War_Apocalypse

by JC Andrijeski

  Swallowing, I nodded, gesturing a yes with my hand, along with a softer apology.

  “Sorry,” I said aloud. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  Sighing, he covered his face with one hand.

  Anger flickered across his expression, more of that guilt, but I felt the wanting underneath. He fought back and forth in his head for a few seconds more, and I felt the pain worsen in his light, until it was affecting his body. I also felt the connection between that and what I’d been feeling on him before, that more compulsive part of his light, the part that caused his fingers to stroke my bare skin, even as he thought through the rest of it.

  Glancing down, he exhaled again.

  That more complex array of thoughts shone behind his eyes, as if he was still fighting between what his light wanted, what his mind thought, and his actual words.

  “Are you going to ask me?” I said finally. “You vowed to ask me… remember? You promised you’d tell me if you wanted something in that area. That you’d show me, if I didn’t get it. Remember? We talked about this.”

  After another pause, he exhaled, nodding. “Yes,” he said.

  “Do you love me?” I said.

  He looked at me, and some of the tension left his face. “Yes, wife. I adore you.”

  “Do you want to hurt me?” I said. “For real, hurt me?”

  He shook his head, even as his eyes cleared more.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then what’s the problem?” I said. “Is it just because two guys you don’t like got there first?” I fought a smile that didn’t have a lot of humor in it. “…Welcome to my world, husband. Or do you think it was fun listening to Kat talk about you like that? And having to remember it ever since?” Hesitating, I added, “…and I didn't miss any of the undertones when you lost your virginity to Raven and those others, either. It might not have been overt, but it was definitely implied. They picked up on what turned you on, right off.”

  “Would you do it for me though, Allie?” he said, blunt.

  When I glanced up, puzzled, since I felt like I’d answered that question already, he shook his head, as if reading the confusion in my eyes.

  “…I mean, would you let me do it,” he repeated, sending me a more directive pulse of light. “Would you let me control it? Including teaching me that thing you do with your light?” When my eyes cleared in understanding, he added, “I never felt comfortable asking for that. The opposite, sure, but I never asked if I could control things. Not even with prostitutes.” His eyes held that conflict again. “After the Gisele thing, I just felt––”

  I cut him off, holding up a hand. “I get it, Revik. Stop. Okay?”

  Even so, I found myself looking at him, thinking about his words, and what I felt in his light as it coiled around mine.

  “Never?” I said.

  He shook his head, clicking a little in what I could feel was another wave of embarrassment. “Not really.”

  “Not… really?”

  “That’s not a dodge, Allie.” He looked at me, his eyes shining harder. “With the Rooks, I mostly got that out of my system when they had me training new recruits. We didn’t sexualize that… not overtly, anyway, although yeah, the line got blurry at times. We didn’t consummate.”

  He shrugged, again avoiding my eyes.

  “Galaith was pretty conservative in his way. He didn’t want any of us taking advantage of uninitiated seers, not if they were joining our network. And I wouldn’t have, anyway. Even with the Rooks, I didn’t have an ‘anything goes’ attitude about absolutely everything. I ended up having to rein Terian in when it came to that kind of thing, of course…”

  Swallowing, he waved off his own words with a hand.

  “…Sexually, I only ever toyed at the edges of it. Mostly in group settings. Where I felt safe doing it, where it was kind of the tone in general.”

  I nodded, but felt my jaw harden a little more.

  I figured he’d done the seer group sex thing, but we’d never talked about it, and he’d never shown me anything like that, not even in the Tank. He hadn’t shown me the “training recruits” thing he’d just referenced, either, but this wasn’t the first time it had come up. Terian made cracks about Revik’s “talents” in that area when I was his captive in D.C.

  As far as the group sex thing, that was considered more or less normal, from what I knew.

  Especially for close-knit, military-type groups like the Rebels had been.

