Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (62 page)

He didn’t look at my face at all but continued to walk as he held my arm, steering me roughly towards the door. Bending down when we reached it, he grabbed the handle in his free hand. Without so much as a glance at me, twisted it and yanked the door away from the frame. Before I could take a breath, he’d already shoved me roughly through the opening.

I stumbled, losing my balance. I nearly fell against the wall.

I doubt he saw that, though.

He was already closing the door.

I just stood there in the corridor, half bent over, my shirt half-undone, breathing hard, adrenaline spinning through my veins…as the door slammed in my face.

I was still standing there when he flipped the lock.

20

WHO’S NEXT

Something’s happened. You need to get out of there, baby––

I know,
he sends softly.
Dragon.

The silence deepens.

I fight to keep the rest from my light, not wanting to know if he knows. I am distracted though, pulled by other thoughts shifting and twisting in the higher areas of his light. I feel something there, something that grits my teeth, but in a different way that time.

Gods,
I send.
You think he’s a part of this, too. What they did to you, the trigger––

We can’t talk about this. Not even like this.

A more laden silence falls between us, a held breath.

I think you’re probably right,
he sends then.

Feeling the flavor of his light, I exhale in that high place.

Chandre?

Yes.
The word falls away, a whisper the silence stretches.
Baby, is that why? Is that why you kissed her?

Yes.

I feel heat on him, more pain than I can stand. It slides out of his control and I draw back, fighting to control my own light, to remain in that place.

Allie…the other thing…

I’m working on that. I’m working on it, okay? It’s not easy.
I fight to keep the rest from him, to pull it back.
There’ve been…complications. I can’t use the person we’d originally planned.

Confusion, then alarm whispers through his light.

Why not?

I’ll figure it out. Don’t worry about it, Revik, I’ll figure it out…

The silence lengthens.

I know it’s hard,
he sends, softer.
I know it is, but hurry, wife…please.

Pain slides through me, worsening in that silence.

I want to come home,
he sends.
I want to come home…

I fought my mind back on line, rubbing my eyes with my fingers.

I sat at the head of a long table, in a dimly lit conference room at Langley. I could feel eyes on me, but I’d been feeling that for days now. Even so, it was difficult to ignore the stares I felt flicking on and off in my direction. Most of those stares came from my own people, of course…meaning those I’d come here with from Mumbai and then Denver.

And yeah, despite my paranoia, none of them were really a cause for concern.

I knew they weren’t reacting to anything that mattered. It was more that they could feel the other thing, meaning the lingering tension in the construct we all shared.

And there was the Dragon thing of course. I’d been cornered multiple times now. By Chandre…Neela…Talei, who seemed to have taken what occurred more personally than anyone else for some reason. Jorag even tried to talk to me. His sheer incompetence in the trying touched me as much as anything any of the others said.

I didn’t want to know how many in our other camps knew by now.

Some of them were in the room now, meaning hooked into our construct via the virtual link. Luckily, most of them were pretty distracted at the moment.

Too distracted to notice any tension on our end, or to give me those well-meaning but cloying concerned looks I still seemed to be getting from most of the infiltrators currently sitting physically at the table with me at Langley.

Leaning back in my chair, I assessed the virtual space with my light, occupying my mind by looking for holes in the construct we’d thrown together in order to have this meeting at all. The construct itself appeared to be pretty solid. We’d piggybacked on an old Langley construct that was still being maintained by local CIA seers––which helped––but I’d needed it broken off and protected from the main intelligence complex, too, for obvious reasons.

I still hadn’t figured out how or if we could loop Brooks into some element of these discussions. I’d been meeting with her privately, of course, and some of those got pretty heated. But to say our alliance was “tentative” at this point would be generous.

I especially didn’t know how to include her in terms of the main subject matter of this meeting…which was some combination of what the hell do we do about Dragon and how the hell do we go about hunting the rest of Shadow’s network seers.

I’d pulled Balidor in to help with the construct end of things.

I wanted him to help me run the meeting too, along with Jon and Wreg and a handful of others who happened to be halfway across the world right then. They’d already been briefed. Initially only on the bare bones of the horror show I’d brought them, namely that I’d lost Terian…again…and that I’d unleashed a highly trained murderous telekinetic onto the world who’d already taken it upon himself to attack a human military complex.

