Collision: Book Four in the Secret World Chronicle - eARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  “You want psycho-babble?” he continued. “I can tell you what anyone with a psych degree would say about my nightmares. Survivor’s guilt.”

  “Your dreams seem pretty agitated for that,” she said.

  “Well, it didn’t help that she got atomized right in front of me,” he sighed. “Anyway, they’d be wrong. Survivor’s guilt is about living when someone else didn’t. This goes a bit beyond that. She didn’t just die. She died ’cause she pushed me out of the way.”

  “So… regular guilt. To the Nth degree. Was she someone close?”

  “She was the One.”

  “The…” Mel sucked air through her teeth, realization hitting her hard. “You realize what you’re telling me, don’t you?”

  “You read my file, didn’t you?” Djinni scowled. “Or you just pay attention to the locker room gossip that infects Echo like a virulent strain of swine flu.”

  “I’m a bartender, you idiot,” she hissed. “If they’re talking, I hear it. Djinni, Bull’s been after any concrete proof of his wife’s death since it happened! You were there, you watched it happen, and you’ve obviously said nothing about it!”

  “I know, I know… what must you think of me?”

  “I think…” she paused as the enormity of his predicament became obvious to her. “I think it must be crazy what’s going through your head, then, now… because you think of this man as your friend, and you loved the same woman. And that woman died, to save you. And the way I’ve seen you look at Bella, and seeing her and Bull… Shit, Djinni. That’s a messed up place you live in.”

  “Mi casa es su casa.” He shrugged, took her tumbler, and got up to freshen their drinks. He turned, and gave her another penetrating look. “You gonna turn me in?”

  “Can’t,” she said, and looked away. “Bartender’s code. Long as you’ve got that glass in your hand, any and all secrets have to stay that way.”

  “The nightmares are pretty standard,” he said, passing her tumbler back to her. “Y’know, for what they are. Sometimes, I freeze up completely. Other times, I manage to cry out. There are even a few where I’m fast enough to reach for her, maybe even enough to try to pull her down. I’m never fast enough. Each time, she’s gone, but not without flashing me that damn serene look of hers. That goddamn look. She’d save it for special occasions, when she wanted to let me know that everything would work out, that we would get through it, that she…”

  He stopped to take another shot, but remained silent, his fingers drumming a soft beat on his glass.

  “You’ve come this far,” Mel prompted him. “Might as well say it.”

  “That she still loved me,” he muttered, and sank back into the bed. They sat in silence, until his tumbler slipped from his hand and fell to the floor. There followed a harsh rumble as it rolled away on the hardwood.

  “I was tortured once,” Mel said. “God, I can’t believe I’m telling you this. I was part of an infiltration operation, but we were pinched. They worked us all up, but they singled me out. The others they used up, got what they wanted, and that was it for them. Me, I was different. I had something else they wanted. So they kept at me, and I fought, and I wouldn’t give it up.”

  This was dangerous ground. She knew she shouldn’t be telling him any of this. It was something she had kept bottled up for so long…and yet, she had so much more in common with Red Djinni than she had ever had with anyone else before. But she had known that, perhaps from the first time she had laid eyes on him. There was something that connected them, and it went deeper than she could have guessed. Maybe that was why it had all come pouring out. It was liberating.

  She looked down to her hands and caught herself shaking again. With apprehension? No, not really. More with…

  “You okay?” Red asked, noticing. Of course he noticed. Noticing everything was par for the course for him.

  She laughed. “No. It’s fine. Just letting go of some tension.” It was oddly exhilarating, and definitely a release. As controlled as she was, the release was going to have some physical side effects, after all. “I’m not used to…”

  “Talking?” he said with a wry grin. It looked extremely odd on the hideous caricature he had adopted. “I know, we usually skip the talking, don’t we? Anything meaningful, anyway.”

  “That’s how we roll,” she sighed. She brought a hand to his face, her fingers delicately tracing the absurd lines and folds of his features. “And not just with each other. I see your veil, Red Djinni. And not just your mask, or the faces you use. The way you hide, I guess I relate.”

  “Yeah,” he whispered. “You get it, I can tell. Hiding’s what we do, and we’ve gotten good at it. Really good.”

  “Maybe too good,” she said. “You hide from it for so long, it just becomes part of you. You don’t expect to have to share it with anyone, but when you do…”

  “… you hope they don’t hate you for it.”

  She watched as his face softened, his eyes once again boring into hers. This time she didn’t look away, and realized with a start that his smile came as a mirror to her own. She felt a flush rise in her cheeks, her breath catch in her throat, and for a moment she was lost in him. There were many reasons this couldn’t work, but they didn’t seem very important to her anymore. And then he was kissing her. It was different. Before it was all a haze of lust and need. Now, it was simply… right.

  After, he did something he never had before. He held her to him, and she marveled over the casual rush of sensation of his breath flowing over her shoulder.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said.

  “You can ask,” she replied, burying her face deep into his neck.

  “What were they after? Your captors, I mean.”

  She pulled away from him, startled. In the faint light, she watched as his own expression shifted from surprise to comprehension and finally to guilt.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to…”

  She stopped him with a gentle press of her fingers to his lips.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she whispered.

