Prophet: Bridge & Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  The sound echoed in the high ceiling of the sunken living room, despite the shag carpet. I could only stand there, listening to them, staring from face to face, seeing Terian in each one.

  Watching them now, all I could think was––Revik was right.

  We were crazy, coming here.

  I was crazy, thinking finding Terian could ever be a good idea.

  53

  NIGHTCLUB

  REVIK WALKED INTO the darkened club, flanked by Chinja, Dalejem, Jax, Loki and Surli.

  He left most of his people outside.

  They would be scouting exits and entrances even now, assessing the club’s construct, feeding intel to Balidor’s team, mapping any active surveillance for taps to send to Dante and Vic, covering doors, windows and the roof with high-powered rifles.

  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.

  Inside the club itself, he didn’t want a show of force.

  The sheik trader, who wore the same style of human robe he’d worn on the docks and at the slave auctions, walked to Revik’s left. He barely paused following their entrance before leading them down the center aisle bisecting the club, motioning with a hand and a smile for Revik to follow.

  Glancing around the dark space with its flashing lights and multiple stages, fighting to get his equilibrium in the pounding music from the speakers, especially with different songs and beats coming from different directions, Revik felt like he’d been transported back in time.

  His light reacted to more than one set of stimuli, but the one he felt the most made it hardest to think clearly––a dense thread of near-desperation in the part of his light that felt Allie’s absence 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 his worry into something a hell of a lot more violent. And focused.

  His light fed those impulses in both directions, even as he tried not to speculate as to what she might be doing here, and who might have her.

  More than anything, he felt the part of him that knew there was no way in 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 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 on raised mirrored platforms to pounding, bass-heavy music as he passed. Revik noted the location of each stage, as well as exits, bars, staff and specific clusters of customers in sharp glances as he walked.

  He also noted which of them were carrying.

  Seven bartenders total, four bar-backs, eight wait staff.

  He had to assume guns behind the bar, given the type of place it was, private security, at least one panic room, possibly gas and lock-down walls.

  He guessed roughly four hundred non-staff people currently milled inside the club. There would undoubtedly be more in the back rooms he’d glimpsed and marked with his eyes. They’d have private dances back there, and, down some of those dimly lit halls, full-fledged unwilling transactions for Sark fetish, bdsm, group light-sharings and whatever else.

  They were past the smaller stages now, and approaching the main stage of the club, the only one with curtains and a full-sized floor. The white-robed trader was likely leading them there, or to a seat near it, since the stage itself remained to their right and ahead.

  He’d already gotten confirmation the buyer was Dontan.

  That was something, although Revik had trouble being overjoyed with the news.

  As for the slave trader, his name was Efrail. Clan Maresk, with which Revik had a passing familiarity. That particular clan came out of Afghanistan, so their new pal, Efrail, may actually have grown up in this part of the world.

  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, much less make any assumptions that factored him out as a threat, but most of Revik’s focus shifted elsewhere. Mainly, he watched 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 might prove useful even beyond getting Allie back. Revik intended to learn more about his particular breed of cockroach in any case, as the knowledge might prove useful in other Shadow cities. If nothing else, their little tour of Dubai convinced Revik that every one of these fucking places needed to be burned to the ground.

  As he approached the black-painted stage, another, harder flare in Revik’s light told him they were closer than he’d realized.

  That pretty much wiped everything else out of his mind, in terms of priorities. It also made him stumble, although he’d recovered his gait by the time he took his next step.

  Allie was definitely here. In this building.

  The understanding made it a lot more difficult to control his light, but it also hardened his resolve into full-fledged war mode.

  He still couldn’t make himself look at Dalejem.

  He knew most of that was anger at himself. As much as he hated to admit it, he more or less agreed with Surli; he never should have let them take her. He should have broken Efrail’s fucking neck––found some way to hide his and his guards’ bodies in shipping crates long enough for him, Dalejem and Allie to take the train into Dubai.

  Even knowing it was primarily himself he was mad at, 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 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 Towers in New York.

  He should never have 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. Never again would Allie leave his side 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.

  He didn’t have to rely solely on Surli or Stanley now––or even the secondary team Dalejem brought in, which included Hondo, Chinja, Anale, Declan 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 left the slave markets, 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, most of them hand-picked and recruited by Revik himself. He knew they were loyal to him above anyone apart from his wife. Not a single one of them would get confused by ideological bullshit or Allie’s intermediary status. None 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.

  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 ID’d by the construct.

