Revik could see Loki’s team using the columns, too, as well as the alcoves by the far right wall, sandwiched at the end of those long, medieval-looking wooden tables.
A voice rose in Revik’s head.
Do you honestly think it will be that easy, brother? the voice asked him.
Revik gave a humorless smile, watching Chinja pick off a guard who went running for the door, presumably because he suddenly didn’t like the odds.
No, Revik sent back, letting the Rook on the other end feel his amusement. But it’s fun, Terry. And I want to see some fucking blood right now, all things considered...
Your daughter isn’t here... Terian said, cautious.
I’m sure you’re not here, either...old friend.
We are...here in spirit.
Not good enough, Revik sent. Give me my daughter. Then maybe I’ll let you leave the island alive. Can’t make any promises about your new girlfriend, though, Terry.
We want to help you, Revi’....
Revik let out an involuntary laugh.
Even as he did, the gunshots began to lessen around him, then to die off entirely.
Revik looked out across the half-circle to see the body of Terian looking up at him, holding a gunshot wound on his chest with a bloodied hand. Revik knew that was probably an illusion, too, but he unholstered his gun anyway, pointing it at the other seer’s head. It gave him a perverse kind of pleasure to see the pained look on the other’s face, real or not, especially since he lay sprawled, legs splayed, next to Cass’s broken body.
“Yeah,” he said, advancing on the other seer. “You always did want to help me, Terry.”
He fired the gun, and the body slumped to the stone floor.
Looking around at the others, Revik realized they were staring at him, puzzled looks on their faces. Revik saw elation there, too, a kind of jacked-up euphoria in their light and eyes, maybe just from all of the pent up tension finally getting at least a bare sliver of release. Revik saw the danger in that too, however, and realized the construct affected them as well.
The Dreng had always liked killing, too, after all.
Even now, he was likely playing along with their game.
At the thought, Revik let his eyes roam in the space of the crimson and black hall.
Corpses lay in inelegant piles near several of the entrances. The half-moon of seers who had stood in front of them lay crumpled and bleeding on the ground. Someone had put the screamer and the guy with the gut wound out of their misery, too. The lower tapestries were splattered by the walls with blood and skull and brain matter from shots. Revik saw blood on the stone floor, too, leaking into the crevices between cut rectangles of dense rock.
Checking the magazine on his gun for the number of shots left, he snapped it back in a few seconds later, realizing only then that he had blood on the front of the armored vest, too. Wiping his hand on a pant leg, he glanced around at the others, realized he hadn’t lost anyone, not yet, apart from Garensche, although Jax looked significantly worse again, and not only from the depletion of his light. Revik gestured with a few fingers to Loki and Chinja, and the two of them immediately moved closer to Jax, and began feeding him from the construct.
Don’t give him too much, laoban... Wreg cautioned from beside him. We need your telekinesis more than we need him mobile right now. We cannot count on Adhipan to feed it anymore...I do not feel them at all down here, even now.
I know, Revik sent back. And understood.
We could take him back up, Wreg sent, still cautious. At the nearest opportunity, laoban...once we are free of this damned construct. He looked around, his long jaw suddenly firm. Unless you think we should all go up now, laoban? Or down, to whatever transport they have in this place...what you and Adhipan spoke of before? Hesitating again, Wreg added, You know it is possible this is all distraction...that they have already left.
Revik nodded, feeling his jaw harden as he glanced again around the room.
He turned over the other man’s words, trying to think about them objectively.
Wreg could be right. Of course he could.
On the other hand, why would they lure him here, only to leave?
The whole fucking thing still made no sense.
He holstered his gun again, fighting to think. Loki and the other seers were approaching from the other side, milling around his own group and exchanging smiles, relieved nods and eye contact with a few of the others. Revik noticed Neela and Pagoj giving one another particularly long looks, and even touching hands, and noticed the light thread that wove between them with a passing glance.
Shit. He hadn’t known the two of them were dating. Then again, he’d probably missed a lot over the past few months, particularly in the realm of interpersonal relationships.
