Chandre had been deeply wary of using it before the emergency was certain.
She knew the boss wouldn’t thank her, if she did.
The Sword had more or less hammered that point into her while they’d discussed this ploy on the carrier, and then again on the ground outside that nightclub. Namely, that he didn’t want her sending up any alarms to Balidor or anyone else until she knew for sure that they didn’t have a shot at taking out Menlim. Having Chandre there as backup to his own attempt wouldn’t do any of them much good if she got taken out by the construct prior to the moment when he really needed her to pull the trigger.
It was a warning Chandre took seriously.
Now, watching the black-uniformed seers melt through the rows of boxes like liquid smoke, she tightened her hand on the gun, glancing at the group of her people standing clustered in the lit area between what looked like two rows of iron-barred cages.
Chandre saw the Bridge standing there, looking incongruous in high-heeled shoes and a form-fitting backless dress that scarcely covered her rear. She stood a few feet from the Sword, who, for the first time since they’d left that club in Deira, wasn’t actually touching her.
That Children of the Bridge seer, Dalejem, stood on his other side, not far from Anale and Delek and two others Chandre only knew in passing. Jax and Chinja stood closest to the Rook, and Surli and Stanley stood on the other side of the Bridge and the Sword, presumably to cover them from behind. Others positioned themselves further back, where Chandre couldn’t see them very well, but she knew how many had come out here, so she could more or less guess where they stood.
Chandre didn’t know how many of them were still armed. To err on the side of caution, she had to assume none.
Therefore, when she swung the rifle back towards the group of seers walking through the crates, she held her breath as she aimed the rifle at the head of the seer who she presumed to be their leader. Instead of an infiltrator’s military uniform, he wore civilian clothes, a black robe of the local style with an equally black sash and headband.
Chandre couldn’t see his face, but she suspected she knew who he was.
She recognized the long-legged gait and the shape of his frame, which was tall even for a seer and borderline skeletal, even in the robe.
She remembered him from South America, well enough for her jaw to clench.
She continued to follow his body with the infrared scope, losing him here and there among the crates. Placing her feet carefully as she tested her balance, she shifted her position slightly, trying to improve her vantage without making any noise.
Once she’d improved it as much as she thought she could––safely, at least––she waited for Menlim to emerge. She hoped to catch him not long after he exited through that final opening, meaning the one leading into the last, open third of the warehouse floor.
She counted through the seconds, waiting.
She waited past where it felt like she should have had to wait.
Then she heard his voice.
Chandre knew it was his instantly. She recognized it, even as it filled the length of the empty stretch of warehouse between that maze of crates. She could nearly see his words, hanging in the air as his light twisted out towards the seers standing between those human-sized rat cages.
Towards the Sword.
“Isre l’ange si nedri az’lenm...isre ti’a ali di’ suletuum...” his voice boomed, echoing strangely in the dark. “Isre l’ange si nedri az’lenm...isre ti’a ali di’ suletuum...sala. Sala ‘ti. Sala ‘ti, mongare sa’...Alyson...”
Chandre flinched.
She pulled her eye off the scope, looking for him with her naked vision. Seeing nothing, she put her eye back to the round opening and swung the infrared scope along that same line, looking for him again that way.
Menlim still did not appear.
He must have stopped before he cleared the crates enough to be in her line of sight.
Even as she thought it, Chandre saw soldiers appear at the fringes of that same line. She noted their positions but didn’t move the rifle.
She didn’t want to blow her cover for one of them.
She wanted their leader. Menlim.
Once she got him, she would shoot at the rest.
Jerking her eye off the scope briefly a second time, she scanned the nearby crates, trying to decide if she could safely move positions again to get a better angle without being seen. The jump down really wasn’t close, though. Now that the soldiers were in the wider warehouse, it was too risky. If a firefight broke out on the ground, she could move without being noticed... but of course by then it may be too late.
Then, she would have already ceased to be the backup that Dehgoies envisioned.
“Isre l’ange si nedri az’lenm...” the seer repeated, raising his deep voice louder. It seemed to reverberate through Chandre’s aleimi, despite her stillness. “Isre ti’a ali di’ suletuum...sala. Sala ‘ti. Sala ‘ti, mongare sa’...Alyson...”
Silence fell over the warehouse.
Chandre wasn’t in the Barrier, so she couldn’t feel any of what was going on from that added vantage, but something about that silence felt charged.
Even as she thought it, something changed.
Chandre heard some kind of commotion in the area by those cages.
She didn’t raise her eye off the gun’s sight.
Whatever it was, she couldn’t help with it. She had her own job to do.
The thought repeated and she once more stilled her light, keeping the scope focused on that line of crates, waiting for Shadow to emerge so she could use the gun for what it had been intended.
He had to emerge, sooner or later.
Chandre told herself that, even as she rearranged her hands on the organic rifle, holding her breath to steady her aim even further. She settled her weight more firmly on her grav-booted heels as she did, steeling her whole body, her whole mind, to wait for the shot.
