Allie's War Season Four

by JC Andrijeski

  “Yes,” I said, simply.

  He nodded, his mouth set in a harder line. For a long moment, he just sat there, and I felt him thinking again. Or maybe just hardening his resolve, I don’t know, wrapping his mind around something he’d already decided to do.

  I was still watching his face when he startled me, pulling me towards him and onto his lap.

  He didn’t do it roughly, not exactly, but he did it firmly, without really asking permission, or being cautious like before. He still wasn’t looking at my face, either, even as he pulled me against him. He didn’t want me to sit in his lap, though.

  He yanked me over his thighs instead, so that I lay prone across his lap on my stomach. His fingers coiled into my wet hair then, holding me down, even as his light wrapped into mine, winding rapidly and insistently into the structures above my head. I felt him slide into those parts of me that I’d used against him in the past, the ones the Lao Hu had trained me in. He gripped those same structures in me, tightly in his light, until he controlled the telekinesis...then pretty much every other part of my light after that.

  I fought him briefly, but he sent a hard pulse of light. I felt the meaning there, too, the reminder that I’d given him permission, that I’d told him he could do this. Realizing he was right, I fought to let go, to let it happen. Seconds later, I felt him gripping me harder, both with his light and his hands.

  Then I felt him testing that control over my light as I lay there, panting.

  I felt what might have been an apology that time, too.

  Then his light was all business again.

  I felt his mind flicker over how I fought against him with my light...even my body. Once he seemed satisfied that he had me there, pretty much unable to move, he started unwrapping the towel from around my body.

  Fear darted through my light, but his fingers only tightened in my hair.

  “Revik...” I began. “No...no. Please...”

  “Don’t move,” he said, gruff.

  “Revik...please...”

  “Allie. Trust me. Please...trust me.”

  Pain slid through his light again, worsening until I closed my eyes.

  I found myself thinking he was going to fuck me, that this was going to be some rape fantasy of his, but as soon as I thought it, I felt that anger in his light worsen, along with a hurt that nearly blinded me when I felt what lay behind it.

  I was naked now, though, lying across his lap on the towel he still wore.

  I could feel that he was hard, but most of his light was still wrapped into mine, focused on holding me still...and the emotions I felt there weren’t about sex.

  Well, not really.

  I felt pain on him still, but that felt less and less like sex pain, too.

  “I’m tired,” I told him. “Revik. I’m really fucking tired. I haven’t slept...”

  “I know,” he said.

  His fingers and hands tightened on me again, even as I felt fear on him, what might have been guilt, or maybe nerves and guilt and fear wrapped into one. He caressed my hair, blowing warmth on me with his light. I felt the tiredness in him, too, what felt almost like exhaustion now, enough to leak into his voice.

  “I know you’re tired, wife...I know,” he said, softer. “But that’s why this can’t wait. I want to do this while you’re tired. I want to do it when you’re too tired to fight me, Allie.”

  I didn’t really understand his words.

  I felt his fear again, though. Something about that feeling caused my own fear to return, until I was fighting him again with my light, and where I could, with my body. He was right, though. I was too tired to fight him, and the longer he held me down, the more that tiredness turned to something that felt a lot closer to despair.

  I couldn’t fight him. I could never fucking fight him.

  I couldn’t fight any of them.

  Tears were running down my face by the time that much sank in, but I couldn’t make sense of that, either.

  The first time he hit me, I sucked in a breath, more in disbelief than pain.

  He held me down, testing my light.

  Then he hit me again, right on the ass, using his bare hand, and I cried out, groaning that time, trying again to fight my way free of his hands and his light. I couldn’t, though. I couldn’t move. I felt his pain worsen as he hit me again...then again.

  The pain got worse, not better.

  It got harder to endure, not easier.

  At some point, I started yelling at him.

  I couldn’t make sense of my words. When he didn’t stop, no matter what I said, I didn’t try to censor those words, either...or even track them.

