Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (2 page)

Or to tell him how sorry I was…about the last eight months.

About all of it.

I couldn’t open my light, not now, or it would all be for nothing. I had to get to Lily first. I had to set her free before I joined Revik…wherever he was now. I thought maybe I could tie her to Kali’s light…and Uye’s. Give them a second chance to try and be good parents. Dalejem would help them. So would Balidor…and Maygar.

So would Jon and Wreg.

At least then maybe Lily could have a life one day…an adolescence and an adulthood and adventures of her own…even if Revik and I weren’t there to be a part of them.

Thinking about that, about how Revik looked the only time I saw him in those eight months since he’d left me in Bangkok, for the first time, something penetrated my mind beyond that crippling shock. Pain ripped off my light, cutting through me like a sword.

Like a fucking sword…which I guess is pretty apt.

When it did, I finally looked away from that blood-covered sky.

I screamed.

I screamed and screamed, but none of it came close to releasing me.

The pain only worsened, even as I clenched my fists in the coarse sand, fighting the images out of my head, the look on his face the last time I’d seen him.

I love you,
he’d murmured, in those few seconds we’d had. I’d felt jealousy on him too, but that fierceness of love…it heated my whole body, wiping out the rest.
I’d do it for you again, Allie…all of it. I swear I would…I’d do anything for you…no regrets. None. Okay?

I nodded like I had then, gasping into the sand.

I was out of breath…out of screams.

But Revik wasn’t there anymore. He was a ghost.

Gone, like the rest.

We knew it might come to this, Allie,
he’d said, pulling my hand and arm closer to his chest, closer to his heart.
We knew. Both of us. You can’t blame yourself. You can’t, Allie…

I nodded to that, too.

But he was wrong.

I could. Of course I could.

And whatever mental gymnastics I or Balidor or any of the others tried to play around this, whatever story we told ourselves about how we got to this point…none of it took away from the reality of what had just happened. None of it took away what I’d done.

My worst nightmares had finally come to pass. I’d seen the demon at the helm, looked them square in the face. I finally knew who the real villain was in this story.

It was me.

After all this time, it turned out those crazy Mythers were right.

That dark angel of death, the bringer of the end…

It really was me.

1

TEN MONTHS EARLIER

Revik shifted his legs, grunting when it brought a low shock of pain. Physical pain, but other kinds, too…enough to pull him out of the dark, enough to make him want the light.

He struggled his way back into consciousness, opening his eyes groggily when his body met resistance, not on one side, but on two. For a long-feeling few seconds, he only lay there, breathing. But he didn’t seem to be in danger. His light vibrated with past traumas, past fears, but nothing pressed in on him now.

No immediate danger.

He felt himself calm slightly at the realization.

He still didn’t know where he was, how he’d gotten there.

Nothing came to his mind. Nothing.

He stared down at the two bodies coiled around him in sleep. One was a lot smaller than the other. It hit him, then, what he was looking at, and his throat closed.

Allie. And Lily.

Both of them.

They’d climbed into bed with him, one on either side of where he lay. They’d curled their bodies and lights into and around his and fallen asleep there.

They were feeding him light, too…both of them, including his daughter. He could feel it, both of their aleimi sliding easily into his, almost without him knowing it.

Warming him.

Revik stared down at their two dark heads, fighting the emotion that wanted to stick in his chest. His mind once more tried to trace back what happened, how he’d gotten here. He remembered Dubai, finding Allie at that club…her dancing on that stage, jesus christ. Even the thought of it hurt his light, enough to catch his breath, although he crushed his reaction at once, conscious of Lily lying next to him, immersed in his light.

He remembered leaving the club…the Waterfront.

His mind blurred into static.

He remembered Menlim. Menlim was there.

He spoke those words…

Allie shifted against him, snuggling deeper into his side. She murmured in her sleep, pressing her body into his, bringing a denser pulse of pain briefly to his light. That one felt a lot closer to pure separation pain, even with her wound so far into him. She had an arm wrapped around his waist, her hand under the loose, white shirt he wore on the other side. That same hand tightened, coiling firmly around his ribs when he raised his head.

He felt the possessiveness there, and it made the pain in his light worse.

Her face rested on his chest, her lips and breath and hair not far from where Lily’s arm had been thrown over him, too, where Lily’s significantly smaller fingers gripped his shirt.

The clothes weren’t his…one of the medical techs must have put those on him.

Revik forced himself to relax, to lean back into the pillow. He forced himself to think, too, trying to decide why his light still felt so totally fucking panicked. Something about seeing those two people coiled around him where he lay made that jarring vibration worse.