Hopefully that meant Loki’s group were the real seers. He pinged Wreg anyway, reminding him to keep an eye on them, and do what he could to scan their lights.
Fishing into his upper vest pocket for a hiri, Revik frowned, realizing he might not have thought to bring any with him. His brow cleared, and he let out a grateful sigh when Jorag tossed him a stick after reading it in his aleimi. Jorag offered to light it for him, too, with a silver lighter he produced from one of his own pockets. Touching his hand in gratitude, Revik couldn’t help noticing that the other man’s fingers were still warm from firing his gun.
Revik leaned over the flame, inhaling on the end of the hiri.
When it caught, Jorag clicked the lighter shut, and Revik exhaled a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, gesturing a second thanks at the other man. He looked around the castle-like room a second time, and realized suddenly, that the construct had gone silent. All of those bright lights he’d seen, pulling his aleimi and his mind to and fro, only minutes before––those had vanished, too.
“Feels dead in here now,” Maygar said, voicing Revik’s thoughts aloud.
“Yeah,” Revik said, exchanging a look with him.
Maygar’s full mouth curled into a frown. “What now? What was all of this? Do you think they are even here, boss? Or is this all just bullshit?”
Revik smiled faintly at the ‘boss’ tag, even as he took another drag of the hiri before offering it to his son. Maygar calling him ‘boss’ hadn’t thrown him the way Maygar calling him ‘dad’ had, while they’d been walking down that corridor...even if he’d done it jokingly.
Maygar took the hiri from him with a touchingly grateful look on his face. After pulling on the stick deeply, he handed it back. Revik noticed only then that the younger seer’s hands were shaking. He could feel flickers of intensity in Maygar’s light, too, but couldn’t quite tell if the emotion he was sensing was predominantly fear, predominantly adrenaline, or some confused mixture of both.
“Come on,” Revik said, taking another drag of the cigarette. He motioned his head towards the door ahead, a stone entrance that led into a darker tunnel. “If nothing else, we can buy Balidor and the others time...”
“Or they can buy their own people time to take out Balidor and the rest of those on the list,” Loki muttered.
Revik looked over at him, and saw the Middle Eastern seer looking up the walls to the high stone ceiling, focusing briefly on the hanging tapestries, a frown on his face. Catching Revik’s stare, he clicked softly, adding,
“...While they distract us in here, laoban. This has occurred to you, yes?”
Revik had to concede his words.
“Yes,” he admitted. “It has. And yes. It’s a distinct possibility.” He hesitated, glancing at Wreg and Jon, then at the others. “Recommendations? What do others feel? What seems like the greatest risk? Do we go back up? Try to support the others at the hotel?”
Revik knew what he was really asking them.
They knew it, too.
Revik likely wouldn’t survive another attempt on Menlim, Cass, Terian or the rest of them. He’d start to lose control over the higher levels of his light within a week, if not sooner. If he intended to go after his daughter at all, it was now
or never. To assist Balidor, to get everyone out of here, via ship or plane or whatever else, would take hours...if not days. By then, Menlim and his people would be gone, assuming they hadn’t left already. It would take more days to find them. Possibly weeks. Possibly months.
Probably more time than Revik had.
“Why the tunnel, laoban?” Jorag said suddenly. “Is it a feeling, or––”
“Yes,” Revik cut in.
Looking around at all of them again, he sighed, then told the truth.
“I feel her strongest there,” he admitted.
“Your child?” Wreg said.
“No.” Revik felt his jaw tighten, then shrugged again. “...Allie.”
He felt Maygar flinch. The younger seer’s light recoiled in the same set of seconds.
“You think it is the child?” Wreg repeated, his voice more cautious that time. “...That you are feeling, I mean?”
Revik thought about the question, then shook his head.
