Revik didn’t want anyone getting out of this fucking club without him knowing about it.
It might not help him in the end, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.
Anyway, he didn’t want to big of a show of force coming inside with him for this.
The sheik trader, who still wore the same human outfit he had both on the docks and in the slave auction house, stood to Revik’s left. He barely paused following their entrance before he walked down the center aisle from where they stood by the back doors, motioning with a hand and a smile for Revik and the others to follow.
Glancing around the dark space with its flashing lights and multiple stages, fighting to get his equilibrium in the pounding music coming from several different directions, Revik felt again like he’d been transported back in time.
He also felt his light reacting to more than one set of stimuli, and a denser thread of near-desperation in the part of him that felt Allie’s absence the most strongly.
They were close now. He could feel that, too.
It created a paradox in his light, both relaxing the most frantic part of him and twisting it into something a hell of a lot more violent... and focused. His mind tried to feed those impulses in both directions, even as he fought not to speculate as to what she might be doing here, and who might have her. More than anything else, he felt the part of himself that knew there was no way in fucking hell he was letting her leave this place without him––even if it meant aborting the rest of the op and taking a good chunk of this part of the city out in the process.
As a result, he barely took in the landscape other than to feed or suppress one or the other of those warring impulses.
Mostly naked bodies writhed up on platforms to pounding, bass-heavy music in several different areas of the room. Revik noted the location of each of those stages and platforms, as well as exits, bars, staff and specific clusters of customers in sharp glances around the room. He also noted which of them were carrying.
Seven bartenders total, four bar-backs, eight wait staff.
Probably guns behind the bar, given the type of place it was.
Roughly four hundred people inside the dark space, but there might be more in the back rooms, which he suspected lived down a few of the dimly-lit corridors he’d already spotted and marked with his light. He knew they’d have private dances in there, and undoubtedly full-fledged unwillings, including for Sark fetish, bdsm, group light sharings and whatever else.
The stage directly in front of them was where the white-robed sheik was taking them.
Therefore, that was where Revik’s eyes remained primarily focused.
He’d already gotten confirmation that the buyer was Dontan.
That was something, anyway, although Revik had trouble being overjoyed.
The trader’s name was Efrail. Clan Maresk, with which Revik had a passing familiarity. He knew that particular clan came out of Afghanistan, so their new pal, Efrail, may actually have grown up in this part of the world, or have legitimate ties to those who did.
Revik filed the information away, still not convinced Efrail himself was anything more than a parasite, living on the underside of Shadow’s city. He was unwilling to bank on that fact, of course, much less make any assumptions that factored him out as a true threat, but most of his focus had shifted elsewhere. Mainly, he found himself looking over the security goons stationed at strategic points around the room, presumably Dontan’s people, since he owned the club.
Parasite or no, Efrail clearly had ties to some of the heavy hitters in Dubai, so he might prove useful even beyond getting Allie back. Revik intended to learn more about his particular breed of cockroach in any case, no matter how things went in here.
But all of that could wait.
As he approached that longer stage, another, harder flare in Revik’s light told him that they were closer than he’d realized.
That pretty much wiped everything else out, in terms of priorities.
It also nearly made him stumble as he walked, although he recovered from that within another pace or two, as well.
Allie was definitely here. In this building.
The thought made it even more difficult to control his light, but it also hardened his resolve into something approaching full-fledged war mode.
He still couldn’t make himself look at Dalejem.
He knew at least part of that was anger at himself, since he more or less agreed with Surli that he should never have let them take her in the first place.
He should have broken that fucking trader’s neck.
Regardless, Revik knew he couldn’t be rational with the other male right then, for a lot of reasons. He couldn’t really be rational with any of them, not when it came to this, but he’d taken over control of the military side of things anyway.
He might really have gone homicidal if he hadn’t.
Luckily, that side of him could operate just fine with his light in crisis. If there was ever any doubt of that in the past, Revik knew it for certain following the attack he’d led on Gossett Tower, in New York.
He should have never let them take her.
He’d deferred to the other seer, knowing he couldn’t trust his light, or assess the situation objectively. He wouldn’t be doing that again, either. Allie would not leave his side again at any point while they operated inside a Dreng city, even if it meant he had to kill every security guard they interacted with from this moment forward.
Even if he had to wipe out every seer and human in this club.
Revik didn’t have to rely solely on Surli or Stanley anymore, either... or even the secondary team Dalejem brought in, which included Hondo, Chinja, Anale, Delek and three more of those Children of the Bridge seers, Baleur, Mansk and Forley.
Revik and the others met up with the second half of that team after they’d left the auction, then joined up with the tertiary team not long after that.
That third team, led by Loki, operated as Revik’s primary back-up now, and included a larger group of seers, many of them hand-picked and recruited by Revik himself, and loyal to him above anyone apart from his wife. None of them would get confused by ideological bullshit or Allie’s intermediary status. None of them would fucking hesitate or blink at any order Revik gave them. Most would lay down their lives to get his wife out of here––even if it meant a shooting fight with every other seer in the room.
