Allie's War Season Three (179 page)

Staring around at the rest of them, Chandre bit her lip, looking at them as if they were dense, or not getting the importance of her words, or both.

“Do all of you know nothing about Cassandra’s past?” she snapped after the silence. “She was abused through most of her childhood. She felt unloved...abandoned. Her mother drank and often left her alone, sometimes staying away for days...even weeks. Her father hit her and left the house while Cass was still very young. She had an uncle who raped her. All of her life Cass has wanted her own child. She told me that even in high school, she wanted a child...something to love. She said she probably would have gotten pregnant at an early age, if not for Jon and Allie. She confessed to me she still thought of it at times...”

Chandre’s face grew slightly more uncomfortable when she added,

“...It was a point of contention for us. She wanted a partner who could give her a biological child some day...” Pausing, she firmed her voice. “Allie was part of this, too. Cass was very jealous of Allie for having parents who loved her...Allie especially. She felt guilt about this, but that jealousy bordered on resentment at times, even then...”

“I thought the Bridge’s human parents were dead?” Garensche muttered, glancing around at the rest of them. “Aren’t they dead?”

“They are,” Chandre said, still glaring around at all of them.

“Then why would––”

“You are totally missing the significance of my words!” Chandre snapped.

“Sister!” Balidor said, raising a calming hand. “We are hearing you!”

“No,” Chandre said. “You are not! If Shadow gave Cass a child...Alyson’s child...and convinced her it was hers to keep, Cass would not be rational about this, especially now! He was already filling her head about Allie and Dehgoies being her true family. If he has convinced her further that they are traitors, insane or dangerous, then promised to give her their child to raise, perhaps to save that child from themselves...”

Chandre trailed, gesturing with a hand that the conclusions were obvious.

Balidor felt something in his heart react to the hunter’s words.

He had felt some of what Chandre was talking about in Cass. That intense heart pain, and loneliness. He hadn’t known any of the specifics, nor had he looked, but he felt these things on Cass even in Seertown, when he first met her as a human. She had clearly been traumatized by Terian, too, and attached to Dehgoies and Alyson in a way that almost implied a form of fear-based dependence. She clearly saw the Sword as having saved her in the Caucasus Mountains. Balidor hadn’t noticed any resentment towards Allie, not then, not around Dehgoies or anything else, but Chandre’s words now rang totally true with what he’d seen of Cass back then.

He was about to speak again, when Wreg broke the silence.

“I can’t reach them,” he said. “Will someone else try?”

Enough of an edge lived in Wreg’s words that Balidor turned, staring at him. “What? You can’t reach who?”

“Nenz,” Wreg replied at once. “Or the Bridge.” His mouth hardened more. “...I can’t reach Jon, either.”

Balidor immediately entered the construct.

Not bothering to be subtle, he pinged all three of them, loudly enough that they each should have answered him at once. When none of them did, he raised a hand to his organic link, touching it to activate it with his fingers. He used his light to key in each of their security codes, and still got nothing but silence.

“Did you try?” Wreg said.

“Yes,” Balidor said. “I can’t reach them, either.” He glanced around, saw other seers in the room trying as well, even as Chandre’s face paled more.

"And that's not a fucking concern to you?" Wreg said, his voice jerking Balidor’s eyes back to him. "I can't feel Jon, either, and I've been trying for the past ten minutes..." At Balidor’s harder stare, Wreg’s mouth curled into a frown. “Nenz said he might talk to her today. I thought maybe they'd turned the damned things off...or got embroiled in some conversation about..." He trailed, his jaw hardening more, just before he glared at Jorag, then back at Balidor. "...About something personal," Wreg said. "I was giving them the space to wrap it up. But it's been too long...or am I the only one who thinks so?"

Balidor just stared at him for a moment. Then he moved, motioning Wreg, Jorag, Chandre, Yumi and Neela towards the door. He already had his hand on his sidearm. “Jon was supposed to bring Nenz up here, wasn’t he? And Allie, if she was there?”

Wreg was on his feet too, already halfway to the door. “Yes,” he said.

“How much time?”

“Twenty minutes.”

Balidor nodded, once. “Weapons. Pull two teams, Wreg...” He trailed when he saw from the seer’s eyes that he was already in the Barrier, even before the ex-rebel motioned his understanding with one hand. They’d gone over this. Just that morning, they’d gone over plans around a potential breach, refining some of the points. He didn’t need to tell Wreg anything. Balidor felt his throat tighten, even as he pinged Tarsi up in her tower, using the frequency they’d arranged to use only if the damned world was coming down around their heads.

His message to her was brief.

The hotel might be under attack,
he sent.
I’ll need you to run the teams in here. I’m going with Wreg after the Bridge and Sword...no destination yet.

Understood,
was all Tarsi answered.

Really, it was all that could be said.

Balidor clicked out, realizing he had already walked most of the way to the elevator with Wreg. The seer gave him a look with his dark eyes, and Balidor found he knew what he was thinking then, too.

