. Too much, really, but I knew I needed to connect with him anyway. He’d been in planning meetings with Balidor, Wreg and I over the previous two weeks, as had Kali, Yumi, Tarsi and even Maygar, but I hadn’t gotten a lot of one-on-one time with anyone I was close to, not recently.

  None at all, really, since I’d left for Colorado.

  Not in the past few months, if I was being totally honest with myself.

  I knew some of the bare facts of their lives.

  I knew Jon had started training the humans in sight skills, including my old friends in San Francisco. I knew that, so far, excluding Dante, Jon’s prize pupil was Angeline, one of my old art school and tattooing friends. I knew Sasquatch had displayed an unusual gift in remote viewing, and that Jaden was learning to talk to organic machines.

  I knew Maygar was one of Jon’s main instructors.

  I knew my biological parents, Kali and Uye, were instructors, too.

  I knew Yumi had started to train Jon in that work she did helping seers process traumas and negative emotions, and that Dante was teaching her mother how to hack.

  I knew Balidor had been working with Cass in the tank, similar to what I’d done with Revik back in China. Balidor confessed to me that Yarli had been adamantly opposed to him doing that work before, mostly out of jealousy. Now that he and Yarli were apparently no longer together, he said it just made sense for him to be the one to do it.

  I hadn’t argued. I knew he was the best we had.

  Also, as much as I hated to admit it, a part of me really wanted to believe he might be able to reach her.

  I even knew Maygar and Angeline were dating a little, although I hadn’t asked for details, or even how serious it was. The whole idea blew my mind when I first heard about it; it also made me wonder if Revik had known about that before he left.