Revik had zero doubts about any of them. Most had been rebels he’d trained personally under Salinse before they defected out of loyalty to him and his wife.
Hell, Revik recruited Loki himself, once upon a time.
Wreg and Jon should be approaching by land within the next hour or so, too.
They’d deliberately staged the teams so they’d have multiple options for reaction, depending on whether anyone’s lights were tagged by the Dreng construct. At the time, Revik’s aleimic signature being ID’d had been the primary concern.
No matter what happened, they needed people on both sides of that construct at all times, as well as at various points of access to either get in or get out quickly.
For similar reasons, they’d pushed most of the long-term Rebels into the later stages of entry, which included Wreg, Jorag and Raddi, along with Baresk, Neela and a few others who’d been active in both wars. For any of those who had been in either rebellion, shields were replaced by light cloaks, and all were instructed to do whatever they could to fly under the radar of the main construct.
Shielding and infiltration skills were a last resort, which meant all of the true infiltration occurred off-site, including within Wreg and Jon’s team. The central infiltration unit, which included Balidor, Yumi and now Varlan as leads, would do most of the heavy-lifting in terms of monitoring the construct itself.
Despite the fact that he’d worked as a Rook for most of the last century, Varlan had already been more or less pulled into full-time ops by now, so it wasn’t really that strange to be using him, especially given his sight rank in actual.<
br />
Anyway, Varlan was on the List.
List or no, Revik also knew Balidor kept a pretty close eye on the ex-Rook.
The infiltration team seers could potentially serve as military back-up in the event of an emergency, although even Wreg’s team would enter the construct only if things went south and they needed extraction help.
Revik knew he might need Wreg to do exactly that, and sooner rather than later, if this went the way he was thinking it could go.
But he wanted Allie with him, first.
Even if that meant doing something a lot more fucking drastic than any of them initially planned, coming in here.
Revik could feel flickers off the others’ light that told him they suspected he was already thinking along those lines, even if they didn’t know specifics. They all remained wary of him, whatever their precise worries. Surli watched him with outright suspicion, but Chinja and now even Loki seemed nervous around him, too.
Revik didn’t much care.
He was still running scenarios in the back of his mind... up to and including a full-scale, telekinetic assault on the nightclub and surrounding areas... when he reached a set of bright, chrome-like steps leading up to a raised platform to the left of the main stage. The steps shone like mirrors, borderline disorienting in the otherwise dark space.
Efrail didn’t hesitate but scaled the low-rise steps up to that private enclave.
Revik followed, feeling glimmers of apprehension from Jax and Chinja behind him. Dalejem’s light remained impregnable––but then, Revik didn’t want to get too close to his light right now anyway.
Reaching the top of the stairs, Revik felt his own light shift around him. He broke some kind of Barrier seal as he reached the last step, then found himself inside a smaller construct that densified the instant he walked out onto the raised platform.
He looked down at the platform’s occupants, cataloguing the basics first.
Five seers. Two humans.
He started with the humans, maybe so he could decide if their presence here had any relevance at all. A male and a female, neither wore much in the way of clothes. Each sat coiled into the lap of one of the seers, all five of whom were male, Revik realized.
The humans were incidental. Definitely property.
He looked around at seer faces then, intending to make sure he had an imprint of their exact features and at least the bare, outward traces of their light. He couldn’t go into the Barrier to conduct a real scan, of course, not until he’d made up his mind on approach... but he wanted to recognize them if he ever saw them again in the physical.
As soon as Revik started looking at their features for real, however, he realized that was a moot point. He paused on the first face he looked at, the one who sat nearest to him on the beige suede sectional facing the stage at a V-angle... and frowned.
He didn’t need to snapshot those features.
Revik had seen the seer before.
The likelihood of that being a coincidence, given where he’d seen him, as well as the specific context of that meeting, struck Revik as... unlikely. More than unlikely. More like, statistically improbable to an exponential degree.
In the same set of seconds, the seer smiled at him.
Narrow mouth. Black hair. Light gray eyes. High cheekbones.
The last time Revik had seen that face, he’d been deep in the jungles of Brazil, Northwest of the SCARB-run work camp called Guoreum that used to stand outside of Manaus.
Revik had noted the resemblance to his own features at the time, even as he’d made a point of noting the differences aloud to Terian, who had been fucking him back then. The fact that this same seer sat in front of him now, a nearly naked male human massaging his crotch through the expensive-looking dark slacks he wore... brought a dense flare of heated light through Revik’s own aleimi.
Terian. This Dontan fucker was Terian. Or he knew him, at least.
He continued to stare at the gray-eyed seer as he thought it. The seer looked even more like him... meaning Revik himself, at least when he wasn’t wearing prosthetics or sporting dyed hair... than Revik remembered.
Given everything, that detail felt almost incidental, however.
