Allie's War Season Four (115 page)

Loki gave her a grim look, but only nodded, once, seer-fashion.

“Agreed, sister,” he said.

He didn’t add that he’d already pinged Balidor with a text version of more or less that same thought.

Illeg must have caught some whisper of that on his light, because Loki saw her relax slightly, even as she gave him a satisfied nod. Her mouth still looked thinner than usual, Loki noted, but they’d all had a lot of reasons to be on edge out here.

Then again, maybe he’d been looking at female mouths a little too often, lately.

Even as Loki thought it, he found his eyes dropping down to his rifle, ensuring that it hadn’t gotten too gunked up in the raid. He knew that was just more distraction, too; he’d checked its workings scarcely five minutes earlier, when they first crouched here after Loki ordered them to halt, mainly to give his team a breather, but also to answer the ping from Oli.

Neither Oli nor Illeg were the females pulling at his light now, however.

Nor were either of them the reason he was having trouble concentrating.

Instead, it was the human woman who stood behind Illeg, who now crouched next to Holo, a wary look on her tanned face. Her closeness to the other male seer sent a ripple of near hostility through Loki’s light, forcing him to pull his light away from hers, even as he let himself notice he had let it creep back towards her in the first place.

He forced his mind off how they’d found her.

More than that, he fought not to think about what she’d looked like in that dank, filthy place, that room of stained mattresses and wires, that smelled of sex and sour sweat, mold from the monsoon rains, rotted food…and yes, sex. Even in that filthy, depressing den, his desire to fuck had flared high enough to nearly make his knees weak.

Even just a brief look at her now brought that denser pain back in a faint pulse.

He shouldn’t be thinking like this.

He should not.

Even apart from who she was.

Moving his eyes away from her heart-shaped face, those large, dark eyes and full mouth, he glanced down the length of the narrow brick corridor towards where Anale guarded the entrance to the alley. He squinted up at the overcast strip of sky beyond.

Jax and Holo were watching Loki though, their lights holding flickers of curiosity.

“Did their mission go well?” Jax asked finally. “In Macau?”

“No,” Loki said, clicking a little, although he couldn’t exactly blame them for asking. Moderating his tone, he added with a seer’s shrug, “...Apparently not. They were able to pick up most of the humans, but the seers had been sold already, and relocated to Dubai.”

They all fell silent at that. They knew Dubai was a Shadow city.

Holo grunted then, as if to lighten the mood. He pulled up his own weapon, wiping the sight with a cloth. He wore a F2000 like Illeg’s.

“I bet the big boss didn’t like that,” he muttered.

He didn’t look at the others when they glanced at him.

No one laughed that time, either.

Loki wasn’t sure what to add to his words. He knew they would hear all about it when they got back to the carrier, and that they were more or less secure here, as long as they stayed out of the Barrier, but it wasn’t really in his nature to share that kind of information, even when he got it secondhand. Oli told him about an encounter with a strange seer, too, who claimed to belong to some group of seers devoted to the Bridge, and that the Bridge herself had threatened that seer for what appeared to be some personal interaction with the Sword...or maybe because the same seer had stabbed Jon, Loki couldn’t quite be sure.

In any case, Loki got the sense that the story had a personal element...personal enough that he’d felt uncomfortable hearing it, especially long-distance. Not only did it make him not want to ask anything further of Oli herself, but in fact, at that point Loki cut Oli off, and pinged Balidor to take her off transmission duty for the field teams, since she obviously did not know the rules about discretion and unsolicited and unnecessary information.

He knew his own team would want to know all of these things.

He knew they craved personal information out here, whatever Illeg’s annoyance. Loki knew they would want to hear about it, if only to keep their minds off the grimmer realities they faced, but he still felt uncomfortable sharing such a thing.

So he didn’t.

“Do we have an approach plan?” Jax said finally. “For D.C.?”

Loki clicked softly, but didn’t answer.

Mostly because there was no need.

They all knew the Sword never proposed anything without a plan. Usually that plan would have a half-dozen contingencies in addition to the main approach.

Jax had merely been using words to pull Loki’s mind back to the present.

Sharpening his gaze, Loki motioned towards the north end of the alley where they stood, indicating he wanted them to get moving again. While the location had been fine for a short rest, it was far from secure. Anyway, they were on the clock again.

Anale took lookout duties at one end, and Ontari, who was ex-Ahdipan, stood a half-dozen meters behind them, keeping his gun aimed at the other end of the long passage.

“Stay with her,” Loki told Mika, motioning with his head towards the female human.

He didn’t look at her himself, but his mind made a mental picture of her anyway.

In terms of her features, she looked a fair bit like her biological daughter, their new teenaged computer whiz, Dante. Her light felt significantly different, however, in ways that Loki’s own light wanted to explore in more detail, to tug and pull and taste so that he could see more of it, and perhaps see more of her inside of it.

On a purely operational level, Loki still felt a faint rush from the thrill of victory at having found her at all. None of them had expected to find her...much less to find her alive.

The human had been resourceful, however.

