War_Apocalypse

by JC Andrijeski

  “So we tell them,” he said, his voice more decisive than he really felt.

  Sighing, he picked the clean shirt up off the table and pulled it over his head, conscious of the other’s eyes on him.

  Wreg only nodded, his face impassive, but he didn’t move, watching Jon from only a few feet away as he finished taking off his old clothes and putting on the new ones.

  Wreg didn’t avert his gaze the whole time Jon changed, but watched him, his face unreadable, even when Jon peeled off the old socks with a grimace and put on the new ones, stuffing his feet back into the mud-encrusted combat boots.

  He felt better. He still wanted a shower desperately, but he felt better.

  Wreg didn’t start to pull off his own shirt, removing his belt to transfer to the new pants, until Jon was already stuffing his dirty clothes into the cloth bag the concierge seer left behind. Jon still felt the seer’s eyes on him, his light unreadable where it coiled around Jon’s own. The ex-Rebel wore a cloak Jon had never felt on him before, one that covered Wreg’s aleimi almost totally, even as it held onto Jon’s as if his life depended on it.

  It crossed Jon’s mind that maybe it did.

  But he couldn’t think about that yet, either.

  30

  ENGAGEMENT PARTY

  I GOT TO the bar later than I’d planned.

  By then, I admit, I was a little nervous. I knew Revik was looking for me.

  I kept getting pulled into new layers of detail while I was downstairs. I went over most of the transcripts of Balidor’s interview with Ditrini, along with a few interviews conducted by Declan and Anale. None of it was all that helpful, even with Tenzi, Garend and Anale there to press for details, but at least I got a pretty good sense of the patterns.

  I tried contacting Tarsi, to get her opinion on the thing with my light, but I couldn’t get through. I never got a straight answer on where she was, but I got the impression from her attendants was that she was in another of those deep Barrier-travel states, like she used to do in the Himalayas.

  Either way, I wouldn’t be able to ask her anything until she came back.

  I was tempted to have Garend jack up Ditrini’s dosage of hallucinogens, then send Anale in there to talk to him, but I didn’t want to mess with whatever schedule Balidor put in place.

  That was about when I felt the next questioning ping from Revik.

  Instead of trying to explain what I’d been doing, I found myself answering him pretty abruptly, and ending the conversation before he could feel much off me.

  I wasn’t about to lob my worries about Ditrini having screwed up my aleimi long-distance––much less my fears that it had something to do with Balidor’s theory that Shadow might already be here in New York. I knew what Revik’s probable reaction would be that I’d gone in to speak to Ditrini in the first place.

  I knew it was kind of shitty to do it behind his back, but frankly, these weren’t normal circumstances. Now that I’d noticed my own blindness, I needed an answer––now. I wasn’t in the mood for Revik’s overprotectiveness or his and Balidor’s paranoia about my connections to the Lao Hu. I couldn’t afford to be blind, not now. I couldn’t fucking afford it.

  I also needed to decide what to do about China.

  The last thing I wanted was another “treaty” with Voi Pai. On the other hand, it was pretty clear Shadow had turned on his old allies in the Lao Hu. There was a good chance Ditrini had been a mole in Voi Pai’s ranks for years––the real question was how long he’d been screwing over his fellow Lao Hu, not whether he’d been working both sides of the fence.

  More to the point, that was a hell of a lot of seers to just let die, no matter how much of a grudge I had with their leader. I needed to at least discuss with the group whether we should send resources to Beijing.

  I wasn’t about to try and explain all my reasoning and conflicted feelings on that to Revik long-distance, either.

  I could tell my absence was bothering Revik, and that I’d pushed my luck on that front already. I couldn’t feel specifics, but flavors reached me through the connection we shared, frequently enough that I knew I was the one stressing him out at this point, not Jon.

  Anyway, I was at a point where I wanted his input, so I was anxious to talk to him.

  I still wasn’t looking forward to his reaction when I laid the Ditrini thing on him.

  I started looking for him in the lobby, well before I passed the hostess station of Park Place South and entered the dark restaurant. I started to feel for him with my light as I walked along the horseshoe-shaped fish tank that pointed the way to the main bar.

