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

by JC Andrijeski

  A shot rang out in the cold air. Clear. Loud in the morning quiet.

  Revik turned his head––

  ––and saw the girl crumple to the grass.

  The tattooed seer holstered the gun, still no expression on his high-cheekboned face.

  So simple. So completely fucking simple.

  Revik stared down at the grass, his heart beating so hard it hurt his chest. Her feet were bare. He’d known that, but seeing those small soles, the pale, pinkish bottoms, made his mind stutter, try to phase out. One leg stretched out straight, the other bent at a graceful angle, her hands open to tilt small palms up to the sky.

  Something in his mind shut off in those few seconds of silence.

  Then the silence ended.

  Charlie screamed. “NOOO! NOOOO! Murderers! Murderers!”

  She screamed, a deafening shriek, her voice a long wail of shocked grief.

  Revik just knelt there, feeling some part of him break, transported back to his childhood in fragments, in broken pieces of blood-covered grass and smoke. He stared at the small body in the grass and saw Gisele there. He saw Kuchta. He saw all the girls he had kissed and fumbled with on the grass, who he’d shown too much of himself to, who had to be removed.

  The strangers Menlim had him kill.

  The friends.

  Pirna. Pirna’s husband.

  Laren.

  Elise… Ellie. His Ellie. He’d killed her, too.

  “NOOOOO!” Charlie screamed. “Gods no! No! She can’t be gone! Junei! Junei! Answer me! Answer me, Junei!”

  Her voice broke, a choked sob wailing into the night sky.

  Revik couldn’t feel her light.

  He winced painfully anyway, the grief in that scream so far inside him, he could hear and feel nothing else. In those few seconds, he wanted to die. He wanted to die more intensely than he had in decades.

  He’d caused this. This was because of him.

  It was always because of him.

  “Nooo!” Kneeling on the grass, Charlie yanked her whole body against the guards’ hands. She pulled and sobbed and screamed until Menlim nodded and they let her go. She crawled, wracked with sobs, trying to reach her daughter. “Nooo! Junei!”

  Menlim nodded to the tattooed seer again.

  Revik closed his eyes. He closed them tight, but it didn’t help. It didn’t take anything away. Even the collar couldn’t do that. Not anymore.

  Another shot rang over the stretch of grass by the City’s walls.

  The screaming and wailing abruptly ended.

  That time, Revik barely flinched.

  He knelt there, no longer even trying to think past the pain. He’d failed. He failed Charlie. He failed his wife. He failed his daughter and son.

  Allie. Lily. Maygar. The others––all those seers and humans still alive from the Lists. Wreg. Jon. Balidor. His aunt. Vash. Garensche, who died at Gossett Tower. Torek. Kali. All the countless others who fought, died, risked their lives for him.

  Allie had been right. It was all for nothing.

  Menlim had known. He’d known before they started this.

  And now his wife was coming here.

  She was coming here to save him.

  47

  ONE MONTH

  REVIK?

  I wait, my light utterly still as I focus intently on that high, silent place. I feel for his pale, blue-white light. That pure, crystalline flavor that is only his.

  Revik? Are you there?

  Silence greets me.

  More than silence.

  I can’t feel him anymore.

  Revik? I send, softer now, more tentative. Revik? Can you hear me?

  Biting my lip, I send him information anyway, telling myself it might help, that he might hear it. I know I am filling the silence, that no one is listening on the other end.

  We’re using the map, I tell him. We’re going to the sites, but each time he’s gotten here before us. He killed Eddard. He killed one of the others, too.

  Lily swims briefly behind my eyes.

  I blink to fight the feeling back, knowing it might show in the space. Knowing that my missing our daughter won’t help him, that it won’t help either of us right now.

  It’s been weeks, and I can’t feel him.

  I can’t even feel him having sex. I can’t feel him drunk.

  I can’t feel him watching me with Jem.

  Revik? I fight fear. I fight to hold onto that higher vibration. Baby, answer me. I need you to answer me. I understand if you’re mad. I promise you, I understand. You can yell at me all you want, but please answer me. Please. I’m afraid.

  Nothing.

  Some part of me holds on to the idea that he’s angry, that this is punishment.

  I don’t believe it, though.

  Not anymore.

  Revik, answer me! Answer me, or I’ll make you sorry you didn’t. I swallow, fighting pain. I’ll make you watch. I’ll make you watch every damned second of it! I’ll open my light… I’ll give him head and open my light. I’ll use the telekinesis. I’ll do it like he was you. I’ll show him that place on me, that place on both of us…

  Biting my lip, I wait, breathing too much, feeling tears on my face.

  Feeling like I went too far.

  Answer me, goddamn it! Answer me!

  But he doesn’t.

  Revik––

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing?”

  I jumped then turned, feeling caught as I raised a hand to my face, wiping my cheek.

  “Nothing.” I cleared my throat, forcing a half-smile as I shook my head. “Nothing. Where are you at with that thing?” I nodded towards the three-dimensional image shining off his hand-held. “Anything?”

  Dalejem frowned, studying my face with his dark green eyes.

