by Cassia Leo
She couldn’t quite make herself believe her interaction with Dehgoies had anything to do with whatever this was, but a part of her needed to verify that for certain, too.
She found a gravel footpath leading out to the main street.
A few of the kitchen staff crouched outside a doorway, forgotten cigarettes clenched between lips and fingers as they stared out at that same plume of smoke without getting any closer. She wished she knew Vietnamese well enough to ask them what had occurred, even though she doubted they knew much more than she did...other than the fact that they would have more specific guesses, she assumed, given that they’d been enduring war in their city for years now, between the French and now the Americans, as well as their own home-grown terrorists, rebels and revolutionaries of various persuasions.
When they noticed her, they stared at her instead of the smoke. One even tried to grab her arm as she passed, to keep her from going out on the street. From his light and the fear in his eyes, Kali knew the gesture indicated concern, and blew warmth over his light.
Thank you, my kind-hearted cousin... she told him in his mind, knowing he wouldn’t hear it as words. Thank you so much for your concern for me...but I will be all right. I will be all right...you can let me go...it will be all right...
He released her, his dark eyes holding a flicker of confusion.
Kali smiled at him, and he smiled back, displaying a wide gap between his front teeth, and one that had been capped by a silver metal.
He wore a dirty kitchen uniform of white, covered in what looked like blood, probably from slaughtering whatever would be served in the hotel’s restaurant for dinner. She knew the hotel was owned by French citizens, and that he likely made a good wage for Vietnam, but one that wouldn’t even pay for cab fare to work for a chef in a similarly-rated New York restaurant back home.
Walking around and through the rest of them with polite murmurs, Kali made it to the other side without any others trying to stop her, or doing more than staring at her in confusion.
Inching past them down the gravel path, she stayed close to the building, trying to keep out of the open as much as possible. She heard the voices of the kitchen staff grow louder behind her, but paid them no mind, since she couldn’t understand their actual words. Even so, she picked up a few things from their light. They wondered if she might be drunk, or perhaps another European journalist, looking for a story.
One wondered why they let women work such a job in a war zone.
One wondered why she didn’t have a camera with her.
Kali shut that out, too.
She reached the corner of the building a few dozen feet later, and peered around the white-washed outer wall.
By then, she could hear the screams, and the smoke had gotten thicker as soon as she got past the protective facade of the hotel itself.
It took her a few moments to realize what she was looking at. When her eyes were finally able to make sense of the scene in front of her, she blinked, more in disbelief than with any more concrete, definable emotion. She saw a car on fire, in the middle of that mess. The front doors of the hotel had been blown out, just like those in the back, but no bodies assaulted her senses, at least not that she could immediately, see.
Instead, on the floor, next to a small lake of what might have been gasoline, an Asian woman with straight black hair struggled with a man who lay on his back in the middle of the road. The Asian woman clutched a gun in one hand, a semi-automatic that looked to have more than a few organic components. The man below her gripped the wrist of the hand in which she held the gun, fighting to get her to let go of it.
He was shouting at her, too, his face dark with soot, his mirrored sunglasses gone, his jacket open where she lay on him. Burns littered his chest and arms, small, but dark against the pale stretches of his skin. Something had cut the side of his head, maybe shrapnel from the blast, maybe something the woman sitting on top of him had done to him.
Kali blinked again, but the scene in front of her didn’t fundamentally change.
In particular, her eyes focused incredulously at the man lying on the ground, struggling with the Asian woman with the long, black hair, who wore what looked like combat fatigues.
It was Dehgoies Revik.
“Raven!” he said in English. “Goddamn it! Get off me!”
“Fucking bastard!” she spat at him.
“Raven! Cut it out! Jesus...let me explain!”
She slammed him in the stomach with her knee and he let out a gasp, but didn’t let go of her wrist, as she’d most probably intended. She tried to head-butt him next, but Dehgoies managed to just get out of the way, right before he angled his body sideways to block another kick, that one aimed at his genital area. He shifted again, blocking her a second time when she tried to elbow him in the throat with the arm whose wrist he’d captured.
“Explain?” she said. “Really? You want to explain yourself to me, you piece of shit?”
Her accent came out Chinese, although Kali heard some German in that, too.
The woman Dehgoies called Raven gripped his hair next, slamming his head against the pavement. From his eyes, she nearly managed to stun him that time. He still didn’t loosen his iron grip on her wrist, however, and it occurred to Kali that he wasn’t really fighting back. Instead, he seemed to only be trying to keep her from hurting him.
At least too badly.
“Explain this, then...cocksucker!” she said, trying to hit him again.
“Raven!” he said. “Stop it! Just fucking stop it, all right? Let me up!”
The woman only fought harder to get her gun hand out of his grip.
Kali was trying to decide what to do, if she could just let the Chinese woman shoot him, as the woman undoubtedly looked like she intended to do, or if she should directly intervene. She could sense a domestic argument when she saw one, and was reluctant to make herself a part of it.
