Allie's War Season Four (117 page)

Even apart from those strange, silver rings, her clothes interested him, too––somewhat dated, dark-colored human-styled clothes with which he was only passingly familiar, including those dark stretch jeans and a black and white band t-shirt from a New York rock band. She had dressed herself in front of him in that back room of the residential apartments where they found her. Loki looked away, of course, along with the rest of the seers, but he had been aware of her, the whole time she covered herself, even as he pretended he wasn’t.

He had felt her aware of him too, even then.

She had been deeply embarrassed to be found this way, he felt. Embarrassed and sad and fearful that they would tell her daughter.

Even then, in those first few moments of contact with her, while listening to Anale explain to her in English who they were, why they were here, Loki himself had only wanted to comfort her in some way. He had wanted to reassure her that none of them judged her, that they would not betray anything to her daughter that she did not want known.

Loki found himself remembering Vikram describing her over the comm, too, right before they had gone into that warlord’s den of an apartment complex near Prospect Park. Vikram sent them images of Dante’s mother, in addition to the verbal description, although Vikram had been forced to steal the former off of Dante’s network queue. For the same reason perhaps, none of those images had been clear or recent, since Dante herself had pilfered what she could of her mother off hacks of government security files, not having any of her own. Dante had lost all of her personal files, of course, when Jon and Wreg were forced to abduct her off that street in Manhattan to save her life from Shadow.

Vikram told Loki that Dante herself described her mother as “kind of a middle-aged rocker type chick, like old lady cool,” which both Holo and Jax found extremely funny.

The woman Loki looked at now didn’t strike him as old in any way, though, or as particularly humorous in terms of either her light or her physicality. Even for a human, she was still quite young...which was neither here nor there to Loki himself, but he found it interesting, in terms of how her daughter seemed to view her. He wondered if it had something to do with her having given birth, or if there was some other reason.

She still wore the remnants of the dark eye make up she had been wearing when they found her in that back room in the apartment complex, too.

Noticing that got him remembering what else she had been wearing––and not wearing––when they broke into that petty warlord’s fortress. A mere flicker of that memory brought a denser pulse of guilt, but also a hotter wave of pain that wanted to take over Loki’s light. The latter caused his tongue to thicken right before he glanced at her again.

Gods. She probably wouldn’t thank him for his being turned on by her enslavement, whether she had negotiated the terms of that enslavement or not.

Avoiding her wide, dark eyes, whose stare didn’t exactly help his concentration, Loki looked away, back towards the Chinook and to Preela.

“Approach?” he said, adjusting the rifle strap on his shoulder. He cleared his throat, his voice toneless. “What do you recommend?”

He’d already told Preela and Rex where they were going, too.

He felt the female human’s light, curious in his, and his pain worsened...enough that he saw Preela flinch visibly, right before she glanced at Rex, and then at Jax, who stood on the other side of Loki. Jax just shrugged, a faint smile touching his lips, even as he gave Loki a wary look. Rex grinned openly, though, leering in interest at the small, muscular, dark-skinned woman standing between Holo and Illeg just outside of their tighter circle.

“Got a hard-on for our cargo, eh, Captain?” Rex grinned, using Prexci, the seer tongue, presumably so the human wouldn’t understand. “You can sit in the back. None of us will bother you if you want to fuck her brains out, all the way to the next drop...”

Loki ignored that too, looking instead at Preela.

“What do you think?” he repeated politely. “In terms of approach?”

He felt the human woman behind him tensing, and blew a warm pulse of light at her in reassurance. He did it without thought, without questioning whether it was appropriate that the others see it, but once he had, he felt the woman’s light wrap even more deeply into his. He felt flickers of that uncertainty in her again...fear of the unknown, mostly, fear of not knowing them, of not knowing if she could trust them. He felt her reminding herself that they had treated her gently, that no one had hurt her...so far, at least...trying to reassure herself she wasn’t crazy to risk going with them, if it might bring her to her daughter.

She couldn’t have understood Rex, but still Loki fought to restrain himself from stepping between the two of them, of using his light to reassure her that no harm would come to her.

He found himself deciding he wouldn’t leave Rex alone with her, either.

He avoided saying her name still, he noticed, or even thinking it.

He knew her name, though. It was Gina.

Gina Vasquez.

His pain worsened briefly, even as he forced his mind off the woman he could now feel almost tangibly where she stood behind him. She wanted to touch him; he could feel that, too. He wanted Holo away from her, almost as much as Rex, and briefly, he had to fight his own light until he controlled it again.

The others were all looking at him now, and a few of them wore wary expressions, even woven into their amusement.

Illeg muttered something to Holo, but Loki only caught a few words.

“...the fuck happened?” Holo muttered. “Did I miss something?”

“...Fixated...need to watch him with her...”

