Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine

by Andrijeski, JC

  She screamed louder, her voice a long wail of shocked grief.

  Revik just knelt there, feeling some part of him break, transported back to his childhood in fragments, in broken pieces of blood-covered grass and smoke. He stared at that small body in the grass and saw Gisele there. He saw Kuchta. He saw all the girls he had kissed and fumbled with on the grass…who he’d shown too much of himself to, who had to be removed.

  The strangers Menlim had him kill.

  The friends.

  Pirna. Pirna’s husband.

  Laren.

  Elise…Ellie. His Ellie. He’d killed her, too.

  “NOOOOO!” Charlie screamed. “Gods no! No! She can’t be gone! Junei! Junei! Answer me! Answer me, Junei!”

  Her voice broke, a half-sob wailing into the night sky.

  Revik couldn’t feel her light. Even so, he winced painfully, feeling the grief in that scream so far inside himself that nothing else remained. Only her voice lived there, echoing inside him, echoing in the air. In those few seconds, he wanted to die again. He wanted to die more intensely than he had in decades. He’d caused this. This was because of him.

  It was always because of him.

  “Nooo!” Kneeling on the grass, Charlie yanked her whole body against the guards’ hands. She pulled and sobbed and screamed until Menlim nodded and they let her go. She crawled then, wracked with sobs, trying to reach her daughter. “Nooo! Junei!”

  Menlim nodded to the tattooed seer again.

  Revik closed his eyes.

  He closed them tight, but it didn’t help. It didn’t take anything away.

  Even the collar couldn’t do that…not anymore.

  Another shot rang over the stretch of grass by the City’s walls.

  The screaming and wailing abruptly ended.

  That time, Revik barely flinched. He knelt there, no longer even trying to think past the pain.

  He’d failed. He failed…and he’d failed his wife and daughter, too.

  Allie. Lily. Maygar. The others…all of those seers and humans still alive from the Lists. Wreg. Jon. Balidor. All of the countless others who had fought and risked their lives for them.

  Allie had been right…it had all been for nothing.

  Menlim had known. He’d known before they’d even started this.

  And now his wife was coming here.

  She was coming here to save him.

  For a long time, that quiet felt worse than anything that had come before.

  27

  ONE MONTH

  Revik?

  I wait, keeping my light utterly still as I focus intently on that high, still place. As I feel for his pale blue-white light. That pure, crystalline flavor that is only his.

  Revik? Are you there?

  Silence greets me.

  More than silence.

  I can’t feel him anymore.

  Revik? I send, softer now, more tentative. Revik? Can you hear me?

  Biting my lip, I send him information anyway, telling myself it might help…that he might hear it. Knowing I’m filling the silence, that no one is listening on the other end.

  We’re using the map… I tell him. We’re going to the sites, but each time he’s gotten here before us. He killed Eddard. He killed one of the others, too…

  Lily swims briefly behind my eyes. I blink to fight the feeling back, knowing it might show in the space. Knowing that my missing our daughter won’t help him, that it won’t help either of us right now.

  It’s been weeks…and I can’t feel him.

  I can’t even feel him having sex. I can’t feel him drunk.

  I can’t feel him watching me with Jem.

  Revik? I fight fear…fight to hold onto that higher vibration. Baby, answer me. I need you to answer me…I understand if you’re mad…I promise you, I understand. You can yell at me all you want, but please answer me. Please. I’m afraid…

  Nothing.

  Some part of me holds onto the idea that he’s angry, that this is punishment.

  But I don’t really believe it.

  Not anymore.

  Revik…answer me, or I’ll make you sorry you didn’t. I swallow, fighting pain. I’ll make you watch. I’ll make you watch every damned second of it…I’ll open my light…I’ll give him head and open my light…I’ll use the telekinesis. I’ll do it like he was you. I’ll show him that place on me, that place on both of us…

  Biting my lip, I wait, breathing too much, feeling tears on my face.

  Feeling like I went too far.

  Answer me, goddamn it! Answer me!

  But he doesn’t.

  Revik––

  “What are you doing?”

  I jumped then turned, feeling caught as I raised a hand to my face, wiping my cheek.

  “Nothing.” I cleared my throat, forcing a half-smile as I shook my head. “Nothing. Where are you at with that?” I said, nodding towards the three-dimensional image shining off his hand-held. “Anything?”

  Dalejem frowned, studying my face with his dark green eyes.

  I watched him decide to let it go, even as he sighed, clicking softly to let me know he was letting it go…and possibly that he might revisit it later.

  “You mean apart from another dead body?” he grunted, looking ruefully over at one side of the Persian rug.

  The same rug covered most of the high-end sitting room and had to have cost thousands of dollars when it was bought; unfortunately, it had been more or less ruined by the corpse rotting into the fibers on one end, even beyond the slight mold smell from the rains.

  I followed his gaze, my eyes focusing briefly on an also-expensive-looking high-heeled shoe still on a stockinged foot. The shoeless foot splayed next to it looked strangely innocent in comparison, making me grimace a little even as I remembered who she was.

  “And this is where he wanted us?” I said, still staring at her foot.

