3

DIFFERENCES

HE KNEW WHERE he was taking me.

He didn’t hesitate as he led me through the main hallway and then down a side corridor. At the end I found myself unsurprised at the sight of a service elevator. He led me inside and hit a button without looking at me. His fingers still squeezed mine, however, and I felt reactions in his light, a sparking vibration that bled through my fingers.

He wasn’t nervous exactly, but his anticipation vibrated my skin.

I felt the boy there, too, and it occurred to me that parts of him might have more at stake in this than others. I had no idea how well he’d integrated the different parts of himself by then, or how the collection of them viewed me. I had no idea who I was dealing with at all really...or how they might flow and interchange.

He only spoke to me once.

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen Feigran?” he said, apropos of nothing.

It took me another few beats to comprehend the question.

“Feigran?” I managed.

“Yes.” His pale eyes met mine. “Have you seen him, Allie?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“You’re sure?”

I stared up at him. “Of course I’m sure. Why would I lie?”

His fingers relaxed slightly.

Feigran was Terian...what was left of him anyway. Another psychotic seer, Terian had been split in more pieces than the two or three that had once made up Revik. The original body, Feigran, had recently dumped down in the Pacific somewhere and disappeared, and none of my people had been able to find him.

Clearly Revik was looking for him, too. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know why, but something in the question made me nervous.

I fought with the idea of asking, but couldn’t find the words.

We rode the rest of the way up in silence...reaching the top floor of the hotel, or at least the top floor reached by that elevator. The button, marked PH, clicked off right before the elevator stopped. Without looking at me, he tightened his hold on my hand and led me off.

No one had walked on or off the thing while we were on it; I wondered if that had been arranged, as well.

It crossed my mind that maybe Balidor had been right; maybe he was going to take me somewhere after all...for all I knew, a helicopter waited for us on the roof. But I felt him tense as he took me down the hallway, reaching into his jacket to lay his hand on the gun I knew lived in a harness there. He’d rarely been without one when I knew him.

It struck me that I still clutched the one he’d given me, hidden in the folds of the green dress. 

Whatever he’d halfway expected, though, didn’t materialize. He relaxed after we turned the corner. Two of his people stood at the entrance of a hotel suite.

I knew they were his, even before I saw the tattoos.

Both of them bowed to me respectfully, rising to their feet as we came into view. One I didn’t know, but looked at me with a near-reverence that was more than a little unnerving.

The other, a giant, Chinese-looking seer with a long, braided ponytail and arms covered with tattoos, I recognized. Balidor had shown me his picture while debriefing me on Revik’s inner circle. We’d also met briefly when I woke up from whatever drugs they’d given me to get me off the White House grounds in Washington D.C.

He had originally belonged to Salinse.

“Bridge,” he said, bowing again in a friendly way. “Esteemed sister. We are honored by your presence...more than words allow.”

“Wreg,” I said, nodding back.

The one I didn’t know started a bit, seeing the gun in my hand, but Revik waved him off, warning him with a look. The seer stood out of my way then, still staring at me in the dress, the expression in his eyes bordering on worshipful.

Religious fanatics. Great. Nice company he was keeping.

I bit my lip as the door was opened for me. I felt both of them watching me minutely. I felt their deference to Revik, but their curiosity, too.

I knew Wreg helped plan the operation at the White House.

For that, alone, I could have punched him in the mouth.

Revik had been himself back then, more or less. He’d been trying to rescue me from that same psychotic seer named Terian and an even more psychotic telekinetic kid named Nenzi. He’d succeeded, in part by killing the boy.

The only problem was, that boy was actually a vessel for a part of Revik himself.

My husband, so it turned out, was the most famous seer who had ever existed.

Made infamous during World War I, he had killed thousands of humans and “traitor” seers as part of the first organized seer rebellion against human beings. He’d been coerced into it by his human and seer handlers, initially anyway. They’d broken him, and then brainwashed him, mainly through psychological abuse and outright torture...but that didn’t change the basic facts.

