Allie's War Season Four (178 page)

“No,” he said, kissing me again.
Fuck them. They wanted to see this. Let them see it.

For a long-feeling number of seconds, I forgot everything as we kissed.

He put so much light in his tongue that I let go into him completely. I couldn’t care about any of it, or even make myself see the significance of the other lights I felt watching from around the room. Their presence there only made the compulsion stronger, made it more irrational and unwilling to compromise...

That impulse to do the telekinesis came back.

It grew strong enough to scare me.

I couldn’t feel what I wanted to do with it, not precisely. I grew conscious of how out of control that part of me really was... or maybe how little control I had over it. I felt Revik pulling at me, giving me suggestions on how I could use it, but the aggression in my own light scared me. It scared me enough that I was pulling back again, out of his arms.

Please,
I begged him.
Please... Revik, don’t..

You won’t hurt them.

I could. You know I could...

But you won’t.

Please,
I begged again.
Please. I could never live with myself...

I felt Revik think about my words as he kissed me again. I felt the pain in him as my words grew real to him, as he imagined me unhappy from what I’d done. Through him, I saw a snapshot of the room after I’d lost control. Bones broken. Maybe someone hitting the wall hard enough, or in just the right way, that it did more than break bones...

“Stop,” Revik said.

His voice was low at first, a murmur against my neck.

When my pain worsened, he gripped me tighter, holding me against him. I saw images flicker through his mind, of us together... of me with other people. That pain I felt in him worsened. Pain from China. The pain he’d felt when I’d been in China. What he’d seen, how badly it had hurt. What he’d imagined.

“Stop,” he said, his voice denser that time, harder. “Stop this... now.”

I felt lights around the room react, sparking off his, bouncing off both of us. I felt fear in some of them, fear at that intensity building in the structures above his head. I felt a part of me back off from that same intensity, even as it tugged at similar structures in my light.

His pain grew unbearable...

“Stop,” he growled. “Fucking
STOP IT! NOW!”

A sharp
pop!
exploded overhead.

I opened my eyes.

More of those pops made me flinch, blinking and wincing against him.

Overhead, the lights dangling over the table exploded, one by one.

They just... exploded.

Pieces of glass... powder, really... rained down on the metal conference table. I felt flinches and gasps from other lights, heard surprised cries and sharper pained sounds from around the table. I smelled smoke, what might have been burning hair and skin...

Something nicked the side of my neck, hard enough that it jerked me out.

The reality of physical pain flicked a switch on some older reflex, one that lived somewhere beyond that need to be with him. Whatever that something was, it cleared my head. Well, it didn’t
clear
it, exactly... but it brought me back to the general vicinity of the room.

And yeah, it did clear it just a little.

I threw a cloak reflexively back over our light. In the process, I slammed the rest of them out of our space. I felt the charged flare of Revik’s aleimi as I did, the heat that rose in both of us, trying to take over our lights once we were finally alone.

Then, I felt the other thing.

I felt someone else retract.

I felt it. I felt the foreign presence there, even as it receded.

Once I let the realization in, it infuriated me.

It scared me, too, but the main feeling emanating off my light in those first few seconds felt a hell of a lot more like rage.

I understood, too, where the urge to perform the telekinesis came from.

That urge to hurt and maim hadn’t only––or even primarily––been aimed at the seers in the room. I felt others in the Barrier space around the table feel the same thing. Not all of them, but enough of them, and enough of the right ones among them, that I knew I hadn’t imagined it.

I felt that awareness on Varlan, first.

I felt it on Balidor next, then a whisper from Dalejem... then Jon. I felt it on Yumi an instant after those first four, then Wreg. I knew I probably would have felt it on Tarsi before any of them, if I could feel her in the first place, which I couldn’t.

By the time I could see again, I realized I still sat in Revik’s lap.

We were no longer kissing, not in those seconds after he exploded the lights, but he still had his hands wrapped around my hips, and I sat flush against him, my hand on his cock, the only thing between us apart from our clothes. I was still breathing hard, and the pain, once I let myself go there, was bad enough that I had to bite my lip to stay silent. Revik was hard against my fingers and palm, pressing against me.

His pain, if anything, hurt worse than mine.

Even with all of them watching us, I found myself letting out a low curse, fighting my own light. Even there, with that particular audience, with what I just felt leaving my husband’s light, like a roach scuttling for the shadows, I had to remind myself why I couldn’t keep massaging him where I felt him wanting it.

I looked down at his face, and saw pain in his expression, too.

He averted his eyes, looking past me to the rest of the room. Only then did I turn my head, following his gaze to look over my shoulder.

A few of them had nicks on their faces, hands and necks from the shattered lights.

The light in the room now came from the strip rimming the interrogation room floor, as well as another ring around the four corners of the ceiling. Someone must have raised both sets after Revik broke the overhead lights.

Now, as I watched, someone raised them even more.

I still fought to breathe, to control the tendrils of my aleimi snaking around us.

