by Cassia Leo
He gave a low laugh, almost without meaning to.
She smacked him in the chest, hard, and he chuckled again.
“You have a lot of talents, Ray,” he told her. “Vulnerability isn’t one of them.”
“You think I can’t be vulnerable...?” she said, a hurt note touching her voice.
He could feel the manipulation behind her words, however, and wasn’t particularly swayed. As if feeling as much on him, she sharpened her voice, and that time he heard anger in her again, along with a more subtle emotion he couldn’t quite identify.
“I told you what I wanted from you,” she said, her voice faintly accusing again. “Why don’t we try now? Since you’re clearly in the mood for that kind of thing...?”
He gave another disbelieving laugh. “You want me to try and impregnate you while Terian is raping humans in front of us?”
“Why not?” she countered. “It’s not like you care what he does. He’d probably be pissed off if you left him out of it anyway...right?”
Terian glanced over his shoulder, sweating from exertion. He had the girl sucking a different cock now, but she looked wholly relaxed, her body moving liquidly with Terian’s.
“Don’t mind me,” Terian told him, winking. “Consider it a sociological experiment...”
Dehgoies felt his jaw harden again.
Fucking Terry.
Both of them, really. They were both out of their gaos d’ jurekil’a heads. He doubted the drugs even had much to do with it.
He was about to respond, when Raven’s light opened more, enough to catch him off-guard. The pain he’d been feeling from talking to the woman by the pool abruptly worsened, to the point where it nearly confused him, confusing the seer he’d met earlier that day with the one lying under him now. He let out a low groan when she opened further, and then she was holding him back, fighting to keep him from losing control altogether.
When he could focus on her again, he saw a smile touching Raven’s lips.
“Ah,” she said, softer. “Yes. I understand now, Dehgoies, my love.”
“Fuck you,” he said, short. “This isn’t a good idea, Ray...”
“Why?” she said. “You don’t want a kid with me?”
He shook his head. “It’s not that...”
“Then what? I thought Galaith approved of us reproducing?”
“He did.” Dehgoies fought to clear his mind, confused suddenly.
He couldn’t think of a good reason not to do it, apart from the ludicrousness of doing it in front of Terian and his newest fuck toys while both of them were higher than hell on imported cocaine and Thai heroin. He couldn’t find a logical reason, though, given everything. It’s not like they hadn’t indulged in these types of sessions a few dozen times before. Still, something in him recoiled at the thought of doing something so intimate with Raven now, regardless of whether Terian was in the room with them or not. Dehgoies found himself remembering what the green-eyed seer had said to him by the pool, trying to make sense of it, of how it even fit with what he was doing now. It seemed like such a long time since he’d really given his actions in this area much thought.
He’d known for a long time he didn’t want a mate.
He didn’t mind having children, though.
Sometimes he even thought he would like that, to be a father.
Galaith made it sound meaningful, especially given what they could do for a seer child under the extensive resources and reach of the Org. Galaith had never pressured him about finding a life partner of any kind, even though Galaith himself had chosen to marry, and to remain exclusive with his human wife...or wives, really, as they had aged and died over the years.
Galaith had, on the other hand, make it clear that he wanted his senior officers to have children, preferably more than one.
Dehgoies had already told himself he would do his duty in that regard, maybe even with Raven, and maybe even soon, but...
“Revi’...” Raven caressed his face, opening her light more, wrapping her legs around him. “Come on,” she coaxed, sliding her light into his. “You want this...I can feel it...you want this...”
He did. He did want it.
He could tell himself he was being manipulated, that this was Raven, that she was playing him, playing his desire for that other seer, taking the opportunity to pressure him into having children with her...but he couldn’t make himself care. He could feel Raven’s light opening to his, and that softer, more vulnerable core of her aleimi, intensely enough that his reaction to that was nearly pain, too. He wanted to let it in, wanted it in a way he hadn’t let himself want anything in years.
Decades, even.
“Fuck.” He gave a low gasp, even as he felt his control over his light slipping. She slid deeper into him, opening him up more, and he let out a thick cry. “Raven...please...”
“Let go, lover...” she said to him softly, gently prising open his light. “Let go...trust me...trust me, please. I understand now. I know what you want...”
He was already pinning her to the bed.
She let him. She let her body grow soft under his, too, knowing he would react to that, as well. She knew how to pull on his light; it was the main reason he hadn’t kicked her out of his bed before now, and why he put up with her crazy shit like car bombs and threatening to shoot him when he didn’t do what she wanted. She tugged at his light now, more subtly than usual, pulling at his walls and defenses.
The silver light of the Rooks got out of the way for that, too.
He let go of all of everything, even of who he was, who he thought he was...opening his light more, enough that he felt dizzy, half-sick with wanting. He didn’t even know what he wanted anymore. He knew it wasn’t Raven per se.
He didn’t even know if it was children.
As he lost himself in sensation and light, the two of them began moving together. After another handful of minutes, he lost hold of the room, too. By then, he no longer saw the sharp turquoise eyes of Raven gazing up at him.