  “It wasn’t with them,” Revik said, his voice showing a twinge of annoyance. “Are you kidding, wife? My uncle wouldn’t let me have a sexual relationship with one seer, much less a group of them. I couldn’t even get naked around them, especially after I got that sword and sun tattoo. He was worried one of them would read into it… start putting things together. If he hadn’t trusted Wreg so much, he might have had his memory erased for having been the one to ink me.” Grunting, he tightened his hold on me. “Do you really think he was inviting me to orgies to bond with the group? Jesus, wife.”

  “Who then?” I said.

  “That was with the Rooks, too, if you must know,” he said, exuding another pulse of embarrassment, despite the grumble in his voice. “It’s actually how Raven and I got together. Galaith didn’t come out and say it, but he quietly encouraged that kind of thing. It made the cells tighter.”

  I nodded, but my jaw hardened more. Something must have changed in my light, because he gripped my hips in his hands, shaking me lightly.

  “Allie… you asked.”

  “I know.” I nodded, still not looking at him. “I know I did.”

  “I didn’t know you then.”

  “I know that, too.”

  There was another silence. Then I forced a sigh, looking up at him.

  “Are you sure we can handle this?” I said. “We’re both a little… hypersensitive.”

  He sighed. “Honestly? No, I’m not sure.” He grunted, his eyes sharpening on mine. “Do you even want to do it, Allie? Or are you just humoring me?”

  I thought about that, too.

  Feeling through different aspects with my light, even as I tried to shield slightly from his, I was surprised by a harder flush of pain, that time coming from me.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I want to do it. And I want it to be you controlling it, Revik… not just me. Not all the time, but yes… I want that.” I glanced at him. “I guess I was worried you might take that the wrong way, too. If I asked, I mean.”

  Again, I saw more than one reaction skim across his eyes.

  “You are taking it the wrong way,” I said, fighting the disappointment in my voice.

  “Only a little,” he said, holding me tighter. “I still want to do it, Allie. Badly enough to risk one of us freaking out. But maybe not right this minute. Maybe when our light is a little more bonded.” He hesitated. “We’ll take it easy at first, okay?”

  I nodded, but still felt my throat tighten.

  “Trust me,” he said, shaking me lightly again. “I’m not Ditrini. I don’t even want that, Allie. It doesn’t turn me on. Not in the slightest.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I know that. That’s not what’s worrying me.”

  But he shook his head. “Your mind might know that, but you got afraid just then, and not just about my emotional reactions.” He kissed my face. “I felt it, wife. And I understand. I swear I won’t make it worse. I promise you I won’t.”

  I nodded again, relaxing a little more.

  “Okay.” Seeing the scrutiny in his eyes, I leaned my head against his chest. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we need to take it easy on each other for a while.”

  His arms tightened around me, even as his fingers curled into my hair.

  I felt that protective thing on him again, too, intensely enough that I felt my previous worries return, strongly enough to eclipse what we’d just been talking about. Whatever I could feel in his light, it wasn’t just love. Not only love, anyway, or even possessiveness. He felt like he wa
s getting ready to take a bullet for me. Or maybe donate one of his kidneys.

  If I really was dying, I was going to kill him.

  Still holding me against him, he chuckled.

  That intensity in his light didn’t lessen, though, and his arms, if anything, only tightened around me more.

  33

  FLYING

  “I ALWAYS WANTED to fly,” she called out in a half-shout, grinning over her shoulder at him. “As a kid, I wanted to fly. I broke my arm, trying to fly off Allie’s roof… did I tell you that?”

  Feigran laughed, wrapping an arm around her waist.

  It was cold on the roof. A storm raged around them, pelting the helipad with rain, the wind driving drops into them whenever it changed direction. They stood under a metal overhang near the door leading into the building below. Raindrops plinked and plunked on the covering overhead when they weren’t being driven sideways by gusts of wind.

  Yanking her closer to his body, he warmed her with his flesh, his light, his hands.

