Allie's War Season Three (2 page)

Using both a Barrier key and a physical one, she unlocked the lock on the leather briefcase. Inside sat four vials of midnight blue liquid and what looked like a small bottle of hairspray, each lying in a cut-foam indentation matching its size and shape. She took out the hairspray-looking bottle and broke the plastic seal. Instinctively, she held her breath, although she knew her own DNA would render her immune to the deadly agent. Aiming the nozzle directly into the wide ventilation shaft, she squeezed off four healthy sprays.

Replacing the canister in the foam cut-out that matched its shape, she re-attached the ventilation cover and moved to the next.

It was brilliant, really, initiating the contamination before the air reached the scrubbers on the higher floors. They would assume contamination occurred somewhere past the scrubbers, if they made a connection with the mechanics of the hospital at all, and didn't attempt to trace it back to a specific patient or ward. By the time they figured out the scrubbers were useless against the engineered contaminant, it would be too late.

She moved from segment to segment of the room, her mind exuding that softer static. In the foreground, a clutch of song lyrics got caught in a loop in her light. She let them remain, filling up that dead-thought space.

As she spun the handle on the first wheel to open the connecting point to three of the main water pipes, the seer hummed. By the time she closed it, placing the first of the empty vials carefully in a plastic bag and locking it back into the foam indentation at the bottom of the case, she sang aloud, albeit softly and under her breath.

"Never fire and back to earth...

We taste it, feel it, pretend we don't...

The time has come, and their end too...

It comes hard, not soft...

And She does too...

But the wheel has turned, and so've I...

So now we'll all bring the end of times..."

“My heart was broken long ago...

Too far back, the elders know...

The books are dust, the prophets dead...

Our time won’t come before the end..."

1

BANK JOB

HE SAID HE’D never robbed a bank before.

I believed him, but for some reason, it struck me as sort of funny. After all, my husband, Dehgoies Revik, was like, public enemy number one to the humans, in terms of international terrorists. His name and face probably had a place of honor on every law enforcement feed in the United States, as well as those in Europe and South America and wherever else.

The only thing that kept them from coming after us more directly, I suspected, was that a lot of them thought he was dead.

They thought I'd killed him.

"Alyson...jesus."

He pulled away from my fingers, averting his eyes when I gave him a puzzled look. Seeing the hardness come over his features, I retracted my hands and then my arms, fighting not to react to his light sparking and sliding back and forth behind and in front of his shield.

"What?" I said.

I lowered my hands to my sides, open-palmed. I didn't really think about it being a seer gesture until I saw his eyes follow my fingers, a faint smile coming to his lips.

"What did I do?" I said in English.

"Nothing." He looked in the mirror, shaking his head. "You didn't do anything."

I felt my cheeks warm slightly. "Well, I must have done something."

Glancing back, he clicked at me softly, raising an eyebrow. Then he finished doing what I had started to do for him. Hooking the straps of his vest on either side of his ribs with his fingers, he tightened them with two quick pulls, bringing the organic armor flush against his body. I couldn't help noticing he was wearing the ring I'd given him, the one that had once belonged to my human father. He gave both straps an additional test tug before he locked them in place around his ribcage on either side.

"I can't exactly deal with you doing that right now," he said finally, glancing at me again.

"I was dressing you," I said, exasperated. "Not
un-
dressing you."

His jaw tightened, but he smiled a little when he glanced back at the mirror.

"Funny."

His eyes remained on the mirror when he pulled a black shoulder holster over the armor, donning it like another vest. I watched as he velcroed that in place as well. Glancing back, he looked over my similar outfit, and handed me a few more 9mm magazines off the metal shelf.

"Do you have a coat?" he said.

I patted the one I'd laid on the metal table behind him. "It's armored. Just like you said."

He nodded, but I saw a faint worry in his eyes. It vanished in a matter of seconds, and I smiled, seeing a different expression flicker across his features. He bounced on his heels slightly, but I wondered if he even knew he was doing it. My smile stole a bit wider when I saw him going through another pile of ammunition, his eyes concentrated.

I'd never met anyone who enjoyed field ops as much as he did...not even his first lieutenant, Wreg, another career military infiltrator. I'd seen that when Revik was Syrimne, living in those mountains with the rebels, but if anything, it was more obvious now. As Syrimne, he'd been hiding in a sense, behind a wall of light that wasn't really his own, playing at being the military commander without really showing a lot of himself in the role.

Now that I could read his subtler expressions again, he looked taut as a bowstring to me, despite the carefully neutral mask he wore. It wasn't fear. His light felt focused, concentrated...at least when he kept it away from mine.

More than that, he felt like he knew who he was.