Dehgoies might be able to get the Chinese woman off of him on his own, of course, but Kali still wondered if she should intervene to keep it from getting bloody, or if her presence there, as another female, would only worsen the situation. She was still standing there, trying to decide, when another man emerged from a bar across the street. His full mouth curled into an expression somewhere between amusement and a frown, and while he moved quickly, something casual remained in the nature of his gait.
Walking directly up to the two of them, wearing an open army shirt and combat fatigues held up by a leather belt, he pulled a handgun out of the holster hanging from that same belt, and fired three consecutive shots up into the air.
Dehgoies and the woman froze in their struggles, looking up.
His gun then leveled on the woman with the dark hair.
Kali couldn’t help noticing that the weapon he held didn’t have any of the organic bells and whistles that the woman’s had. Even so, it would kill her, particularly at that short of range, and with the way he aimed it her head with a rock-steady hand.
“Should I shoot her, Revi’?” the new man said, cocking the pistol deliberately. Meeting the gaze of the woman with the tangled black hair, he smirked at her before looking back at Dehgoies with a shrug. “...Your call.”
Kali felt her throat close, even as a shard of ice tried to enter her heart.
The man standing there, with his auburn hair ruffling in the hot wind where it grew in a longish tangle, his army shirt open over what looked like an American flag t-shirt and a St. Christopher’s medal, was none other than Terian himself.
***
THREE
“Seriously. What the fuck is the matter with you?” Dehgoies held the wet cloth to his mouth, where Raven had clocked him with the butt of the gun, not long after Terian dragged her up off of Dehgoies himself. He glanced down at the blood that came away from his lip, feeling another hot flush of anger as he realized it would probably swell.
“...Jesus, Ray. You need to lay off the coke. Or are you just pissed off because Galaith sent you back
to this shithole?”
Raven glared at him, folding her arms tightly across the armored vest she wore, her boots propped up on the table in the hotel suite he’d been sharing with Terian. Raven had a cut under one shockingly bright turquoise eye, but he hadn’t given it to her. It came from the car bomb she’d set off to get his attention as he left the Grand Hotel.
He watched as she leaned over the mirror on the table, taking up the rolled up dollar bill that Terian had left and snorting a thick white line of powder, partly in defiance of his words.
He gritted his teeth more, but took the same dollar bill from her when she shoved the mirror in his direction. He did a line himself, gasping a little at the sting in his nostrils, feeling that metallic taste hit the back of his throat even as the drug set his aleimi on fire.
He did another line before Raven rapped the table with her knuckles, motioning for him to pass the mirror back to her.
From the other side of the room, Dehgoies saw Terian shake his head at the two of them, a faint thread of humor in his amber-colored eyes.
“Who was she?” Raven asked again, gritting her teeth as her pupils dilated more under the coke. She rubbed her nose, sniffing a bit as her aleimi sparked.
Dehgoies only stared at her for a few seconds, feeling the high hit his light in stages, bringing a head rush that seemed to light a fire in his own light, coursing over his skin.
“Who was who?” he said.
Raven threw the glass she’d been holding at him and he ducked, cursing in Mandarin when it shattered against the hotel wall behind him. Glaring at her, he tensed when she slammed her booted feet down from the table, leaning towards him, her eyes glittering with a deeper anger.
“We said no seers,” Raven snapped, slapping her hand down on the polished, reddish-chocolate wood to emphasize her words. “No seers, Dags. It wasn’t an ambiguous fucking request...”
“I didn’t fuck any other seers, Ray.”
“Not from lack of trying, I’m sure...” Terian muttered humorously, leaning over the table to pluck the dollar bill from Raven’s fingers. Raven glared at him as he used the razor blade to chop up more of the coke after he dumped another small mountain on the rectangular glass surface. Not getting a reaction from him, Raven glared back at Dehgoies, as if asking if Terian was right.
Dehgoies gave Terian an openly silencing look, right before he looked back at Raven.
“I didn’t fuck her, all right? Calm down.”
“Why didn’t you, Dags?” Raven said, sarcastic. “...Is Terry right? Did she turn you down?”
Terian chuckled as he finished the line he’d been working on, sniffing hard and tilting his chin up towards the ceiling as he raised his head. He rubbed his nose, sniffing again and blinking hard into the afternoon light.
Dehgoies watched the seer’s pupils dilate sharply, turning his irises nearly black.
He bent down to do another line, but Raven continued to glare at Dehgoies from around the blocking angle of Terian’s body.
“Did she, Revi’?” Raven pressed. “Did you ask her and she said no?”
Dehgoies felt his face warm slightly as he turned over Raven’s words, enough to know that he’d already likely betrayed himself. Maybe to distract himself, or maybe to distract her, he glanced at the bag of coke on the counter and wondered if they should start mixing. It might be a bad idea, with him and Terian still technically on call, if in a waiting posture and unlikely to be pulled back into the fray that day.
When he glanced back across the table, Raven’s eyes glinted with a denser anger.
Dehgoies held up a hand, heading her off.
“We said we would try the monogamy thing,” he reminded her shortly. “We said we’d try it. If she’d said yes, I would have asked you, Raven...I would have asked. All right?”