  He wanted to fuck her again. She could probably feel that, she’d gotten so good with her light. She got better with it all the time, which only made him want to fuck her more often, harder, for longer periods of time.

  He’d promised he’d take her flying though. He’d promised.

  Feigran knew few things with utter certainty, but he did know this: a promise was a promise. He couldn’t break a promise, no matter how carelessly given. Revi’ taught him that.

  Like the promise he’d made to Jon.

  Feigran promised Jon he would look after her. He’d promised he’d never let anything bad happen to his sweet girl. He would keep that promise, too. He would keep War Cassandra safe––safe and well-fucked, pampered and petted––cushioned from all those who might harm her, even herself.

  Even the father, if it came to that.

  “Did I tell you about that?” she prodded. “Did I tell you I tried to fly? I jumped off the roof, flapping my arms like a great, big, featherless bird. Allie and Jon found me in their backyard when I screamed, and her mother––”

  “That never happened, darling,” Feigran said.

  He spoke loudly, fighting to be heard above the whistling, moaning wind and the whipping rotor blades of the helicopter slowly descending in front of them. Feigran watched the pilot through the window, saw him staring at him and Cass. Without looking away from the pilot’s mirrored glasses, he added,

  “That was just a story, remember, my love? Your father broke your arm. He snapped it right in two, when he was drunk. He called you a slut… a baby whore. You were eleven. You went up on that roof because you wanted to punish him. You were going to jump off, kill yourself, but Allie talked you out of it.”

  Glancing down briefly, he smiled at her.

  “…Of course, it’s unlikely the fall would have killed you. But you might have broken your other arm. Maybe a leg. It surely would have earned you another beating from your father, so it is probably good you didn’t follow through.”

  There was a silence.

  When it stretched, Feigran looked down at her, studying her face for longer that time. He gazed into the deathly pale, beautiful, oval face of War Cassandra, and saw that her animated expression had entirely blanked.

  For a long-feeling few seconds, she only stared, unable to see him, or anything around him.

  Then, slowly, she nodded.

  “Wow,” she said. “You’re right.” Her red-lipsticked lips pursed in a frown as her irises clicked back into focus. “That’s strange, isn’t it? That I would remember that as real? I’d forgotten Allie was there at all. In my memory, she came outside after.”

  He kissed the side of her face.

  “Not so strange, darling,” he said, kissing her again. “We all remember what we want to, at times. We seers perhaps have to work at it a bit harder than humans, but we can paint our own memories just as well as they can in the end. Perhaps better. Perhaps we simply have to believe it more than they do.”

  “But it seemed so real. I can remember every detail.”

  Still speaking loud over the rain plinking and plunking overhead, and the helicopter as it lowered to the white circle in the center of the helipad, Feigran half-shouted,

  “I told myself as a child that my parents were killed by pirates. I told myself it was the pirates who took me to the slave camps. I believed this for years, my darling. I even remembered the pirate ship… and their leader, who had a peg leg made of metal.”

  Her full, suckable, red-lipsticked lips frowned. She shielded her whipping black hair with fingers decorated by nail polish matching her hair and lips.

  “What really happened?” she said, loud.

  He grinned wider. “My father sold me. And my mother.” At her scrunched eyebrows, he smiled wider. “He did not do it out of malice. He was afraid they would kill all three of us if he didn’t agree to sell us to them. They had already raped my mother.”

  At War’s open-mouthed stare, he hugged her tighter.

  “I was quite young, my sweet. I didn’t fully understand what was happening at the time. After the slavers raped my mother to death in the back of that truck on the way to the transport ship, it was easier for me to pretend they had both died. Instead of a freight ship flying a human sail, I remembered a wooden ship with the skull and crossbones flying from the mast. Instead of the slave-auctioneer who beat us in the hold and dumped cold salt water on us, I remembered a man with a parrot and an eyepatch and a metal leg.”

  She smiled, and he kissed her lips.