The fact that it was just the two of us seemed to have heightened that reaction somewhat. Either that, or he'd been even more stir-crazy than I'd realized, being locked indoors and under observation for longer than his type-A with a capital "A" personality could handle. I could see the gears turning in his head as he went over all the things that might change en route or go wrong once we were on the clock. He looked charged, though, almost happy, despite our odd little back and forths that still seemed to happen whenever we were alone.

Seeing him like that, so open and so himself, made it really, really hard not to touch him. But I'd been having that problem for weeks now.

We were in the storage room under a seer-run, five-star hotel in Manhattan called The House on the Hill. It had been named after the Old House on the Hill in Seertown, India, of course, but most humans thought it got its name from its location at the top of Fifth Avenue and its already famous, panoramic view of Central Park. Then again, most humans didn't know the hotel was owned and operated wholly by seers, more than half of them living off the grid.

The House on the Hill had become our base in the past months, and while I was pretty comfortable here by now, it still struck me as a strange place to hide, even when trying to hide in plain sight, like we were now.

Revik muttered, "He's going to blame me, you know."

I looked over at him.

"Who?"

He rolled his eyes in exaggerated seer fashion. "Who do you think?"

"Balidor?" Thinking about this, I snorted, shaking my head. "No, he won't. In fact...not hardly. They already think I'm corrupting you."

"Corrupting me?" Revik turned over my words, his face holding an unfeigned surprise, even as the German accent grew more prominent again. "What does that mean? Who does?"

Shrugging, I gestured vaguely with a hand, stuffing the magazines he handed me into a zippered pocket on the vest I wore.

"...All of them."

"All of
who?"

I sighed, touching his arm before I'd thought about what I was doing. I took my hand away when I felt him flinch.

"They
all
do. 'Dori. Vash. Wreg even gave me a 'talking to' the other day..."

"Wreg did? About what?" Revik was still glancing up at me periodically, even as he pulled out another gun, checking the clip and then the chamber. I recognized the gun that time; it was one of his desert eagles. So he must have brought that one down with him from his room. When I didn't answer him right away, he nudged me with his shoulder, playfully that time, but with enough behind it that I knew he wanted my answer.

"...Allie?"

I sighed, tightening the band holding my hair back before I let my hands flop back to my sides. "Both Wreg and 'Dori told me to lay off you," I admitted. "They think I'm taking advantage...that you're too vulnerable to me right now. Only with Wreg, I'm not sure
what
he was telling me to do. If he was telling me to leave you alone, or to do something else..."

Revik continued to look at me for a moment, then glanced down at the gun he still held in one hand. Pushing the safety into place with his thumb, he flipped it around with his fingers and passed it to me, handle-first. He watched me slide it into a thigh-holster. I saw his eyes still running over my appearance, looking for gaps, things I'd forgotten, or maybe just giving himself space to think. Realizing I was watching him look, he glanced away, frowning a little as he looked over the small arms table again.

Grunting softly in belated amusement, he slid an arm into the long coat he'd brought, flipping it around his back once he had his other arm hooked in the opposite sleeve. He pulled it over his chest to cover the armor and the holster.

I watched him yank it down until it settled on his shoulders.

"...Anyway," I said. "The point is, they'll blame me, not you. Besides...it
is
my fault. Do you really think I'd let you take the fall, when it was my idea?"

"Do
you?"
he said, his voice casual.

"Do I what?" I said, bewildered.

"Think you're taking advantage?" He smiled faintly, but I saw the thread of seriousness in his clear eyes.

I snorted, folding my arms in front of the armored vest.

"Please," I said. "Like I could, even if I wanted."

His eyes flinched a little. I saw him thinking then. His mouth firmed before I could decide what, then he shrugged, his voice casual again.

"Allie," he said, glancing at me without really meeting my eyes. "I'd jump off a building right now if you asked me to...you must know that."

I stared at him. His voice held the same lightness as before, but I felt something else behind his words. Whatever that something was, it ran through my body like an electrical current. My gloved hands tightened, the leather pressuring my fingers where it crinkled.

"You'd better be kidding," I said.

He shook his head slightly, but not really in a 'no.' Clicking a little, he buttoned up his coat, still not looking at me.

"Figure of speech."

"For
who,
exactly?"

"Allie." He gave me a harder look. "You know what I mean."

I fell silent, biting my lip. Then, before I could second-guess it, I walked up to him, sliding my arms around his waist.

He stiffened, but didn't pull away. Instead he stood there, not quite enduring it, but clearly struggling to decide what to do...or maybe just how to react. I pretended not to notice.

"Why?" I said. I tugged at him gently with my arms and felt him stiffen more. "Is this guilt? Because I thought we talked about that..."