Allie's War Season Four (41 page)

When Jon glanced back up at Revik’s face, he caught the seer looking at him.

“Now what?” Jon said through the link.

Revik’s gaze sharpened.

“Now we go back to the hotel,” he said, sliding a hand through Allie’s hair, pulling it carefully away from her face. “We wait.”

“Wait for what?” Jon said, his voice wary.

“For that bitch to give me a call,” Revik said, his voice just as calm and stripped of emotion as before.

Watching Revik lean down to Allie’s ear, speaking to her quietly, Jon realized he was staring again and looked away, swallowing as he turned over Revik’s words.

They actually made a perverse kind of sense.

If Revik really intended to seal off Manhattan, to take out its defensive and offensive capability and prevent anyone from coming or going, then Cass, Feigran and Shadow would be forced to negotiate with him in some fashion.

That, or yeah...try to kill him.

Neither option struck Jon as more improbable than the other. He’d known Cass most of his life, but reports he’d read about her in the past few months, as well as what he’d seen firsthand, made him feel more lost than the others when it came to predicting her next move.

Really, Cass just seemed like a psychopath to him now.

Like Terian had, before he got turned into Feigran.

Watching Revik lead Allie back to the line of Humvees, Jon could only give a low snort, one that held less humor, as he turned over Revik’s flippant response. He watched as Revik made a signal with one hand to Wreg, asking him to raise the bullet-proof glass to shield them from the street, right before he climbed into the long seat after Allie in the second of the three Humvees parked on the curb.

Back in New York last time, Jon still wanted to help Cass. He still wanted to get her away from Shadow, to save her from him.

He didn’t feel like that anymore.

Even in his worst moments as
Syrimne d’ Gaos,
Revik never turned on the people he loved...not even after Allie betrayed him.

What Cass had done felt intentional.

More than that...it felt like she was enjoying herself.

Jon knew he wasn’t seeing the whole story there, either. He could rationalize about her childhood, about Cass’s own self hate and feelings of powerlessness, about whatever Shadow might have done to her in Argentina and since. Hell, Jon could tell himself all manner of stories to explain all of it.

He just couldn’t make himself
feel
it. Her constant psychic attacks of Revik in his dreams, her ability to joke about seducing Revik after what happened in the Caucasus Mountains, and after she’d left Allie nearly dead in the same house where Terian murdered their mother. The fact that she could use Jon to get Allie out of that hotel in the first place...all of it just refused to compute in some part of Jon’s mind.

He knew somewhere in that, he probably still felt love for her.

It was hard to attach much meaning to that either, though. Maybe the reality came closer to shock than hate, some kind of disconnect between the way Jon thought the world worked and the way Cass decided it should operate under her own set of rules. More than that, it made him question himself, his ability to judge or understand people in any way.

Following Balidor, Wreg and Yumi back towards the same armored car Revik and Allie just crawled inside, Jon realized things felt a lot simpler to him now. His worry dissolved the longer he turned over the lingering rush of light still emanating off of Revik’s aleimi.

He remembered that feeling of power as Revik patiently worked, eliminating tanks, planes, guns, ammunition and armored vehicles on that packed dirt runway. Jon realized that, in a weird sort of way, he was looking forward to when Revik and Cass faced one another again. Well, not looking forward to it
exactly.

Maybe fantasizing about it would be more accurate.

Jon wondered distantly if that made him a psychopath, too.

THE SURGE OF energy from working continued to vibrate Revik’s light.

He felt tired, sure, but most of the worst of that tiredness had been mitigated with the influx of light Balidor provided him from the makeshift feeding pools they’d set up and tapped inside the construct.

That construct had now been tied to the one in the House on the Hill hotel, which gave it a lot more stability. Revik felt the shift as soon as the change took place, somewhere in the middle of their initial strike on that airfield.

He knew that feeling of limitless power was illusory, that he couldn’t afford to grow accustomed to it, much less dependent on it, but his skin and aleimic structures vibrated from the excess light anyway. He and Balidor had discussed keeping his aleimi flooded with light as often as possible via the pools, even when he wasn’t working directly with the telekinesis...mainly on the off-chance that their feeding pools got cut off during a frontal attack on the hotel.

Revik knew Shadow’s people would be searching for his light source even now, trying to do that very thing. Revik knew enough about the way Menlim thought...and even Terian and Salinse...that it had to be the very first thing on their list.

Well, assuming they didn’t have that mapped already.

Either way, whether he’d managed to catch them by true surprise or not, Revik knew he had to plan things with the assumption that he would soon have to rely solely on his own team for light, or possibly, that of their seer allies in New York and San Francisco. That assumption diminished their resources significantly, at least in the event of an actual firefight, where he would need seers holding guns almost as much as he would need them in the Barrier. He knew it was the realistic scenario to expect, though, and where he needed to assume they would end up.

Still, things had gone well, all in all.