The eyes he saw under him, glowing faintly in the dim light of the hotel room, looked green, instead. Not the green of the eyes of the woman by the pool, but a softer jade that seemed to hit at him somewhere in the middle of his chest.
He let out a low cry when he opened to what he felt there.
He wondered if that other female seer was fucking with him, the woman he’d met earlier that day. Fear hit him at the thought, a brief panic that he might be revealing too much of himself to her, that she might be an assassin or some kind of spy, after all...but that didn’t feel right, either. He doubted she’d approached him only for intel, although she could have been gathering intel on him, sure. She could have been lying to him about the rest of it, too, feigning interest in him, feigning compassion...trying to draw him or Galaith or all of them into some kind of trap, maybe for the Seven or the Adhipan or both. He almost didn’t care anymore.
He couldn’t make sense of who she was, or even who he was, not in the wash of light...he couldn’t even make himself feel afraid of her.
He couldn’t even be certain it was her he felt at all.
He still saw those green irises when he let go entirely.
By then he was sweating, gripping Raven’s narrow hips in his hands as he lost himself in liquid motion and light, groaning at every thrust, half-blind with pain as he fought to open more of himself. He’d never felt so much wanting before...it was more than he could handle, more than he could think past. He’d forgotten Terian by then, and the woman in the blood-red bikini, and the roaches from the poolside bar who were probably sodomizing one another only a few feet away.
He’d even forgotten Raven herself...and the green-eyed woman by the pool. At the end, when he finally opened himself for real, Dehgoies heard Raven calling his name, real emotion in her voice, but somehow, he couldn’t feel that, either, nor her fingers and nails where she gouged his back, trying to pull him further inside of her.
All of it felt far away, distant almost. No
ne of it felt close to him, not next to the certainty of those green eyes, staring up from him from an alien face.
Somehow, although he’d never seen it before, he knew that face.
He knew it better than his own.
***
FOUR
He woke to a splitting headache, and a beeping sound he recognized.
Reaching over to the bedside table to deal with the latter, he jerked open the top drawer of the dresser with a clumsy hand, rooting around inside once he had it separated from the wooden frame. Within a few very long-seeming seconds, he snatched up a flat, stone-like device, looking for the finger grooves to trigger the organic back into silence.
He got them, eventually, but not before he was fully awake.
Raven, who sprawled next to him, barely stirred.
Raising his head, Dehgoies saw a shaft of sunlight wafting through a break in the curtains. The light didn’t manage to penetrate much of the overall darkness of the room, but between that and his sight, he was able to make out the lay of the land.
They were alone again.
Raven lay on her stomach beside him, her hands and arms cushioning her head and the tangle of black hair that fell down her back. Her naked body stood outlined under the single, off-white sheet she’d used to cover herself, and her small feet poked out the bottom on the other end. He didn’t see any trace of Terian’s playmates from the night before, or of Terian himself. The only clues that they had existed at all resided in a few tokens left by the men from the poolside bar...a black tie here, a sock there, a pair of boxer shorts in a crumpled heap in the corner, a shirt folded almost neatly over the back of a crushed velvet chair. Dehgoies didn’t see any sign of the woman at all.
Groaning a little as he did it, Dehgoies sat up.
He glanced down at the device in his hand, cursing silently to himself when he saw the notification showing up on the dark-green metal.
Fuck. They were already late.
Dragging himself to his feet, he brought the device with him, but left Raven where she was. He was still rubbing his face as he walked to the common room separating the suite’s two bedrooms. It didn’t occur to him that he was naked until he realized he was hard, too, enough so that it was difficult to walk. He knew he probably needed to urinate, but other thoughts shifted in the back of his mind, too, and none of them featured Raven.
He’d been dreaming. About that woman by the pool, he realized.
Pushing her out of his mind in some irritation, he glanced around the common room once he’d opened the bedroom door, only taking in a few details. They’d pretty much demolished the bar’s stores. Empty bottles stood on the mirrored tray and lay scattered on the carpeted floor, along with glasses holding remnants of alcohol and tepid water from the ice, some with human cigarette butts and hiri floating in them, staining the liquid dark yellow and brown. The mirror they’d pulled off the wall of the bathroom to use for drugs somehow got cracked down the middle, but a few, lonely-looking lines remained down the center of it, along with the razor blade they’d been using and the now-frayed dollar bill.
Dehgoies paused at the table, staring down at the mirror.
Then, making a swift decision, he bent over, chopping up the exposed remains of the drugs they’d laid out the night before, rearranging the powder on the glass before he re-rolled the bill. Setting down the organic hand-held briefly, he used the bill to snort up the two thickest lines he’d created of that mixture of cocaine and heroin.
As soon as the drugs hit his bloodstream, he felt better.
His aleimi caught on fire, too, vibrating around his form.
Raising his head, Dehgoies rubbed his nose, sniffing again until he tasted copper and that harsher taste at the back of his throat. He felt his body start to wake up for real.
By the time he walked to the door to the other bedroom, his mind was almost working again.
He knocked, sharply.
When his knock was only answered by silence, he didn’t wait, turning the handle to the door and pushing it open.
Terian lay sprawled there, two of the bar rats wrapped around him in sleep.
