Revik

by J. C. Andrijeski

  Pain flickered around his light, mixing with the pains in his body.

  They’d offered him food, but he couldn’t eat. He’d cursed at them, barely knowing why. He’d threatened them, when they wouldn’t leave him alone.

  He woke up with a collar on, which he should have expected, but the realization that they’d done it to him while he slept turned him insane with fury. He’d slammed his body against the walls of the cell where they’d been holding him, screaming every obscenity he knew, in every language in which he was fluent.

  He knew a lot of fucking languages.

  Now, they’d sedated him.

  They’d tried anyway.

  After all the heroin, it barely did much more than mellow him out. Hell, if anything, it made him feel the closest he had to normal in over a week.

  He was going to their leader now.

  The head honcho. The head kneeler.

  Revik knew him, too.

  The guard behind him held his bound arms, and Revik had to clench his jaw to keep from fighting back, from elbowing the fucker in the face, breaking his nose. He could get free. He could get free, even now, and they were too fucking stupid to know it––

  “Undoubtedly you are right, my friend,” a melodious voice said, breaking into his mind.

  Revik blinked.

  He had kept moving somehow, through his mental tirade.

  Now he found himself standing inside a bamboo-paneled room.

  He still stood there, unmoving, as the guard behind him uncuffed his arms and hands. Revik barely gave him a glance as the seer who led him there removed himself, leaving Revik standing alone in the middle of the room, now completely unbound.

  Open windows displayed a view of the snow-covered Himalayas.

  It was a view dramatic enough to make him pause.

  It might have even caught his breath if he hadn’t felt like throwing up on the woven, multi-colored prayer mats he saw scattered across the wooden floor.

  Revik stared out at the frozen prayer flags fluttering stiffly in the breeze, seeing glowing electric lights and candles in the nearby buildings, and a lone monkey on a roof, its tawny fur covered in icicles by his mouth and ears.

  He could smell incense and the barest whiff of a wood fire somewhere nearby, maybe even from this very room. He looked back out the window, taking in the low-hanging gray sky and the few flakes of snow, before he turned to look at the old seer who had spoken.

  Compared to the guy in the woods, who appeared to be middle-aged––which for a seer meant somewhere in the vicinity of three or four hundred years old––this one looked positively ancient. He had to be six hundred years old, minimum.

  Revik suspected that number was a lot higher.

  Even so, the similarities in features and body between this seer and the one in the woods were unmistakable. Revik found himself swallowing as he stared at the old man, feeling a hotter pain build in his chest as he recognized that dark-eyed stare.

  Before he could put any of his conflicted feelings into words, the male seer was already crossing the room.

  Revik barely glimpsed the tears in the old man’s eyes before he clasped Revik around the back with his long arms, pulling his body up against his chest.

  “My friend,” the old seer said, choking on the words.

  The ancient seer held him tighter, tight enough that Revik felt his light wavering, trying to incorporate the light of the old man, then trying to push it away and failing.

  He remembered his scornful reaction to Kali’s suggestion that he come here. He remembered the contempt he’d felt, the certainty that they wouldn’t want him here, that they would feel nothing but disgust for him.

  He fought to harden his heart, to distance himself from the warmth he felt on the other male––a dense, real-feeling warmth that made the glimmers of affection he’d experienced from Galaith feel like a distant dream.

  A carbon copy of a carbon copy.

  That affection from the Rooks now felt to him like a movie version of love, like they’d learned all the right words, all the right things to say, but forgot the feeling.

  He felt his throat close. As it did, his voice turned harsh.

  “Vash,” he said. “The mighty Vashentarenbuul.”

  “Yes,” the old seer said, smiling widely at him as he separated their bodies. “Or, the head kneeler, as you so aptly put it.”

  Revik met his gaze, but found he could not hold it.

  His jaw tightened as he stared around the room.

  It really sank in for him only then that the two of them were alone, that the other seers he had initially felt talking about him had cleared out of the room, either right before he arrived or in those few seconds while Vash had embraced him.

  “Revik,” the seer said seriously. “I must speak with you.”

  Revik nodded, still not looking at him, but out the long window.

  His body was starting to hurt again, along with his head. His shoulder ached from the gunshot wound, but he didn’t try to move it, or to change the position of his arms.

  “I must ask you something,” Vash said.

  Revik looked at him that time, but still didn’t speak.

  The older seer was watching him with pained eyes, his hollow cheeks prominent under the curtain of his iron-gray hair. Unlike his son, Yerin, Vash wore his hair completely down, outside of the traditional seer clip favored by most males.

  “My friend,” Vash said. “I have spoken to your old master.”

  Revik felt his jaw harden, almost without him willing it.

  “You’re going to cut me loose, aren’t you?”

  He heard the bitterness in his own voice.

  Nodding, he didn’t know whether to feel relief or anger.

  It felt more like someone had stuck a knife in his chest, and whatever will had remained there had already begun to drain out of him.

  “When?” he said coldly.

