Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (9 page)

They were kissing then, and he felt his pain worsen.

He’d never had any human react to his pain like Gina did. She had her hands under his shirt before he could take a breath. He let her shove the shirt off his shoulders, and the aggression behind it had him gripping her tighter, nearly losing control of his light for real.

She had her hands on the fasteners of his pants next.

That instant seemed to stretch, to pull at him. Feeling a sliver of fear run through his aleimi, he realized something else.

He’d been using Dante as an excuse.

The truth was, he was terrified of this.

His mind fought with the reasons why, even as those few seconds stretched, as the brief confession to himself triggered a deluge of smaller confessions making up his specific fears.

Humans died so easily…they lived such a short time.

Gods, what the hell was he doing with her?

He could get her killed just by having her here with him. He would be leaving her now…leaving her unprotected. She should not be so close to the front…she should not be so close to the Bridge and the Sword. She should have gone with the other humans, with the civilians taken by the Bridge’s biological parents to whatever safe haven they were carving out in this new world.

She shouldn’t be here with him.

He let out a low groan when her fingers got the front of his pants undone.

He’d been stalling for his own reasons, not only because of her daughter. He understood in the same set of seconds that Gina had every right to be annoyed with him about this. He’d been hiding behind Dante, when the real issue had been him all along.

The longer he thought about it, the more he realized how childish it was.

He also realized he was done with it.

Whatever his fears of being hurt, of being abandoned, of needing one so different from him, of vulnerability to a female with a lifespan significantly less than his…wherever those fears lived or had been born, he was finished.

He had committed to this thing, for better or worse.

He would see it through to the end.

4

DRAGON

He dreams in magentas and indigos and grays.

He is the fire.

He is the no one, too. He fills the cracks between light and dark…black and white photos tinged with crimson and jeweled strands. Streaks of color live on either side of his line…but he is the black line, the hair’s width, the mind the gap…

He is the singularity, the silences where they overlap.

He is the no thing…he is everything too.

He is the backdrop, that which lives in the spaces.

Between dark and light.

Between Barrier and not.

Between Barrier and beyond.

Between living and death.

He watches the currents go by on either side. Lights like party boats in water rolled over by dark clouds…distant stars. He coaxes and teases. He pulls at the currents, bringing them closer, blowing them further away. He feels…so much.

He feels nothing.

It is smoke and glass…it is death. It takes so little to shred. They rebuild it again and again, flimsy diversions in flickering shadow and pale lights.

He is a slave. He knows. They think he does not, but he does.

Or perhaps they simply don’t care.

In through the out door…

Out in the open now. Revealed. She feels him there, although she cannot yet name him. She sees him in dreams although she does not yet recognize him. She looks for him, for who might be next, knowing only that it will be someone she loves…

She will come here.

She cannot ignore him forever.

She will embrace him, as it is written.

Together.

Together, they will watch the world burn.

Together they will close all of the remaining doors.

I folded my arms, nodding as I stared out over the horizon of shadow-darkened buildings framed by aging sunlight.

The view I gazed at wasn’t real, of course.

Not this time.

Well, it
was
real…essentially…but I wasn’t looking at it from the top of the high-end apartment building, like I had been before. Rather, the view was being projected into the space around us via some virtual hook-up of Dante and Vik’s.

It was easy to forget that as I watched the sun sink closer to the horizon.

The hole in the far enclave wall still smoked in the distance.

I could smell the smoke in fleeting whiffs carried to the rooftop by a humid wind, along with the echoing sound of occasional bursts of automatic gunfire. The red-hued sun reflected on the shimmer of the river and I could see its bouncing glare off the tips of buildings, some of those the holy Wats situated in the oldest part of the city.

Clouds gathered at the distant edges of that horizon too, tinted pink and red and orange with a darker blue in the background.

I couldn’t see any stars straight ahead of me yet, but if this were a real view, they’d be starting to appear in just a few minutes if I just looked over my shoulder.

A stray thought flickered through my mind.

It wasn’t an unpleasant thought…but it was unwelcome right then.