  “Same marker,” he said, his voice leaking frustration as he focused back on the organic key. “We’re exactly where we’re supposed to be, according to this dugra-te thing. I’m beginning to think he’s just leading us to his handiwork…like a cat leaves a dead mouse on his favorite human’s pillow.”

  He motioned around at the building as a whole.

  “There is no one else here,” he added. “No storage, like you told me to look for…no other bodies. Their lights just extinguish from the board, about an hour after we arrive. Like the last two drop points.”

  I forced myself to try and think, to focus on this, the immediate thing.

  “Which person was this?” I said, frowning. “Who was she in real life?”

  “Foreign Minister to Britain from Dubai,” he said at once. “Before the plague, anyway.”

  He continued to read off the diagram, his eyes narrowing.

  “According to Balidor’s people, she’s got a half-dozen aliases,” he said. “The one here is human, obviously. Not only was she a diplomat but a prominent businesswoman. Well-connected, obviously, or she wouldn’t have gotten the post. Immigrated here from the Middle East when she took the diplomatic appointment back in 2013. ‘Aria Sparten’…it looks like the family is a married name. No children…”

  He gave me a flat look.

  “…Obviously. She was heavily involved in the art community here in London before the plague. Ran a gallery down in Soho. Part-owner of another near Westminster.”

  “Any other important aliases?”

  “The others seem to be neutralized now. She was the wife of a sheik-type in some earlier human life, according to this thing. She’s seer, so most of the aliases go pretty far back.”

  I nodded, still fighting to think.

  “So?” he said. “This is bullshit, right? He’s not leading us to anything, really. Not even to himself. Just showing us his kills. We can’t even get ahead of him because he only highlights the next after we reach the one before. And we still have no idea why he’s doing this…or if it will even do any good, given what Balidor told us about t
he bodies replacing themselves.”

  I frowned, looking around the high-end flat we’d broken into.

  “You’re sure there’s no body storage here?” I muttered, thinking aloud as much as anything.

  “Like I just told you, I looked,” Dalejem said, rolling his eyes a little. “…Just like at the last two places. There is nothing, Bridge. Nothing we can pick up with sensors…no constructs in the area apart from the one around this apartment. Nothing the locals haven’t ID’d already, and most of those come straight from our allies here in Britain.”

  “Can we trust them?” I said, giving him a sharper look.

  Dalejem shrugged. “More here than anywhere else we’ve been,” he said.

  I nodded, knowing he was right.

  Most of the seers here were loyal, although I had zero doubts that Shadow’s people had infiltrated the group on the ground here, just like they did everywhere else.

  Hell, Eddard and this other network woman were proof of that. I’d already noticed Menlim seemed to like to hide his network people among our people more often than the obvious, Rook-infested areas. Even now, after the plague, none of those dots had shown up in a Shadow-run city. They’d all remained outside of them.

  Yet London was one of the few cities that had a real working force of infiltrators straight out of Seertown’s training programs under Vash. So yeah, I knew we couldn’t trust all of them, but I also knew that Shadow would be stupid to store anything important here.

  Well, other than his handily-replaceable network people, that is.

  The lead infiltrator on the ground here, an older and unusually dark-skinned seer named Jasek, was someone I liked a lot, and pretty much instantly. I’d met him way back when I came to London the first time; he’d led the team of infiltrators who debriefed Revik following his time as Terian’s captive. He’d also been the one I talked to while Revik was still in Cairo.

  I’d trusted him almost instinctively back then, although I knew it might be foolhardy to do so now, given that I didn’t really know him all that well. His unusual coloring and hair texture made him a natural for infiltration, so he’d been recruited as a kid into the Seven’s team.

  Balidor told me he’d been courted by the Adhipan too, but had declined out of respect for his parents, who apparently hadn’t wanted him to be disappeared into the caves of the Pamir for however-many years.

  Honestly, that made me kind of like him, too.

  He was on the List, too, the seer one…and as a Level 1, which is part of why I’d known his name so well from recruitment meetings. There had been some discussion about relocating him and his mate to be with the main group of Listers since there were legitimate fears he might be gunned down if anyone found out who and what he was.

  We didn’t have a lot of seer Level 1s.

  Six in total, which was more than the other two lists, but still not a lot.

  Wreg and Balidor were two of them, along with Jasek and a female seer they thought was still in China somewhere. We didn’t have a location on the last two, although they’d both been born in the Americas...one in South America and one in North America...and both were female. No one in our group had recognized either of their names, as far as I knew.

  We’d noticed a lot of sex-pairing like that. Only two humans had the Level One designation on the human List, Jon and Dante, so one male and one female. The Level Ones on the intermediary List were the Four––me, Revik, Feigran and Cass––so two and two.

  And yeah, with the seer List, it was three and three.

  Brushing that from my mind, I looked out the long window to my right and the view of Hyde Park, which looked wilder than I remembered, more overgrown.

  It was strange to be back in London. I found myself fighting not to think about the first time I’d come to this city…or how close we were right now, relatively speaking, to Revik’s old apartment just off Belgrave Square.

  I agreed with Dalejem, though.

  This was our third hit on the map, and the third dead body.

