Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (109 page)

Also, as per usual with the two of us, Cass’s get-up pretty much guaranteed that every guy in the room would blow past me with hardly a glance in favor of staring at my best friend.

And yeah, while I was used to that, tonight it stung a little.

Maybe because, for me, my own costume was definitely on the sexy scale.

Trying, anyway.

Next to Cass’s, though––and, more to the point, Cass’s body––I knew I might as well have come dressed in garbage bags, or maybe as a farmer in ratty overalls and straw in my dark brown hair. Every guy within visual range paused to check Cass out––girlfriended or not, straight or gay, alone or in a group––and it wasn’t because of the dummy meat cleaver covered in fake blood that she gripped in her free hand, either.

This guy was staring at me for some reason, though. Not Cass.
 

And Cass was punishing me by making me look like an asshole in front of him.

Not on purpose, of course.

Well,
my mind muttered cynically in the background.
Probably not on purpose.

I decided to ignore that voice, though.
 

Truthfully, more than anything I wanted Jon to get here and save me from trying to wrestle drunk clown nurse hooker alone, in the event she decided to get either or both of us in trouble. I knew the Jack thing genuinely bothered her, which made her unpredictable at best.

But Jon just pinged me via my headset to let me know he’d be another hour.

Luckily, it was pretty danged loud in there.

The other costumes in the room were easier to identify than me and Cass’s, for the most part.
 

Dressing up as a seer was all the rage this year, just like it had been the year before, and the year before that. It seemed like every other person I saw wore funky contact lenses, a fake sight-restraint collar, leather clothes of one kind or another, or military gear, if they were going for some kind of historical version. I’d seen a few seer Nazi’s, and one guy with the big sword and sun sign on his chest, who I’m pretty sure was supposed to be Syrimne, the telekinetic seer who fought with the Germans in WWI.
 

Since a lot of seers worked as sex workers downtown––the ones that weren’t owned by corporations or rich douche bags, that is––dressing up as a seer was one of those cool, “alternative” costumes that gave people an excuse to show some serious skin.
 

I thought it was pretty tacky, honestly.
 

Moreover, I’d love to see one of these bozos wear something like that anywhere near the real deal. Meaning an actual, real-live seer, like at one of the ritzier clubs on Broadway or whatever.

Even as I thought it, I found myself rubbing the “H” tattoo on my arm.
 

A nervous tic, I suppose. Now that more seers lived full time in the United States, we all had to wear those as part of the Human Protection Act, in addition to the barcodes…at least once we turned eighteen. Before that, we had to wear implants, which were worse.
 

Implants didn’t just verify race-cat; they could be used to track your every movement. Worse, your parents could access that information if they wanted. We all learned to jack them and distort the signal even in grammar school, but still, yeah, I’d been grounded more times than I could count because I’d failed to jack my implant correctly back in high school.

So yeah, the dual tats weren’t awesome, but they were an improvement.
 

I’d had nightmares where someone had burned both tats off me and threw me in a cage with a bunch of human-hating seers.
 

My mom said it was because I was a worrier.

I hated the seer thing, though…I really did.
 

I don’t mean seers themselves. I mean, I didn’t know any actual
seers,
did I?
 

I hated the system, and how we were all supposed to pretend it was normal. I didn’t care what anyone else said. It wasn’t normal. I didn’t care how the government spun it, or what they said in those public service ads on television, either. It was screwed up and it was wrong, and it was pretty much slavery, whether they were human or not.

Jon 100% agreed with me on that, by the way.

He also agreed with me that the government was full of shit when they droned on about how “safe” it was, integrating seers into human society.

Cass agreed with me and Jon, too, but I honestly got the sense she more didn’t care all that much. Cass thought seers were sexy. The slavery aspect of that maybe struck her as sexy, too, knowing her, although I hadn’t wanted to ask her outright.

I did know there was an all-seer band out of Seattle,
End of Times
, owned by one record label or another, that Cass had been obsessed with for like five years. In particular, Cass crushed on their lead singer, Darvon, an Asian-looking seer with light purple eyes splattered with bright gold flecks. She wasn’t alone in her crush, either. A lot of girls I knew lusted after that guy, even though I read on some feed station fan site that he was something like two hundred years old, which, to be fair, is supposedly like thirty in human years.
 

They had up-close images recs of his eyes, though, on that same station.

And yeah, he was pretty damned beautiful.

He also had a body to die for, whatever age he might be.
 

Because he was seer, they could show his real face and body on the feeds, too, meaning without distorting his appearance or voice via an avatar. Since seers don’t fall under the image ban protocols of the Human Protection Act, they showed a lot of their real faces and bodies on the feed stations…unless there was some security reason not to, I guess.

Cass wanted me to go with her to the next
End of Times
show at the Fillmore in two weeks, so she could see Darvon up close. I knew the place would be mobbed, but I was curious, sure. Since the Fillmore was a pretty small venue, we could probably get right up next to the stage, depending on what they had in the way of security.

And yeah, Darvon
was
pretty hot.

Even so, it struck me as pretty weird to want some guy owned by a corporation.
 

I mean, he wasn’t even human.

