Allie's War Season Four (193 page)

He knew who I was.

The recognition there was overpowering, even without the emotion I saw woven into it, as well as into his words he spoke when he addressed me out loud.

“Dearest,” he said, rising smoothly to his feet. “You are even more gorgeous than I remember... even with all of that crap on your face.”

I followed him with my eyes as he rose, swallowing as I remembered how tall he was, even taller than Revik, which always threw me when I’d known him before. I watched his blue eyes in stunned disbelief. My gaze drifted down when he held out his arms, as if to embrace me from where he stood, even as he rapidly closed the distance between us.

I fought to think, to decide what to do, if it was too late to pretend he was mistaken about my identity. That recognition was overpowering though, as was the affection I saw in his face as he crossed the room.

“I am so very happy to see you, sister,” he said, still grinning like a loon. “I feared you would not come. I feared I would have scared you away, with my attempt to speak with you. I cannot tell you how relieved I am to have been mistaken...”

My jaw dropped even more.

I closed my mouth as soon as I realized how I must look, but the shock continued to reverberate and recoil through my light.

By then, he had reached where I stood.

“Allie!” he said, catching hold of my bare arms on either side of the beaded dress. “Darling! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me!”

The wheel tilted once more, back to the voice I associated with this particular body, the one I thought I knew when I lived with him for a time in the Forbidden City.

But I also hadn’t been wrong about the other thing he’d said.

I’d seen the expression in those blue eyes shift. I’d seen the difference in him, heard his words when he first walked towards me.

I stared up at him, mute.

“Alyson! Do not pretend not to know me! After all of our time together in Beijing!”

Confused, doubting what I saw and heard, even though I understood all too well, I stared up at him, fighting to decide what to say, whether I could deny any of it, even now.

“It is me!” he said, shaking me slightly. “Ulai! Do not say you have forgotten me, Allie! I will be heartbroken!”

From the couch, the younger, black-haired seer snickered.

I looked over at him, and that time, even with the collar, I knew.

Something in his facial expression maybe, or the way he stared at my bare legs below where the edges of the beaded dress ended.

“Terian,” I muttered, feeling my throat close. I looked up at Ulai. “Gods. Terry? Are you Terry, too?”

The man I’d known as Ulai beamed at me. But it was too much. I could see the person I knew then, and the understanding hit me even harder.

I found myself remembering what Cass had said to me, the last time I’d spoken to her. What she’d known about me... about my time in Beijing.

“Even then?” I said. I heard the bitterness in my own words.

“Of course, darling,” he said, beaming at me again. “I could not leave you in that terrible place, all alone. Someone had to keep an eye on you... for Revi’, you see.”

Before I could decide what to do, he leaned down, kissing me hard on the mouth. The kiss was passionate, woven through with light, and I tried to pull away. He tried to kiss me again, but I jerked my mouth and face away for real that time, shoving at his chest. Unhooking my arm from the orange-eyed seer, I stepped back, panting, staring up at him.

Then I found myself staring at the orange-eyed seer, too, right before I looked back at the black-haired one, and realized there was something really damned familiar about him, and not only the fact that I could now see Terian’s light shining out through those pale gray eyes.

Then it clicked, and I found myself staring at him, too.

He looked like Revik.

Like... a lot.

If he’d been looking at me directly... and maybe if I didn’t know the real Revik’s face and body and light so well... I might have noticed the resemblance sooner. When he rose to his feet and I gazed up at his height... and got a better look at his narrow mouth and high cheekbones and light gray eyes, the resemblance hit me a lot harder.

“What the fuck is this?” I burst out.

I turned and stared at Kat, wondering suddenly if she was in on this, too.

But she looked just as flabbergasted as me.

More so, maybe, since she really had absolutely no idea what was going on. She was also staring at me, understanding bleeding into her light brown eyes. She looked from me back to the Revik lookalike, then back to me... almost like she couldn’t decide if she was looking at the real Revik or not, and expected me to confirm or deny who he was.

Facing forward once more, I stared up at the Terian body I had known as Ulai.

Remembering that he’d been the one to first train me in sex for the Lao Hu, on the orders of Voi Pai, I felt my face flush hot, even as my mind tried to wrap around this again, to make sense of it. I knew Revik would not like this at all, but I shoved that from my mind, too.

I’d shared a bed with this fucker... for months in the Forbidden City.

At the time, I hadn’t cared who I slept with all that much, not after Revik asked me for a divorce and kicked me out of his life for the second time in less than two years.

I fought with the timeline, too, with the fact that Ulai had been in Beijing after Feigran had been unified, when we thought no more Terian bodies existed.

My mind tried to make sense of that, too.

When had he been created? Did Salinse do it?