I felt the others start to recover. Despite the number of them watching us, the pain I felt from the group frightened me enough that I clamped down harder on Revik’s light. Embarrassed, I took my hand off his groin, but I couldn’t seem to make myself let go of him entirely. I gripped his arms through the long-sleeved shirt he wore instead, fighting to slow my breathing without looking at any of them. Once I had my body more or less under control, I forced myself to turn and slide off his lap. I felt him not liking that any more than I did, but he made no move to stop me. I landed on my rear on the padded bench next to him.

I didn’t move very far away.

I couldn’t make myself, even knowing all of them were staring at us, and why. I couldn’t take my hands off him wholly, either. My fingers wrapped around his thigh and promptly began massaging the muscle there, even though I felt an immediate reaction in Revik’s body and light when I did.

I blinked to focus my eyes, still concentrating most of my light on shielding us.

Because of that, I couldn’t feel their lights very well.

I could see their faces, though.

Even as I thought it, Revik wrapped an arm around me again, from behind that time. Pulling me flush against his body, he gripped me diagonally across the chest, holding my shoulder firmly, holding my back against his side and part of his chest. There was absolutely no mistaking the possessiveness behind the gesture.

More than anything, I found it a relief.

They continued to stare at us, but now some of them looked embarrassed.

I saw Chinja glance at Raddi, even as Poresh glanced at Neela. I knew the latter two were dating, but I’d also heard Chinja was dating one of the females in the crew, although no one had given me a definitive answer as to which one. Anale? Illeg? I had no idea.

In any case, the heat in those stares didn’t really dim, even after the four seers looked away from one another’s faces. I saw a guilty, flushed Loki glance at Dante just long enough to turn even redder. I noticed in that same exchange of looks that Dante herself looked a lot pinker than usual, herself.

I didn’t feel anything untoward in Loki’s look at her, though.

When I looked at Loki, all I could see was his new girlfriend, Gina, all over his light.

Coupled with that feeling of entanglement between the two of them came a desire that made me flinch when it interacted with me and Revik’s light, and the pain that still coursed between us like a sentient force. I also got a lot more information about the current state of Loki and Gina’s relationship than I really wanted, including the fact that they hadn’t actually had intercourse yet, despite a number of close calls and some preliminary oral sex.

Again, more than I really needed or wanted to know about either of them.

More than that, the sheer level of frustration I felt in Loki’s light hardly did my own pain any favors.

I could feel that the lack of said sex was still mostly to appease Dante, who both Loki and Gina, separately and together, had been trying to convince of the authenticity of their relationship. They’d done that in part by slowing down on the physical end of things, and by sleeping in separate rooms.

I got the strong impression Loki didn’t think it was working, though.

Moreover, Gina was getting royally pissed off at him about it.

But yeah, his sexual feelings weren’t aimed at Dante.

Rather, Loki was struggling with the fact that Dante was in the room at all, partly because his relationship with Gina was confusing how he saw Dante herself, making some part of him want to slide into the role of a pseudo-parent. That same desire to protect the offspring of his lover also made him struggle with whether he should attempt to order Dante out of the room, due to her age, her relative inexperience with seer sexuality and the very clear direction this experiment had taken with me and Revik.

He really, really wanted to order her out of the room.

He wanted it badly enough that it was causing a kind of crisis in his light as he struggled with what a bad idea that felt like to him, in terms of his relationship to Dante herself.

That probably came from the part of his brain that actually
knew
Dante a little.

Again, that whole situation might have been funny, but for the expression on Loki’s face, and the glimpses I got of his light. The pain he was in because of Gina and the confusion about how to handle Dante herself was all too real for him. He wanted to protect her without alienating her, and he didn’t know how to do either.

Luckily, he didn’t have to be the one to do it.

Vikram did it for him.

“Dante,” Vikram said, his voice hard. “I thank you very much for your services, cousin, but we no longer need you here. I would like very much for you to go back to the tech room now and finish the work you’ve been doing to prep us for Dubai.” Vikram glanced at her, his expression neutral, despite that harder edge I heard in his voice and the pain I saw in his violet eyes. “...Now, please. Kindly take Jaden with you.”

Dante, who normally would have pushed back, at least in my experiences with the young comp-head, didn’t so much as open her mouth. Nodding, her cheeks still pink, she rose silently to her feet, the hand-held clutched to her chest. Once up, she glanced at Jaden, who sat behind her at the comp desk. She motioned with her head for him to follow.

Jaden didn’t seem to see her, though, not at first.

He was staring at me.

I saw his eyes focus on Revik’s arm wrapped around me, right before they slid back to my face, to whatever he could see in my expression.

Unfortunately, as I caught that deer-in-headlights look on his face, I recognized the rest of the expression there, too, above and beyond his obvious shock at whatever he’d seen after Revik and I went into that trance. I should recognize it; we’d lived together for almost six years. I’d seen him turned on before. I’d seen it when it was aimed at me, and I’d seen it aimed at other people, when he thought I wasn’t looking. I’d seen it aimed at porn, for that matter, and, once or twice, I’d seen it aimed at Cass.