He didn’t intend to rest on that fact, but he felt satisfied enough to wait for their next countermove while he continued to dismantle whatever resources he could dig up throughout the rest of the city.

He glanced out the window at the thought, glimpsing another brief, tail-end view of humans running down a narrow side street. They’d stopped a few times so Revik could disable working vehicles, and even to crack open a few of the more tightly shielded buildings they passed, those that Revik strongly suspected might belong to one of Shadow’s allies, or, at the very least, one of the humans who bought their way onto Shadow’s list of ‘deserving humans’ who had been relocated behind the quarantine wall to avoid C2-77.

He knew more military vehicles would be stored underground, as well as off the island altogether. He wouldn’t be able to get to all of them, but he could diminish their numbers considerably.

Balidor’s initial estimates were that they should be able to disable or confiscate between forty-six and sixty-seven percent of the remaining transport and offensive capability in Manhattan within the first three days, that variance depending primarily on how much of the city had been accurately mapped by the seers at the hotel.

That wouldn’t be enough to keep all of Shadow’s allies on foot and weaponless, but it would raise a fuck of a lot of security issues for whatever and whoever remained, given the fact that they were having population control issues already. Revik fully intended to exploit the fact that a lot of humans and seers were already starving inside this New World Order of Shadow inside Manhattan. He also intended to help as many of them out as he could. To that end, he had zero qualms about feeding some of those same dirty masses out of Shadow’s own stores, which had been part of the point of knocking shielding off buildings that had been constructed specifically with the idea of keeping those less fortunate out.

If he made a point of knocking out local and outside transmissions, as well as exploding every aircraft they tried to aim at that door in the OBE field, even more of Shadow’s ‘followers’ would likely panic...as well as start to doubt Shadow’s ability to keep them safe, at least without some kind of cooperation from Revik himself.

He knew Menlim.

Menlim would want to negotiate.

He would also be certain he could get Revik to ‘see reason.’

Revik even had a good idea of where Menlim would start. He would make promises around fixing Allie, to begin with...of returning his child, keeping his people safe inside the quarantines, maybe even giving them a quarantine zone of their own. He would promise to stop killing humans and seers on the Displacement lists. Revik couldn’t bank on what Cass would do, despite the number of scenarios he, Balidor, Wreg, Yumi and Tarsi had run over the past few months, but he could guess in terms of Menlim.

As far as Cass herself, all he had to go on was what he’d been told by Chandre and others, as well as the contents of his own dreams.

He knew from the latter that Cass was harboring some delusion of being the queen of this shit-heap she and Shadow had created, by unleashing the disease and killing off so many humans. He also knew, despite her pretend flippancy, that she had genuine feelings about his and Allie’s child. He didn’t know what those feelings were, precisely, but from talking it over with Yumi, Chan, Balidor and Jon, he guessed that Shadow was using their kid to control Cass in some way, too.

Revik hadn’t figured out how to use either of those things yet, but he would.

He’d spoken to Wreg and Loki about it, too, as well as Tarsi, who had stayed in New York. Tarsi seemed to think, even more strongly than Chan, that the key was the child, that the child was what mattered to Cass.

Revik agreed, but still had trouble wrapping his mind around that fully...or maybe he just didn’t want to.

Allie shifted in his lap at the thought, and he glanced down, in spite of himself.

He knew he was reacting to her again. The telekinesis didn’t help. He looked at her now, at the faint glow of green in her irises and shifted uncomfortably in his seat, aware suddenly of the lights of the other seers in the Humvee, and how attuned all of them were to the two of them, especially now.

Allie looked up at him then, and smiled at him, and Revik’s guard fell, almost without him meaning it to.

He smiled back, and she curled her arms more tightly around his neck, shifting deeper into the curve of his body where she leaned partway against the door. He found himself watching her look at him, feeling ripples of pain off her light as she studied his features in the daylight through the tinted organic glass.

He knew the other seers had watched him kiss her by the pier.

He struggled to care about that, too, or the fact that he didn’t know precisely what he thought about that fact himself. The thing was, he could convince himself he could feel more of her now...more of her in tiny increments every few days. He knew he might be deluding himself. Hell, he knew he was
probably
deluding himself. He’d been warned about that very thing by Balidor and Wreg both, but the greater part of his mind clung persistently to the belief anyway.

When she leaned her face down, kissing his neck, he closed his eyes, murmuring in her mind, hoping none of the others would hear it.

Come back to me. Come back to me, Allie...please...I need you...

She touched his face, trailing her fingers down his jaw, making him shiver.

Please,
he begged her in a murmur.
Please come back to me...please...

Her fingers wrapped around his neck, clutching him there briefly before she slid them under the edge of his shirt. He knew he shouldn’t be letting her touch him in front of the others, not when he felt like this, not with the ripples it created in his light...ripples he knew they could see...but he couldn’t seem to make himself care about that, either.