  A few things stood out more than others, though.

  I called him an asshole, like Angeline had done.

  I told him he didn’t give a fuck about me...that he didn’t want me, that he’d never wanted me. I told him I didn’t care what he did anymore, that I knew I’d never be enough for him, no matter what I did or how much of a whore I made myself for him. I told him he could fuck whoever he wanted, that he could fuck Ullysa or Dalejem or my mother...that I wouldn’t try to stop him. I told him I didn’t want to be married to him anymore. I yelled at him for lying to me, for breaking vow...for being nothing but a coward who never told me the truth, who was incapable of telling the truth to anyone. I accused him of fucking other people on the ship. I accused him of wanting Dalejem, of wanting Ullysa, of fucking her after she beat on him, of lying to me and to himself about why he went to her.

  I told him he didn’t love Lily.

  I said other things, too...about Kat. About him being just like Ditrini...about him wanting to hurt me, to break me, like Ditrini wanted.

  I felt some of my words hurt him, but he didn’t let me go.

  He didn’t stop, either.

  The pain worsened, too, even after I thought it couldn’t get any worse.

  I felt him in my light. He was deeper in my light by then, pulling on it, pulling and tugging on me and coaxing me open...even if it meant me hating him more. I felt him sliding into the cracks that were forming around my shield...and that pain that had been throbbing in my chest for the past few days, the one that started on the beach before I’d gone on that walk with Kali, that same pain I’d forced down, deeper and deeper, until it smoldered, not quite going out but filling my whole chest and light with smoke.

  That same pain and light flared hotter again.

  That pain started to hurt more than his hand.

  It started taking over my light, hurting me, hurting my chest and belly and throat, blindingly hot, until I couldn’t speak past it, couldn’t breathe.

  I found myself remembering Kali on the beach. Pain twisted through my insides, what must have been memory. I remembered them, both of them...and I remembered...

  Gods. I remembered Dalejem.

  I remembered him leaving me under that overpass. They’d left me there, and I remembered screaming, crying into the dark. And then I was in the dark again, after Cass cut me open and left me. I remembered her face, her smiling face. She’d been so happy about hurting me. It made her happy to cut me open, to leave me like that.

  I remembered Revik reading to me, trying to reach me through that dark...

  Revik let out a gasp over me. I realized it was a sob.

  But I was lost. I almost couldn’t hear him...I was lost there again, lost in that place, that darkness and pain with no end. I remembered being lost, of being so far away, from everything and everyone. No one came. There was no light. I screamed for Lily, screamed for Revik...for my parents, for the light.

  No one came.

  And then there’s that crossover again, confusion in light and shadow.

  Gray metal struts overhead, the sound of the cars on the overpass, their flickering shadows as they fly overhead, echoing by the heap of trash where he left me. I smell human piss and vomit and fetid breath on my face. Someone is touching me, even as insects bite my skin...

  Jon was there. He yelled at
me, blamed me.

  I felt them all looking at me, staring at me, asking me to save them. And I was supposed to just pick myself up now, to do it all alone, to be cut out and pushed out and have to fight for every damned step. I couldn’t trust anyone. I couldn’t trust any of them.

  They all left me. Sooner or later, they all left.

  Kali wanted to take Lily from me again.

  They wanted to take my baby.

  I let out another choked sob. That one was closer to a scream.

  Revik hit me again, harder. I felt pain on him and I gasped, fighting him, fighting his hands and his light, but he held me down, and I felt his light twist out of control, wrapped so tightly into mine that I could barely breathe. I felt him there, alone, and for the briefest instant, I really did feel him. I felt him trying to reach me, fighting to get to me, too.

  Somewhere in that, that heated, hard rock in my chest broke.

  Blackness filled me...filled my eyes. Liquid heat swam out in flames through my chest. For a long moment time stopped, I wasn’t in the room at all...

  Then I cried out, half in pain and half in relief.

  I cried until I was exhausted, until I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

  I cried until I was gasping, fighting to speak.

