by Deanna Chase
Here, the ceiling was wood-paneled, a rich, aged oak that still managed to surprise him.
Revik had lived in the penthouse flat of this old house for several months now...ever since Vash told him it was no longer safe for him to remain in Moscow. It still felt like sleeping in someone else’s home.
Having a manservant didn’t help.
Revik had neither wanted nor needed one, but he hadn’t been given any choice in that matter, either. The humans watched him, too. Not in the same way Vash and the Council did, but between the lot of them, Revik felt more inclined to cut and run every day.
Fuck penance. Fuck working for worms.
He pushed the thought out of his mind.
Truthfully, he took penance seriously, despite how much the constraints and invasions to his privacy grated on him. He hadn’t forgotten the lessons of the Pamir yet, nor would he be likely to, at least not anytime soon. He still wanted to contribute good to the world...even if being back in the real world made it harder to believe he ever truly could. It made some of the monks’ words feel a lot less relevant, for certain.
Or less practical, perhaps.
Rubbing his eyes with a forefinger and his thumb, Revik fought to pull the rest of his light back into his physical body, to calm himself in the process. Someone had come in here while he’d been out, he realized, glancing around the bookshelves. He knew that, in part, because whoever it was, they’d built a fire inside the stone grate that the leather chair faced.
Revik stared at the fire, frowning.
It had to have been the aforementioned manservant, Eddard.
The thought didn’t reassure him. Nor did he like the idea of anyone he didn’t know very well being that close to his physical body while he wasn’t in it.
His mind drifted back to the conversation with Vash, then to the incident a few days earlier, with Alyson. Due to the time difference, Revik had jumped in the early morning here, in London. It had been the first day of November on his side of the Atlantic.
In California, where Allie was, it had been around eleven o’clock at night, and still in the dregs of October.
And yeah, Revik knew exactly what Vash had been warning him about.
Even so, he felt a little sick at the idea that the Council had been watching him through all of that. He knew some of that feeling stemmed from shame, but not all of it. He hadn’t done anything wrong, not technically...not really. He hadn’t walked in on her on purpose.
Unlike most of those monks, he also wasn’t yet dead below the waist.
He’d been keeping an eye on her because she’d been at that party, because Cassandra was drunk, because Allie’s adoptive brother, Jon, wasn’t there...because she was wearing that damned costume that could have doubled as hooker-wear, even with the silver paint on her face.
Honestly, he’d been surprised she’d worn that out, even with Cassandra there to goad her on. Usually Alyson stayed pretty low-key when she went out drinking, in part because she had a tendency to attract a lot of attention no matter where she was...and no matter what she wore...although not all of that attention was sexual.
She got a fair few religious nuts. Schizophrenics.
The “full moon” crowd, as her brother, Jon, termed it.
Truthfully, Alyson herself seemed to be in denial about the effect her light had on a lot of humans. It irritated Revik that she could be so willfully blind about who and what she was...but Revik supposed that wasn’t particularly surprising, either, given the implications for being seer in the current climate of the world.
More than anything, she just seemed to want to blend in, be normal.
He could even understand that.
Either way, Revik hadn’t been watching her for his goddamned health. He’d been trying to keep her safe...which of course was his fucking job.
He had a tendency to err on the conservative side when it came to the Bridge, but he assumed that was partly why they’d given him the job. Regardless, he thought it would be a few hours, tops, of watching her at that level of detail, mostly just keeping an eye on her in case something dangerous happened, or any seers happened to be anywhere in her vicinity.
Really, his main concern had always been other seers.
Initially that had been more in terms of her being ID’d by some outside group––the Rooks in particular. Now that more seers lived and worked among humans, however, her risks of exposure proliferated. She could be ID’d by a random seer with better vision than most, or enough resonance with the Bridge’s light to be able to see through the Council’s shields. She could be hunted for bounty by random traders if word of her incarnation ever got out.
Hell, the Chinese might go after her if they knew…or the Rynak.
Because the precise nature of the danger remained difficult to anticipate or track, he always had some kind of line to her, whether he watched her directly or not.
He also had lines to her brother, Jon...as well as her friend, Cassandra, Allie’s mother, Mia Taylor, and several others in her life, both at work and at her art college. He did that mostly to ensure he could intervene in time, in the event anything went seriously wrong. He had people on the ground he could call in, too, of course––meaning people actually living and working in San Francisco––but mostly those acted as back-up for whatever Revik couldn’t do himself from the Barrier. After all, those back-up infiltrators were seers, too; they might ID Allie, even with the blocks around her light. The Council wanted no one apart from Council members and Revik himself to know Allie’s true reincarnation status.
In other words, calling in back-up was another last-resort kind of scenario.
No way would Revik have involved them for a human holiday party.
Revik himself only hovered like that when she was unprotected in a public place; that night, he figured he’d cut out as soon as Jon showed up. Jon had advanced belts in martial arts, which Revik himself had subtly influenced the human to get, back when Jon was still a junior in high school. The Council warned Revik that he couldn’t be ID’d by Allie, either, which meant he had to do the vast majority of his work from the Barrier.