  I was pretty distracted, but I did notice how much darker the restaurant was than I remembered. Some of that was from the fish tank, which now appeared to be full of trout and other freshwater game fish, rather than the colorful tropical fish it housed before.

  In general, the bar was darker, louder, smokier and more full of people than I remembered. Music thumped loudly from the overhead speakers––some kind of modern mash-up with traditional seer music that featured intense percussion and high-pitched singing chants along with modern tech beats, electronic instruments and more melodious vocals. Hiri smoke gave the air a honeyed, campfire kind of smell.

  Most of the voices I heard were speaking Prexci, although I heard English, Mandarin and even French as I passed a few round tables on my way to the bar.

  Once I could see the bar past the smoke and the crowds of the larger space, I noticed a group of seers all clustered around one end of the antique hardwood. Shadows from the game fish floating in the two massive aquariums made it difficult to identify faces. I was reluctant to use my light on anyone I couldn’t see, in part because I wasn’t keen to draw attention to myself. I started walking over there, anyway, figuring that had to be my group.

  When I got a few yards closer, shock hit my light as I realized Jon and Wreg were sitting in that corner of the bar. All the seers I’d seen were hovering around them.

  I came to a stop on the hardwood floor, watching Wreg where he leaned against the wall by the bar. His eyes followed Jon and a faint smile tugged at his lips, although his face and light looked as exhausted as I’d ever seen them. Jon leaned against him instead of the bar, not sitting in his lap exactly, but pretty damned close.

  He also looked tired, but not as exhausted as Wreg.

  Both wore clothes I didn’t recognize, including a dark gold T-shirt on Wreg that was probably the lightest-colored anything I’d seen on his body.

  I found myself staring at Jon more than Wreg, sensing that something in him had changed again. I tried to pinpoint what that something was, but only got details, nothing on the bigger picture of what it meant.

  His hazel eyes, which already seemed to grow lighter and more strangely calico-colored with each passing day, now shone with an intensity I’d never seen in them before. He hovered over Wreg with a kind of hawkish protectiveness I’d never seen in him, either. His dark blond hair stood in spikes on his head before it tumbled over part of his forehead. His shoulders looked broader than I remembered.

  Somehow, he looked taller than I remembered, too.

  It crossed my mind that Jon now looked and felt about ten times tougher than he had back when we lived in San Francisco––even being multiple black-belt guy.

  That hesitation I remembered in him after that whole nightmare with Terian was gone. That post-Terian propensity he had to recede into the background had disappeared, too.

  He drew eyes without seeming to mean to, but also without seeming to mind. He’d done that in San Francisco, too, before Terian caused something in his light to retract––but never to this degree. He exuded light now, drawing eyes more effortlessly than he ever had, even during his happiest and most confident periods in California.

  I watched him rub Wreg’s leg, his light and eyes sharpening as he listened to something Jorag said, and I wondered if anyone from home would recognize him at all anymore, and not only because of his clothes and hai
r.

  I didn’t see Revik, though.

  I felt a twinge of nerves as I did another round of scanning faces. Someone saw me then, interrupting my scan.

  Then several more someones.

  Oli, Torek, Barondi and a handful of other ex-Rebels pulled me into the circle around Jon and Wreg. Most of the faces I saw belonged to seers who’d stayed behind while we were in San Francisco and Argentina, but I also saw seers from our trip––even Chandre and Garensche, who should have been more tired than most, since both were heavily involved in bringing the sub across New York Harbor.

  When he noticed me, I exchanged cautious smiles with Jon, then waved off the worried apology I saw in his eyes when he continued to stare at me.

  It made me relax, though, at least about that end of things.

  All the while, I felt my light creeping out in a wider circle, looking for Revik.

  I couldn’t help watching Jon and Wreg with part of my attention, though.

  Jon didn’t move from Wreg’s side, while Wreg’s hand never left Jon in some form. Still, unusually for the two of them, Jon seemed to be in the dominant role, fielding the questions and teasing from the circle around them while Wreg took more of a back seat, sipping at a heavy-looking beer while he rubbed Jon’s back.

