Allie's War Season Four (70 page)

Revik could tell that the pieces he felt were more or less ‘real’ but the dimensions and distances were off, which rendered most of those glimpses as only marginally helpful, at least when it came to mapping out a workable schematic.

Even so, he shared what he saw with his own people, watching them frown and look at the same walls in confusion as they followed his Elaerian glimpses into the physical structure of the walls, floors and ceilings.

Revik was still looking around when a half-circle of forms appeared in the middle of the room, facing them directly.

Revik blinked, staring back at them.

They’d appeared so silently and immediately that he doubted his senses...then doubted whether he’d somehow missed seeing them before. But no, they were new. They’d only just arrived, despite the utter lack of change in the room’s vibration.

The shape of that half-moon they formed struck him as deliberately menacing. Something about it struck him as trial-like in nature...or maybe more like a firing squad.

He supposed that had to be deliberate, too.

He felt his own people react, sparks of fear coming off them as they took in the reality of the group of newcomers standing in front of them. Neela stepped back, raising her rifle. Jon held his gun in his good hand, too, as did Wreg. Revik didn’t take his eyes off the people facing them, but he could feel Jorag on his other side raise his gun and unlock the harness on his rifle. He felt Chinja swivel her rifle down to aim forward, too, as did Jax.

Only when Revik had finished taking stock of his own people did he focus specifically on the faces of those in front of them.

He knew the reason he’d avoided doing that, too, even before he met the gaze of the yellow-eyed man in the center.

He could feel her here, somewhere.

Not his daughter...Allie.

He knew it wasn’t real, but the whisper of her presence hit him harder somehow...even harder than it had in that walking and talking ghost they’d already thrown at him. He knew the man in front of him had to be responsible. He knew it wasn’t real, but it took him a few more seconds to recover, to control his heart rate, his breathing, his light.

He could feel her, and gods, it hurt.

He forced his eyes to focus on Menlim, instead.

“Hello, nephew,” the ancient seer said.

Revik didn’t bother to answer.

He didn’t believe the seer to be physically ‘there’ in any real sense, any more than he believed in the walk-in stone fireplace at one end of the room, or the wine glasses that stood like small sentinels filled with blood along the length of the nearest wooden table. He knew Menlim and the other bodies who faced him were likely just fabrications of the construct imbued with presence, just like that not-Allie thing had been.

Just like everything in here.

Even so, he hadn’t faced his uncle in over one hundred years.

Revik could feel reactions in his light and his body regardless of what he knew. They worsened the longer he looked at the image of the aged seer. With Allie’s light still coiling and sparking in his in the background, the emotions that rose as he looked at Menlim only intensified, grew harder to catalogue, much less to control in any real way.

Menlim stared back at him, his face as expressionless and emaciated as Revik remembered it from when he was a child.

The face was aged––not quite to the extent of a Tarsi or Vash, but definitely on the high end of middle age, at least a hundred years older than Balidor, if not a hundred and fifty or two hundred, possibly even more––but, that face had not aged more from when
Revik
had last seen it, at least, not as far as he could tell. Menlim’s appearance didn’t seem to have changed at all in those intervening years, not in the color of his hair or skin, not in his weight or the appearance of those yellow eyes, or the set of his sculpted mouth.

Once he found his eyes resting there, Revik couldn’t help but look at the man’s form in detail, almost as if reminding himself of its basic shape, the feel of the male seer behind it. He tried to sort fact from fantasy, from the nightmares of his childhood, which had likely blown the seer into almost mythic portions in the more traumatized areas of his mind.

He found it almost impossible to do that, too.

He started with clothes, with the presentation of the man, which also hadn’t changed significantly from what Revik remembered. Menlim wore dark, wood-colored pants that looked almost to be suede. He’d tucked a light-colored, collared shirt behind a plain, black leather belt, and a dark-green jacket fell to about calf-length down his sides and back, also of some soft leather, possibly calfskin. Menlim wore his iron-gray hair exactly the way Revik remembered from Bavaria, too, in a plain metal clip at the base of his neck, and pulled severely out of his skull-like face. The goatee was new, but it fit what Revik remembered of the man’s personal appearance, as well. It also fit with how Menlim
liked
to present himself, almost as a retired professor type, outdoorsy but highly educated and well-read.

Revik shifted his weight between his feet, feeling irrationally younger as he stared at that face. Clenching his jaw didn’t help. Remembering Allie...remembering his daughter, or Cass, or the seers standing protectively around him...none of that really helped him either.

His heart pounded in his chest, hard enough he found himself thinking the others must hear it––that Menlim must hear it, too.

Maybe to distract himself, or maybe to keep from changing expression, Revik looked at the others in that half-circle facing them, scanning past faces without fully letting himself see them. He paused on Terian’s familiar features for less than a breath, then spent even less time on Cass’s face, noting only the lack of the Nazi-like scar before he moved on to the next. He barely looked at Salinse at all...or the face of the old woman he scarcely remembered from some feed broadcast or another about the White House under Wellington.

The next four faces Revik didn’t know at all.

The last face Revik’s eyes settled on made him start faintly in surprise.

The familiarity jarred him, but more because of its seeming incongruence here, in this underground dungeon, not so much due to any negative associations or emotions with the actual person. Seeing him here struck Revik as one of the more unreal aspects of this bizarre meeting, given his last run-in with the man in London.

Eddard.

Revik blinked, but the face didn’t change.