“Bullshit. Asked me? Are you fucking serious, Dehgoies? How stupid do you think I am?” She stood up and he flinched back in spite of himself, feeling his jaw clench again as she loomed over him, his muscles tensing as he tried to decide if he was going to have to fight her off a third time. She looked like she might be getting ready to hit him even as he thought it, then seemed to change her mind. Folding her arms, she made a disparaging sound.
“...So she didn’t want you, huh?” Raven said scornfully. “Poor Dehgoies. No wonder you’re in such a bad mood. What did she want from you, then, if not to suck on your cock?”
Terian chuckled again, even as he walked over to the bar, pouring himself a drink.
Dehgoies felt his jaw harden more.
He watched Raven, silent, as she walked over to join Terian. Once the auburn-haired seer finished with his own drink, Raven poured herself another as well, plucking a new glass from the counter over the stocked bar that came with the room. Dehgoies followed her movements warily as she added ice from the cooler, grabbing a bottle of his stuff, the Woodford, which was expensive and already running low. He didn’t say a word as she splashed the last of it generously over the ice.
He knew she did it to irritate him. Bourbon wasn’t even her drink.
It pissed him off anyway.
A fucking car bomb. Jesus. She set off a fucking car bomb, because she found out he’d gone after the seer who’d been tailing him.
Grunting in irritation, he pulled the mirror back over to him, sliding it over the wooden surface of the table. Re-rolling the dollar bill with deft fingers, he briefly used the razor blade to consolidate the last of the remaining scratch from the previous lines they’d already consumed. He disposed of the last of it in a single inhale, sniffing sharply to get that bitter taste back in his throat and to clear his vision. The hit sent a similar ripple through his aleimi, but less intense that time.
He was still having trouble getting that other seer’s light out of his, and it had been over an hour since he’d left her by the pool.
Dehgoies felt Terian’s humor from the other end of the room, and knew the other male seer listened to his and Raven’s interaction with more interest than he let on. Terian had always been remarkably talented at hiding his innately sharp perceptions and observations by either acting like an ass or acting batshit crazy.
It was a talent of his that Dehgoies both admired and found deeply irritating.
He wasn’t about to explain himself to her, though...to either of them.
He knew exactly why Raven had carved him out as a part of her territory, and why she wanted him to stay away from other female seers. He also knew it had little to do with how she felt about him, per se. She saw Dehgoies as her ticket to a higher status within the Rooks’ hierarchy, plain and simple. With the rumors circulating around Galaith’s plans to name his successor in the next few weeks, Raven had clung to Dehgoies like glue, reminding him every time he turned around of the deal they’d made with one another.
He’d pretty much had it, truthfully.
Even apart from the headache that still throbbed the back reaches of his skull, and the swollen lip...he didn’t like being told what to do. He didn’t put up with it from anyone. Much less some power-hungry viper who only wanted to use him to get closer to Galaith.
He still liked sex with her. They’d had a lot of fun together in the past few months, even with her crazy bullshit...and sometimes because of it. If he’d wanted a wife, though, he would have looked for one. He sure as hell wouldn’t have chosen her, whatever her talents, in or out of the bedroom. Raven would as soon stab him in the back as watch it for him, and Dehgoies didn’t let himself forget that for even a second.
Either way, he and Raven weren’t close.
He certainly didn’t intend to try to put into words his personal reactions to the female seer he’d just confronted poolside at the Grand Hotel.
Particularly since he still couldn’t explain those reactions to himself.
He didn’t even like the fact that Raven had obviously been watching him from the network, well enough to know he’d followed the other female, and that he’d been turned on by her. Raven hadn’t s
een enough to know he hadn’t slept with her, (not from lack of trying, Dehgoies was sure), but he found that only mildly reassuring. He sure as hell hoped Raven hadn’t felt or heard anything about his actual conversation with the other female, especially towards the end.
If Raven did know something, and decided to act on that information before Dehgoies himself had decided what to do, he might be forced to actually kill her...or hurt her, anyway, to keep her quiet. Raven, that is.
Galaith wouldn’t be very happy with him if he did that.
Dehgoies knew he would have to tell Galaith what that female seer had said.
He knew that, but somehow, he found himself hesitating anyway. He didn’t want to probe why he was hesitating...not deeply, not yet. He needed time alone first. Time where he could think, without the rest of the network...or Raven...or Terian...breathing down his neck.
One thing he did know for certain; he didn’t want Raven anywhere near the female seer he’d talked to today at the Grand Hotel.
At the thought, his mouth curled more.
He hadn’t even gotten her name. He could still taste her light, enough to get him hard if he let himself go there, but he didn’t know her damned name. He’d barely been thinking straight, the whole time he spoke to her. He’d let her control the entire conversation, and him, inside that conversation...even down to when he’d left.
He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.
Then again, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a conversation with a female seer who wasn’t either a recruit or a full-fledged member of the Org already.
He pushed aside the memory of her, if only because it brought him too close to the rest of it. He didn’t let himself think at all about what she’d actually told him, not wanting his mind anywhere near those things, not here. He didn’t want to think about it at all, really...not where it might get picked up by the network, or even one of his brothers or sisters-in-arms.
Shoving the woman further back into the recesses of his mind, he looked at Terian.