  I saw Jon reacting to his touch, and found myself focusing on his light, trying to understand the change I saw there. Both of them were wound up, that much was clear.

  The longer I looked at them, the more I could feel that cord between them, and how familiar it felt, even though the exact combination of frequencies was unique to the two of them.

  In any case… gaos. Revik was right. They were already halfway bonded.

  The realization gave me a brief flutter of fear.

  Jon could die if Wreg died. Wreg wasn’t exactly a low-risk kind of guy. He wasn’t full-blown reckless, but he wasn’t what I’d call cautious, either. He was definitely a “jump in feet-first and think about it later” kind of infiltrator.

  As I thought it, Jon gave me a reassuring smile, rolling his eyes a little.

  I saw the nerves there as he did it, but I also saw his broad shoulders relax. I wondered if it had finally occurred to him that my worries about the two of them might actually have something to do with the fact that I loved him. That I might be worried about him. That I might be afraid for him, given everything Revik and I had been through.

  The thought that it might have finally sunk into my brother’s thick skull that I wasn’t out to sabotage him and Wreg out of some kind of imaginary desire to sleep with his boyfriend both relieved me and made me want to throw something at his head.

  Like maybe a full glass of whatever Wreg was drinking.

  Jon must have heard some of that, because he snorted an involuntary laugh, clicking at me as he brought a glass of what looked like hard alcohol to his lips.

  Great. Wreg would probably turn him into an alcoholic, too.

  Jon laughed louder that time.

  Clicking and rolling my eyes when I saw Wreg tense, I fought with my aleimi in frustration, more conscious than ever of whatever the hell was wrong with it. I could still feel that block, enough that I struggled to make sense of the currents flowing around me in the room, the fragments of thoughts and impressions from the seers standing around me.

  I hated how blind I was––or deaf––or both. It was like trying to listen and see through a few meters of murky water, or having my ears blown out after a loud noise.

  I was still struggling with it, when Garensche’s loud voice broke through my reverie.

  “So are you having a ceremony, like your sister?” Grinning, he knocked Jon in the shoulder with one large hand, earning a reaction from Wreg.

  I couldn’t tell if Gar noticed Wreg’s hard stare.

  I decided he hadn’t when he immediately touched Jon’s face.

  A few other seers pulled Gar back that time, laughing, but the stiffening of Wreg’s shoulders hadn’t been a joke. That impression only strengthened when Jon laid a hand on Wreg’s thigh, obviously to calm him down.

  Gar went on with a grin, still oblivious, but now out of contact range, at least. Gar looked tired, too, I noticed, even as I glanced around at the others, a little bewildered at how many of them appeared to be from our team in South America.

  I wondered why more of them weren’t passed out in their rooms.

  “…I missed out on the crazed dancing and the lovemaking with strangers last time,” Gar said, his voice booming over that end of the bar. He nudged Jax with a hand, since he couldn’t get at Jon. The way he looked at Wreg, however, made me think he’d caught the flare of heat on the older seer’s light. “…I would also like very much to be high and crazy and try to seduce all of the Bridge’s sexy human cousins.”

  I didn’t laugh with the others. Instead I stood there, frozen, as the meaning of Gar’s words finally penetrated my hyper-distracted mind.

  Ceremony.

  Wedding ceremony.

  Jon and Wreg weren’t just letting this bond thing develop quietly on its own. They’d gone full-blown public with it. Despite what I’d been thinking and noticing in their light, the realization managed to shock me all over again.

  My eyes swiveled to Wreg and Jon––stopping on Jon.

  Jon noticed the look on my face, even as it sank in what this little party was about. Then I was looking at Wreg and Jon’s light for real, trying harder to understand the difference I felt there. Mostly, I wondered how far gone they were, and whether we could expect to see anything of them for the next month. Fear rose in me at the realization.

  Could we really afford to have the two of them be that vulnerable right now?