They’d turned him into a sociopath, at worst. At best, a severely misguided religious fanatic with a mandate to wreak vengeance on humanity for its crimes.

Following the war, Vash and the other seer elders tried to save whatever sanity remained in him by breaking his aleimi, or living light, into several pieces.

One of these, the most dangerous, had been housed in the body of a twenty-two-year-old seer and buried inside a mountain prison in India. Until Terian unearthed the kid the previous year, Revik never knew he existed, or even who he really was.

Neither had I, unfortunately.

Vash and the other elders had thought they were helping him.

I even understood. He’d been beaten and psychologically abused for years, from childhood on up, by radical seers who wanted him as a living weapon. They’d hired human kids to torture him, isolated him, removed any incentive to fight back by killing everyone he cared about. Then, when there’d been hardly anything of him left, they instilled a God-complex to give it all meaning to him. His mind was soaked in the ideology of sacrifice, destiny, racial superiority and sacred duty. So when Vash and the other elders finally managed to bring him in, they realized they couldn’t rehabilitate him through any normal means. His mind was too badly fractured.

They were faced with a choice: kill him, or split his mind, give him a new identity. They decided on the latter.

They’d invented Dehgoies Revik.

The problem was, I fell in love with Dehgoies Revik. I married Dehgoies Revik. And now, Dehgoies Revik turned out to be, if not a complete lie, a pretty damned big half-truth.

I still couldn’t quite forgive them for not telling me, especially Vash. I knew when I met the boy that there was something about him...something that, even in the beginning, felt disturbingly familiar at times. When I studied Syrimne in the Barrier, I could feel it, too. Like I knew him, like this was someone I had a connection to, in some way. I had thought it was the race thing. Everyone told me that we were the same, Syrimne and I. Intermediary beings. Tarsi, Vash, Balidor...even Maygar...they all said the same thing.

That Syrimne was a being like me.

But I should have known there was more to it. When the boy showed up, I should have realized the familiarity I felt towards him was far too strong to be explained by some abstract connection due to race. The kid knew too much about me, for one thing, especially considering he’d been imprisoned since before I was born.

Through his connection to Revik, he knew me almost as well as the rest of him did.

When Revik killed the boy, that part of his aleimi returned to the original body. It also effectively killed the man I’d fallen in love with...burying him in the broken mind of a seer who...in addition to the brainwashing and the torture of his earlier years...now had almost a century of imprisonment in a lightless, foul cave to twist his mind even further.

How much the more stable parts of his personality moderated the rest was anyone’s best guess at that point. It was a question everyone in the Seven had been occupied with trying to answer since the fiasco in D.C. Vash warned me, however, that the more aggressive sides of him had always been dominant prior to the split.

He also told me that the Revik I’d known would never exist again.

Following him inside the penthouse suite, it struck me that I still had no answer to that question. It also struck me that what I was doing was foolhardy in the extreme. I’d seen as much in Balidor’s eyes.

But, as per usual with Revik, I only halfway cared.

The room on the other side was empty, as far as I could tell.

Of people, anyway. Expensive-looking furnishings gave the suite a warm but almost antiquated look, despite the modern lines. I saw a silver ice bucket with a bottle of champagne beside a lit fireplace. The fireplace itself stood in an island chimney of polished stones, surrounded on either side by massive windows overlooking the nighttime lights of old New Delhi. Looking at the champagne, I folded my arms.

“It’s a bit much, isn’t it?” I said, hearing the door to the hallway close. I motioned towards the champagne. “Is this supposed to be funny...?”

But when I turned, he stood directly behind me.

Before I could move away, his arm slid around my waist. He brought me up against him, melting the length of his body against mine. I reacted before my mind caught up with the rest of me. My light opened to his even as I felt the thing connecting us pull on me like a drug.

I braced myself to be kissed, but he just looked at me, his eyes taking in my body in the dress. He didn’t hide his appraisal, and I found myself reacting to his stare, too...but the best I could do with that was to avert my gaze.