Revik really
looked
at him then, unlike the others, studying the face of his ex-manservant, who he’d always believed to be human. Revik looked him over from head to foot––from the wire-frame glasses and the thinning, nondescript, brown hair, down the expensive-looking, tailored blue suit above black, Italian loafers.

Raven told him once, that Eddard was a part of this.

Revik hadn’t really believed her.

Hell, he’d barely given the idea much thought at all.

Of course, Raven told Revik about Eddard in the same conversation that she told Revik Maygar was his biological son, so the detail got lost somewhat, given her more dramatic confessions. Truthfully, Revik had forgotten all about it. He’d barely acknowledged it at the time, other than to mention it in passing to Balidor, along with a physical description so the Adhipan leader could verify Raven’s story. He’d never even thought to ask Balidor about it after. It had been purely a standard debriefing kind of thing, like describing a car driven by one of Shadow’s minions...or a courier a target had once used.

The whole idea of Eddard being in Shadow’s inner circle still struck Revik as ludicrous on a certain level.

He remembered Eddard...well, in fact, given how much time he’d spent with him, and how much access the human had to some of the more intimate details of Revik’s life, and for over a decade. Revik had been forced to accept the ‘gift’ of Eddard from his British employers, knowing full well he was there to spy on him.

Revik had never been stupid enough to trust him for that reason, but he hadn’t been able to hide all aspects of his life from someone so close to his personal affairs, either. Eddard oversaw his household, made travel arrangements for him, dressed Revik for formal engagements with the Department of Defense, dealt with his laundry, bought him clothes and toiletries, picked up his dry cleaning, cooked for him, arranged cars for him, brought him primary source books and data cards he needed for research or lectures...among other things.

He’d been good at his job.

Discreet, at least on the surface, efficient, detail-oriented, unerringly polite. Revik included Eddard in the less important details of his life as a means of feeding intel to the Brits, including details of his somewhat spotty sex life at the time, which he knew would fascinate those who kept an eye on him while also providing a form of distraction from anything about his life they might perceive as more ‘political.’

Mainly, he hadn’t wanted them finding out anything about Allie, or his secondary job in keeping an eye on her. He’d used Eddard pretty liberally to that effect, mainly by asking his servant to hire him the occasional prostitute...as well as by making sure Eddard overheard the far less occasional sex work Revik took upon himself for extra cash. He let Eddard listen in on a number of negotiations with potential clients, including more than one in actual diplomatic functions, some with married humans...and a number with prominent businesspeople who frequented the same fetish clubs Revik did in downtown London.

Revik knew with humans, sex was a decent distraction. Really, better than most.

And they would all assume he was a pervert anyway, given what he was. They’d likely have wondered a lot more if he
wasn’t
doing that kind of thing on a semi-regular basis.

But yeah, other than that, Revik hadn’t really given Eddard much thought.

It was strange to even think of those years, given what had happened since. Eddard hadn’t even made a particularly impressive human, from what Revik could remember...much less had he shown signs of being some kind of seer adept. Revik found the thought disturbing, that he could have been fooled so completely, and by someone he’d believed himself to be using for his own purposes within the British intelligence community.

Now, though, looking at that familiar face, it struck Revik as somehow overly quintessentially human. He found himself measuring what he could see in those muddy eyes, and in the chinless jaw below a somewhat loose-looking mouth that broke into a smile when they made eye-contact. Revik found himself wondering just how much of what he could see in the middle-aged man had been constructed as illusion, too.

In any case, it forced an involuntary shudder out of his body, the idea that Menlim might have been spying on him all of those years.

The man, Eddard, didn’t feel like a seer to Revik, even now.

Then again, he didn’t feel particularly human to him anymore, either.

Looking away from Eddard’s face, Revik glanced at Jon, then at Wreg. Jon’s eyes focused unmistakably on Cass. Wreg, on the other hand, stared at Menlim. Both of them looked slightly off-balance, enough that Revik flicked at them with his light.

Hey,
he sent, not caring if they were overheard.
Focus.

Jon jumped a little, looking over at him. Wreg gave him a glance, too. His muscular shoulders relaxed slightly after he met Revik’s gaze.

Once he felt he more or less had the two of them back on their game, Revik looked back at Menlim. It occurred to Revik that the old seer still had an inch or two on him, even now. He glanced at Salinse then, who stood almost as tall as his blood-cousin, Menlim.

Feeling his muscles tighten, Revik stripped his mind of thoughts, of as much emotional reaction as he could. It was too late for any of that now. He knew why he was here, whatever he told himself. He’d lowered his gun, and saw Jon, Wreg and even Jorag lower theirs, too. Even so, Revik felt like he’d walked into some kind of Old West standoff, like the moments before the gunfight at the OK Corral.

“What do you want?” he asked Menlim, blunt.

The seer smiled.

That smile made some part of Revik recoil. He found himself fighting past the more visceral reaction he had to seeing his ex-guardian in the flesh, even as he tried to see him, to hear his words past the aleimic interference he could feel, even from five meters away.

“You came to me, nephew,” the other said, his voice chilling in its familiarity. “I would ask you the same question.”

“Would you?” Revik retorted.

He stared down the line of seers standing there, feeling his jaw harden. He glanced at Jon, maybe just to ground himself, to remind himself that this was real, whether or not the people standing in front of him were. Revik’s eyes shifted back to Menlim after he exchanged a look with Jon, then with Wreg. He gripped the handle of the gun in its holster.