“You and I will take the elevators,” he clarified. “If we get stuck, we can rappel down...we can’t miss the opportunity in terms of speed...”

Wreg nodded, clearly in agreement. The seer’s face was unreadable, but Balidor found he could see past that immovable expression, even though he couldn’t glimpse so much as a sliver of his light past the dense shields that had now fallen over Wreg’s muscular form. He knew, though, what would happen, if Jon ended up being under threat, too. He had seen mates fighting for mates before, and knew that Wreg’s silence came only from the kind of focus he’d cultivated over centuries of life and death situations.

Anyway, both of them knew. Balidor could feel it.

Balidor’s mind couldn’t yet fully process what it knew, much less give it a name, but he found himself glancing at Chandre, noting the hawk-like look that had come to her dark face as well. Noting she had a gun in her hand, even as Jorag handed around extra magazines, he motioned the female hunter towards the stairs.

“Take a team,” he told her. “Move fast, sister.”

Nodding, Chandre didn’t need another word.

Touching her earpiece, she motioned for Neela, Jax and Jorag to come with her as she jogged for the door to the stairs. Before they could reach it, a loud, jarring Barrier sound trembled the construct overhead, physically silent but deafening inside the dense walls of aleimi that cocooned the outer and inner walls of the hotel.

The pulses of light and sound spiraled upwards, growing louder and harsher, making it briefly difficult to think even as it flooded Balidor’s aleimi with information and awareness...more than he could process at first, or even acknowledge.

The siren blew open every empty space left in his mind, killing that last shred of doubt, even before he knew what it meant.

Then he understood that, too.

The Barrier alarm had gone off.

The hotel had been breached.

“Underground!” Wreg said, his eyes coal now.

He entered the elevator with Balidor right on his heels beside Garensche, Yumi and Anale.

“Ditrini,” Balidor said, chambering a bullet in his organically-enhanced gun.

Wreg receded back into the Barrier, even as Balidor pinged three other teams, sending one to the roof as a precaution, the other three to meet them in the basement.

Even as he did it, information continued to churn in the foreground, eating at him, even as a picture began to form around what was happening.

No way could the timing be a coincidence.

The whole telecast, the offer to meet the Bridge and to negotiate, it had been nothing but distraction.

They’d known the Bridge would be separated from the rest of them. The realization that they had someone inside hit at him, in a way it never had before.

They knew the Sword couldn’t use the telekinesis.

They knew about the pregnancy.

They knew the Bridge would be suffering from the temporary blindness that came during the first stages of pregnancy, while her aleimi learned to incorporate the aleimi of another being and she would be forced to depend on her mate.

They’d known where the Bridge was.

Perhaps they’d found some way to track her, to track the Sword too? Something they put in their aleimi down in Argentina, or perhaps someone at the hotel? Someone with eyes and ears even on the Bridge, who could report her position to Shadow, as well as the position of others who might be able to protect her?

“We’ll find that fucking mole,” Wreg said next to him. “I’ve got my people on it right now,” he said. “Looking for any Barrier signal out of the construct...”

Balidor nodded, but the bare facts didn’t change in his head. Whoever it was, they had to be in the inner circle. They had to be close enough that they could see right into their most intimate decisions, even that of Dehgoies attempting to conduct a private interview with his son.

Somehow, they'd known everything.

Everything that mattered.

"We'll need more weapons...and armor," Balidor said.

Wreg nodded. "It's all downstairs. Armory’s not cut off."

"Has the breach point been pinpointed?"

Wreg nodded again. "I've got people headed there now. Can you feel them?" he said.

Balidor couldn't. He shook his head, once.

“Neither can I,” Wreg confirmed. “Something’s up with the construct. We might need to use links...even when we can hear one another.”

Balidor nodded to that, too.

The elevator car grew less distinct around him, as Balidor waited for the floors to tick down, to get them to the basement. The alarm continued to scream into his light and his mind, but he barely heard it now as he tried to think through the reality of their worm, of who could have gotten so far into their inner sanctum.

Either way, Chandre had been right. Balidor now knew what Cass and Shadow wanted. It was why they didn’t take them in Argentina. Perhaps they needed the construct there to confirm the pregnancy, or perhaps they’d set up this extraction in advance, too.

Just then, the whole building trembled, and the elevator along with it. The lights flickered overhead even as the elevator slowed, then slowly began picking up speed.

"Not earthquake," Wreg said. “...Explosion.”

Balidor nodded, silent.

His mind continued to turn over facts, even as he listened in the construct, trying to hear past the sirens, and that cloak that had fallen over the hotel itself, that felt denser with every passing minute. Ditrini told them what would happen. One might even say he warned them. He said to Balidor’s face that when Shadow came, he wouldn’t come for Ditrini himself, or even Dehgoies.

He said they would come for the Bridge.

Balidor hadn’t realized at the time that Ditrini didn’t just mean that they’d take Allie, try to extract her from the hotel. Truthfully, they might not even want her at all.

They simply wanted to take everything from her.

Everything.

17

MOLE