Allie's War Season Four (118 page)

Truthfully, Loki could no longer be certain what that was.

He supposed they felt hunted, just like all of them felt hunted in these days. But Loki, like Balidor and Varlan, with whom he had spoken about some of these details, also believed that the human leaders were being manipulated into a state of near-constant fear and paranoia by Shadow and his seers, as well.

Truthfully, in looking around what remained of Washington D.C. as they reduced altitude over the city, Loki found himself thinking that the humans might have been perfectly safe in remaining here, all things considered. By that, of course, he meant they would likely have been no less safe here than in most other parts of the continent...although he supposed that anonymity of location had its advantages, even in times such as this.

Further, being away from the coast increasingly had its advantages, as well.

Balidor had last told Loki that he suspected most of the government initially relocated to the old NORAD headquarters in Colorado. The Adhipan leader seemed to think it was possible they had moved on since that time, probably because NORAD itself was still relatively well-known, too, just like Langley and Washington D.C.

Loki frowned out the window as the Chinook’s blades powered down, staring up at the walls of the famous human building’s South Portico and its high, white, ionic columns. He squinted past the anti-glare glass to the rooftop balconies, where secret service used to patrol above the two massive balconies below those upper floors.

He saw no one up there now.

Further, the place felt abandoned.

Loki’s own light told him as much, from the mostly dismantled constructs that had already begun to dissipate from lack of maintenance by construct seers. He could feel few people inside the building itself, and those he did feel had a haphazard energy to them, totally unlike the previous glimpses Loki had gotten of this place, when it housed a working government, and even more importantly in many respects, that government’s leader.

Now it felt hollowed out. Empty.

It did not help that Loki could see where organic-reinforced windows appeared to be missing on the upper and lower floors, particularly all throughout what he could glimpse of the East and West Wings. Loki knew that none of those windows had been glass.

They must have been broken manually out of the very walls, using some considerable amount of force. He knew that could possibly have occurred through the use of missiles, or some other military-grade ordnance, but he doubted it, given the lack of scorch marks on the outside of the building itself, apart from in a few, isolated locations. Those he did see looked more to be from fires than from explosions, anyway.

The quiet bothered Loki.

Then again, he did not intend for them to be here long.

The boss gave him very specific instructions. He also asked Loki to keep most of the particulars of any intel they found to himself, at least until he no longer could...but that would only be a concern in the event they were successful.

Loki found the Sword’s request for secrecy interesting, but hardly scandalous.

The Sword’s default position tended to live in the restriction of information, so really, the request hardly constituted a deviation from the norm.

Regaining his feet as he continued to run over details of the plan in the back of his mind, Loki hunched his way out of the seat, and then straightened in the main aisle of the plane before reaching up to the luggage rack, where he’d hung his weapon on one set of hooks that had been fitted to the luggage racks for that purpose. Since the Chinook had been converted to civilian use at one point, and they primarily had been using it to move personnel, not supplies or bombs or even weaponry per se, they had kept the modifications to a minimum, at least until they needed to change the design more drastically.

The other seers continued to peer out the windows, most of them also standing in the single aisle with rifles slung around their backs, leaning down on the seat backs to stare through the oval portals.

“We going in there, boss?” Jax asked him.

Hesitating only a bare instant, Loki looked at him, and nodded. He found his eyes shifting to the woman in the fourth row of seats behind the cockpit.

“Is she coming with?” Illeg said. “Or staying here?”

Loki thought about that, too.

He really did not want to leave her with Rex, not even with Preela here to watch over the two of them. He could leave Illeg behind...or Anale...but both of them were seasoned in the field, and he might need them if things got difficult inside.

He made the decision even as he glanced back at Rex.

“Yes,” he said. “She stays. So does Preela. I want Rex with us.”

The large-boned seer with the heavy shoulders grinned. “Don’t trust me with your best girl, eh, Capitan?”

Loki didn’t answer aloud, but found himself thinking,
No. No, I do not.

He must have thought it louder than he intended, because Anale laughed.

“I can stay behind, boss,” she told him.

Loki shook his head again, slower that time.

“No,” he said. “I might need you, sister. Preela can handle it. She can lift off if she encounters any trouble...and unlike last time, we shouldn’t be long.”

Hesitating, he glanced to his right, avoiding looking at the woman, Gina, as he met Preela’s light hazel eyes from where she stood silhouetted in the cockpit’s door.

“Land on the roof,” he said, motioning towards the White House’s south side. “If you can. Meaning, if you encounter trouble, sister...but have a care. There could be structural damage.”

Preela nodded, winking at him.

She glanced at the woman in the fourth row, too, smiling at her in a friendly way. When Holo stood up, however, the woman, Gina, stood up with him to follow.

“No,” Holo said in heavily-accented English. He motioned to her, too, using seer sign language, which Loki knew would be meaningless to her. His English was pretty much nonexistent, though, so he smiled at her, motioning again with his hands, smiling as he indicated her seat. “No...stay. Please. Thank you...”

Anale snorted, rolling her eyes. In Prexci, she faced the rest of them. “Are all of you that bad at English?”