“Are you going to lose the gun at least?” he said.

Looking down at my hand, I saw that I still held it. After the barest pause, I loosened my fingers, letting it drop to the carpeted floor. It was useless to me anyway. If I killed him, there was still a reasonably good chance I’d die myself. And anyway, I wasn’t ready to kill him. I might not ever be ready to kill him.

Revik continued to study my eyes.

After a pause, he shook his head, clicking softly to himself.

“So what is this separation bullshit?” he said. The faint German accent remained with his English. He pulled me closer still, so I could feel him hardening against me. “Are you trying to hurt my feelings, Allie? Or are you just pissed off it’s taken me this long to come for you?”

I shook my head, unable to answer at first.

I felt his stare intensify. “Are you going to talk to me?”

“Revik,” I managed. “What are you doing here?”

For a moment he didn’t move. Then his light wound invasively into mine, pulling on me with an intensity that blacked out my mind, obliterated the last semblance of resistance in my limbs. I felt it do the same to him...right before his pain intensified more, until I barely recognized his light. It slid into that deprivation place I’d glimpsed in the boy, but never on the adult Revik. His fingers gripped my hair hard enough to hurt.

“Goddamn it, Allie...” His voice grew thick. The emotion I heard in it brought a sharp pain to my chest. He pressed into me again, his hand pulling up the fabric of the dress.

“...Maybe we can talk after,” he murmured, staring at my body again. “I’m assuming you need this as badly as I do...”

Fear reached me, for the first time.

We’d never been together like this. He’d wanted to; he came to find me in the Pamir, not long after he killed the boy. But he’d tripped the construct alarms, and had been chased out by the Adhipan before much really happened with us.

Now, looking up at him, it struck me that it wouldn’t just be a watered down version of the Revik I’d known. I could already feel differences in his light...even since that night in the Pamir. I’d be sleeping with the boy this time, too...and the sociopath who worked for the Rooks and for Menlim all those years ago. More than that, I’d be sleeping with another Elaerian...an intermediary being, like me. I had no idea what that would do to me.

I had no idea what that would do to either of us.

I started to push him back, but his hands only tightened on me.

“Baby,” he murmured against my ear. “Please. Let’s make up—”

“Revik!” I caught his hand as he kissed my throat, sliding his mouth lower, to the exposed part of my breasts. I pulled his fingers off even as I stepped back, separating us.

“The Adhipan won’t wait that long,” I blurted. “...you know what’ll happen...”

It was a lame excuse. I heard it in my voice.

He just looked at me for a moment.

When I didn’t back down, he nodded, his lip curving slightly, but not really in a smile. For a second at least, I actually thought he intended to let me go.

But as soon as I started to pull away, his arm tightened.

That time, he kissed me, drawing me deeper into the curve of his body.

He caught me by surprise, and I found my light opening...enough that his own flared in reaction. Before I could pull my mind back together, his light turned to liquid, flooding mine from the Barrier. It felt utterly different, almost alien, but so familiar I couldn’t think through what it was about it I knew. It did things to mine, connected with mine in ways I’d wanted before, ways I’d tried to coax out of him in our few weeks of real marriage...but couldn’t. I felt that same desperation I’d felt on the boy, mixed with a wanting that felt a lot older.

I was starting to lose awareness...going back into that state I’d fallen into when we’d last been together...

It terrified me.

“Stop!” I shoved him back, hard...using my light, and my hands.

It was my light that did the trick.

It ripped out of me...that sense of folding space, of force originating from somewhere over my head. That part of me slammed into him, without my hands touching his chest.

It forced him toppling and skidding backwards about seven feet.

He regained his balance, hopping on one foot.

I saw him stare at me, his eyes glassy, half-lidded.

Then he blinked, and those clear eyes turned predatory.

“Gods, baby...you have no idea what a hard-on you just gave me...” He took a step closer. “When did you learn to do that? Is it from me?”

I held up a hand. “Revik! Jesus...will you just be reasonable for a minute?”