  Vash took his arms, squeezing them in surprisingly strong fingers so that Revik would look up at him once more. It occurred to Revik only then that the aged seer was taller than him, by at least a few inches.

  “No, Revik,” the seer said gently. “Galaith has agreed to honor your free will in this. It is a part of the treaty between our two peoples.”

  The old seer hesitated then, studying his eyes.

  Revik saw no guile there, no wariness or pretense at all.

  “Have you changed your mind, brother?” Vash said.

  Revik let out a low snort, but that compression in his chest worsened. “Why would I go back?”

  “Why would you stay?” Vash answered softly.

  Revik looked up at him, thinking about the question in spite of himself.

  He thought about the woman with the green eyes.

  He thought about what he’d felt, right before he’d shot Terian and Raven in that hotel room. He thought about what he’d felt again, when they stood by the banks of the Mekong, and he saw that other face faintly over hers.

  He fought with how to put any of that into words.

  But there were no words. No words existed that would have explained why he’d done what he’d done. Trying to find them just made him doubt himself again, and wonder if maybe he had made a mistake.

  In the end, he only shook his head.

  “If you want me to go, just say so, old man,” he said.

  Vash’s fingers tightened on his arms, hard enough to hurt.

  “I would keep you here by force if I could, brother Revik,” he said, his voice suddenly steel. “But I know you. I know how futile that would be. You must tell me that you desire this. You must say it to me, before I can do what must be done to separate you from them.”

  Heat bled from his light, warmth, sympathy… love.

  It washed over Revik as the seer added, his voice low,

  “Once I start, and for some time after, you will be so far from rational, we will not be able to trust anything you say. You must tell me now, Revik. Before we begin.” />
  Revik swallowed.

  Something in his shoulders relaxed at the man’s words.

  “I will stay,” he said, looking back out the window.

  He felt the old man watching him, his light hesitant.

  “It will hurt,” Vash told him.

  “I said I will stay,” Revik said, giving him a harder look.

  Vash himself seemed to relax that time, letting out a breath Revik could almost feel. A faint smile appeared on the old seer’s face, ghosting his narrow lips.

  He didn’t let go of Revik’s arms, though, and after another moment, he spoke to him again, his voice subdued.

  “There is one more thing, brother,” the old seer said.

  Revik looked up at him, waiting.

  “You will have to forget some things,” he said. “It is also part of our agreement, between myself and your old master. You cannot be allowed to remember things that could damage him in the future. I cannot help but see his point in this.”

  Revik thought about it, too. He turned over Vash’s words, seeing it from Galaith’s perspective, from the old man’s.

  For a few seconds, his mind rebelled at the idea, not liking the thought of losing part of himself, even if he saw the logic in it.

  Then he remembered his last days in Saigon.

  The naked seer children with bite marks on their breasts. The pile of coke in the hotel suite at the Majestic. The woman in the red bikini, and what he’d done to her.

  Nodding, almost to himself that time, Revik didn’t look at the seer when he answered.

  “Fine,” he said. “Erase it. All of it.”

  Vash released one of his arms, startling Revik by touching his face.

  Turning his jaw gently so that they faced one another, the old seer studied his expression, his light exuding compassion, so dense Revik closed his eyes. He felt his jaw clench as the old man’s light washed over him. A hot pain started in the middle of his chest, one Revik both hated and somehow craved.

  “You will still be the same man, Revik,” Vash reminded him gently. “I cannot change that. I can only make you forget what you chose to do with that once.”

  Revik thought about that, too.

  Pain reached him again, but it felt softer that time, in a way he couldn’t explain.

  He exhaled a breath he hadn’t known he held, nodding again.

  “I understand,” he said. “Tell Galaith I agree to your terms. Show him this conversation. He will know I mean it.”

  Vash smiled.

  His dark eyes held sadness that time, though, mixed with a denser feeling that hit Revik once more in the chest, stuttering the images stuck in a slow loop inside his mind.

  Whatever that feeling was, it hurt.

  It was a good pain, though, a soft one.

  One that felt almost, faintly familiar.

  It didn’t occur to Revik until later that what he felt from the old man was the same thing he’d felt from the green-eyed seer on that wooden pier outside Phnom Penh.

  The only word that came to mind for that feeling was…

  Love.

  WANT TO READ MORE?

  Check out the main series of the BRIDGE & SWORD WORLD, starting with:

  ROOK (Bridge & Sword Series #1)

  Yanked out of her life by the mysterious Revik, Allie discovers that her blood may not be as “human” as she always thought. When Revik tells her she’s the Bridge, a mystical being meant to usher in the evolution of humanity––or possibly its extinction––Allie must choose between the race that raised her and the one where she might truly belong. A psychic, science fiction romance set in a modern, gritty version of Earth.

  See below for sample pages!

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  Sample Pages

  ROOK (A Bridge & Sword Novel)

  1 / Allie

  I KNOW WHO I am.

  Somehow, deep down inside, I’ve always known.