Brushing the thought out of my mind, I took a longer drink of beer and looked around the room, that time trying to get a sense of the crowd as a whole. A lot of college students and recent grads were there, like me, but I also saw a fair few people in their late twenties and early thirties.
 

More Jon’s crowd, in a lot of ways.
 

A lot of them looked straight, though.

The first band cranked up the sound from about a dozen yards from where we stood, sliding into the chorus of a song that sounded vaguely familiar from the local college station. I looked towards the make-shift stage and saw the lead singer sing-shout-spitting through the mike, his face bright red from the exertion between that and strumming his dual-necked guitar.
 

They played a metal-rockabilly-punk-new wave type of thing, one of those mish-mashes of the old, new and ridiculous that seemed unique to the San Francisco underground music culture.

And yeah, I’m from here, so I’m generally open to weird, but these guys were seriously giving me a headache.

Maybe I needed to do like Cass and drink faster.

“What do you think?” Cass said, beaming at me. “Pretty cute, right?”

Before I could stop myself, I gave the guy a casual look, and indeed, caught him staring at me again. When he saw me looking him over in return, he met my gaze, a smile teasing the edges of his lips. Before I could look away, he raised his beer to me, too, a mock-toast.

I returned his smile, caught off-guard as much as anything.

As I did, I had a sudden flash of how creepy that grin must look on my silver face.

“So?” Cass said. “What do you think?”

I’d already averted my gaze, so I only shrugged.

“I think you’re really loud,” I muttered, taking a sip of my own beer. The black lipstick left a dark stain around the lip of the bottle.

Cass laughed, somehow hearing me over the chaos.

A big guy wearing a leather jacket covered in spikes slammed into me just then, drifting out past the circle of the dance-mosh-whatever pit just in front of the stage. Cursing as I tried to surf my beer bottle to safety, I felt my face grow hot under the silver make up after I glanced up and caught the black-haired guy grinning in my direction.

“Okay,” I said to Cass as I shook out my wet, beer-covered hand. “He’s cute.”

“You need to go talk to him,” she announced, looking me up and down. “You look awesome in that dress, by the way…no wonder he’s gawking.”

“He’s not gawking,” I said. “He’s just…looking.”

“He’s confident,” Cass said, looking over at him. Her gaze grew more shrewdly appraising. “…Cocky, maybe. That could be a good thing,” she added, tilting her head as she continued to look him over. Glancing back at me, she smiled. “…Or he could be an arrogant asshole.”

“Awesome,” I said, grunting a laugh. “Thanks for that.” Watching her look at him again, I rolled my eyes, irritated in spite of myself. “Why don’t
you
go for it, Cass? You clearly think he’s hot. Why not give Jack something real to worry about for a change?”

Cass frowned. She put her hands on her hips.
 

“I have a boyfriend,” she said.

“Would serve him right,” I returned, undaunted. “You told me what he did just the other night. With that girl at the bar. He’s an asshole, Cass. He’s not even hiding it from you anymore.”

She waved me off, but I saw her mouth tighten.
 

“He didn’t mean anything by that,” she said.

“He never does,” I muttered, taking another sip of the beer to hide my frown when she looked over at me. “Doesn’t make him any less of an asshole.”

“…Besides,” Cass added, clearly deciding to ignore my snide remarks. She smiled. “This one’s not my type, Al…I like blonds, remember?” Her grin widened, even as she wrapped her cleaver-holding hand and arm around my shoulders. “If I was going to find someone to play with tonight besides Jack, it
wouldn’t
be a dark broody gothy type with pretty eyes. It would be a hot, hung, kung fu instructor who happens to be between boyfriends…”

I rolled my eyes at the reference to my adopted brother, Jon.

Cass had been crushing on Jon since we were kids. She couldn’t seem to get it through her head that it was never going to happen. For a lot of reasons.

“Jon’s gay, Cassie,” I said, sighing. “Jeez. Get a grip. I’ve known Jon was gay since I was twelve. So have you.”

“Cass,” she corrected, frowning deeper. “Don’t call me Cassie. I hate that.”

I fought the impulse to roll my eyes a third time. “Sorry. Forgot.”

“It’s only been…what? Five years?” she grumbled.

Taking another sip of beer, I didn’t answer.

I glanced again at Mr. Blue Eyes instead, who’d clearly been watching our little back and forth. His eyes shone with overt curiosity, like he was trying to figure out what we were talking about, or maybe like something in the dynamics between us fascinated him.

Either way, he wasn’t bothering to hide his interest at all now.

I was just about to drag Cass off to some other corner of the room, maybe just to get a breather from all of the staring and silent back and forth…when Mr. Blue Eyes surprised me. Almost as if he knew I was about to leave, he started walking straight toward us, sidestepping a few other groups along the way to reach where me and Cass stood.

Clusters of costumed party-goers ignored him walking and me watching him walk.
 

I glanced behind me, maybe just to stop staring, but only saw the ugly, shit-brown couch we’d been standing next to for the last twenty or so minutes. Someone had pushed the couch against one wall, presumably to make room for more people. For me and Cass, it had been a reasonably safe spot compared to the chaos in front of the stage itself. On the other side, a few groups of people stood near the dance floor, closer to the band.

The guy with the black hair and the blue eyes didn’t seem bothered by the noise. Or the people in the nearby dance pit.