He took a step closer.

“Do it again,” he said. “Please, Allie...” His voice turned wanting, cajoling, nearly affectionate. Loving, I realized, seeing his face soften.

It felt like being stabbed in the chest, again.

“Stay back!” I said. “Please, Revik...stay back!”

“Allie,” he said. “I have so much I want to show you. Please...just come with me. I’ll give you anything you want. Anything. What are you doing with these worm-lovers, anyway? You belong with me...”

“No, goddamn it!” I held up my hand again, breathing harder. “Revik! Stop it! I know what you’re doing...”

His face hardened. I felt another flush of pain off him, an anger that startled me more for the genuineness I felt behind it.

“Do you?” he growled. “Why don’t you enlighten me, Allie. What am I doing? Besides trying to seduce my wife...who seems to think a fucking political disagreement merits a goddamned divorce...”

I stared at him.

His eyes didn’t waver.

“A political disagreement?” I said, incredulous. “Is that what you’re telling yourself this is?” I fought back another wave of feeling that tried to crush me. I could barely look at his face. “Jesus, Revik...are you telling me that your being here has nothing to do with who I am? Or that if we’re mated, no one on my side would dare try to kill you...?”

“We already are mated, Alyson,” he growled. “Maybe you forgot?”

I shook my head. “You know what I mean.”

“No...I don’t.” His anger flared again. “And you’re lying to me, Allie...maybe to yourself. You know damned well that’s not why I’m here...”

Before I could take a breath, something grabbed hold of me, like invisible arms. It was too strong to fight...and it was over before I realized what was happening.

The gap between us closed in a second.

His physical arms encircled me. By then, I was so lost in his light I couldn’t seem to pull back. He let out a low groan when my light went deeper, and that was so familiar I found myself gripping his arms. When he kissed me that time, I kissed him back, clutching his hair. I realized for the first time it was longer, a well-cut, shaggy black that felt soft as I curled my fingers into it. He pulled me against him, and I felt the boy there again, a near disbelief that I was finally letting him touch me...that I had my hands on him. There was something so vulnerable about that part of him I couldn’t make myself want to push it away.

I wanted him like this.

The realization hurt almost. I hated myself for it; it felt like a betrayal, but it didn’t change anything.

As if he heard me, his pain grew intense again, darkening into that lack. The separation worsened...I felt my control slide away as he groaned again, against my mouth. I felt the boy, stronger than the others. I felt the want behind him, behind the other parts that had been left behind, and it was more than I could stand with my rational mind. I think I would have done anything at that moment to lessen it...anything.

I didn’t remember my feet moving, but suddenly my back was against the wall. He leaned into me, kissing me harder, his hands all over me through the gown, his legs between mine. He paused long enough to look at me again, his eyes glassed.

“Allie,” he said thickly. “Come with me. Come home with me, please, wife...I’ll buy you a dozen dresses...anything you want, Allie...”

“No,” I managed.

One of his hands was under the dress now, holding my leg, holding me against him. His fingers dug deeper into my flesh, even as he met my gaze.

“I want to make love,” he said. “Now, Allie...will you let me?”

I didn’t think about the question long.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you love me?”

I hesitated, staring at his eyes.

When I didn’t answer, pain flared in his light.

That time, it wasn’t separation pain.

He removed his hand from my leg, long enough to grab the front of the dress. He ripped it open, one-handed, and I felt the deliberateness behind that, too. I opened my mouth to protest, but he only kissed me again, harder, and again I felt the boy in it, mixed with that other person, the one who frightened me. His light wound into mine though, and for a moment, I felt him toying with it, experimenting...

Until he found what he wanted.

I let out a choking gasp...his light slid so far into mine I actually came close to losing consciousness. I lost track of where I was.

I ended up in the Barrier, lost with him, in some other place...

When my eyes slowly came back into focus, he was holding me up with one arm, watching my face, his eyes dense, his skin flushed hot. He closed his eyes, longer than a blink, and I realized both of us were sweating. His fingers tightened on my bare back.