  I don’t know how to explain that statement precisely. It’s not in the “I am Alyson May Taylor” sense of knowing myself. It’s more like this presence I carry within me, this solid sense of “me-ness” that feels untouchable in some way. It shocked me as a kid, when I realized a lot of people didn’t have that.

  For a lot of people, that rock-solid, “here I am” thing was more elusive. A lot of them spent their whole lives searching for it.

  Funnily enough, with me, it turned out who I was didn’t end up being all that important.

  What I was mattered a whole lot more.

  On that front, I knew a lot less than I thought I did. I might have had that essence thing down, but I was missing a hell of a lot of pretty significant details.

  “HE’S BAAAACK.” MY best friend, Cass, grinned at me from where she leaned over the fifties-style lunch counter, her butt aimed at the dining area of the diner where we both worked. Given that our uniforms consisted of short black skirts and form-fitting, low-cut white blouses, she was giving at least a few of our customers an eye-full.

  Seemingly oblivious to that fact, and to the men sitting at the counter to her left and my right, pretending not to stare at her ass as she stuck it in the air, she grinned at me, her full lips looking even more dramatic than usual with their blood-red lipstick.

  “Did you see, Allie?”

  I pursed my lips, rolling my eyes.

  “What’s the pool up to now?” she said. “Seventy bucks? Eighty?”

  “Eighty-five.” I used the metal stopper to compress finely-ground espresso beans into the metal filter I held in my other hand, managing to spill a small pile of grounds on the linoleum counter in the process. “Sasquatch threw in twenty yesterday.” Remembering, I let out a snort-laugh. “He walked right up to the guy’s table. Asked him his name, point-blank.”

  Cass’s black-eyeliner decorated eyes widened. “What happened?”

  I smiled, shaking my head without looking up. “Same thing that always happens.”

  Cass laughed, kicking up her high heels, which were red-vinyl platforms, more seventies than fifties, not like it mattered. Again, I saw the men nearby sipping their coffees while they surreptitiously stared at her legs.

  Cass had been on a red kick lately. Her long, straight, raven-black, Asian hair had dark red flames coming up from the tips, the color matching her lipstick, eyeshadow, fingernail polish, and the five inch heels.

  Two months ago, everything had been teal.

  She could get away with just about any style she wanted, though. Her ethnicity, an odd mish-mash of Thai sprinkled with European and Ethiopian, somehow mixed inside her to make her one of the most physically beautiful women I’d ever seen.

  I hated her a little for it, sometimes.

  Other times, I pitied her for it. Truthfully, I hadn’t seen that it had done her a lot of favors over her life, and Cass and I had known each other since we were kids.

  Looking up from where I was doing battle with the diner’s antiquated espresso maker, a machine I was convinced had it in for me, personally, I blew my much less dramatic dark brown bangs out of my face, glancing at the man in the corner booth in spite of myself.

  I’d seen him walk in.

  Truthfully, I’d felt him walk in.

  It was unnerving as hell, the effect he had on me, simply from entering a building I happened to occupy.

/>   This was in spite of him never saying a damned thing to me, apart from whatever single-item purchase he made off the diner’s crappy menu. He paid in cash. He never came in with anyone else. He flat-out ignored any attempts at small talk, even polite questions. He rarely made eye-contact, although I always felt his eyes on me. When I looked over, however, he was usually staring out the window, or down at his own hands on the table.

  Mr. Monochrome wasn’t a talker.

  He wasn’t a people person in any sense of the word. He took ignoring other sentient beings to the level of an art form. The extremes he went to in avoiding conversation didn’t just verge on rude; they were rude. Mr. Monochrome didn’t care.

  Mr. Monochrome wasn’t interested in our opinions of him.

  Mr. Monochrome wouldn’t even tell us his name.

  That last part was the pool Cass referred to.

  Given that most people paid bills with their headsets these days, the fact that he paid in cash made him frustratingly impervious to our curiosity about him. He was a blank canvas. My mind superimposed that canvas with various stories, of course, as did my co-workers––undercover cop, international fugitive from justice, spy, private detective, writer doing research, terrorist for the seer underground. Serial killer.

  I knew the reality was likely a lot less interesting.

  Jon, my brother, referred to him as my “current stalker,” but Jon was paranoid about that kind of thing, given the number of problems I’d had in that area back when I was a kid. Apart from the fact that Mr. Monochrome insisted on sitting in my section every day––even when we moved around which tables were mine––he didn’t seem all that interested in me, either.

  He certainly hadn’t made any overtures in my direction, not even oblique ones.

  He was probably just a guy who lived somewhere on the autism spectrum, and I’d fallen into his daily routine.

  At most, he might be cultivating a deep-seated paranoia around being tracked by the government, one that made him reluctant to use his headset. If he did have some kind of socially-dysfunctional crush on me, he didn’t seem the type to do much about it. He likely worked at one of the tech companies nearby and came to the Lucky Cat because we still accepted cash; more and more places in San Francisco didn’t.