  Sighing, he gazed up at the cloud-filled sky, watching it rain past the overhang where they stood, massaging her back where he held her.

  “They killed so many in that truck,” he mused. “My mother was only one. Even more died on the ship. I can remember the truth now… so it’s not that my seer light didn’t record it. It simply painted over it, in a way.”

  The frown on her full lips deepened, making him want to kiss them again.

  “I’m sorry, baby.” She caressed his face, combing her fingers through his auburn hair. “Did you love your mommy, precious?”

  “Very much,” he said seriously. “I still remember her face, of course. I remember it alive, and I remember it dead. Would you like to see it?”

  “Yes!” She hugged him with both arms, beaming up at him. “Yes, of course I’d like to see your mom!”

  “Alive? Or dead?”

  She frowned, pursing her lips in thought. “Dead, first,” she pronounced. “Then show me her alive, so that will be the last version in my mind.”

  He smiled, kissing her. Then, after sliding deeper into her light, he closed his eyes, recalling the images from his memory, in the order she requested them.

  “Aww. She’s so pretty.”

  “She was very pretty, yes.”

  “You look like her, baby.”

  His lips curled in a half-smile. When her eyes clicked back into focus, that smile was still on his face. He felt her noticing him, noticing how his face had changed, how different he looked since he’d left that hotel in New York. He saw a memory of himself in her mind, a sickly-thin, deathly-pale, owlish-looking man in the catacombs under the House on the Hill. She could only see hints of that man now––his eyes, the shape of his mouth and nose. She had to look for him though. She’d found that man odd-looking, a little bit disturbing.

  She found him handsome now.

  Even his eyes, which had seemed too big then, now fit his face perfectly. He heard her wonder if their father had even done something to his face, to make him look so different. She wondered if he’d had some kind of medical augmentation.

  “No.” Feigran shook his head, smiling. “Not the way you mean, love… no surgery. Some of my bone grew back, though. I was malnourished in that capsule, so father helped with that. He helped me grow to what I would have been, had I developed naturally, on Earth. I wasn’t fully grown when they put me up in the sky.”

  She smiled, leaning up on her tip
-toes to kiss his mouth.

  He kissed her back, biting her jaw and her throat after the kiss ended.

  She liked his body now, too. Her hands roamed over his muscular chest, his arms, his thighs, his back. She stroked his fingers.

  “I’m glad he did,” she said in his ear, so he’d hear it over the whipping wind. “You are beautiful now, my love. Such a beautiful man… it is only right that you look as you should, as your mother would have wanted.”

  He pressed his groin against her, wrapping his arms tighter around her waist. When her hands grabbed his ass, squeezing, his cock hardened in seconds. Letting out a soft sound, he pressed into her again, pulling her closer.

  “We’ll fly first,” she said, speaking above the wind. Separating their bodies just enough to get her hand between them, she massaged the bulge in his pants. “You’ll take me flying, like you promised. Then we’ll go fuck, okay? We’ll fuck a few times, and I’ll rub you with oil, but we’ll do this first.” At the low, impatient, disappointed sound he made, she laughed. “Come on. Father says we have to practice, right? We have to do a trial run.”

  Feigran thought about this, puzzled.

  “I thought he had a way in?” he said, louder as she pulled away. “Past the OBE?”

  “He does,” she half-shouted back. “But he still wants us to know the route to that part of the city. The risk is from the military on this side of the bay… not over Manhattan.”

  He nodded, understanding reaching him. He studied her caramel-colored eyes.

  A small smile touched his lips as another possibility reached him.

  “Will you fly topless, my love?” he said. “Your breasts are so beautiful… I would like to look at them while we fly. I promise to reward you after, if you do.”

  She laughed, her long black and scarlet hair whipping around her face.

  As she turned, looking at him with those beautiful eyes, her full lips curled in a smile, a small dimple by her mouth, her black hair silky and long…

  He thought her the most beautiful woman in the world.

  34

  OVERPROTECTIVE