He looked at me. His eyes held the same expression they had that morning in Seattle.
Even as I thought it, he shook his head.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said.
His voice was hollow, lost-sounding.
Whispers of that other place remained, pulling at his light and mine; I felt him wrestle with it, forcing it out of his light only to be compelled to look at it again. Pain wafted off him, for the first time in weeks, and he didn’t seem to be trying to hide it from me. Without thinking beyond a vague desire to reassure him, I reached for him, touching his face, pausing to finger his longer black hair back behind one ear.
He jerked from the caress, but afterwards he stared at me.
His eyes flickered to my mouth, lingered there.
For an instant, just an instant, he hesitated. Then I saw his eyes change. They grew openly angry...just before the light in them died.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said again. His voice roughened. “I want to sever us. Do you understand me, Alyson?”
I didn’t understand, not really. But he waited for an answer.
“I think so,” I said. “I mean, I—”
“Will you agree to it?”
“I don’t really know what...” I trailed, seeing his eyes harden to glass. I softened my voice. “Yeah, sure. Whatever you want, Revik.”
“Good.” He nodded, once. “Thank you.”
Without waiting, he regained his feet. For a moment he only stood there, over me, as if catching his breath. Then he moved, stepping around me to reach the stateroom door.
He opened it without hesitating, without a backwards glance.
I saw him murmur something to the guard, too low for me to hear, and probably in a language I didn’t know. The man standing there stared first at him, as though he didn’t quite believe what he’d heard, then at me, his expression openly bewildered. The guard continued to stare at me, his eyes a near question, when Revik’s voice sharpened, bringing his eyes back to him. As I’d suspected, Revik didn’t speak Prexci, but something else...one of the languages he hadn’t decided to teach me.
Eventually, the guard stammered a reply, bowing to him.
I watched Revik slip around the guard an instant later and disappear.
After a last, piercing look from the guard himself, the door closed.
I heard the lock glide into the wall with a soft click.
Through all of it, the stares and Revik’s anger, it slowly sank into my awareness that something had just happened...something decidedly more than one of our bantering back and forth bickering matches, or even the fight around Kat in Seattle. Even knowing this, I found I couldn’t move, or think really, not at first. I could only sit there, fighting to control whatever rose in me at his absence.
But I knew. Maybe I’d known for weeks now.
I was in love with him. Like, really in love with him.
Clearly, that wasn’t going to work for him, either.
Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, Magic
18
BETRAYAL
Terian studies the construct, mesmerized.
Like all constructs, the images that obfuscate the border between it and the Barrier proper contain some flickering of truth. Like now, they show a monolithic parade of living stills that coalesce around certain themes despite how quickly they morph and change. Water figures in abundance of course; given their mode of transport, that is hardly surprising. The construct flashes with waterfalls, waves, cracking ice in metal trays, rivers and streams gushing over dark stones, puddles on city streets, saliva, sweat, tide pools, rain.
Terian recognizes some of these images from providing light to Dehgoies in the past.
Others must belong to Alyson, or one of the Seven’s Guard, whose lights watch over the edges of the construct walls.
Terian has studied the construct for days.
It takes that long to notice differences in the ripples of light. Now he knows the rhythms and moods of its normal state, as well as the range of its oscillations.
Therefore, when a shift occurs in those rhythms, even a relatively small one, he cannot help but taste the new flavor, the faint whisper of something he hasn’t felt before within the churning pulse. The difference weaves into water and ice and cold night skies. The change is subtle, but distinct enough that Terian picks it out before it can be reabsorbed.
A flicker of warmth greets him, a fleeting image of limbs entwined, clouding breath and glowing eyes, gone as soon as he catches the scent.
He has felt masturbation before this, of course.
There are over twelve seers inhabiting this particular construct. Only a few of those seers are female, including the Bridge. Even fewer of them are currently having sex.