  With some effort, I managed to make out the structure half-formed between them, the same structure Revik must have noticed on the plane. Even knowing what I was looking for, I struggled to see it, which stressed me out even more.

  I fought to keep my feelings and worries off my face and out of my light, meeting Jon’s apprehensive look with a faint smile. I raised my voice over the thumping seer music.

  “Something you want to tell me, O Brother of Mine?”

  Seeing the humor I pulsed at him, his expression collapsed in almost comically-obvious relief. Something about the openness of that look exposed the vulnerability underneath and I found my heart opening to him, to both of them really, when I realized he’d been watching my face, worrying how I’d react.

  “Hey,” I said, raising my beer in a toast. “You want to marry that scary son of a bitch, you go right ahead, Jonathan. Your funeral.” I let him hear the teasing in my voice. “But you can’t complain about me marrying a violent terrorist anymore.”

  Still thinking, I grimaced.

  “Shit, does this mean you’re going to start craving dead bunnies for every meal and dressing like a Mongolian horse warrior on steroids?”

  Chandre burst out in a laugh, causing me to stare at her.

  I recognized the look on her face, even if I hadn’t seen it in a long time. Chan was drunk. I hadn’t seen Chandre drunk since Seertown, on the day of Syrimne’s birthday celebrations.

  The memory made me smile––then wince, as it brought up Cass’s face. I found myself shoving it back, even as it caused a sharp pain to rise in my chest.

  “Jesus.” I spoke loud, fighting to cover over the pain in my light. “Who got Chandre hammered? And why aren’t the rest of you in bed? Are you really so horny that Jon and Wreg’s hormonal issues are worth staying up for?”

  Getting a whiff of Holo’s shirt when he slung an arm around my shoulders, I waved a hand in front of my nose.

  “…And not showering for? Jeez louise, guys. Have a little mercy.”

  A couple of the seers we’d left behind at the hotel laughed. I laughed myself when I saw a few of the ex-Rebels sniff their own shirts, half of them kidding but some less so. A few grimaced after their sniffs, looking mildly embarrassed as they glanced around.

  Oli burst out in a laugh as Jax snif
fed himself next to her, and blushed.

  Watching all of them, I remembered it wasn’t even close to dinner time yet.

  “You missed the real sex show, Bridge,” Garensche told me, half-shouting even though he stood fairly close to me now. “Your brother is one kinky pervert, ilya. He had poor Wreg begging him, just like we used to hear from the boss with you––”

  “Please.” I scowled, really not kidding that time. “I seriously don’t want to hear about that.” Smacking Garensche’s arm when the seer got closer to me, feeling him still thinking about Jon and Wreg, I scowled deeper. “Gaos di’lanlente a guete, Gar. I don’t want to see that shit, either. Are you trying to torture me? Or only accidentally scarring me for life?”

  Chandre laughed again, louder than before.

  I noticed the seer sitting next to her, that new SCARB seer, Talei, and wondered that Wreg or Balidor let her wander around without having gone through the full range of security checks. Her hand rested on Chandre’s thigh where they sat next to one another at the bar, but I knew that couldn’t be the whole explanation. Nor could the fact that she’d supplied us with the OBE grid maps right when we needed them to get back into New York.

  I definitely needed to compare notes with Balidor when he resurfaced.

  I jumped when Gar wrapped an arm around me and squeezed, grinning down at me. He smelled as ripe as most of the males in the room, unfortunately.

  “Watch it Gar!” Holo shoved at his thick arm from my other side. “I think your judgment’s impaired, brother, with your roaming hands. First you test Wreg’s tolerance, now the Sword’s? Our Illustrious brother may have mellowed some since his marriage vows and finally having his wife in his bed… but he’s still a scary fucker.”

  Wreg chuckled, now holding Jon around the waist.

  “Speaking of the old man,” I said, smiling a bit more stiffly. “Does anyone want to point me in his general direction?”

  I saw Jon glance around once my words penetrated, as if it hadn’t occurred to him Revik might have left. I followed his glance, then, seeing nothing, I gave up, opening my light around the connection I shared with Revik.