  To minimize the likelihood of that occurrence, they’d pushed most of the older Rebels into later stages of entry, including Wreg, Jorag, Raddi, Baresk, Neela and a few others who’d been active in both wars. For a
ny who’d fought in either rebellion, shields were replaced by light cloaks, and all were instructed to do whatever they could to remain under the radar.

  All of the true infiltration occurred off-site. 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 been more or less pulled into full-time ops now.

  Revik didn’t mind. He trusted Balidor and Tarsi to handle that end of things.

  Anyway, Varlan was on the List.

  Revik knew Balidor kept a pretty close eye on the ex-Rook, anyway, List or no.

  Wreg’s team would enter the construct only if things went really far south and they needed extraction help. Revik knew he might need Wreg to do exactly that, and sooner rather than later, if this meeting with Dontan went the way he thought it might.

  He needed Allie with him first.

  He at least needed to know exactly where she was.

  He could feel flickers off the others’ lights telling him they suspected he was already thinking along more drastic lines, even if they didn’t know specifics. They all remained wary of him, whatever their outward demeanors. Surli watched him with outright suspicion. Chinja, Declan and Loki’s infiltrator masks never wavered, but Revik sensed their worry.

  He 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 chrome 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 to the private platform on top.

  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 anyway.

  When he reached the top of the stairs, he felt himself break through some kind of Barrier seal. Pausing briefly on the new construct, he walked out onto the raised platform.

  He looked down at the platform’s occupants.

  Five seers. Two humans.

  He started with the humans, maybe just to determine 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 at seer faces next, 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, but he wanted to recognize them if he ever saw them again.

  As soon as he started looking at them, however, he realized ID’ing them in the Barrier or otherwise was a moot point. He paused on the first face he saw, the one belonging to the seer sitting nearest to him on a suede sectional facing the stage, and frowned.

  He didn’t need to snapshot those features.

  He knew them. He’d 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 exact face, he’d been deep in the jungles of Brazil, Northwest of a SCARB-run work camp called Guoreum that used to operate outside the city 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’d been fucking the gray-eyed seer 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 aleimi.

  Terian. This Dontan fucker was Terian.

  At the very least, he knew Terian.

  Revik continued to stare at the gray-eyed seer. The seer looked even more like him than he’d remembered.

  After a few more beats, his eyes shifted, taking in a tall, handsome, orange-eyed seer wearing an expensive suit of some dark-blue metallic material. It was clothing Revik definitely could imagine Terian wearing.

  His 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 reaction in his light. He’d seen that fucking blue-eyed seer in Beijing, when he went there to pull his wife out of a prostitution contract with the Lao Hu.

  This same seer had kissed 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 he’d 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 dismissed that as a detail, claiming it was utterly meaningless. Revik believed her, but like most things involving his wife and sex with other men, believing her hadn’t lessened his emotional reaction much.

  He hated the fucker. For a lot of reasons.

  Not the least of which being, he’d been the first seer to teach his wife to perform sexual circus tricks for assholes like Ditrini.

  Motherfuck.

  He looked at the next seer sitting on the 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 rich amber 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, 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 transcribed those names right out of the ether, like Kali herself had done.

  Which meant Menlim likely had a copy of those names by now, as well.

  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, 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 Revik knew best grinned wider at him. “Have a seat!”

  He patted the suede next to him. That crazy spark gleamed in his light-colored eyes, even as he made a polite motion towards the other empty segments of couch.

  “Please!” he called out to the others. “All of you! Take a load off! Order drinks! On the house, of course! Are you hungry? Want a foot rub? Your cocks sucked? Pussies fucked? Everything is free, free, free!”

  Revik’s jaw hardened more.

  Terian turned that grin back on 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 absolu
tely 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 briefly.

  He watched her, as she walked out on the tiled black stage. Time stopped, the room’s sounds receded, all but the click of her heels on the slick, mirrored surface.

  The clothes were only part of it. His body reacted before his mind knew what it was seeing, even past the heavier currents of light under multiple constructs.

  Even with that, even here, he felt her light.

  He felt her real light, even as the construct tried to manipulate that light in front of him.

  His throat tightened until he 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 the 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 lacy, 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 that bile rose to his throat in reaction.

  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 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 like a model’s runway now that he could see it from above, then slid smoothly into a crouch, following the music as seers and humans seated at the tables in front let out wolf-whistles and cat-calls.

  Revik watched her, his jaw loosening as she glided back into a full stand and undulated her hips.