Salinse must have done it, and long before Shadow got ahold of Feigran in New York. If Terian was telling the truth about Ulai being a plant while I lived in the Forbidden City, then all of that must have started months earlier. They must have started the splitting process a lot sooner than we’d realized... likely when Salinse and Revik held Feigran captive in those mountains.

Clearly no one told Revik, but that didn’t surprise me all that much, either.

Even so, how had Feigran remained more or less intact for as long as he had? Why hadn’t that same splitting process turned him back into Terian, and long before Shadow fashioned him into a playmate for Cass?

Or had it?

Had Feigran turned back into Terian in front of our eyes, without us even noticing?

The questions spun in the background of my mind, fighting to be picked apart, to be understood in their entirety.

But I knew I probably wouldn’t get answers to those questions here.

Moreover, they were kind of besides the point––right now, at least.

“Terry?” I stared up at Ulai’s face, then around at all three of them, feeling that sick feeling in my stomach worsen. “Terry, what the fuck is this?”

All three of the male seers laughed.

For a minute, I could only stand there, listening to them... staring from face to face as the reality hit me again. They really were all Terian. I wasn’t imagining it. The thought struggled to make sense to my mind, despite the fact that I already understood it perfectly well.

Then all I could think was, Revik was right.

We were crazy, coming here.

I was crazy, thinking that finding Terian could ever be a good idea.

30

NIGHTCLUB

REVIK WALKED INTO the darkened club, flanked by Chinja, Dalejem, Jax, Loki and Surli.

He’d left most of his people outside. If they were following orders, they would be scouting exits and entrances even now, assigning posts to provide backup to the group inside, as well as the cover different parts of the interior with at least a few seers with high-powered rifles and infrared scopes.

Revik didn’t want anyone getting out of this fucking club without him knowing about it.

It might not help him in the end, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Anyway, he didn’t want to big of a show of force coming inside with him for this.

The sheik trader, who still wore the same human outfit he had both on the docks and in the slave auction house, stood to Revik’s left. He barely paused following their entrance before he walked down the center aisle from where they stood by the back doors, motioning with a hand and a smile for Revik and the others to follow.

Glancing around the dark space with its flashing lights and multiple stages, fighting to get his equilibrium in the pounding music coming from several different directions, Revik felt again like he’d been transported back in time.

He also felt his light reacting to more than one set of stimuli, and a denser thread of near-desperation in the part of him that felt Allie’s absence the most strongly.

They were close now. He could feel that, too.

It created a paradox in his light, both relaxing the most frantic part of him and twisting it into something a hell of a lot more violent... and focused. His mind tried to feed those impulses in both directions, even as he fought not to speculate as to what she might be doing here, and who might have her. More than anything else, he felt the part of himself that knew there was no way in fucking hell he was letting her leave this place without him––even if it meant aborting the rest of the op and taking a good chunk of this part of the city out in the process.

As a result, he barely took in the landscape other than to feed or suppress one or the other of those warring impulses.

Mostly naked bodies writhed up on platforms to pounding, bass-heavy music in several different areas of the room. Revik noted the location of each of those stages and platforms, as well as exits, bars, staff and specific clusters of customers in sharp glances around the room. He also noted which of them were carrying.

Seven bartenders total, four bar-backs, eight wait staff.

Probably guns behind the bar, given the type of place it was.

Roughly four hundred people inside the dark space, but there might be more in the back rooms, which he suspected lived down a few of the dimly-lit corridors he’d already spotted and marked with his light. He knew they’d have private dances in there, and undoubtedly full-fledged unwillings, including for Sark fetish, bdsm, group light sharings and whatever else.

The stage directly in front of them was where the white-robed sheik was taking them.

Therefore, that was where Revik’s eyes remained primarily focused.

He’d already gotten confirmation that the buyer was Dontan.

That was something, anyway, although Revik had trouble being overjoyed.

The trader’s name was Efrail. Clan Maresk, with which Revik had a passing familiarity. He knew that particular clan came out of Afghanistan, so their new pal, Efrail, may actually have grown up in this part of the world, or have legitimate ties to those who did.

Revik filed the information away, still not convinced Efrail himself was anything more than a parasite, living on the underside of Shadow’s city. He was unwilling to bank on that fact, of course, much less make any assumptions that factored him out as a true threat, but most of his focus had shifted elsewhere. Mainly, he found himself looking over the security goons stationed at strategic points around the room, presumably Dontan’s people, since he owned the club.

Parasite or no, Efrail clearly had ties to some of the heavy hitters in Dubai, so he might prove useful even beyond getting Allie back. Revik intended to learn more about his particular breed of cockroach in any case, no matter how things went in here.