  He grinned, a full-on Alfred E. Neuman grin.

  “What, me worry?” he said, and held her again and she smothered her laughter into his chest.

  * * *

  It would have been a complicated bit of programming if more than half of it hadn’t been spellcasting. If Djinni’s at Mel’s place, turn off Overwatch audio/visual. Unless—and a complicated list of biometric conditions. Because she didn’t want to know, she truly didn’t want to know. Well she knew, but she didn’t want the details. Didn’t want the temptation of having a recording either, because even though you don’t want to know, there is still that urge, like picking at a scab, to find out anyway.

  It had all worked pretty well, until tonight, when Mel screamed in her sleep, and not only triggered the Overwatch “wake up,” it triggered an alert that woke her up and fed the rest right into her ear.

  Stuck in a state that was half embarrassed shock and half sleep-fog, she stopped it right after “I don’t wake up screaming from mine,” and put Djinni’s system back to “silent monitor.” She sat in her bed with her face buried in her hands, weeping quietly.

  For what had been lost.

  For what would never be.

  Then, knowing that sleep would not be coming again soon, she went to the bathroom, washed her face, and bundled up in a heavy robe. Overwatch always needed additions, tweaking. Intel needed sorting, looking over, analyzing. There was always work.

  Until the day she died, there would always be work.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Beloved

  Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin

  Oh, how Shen Xue despised this man, who bent over his desk, pointedly ignoring the one who had come to give him the news he so longed to hear. And yet…he had the means and resources to combat the Thulian menace, and the General did not. And the General knew that once Dominick Verdigris was no longer distracted by the Celestial and his need to obtain the cr
eature, he would finally bend that formidable intellect on the important problem of how to defeat the Thulians. If only as a means to save his own gutless hide.

  So the General would get him his toy. He would play with it, and get what he wanted from it, and then they would go to work. And eventually, when the Thulians were defeated, Shen Xue would end him. The Celestial would be a valuable tool for Shen Xue once Verdigris was removed.

  There could only be one Emperor, after all.

  And so the General made a perfunctory little bow to this thing he despised, and spoke the words Verdigris had been waiting for. “The trap is ready.”

  Verdigris’s head came up, infernal fire in his eyes. “When?” he demanded.

  But the General made a hushing motion with one hand. “The fewer that know, the better. But it will be soon.”

  * * *

  “Shto?” Red Saviour stared at Untermensch in fury and astonishment. “What do you mean, there is no petrol?”

  “There is no petrol, Commissar,” Georgi repeated with a shrug. “Is hazard of working with old equipment. Gauge reads full, tank is empty. Delivery will not be for four days. We are nyet petrol station, we do not get priority.” With the entire world still in the midst of rebuilding, gasoline shortages were commonplace, unless you were part of an essential service, like the police, hospital ambulances, or the military. The CCCP fell somewhere along that spectrum, but also somehow short of it; some weeks it came down to how much threatening and cajoling Natalya could get away with being the only thing that kept the lights on and the gas tanks on the Urals full.

  Natalya fumed, but what could she do? Not all the screaming or pounding a desk, or threatening boots to the head would fill the empty tank. For the next four days, anywhere CCCP comrades needed to go, if they did not have some sort of power that enabled them to travel quickly, they would either have to walk, or…

  Or call upon ECHO. Nyet! Saviour did not want to have to go to the blue girl—who should never have been put in charge—with cap in hand, begging for favors. Bella Parker was a good healer, a fine healer, but too timid to lead. Look what she was doing now! It was well past time to take the battle to the enemy, but she delayed and delayed, speaking words of caution. Words of cowardice? Maybe. She did not want to think such things of one that she had come to call sestra, but this was war. Natalya knew that she had to think dispassionately about the problem. It was never wise to put a healer in charge of an army. They thought too much of casualties, of losses, and not enough of victory at whatever cost was required. Natalya reflected for a moment on how much they had already lost; how many people, how many comrades…it was a stab of pain that she quickly locked away. Nyet, must focus on the moment, not the past.

  And, of course, at just this moment there was an urgent delivery from Moscow waiting at the shipping depot. What it was, Saviour didn’t know; she only knew there would be phone calls and shouting if it was not in her hands within an hour or two, because that was how her father and Boryets showed her that they were the ones in charge of CCCP, and not her. Petty tyrannies…well, Moscow had always worked by tyrannies, petty and not so petty, and right now, she needed Moscow’s good will. And of course, the shipping company would not deliver here, oh no, it was too dangerous, they said. Which was why she had intended to send Untermensch, the best rider among the comrades, on a Ural.

  “Bah,” she said, then spat. “Bah. I will go myself!” She could fly, after all. It should not take more than half an hour, an hour at most, to go there and back. No wasted fuel that they didn’t have, neat and tidy.

  “Not advisable, Commissar,” Untermensch objected. “You are needed here. Even with Overwatch and Gamayun, if something were to erupt, the Commissar must be in place to lead. How many times have you not shouted at the television, because nekulturny Starship Captain goes on Away Team?”