Now a few of them knew more than that.

I wasn’t sure how few, but I’d been explicit this time at least about asking people to keep some of the more graphic details to themselves.

To their credit, it was all so off-the-charts bad, no one bothered to state the obvious around that, or lecture me about my own stupidity in letting Dragon out in the first place.

But yeah, I could feel the pall over the group.

I could feel emotion in their lights, even via the virtual-slash-construct space.

I could feel the whispering layers of fear and depression about Dragon, about losing Feigran for the fifth or sixth time, and about so much human death…in addition to most of them still reeling from having lost Revik. I think Revik was still the big thing with most of them, honestly. I didn’t know if they blamed me for that too, but some part of me felt like they did. Maybe they didn’t even know they blamed me…but yeah, I strongly suspected the question lingered there, in some of their minds at least.

Either way, I’d managed to crash any superficial hope they might have harbored around the whole “well, at least it couldn’t get any worse” thing.

Needless to say, no one dared to say that now. Not aloud at least.

I glanced around at a few faces, watching Jon, Balidor, Neela, Jax, Wreg, Anale, Chinja, Yumi, Holo and Maygar stare up at the images on the screen as we showed them recordings of what happened at the NORAD complex. It was strange seeing them sitting around the table in the VR-enhanced space; I had to remind myself they weren’t really there. I could feel their lights, strongly in a few cases, so it wasn’t always easy.

I couldn’t feel
where
they were, though, which was all that mattered.

Gasps left some of them here and there, especially when we showed them the footage from the main gates of the complex. Some of them were from how much Dragon looked like Revik. Some were from what they actually saw him doing. Glancing up at those same images, I found it hard to believe we’d left Colorado two weeks earlier.

In some ways it felt like it had been a lot longer than that, decades maybe; in others, it felt like we left yesterday.

I felt eyes on me again. Hard, insistent.

Feeling from what part of the table that stare originated, I didn’t look over.

I felt my skin warm though, which was almost worse.

At least I knew I wouldn’t be getting concerned looks from him.

I’d made sure Dalejem and I weren’t alone in the same room since that night I’d showed up at his door. For the most part, it hadn’t been difficult. That first week or so he’d seemed to be avoiding me too; the few times we’d been forced to interact, it had been easy enough to sidestep all but the most impersonal types of exchanges.

I was deep in meetings with Balidor and Wreg for the vast majority of those two weeks anyway, so I didn’t see much of anyone apart from that, not before we finally came to a few key decisions. At that point, I crashed, sleeping for almost twenty hours straight.

Now we were here.

Today, however, he seemed determined to communicate…something…to me.

I had no idea what his deal was, but I was getting ready to do something really fucking childish, like maybe throw my mug of crappy instant coffee at his head.

Or maybe send him back to Asia.

More and more, that was feeling like a really good idea.

I knew it was my fault.

I mean…clearly…I’d caused this problem.

And yeah, maybe Dalejem hadn’t handled it all that well, but that was besides the point. I’d done this. I could own that and still think I should send him back to my parents and Balidor. If he still wanted to do something for Revik, he could help protect our daughter.

I told myself it was a practical decision, even though I knew it wasn’t, not entirely. But given that neither of us seemed to be capable of working with the other one now, or even having a civil conversation…I supposed it didn’t really matter.

The practical thing existed, whether it was my primary motive or not.

I’d have to find someone else though.

Contemplating that was harder.

I’m not going back to fucking Asia,
a voice muttered in my head.
Not unless I bring you with me…so you can just forget that whole idea, Esteemed Bridge…

I didn’t look over.

My jaw hardened to granite, though.

I managed to keep my thoughts stripped of emotion when I answered.

You’ll follow orders, brother.

We’re going to talk about this,
he sent, his light sparking with heat.
Today, sister.

No. We’re not.

The hell we aren’t…

I blanked my mind, shutting him out deliberately.

That time, when I glanced back at the table, I saw Balidor looking at me quizzically. His light gray eyes darted briefly to Dalejem, just enough that I could feel he’d caught some flavor of the undercurrents of our exchange.