Luckily, Jon had taken a strong liking to martial arts, and had pursued it on his own for years after Revik’s initial nudge. Jon now worked as an instructor at one of the larger kung fu schools in San Francisco, which suited Revik just fine. Jon and Allie remained close, especially after their human father died, so Revik trusted her to be safe when Jon was around.
So yeah, if Jon had gotten there sooner, Revik might not have seen anything at all.
Jon didn’t get there until well after midnight, though. More than an hour earlier, that punk musician started eyeballing Alyson from across the room. Feeling something off with the guy, Revik paid more attention again, unsure if he liked the guy much, even before he opened his mouth. Revik liked him a lot less after he had.
“Hi, I’m Jaden...”
The guy clearly wanted her.
The rules were etched in stone with that kind of thing, though, and Revik agreed with them, both in practice and in spirit. No interference in anything consensual. No interference at all, if the Bridge wasn’t in immediate, physical danger. Revik was there solely to protect her, not to impinge on her free will, or to dictate the course of her life in any way.
Occasionally, there were more ambiguous things, though.
Revik had gone to the Council a few times for direction when they stopped him from intervening in situations that struck him as dangerous.
We need her to learn, they’d cautioned him. You cannot intervene in all matters, brother Revik, simply because you are there and it is uncomfortable to see a fellow seer in emotional distress. You cannot keep her from learning about the realities of her world...and in particular, the realities of our human cousins and their less-savory predilections towards one another and other species. It would defeat the entire purpose of the Bridge being fostered with a human family, if you were to protect her from any ill-effects of being raised as one of them.
It still angered him, though.
It particularly angered him in one notable case with a neighbor who collected train sets.
The neighbor used those same trains to lure over neighborhood kids when their parents weren’t around. That piece of shit all but fucked her when she was about nine years old, and probably would have if Alyson’s human father hadn’t picked up on something wrong and forbade Allie from ever going over there again.
Revik had been fairly new on the job back then, and he’d been shocked...and angered, almost beyond reason, truthfully...when the Council told him not to intervene. They’d even directly thwarted him when he ignored them and tried to intervene anyway.
That had been Revik’s first warning.
Luckily, Allie’s adoptive father wasn’t a complete idiot and picked up on something wrong on his own. It took him a few weeks, however. During that time, Revik tried to tip him off...twice...and again got thwarted by the Council.
During most of that time, Revik argued with the senior monks at length, trying to convince them to let him intervene, even after they warned him. He pointed out that she didn’t even have the advantages a human would in those situations, that her race made her vulnerable to certain kinds of manipulation, more so than any human, no matter what their age. He argued further that she would inevitably blame herself if she didn’t understand this.
Revik still felt strongly that if she learned the truth of her race, she’d know to protect herself better. She’d certainly know more about weaknesses of hers that weren’t about character or predilection or even naïveté, but pertained directly to species variation.
Revik got overruled.
So he knew even without asking what they would have said about the situation with Jaden. She hadn’t been in physical danger––even Revik could admit that much, although he almost wished she had been so he could have done something directly, maybe gotten one of the drunk party-goers to break in there and beat the hell out of that little fuck while his pants were down around his ankles.
But Jaden hadn’t hurt her.
She’d more or less consented to what occurred.
To Revik, however, the not knowing what she was part of things meant she was still being taken advantage of. The Council was letting her be manipulated, in effect...leaving her highly vulnerable to being used in various ways by humans who didn’t mind pushing on or even trampling over her boundaries. The situation of her race more generally was only compounded by the effect her light had on others, as the Bridge.
And yeah, it pissed him off.
Even so, he’d been surprised when Jaden took her hand and pulled her off the dance floor and into the bathroom of that rundown, artist hovel of a house. He’d been even more surprised when that little shit had been so forward with her...and more so when she’d been turned on by his forwardness, rather than annoyed.
Granted, she was...what? Twenty-one, now? Twenty-two?
So hardly a kid. Especially by human standards.
Even so, Revik knew he probably didn’t see her clearly, despite his near-constant proximity to her light. He also occasionally got confused by how different she felt behind the Barrier versus how she acted in the world with her friends. It didn’t help that she’d grown up physically about three times as fast as a normal seer. He’d already been forced to adjust to changes that wouldn’t have occurred for another ten to twenty years in an ordinary seer.
He’d been forced to deal with watching her light develop exponentially, too, presumably because of who she was, and the fact that she really was different from most seers.
All other seers, really.
She was the Bridge.
According to the elders, the Bridge only came when a new evolutionary jump was required in the continuum of living beings. For the same reason, seers generally felt ambivalent about her coming. Many would welcome the Bridge as the savior of seers from the humans. Many might also want her dead, if they worried she might wipe out seers along with the humans.
