by Deanna Chase
I still felt defensive about it, though.
I mean, I saw how seers lived.
I didn’t see them often in reality, of course. There was the occasional glimpse of a collared seer owned by a corporation downtown, or seer sex workers standing outside high-end clubs on Broadway. Even more rarely, I saw privately owned seers with their rich owners, only discernible by their weird-colored eyes and their sight-restraint collars.
Those were rare. Even more rare than the other kinds of seers I mentioned above.
Mostly, I saw seers on the feeds, especially the news feeds.
Then there were the seer bands I liked, owned by one record label or another. There were a number of seer actors owned by the studios that I also found fascinating. I wasn’t alone in that…most of my friends thought they were pretty damned hot, too. I also liked Void Watch, a nonfiction crime show about seers, which showed them solving crimes and foiling terrorist plots and so on. And yeah, some of that was cool.
But I didn’t for a second believe that was how most seers lived.
I’d also seen news commentators rant about “icebloods,” and how we should just nuke all of Asia, wipe them off the planet before their numbers grew large enough for them to be a real threat. I’d seen the more mundane, day-to-day stuff, too: stories about seers being beaten to death in the street, gang-raped by mobs, chased down and burned by religious fanatics who called them the “Nephilim,” sold to the mafia for sex clubs and porn.
Most of that happened in Asia, where the majority of seers lived, but I’d seen riots in Eastern Europe and even one in the red light district in London, England.
I’d seen human protests on both sides of the “seer issue” when government officials came to town, or when the World Court had one ruling or another that rubbed people the wrong way.
Seer rights was one of Jon’s rant-topics, actually.
Jon was a lot more political than I was, and he’d get pissed as hell if you brought that shit up, about seer policy and the Human Protection Act and Seer Containment and whatever else. He could end up muttering about it for days if you really got him going, like an automatic hot-button of injustice that just infuriated him. He got angry about the seers’ rights side of things, of course, because he was that kind of guy…but he also got angry because he was convinced the government and major corporations used seers to spy on us and manipulate us, meaning other humans.
And yeah, I couldn’t really disagree that it was a definite possibility.
After all, if people can do something––especially if they can get away with it––then chances are, some of them will. No matter how fucked up it is.
On the other hand, I doubted the government really needed to spy on most of us.
Most of us didn’t pay enough attention for them to bother.
But yeah, I wasn’t anxious to have my race-cat called into question, for any reason.
I’d tested a full-blooded human since I was a baby, so I wasn’t worried, exactly...but I’d also gotten the side eye enough times to be paranoid.
I also knew Seer Containment made mistakes.
I didn’t want to be one of those mistakes. I wasn’t anxious to be shipped off to Asia to live in some seer commune...or worse, sold to some rich douchebag here in the States, just to act as his personal fuck toy. Besides, whoever bought me would want me to spy on their friends and business associates, and probably wouldn’t be too happy with me when I couldn’t.
The wind kicked up, snapping me out of my thoughts.
It also reminded me that I still stood at the bottom of my stairs, looking up at my own apartment building.
Well, house, really. Or it had been, before they partitioned it off into flats to take advantage of the astronomical rents in San Francisco. A three-story Victorian, painted light blue, it now comprised four main apartments and an attic, and the only reason I could afford to live there at all was that I’d signed the lease with another woman who’d been my roommate when I first got out of school. She’d gotten put on the lease by her grandmother who lived here for like, thirty years, and so locked in with the rent control. When my original roommate, Angie, met a guy and moved out, she let me keep the lease.
Which, yeah, was insanely cool of her.
Forcing out a sigh, I jerked my feet and legs forward again.
The door stood locked, sitting in its frame, slightly crookedly, exactly as it should.
No one was waiting for me in that house. No mysterious person who liked to rifle through my drawings. No Jaden. No Mickey. No random serial killers.
Not even Cass would be there. She’d made up with Jack finally, and moved back in with him the previous weekend, despite me and Jon trying to talk her out of it.
Exhaling in irritation at my own continued foot-dragging, even after my quasi-pep talk in my head, I lifted my combat-booted foot and resumed walking up the creaky stairs. I got up to the porch before I pulled my backpack around my body and fished in the smaller pocket for my keychain, still muttering.
I wanted to get a nap in, and get up in time to eat something so I could catch Jon’s noon sparring class in the outer Richmond. I had my mind back on logistics, sighing in a kind of blissful relief when I remembered a hot shower waited for me inside. I slid the slightly-bent key into the lock, jiggled it a little, and twisted it to the left to open the deadbolt.
I was still looking down as I walked in, nearly tripping over the mail that had been shoved through the slot, as I tugged at the key to get it free of the lock.
The mail itself flickered at me, VR-enhanced, glossy packets likely just itching to fill my headset with adware viruses if I was stupid enough to let any of them close enough. Mostly, I had Cass to thank for that, given her propensity to order crap over the feeds that forced her to give out our physical address.