The boathouse. There’d been a boathouse at the end of that man-made spit of land…

He couldn’t remember.

Why couldn’t he remember?

He looked at Allie again, even as the light went back on in his mind…then dimmed more. He found himself examining her body and her light for real that time.

Bruises. Fuck.

She was hurt. Fuck, she was really hurt…

From her light, it felt like she’d been beaten up. Like she’d been hit hard, with metal poles, or maybe thrown from something, or dropped.

He could feel a lot more on her than he could see. Cuts in the back of her head. Broken ribs, taped now, but her whole chest was probably black and blue. Her thigh was cut, her knees. One elbow was broken. Her hand…two fingers taped, also probably broken.

Her back…something hurt her back…

His mind turned over the information. She hadn’t been hurt when he saw her last. Not at that club. She just about gave him a heart attack on that fucking stage, but she’d been in perfect health, not even as banged up as normal for the two of them. She wasn’t hurt when they got to the Waterfront…or when they first saw those cages.

She’d been fine then. Totally fine.

Revik had known Menlim would be there.

He’d felt his ex-guardian’s presence around every step they took once they entered that Dreng construct strangling Dubai. Revik had ordered Chandre there as back up…she was supposed to follow them. She would have, too, because she was Chandre and the only reason she wouldn’t make it there was if she’d been dead.

Since Revik could feel whispers of her light in the construct now, he had to assume she wasn’t dead…so Chan should have been at the Waterfront. Failsafe. If Revik couldn’t do it with his light, then Chan was supposed to do it.

She was supposed to take Menlim out the old-fashioned way.

Of course, he knew they couldn’t kill Menlim for real.

Hell, Revik himself couldn’t do that, not even with the telekinesis…nor with any of those other, higher areas of his light, the ones he was still getting to know. Allie had been helping him with that, but they’d known killing Menlim would be a stopgap at best, a delaying tactic.

With Menlim, there was truly nothing there to kill. If Menlim was what Allie suspected he was––meaning one of the Barrier beings called the Dreng––he wasn’t alive at all, but wore that Sark body like a cheap suit. He wasn’t even a “he” but an “it”––a walking parasite, but not one that truly lived on Earth, or even in the material plane.

Revik or Chan could take out the body, though.

They could sever his attachment to the material plane, however briefly.

They could get him out of the fight, for a short time, at least.

Keep Allie safe. Keep Lily safe…until they found the rest of his network down here.

A calculated risk.

But something had gone wrong…

Something must have gone wrong.

Revik’s head hurt, and not from whatever was wrong with him physically. His heart hurt, his light, and it took him a few seconds more to even figure out why. When it hit him what it was, he didn’t understand what it meant, not at first.

He was missing time.

He was definitely missing time.

The realization spun through him, disturbing him more than even the injuries on his wife’s body.

He hadn’t been present when his wife got hurt. Or maybe he had been and he didn’t remember. Had he been drugged? Revik scanned his own light, trying to think through the panic building in his chest.

No. No one drugged him…he was sure of it.

He was missing time. Really missing time…as in, he couldn’t explain where he’d been, what had happened to him or why he couldn’t remember. How could he be missing time? He hadn’t missed time like that,
really
missed time, not since…

Fuck, not since…

Not since he’d been a kid.

Pain broke somewhere in his light, paralyzing him at first, blanking his mind.

He had a memory of sitting outside a wooden house. It had been years ago, during the war…meaning the first War, not the second. Back when he still carried a Lugar and not a Glock. He remembered sitting there, holding the gun. It rested in his lap, splattered with blood, like his face and clothes and hands. He’d been unsure how the gun got there…how he got there, where he even was. Unable to remember any of it, what it meant.

There had been blood on his hands. Blood…there’d been so much blood, and he’d been holding the Lugar in his lap. Crying. He hadn’t known why he was crying, either, not yet.

That would come later.

Even then, the memories never fully came clear.

He’d been so fucking confused. Even after he saw the police standing there, approaching him, their own guns raised, he’d still been confused.

That one cop. He thought he was a monster. Like something out of a horror story. Like Jack the Ripper. He thought Revik was only pretending not to know where he was.

He thought he just didn’t feel anything.

He’d been outside a house…and he had no idea how he’d gotten there.

Pirna had been inside.

He only found that out later, too.

That same cop told Revik back at the police house in the downtown of that Bavarian city. He told Revik in detail what he’d done to Pirna and her husband, what he’d done with the gun, and also with his hands and fists.