The seer religion had many human converts over the years, as well. Most of those converts redrafted the Myth in their own image, with humans at the center of life’s continuum. Not that surprising, really, from Revik’s experience of humans.
Either way, many of those humans would also want her dead.
The Bridge was supposed to be the harbinger of a new world…for seers and for humans. Her even being here, incarnate on Earth, meant that a Displacement rapidly approached. Similar to the human word, “Apocalypse,” a Displacement meant that everything would change, and really damned fast. Also similar to the human concept of Apocalypse, it implied many, many beings would die in the process.
Those left would be forced to evolve.
Knowing all of that didn’t help Revik at all, however, as he watched Jaden fuck her on that countertop in a dingy bathroom filled with dirty towels and half-empty beer bottles.
Revik understood Vash’s warning, of course.
He’d been a little shocked by his own reaction to the whole thing, too.
After all, he’d been determined not to get emotionally close to his charge in any way, pretty much from day one of his assignment to watch over her. Revik had his reasons for that. In his opinion, damned good reasons. Not all of them were strictly rational, however...and none of them were really her fault. Revik didn’t much care.
Even so, he’d jerked off after seeing her with Jaden that night. Twice.
Okay, maybe three times.
It hadn’t really helped. Nor had it diminished the shame he felt from the separation pain that coiled off his light whenever he let himself remember the look on her face as she’d been getting off. Shame didn’t come close to covering it. For one thing, shame implied he’d done something wrong, and Revik couldn’t honestly decide if he believed that or not.
He’d watched every minute of their liaison from the Barrier.
Truthfully, he hadn’t been able to make himself look away. He’d been nearly mesmerized at the sight of Jaden pounding into her, Allie gasping against his neck with that silver paint smeared on her face and his skin, her leather boot-clad legs wound around his waist. Revik still couldn’t quite get over his shock that she’d let him finger her then fuck her after talking to him for a total of maybe twenty minutes.
He’d never seen her do anything like that before.
Hell, as far as he’d known, she was a virgin. He’d witnessed a number of drunken but relatively innocent fumblings in the backseats of cars, but that was about it. She’d never even had a real boyfriend.
He knew why she’d been hesitant to date much. Revik could feel that she was nervous about the reactions others had to her, even if she didn’t understand what those reactions actually meant. Whatever she pretended, she knew those reactions could be dangerous...she understood that much, on some level at least.
That same realization forced Revik to face his own changing perceptions, too…as well as a truth he’d been trying his damnedest to avoid for months now, maybe even the past few years.
He didn’t see her as a kid anymore.
Not at all.
More than that, he’d been jealous of that smug little prick to the point of wanting to snap his goddamned neck.
3
NOT NORMAL
“Hey, Al...Al! Earth to Allie!”
I glanced up from where I’d been refilling salt and pepper shakers and saw Cass standing there, a hand parked jauntily on one hip, her black waitressing apron askew over a too-short mini-skirt. She grinned at me.
“Did you see who just showed up?” she said.
I let my eyes fall to her skirt.
“You’re going to get fired if Jeff sees you wearing that,” I told her. “Didn’t he already warn you about that? About wearing that exact same skirt?”
Cass exhaled, blowing bangs out of her eyes with an exaggerated huff. She’d dyed the ends of her hair blue this time, which I still hadn’t c
ompletely gotten used to. It looked cool, but I liked the red better, maybe because it made the tips of her hair look like flames against the black of her normal Asian hair, which fell like a heavy curtain around her face.
I’d always loved Cass’s hair.
All through high school, I’d wished my hair looked like that.
“He seems to be A-okay with staring at my ass whenever I wear it,” she grumbled.
She paused long enough to glare pointedly over the partition at another waitress, a dark-haired girl named Dania who seemed to get off on tattling on the rest of us. She was convinced no one pulled their weight here but her.
And, well, in Cass’s case, she might have been right.
“We need to quit this fucking place,” Cass muttered, once Dania was out of range of her death stare. “...And hey, did you even hear me? That guy’s here.”
I didn’t look up that time. Just went back to pouring salt into glass shakers.
“What guy?”
“Over there,” she said, jerking her head sideways.
I watched Cass stare over the partition again, this time focusing somewhere on the main floor of the restaurant. I hated it when she withheld information to get me to pay attention to her. It was totally high school to try and pique my interest all the time instead of just telling me things outright, but it also seemed to be a habit she was incapable of breaking.
Even so, I hesitated, curious in spite of myself.
I really needed to get the side work done. I wanted to get the hell out of there.
Curiosity got the better of me, though, as it often did––which is probably why Cass did it, incidentally, I was a sucker. In the end, I put the salt container down, and walked over to where Cass stood with a sigh. Once I got near enough, I peered around the partition, since the part in front of me was too high for me to see over. It took me a few seconds more to zero in on the right table. Once I had, I realized he was staring right at me.
When he caught my gaze, he grinned outright, raising a hand in a short wave.
I waved back, then retreated behind the partition, giving Cass a dirty look.