Muttering another string of curses under my breath, I switched off my headset before it could trigger any of the wireless packets, unhooking it from around my ear and shoving it in my backpack for good measure before I tossed my backpack down the hall and out of range of the pile of crap by my front door.
Now I’d have to soak these fucking things in water, too, before my shower. I wanted to make sure they were toast before I forgot about them, though…which I would inevitably do after I’d slept a few hours.
“Damn it, Cass,” I muttered, shoving the door closed behind me with one hip.
Then I looked up.
A man stood behind the door.
I let out a surprised gasp.
It would have turned into a full-blown scream, but he clamped a hand over my mouth, fast. Too fast for me to finish inhaling that breath. Then, before I could fight him, he spun me around so fast I lost my breath entirely.
He slammed me roughly into the wall, then pinned me there.
He managed to use his knees, hands, arms and even a shoulder to hold every one of my limbs completely immobile. He pinned my body with most of his weight, too. It all happened so fast and so skillfully that before I could wrap my head around what he was doing, it was already done. I fought to yell against his fingers, but he only clamped his hand down tighter, pressing his mouth and face by my ear.
“Gods,” he breathed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for scaring you...but this is necessary, Esteemed Bridge...I swear to the gods it is necessary...”
I writhed against him, feeling his heart beat against my chest, feeling him grip me firmly, but without hurting me, without even any real threat in his hands. When I bucked harder to get away, he pressed the length of his body against mine, again seemingly only to hold me in place. Even so, an unambiguous erection pressed into my thigh, and I cried out, fighting against him harder.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Gods, I’m sorry...”
I found myself looking up at him.
He had a deep voice. A faint German accent touched his syllables, making me stare at him.
It occurred to me that I had no idea who he was.
I confirmed that fact aga
in, looking over the rest of him.
I definitely didn’t know him. I’d never seen him before in my life.
Angular features and high cheekbones stood out a narrow face. He had pale eyes, ghost-like, almost colorless eyes, like tinted glass. His mouth was narrow, set in a firm line below a prominent nose. He had coal black hair, cut on the long side but likely expensively, and if I saw him on the street, I might have thought he had money, between that and the suit.
The longer I looked at him, the more I knew I didn’t know him, and yet also that I did.
I didn’t know his face, I was certain of that. He wasn’t the kind of guy who’d blend in among the people I knew, so I doubted I’d seen him around anywhere, either, and just forgotten. He wasn’t what I’d call handsome, not stereotypically, anyway, but I definitely would have remembered this guy if I’d seen him before.
So yeah, I didn’t know him. Even so, his presence crashed around me, making my skin vibrate, making my chest hurt.
Suddenly, I knew the reason for that aching familiarity.
I didn’t know how I knew, but I did.
It was him. It was the guy in my head.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured again, pressing deeper against me. I winced against the erection I felt a second time, letting out another strangled cry against his fingers and hand. “I won’t hurt you...I swear to the gods, I won’t touch you, Allie…I promise.”
I felt him hesitate, wanting to say more.
Then, out of nowhere, something in him seemed to switch over.
Once it had, his presence evaporated like smoke. He seemed to vanish from around me, every fragment of his being blown away, as if by a strong wind.
“Sleep,” he murmured against my ear. “Sleep now, Allie...sleep...please, honey...”
His words grew softer, vague, as smoke-like as his presence.
He was so fucking tall. How was he so tall?
His faintly accented voice receded further as I looked past the warmth of his cheek. He was far away now, as far as the hallway of my Victorian flat, the VR ads moving and shifting on the hardwood floor, my beat up backpack lying near the end of the foyer.
All of it was far away, as if coming from the other end of a long, hollow tunnel.
I hung there, no longer fighting, only staring up at the ceiling, his hand still clamped over my mouth.
Despair filled me. I remembered the bar, when everything collapsed on me before.
I knew what was coming next.
But I couldn’t move. Like that time in the bar, I couldn’t stop it.
I was already there, in that same exact place.
Nowhere.
12
CLEAN SLATE
Revik held her against the wall, fighting to control his light, his mind, even his body, although he knew that last part of the equation no longer mattered...not to her, at least.
He couldn’t calm her fear. He’d tried, but he couldn’t.
She’d recognized him somehow. She’d known him, even though...
Shaking his head, he cut off the thought.
It was impossible. She couldn’t have known him. The Council assured him she had no access to her abilities yet. She was blind. Human-blind. There’s no way she could have known him through that, through the dense locks they held on her light to keep her from discovering who and what she really was.
But Revik knew what he’d heard. He couldn’t make himself unhear it.
Feeling his breath twist and clench in his chest, he looked down at her closed eyes, at the tension that remained in her features, vibrating her light. He’d used his aleimi to knock her out, severing the immediate connection between her body and light. She’d gone out at once, like a human would have, and basically in his arms.