Smart, which Loki liked, too.

Even Illeg, who could be gruff towards humans, noted that this woman must be highly intelligent, also like her daughter. Her situation had hardly been enviable when they found her, true, but Loki could not help but admire her for having found any means of survival at all, when so many like her had already died. She had explained to them, in an almost offhand but endearingly embarrassed way, that when the human bandits came to her, she offered them a choice, and then negotiated until they opted to keep her alive.

In the end, she convinced them she was worth feeding...and protecting.

She termed it as “worth a longer-term investment,” which Loki also found an interesting choice of words.

The female human was attractive, too.

A little too attractive for him, at least right then.

Loki needed sex, and badly. It wasn’t just this woman, he told himself. It was him. He’d been looking at the seers in his team a little too long, too, even before they’d found her.

Of course, he knew that was rationalization.

Partly, at any rate.

He hadn’t looked at any of the seers in his unit the way he looked at her. His light didn’t react to any of theirs in a way that even came close to the intensity he’d felt since they’d come across this human, either. Truthfully, he couldn’t remember reacting to anyone in decades the way he’d been reacting to the human female since they found her in that dank, drink and smoke-choked hole at the fifteenth floor of the reclaimed brownstone.

Even so, he knew that the more general need for sex must be making this worse.

He didn’t normally bed males, but he’d even been looking at Jax the other day, noticing the muscles on the seer’s shoulders and back while he washed off in the river following their initial scout of that human enclave at the northern end of Prospect Park.

But those had been momentary things, fleeting.

He had scarcely been able to tear his light off the human woman since he first laid eyes on her. And he still couldn’t seem to keep his light away from hers.

Even as he thought it, he caught her looking at him, her dark brown eyes appraising.

Whoever these assholes are, they’re all pretty hot…

He realized with a jolt that had come from her, her mind. He had gotten too close to her light; he could hear her thoughts.

He looks almost Middle Eastern. But damn. Like a movie star of the hot sheik. Why does he keep staring at me, though? He looks at me like I annoy him or something...

She continued to stare at Loki, seemingly oblivious both to the fact that he could both read her thoughts, and that she was staring at him, too.

She did seem to notice that he was reacting to her, and to the intensity of her stare, but he couldn’t tell how she interpreted that exactly, despite her fleeting thoughts. Those thoughts still seemed to occur on several levels, as if she tried to talk herself into one interpretation even as she reacted to at least one other.

He found himself trying to follow both trails, but parts of her still eluded him.

Unfortunately, the fact that she was able to block him, at least to a degree, only managed to turn him on more.

God,
she thought then.
I wonder if they really do know where Dani is...

A different kind of separation pain infused her light, one that touched him enough that he had to look away.

Even if they don’t, belonging to them can’t be any worse than being one of Balucci’s women…and none of them has tried to touch me, at least.
Her dark eyes focused on Loki again.
He seems to be in charge. Wonder where he’s from. He doesn’t talk much, compared to the others. Not even in that other language...

He listened to her, fighting not to react to her open appraisal of his body.

Still, more than anything, Loki could feel the woman’s puzzlement, her attempt to wrap her mind around who they were, whether they were friends or foes, what they wanted from her, her fears about the safety of her daughter, whether she could believe anything they told her.

Most of her surface thoughts held an element of bravado, but the vulnerability he felt below that nearly made him sick with want. He couldn’t look at her at all now, even as he continued to strain for pieces of her thoughts, seeking the underlying emotion.

She seemed to think they’d rescued her from that fortress by the park.

That should work to their advantage in persuading her that they meant her no harm.

Even as he thought it, Loki felt another dark flicker of pain, seeing her staring at his body through the bulkiness of the organic armor he wore. He didn’t manage to suppress the pain fast enough that time, and Mika, the small, Asian-featured seer from Seattle, grinned at him, thumping his back with one small hand.

You need to get laid, brother,
Mika told him teasingly.
Are you really going to try and bed that woman?
Her eyes flickered to Dante’s human mother.
You might do better to try and court Illeg, brother...although I’ve heard Chinja can be possessive, so maybe you’d have a fight on your hands there, too.

Loki didn’t answer, but turned his head to gaze down the alley, using his light in subtle touches to assess whether anyone had noticed their small group, either from the street or one of the nearby buildings. They’d managed to shake, push or knock out all of the human soldiers and muscle who tried to follow them after their extraction of the human woman herself.

He still felt no one.

Glancing back at Mika, he motioned his head back towards the open end of the alley.

Move ahead, sister,
he told her politely.
Head west. Towards the landing area.

Smiling at him, Mika touched his back again, right before she leaned towards his ear.
You know, Dante may not thank you for trying to get into her mother’s pants, brother Loki.

Loki suppressed a grimace, and did not answer.

Patting his back again, Mika grinned, obviously enjoying teasing him for some reason, since she’d been doing so pretty much since they’d left the aircraft carrier, and even though the Bridge and Wreg had put Loki in command of this group.

Maybe she liked to harass him because he did not react much in a way that was visible.