Revik’s eyes shifted again, taking in a tall, handsome, orange-eyed seer wearing an expensive suit of some dark-blue metallic material... also clothing Revik would have seen on Terian, once upon a time.
Revik’s eyes moved to the next, a seer with pale blue irises who also looked familiar to him.
It took Revik a few seconds longer to place that particular face, but once he had, he had to fight back another burst of intense reactions in his light.
He’d seen the blue-eyed seer in Beijing, when he went to pull his wife out of that prostitution contract with the Lao Hu.
This same seer had been kissing her. Allie.
He’d also refused to remove Allie’s collar when she asked him to take it off, claiming he wouldn’t do anything to facilitate her return to Revik.
Allie told Revik later that the blue-eyed seer had been her handler for most of the time she’d worked as a consort of the Lao Hu. He’d also been her lover, although she claimed it was meaningless. Revik had more or less believed her, but like with most things involving his wife and sex with other men, believing her hadn’t really lessoned his emotional reaction much.
He’d hated the fucker. For a lot of reasons.
Not the least of which being that he’d been one of the first seers to teach his wife to perform sexual circus tricks for assholes like Ditrini.
Motherfuck.
Even as the thought solidified in his head, Revik looked at the next seer sitting on that same couch, examining his face with the same scrutiny. That one that looked ethnically Middle Eastern and wore a similar outfit as Efrail. His eye color was more familiar to Revik, being a light amber in color, but Revik didn’t recognize the specific face.
The fifth seer was Terian himself.
Meaning, it was the body Revik had known for most of the time he’d spent with the other seer, while they worked together under the Rooks.
His eyes reflected the same amber color as the Middle Eastern seer, only brighter.
Staring at that high-cheekboned face with its distinctive, sculpted mouth and laughing eyes, Revik felt something in his lower belly grow cold. He had to fight briefly not to attack him, to beat him with his fists until Terry told him what he’d done with his wife.
Revik only stood there for a few seconds though, silent, drinking in the reality of what this was. Terian was Dontan. Of course. Of course he fucking was. How had they ever doubted it? Which also meant, a second copy of the Lists might not exist at all. Terry might have simply transcribed those names right out of the ether, like Kali herself had done.
Which meant Menlim must also have a copy of those names by now.
Revik was still turning all of that over in his mind when it occurred to him no one had spoken, either from the couch or in Revik’s party.
He returned his gaze to Terian at the thought, even as he wondered if he could assume––if only from the way Terry was grinning that batshit crazy grin of his at him––that Terry knew him, regardless of his disguise.
He barely had time to think it before the question was answered.
“Hello, Revi’.” The Terian body that Revik knew best grinned up at him. “Have a seat!” He patted the couch next to him. That crazy spark gleamed brighter in his light-colored eyes, even as the auburn-haired seer made a polite motion with one hand towards the other empty segments of the suede couch. “Please! All of you. Take a load off! Order drinks! On the house, of course. Everything is free, free, free!”
Revik felt his jaw harden more.
Terian grinned at him, adjusting his lower body in the couch. “Relax, my Illustrious brother! I will not hurt you! And I won’t tell daddy you’re here. As always, your timing is absolutely impeccable. Could not have been better...”
As he said it, his hand shifted directions in mid air
, turning into a more eloquent expression of interest aimed at the main stage.
Revik followed his fingers, almost outside of his own will.
Once he had, his mind stopped working for a few seconds.
He watched her, frozen inside that timeless space, as she walked out on the largest stage. The clothes were only part of it. His body reacted almost before his mind knew what it was seeing, and even past the heavier currents of light in the room overall.
Even with that, even here, inside the Dreng’s construct, he felt her light.
He felt her real light, even as the construct tried to manipulate it in front of him.
His throat tightened until he almost couldn’t breathe when his eyes shifted down, and he realized what she was wearing.
“Holy shit,” Jax muttered from next to him.
Revik didn’t need to glance behind him to know he wasn’t the only one staring at that stage.
Fighting a sudden, irrational urge to snarl at all of them for gawking at his wife, given what she was wearing, or really, not wearing, he bit his lip until he tasted blood.
Still, his eyes remained on her, and on the lacey, black... well, essentially underwear... she wore, covered only in theory by a filmy, see-through top that shifted colors under the rotating lights. He bit his tongue harder when she began to move, until he could taste enough of his own blood to wince.
For a brief instant, he saw Allie’s eyes shift up towards where he stood.
He knew he was in the dark, that the lights in her face made it unlikely she could see him, but he froze anyway, fighting again to control the pain that wanted to take over his light. She continued her hip-swaying walk to the end of the long platform, what looked almost like a model’s runway now that he could see it from above, and then she slid smoothly into a crouch, following the music even as the seers and humans in the tables up front let out wolf-whistles and cat-calls. Revik watched her, his jaw loosening slightly as she glided back into a full stand and undulated her hips.
Allie's War Season Four Page 126
