Allie's War Season Four (50 page)

“Jon.” Wreg looked at the other man, giving a small shake of his head, his eyes warning.

Revik felt his jaw clench harder than before. Painfully hard.

He didn’t look up as he took a long drink from his own glass.

When neither of the other two men said anything else, Revik shook his head, clicking softly to himself. He spoke almost before he knew he meant to, feeling Jon flinch at the bitterness behind his words.

“You want me to refuse my wife sex, when she asks it of me?” Revik said, leaning back in the leather couch. He folded one arm across his chest, propping the elbow of the other on it, the same one holding his glass. Lifting the latter in a mock toast, he met his brother-in-law’s gaze with a level stare, even as he felt his eyes sting. “...Fuck you, brother Jon. And if this is your way of leading up to asking me for a favor, I gotta tell you, your delivery sucks.”

“Nenz,” Wreg broke in, holding up an appeasing hand. “He doesn’t mean anything by it. We’ve all been worried. Let it go...”

Revik gave the Chinese-looking seer an equally hard stare.

He knew he wasn’t being rational. He could feel the confusion in Jon’s light, too, well enough to know that Jon wasn’t in the best place to filter his own words, either. It was amazing how Revik could know all of that and still not care.

Even so, he forced his eyes back to the fireplace, which had dwindled down to a bare flame. Taking another swallow of the wine, he motioned for the other two men to speak.

“You want to ask me something,” Revik said. “So ask it.”

Another silence fell over the room.

When Revik glanced up, Wreg was looking at him again. Revik couldn’t help noticing that the larger seer had inserted himself slightly between himself and Jon, or miss the protectiveness behind the stance. Feeling the wariness of the other man sharpen, Revik fought to control his light, at least long enough to get both of them out of there. Why the hell was he prolonging this? Did he really just want to vent at someone, and saw the two men coming up here as a way of volunteering for that role?

Realizing there was probably some truth to that, Revik forced another exhale.

“The two of you want to go into hibernation,” Revik said, blunt. He took another mouthful of wine, gesturing vaguely as he swallowed. “...You want to finish the bond.”

The two men exchanged a glance.

Then Wreg spoke.

“Yes,
laoban.
We talked about this before. You said you could work around it.” Wreg continued to study Revik’s face, his voice openly cautious. “...Is that still true?”

Revik nodded, once. “It is.” He gave them both a hard look, that time more from the military side of his brain. “I will pull Jon if I need him, brother Wreg. I’ll pull him even if I have to trank you to do it. That’s non-negotiable.”

Wreg nodded, his eyes showing him to be turning over the words. “Agreed.”

Revik turned his head so he could make eye contact with Jon, from where he stood slightly shadowed by Wreg’s bulk. “If I do that, Jon...it’ll hurt. It’ll hurt like a motherfuck. Remember how I was, when Terian took Allie before we’d completed the bond?”

Jon stepped to the side, facing Revik directly.

He nodded, unfolding his arms. “I remember,” he said.

“You’re okay with risking that?” Revik pressed. “Because if you leave here and you and Wreg do this thing, know that you’re giving me permission to do that to you...”

Jon nodded again, his eyes showing a faint flicker of nerves. More than the nerves, pain seemed to dominate the majority of his light, sharp enough that Revik winced away from it a second time, in spite of himself.

“I understand,” Jon said. “You have my permission.”

Revik grunted, humorless. “Sure. You say that now.”

“I get it, Revik,” Jon said, exhaling. “I just don’t see any good options.”

Nodding, Revik conceded his words with a flip of his hand. He finished off the last of the wine in his glass then set it on the table, motioning to Wreg that he wanted more. He knew he should just get it himself. He didn’t know why he was being such a prick. Feeling another pulse of pain off Jon’s light, Revik winced again, tightening his arm around his chest.

Maybe he did know why.

Wreg swept Revik’s glass off the wooden coffee table without protest, bringing it back to the counter and filling it almost to the brim with the last of the wine in the bottle. When he brought it back to Revik that time, Revik raised the glass to them in a mock toast, trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice that time and not succeeding.

“Congratulations, then...to the happy couple.”

Before either of them could raise their glasses in return or speak, Revik had already taken another three or four healthy swallows of the wine. When he stood up that time, he nearly staggered. Jesus, now he was drunk. He’d forgotten to get that food.

Maybe the fact that the two men had shown up on his door bleeding pain and practically knocking him over with their bond-compulsion hadn’t exactly helped.

“Laoban.”
Wreg caught his arm, and Revik flinched. He nearly jerked his arm away in reflex, but caught himself in time, knowing that might have been followed by a punch, if he didn’t control himself.
“Laoban,”
Wreg repeated, his voice lower. “You shouldn’t be alone. I’m going to call Adhipan. He and Yumi...they should be here.”

Revik frowned, shaking his head. “No.”

“Yes,” Wreg said, his tone insistent. “I’ve already done it. You can’t be alone right now.”

Revik let out another humorless laugh. “Who’s in fucking charge here?”

“You are,” Wreg said promptly. “But you know how this works. You wouldn’t let one of us be alone in this state, either.”

Revik bit his tongue. He could feel the part of himself that wanted to lash at the two men some more, but he restrained that, too. At least Balidor’s girlfriend was out of town. She’d been part of the group they’d sent to track Ditrini as the Lao Hu seer made his way through the Middle East and Africa. Nodding, if only to get rid of them sooner, Revik started to speak, when a sound from the back of the hotel suite made them all jump.

