Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (108 page)

I even heard birds. They called to one another as the sky darkened, as the sun dropped the very last of its light behind the horizon somewhere on the other side of that river. I saw them flicker overhead in strange arcs, conducting their nightly rituals before the day ended.

The rushing of the water sounded less menacing now, too.

I think a few more minutes passed before it really sank in, before a denser heat began filling my light, along with something I hadn’t felt in as long as I could remember…definitely not since that nightmare in Dubai and Revik told me his plan to infiltrate the Dreng.

I knew it made no sense.

I knew it might even be shitty to feel it now, with so many dead.

More than I really wanted to know about.

I knew this place itself would be poisoned soon, once those clouds in the distance made their way from the horizon. The water would be poison…the land…

More people would die.

But I couldn’t help it; I felt it anyway.

I felt hope.

I felt real, honest-to-gods hope.

Continue reading the ALLIE’S WAR Series with
 

LONDON: ALLIE’S WAR EARLY YEARS

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THE ALLIE’S WAR SERIES
is a dark, unique and gritty psychic romance involving a young woman grappling with her role in bringing about the end of one world and the start of a new one. Follow Allie Taylor and her antihero partner in crime, Dehgoies Revik, as they fight terrifying enemies and one another in a passionate story spanning centuries, and filled unpredictable twists.

THE ALIEN APOCALYPSE SERIES
is a dystopian new adult romance about a tough girl named Jet Tetsuo who grew up on Earth following an alien invasion. Forced into living among her conquerors, she has to navigate a treacherous world full of enemies who pose as friends, even as she becomes their most famous fighter in the Rings, a modern day version of the coliseum.

THE GATE SHIFTER SERIES
is an unusual shifter romance centering on shifters from another world altogether, called morph. Earth humans remained blissfully ignorant of the existence of alternate dimensions until Nihkil Jamri tries to save private detective, Dakota Reyes, while he is surveying Earth. Part urban fantasy, part detective series, part paranormal romance, part science fiction adventure, the Gate Shifter series explores crime solving, interstellar warfare and alien romance with the least likely candidates imaginable.

More Books by JC Andrijeski

“Seeking Truth in Made-Up Worlds”

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LONDON: ALLIE’S WAR EARLY YEARS

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One

HALLOWEEN

“That guy’s still staring at you,” Cass said, leaning close to my ear. She continued talking in an intensely not-stealthy way, I guess to be heard over the music. “He’s been staring. At you.
Only
at you, Al. For like…an hour!” she added, even louder.

She was pretty drunk.

Drunk enough to have forgotten that we’d barely been here, meaning at this particular party, for an hour, so I doubted the black-haired guy Cass was staring at currently had been staring at me all that long. Drunk enough to forget we were both in costume, and this guy probably had no idea what I even looked like. Drunk enough that between her talk-shouting in my ear and motioning towards the guy with her beer-clutching hand and grinning like a loon, my best friend, Cassie, was about as subtle as if she’d yelled from across the room and waved her arms for him to look over at both of us.

Drunk enough to embarrass the hell out of me, in other words.

But Cass had started her drinking well before we left the house.
 

Her and her jerky boyfriend, Jack––her on-again, off-again boyfriend of more years than I could count––got in another big fight earlier that day.
 

Which I guess meant they were probably off-again at the moment.

I hadn’t been able to get much that was coherent from Cass on the subject, though. She knew I didn’t like Jack, so she tended to keep her comments on him short and cryptic, since both she and I knew Cass would probably be back together with him again in a day or so.
 

Also, yeah, she started drinking a few hours before I even got off work.

Cass was my roommate at the moment.

That happened the way a lot of things happened with my best friend, Cassandra Jainkul. Meaning, I told her she could crash with me at my crappy apartment on Fillmore Street for a while if she needed to. I said she could stay as long as she needed, even for a few months, if it took that long, while she got her shit together and figured out what came next for her.

That was two years ago.

My brother, Jon, warned me back at the beginning that Cass would never leave, barring some unforeseen Act of God.
 

Since neither of us could think of what that might be, apart from her winning the monthly state raffle or one of the city prizes, it was the same thing I guess.

Jon also warned me that my drama quotient would go way up if Cass moved into my place, even apart from the drinking and Jack and her lack of money and whatever else. Knowing Jon, he was probably worried about my grades, since I’d just gone back to art school and Cass was freewheeling it without that whole higher education nonsense. And yeah, I knew Jon was right, even then, but what could I do? She was Cass. She was my best friend. And while Jon was right about the drama, she was also a lot of fun. We could drink wine and paint and laugh about stupid shit on the feeds and she would drag me out of my cave once in awhile.

Even I knew that was good for me.
 

Without Cass living with me, I knew I’d be home alone a lot more, not depressed or anything, but definitely more broody and artisty and that wasn’t great for me, either.

So a little drama came with that? Seemed like a fair trade to me.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to let her end up on the street, even if she had terrible taste in men and got fired more often than anyone I knew. At that point I would have done just about anything to keep her away from her crazy family…or from moving in with Jack, who I suspected had a lot bigger issues than Cass’s tendency to over-drink, whatever b.s. she fed me.

Since Cass was now staring at the guy with the black hair and the light blue eyes hard enough for both of us, I didn’t let myself look over at him, not even when she did the shout-whisper thing in my ear. Instead I stared at the far wall, like there was some other guy staring at me from that part of the room.
 

Or like I wasn’t all that interested, maybe.

I tried to keep my face blank, too, but I doubt it was all that convincing.

It was easy to forget I wore full-on face paint, given my Space Girl costume…a character from an obscure comic book Cass and I fell in love with a few years earlier, and the reason I got more puzzled stares than recognition when people saw my get-up.
 

The silver metallic foundation, black, raccoon eyes and black lipstick made me pretty difficult to recognize.
 

It also made the subtler expressions hard to pull off.

Given that I also wore a skin-tight, rubber shirt with a big, neon “S” on the front, a black micro-mini, fishnets and thigh-high vinyl boots, it was to the guy’s credit that he looked at my face at all. Or that he wasn’t leering at Cass, really, given that she’d opted for some kind of weird clown-nurse-slut costume that had her looking both mildly frightening and full-on sex kitten all at once. I knew hers was from some B-horror flick Cass thought was funny. As I hadn’t seen that particular gem yet, I had to admit, the get-up looked schizophrenic, even for her.
 

In addition to Cass’s normal, dyed, neon-green hair, she wore a crazy-short white nurse’s dress open almost to her navel in front. The latter showed off a lace white bra and most of her cleavage, which was about four sizes bigger than mine and usually got her attention even in regular clothing. To complement the white maybe, Cass also wore spiked, white, fuck-me shoes, a nurse’s hat, a stethoscope…and full-on clown make-up with a neon-pink frowny face over most of her cheeks and chin.

It was pretty terrifying, honestly.