“That’s what you wanted from me...” he murmured, kissing me. “Before, in the cabin. That’s what you wanted...isn’t it baby?”

He kissed me harder, his tongue hot in my mouth, and I found myself reacting to the pain coming off him again, the erection that seemed larger when he pressed it against me. He was turned on to the point where all of his muscles had melted, merging into me.

I hadn’t seen him like that since—

“See, love,” he said, softer, cajoling, his voice a caress. “See, it isn’t all bad...I can give that to you now...I can give you what you need...”

I couldn’t speak.

I stared at him though, remembering without my willing it.

It had been our honeymoon, I guess. A seer honeymoon, if it could be called that. The two of us had gone into a kind of sexual trance, which I only found out later was normal...a process of bonding between new mates that usually took weeks, sometimes longer. Despite how foggy I’d been through most of it, I remembered all of it afterwards, every minute between us, from the most embarrassing to the most heart-wrenchingly intimate.

So I knew exactly what he was referencing. I’d wanted something from him, for most of our time together. In fact, I’d wanted it so badly that, at times, I got nearly angry at him when he wouldn’t give it to me.

When I looked up next, he was smiling.

“No,” I said, feeling his thoughts. “No, Revik...it doesn’t change anything.”

Anger flashed in his eyes, but his arm tightened.

He kissed me again, deepening it when I returned it; his hands clenched on my skin. He started playing with my light again, until I moaned against his mouth. I was undressing him then...fumbling with catches on the white tuxedo shirt. His pain worsened when he realized what I was doing; I saw his eyes close, just before he started tugging at the straps of the dress. I looked down at his body as I slid the shirt and jacket off his shoulders, trying to take in the changes on him, how different his chest looked.

Then he was lifting me in his arms, moving the dress out of the way as he began unfastening the front of his pants. I started to help him but he wouldn’t wait for me. Pushing my hands back, he ripped open the zipper and freed his cock, moving the lace underwear I wore aside enough to enter me.

He paused...just long enough to slide his fingers inside me, groaning in a near gasp against my neck when he felt me ready for him.

My mind tried to phase out again...to deny I was doing this.

He removed his hand. He gripped my hair, muscles tensing, still staring at my face...then he maneuvered his way into me, hard.

For a long moment, neither of us moved.

He let out a low sound, almost pleading.

In that moment, I felt him.

I felt Revik...what I still couldn’t help but think of as the real Revik...and it caught me so completely off guard I cried out, clasping his neck. I felt him again, stronger, and I choked...it took me longer to recognize it as a sob, locked so far in me I couldn’t get it out. I was so completely unprepared for feeling him there, especially with him inside me...

I couldn’t control myself when the presence lingered.

He arched into me, as deep as he could, and my fingers clenched his hair.

He didn’t go away. He stayed with me...along with the boy, glimmers of all three. But I held onto the whispers of him, grasping for him in their collective light, chasing the thread like an addict, feeling my light open to his.

I heard him in his voice when he groaned.

“Allie...gods, Allie, I’ve missed you...I’ve missed you...”

“Baby,” I felt tears in my eyes. “...I love you...”

His pain nearly cut me in half.

That deep coil of light found me once more...my vision left me again.

When I came back, his light was still locked into mine, as if opening me up from inside out. He arched into me again, his whole face changing as I gripped his shoulders, moving with him, using my weight, legs and arms. That other part of him slid into me then, the alien, seer part I still hadn’t fully gotten used to...and I opened my light more, heard him cry out in a kind of disbelieving want. I heard the boy in his voice even as his hands tightened, pushing my back against the wall as he slid into me harder.

The image shimmered, breaking apart, but I held onto that lingering thread of him as if my life depended on it. He gripped me tighter, holding me with one arm while he leaned his other hand on the wall beside my face, forcing my body nearly horizontal.

For a really long time after that, I didn’t think at all.

It wouldn’t occur to me until much, much later how much worse this would only make everything.