  It was also the third time we’d come up with diddly-squat in terms of new intel.

  The first body we’d found, that of Eddard, had been the most unnerving in a way, if only because I’d known him a little. Seeing his dirty brown eyes open, the irises already turning a milky color, his thinning brown hair even more limp than I remembered over his bland and now blank features…it was like seeing a broken doll version of someone I knew. I think I stood over him the longest, just staring down at him, trying to even see him as real.

  At that point, it hadn’t yet felt like a pattern.

  Both Dalejem and I had assumed we must have simply gotten there too late, like we had with Novak. The glowing dots on the map continued to glow for about an hour after we arrived…so well after the network seer was dead…then it shifted on to the next one.

  So whatever shut off the one light and ignited the next had to be tied to us, not to the death of the seers themselves. That, or it got triggered by the murder scene breach, although we hadn’t been able to find any kind of tripwire or sensor to indicate how he might have done it.

  Dalejem pointed out that the map itself pointed to some kind of Barrier-slash-satellite technology, but even with his mad skills with organics, Jem hadn’t been able to source it back far enough to know how it actually worked.

  We had to assume Dragon knew exactly where we were right now, though.

  Unlike us with him.

  “Is the next one showing yet?” I said.

  Dalejem nodded, clicking under his breath. Giving me a grim look, he used his mind to point out the new brighter dot on the map, even as he blew out the projection, showing me a more detailed map of the physical coordinates.

  Cairo.

  Fuck.

  That would be a lot harder.

  More and more, I was with Dalejem. This was a wild goose chase. At best, Dragon was getting his jollies leading us around by the nose, leaving us his morbid little breadcrumbs for reasons I couldn’t fathom at all. At worst, he was distracting us from what was going on in China right now, as well as the bases we’d left behind in Colorado and Langley.

  I exhaled, fighting that nagging feeling that we were missing something, that we weren’t looking at this right. The variables were starting to mess with my head. This stupid map. The missing book. Dragon. Feigran and his crazy visions. Whatever Revik had been feeling while we were looking at this stuff on the ship.

  I was still turning it all over in my mind when I frowned.

  “Why would he do this?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Jem said.

  “I mean why bother with this at all,” I said, frustrated. “Why one body at a time? We already know Shadow’s got whole warehouses of these somewhere…so this wouldn’t do shit, right? I mean, if he’s not going after the storage area for the bodies themselves, then what good is killing one body going to do?”

  Jem shrugged, his eyes flat. “We already know he’s not stable,” he said.

  “But this has a purpose,” I said, frustrated. “You know it does.”

  “Crazy people can have plenty of purpose,” Jem said. “They can have elaborate, well thought out purpose. They are still crazy, Alyson.”

  “Did anyone ever look through that book for parallels to the network?” I said.

  Seeing the blank look on Dalejem’s face, I realized I’d still only shared about half of my thoughts with him.

  “…The book Kali found. Dragon’s book.”

  Dalejem frowned. “I thought your husband did that. And Balidor.”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t know anything back then,” I said. “That was in New York, and we didn’t even know Menlim was a part of this then.” I studied his face. “The Children of the Bridge had the book for years. Did anyone ever check to see if there were resonances or structural similarities between the material in the book and the network itself? Even the Pyramid?”

  Jem gave me a strange look. “Structural similarities? What kinds o
f structural similarities?”

  Realizing I hadn’t included him in that part of my thought processes either, I sighed. I was too used to working with Revik on this stuff. He was usually about ten steps ahead of me when it came to anything semi-dimensional, especially structural design.

  Jem let out a low grunt.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Whereas I’m about twenty behind.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” I said, my voice carrying a thread of impatience. “…And hardly. It’s just different when you’re bonded.”

  Jem nodded, but I saw his jaw harden.

  Shrugging, I added, “Anyway, Revik’s a total weirdo with this stuff. His brain is like…wired for it. Even he will admit that…assuming he’s not doing one of his ‘playing dumb’ things, which he does a lot more than you might think.” Clicking, I gave Jem a grim smile, adding, “He’s disturbingly good at it. Which makes sense, given how he was raised…but yeah, disturbingly good. A little too good, honestly…”

  Seeing Jem looking at me again, his eyes holding a faint scrutiny now, I flushed.

  Clearing my throat, I gestured up at the network diagram.

  “I meant similarities in terms of the equations listed in the book, brother,” I said, extending the politeness to my tone. “Mathematical interpretations of the drawings. Your people knew more about the larger Dreng network back then…more than we did in New York, for sure.”

  Jem’s green eyes studied my face. “Do you think they are connected in some way? Dragon’s book and Shadow’s network?”

  I shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. But given Feigran’s insistence that we find that damned book, I thought there might be a connection.”

  “I thought he wanted to find it for Dragon,” Jem said.

  “Yeah,” I said patiently. “But why does Dragon want it?”

  Jem didn’t answer at first. After a longer pause, he nodded.

  “All right, Esteemed Bridge,” he said. “But let us say they are related, as you suggest. How does that help us, exactly?”

  I sighed, my hands on my hips. I glanced out the floor to ceiling windows, noting that smoke was now coming from one of the buildings I could see to the north.