  I felt that thing break more, smashing somewhere in the middle of my chest. Heat pooled out of me again as it broke, like liquid light...and I remembered everything again, even the things I’d forgotten so intensely that I didn’t realize there was anything to remember. I felt that sick feeling in my belly worsen as I realized I’d seen Revik aligned with all of them against me: with Kali, with Dalejem and Terian, even with Cass. They wanted to take my child from me. They wanted to do to her what had been done to me.

  I couldn’t let it happen again. Not to her. I couldn’t...

  Revik’s light coiled deeper into mine, blotting out all the rest.

  I felt fierceness there, a protectiveness and love filled with so much intensity and heat I couldn’t feel anything else. I’d never felt anything like it before...not on anyone. Somewhere in that, he yanked me off his lap. I moved with his hands, and he rolled over with me, laying me on my back.

  That hurt, too, but I didn’t care anymore.

  I yanked at the towel around his waist, pulling it off him even as he pinned one of my arms to the mattress. I got most of it off...and then he was inside me, and his light flooded into mine, wrapping so deep into me I lost touch with the room.

  Everything went away for awhile in that...everything but his skin and breath and eyes.

  I saw him crying, even as he called out my name, and that harder feeling in my chest broke more, even as his fingers clenched in my hair and around my back, holding me against him as he arched into me deeper, trying to break me open in a different way that time. That feeling in his light strengthened, until it was almost frightening in its intensity...or it might have been, if it didn’t feel so much like him, in spite of everything.

  Somewhere in that, I remembered him.

  I remembered myself, but I also remembered him.

  Everything from the past year seemed to break over us in those few seconds.

  I realized how much we’d both been holding back, circling one another, like he said. I felt the wanting in him, the near-longing to break through that, to smash whatever it was that stood between us, to crack it open, even if it hurt us both in the process.

  I remembered feeling that, too. In the tank with him, all of those months.

  Even after, when I was in Beijing, and could scarcely feel him at all.

  Pain wafted off him, a memory of things I’d said to him while he’d been hitting me, and I felt him in that, too, even as the heat in his light burned hotter.

  I found myself drawing deeper inside of him, the more of that light I could feel...using that intensity to pull him closer instead of pulling away. That heat in me continued to spread, too, until some part of me was almost laughing, if only because I knew no other way to express it. I kissed his face as he pressed his against mine, laughing through tears as I felt that thing in me break, leaving nothing but dust. Or heat, maybe...but a different kind of heat than before.

  Whatever remained of me, I suppose.

  Revik’s pain worsened as I opened my light, but I felt relief there, too.

  Relief, but it was so much more than that.

  Whatever that thing was, whatever had finally broken in me, Revik seemed to know it better than I did. I felt his heart open as the last shards of it burned away inside my light, like a meteor arcing across the stars. I felt a kind of satisfaction in him as it went, and realized that’s what he’d wanted. He’d been trying to break me open, in any way he could.

  In those same few seconds, I felt anger in him, too.

  Not at me, but at pretty much everyone else.

  At Cass. At Terian. At Jaden. At Jon and Wreg. At Angeline.

  At Ditrini.

  At himself. Maybe especially himself.

  I felt a part of him that hated Kali, too, and Dalejem...and Uye...even as his light promised mine, in a heated vow that took my breath, that he’d never let any of them, any of them...even himself...ever hurt me again.

  I knew he meant it, in those few seconds.

  I knew how badly he meant it.

  And I also knew just how futile it was, too.

  Without that harder thing choking off my heart and light, though, that truth didn’t sadden me, or make everything feel hopeless or wrong, like before.

  It just felt like truth.

  20

  PROPHET

  TERIAN DIDN’T LOOK away from the window.

  Something in the sand pulled at his mind, swirled his light in concentric eddies. It was too far away from him now to see it, but he watched it anyway, in the darkest reaches of his mind. He watched the sand twist and jerk in imaginary gusts of wind, creating looping, symmetrical patterns. Patterns of tinted glass...patterns he could fall into, that he could almost smell under the heat of the sun on the water and steel and the roofs of buildings.