  I watched him decide to let it go, even as he sighed, clicking softly to let me know he was letting it go––and possibly that he would revisit it later.

  “You mean apart from another dead body?” He grunted, looking ruefully at one side of the Persian rug. “It’s still dead.”

  The rug covered most of a high-end sitting room and had to have cost thousands of dollars when it was bought; unfortunately, it had been more or less ruined by the corpse rotting into the fibers on one end, even beyond the mold smell from the rains.

  I followed his gaze, my eyes focusing briefly on an expensive-looking high-heeled shoe still on a stockinged foot. The shoeless foot splayed next to it looked strangely innocent in comparison, making me grimace even as I remembered who this was.

  “And this is where he wanted us?” I said, still staring at her foot.

  “Same marker,” he said, his voice leaking frustration as he focused back on the organic key. “We’re exactly where we’re supposed to be, according to this dugra-te thing. I’m beginning to think he’s just leading us to his handiwork. Like a cat leaves a dead mouse on his favorite human’s pillow.”

  He motioned around at the building as a whole.

  “There is no one else here,” he added. “No storage, like you told me to look for. No other bodies. Their lights just extinguish from the board, about an hour after we arrive. Like the last two drop points.”

  I forced myself to try and think, to focus on this, the immediate thing.

  “Which person was this?” I said, frowning. “Who was she in real life?”

  “Foreign Minister to Britain from Dubai,” he said at once. “Before the plague, anyway.”

  He continued to read off the diagram, his eyes narrowing.

  “According to Balidor’s people, she’s got a half-dozen aliases. The one here is human, obviously. Not only was she a diplomat but a prominent businesswoman. Well-connected, given her posting. Immigrated here from the Middle East when she took the diplomatic appointment back in 2013. Aria Sparten. It looks like the family is a married name. No children.”

  He gave me a flat look.

  “…Obviously. She was heavily involved in the art community here in London before the plague. Ran
a gallery down in Soho. Part-owner of another near Westminster.”

  “Any other important aliases?”

  “The others seem to be neutralized now. She was the wife of a sheik-type in some earlier human life, according to this thing. She’s seer, so most of the aliases go pretty far back.”

  I nodded, still fighting to think.

  “So?” he said. “This is bullshit, right? He’s not leading us to anything, really. Not even to himself. He’s just showing us his kills. We can’t even get ahead of him because he only highlights the next after we reach the one before. And we still have no idea why he’s doing this. We don’t even know if it will do any good, given what Balidor told us about the bodies replacing themselves.”

  I frowned, looking around the high-end flat we’d broken into.

  “We’re sure there’s no body storage here?” I said, thinking aloud.

  “Like I just told you, I looked,” Dalejem said, rolling his eyes. “Just like at the last two places. There is nothing, Bridge. Nothing we can pick up with sensors. No constructs in the area apart from the one around this apartment. Nothing the locals haven’t ID’d already, and most of those come straight from our allies here in Britain.”

  “Can we trust them?” I said, giving him a look.

  Dalejem shrugged. “More here than anywhere else we’ve been.”

  I nodded, knowing he was right.

  Most of the seers here were loyal, although I had zero doubts Shadow’s people had infiltrated the group on the ground here, just like they did everywhere else.

  Hell, Eddard and this woman were proof of that.

  So far, Menlim seemed to actually prefer hiding his network people among ours, rather than the more obvious, Rook-infested areas. Even now, after the plague, none of those dots had shown up in a Shadow-run city.

  They all remained outside of them.

  London was one of the few cities that had a real working force of infiltrators straight out of Seertown’s training programs under Vash. While I knew we couldn’t trust all of them, I also knew Shadow would be stupid to store anything important here.

  Well, other than his handily-replaceable network people, apparently.

  The lead infiltrator on the ground here, an older and unusually dark-skinned seer named Jasek, was someone I liked a lot, and pretty much instantly.

  I’d met him back when I came to London the first time; he’d led the team of infiltrators who debriefed Revik following his time as Terian’s captive. He’d also been the one I talked to while Revik was still in Cairo.

  I’d trusted him instinctively back then, although I knew it might be foolhardy to do so now, given that I didn’t really know him that well. His unusual coloring and hair texture made him a natural for infiltration, so he’d been recruited as a kid into the Seven’s Guard.

  Balidor told me he’d been courted by the Adhipan too, but declined out of respect for his parents, who apparently hadn’t wanted him disappeared into the caves of the Pamir for however-many years.

  Honestly, that kind of made me like him, too.

  He was on the List, the seer one, and as a Level 1, so we were working on recruitment with him again. There’d been some discussion about relocating him and his mate to be with the main group of Listers since there were legitimate fears he might be gunned down if anyone found out who and what he was.

  We didn’t have a lot of seer Level 1’s.

  Six in total, which was more than the other two lists, but still not a lot.

  Wreg and Balidor were two of them, along with Jasek and a female seer they thought was still in China somewhere. We didn’t have a location on the last two, although they’d both been born in the Americas––one in South America and one in North America––and both were female.

  No one in our group knew either of their names.