  “Stupid svinya Starship Captain,” she muttered, but as usual, Georgi was right. Who to send? The depot was across town, and across three separate destruction corridors. Impassible for anything other than the van and Urals, and a route which would take too long for one on foot. One would have to have wings—

  “Ha!” she exclaimed, snapping her fingers. Perfect. “Overwatch,” she ordered. “Open: Comrade Sera.”

  As Georgi tilted his head to the side, momentarily confused, the so-called “angel” answered the hail on her headset. “Yes, Commissar, have you an order for me?” came the infuriatingly calm and neutral voice. Natalya not only found the “angel” herself irritating, by virtue of simply existing, she found the woman herself doubly so because she was so impossible to read, or to intimidate. She did not like the business between the “angel” and Murdock, either. She needed all of her comrades to be at their best for the coming days, and right now the Amerikanski and the winged woman were certainly not, between his memory and her delusions. If nothing else, however, the “angel” knew how to take commands and carry them out, a trait that Natalya could certainly admire in a subordinate.

  “Da, am having order for you. Important courier duty. You are being to fly with all haste to ExpressEx depot and pick up package for me.”

  At least the “angel” never argued with orders. “At once, Commissar,” she said, obediently, as Red Saviour replied to the email notice from ExpressEx with the reply that Comrade Seraphym—nasrat, even to type the word made her irritated!—was authorized to accept the parcel.

  “There. That is sorted,” she said to Georgi. “Now, what other crisis is there needing my attention?”

  “Well, there is the matter of the Urals themselves, Commissar.…”

  Natalya let out an exasperated sigh. “How many more has that Amerikanski destroyed?”

  * * *

  It was winter now, and although Atlanta seldom was cold enough for snow, the world was still white and gray; the white of bleached concrete, the gray of stone, and bare or winter-dormant trees. The gray of leaden skies, through which the Seraphym flew. The bleakness of the still-shattered destruction corridors oppressed her, the skies oppressed her, the chill of the air oppressed her.

  And yet, it seemed fitting. Fitting that the ground, the sky, be dressed in white and gray. It was winter’s turn to dance in the skies where she had once danced, and where now she labored, heavy wingbeat after heavier wingbeat.

  The cold had not mattered before; she had been indifferent to heat or cold. Now…now it seemed as if warmth never entered the core of her. Except when she was near John Murdock—and that was such a false and deceptive warmth. And a temptation, the temptation to see in him the man she had lost—no, not just that, to make him into the man she had lost, and that could not possibly be Permitted. She kept her distance from him as much as possible, which was exceedingly difficult given that the Commissar kept throwing the two of them together.

  At least this assignment was one she had been given alone. It was better for them to be apart, no matter how much she missed the man he was now. That man was a good man, but he must become something she could not foresee. He must not bind himself to her in any way. He must not ask her for direction. He must grow.

  And I must diminish. That is how it must be. My powers must become his. He must connect to the Infinite, and become something more than mortal, and less than seraph, with the understanding of the former and the vision of the latter. For that to happen, he must take what I have left, and I must dwindle and be gone.

  The headset she wore chirped out its directions to her in a mechanical monotone as she flew. This landscape of alternately shattered and intact cityscape was not familiar to her, but the guidance of the computers that her headset was linked to was enough. Finally, she saw in the near distance a mathematical array of identical buildings, and the familiar orange and blue livery of ExpressEx trucks.

  Odd. Something about this place seemed hauntingly familiar.…

  She landed on sudden impulse in a quiet spot, where there were no trucks, and no people; nothing moved in that gray landscape of faded asphalt and concrete and m
etal. It was a spot that she did not recognize until she turned a little, and then—oh then—she was struck dumb, and numb, with recognition.

  This was where she had first seen him. This was where she had first encountered him; spoken to him. This was where she had met John Murdock.

  It felt like a knife to the heart, that recognition. The memory overwhelmed her, blinded her, deafened and defeated her. There he had stood, over the body of the wounded driver he had saved, the man who had become the ECHO meta Speed Freak. There he had looked at her—actually seen her for what she was—without comprehension of what he was seeing. There was the scorched, vaguely man-shaped splotch on the pavement that was all he had left of the gang leader he had slain.

  And there, there, there he had stood, the pain of his life standing clear in his eyes, the aching need for forgiveness a raw wound in his soul—

  Without realizing it, she cried aloud, blinded, a cry of pain of her own, for there she had stood, still at one with the Infinite, still at one with the Song and now she was alone, alone, alone.…

  So it was, she did not see the furtive movement behind her. Did not sense the men around her. Did not know there was anything amiss until she heard a muffled sound, like an explosion, but nearer to hand, and she whirled, and saw the net in the air, the sparkling drops upon its weft like drops of black blood. Did not think to call her sword of fire until it was too late, and the net settled over her, each of those drops a focus of terrible pain that drove all thought from her, and the net flattened her to the cracked asphalt, afire with a fire that was not hers, until the sharp stab of a needle against her neck brought nothingness.

  * * *

  …how long had it been?

  Minutes? Hours? Days?

  Time was meaningless in the face of more pain than she had ever imagined it was possible to feel. She only knew the pain, and the voice of Dominick Verdigris, who asked the same questions, over and over.