All three of their heads turned instantly towards the sound.

Revik’s faster than the other two.

At first, the noise was so loud, the light so bright, Revik almost thought a bomb had been set off in the suite. His mind went sharply and without hesitation to Allie. Allie...who he’d left in their bedroom, just on the other side of that wall from where the light came...

He thought of her and the pain in his heart almost debilitated him.

“Wife...” he managed.

He was moving even as he whispered it. He’d already regained his feet, fought and leapt over the back of the couch. He’d moved halfway across the room before he recognized that flicker on the wall. By then, the sound already drowned out his thoughts. He could feel Wreg and Jon following him, but he almost couldn’t make sense of that, either.

It wasn’t a bomb.

The feed monitor had come on by itself.

Staring up at the face that smiled at him from that monitor, all of the sickness, worry, grief and pain that had been twisting Revik’s gut for the past hour turned into something more primal. Something a lot easier for that more animalistic part of his brain to understand.

Cass stood there, grinning at him, wearing a leather business suit.

In her arms she held a child of maybe two years old. Well, she would have been that age if she were human...as a seer, she should be at least a year or two older. Revik saw that face, saw eyes the shape of his wife’s staring at him, a mouth that looked like Allie’s, too, dark hair in soft curls. His whole body stiffened as he looked at that little girl clinging to Cass’s neck, watching him warily, as if he were some kind of animal.

Gods. She looked so much like Allie.

She looked so fucking much like Allie...

The resemblance paralyzed him, cut his breath.

He fought for rationality, for something that made sense to any part of his mind. But all he saw was his wife’s body and face in miniature, wrapped in a light that he knew somehow, he fucking
knew
it, in a way he’d never felt so strongly about any light, not since he’d first laid eyes on Allie herself. He knew her. He knew her so well...

Revik still stood there, paralyzed, watching Cass smile at him through the monitor.

He didn’t move, didn’t so much as blink as Terian walked up behind her––and it was Terian again, not Feigran, Revik could see the difference in the male seer’s eyes, in his walk, in his light, in everything about him. Terian slid up against the child as well, holding the two of them like they were family, like parents would cradle their beloved daughter in their arms.

Revik looked at the three of them, standing there together, and it hit him, for real that time.

They’d stolen his life.

They’d stolen all of it, every part of his life that meant anything to him.

Everything he’d ever dreamed he might have, even when he wouldn’t admit to himself that he wanted it...much less that he believed he’d ever have a chance in hell of having it, in this lifetime, at least. Things he’d wanted, prayed for, even down in that hole under his uncle’s farmhouse when he was a kid. Family. Love. Allie herself, although he didn’t know her then, didn’t remember anything.

Grief lived there, but it was more than grief.

It felt like a part of his actual body, a pain so deep he’d barely learned to recognize it; the sensation and emotion so much a part of himself, he’d lost the ability to distinguish either from who he was. Maybe that had been true forever. Maybe it had been true since he’d seen his own parents dead in that wooded clearing in the mountains east of the Pamir.

“Gods,” he heard Wreg say behind him. The other male’s voice came out choked, almost a prayer. “Gods...Nenz...
guete a Hulen-ta...”

He felt the other male reaching for him, but Revik only felt himself telescoping inward. He didn’t know where he was going exactly, what it meant, but before he went there entirely, his wife pulled him back to the room.

Her light hit his, turning his head so fast no thought accompanied the shift at all.

Allie stood there, in the doorway.

She stared up at the same image of the three of them, her best friend from childhood, Cass. Terian, who had raped and beaten her in D.C. Her and Revik’s child cradled in both of their arms. Like a family portrait, only framed by organic machines instead of those gray and blue smudged backdrops in the old human versions.

Once he met his wife’s gaze, Revik couldn’t look away.

For the first time, he didn’t suspect, he
knew.

He saw something in her eyes, something beside the wires, or that faraway stare that scared him, even as it angered and frustrated him and left him with a perverse kind of guilt and pain and wanting when he couldn’t reach her through it. This time he fucking
knew.
He could see the awareness in her eyes. She knew what she was looking at, what it meant.

Revik was still staring at her face, at the strange, off-kilter clarity he could see in her jade-green eyes, when he realized the wire had gone from her neck. She clutched it in one hand, gripping it in a fist by her thigh. She’d taken it off on her own.

She’d never done that before, either.

Instead of relief, fear erupted in Revik’s chest, although fear of what, he had no idea at first.

He moved towards her before a single thought penetrated that terror.

“Alyson...” he said. “Allie...no...” He choked out her name, holding up a hand, maybe to calm her, maybe to calm himself. Tears came to his eyes, shocking him, blinding him and confusing him all in the same set of seconds. “Allie...darling. Go back in the other room. Please. Please, don’t...” He fought for breath. “Don’t look at this. Please, wife...”

A voice came out of the monitor then, a voice that made every hair on the back of Revik’s neck abruptly stand on end.

“Al?” Cass called out in delight.

Revik froze, turning his head, staring up at the screen.

Only then did he hear Wreg on his headset.

“Right now!” the seer snarled. “...Trace the fucking thing, now! She’s bypassed the server entirely...it’s in his room. Two-way signal...”