  We’d noticed a lot of sex-pairing like that. Only two humans had the Level 1 designation on the human List, Jon and Dante, so one male and one female. The Level 1’s on the intermediary List were the Four––me, Revik, Feigran and Cass––so two and two.

  With the seer List, it was three and three.

  Brushing that from my mind, I looked out the long window to my right at the view of Hyde Park, which looked wilder than I remembered, more overgrown.

  It was strange to be back in London.

  I fought not to think about the first time I’d come to this city––or how close we were now, relatively speaking, to Revik’s old apartment off Belgrave Square.

  Forcing my mind back to the present, I nodded to Dalejem’s words, agreeing with him belatedly. This was our third hit on the map, and the third dead body.

  It was also the third time we had nothing in terms of new intel.

  The first body we’d found, that of Eddard, had been the most unnerving, if only because I’d known him a little. Seeing his dirty brown eyes open, the irises already turning a milky color, his thinning brown hair more limp than I remembered above bland and now blank features––it was like seeing a broken doll of someone I knew.

  I stood over him the longest, just staring down at him, trying to see him as real.

  At that point, it hadn’t yet felt like a pattern.

  Both Dalejem and I assumed we’d simply gotten there too late, like we had with Novak.

  The glowing dot on the map continued to glow for about an hour after we arrived, so well after the network seer was dead.

  Then the glow faded and a new dot began to glow.

  Whatever shut off one light and ignited the next was likely tied to us, rather than the death of the seers themselves––unless we’d arrived at the murder scenes at the exact same time following the death in every case.

  That, or it got triggered by any murder scene breach––although we hadn’t been able to find the trigger mechanism.

  Dalejem observed that the map itself pointed to some kind of Barrier-slash-satellite technology. Even with his mad skills with organics, however, Jem hadn’t been able to source it back far enough to know how it actually worked.

  We had to assume Dragon knew exactly where we were right now, though.

  “Is the next one showing yet?” I said.

  Dalejem nodded, clicking under his breath. Giving me a grim look, he used his mind to point out the new brighter dot on the map, even as he blew out the projection, showing me a more detailed map of the physical coordinates.

  Cairo.

  Fuck.

  That would be a lot harder.

  More and more, I agreed with Dalejem––this was a wild goose chase.

  At best, Dragon was getting his jollies leading us around, leaving his morbid little breadcrumbs for us to follow. At worst, he was distracting us from what was going on in China, along with the bases we’d left behind in Colorado and Langley.

  I exhaled, fighting that nagging feeling that we were missing something, that we weren’t looking at this right. The variables were starting to mess with my head. The map. The missing book. Dragon. Feigran and his crazy visions. Whatever Revik had been feeling while we were looking at this stuff on the ship.

  I was still turning it all over in my mind when I frowned.

  “Why would he do this?” I said.

  Jem turned, frowning. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean why bother with this at all?” I said, frustrated. “Why one body at a time? We already know Shadow’s got warehouses of these somewhere. If Dragon’s not going after those, then what the hell good is any of this going to do?”

  Jem shrugged, his eyes flat. “We already know he’s not stable.”

  “But this has a purpose.” I turned, frowning at him. “You know it does.”

  Jem shrugged. “Crazy people can have plenty of purpose. They can have elaborate, well thought out purpose. They are still crazy, Alyson.”

  “Did anyone ever look through that book for parallels to the network?”

  Seeing the blank look on Dalejem’s face, I realized I’d still only shared about half of my thoughts with
him.

  “…The book Kali found. Dragon’s book.”

  Dalejem frowned. “I thought your husband did that. And Balidor.”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t know anything back then. That was in New York, and we didn’t even know Menlim was a part of this then.” I studied his face. “The Children of the Bridge had the book for years. Did anyone ever check to see if there were resonances or structural similarities between the material in the book and the network itself? Even the Pyramid?”

  Jem gave me a strange look. “Structural similarities? What kinds of structural similarities?”

  Realizing I hadn’t included him in that part of my thought processes either, I sighed.

  I was too used to working with Revik on this stuff. He was usually about ten steps ahead of me when it came to anything semi-dimensional, especially structural design.

  Jem let out a low grunt.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Whereas I’m about twenty behind.”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said, my voice carrying a thread of impatience. “…Or mean that. And hardly. It’s just different when you’re bonded.”

  Jem nodded, but I saw his jaw harden.

  Shrugging, I added, “Anyway, Revik’s a savant with this stuff. His brain is like… wired for it. Even he will admit that––assuming he’s not doing one of his ‘playing dumb’ things, which he does a lot more than you might think.” Clicking, I gave Jem a grim smile, adding, “He’s disturbingly good at it. Which makes sense, given how he was raised. But yeah, disturbingly good. A little too good, honestly.”

  Seeing Jem looking at me, his eyes holding a faint scrutiny, I flushed.

  Clearing my throat, I gestured up at the network diagram.

  “I meant similarities in terms of the equations listed in the book, brother,” I said, extending the politeness to my tone. “Mathematical interpretations of the drawings. Your people knew more about the larger Dreng network back then. More than we did in New York, for sure.”

  Jem’s green eyes studied my face. “Do you think they are connected in some way? Dragon’s book and Shadow’s network?”