She was more seer now, he could feel it.
Pushing the thought from his mind, he downshifted in front of the wooden hotel sign hanging from the edge of a steep, slate-tile roof. Bringing the snowmobile to a slow stop where it wouldn’t hang out in the faint outline of road, he stepped on the foot brake, turning the wheel to wedge the tires into a line of rocks.
He turned off the engine. The silence once he had was strangely disorienting. All he could hear was the wind through the thick glass, and the faint squeak of the chain holding the sign from the roof overhead.
“Hey, Revik,” Cass said, watching him pull the keys out of the ignition.
“What, Cass?” he said, not looking over.
“I’m sorry about what I said.”
He glanced at her. She looked timid, lost inside the bundle of blanket and scarf. She touched his arm with her bony hand, and he flinched a little, feeling the emotion behind the gesture.
“I just don’t get it, I guess. You seem like one of the good guys.”
Looking at her, he felt his fingers grip the steering wheel, still holding the keys. He glanced at Jon and saw the male human looking at him, too.
Revik exhaled shortly, rubbing his face with a gloved hand.
“There is nothing to get, Cass,” he said. He met her gaze, his jaw hard once more. “...And I’m not that good.”
Jon spoke up, surprising him.
“Do you love her?” he said.
Revik looked at him. Focusing back down on his hands, he watched the leather crinkle around his fingers. After another moment, he exhaled again.
“I love her,” he said. He nodded, half-surprised he’d said it. “Yes.”
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. When he glanced up next, Cass smiled at him. Jon clapped him on the shoulder with his good hand, shaking him lightly in the same gesture. A faint smile tugged at his lips.
“All right.” He smiled wider, tugging at his shoulder a little harder, to get Revik to look at him. “Come on, man. Let’s find that shower.”
Watching Cass fumble with the door handle, Revik nodded, wiping his face before he turned to do the same.
Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, Magic
27
LONDON
I aimed my body down a London street, scanning faces.
I took in buildings as well, and the occasional car as we strolled past yet another wooded park, a different park from the one we’d first passed as we’d left the tube station.
I stopped at a newsstand and stared blankly at the morphing feed headlines blaring from a monitor over the stand window. My eyes took in the actual words beats later, which went something like this:#p#分页标题#e#
“NEW SYRIMNE KILLS 28 IN PAKISTAN BOMB BLAST! TERRORIST PLOT LINKED TO CHINA!”
Even after months of travel and India, I still commanded the front page.
I read details as they ran out under the headlines. Apparently I was believed dead again, I noted. I was still reading about how I’d died when Maygar came up from behind me and took my arm none too gently in his thick fingers. He led me down a street lined with white houses that looked to me like they’d been torn from the pages of a London storybook.
Flags from different countries flapped over our heads.
A limo slid by with tinted, bullet-proof glass and small square flags on the front of its hood, too, then another flanked by military police.
It struck me as interesting that Maygar had brought me here, where representatives from at least a dozen countries seemed to have taken up residence, most of whom would pay top dollar to see me collared and stuck in the back of a windowless van.
Still, it was pretty, where we were.
The park flourished in the background, dense with green, filled with strolling men in suits who held the arms of women wearing hats and gloves, giving it a strangely timeless feel. I looked down at my own hands, which were dyed darker than my normal skin tone. My stubby nails made me look like a drug addict, or some kind of street kid. Touching the silver chain necklace I wore around my neck, I shoved those same hands into my pockets.
For the plane ride over, the seers used everything but surgery to disguise my appearance. I flew out of Kolkata wearing facial implants, skin dye, blood patches on all my fingers in the event of a random racial screening, colored contact lenses, a wig, a hat, several scarves. My fingerprints and DNA matched my ident, which was that of an East Indian woman traveling for business with her merchant husband.
My current attempt to blend was a bit more West than East, and consisted of men’s mirrored sunglasses and a hoodie. Pretty low-tech, but surprisingly effective against the street-level facial recognition software employed by cameras that dotted most London public areas.