Allie's War Season Four (116 page)

His personality had that effect on some seers, he had noticed.

Even the Bridge, at times.

Dante really may not like it,
Mika teased again.
...which means Vik won’t like it...or the Bridge. Or even the Sword. Not even if you ask nicely and give her many favors with your tongue and cock. Not even if you don’t push her too hard with your light to get her to comply. Remember, brother, the Bridge...she thinks a bit like a human with that kind of thing...

Loki gave her another blank look, but Mika only laughed.

I’ll suck you off as a favor, brother,
she told him.
If you really need some relief...and it looks like you do. If it cannot wait until you return to the fodder of the refugee pens, then just ask. Are you any good with your light, though, brother? Or has it been too long?

Loki felt his skin warm, especially around his neck and ears.

It wasn’t really embarrassment.

Instead, she’d managed to re-ignite the separation pain in his light, intensely enough that he couldn’t control it entirely for those few seconds.

He found himself thinking about the American-accented seer’s offer almost objectively. Maybe he could use the light contact, no matter how brief...even if she meant the offer partly in jest. He had little to offer her in trade, though, and he knew the other woman worked as a professional prior to joining the military arm of their group in New York.

She might expect payment. She seemed to be offering him something for free...he would need to discern that for certain if he tried to take her up on her offer, but he knew the whole thing might be a joke, anyway.

He knew he did not really want her.

Loki could tell the female seer did not really want him, either. His pain had turned her on. She found him attractive in the physical sense, but it did not go beyond that for her, which was pretty much exactly how he felt about her.

Loki did not really like that feeling of charity, either.

He wanted a willing lay, not a favor.

Mika must have picked up on some of that, too, because she laughed.

Rationalization...
she sent to him, the thought sing-songing in his mind.

Loki followed her gaze to the human woman, feeling his pain worsen when he saw her staring at the two of them, a faint crease between her eyebrows as she looked from him to Mika, her full mouth puckered in a frown.

He hadn’t yet managed to tear his eyes off her brown-skinned face, when Mika spoke once more in Loki’s mind, her words holding more compassion that time.

Fair enough, my handsome brother,
she murmured softly.

Leaning over him, she kissed him on the cheek, ignoring Loki’s surprised wince as she straightened. Mika winked at him when his eyes followed her up to a standing position. Massaging his shoulder again briefly, Mika began to walk, following the direction of his earlier gestures down the trash-littered alleyway.

Loki watched her outline as she approached Anale and the lingering daylight.

Even as he looked away, Mika sent him a brief flicker of pain, one he felt all the way to his groin.
Let me know if you change your mind, though, brother,
she sent, softer.
The offer didn’t contain as much charity as you seem to think.

Loki did not answer that, either.

Instead, inexplicably, he found himself looking at the human woman again, only to find her staring at him, too, a deeper frown turning down the edges of her full mouth.

A girlfriend? Or maybe he’s just sleeping with her...?
Loki felt the woman muse.

His cock hardened painfully, catching him off-guard when it occurred to him that the thought had bothered the human. It might have even made her jealous, although she did not seem to have admitted that fact to herself yet.

Loki fought to pull his mind off her, off the woman’s full mouth and Mika’s offer of oral sex and whatever else, even as he heard Mika herself laugh quietly in front of him, as much in his mind as in the open air.

Forcing his eyes off the human woman, Loki did his best to make his face blank once more. Unreadable.

He wondered if he was having as much success with that as usual, however.

THEY MADE IT to the Chinook in just under two hours.

They stood outside of it for a few minutes, on the empty, cracked asphalt of what had been a school playground, at least according to the woman with them.

The woman even seemed to recognize it, Loki though, watching her look around, a faint sadness in her dark eyes. He wondered if she’d gone to school here, if she had memories in this place, ones that were personal, and had to fight to keep his light off hers to find out. He wanted to comfort her, in any case. He could see the shock wearing off her slowly, not just of her rescue, but maybe of the shift in her reality, from slavery and certain death to something a lot less certain and still only barely tinged with hope.

To Loki himself, this place looked entirely desolate. It reminded him of war-torn areas of his youth, of human bombs, of dead bodies.

It also looked abandoned.

The field’s grasses had turned to a near-swamp in the intervening months, high and green in places, but brown and smelling of mulch and mold from the rains, especially near the chained link fence that separated the field from the road. To his left, in the distance, Loki saw a brown brick building, windowless, that stretched the length of the block on the other side of yet another street. He guessed, from the woman’s fleeting memories, that this had been the school itself.

Directly in front of him, a sad-looking remnant of school pride stood in the form of rusted metal bleachers. Empty now, the bleachers overlooked the waving grasses of the field, limp now in the slanting, sideways rain of another tropical storm.

