Allie's War Season Four

by JC Andrijeski

  ALLIE’S WAR SEASON FOUR

  BOOKS 7-8

  by

  JC Andrijeski

  Copyright © 2014 by JC Andrijeski

  Published by White Sun Press

  Cover Art & Design by Jennifer Munswami at

  J.M. Rising Horse Creations

  www.facebook.com/RisingHorseCreations

  2015

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an official vendor for the work and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  SYNOPSIS

  “…And lead them out of the darkness of that dying world.”

  Books seven and eight in the gritty, unique, apocalyptic and metaphysical psychic romance series, Allie's War, featuring Allie Taylor and her antihero guide, Dehgoies Revik.

  In Season Four, we see Revik having to go it alone for the first time, leading the armies of the Bridge without Allie as they are separated by Shadow and his new pet intermediary, War.

  Allie stepping into a larger part of herself as a result of that separation affects both of them, as does Revik’s growth into the full-fledged military commander that Allie more than anything needs him to be.

  Bridge: Allie's War Book Seven - Revik finds himself leading the remnants of the Bridge’s army alone, hunting Shadow and War in the hopes of saving what remains of his family from a fate worse than death.

  Prophet: Allie's War Book Eight - Allie and Revik hunt down the Displacement List seers, trying to save them from Shadow, when a new player enters the scene and begins stealing those seers for their own purposes.

  Series Summary

  The Allie's War series is a psychic romance set in a unique, gritty version of Earth populated by a second race of psychic beings called Seers. Its heroine, Allie Taylor, was marked "The Bridge" from birth, born to be the leader of the Seer race and the bringer of the next stage in humanity's evolution. Unfortunately, to many Seers, that means the death of just about every human on the planet.

  She is helped and hindered, awakened and impeded by her antihero partner, Dehgoies Revik, whose on-again-off-again relationship with the dark beings known as the Dreng may destroy them both.

  The series takes place in a modern version of our world at the brink of apocalypse and a dystopian future. It spans centuries along with the lives of its main characters, the Seers, and the wars they fight with themselves and their human allies and enemies.

  Praise for the Allie’s War Series

  “Highly Recommend!” ~ Escape Into A Book

  “Word of advice…remember to breathe!” ~ The Cabin Goddess

  “The sexual tension is scorching...” ~ The Muses Circle

  “[B]eware; you’ll immediately want to dive into the next installment.” ~ The Indie Bookshelf

  BRIDGE

  Allie’s War Book Seven

  For my mom

  Prologue

  BETWEEN

  “...And the lands between will swallow her for a time / Until she forgets herself, lost in death and drenching cold / In that place of ghosts / Only the one who carries half her soul / Can hold the light for her in the end...”

  ~ from “The Love Story,” Commentaries on the Final Days

  I REMEMBER EVERYTHING now. Everything.

  Every moment, every piece of my life. Every thread of the tapestry that eluded me all of those years, that consisted only of random, disparate acts...of reaction and fear and lack of agency. All of those connections. All of the resonances I glimpsed and missed. The moments in my life, powerful or not, that refused to add up into any kind of coherent whole.

  I remember them all.

  I remember, and I see the threads that lay between.

  I see the image from here, that finely detailed painting that makes up my life, and it almost makes sense. It almost connects my mind to those parts of me that know why I came to this world, what I’m even doing here. It contains so much, this knowing, this image of life...but I also see how small it is, how interdependent and connected to all the rest.

  The feeling behind that remains elusive, but the glimpses I catch in those silences cut my breath.

  I feel so much there. I cannot express even a small part of that feeling. It contains so many shades, old and new, ancient and birthing. Timelessness lives there. Timelessness that is somehow beautiful in its very existence.

  So much beauty. So much hope.

  Those things live in distant glimmers of heart and light that promise to contain everything, the very meaning of life itself, and not just for me. For all of us. It is not something I can comprehend. Not even here, where my mind feels its most all-encompassing, its clearest and least shadowed by my own hang-ups and misconceptions and fears and longings.

  Not even here can I understand even a fraction of the things that live in that light.

  I want so much here.

  Yet here, I need nothing.

  I slide over mountains, valleys.

  One valley. One perfect valley, so beautiful it makes me cry, or I fervently believe it would, if I could cry in this place. I believe it so strongly, that feeling blooms like a pain in my side, fighting against what body I have left. That valley grows larger before me, filled with white and gold light so that I scarcely see the lapping waves. Details etch in marbled cliff faces, each grain of sand so clear and glass-like, I feel a thousand worlds living in each smooth surface. They reflect the light of one another, merging yet separate, so beautiful and filled with so much meaning, more meaning than I can...

  I know this place. I know it, but...

  I can’t be here.