“No,” he said, clicking softly. He rested his hands on his hips, exhaling. “I think it’s Cass. But she’ll have my daughter with her. I felt that much on her, from the small amount of contact we’ve had. She thinks the child is hers. Not Allie’s. Not mine. Not even Terian’s...or Shadow’s. Hers. She wouldn’t leave her, not even temporarily. Not with me here. Not unless she had a damned good reason...”
Revik glanced around, and saw a few of the others nodding.
He saw agreement on Jon’s face, and Wreg’s, and even Loki’s, and realized they must have felt enough off him and possibly off Cass herself to share the same impressions. Revik noticed he wasn’t the only one smoking, either. Jorag had lit a hiri for himself, too, somewhere in the pause after he offered one to Revik. Loki had apparently taken a hiri off Jorag, too.
Jorag’s hands shook worse than Maygar’s as he smoked, Revik noticed.
Revik took another breath.
“So?” he said, indicating towards the door.
None of them answered that, either, not directly. Revik saw a few exchanged looks circulate among the seers standing there. He glanced at Jon.
“Do you feel her?” Revik asked him. “Cass?”
Jon shook his head. “No. But I think you’re right. Someone’s still here. In this building.”
“It could be illusion,” Loki pointed out.
Next to Maygar, Chinja nodded, still gazing around the medieval-looking hall.
“Why?” Wreg said, aiming his words at Jon. “What makes you think they are still in the building, brother? Can you tell us more about what you feel? Or anything about why they would remain here? Why they would stay...especially now?”
There was a silence while Jon stared at the stone floor.
Then he shook his head, his eyes clicking back into focus.
“I don’t know,” he said, exhaling heavily. “They want something from you.” He looked at Revik as he said it. “I don’t know what. Is it possible they could keep you alive, man? Is there some machine that could do it, I mean? Even without Allie?”
“No,” Loki said, making a negative gesture with one hand. “It is not possible, brother.”
Wreg shook his head no, too.
“Is there any way Terian could use your body?” Jon pressed. “Part of it, maybe?”
Wreg shook his head again. “No. It is unlikely...for the same reasons.”
“But I’ve heard stories,” Jon said. He glanced at Revik again, then, for some reason, at Maygar. “Isn’t there some way to keep a bonded mate alive? Maygar? Didn’t you tell me that once?” he asked. “That there’s a way to do it?”
Maygar flushed a dark red, glancing at Revik. He didn’t answer.
“They could try to re-bond him somehow,” Wreg said, making another dismissive gesture with his tattooed hand. “But truthfully, brother, this is mostly myth, too. Re-bonding is nearly always a failure. With the previous mate already dead, I would say failure is closer to one hundred percent. Re-bonding only works if the bond between mates is already weakened. Meaning, if one in the pair were having an intimate affair, or if for other reasons the two of them have pulled apart. Both of those things are extremely rare with seers who have developed a physical dependency on one another. At the very least, the surviving seer would have needed to be immersed in their new bond-mate’s light long before their first mate died.”
Maygar frowned at that, staring at Wreg. “But it’s been done before?” he said. He glanced at Revik. Nerves touched his eyes, along with a flicker of what might have been guilt. “It’s been done, hasn’t it? I read about this, in one of the feeds...”
Wreg made another non-committal gesture with his hand.
“The experiments they’ve done with that, with re-bonding,” he clarified. “...They are highly publicized, little brother, for the inherent drama for seers and the wishful thinking in some cases. In ninety-nine percent of these cases, however, the attempts to re-bond do not even prolong the life of the surviving seer. I have only ever heard of one successful re-bonding following the death of a life mate, and in that case, the male seer in question fell in love with the woman they re-bonded him to before his first wife died. The two of them, this male and his new mate, they had some unusual light connection, too, which facilitated the transition. Perhaps if the Sword had been bonded to another prior to meeting the Bridge, then he and the Bridge could have re-bonded following his first mate’s death...you see? It would have to be that type of connection. Or something equally unusual, something that transcended this particular life.”
Wreg looked at Revik then, his eyes holding a faint apology.