At least one dead body lived under there, too, Loki knew.

He could smell it, even from where they stood.

He glanced at the woman again, and saw her shove her small, white-looking hands in the front pockets of her black jeans. She wore four rings, he noted...silver, chunky things that looked less like they had emotional meaning than that she liked to wear them for other reasons. He wondered almost if they had served as weapons, in that horrible place where they’d found her.

She caught him staring again, though, and he averted his gaze, fighting not to react to the way her light clung to his, maybe looking for reassurance.

More images flickered through her mind, memories of this place.

Loki felt her grief. He realized she was coming out of a kind of shock, from being underground for so long. Shock of memory, of realization that her world had crumbled even further while she’d been away.

Fear of the unknown. Grief.

Tearing his light from hers, from her memories, he fought to refocus on his task.

Blinking into the rain, he faced his small team, and the Chinook parked just behind them.

According to their pilot, Preela, and Rex, the muscular seer Loki left with Preela to help her guard the Chinook from any potential breach, the two of them had spent most of their seven mission hours on the roofs of the nearby buildings. They’d been forced to do so, apparently, primarily to get away from militia groups and armed human gangs. They had spent a lot of that time on the same brick building that stood behind them, although apparently at least one human gang lived inside those windowless walls, too.

So far, all of those who tried to accost them had been human, so they had been able to push a good number of them away...or at least persuade them not to aim missile launchers and other larger weapons at them while they were in the air.

Preela even managed to get the bird refueled at the nearby JFK airport.

That feat alone impressed Loki, as well as others on their team, he could feel. Given the plundering that had gone on there, too, she must have been resourceful, indeed.

From what Preela reported, and the far-less-talkative Rex confirmed, they’d had to fight their way through elements of one of the local militias for that, too, since one of the bigger groups had taken to guarding the fuel as part of their own personal cache. That same human militia had determined some means of converting and diluting the higher-octane plane fuel to a version they could stretch out for use in ground vehicles.

Which meant they had at least a few people in their group with half a brain, despite how animalistic Loki had observed most of the humans behaving. It seemed the worst depravities of human nature had only grown more bestial in the months since law enforcement and the regular military ceased to operate in this part of the country.

Loki again found himself thankful that they would be leaving this island soon.

Beyond the swamp-like weather, the periodic flooding and electrical storms, he found the descent into madness ultimately depressing to witness.

He could feel relief on the human woman, too.

Then again, his light had become more tied into hers over the past hour, rather than less. He found his light drawing deeper into hers still...more and more with each passing minute it seemed, until now it was almost uncomfortably so...but he didn’t seem to be able to do much about that, either.

The other seers had noticed, he knew.

A few of them gave him glances that Loki knew he was not meant to intercept. He saw them looking between his light and that of the human woman, too, and could feel side conversations he was not supposed to hear, either.

Loki tried to pretend he didn’t see those looks or hear those murmurs, but again, he knew he could not hide what his light was doing, not in this small of a construct.

Luckily, most of them seemed to find it amusing more than anything.

Only Illeg and Jax seemed less amused...and Anale, to a lesser degree.

Loki knew that all three of them were close to Dante, and that at least part of their reaction stemmed from a desire to protect their young cousin. He knew they would do their best to protect the woman who had given birth to Dante, as a result...even if that woman was a full adult in human years, being in her early- to mid-thirties at minimum.

Loki grew uncomfortably aware of the female human’s eyes more and more on him, too. He knew that might be his fault. She could not help but react to his light’s interest in hers. Of course, if she had felt differently about him, it would have caused a different reaction in both of them, but as it was, he found himself looking at her too often, and more often than not, he found her returning those looks.

Truthfully, a part of his mind was already contemplating how he might find some way to talk to her. Alone, that is, without the others around.

He remembered what Tarsi’s cake had told him, all of those months ago.

It prophesied a love interest for him, during these dark days. He had not been gifted with a glimpse of her, of this love of his, but he had definitely felt her to be human. He had been turned on by the vision...he had, in fact, spent most of the night kissing the Bridge’s human aunt, he had been so turned on by it...but he had not felt with any confidence that he had yet met the woman whose light he tasted in that vision.

Now, his hunger wanted to confuse him on that point, too.

Even now, as he tried to think about how best to approach D.C. from the air, how close they should get before finding another mode of transportation into the city itself, Loki’s eyes found an excuse to look in her direction, again and again. Under the pretext of looking at the runways, at the buildings behind where she stood, even at the sky, his eyes lingered on her long, jagged-cut dark hair and noted her body as slim-hipped and muscular, but wiry. She had medium-length legs, and they looked strong and toned under the black jeans she wore.