He felt a sick, horrible feeling in his gut, looking at her.
She’d felt his erection. He hadn’t been able to control that, either.
“Fuck,” he muttered, taking his hand off her mouth.
Still keeping his hand lightly on her face, he gently allowed her head to slump forward, still monitoring her light. Traces of her fear coursed through the edges of her aleimi. He felt the sharper, stronger pieces of that light past the near-human fog that surrounded her, obscuring her from the Barrier, like the Council wanted.
He knew the Seven maintained that fog, both to keep her from waking fully to her seer nature, and also to keep her hidden from other seers.
She really did look nearly human from the Barrier.
Well, not this close, but normally she did. Look human, that is.
No mean feat, really…for any seer, but especially given who she was. But then, the seers protecting her were some of the highest ranked seers alive. Vash himself had to be close to seven hundred years old. He’d spent a good portion of those years training his aleimi to the highest levels possible, at least within the monastic traditions, if not the more militaristic branches, such as the Adhipan or the Seven’s Guard.
They had good reason to keep her hidden, too…at least until she could be trained to defend herself from the Rooks and whoever else. Even so, it still made him nervous. It made him nervous long before Jaden and even that fucker, Mickey, entered the picture.
Really, it bothered him since he was first assigned to her.
That had been her seventh birthday.
He remembered looking at her, unable to see her as anything but a child, one surrounded by her natural enemies, even as her human parents doted on her.
It bothered Revik––a lot, at times, even back in those early years.
He still didn’t understand how the Council changed her biology so much, either…how they got her to age so quickly, more or less pacing her human peers, year for year. He assumed it must be through some esoteric magics of theirs, or something to do with her intermediary status, or both, but the question nagged at him.
And yes, that fact reassured him in some respects, but it made him more nervous in others. For one, she looked sexually mature far younger than an ordinary female seer would have. Most seers looked like children until around twenty or so, when they entered adolescence and their bodies began to change in more noticeable ways.
Humans reached that phase a decade earlier.
Therefore, in addition to everything else, her very appearance confused Revik; it also made him extremely uncomfortable when he saw adult humans noticing her sexually at such a young age. Really, she’d been having problems with humans since he first got tasked with protecting her. Humans reacted to her, even shielded as she was. They just knew, somehow.
Strangely, they knew even while blind themselves.
But perhaps she woke up their light, even now. Maybe her job started down here the instant she incarnated, whether she acted upon it consciously or not.
Revik forced that out of his mind, too.
He fought not to remember the things her biological mother, Kali, said to him, all of those years ago, and focused instead on what he was doing there now. Really, given what she was, he could not take his own reactions to her too much to heart, either.
Many, many seers would react strangely to her. Many more, once she awakened for real.
Already, especially this close, her light was…different.
It pulled at his, wanting his to come closer, wanting his light to coil into hers. That had to be some function of her being the Bridge, too.
It had to be.
He could not afford to think about it differently, given his job. He also couldn’t let himself play magical thinking games, simply because Kali screwed with his head all of those years ago, telling him that he would have some kind of “relationship” with the Bridge once she became an adult. He couldn’t trust Kali’s motives and he knew it. She’d wanted him away from Dalejem. She’d wanted both of them to protect her daughter.
Revik had zero doubt that she would have said whatever she thought she needed to say to keep her daughter safe. He suspected that would be true even if her daughter wasn’t the Bridge.
>
Seers had never been particularly rational when it came to their children.
For the same reason, he’d wanted to hate Allie, when he’d first been assigned to her.
He’d felt played, messed with, manipulated...and he’d wanted to hate Kali’s daughter because of it, or at least dislike her enough to keep a hefty emotional distance between himself and his charge. If nothing else, he’d wanted to prove to them that he couldn’t be puppeteered so easily. He’d hated that they’d used Kali’s child to drive a wedge between him and Dalejem. He’d hated how easily both of them had been used.
He hated how much he’d been asked to give up.
Most of all, he hated how sure Kali was of him.
He’d hated her knowing, amused looks…as if his life had already been written in her eyes...as if Revik had no say in what happened at all.
So he decided he would not grow attached to Kali’s daughter, no matter how long he was assigned to her. He told himself it was a job, that he would do it out of duty, but he didn’t have to like her to do it well. He told himself he would do the job better if he disliked her...that he would be better able to be objective. Make the tough calls.
He hadn’t been able to do that, either.
Clicking under his breath, he muttered a few curses in German, watching her face as she breathed, as her body leaned against the wall and him, her eyes closed.
He did another surface scan of her light, if only to buy himself time to calm down.
Her fear was starting to dissipate now. He watched her face smooth as her light slid into a higher area of the Barrier. He could see a different frequency weaving through her aleimi now, a golden-white hue he saw in her dreams sometimes, that he associated with her protectors in that other place. He saw an ocean there sometimes, a long gold and white beach. He saw high clouds, towering mountains made of red and gold light.