She’d been trained as a sniper.
No matter what else was going on in the warehouse, her role was the shot.
She had to wait for the shot.
So that was precisely what she would do.
33
TAKING THE BULLET
I WAS STILL lost there, in no time, staring up at Revik’s glowing eyes...
When suddenly, a shape appeared in front of me.
I couldn’t make sense of it, even as my own light flared in that half-instant of space the person standing there bought me. The shape distracted Revik, pulling his eyes, pulling his light... a bare handful of seconds, maybe not even that... but it bought me time.
Just enough time.
Time to bring my own telekinesis online.
It happened fast, before my mind could catch up... and then my physical vision got erased when my own eyes ignited.
Revik’s light erupted then, reaching for me, but my light reacted in the same half-second, expanding out of me only to hit a hard wall.
I felt that crackling current, shuddering my whole form through the current of his light.
For a long-feeling couple of seconds, we were at a standoff.
He shoved at me in that space, and I shoved back, and then he did something to twist around my light, moving so quickly that I let out a startled gasp.
We broke, and I found myself standing there, panting, facing him.
Whoever had stepped between us was still there, I realized.
“Get the fuck out of the way!” I shouted.
I reached for him, meaning to shove him away from both of us, but before I could, his body jerked sideways as if it had been hit by a wrecking ball. I didn’t follow it with my eyes. I had enough presence of mind to know I couldn’t, not now, but I felt it hit hard against the metal bars of the cage, a good fifteen feet from where we stood.
Silence fell over the space.
I felt the other seers around us, paralyzed. For another long breath, I think I might have been paralyzed too, staring up at Revik even as f
ear coursed through my light.
Unlike Revik with me right now, I didn’t want to hurt him.
That not wanting to hurt him would be a huge disadvantage, I knew. My mind spent less than a millisecond of thought on that knowledge, but it sent terror coursing through me.
Somewhere in that, my light flicked out, touching the bare edges of the body now crumpled on the cement floor like a broken doll. I tasted it only long enough to recognize the high-cheekboned face, the long dark hair that fell over his neck, his green, violet-rimmed eyes. I could feel those eyes closed now, knew they may never open again, but I knew who it was, even though I couldn’t look over there very long, not even with my light.
Dalejem. He’d stepped between me and Revik.
Dalejem just basically saved my life.
Well.
Temporarily, anyway.
Next to me, voices erupted. I felt hands on my arms, pulling me back, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. I didn’t even waste the breath or my concentration to tell them that, but continued to stare at Revik, my light charged where it remained high up, wound into the structures of my telekinesis.
When they grabbed hold of me a second time, I elbowed them off me, gasping as I watched the structures in Revik’s light ignite again.
“Get back!” I shouted, not tearing my eyes off his face. “Get back! Fuck! Are you stupid?”
I managed to writhe free, even as I slammed out at Revik with my light.
The force of my blow threw the seers away from me.
It also threw Revik’s back into the bars of the nearest cage.
I saw his eyes close, a bare shimmer of pain in his body, but he didn’t lose his balance.
He didn’t lose his focus, either.
Before I could even take a breath, he hit out at me with his light... a fuck of a lot harder than I’d hit out at him. The thought flashed in me again of how much harder it would be to stop him when I was terrified of hurting him. Unlike me, he threw everything he had at me the second that gap hit after I’d expelled most of my light.
My feet left the ground, almost before I knew what had happened.
I barely had time to construct a shield––something Revik himself, incidentally, insisted I learn––but I managed it midair.
Again, mostly because he’d hammered it into me, again and again.
Even so, I moved across that empty space so fast that it sucked the air out of my lungs, hurting my back and neck from the displacement of the air... and that was even before I’d hit. I crashed into the first solid thing between Revik and where I’d started, which happened to be a crate a good fifteen feet off the ground.
Slamming into it, more or less head-first, I let out a stunned gasp of air.
Even with the shield, it knocked the wind out of me completely.
Worse, I lost hold of the shield from the impact, too, so I cried out in real pain when I landed, hard, on the cement floor below.
Revik didn’t wait.
He threw his light at me again before I could recover, and then he was trying to get at my bones, specifically my spine, my neck.
Realizing he was trying to snap one or both, I shoved out at him with my light, crying out in terror. That time, I hit at him harder than I ever had, even as the thought crossed my mind again that I had to wrap my mind around hurting him, at least enough to knock him out. I was still holding back too much.
It was going to get me and him and Lily killed.
At the thought, tears came to my eyes.
I slammed him into the bars for real, hard enough that I saw his eyes roll back in his head, right before he sank to his knees, falling like a stone to the floor.
“STOP!”
I shouted it at him, filling my words with light, dragging myself to my feet. I held up a hand, my heart slamming like a jackhammer in my chest. I tried to reach him with my light a second time, trying to penetrate the fog I felt around the structures of his aleimi, strangling his mind, erecting a wall between my light and his.