“I speak it,” Loki said, his voice clear, holding a trace of British accent, or so he’d been told. He’d been classically trained in English, though. He did know the language well.

His answer only made the others bust up laughing again, however.

Rex clapped him on the back, switching to Prexci. “You can practice it later, brother,” Rex said, grinning. “You know, when you start asking her, ‘does this feel good?’ ‘how about this?’ And ‘what about when I do this with my––’”

Before he warm up in his exposition, Anale cut him off, once more looking at the human, holding up both of her hands in reassurance.

“––It is okay, cousin,” she said, switching to the human language.

Turning with her gun, she faced the woman, Gina, directly, speaking with only a slight Asian accent of her own.

“It is okay, beautiful cousin,” Anale said. “You should stay here. We want you to stay here...where it is safe. We will not be gone long. We have only a short thing to do here.”

Still on her feet, the woman, Gina, looked directly at Loki.

Even without turning, he felt her stare.

Again, pain tried to take over his light.

Anale must have felt that, too, from standing so close to the human. Whatever her reasons, she stood more squarely in front of him, blocking the woman’s view of him...or maybe trying to get in between their respective lights.

The next time Anale spoke, she seemed to be trying to get the human’s stare to shift to her, to get her to stop focusing on the Middle Eastern seer. Loki could feel his own light wrapping into the woman’s once more, however, and almost told Anale it would do no good.

“It is okay,” Anale repeated. “We will not be gone very long, cousin. We will all come back, and then we will leave here. We will take you to your daughter.”

“Dani?” the woman said. For the first time, her eyes shifted away from Loki. She looked at Anale, focusing on her alone, her mouth in a slight frown. “You’re going to take me to Dani after this? When? Where is she?”

“Soon, cousin,” Anale soothed, nodding. “Yes, cousin. We will. We are only stopping here for a very short time. She is on a ship, and we will go there next...”

Seeing the woman’s stare shift back towards the Middle Eastern seer, Anale snorted, as if unable to help herself.

You are truly fucked, my brother,
she sent to Loki.
She has it as bad as you do...what did you do to her down there? She seems to think you saved her personally, brother...that you went in there looking just for her...

Loki didn’t answer, but he couldn’t tear his eyes off the human, either.

Mika clapped Loki on the shoulder with a grin, maybe to distract him, to give his light something else to feel. She aimed her words at the human woman, though, and spoke in English, so she’d be understood by her, too.

“Hey,” she called to Gina. “We won’t let him get hurt. Don’t worry, cousin.”

The woman, Gina, looked doubtful at Mika’s words.

“We’ll keep him safe,” Rex seconded, also gripping Loki’s shoulder briefly. “Promise.”

Loki felt Gina’s light pulling on his, willing him to turn, to look at her, maybe to reassure her himself. He told himself he wouldn’t turn, that he wouldn’t look at her again...but after a few more seconds, he did, unable to deny her light what it wanted of him.

When he met her gaze, he found himself staring at her again, lost in those dark eyes which still seemed to be looking for him behind his silence. He didn’t see fear for herself in that look. Or maybe, that’s simply not all he saw. Returning that worried look in her eyes, noting the firmness of her mouth, he lost control of his light again briefly, even as he gripped the seat in front of him. He muttered words in Arabic, in spite of himself.

“Steady there, brother,” Mika said from his other side, also touching him along with Rex, rubbing his arm. “Hey. Control. You’re control guy, aren’t you? Chill.”

Loki felt another darting pang of jealousy off the human woman from Mika’s touch, and his pain worsened. He bit his tongue, trying to pull back his light, but Rex laughed behind him.

“It’s always the tightly-wound ones you have to keep an eye on,” the larger seer joked. “I think maybe he’s the one we can’t trust to be alone with her. One of us should check her light. Read her to know if he’s manipulating her to act like a dog in heat with him, just as he is with her. Dante will never forgive us if he is bending the light of her mother...”

For a long-feeling count of seconds, Loki wondered about Rex’s words.

Then he wondered if perhaps he should not go on this mission.

Perhaps he should stay here, on the Chinook.

Perhaps he was a liability at this point.

That thought brought another swell of pain, one he found himself fighting more deliberately, maybe in horror of how visible he was at the moment, or how much he could feel himself genuinely alarming the other seers with his erratic behavior, despite their back and forth jokes. He felt Illeg watching him the most closely of all, followed perhaps by Anale and Ontari. Despite his words just then, only Rex seemed to find the whole thing genuinely amusing.

Eventually, Loki pushed that out of his mind, too.

The Sword had given him a job.

He would do that job, just as he told the Sword he would.

When he glanced at the human again, she was lowering her weight reluctantly back to her seat. Loki felt her pulling once more on his light, but less insistently now, more in a kind of reflex from the background currents weaving through both of their aleimi, separately and where they already wound together. At least some of what he had been thinking must have passed to her in that pause. The human’s expression had shifted, holding a stonier, but more accepting kind of worry. Like she got, somehow, that Loki had to do this, but she still did not like it.

She did not like it one bit.

The fact that she did not want him to go only made the pain in Loki’s light worse.

“We’d better get him out of here,” Illeg muttered.

Laughing, Jax seemed to agree.