  Behind him, someone cleared their throat.

  “Brother,” the seer said, his voice patient.

  Terian turned his head, still clasping his hands at the base of his back. His mind clicked forward in that pause...some of it, at least. He left some of it to play in that sand storm he’d built in his mind, to wind up and into the light, into darkness, chasing shadows across the dunes as heat created mirages of mirrored lakes inside dimpled pieces of empty land.

  The seer looking at him exhaled, his eyes and voice still patient.

  “Are you still trying, brother?” he said gently. “As we discussed?”

  Terian felt something twist in a different shape around his aleimi, a broken, snaking current like a hose shooting water, with no hands to hold at the squirting end.

  Perhaps that part of him was thirsty. Perhaps it needed a drink.

  His mouth and face bent into the expected positions, however.

  “Of course, father,” he said, smiling, nodding his head. “Of course.”

  The tall, skeletally-thin seer watched Terian’s face without changing his expression, his scrutiny overt, almost openly skeptical now. Terian felt his light flinching and flickering around that, too, even as he made his aleimi submissive once more. Pliable. Easy to imagine. He would do whatever father wanted. He would do anything, really and truly.

  Waggy tail, happy dog, he thought, smiling wider at the narrow-faced seer with his skull-like face, and long, iron-gray hair. Waggy, smiley dog, who will do anything, anything, anything, master...who will lick your cock and fetch your slippers and wag his tail and bark when you say bark, as long as you don’t smash him...as long as you don’t set him on fire...

  Menlim let out a patient-sounding sigh, followed by a series of clicks.

  “Do you have everything you need here, brother?” he asked then.

  Terian looked around where he stood, confused at first by the question.

/>   He looked at his leather couches, his sunken living room, the fireplace that needed air conditioning to balance its heat, the original paintings and glass sculptures. The servants he knew he could call in here to suck his own cock, or beat one another to death if the mood struck him. The jacuzzi bathtub. The walk-in closet filled with clothes that was actually a modified bedroom now filled with racks of designer garments and shoes.

  Looking at the solid gold wall-hanging of the sword and sun over his bookshelf of original books, with leather spines and real paper pages, Terian smiled again, gesturing fluidly with one hand across the expanse of the high-rise apartment.

  “What is to need, father?” he said.

  “Do not humor me, brother,” Menlim warned, still watching Terian’s amber-colored eyes. “This is too important.” He paused, then his voice grew more meaningful again. “I will deny you nothing, my brother, as long as you retain your loyalty to me.”

  Terian smiled wider.

  Smiley, waggy dog...

  “You wish them back, don’t you?” Menlim said, his voice warning as he broke into Terian’s light. “Your sister, War. Your daughter, little Kani.” Menlim paused, still studying him with those oddly cold, oddly lifeless, yellow eyes. “...Your brother, the Sword? You want him back, don’t you? You want him to be your brother again?”

  Terian flinched, almost without meaning to.

  “Of course, father,” he said, chastened that time.

  “Then you must try harder, brother,” Menlim said, folding his own hands at the base of his back. “You know I would do this myself, if I could. You were given a gift, my precious brother. One you cannot squander due to conflicted loyalties about your family...not when they have made their own loyalties so demonstrably clear...”

  Terian nodded again, feeling the sharp whispers of silver light as they coiled around him, looking for secrets, pulling at him from the dark...

  He wanted his secrets. He wanted to chew on him, gobble him up...

  “We need you, brother Prophet,” Menlim said, softer. “You must know that, too. They have one like you now, you know.”

  An image flickered past Terian’s face. Green eyes, but not the Bridge. Black hair. He remembered her in Saigon, the Vietnamese-style dress she wore there...the way Revi’ panted after her. The way he wanted to stick his dick in her, even then...