“Gods,” Ontari muttered. “When? When we found her?”

“No one knows––” Jax said, even as Illeg talked over him.

“––I don’t know. Does it matter?” she muttered.

“Happened fast, though,” Jax muttered, maybe not to be outdone.

Loki did not look directly at any of them, but just stood there, letting them feel over his light. He understood their concern. He accepted it, along with their scrutiny. He likely would have had a similar reaction, if the situation had occurred with one of them in relation to a civilian passenger who they had the collective responsibility to protect.

They had to know they could trust him with her. They had to know he was not going to do something crazy, something that might jeopardize the mission.

A few seconds after they finished scanning his light, Anale tried to break the tension, but Loki heard a thread of nerves in her voice, too.

“Cap’n’s gone off the deep end,” she said. She gave Loki a good-natured punch in the arm. “Pull it together, brother. Or hell, ask her for it. Do we need to get you drunk?”

“Don’t tell him to ask her!” Illeg frowned. “Gods, Ana...we’re in the middle of an op!”

“Not to mention that the Bridge would kill us...if Dante didn’t do it herself,” Jax muttered.

“He might need to ask her,” Ontari muttered.
“Dugra a’ kitre
...look at him.”

“We can’t talk about this here,” Mika said. “Shut up, all of you. You’re all just making him worse, talking about him fucking her...can’t you see that?”

Jax broke out into a nervous laugh.

Anale only shrugged towards Mika, unapologetic. Her eyes remained fixed on Loki’s face.

“You all right brother?” she asked him again.

Loki shook his head, feeling his face get warmer.

He knew most of that was not from embarrassment, either.

“I’m fine,” he said tonelessly.

When the silence deepened, Loki took a step towards the Chinook, not looking at any of them as he aimed his feet for the open hatch into the main hold.

“We should leave now,” he said simply.

Without waiting for any of them to answer, he grabbed hold of the metal handle on the outside of the Chinook’s open forward hatch. Placing a foot on the second step of the descended metal staircase, he yanked himself up, without looking back to see if any of them were following him. Even so, he felt the exchanged looks between the seers he left outside as he made his way deeper into the row of seats behind the cockpit.

He kept his mind blank to that, too...as much as he could, anyway.

He had an operation to plan.

He mostly succeeded with that thought by the time the rest of them began to file up the same staircase. He had deposited his weight in a window seat on the starboard side of the helicopter, about ten rows deep into the thirty or so in the main hold. Loki watched in his peripheral vision as the other seers made their way through that same aisle, choosing seats throughout the body of the Chinook and talking to one another in low voices.

Loki only intervened once, clicking his fingers and waving a hand sharply towards the front of the plane. Rex had filed in after Holo and their human cargo, and seemed intent on sitting beside her for the duration of the flight.

“No,” was all Loki said.

He said it loudly, however.

After he spoke, Jax and Rex exchanged looks with Anale before all three of them burst into mutual laughter. Looking between them, Loki realized that, clearly, the attempt had been staged for his benefit, to see how he might react. Even after he determined that fact, Loki still watched Rex closely as he relinquished his seat. He continued to watch as the large-boned seer walked towards the back of the helicopter, moving his bulk awkwardly through the row of navy-blue, cloth-covered seats with their individual headsets and plastic armrests. The large seer winked at Loki as he passed, patting him on the arm, but Loki didn’t smile at that, either.

Instead he fought back another wave of pain, watching Holo seat himself next to the human woman.

Loki did want to sit with her. He knew it was not a good idea, and not only because every seer on the aircraft was now watching his eyes and light with amusement.

He wanted it, regardless.

Pushing the thought from his mind, Loki aimed his eyes out the oval window of the Chinook, fitting his headset over one ear as he replayed the message he had received from the Sword via Oli. He would figure out what to do about the woman later.

For now, he had work to do. The Sword had given him a job.

The thought sustained him through most of the next ninety minutes of flight.

THEY DROPPED DOWN right in the middle of the city, as it turned out, on the largest of several lawns belonging to what used to be one of the most heavily-guarded buildings in the world.

Loki contacted the carrier en route, telling them of his intentions once he got a good look at the current satellite feeds out of the D.C. Once he realized the place was almost totally abandoned, at least in terms of a real military presence by the humans, he requested permission for a direct assault, utilizing speed rather than stealth to minimize risk.

He knew from feeds, of course, that the United States government continued to function, out of some kind of bunker located in another area of the country.

He had heard a few rumors as to that location, and none of them were coastal.

Like Balidor and others among their higher-ranked seers, Loki believed those sites to be primarily underground, too, although the list of potential locations had grown somewhat in recent months, since the remaining human elite seemed to be employing a lot of seers at this time. They also seemed to be periodically changing locations to evade...

Well, whatever it was they felt they needed to evade.