Dehgoies didn’t see the woman, or the other three men he’d pushed into joining them from the poolside bar, but that didn’t surprise him, either. Usually a few favorites emerged by the end of the night, and Terian would push the others out the door, with or without clothes, and with or without their memories intact. Erasing them often wasn’t necessary.
Shame could do wonders to keep people silent, even in Saigon.
One of the remaining males still had come dried to his chest, gods only knew from which one of them. One was blond, the other dark-haired. Both looked to be in their late twenties, and in decent physical shape. They had strong jaws, handsome faces, long limbs. Terian’s two new acquisitions both looked contented in sleep, wrapped around Terian’s chest and waist as if they’d been fucking him all of their lives. Dehgoies wondered if they’d had some sort of latent preference for males, or if Terian had liked them for some other reason.
A few seconds later, he decided he didn’t care.
He picked up a throw pillow from the nearest chair and aimed it skillfully at Terian’s face, hitting him dead-on, hard enough that the seer jumped. The other male’s eyes jerked open as he sat up, halfway in fighting mode already.
When he saw Dehgoies there, he relaxed.
Dehgoies gave a low, humorless snort, then lifted up the organic, showing Terian the same message that had woken him.
Terian nodded, even as he grimaced at little, rubbing his temples.
Clearly, the night was catching up with him already, too. The other seer’s amber eyes had glassed over again slightly once his mind caught up with the lack of an immediate threat to his life. Dehgoies watched as Terian rubbed his face with the heel of one hand and began disentangling himself from the two males wrapped around his naked body.
“Hurry up,” Dehgoies whispered. “...Do a few lines. I can bring it in here, if you want.”
“No, no...you go ahead.”
“I already did,” Dehgoies said.
Terian blinked again, rubbing his face a second time. Then he smiled, motioning down towards Dehgoies’ erection. “I can see that,” he smirked, staring openly at the other’s cock. “Your stamina, as always, impresses me to no end, brother...”
Dehgoies snorted. “I bet.” He threw another pillow when the male continued to stare at his erection. “...Move your ass, Terry. I’m taking a shower. And no, you can’t join me. We’re leaving in ten. Wake Raven, all right? When you’re finished?”
“Of course, brother. Of course...”
With that, Dehgoies left the room, not bothering to close the door behind him.
*
A few hours later, they were in a compound outside of the city, and it was hotter than hell, even though it was only midday.
Dehgoies wiped sweat out of his eyes with the back of his wrist, adjusting the olive green army cap over his head to keep the sun off his black hair, where it seemed to want to bake his very skull, making him feel even more like throwing up. He knew he smelled from the alcohol and drugs being sweated out of his system, but he found it difficult to care about that, either, as he surveyed the pen in front of him, frowning as he took in faces.
“This is all of them?” he asked the seer in Prexci.
The man was wearing carefully crafted Viet Cong garb.
In fact, he had his local-peasant-slash-revolutionary part down to a ‘T,’ down to the tire tread sandals and the tattered shirt he wore over his dark gray peasant pants and longer, v-necked cotton shirt beneath. Dehgoies knew the NVA was already on its way to this part of the country and, at least from his most recent intel, headed for Saigon itself. He also knew the war would likely be over soon. Hell, it basically ended once the Americans stopped providing money to the puppet regime in the South, but he didn’t much care about that, either.
That wasn’t really why they were here, not anymore.
> In fact, Terian and he hadn’t been involved much in the war itself for a few years now.
Dehgoies’ eyes scanned the seers squatting outside of the mud huts. Palm trees angled down at them without managing to block any of the sun. Flies and other insects buzzed around his face and other exposed areas of skin, along with Terry’s and Raven’s and the skin of the prisoners. The sheer number of insects made it difficult to think straight, their prevalence made worse by the nearby rice paddies and the rotting dead they’d passed on the road on the way here. He could smell urine and feces from where the prisoners had soiled themselves, probably through fear, at least in part. He also could smell the faintest whiff of copper that he knew had to be blood.
Dehgoies didn’t want to know how many of those dead he’d seen on the road were seers.
He definitely didn’t want to know how many should have been part of this shipment.
At the same time, he would need to find out how many, before he left here.
The remains of the delivery had been tied together with dirty rope, so that they huddled together more like animals than seers. Dehgoies grimaced again when he realized that most of the females weren’t wearing any clothes. He saw black eyes on more than a few of them, too, and swollen jaws and cheeks. Several of those who had been beaten couldn’t have been more than twenty.
Because they were seers, that made them look closer to eleven or twelve, in human years, and small enough that he couldn’t help wincing at the bruises over the lower half of their naked bodies.
Those bruises seemed darker and more vivid under the pale skin of their pre-adolescent breasts. One had a savage-looking bite mark by her light brown aureola, and a cut across her stomach from what looked like a hunting knife. He couldn’t help noticing a few of them had dried blood on their thighs, too. Revulsion took him, enough that he had to look away from that part of their bodies, too, feeling a kind of shame creep in that he’d been staring at all.
Seeing that same prepubescent female looking up at him fearfully, an open panic in her violet-colored eyes, Dehgoies felt his throat constrict.