“Revik!” I hit at the fogged wall harder. “REVIK! Snap out of it! Now! You’re going to kill both of us! You’re going to kill Lily, goddamn it!”
Still on his hands and knees, he slammed out at me again.
I fought to meet him in the space.
I blocked part of the hit in the process, lessening the force, but he still managed to throw me against the bars of the opposite wall, hard enough that I let out a groan, falling to my knees, just like he had done. Even so, I couldn’t let go of my light, and when he met me in the space, I gasped, fighting to keep him from getting close enough to kill me.
My head was bleeding now, dripping down the back of my neck.
I nearly passed out with dizziness when he finally backed off, but he didn’t give me long to recover. I’d barely regained my hold on those structures in my aleimi before we were struggling in the space again, each trying to knock the other one unconscious.
The difference was, I knew he’d kill me once he’d done it.
He was gaining on me too––I could feel it. He knew more ways to misdirect, to pull me off balance, to drain me. I felt the Dreng helping him in that, yanking parts of me into the construct as I struggled to think through my own foggy head.
I shoved him off me again, even as a sideways flick of his light darted out, throwing me sideways, so fast I barely managed to pull the shield around me in time to lessen the blow. Gasping, I only hung there for a moment, staring through the bars of the cage I held, barely seeing the pale faces that stared back at me.
I saw their expressions, though.
Terror filled their faces as the light from my eyes reflected in theirs.
I closed them, fighting to concentrate, but I couldn’t push the other thing from my head.
I was losing.
It wasn’t only my unwillingness to hurt him. He was better than me.
He was going to kill me. He was going to kill himself.
He was going to kill our daughter.
He tried to throw me sideways again, but I smacked down the snaking tendrils of light, right before he went after my heart, crushing it briefly in my chest before I managed to shove him off. I groaned in pain from what he’d done, even as he went after that part of my light he liked to coil into when we had sex. Gasping, I fought to keep him out, but I felt him getting into my light through those cracks that connected us, deeper that time...
Too deep. Deeper than I could extricate myself.
I felt my separation pain spike, the part of me that wanted so desperately to coil into him, to rebuild the bond that Terian had broken over the last month.
Remembering Lily, I gritted my teeth, trying to shove him out. Forcing out a burst of light, I tried to break his hold again, even as I grabbed the bars more tightly in my hands, using them to drag myself to my feet.
Turning, I slammed out with my light again once I was upright, trying to get him off me for real, if only to give myself some breathing room.
I felt my light hit, sliding past his shields at the last minute when I traced that pain back to his own half-severed bond. He gasped, then saw what I was doing and tried to block it, but too late. Even so, the blow that finally reached him was definitely weaker that time. It got him to let go, but for barely a half second.
Then he was after me again.
It wasn’t enough. No matter what I did, it wouldn’t be enough. He would continued to worm his way deeper into my light. Eventually, he would get in. He would get in for the same reason that I could always get in with him, even when he was a servant of the Dreng. He would get in because he and I were so tied together there would be no stopping it.
“Revik,” I groaned. “Revik. Don’t do this, baby. Please. Please...”
He was using the bond.
Sex, the bond... us. He was using us.
I couldn’t fight us. I never could.
“I love you...” I told him.
He didn’t seem to hear me. His light was using everything that
connected us to one another, only now he was using it to get at me. Feeling myself lose ground again, I fought him harder, trying to force him out, but I couldn’t. His light was tied too inextricably to mine.
“Revik... Lily. You’re going to let him kill Lily...”
I thought about the reality of my own words and slammed out at him again, hard enough to throw him sideways that time, and into the wall.
I watched in a kind of hazy disbelief as he fell, then went sliding across the floor on his stomach. His fingers were bloody now, and his arm, but it seemed like bare seconds passed before he stopped his backwards momentum, gripping the cement with his fingers.
His long legs splayed where he sprawled between both sets of cages.
That time, I saw his eyes flare like headlamps, right before he cracked out with his light, hard enough to take my breath, even before it hit me.
The force ripped me off the bars set in the wall, again making my feet leave the ground. The force of the hit sending me flying, weightless, through the air. I existed in that silence for what felt like seconds before slamming into a crate with my side and the small of my back.
The thing was heavy, but the force of the blow moved it, right before I crumpled at its base.
I hadn’t managed to shield the blow at all that time.
That time, all I could do was lie there for a few seconds, gasping.
Blood ran freely down my face when I raised my head.
I fought to blink through it, to focus my eyes. I focused my light, fighting to shield, but fear exploded over me when I realized I could already feel him inside my aleimi, winding through my bones and flesh.
Hell, I was barely managing to stay conscious.
I wouldn’t win this, I realized again.
Revik was going to kill me. He was going to kill me and Lily.
He was going to kill himself.
Even as I thought it, there was a loud, hollow sound from somewhere behind me.
I heard it and flinched, ducking my head. At that point, I more than half-expected it to mean that something hard had just caved in the back of my head.
But whatever had happened, it hadn’t happened to me.
Allie's War Season Four Page 132