  The part of me that can feel, can think, lingers out of reach of all those pieces of reality I would touch, if only I could.

  Whatever leaves me here, it lets me see it.

  It lets me feel the caress of those waves, the rough brush of sand on the bottoms of my feet and toes, the soft kiss of sunlight filled with presence and hope, like a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, but it doesn’t let me reach it...not really.

  As a few hundred years tick slowly by, without any sense of where or when, I watch that valley and ocean recede. The movement starts slow. After a few seconds (breaths? thoughts? grains of sand falling?) it rapidly accelerates...like a film rolled backwards through an antique projector. Smoke turns to fog, until everything I love flickers dimmer and more indistinct the faster it goes, the further it disappears into the distance.

  I am left behind.

  The grief tries to overwhelm me again, to annihilate me anew, finish me for good. It is too much, this grief. I can’t handle it...I can’t do anything but let it strangle and rip apart my insides, without even a body to house them. My heart hurts, my head hurts...my belly hurts and my intestines and my throat...yet there is nothing there of me, no way to house any of what I am in a form I could possibly recognize.

  My heart and everything in the world feels deadened somehow, despite everything I feel on the other side. It’s as if someone locked me and everything I care about under glass. All that gets through is the image. I am preserved there, a glass vase. Empty...

  Empty of him.

  Here, I remember everything. Every single thing.

  I can almost see him there, too, in the case next to me. A different glass cage, visible to me, but out of my reach, when I love him the most. When I need him the most. When I most need to feel his light, to let him feel mine. Maybe I really am dead. Ma
ybe the end will come soon, and then I have only to...

  Wait. Wait for him here.

  Wait for both of them, maybe.

  If I waited long enough, some part of me would figure out how to reach him...to reach her. Or maybe just to forget.

  Forget that I’d failed. Forget the pain I left for both of them.

  Failure for me is nothing new. My course through lives could be tracked by the failures, big and small that attach to my name.

  The feeling matters. It is all that matters, that feeling.

  I love them both so much. I love...and even that word feels inadequate.

  A promise broken, not by me, but broken nonetheless. All feeling lives in me still, but I can’t use it to help either of them. I am gone but not gone. I cannot even return, not until something in this glass case breaks, setting me free.

  They destroyed me, but not. I still am, but not. I still love. They haven’t taken that from me, even if I can’t breathe in this place, I still have that.

  I have to trust that the bare bones of me still exist, somewhere. I have to trust that I’m still here, just temporarily stuck, temporarily on hold, since I can’t reach anything, since I can’t feel my own body or find my way back on my own. The small things elude me...I elude myself, who I was. I can’t find him...

  I try to hold on to the other. I live for those occasional glimpses...like a poster print of a master that has faded in direct sun. She teases me, pulls at me, just enough to remind me that I can’t get to her, either, not now, when she is the smallest and most vulnerable.

  She is lost to me, but I cannot stop myself from trying.

  I can’t get to her, and she is alone. She cries out to me, but I can only feel her grief, her loss. I cannot soothe her, cannot keep that promise, either. Nor can he. I feel his heart breaking, and I can only...watch. I can only watch them both.

  I cannot bear that I have left her there. I cannot bear that I left him.

  Words live there, but they contain too much. Too much for me to hold.

  Husband. Father. Daughter.

  Daughter...

  I try to reach her, but I cannot. I hear his cries, too. The pain in his heart, as he tries to reach her. Those golden waves come when they want to come...leave when they want to leave, and leave me a shell in the spaces between.

  I am nothing here. I am all, but I cannot help them.

  I am the empty vase.

  I dream for her. I imagine innocent light, a wealth of feeling and intensity. Up and down feeling, remorse and fear, intensity and deception, heights that soar only because plains and valleys live below. I remember that person, who might have once been me, once upon a time...whose light looks dirty to me now, confused and dim, but who could touch those golden shores. I try to share that with her, too. But the gear shaft is broken. All of the connecting points between no longer work.

  This can’t be right. Things can’t end this way.

  This empty, nothing place, it can’t be right.

  Her being alone here, without either of us...that can’t be right.

  That grief over the golden waves...

  The being alone...

  It can’t be the way this story ends.

  When I concentrate on him, I get only vague feelings, images, a pain I can’t control or categorize or make less. The reality of him, the certainty of him remains...a constant flicker of difference in the pit of nothing in which I live. Some promise, a fervent wish for possibility. Another part of me knows that as delusion, or maybe just wishful thinking...wanted so much it spins across the surface of my mind, trying to rationalize, trying to convince myself I will get better, that there is something left of me to save.

  A voice. Soft, so familiar.

  ...And in those ending moments, she will die. But it is not a quiet death, for a part of her will remain. It will stay and be lured back into the light, back into one final struggle against the dark. The birth comes from that death. The final form comes from its ending...