“...It is like the holy grail to some seers, to poach a bonded mate,” Wreg added. “Fixated seers, like Ditrini. That sick fuck is not unique in this...in the wanting of one who has established a life-dependent bond with another. But it is fantasy. Pure fantasy. Usually, this does not work even when both seers are cooperating. If the seer in question does not cooperate...”
Wreg trailed, making a vague but expressive gesture with his hand.
“...It is beyond unlikely, my friends,” Wreg finished. “Menlim would be a fool to pursue such a thing, particularly if it endangered the intermediaries already under his control. Much less the daughter of the two oldest souls known to exist in the physical plane.”
Loki nodded at Wreg’s words, his eyes showing full agreement.
Maygar had paled the longer Wreg spoke, Revik noticed. Looking at his son, he frowned slightly, but didn’t probe him to understand the reaction. He had a feeling he could guess; it wasn’t something he really wanted or needed confirmed.
For a long moment, none of the seers spoke.
Revik looked back at the stone archway. He’d been about to speak, to muster them all into movement once more...
When the room altered around them again.
Or maybe, that time, Revik was the thing that altered.
Maybe they’d finally taken what remained.
REVIK PLUNGED INTO dark.
The floor once more fell away. He dropped, fast that time... completely out of control.
Free-fall. Nothing touched his body that time, not even to hurt him. He could feel nothing under him as he fell, nothing confining him, nothing to grasp at, to even touch at first. He could feel nothing with his light, no glimpse of what the building had done around him.
It felt like a trap door had opened under his feet.
Revik continued to try, fighting to track the physical plane with his light.
He looked for Jon...for Maygar...fighting to hold onto the anchors in their lights, the shield Jon held around him, even in the seconds leading up to the change.
As he realized himself as falling he reached out, grappling, looking for walls, feeling his fingers touch and slide against something slick and cold, like a tunnel of ice. He imagined freezing cold metal, maybe stone. The images evoked the cave again. Panic locked his heart, his lungs...he spiraled into a lost feeling, of being lost to die alone in the dark. He threw
his body at the nearest wall, again trying to grab hold, conscious of being alone, of having lost the threads holding him first to Maygar...then to Jon.
They’d taken him. Only him.
Revik cried out, feeling the shield go, even as he fought to stop his fall.
Seconds later, he hit, hard.
Revik bent his legs instinctively, letting his body go soft even as he rolled to his side. Even so, his knees hit hard, as did his feet, jarring his ankles. He had his hand on the holster of his gun even as he came to a stop. He didn’t try to move other than to pull out the Glock, aiming it up before he could see in the wash of light that met his eyes.
Wherever he was, it was bright––too bright.
Panting, he stared up, using his light cautiously without the shield. He held up his free hand, fighting to see against the brightness after all of that dark, and even the dimness of the light in the medieval hall above. He found himself staring at a similar set of faces as what he’d seen above, even in similar clothes.
His childhood guardian, Menlim stood in the center, as before.
“We tried it the polite way, nephew,” Menlim said, his voice soft, almost melodious under a layer of sadness Revik could hear. “I’m afraid that now we’re going to have to be more direct, as you phrased it...”
Revik stared up at him, fighting his mind back on line, fighting to think, to assess his own light, the state of his body. He watched numbly as the tall Sark checked his wrist, looking down at a watch that Revik recognized from years and years past, seeing it as clearly in his mind as he did on the bony, white wrist, despite the passage of time.
He stared up at Menlim, still trying to control his light.
He shifted his gaze then, looking at Terian, the old woman with the lizard-like face, Cass, Eddard, the Middle Eastern seer in the expensive business suit, the older white man he’d shot in the stomach upstairs...
Revik looked around at all of them, and realized his time was up.
For a split second, he considered killing himself.
They’d been kidding themselves, thinking any outcome but this one would occur. He’d been kidding himself, too angry and blinded by grief to consider any possibility that didn’t include him taking at least one of them with him on his way out.
Allie's War Season Four Page 47