I remembered Revik and I sitting on a different roof, in a different city on the other side of the world, back when airplanes still passed overhead and the neon of the city buildings and people passing in crowds on the street below had their own form of civilized beauty. We’d been lounging in the roof hot tub a few days after our wedding ceremony at that restaurant in Central Park, discussing having a honeymoon on the beach.

Revik had tasked me with finding us a place.

He brought it up again in San Francisco, right before we went live on that op to extract List humans out of Jaden’s house by Golden Gate Park.

Both times, Revik teased me that it would be my job to choose our honeymoon spot since he staked out that cabin in the Himalayas. Garensche later joked that he fully intended to come with us, since he’d been snubbed for the wedding itself.

The thought of Gar closed my throat, too.

He’d joked about that wedding a lot, but I knew missing it really bothered him.

And yeah, I had, too…picked out a spot, I mean. More or less.

Fiji.

I had no idea why I wanted us to go to Fiji except it came with the best pictures in my head. Whether I’d made those pictures up wholesale or they came from some subconscious memory from the feeds back from when I’d been a kid, I had no idea.

I just got pictures of turquoise blue water, grass huts and white sandy beaches.

I had no idea if Fiji even existed anymore. That rash of tsunamis in the Pacific really pissed on my parade.

Even our talking about it felt a million miles away now.

Forcing my mind back to the present, I turned to look at the seer with whom I shared the virtual space. Studying his amber eyes, I refolded my arms across my chest.

“You’re sure?” I asked him. “You wouldn’t lie to me about this…would you, Feigran?”

His eyebrows merged together in a puzzled stare.

That stare didn’t appear to be focused on me, of course.

Instead it focused somewhere about a hundred yards past me…or maybe a thousand.

It could be a million, knowing Feigran.

He sat on the floor, his thin body huddled around a large drawing pad surrounded in a row of charcoal sticks and pens arranged in some precise manner that only Feigran understood.

It clearly
was
a kind of order, though. I could sense that order, even amidst the randomness. Focusing back on Feigran himself, I noted the visible outline of his ribs under his open pajama top. Taking in the thinness of his pale skin, the darker, almost reddish nipple and hairless chest, I winced, feeling invasive for staring in spite of myself.

The reaction wasn’t to his body, but to what I’d walked in on when I came down here.

Apparently the move had “upset” Feigran.

Lately, Varlan had taken to soothing Feigran’s emotional ups and downs, utilizing methods that had worked on him back when Galaith had been the fractured seer’s keeper.

Primarily that occurred through sexual gratification, I was learning.

Although affection was a part of that, too, I guess.

And yeah, it worked…better than anything we’d tried on him, for sure…but it still made me feel kind of gross. Feigran was so childlike and dissociated in some ways I struggled not to see Varlan as taking advantage of the half-crazy seer. At the very least, it felt closer to conditioned abuse than anything my mind could call truly consensual.

Even so, Varlan had been matter-of-fact about it.

He claimed Galaith had been managing Feigran in such a way for decades, that it was how Feigran had been conditioned to find comfort.

I knew Varlan wasn’t doing it to hurt Feigran, but yeah…eww.

So when I glimpsed the two of them together through the portal window earlier, I’d given Revik a disbelieving look that shifted into something closer to anger. Revik hadn’t looked all that happy about it, either, but he only shrugged, telling me bluntly,

“He asked for him.”

I knew he meant Feigran asked for Varlan, but it didn’t help my reaction much.

That one glimpse of Varlan getting blown by Feigran, stroking the seer’s long red-brown hair as he got off, would probably be burned into my retinas forever.

Still, there wasn’t a lot I could say.

Long piece of charcoal, short piece of charcoal, black ink pen…long piece of charcoal, short piece of charcoal, blue ink pen, orange crayon…long piece of charcoal, green ink pen, yellow crayon, black crayon…

It went on like that, fanned out in front of him in an impressively symmetrical half-moon pattern that he’d spent a good two hours arranging, according to Balidor. He’d started the instant the construct tank had been locked down onto the bed of the armored truck.