  I listen to him.

  I try to reach him, to comfort him, but I cannot.

  He reads to me, for hours sometimes. Days maybe...weeks.

  I drift inside his words, lost there.

  I try to understand, but the words disappear like a sand sculpture in wind, as gusts slide roughly across the face, turning features smooth and bland, empty of him.

  ...The battle will not end this way. Death will neither bring it forth nor its end. Death will break the last hold of the spark into the fire, luring from the place of lost between...

  Some part of me cries, hearing his words. It cries and cries.

  He doesn’t always read. Sometimes he cries there, with me.

  I see him, from a long way away, holding a body I almost recognize.

  ...Don’t leave me, he says. Gods, baby...don’t leave me here alone...

  I can feel that...I can feel his words. But not him, not his tears.

  I cry, but I can’t move, nor crawl my way out of that dark.

  I can hear him, but I don’t know how to help him.

  I remember, though.

  I remember everything.

  1

  MOTHER

  I FEEL HER there, alone. I feel the bite of that silver light.

  I see the smoke-filled glass that corrupts her light, making it rigid in all the wrong ways, breaking her on the inside, cutting her off from her heart, from all of that love that lives above and around her...terrifying her. Lost in the dark. There is no horror deeper than this. It is beyond fear. Beyond loss. The abyss beckons, pulling at her gently, promising her that she will succumb. She reaches for me, but she cannot touch me here. She reaches for him, but cannot feel his light, not in all of that dark. She reaches for the only thing she has left, the one hope, the one thing that seems to love her...

  Mother. She has a mother.

  The thought makes me scream inside.

  I cannot let them have her. I cannot let them break her.

  I cannot...

  CASS SNAPPED OUT, frowning. She felt whispers like that sometimes, closer to hallucinations than real thoughts. The presence behind it felt real, but then, Cass had known Allie for nearly thirty years, so she could have done that part herself. Cass could conjure Allie’s presence just fine all on her own, no outside intervention required.

  This seer business was still new to her, though.

  Menlim told her that picking up a flotsam of random impressions, resonances and information from the Barrier constituted part of Cass’s new normal. Meaning, it was just part of being a seer. Menlim also said she should be receiving significantly more of that crap, actually. The construct over the ship shielded her from the worst of it, blocking or deflecting the vast majority of what would’ve hit her otherwise.

  Menlim assured her that he would always protect her in this way.

  Still, she wondered what those weird, ghost-like whispers from Allie meant.

  Could it really be Allie’s ghost?

  More likely it was just her, meaning Cass’s own brain playing tricks. Some part of Cass imagined Allie’s thoughts simply to entertain itself. Or maybe Cass compulsively and stubbornly continued the argument with her ex-friend, knowing the other’s mind well enough to act out both ends of the stupid drama, even with Allie out of the picture.

  Or was there some other, deeper-seated psychology operating there? Was it some half-assed attempt to keep Allie around?

  Snorting a little, Cass shook her head.

  Not likely.

  Still smiling at the thought, Cass gazed out over the wake of the ship, feeling the deck below her feet roll up and down. It moved sensually, comfortingly, sliding over and under a series of long-appearing waves. Those waves glided toward her in an odd, inexorable silence, their white crests visible all the way to the eastern horizon.

  Cass’s mind fell into a gentle hum. She let her knees and weight grow loose under the motion, let her whole body conform to its rhythms, lulling her.

  She shook her hair
into a gust of spray from the tailwind, exhaling in a near-sigh.

  She’d spotted whales alongside the ship yesterday.

  Even in so short a time, the whales seemed to sense that the threat from human predators had significantly diminished over the past several months. Whales had been protected for the past three decades, but poachers never bothered to read the fine print, especially given the lucrative market in whale meat in both Asia and North America. Cass’s own family had been buying black market whale meat since she was a kid. She remembered Allie coming over for dinner once and frowning down at it, her nose crinkled.

  Her dad probably never brought home whale meat.

  At the thought, Cass felt her face tighten in the wind. Her jaw ground her back molars together, even as she fought to push Allie from her mind.

  She’d done this to herself.

  Allie had no one to blame but herself.

  Cass liked her ocean-bound existence, although she missed living in cities, too. Sleeping on and under the ocean had grown so familiar, she scarcely noticed the motion of the water other than to relax into it. She’d been warned about sea-legs, of course, more than once while preparations had been underway for excursions onshore, both in Europe and the Middle East.

  They’d left those land masses behind weeks ago, though.

  Cass’s seer bodyguards, currently consisting mainly of Salinse’s people, along with several left over from the guard that once protected Shadow’s dwelling in Patagonia, assured her that shore excursions would be limited to the quarantine cities from now on.