Knight: Bridge & Sword: Apocalypse (Bridge & Sword Series Book 5) Read online

  Table of Contents

  SYNOPSIS

  PROLOGUE: Day One

  ONE: Bank Job

  TWO: Work Friends

  THREE: Top Floors

  FOUR: Ground Floor

  FIVE: A Quiet Night

  SIX: Man Bait

  SEVEN: The Vault

  EIGHT: Dawn

  NINE: The Wrong Face

  TEN: Plague

  ELEVEN: List

  TWELVE: Smoke Signals

  THIRTEEN: Irrational

  FOURTEEN: Navigating Wreg

  FIFTEEN: Confrontation

  SIXTEEN: Greeted

  SEVENTEEN: Guests

  EIGHTEEN: Ungrat

  NINETEEN: A Different Goal

  TWENTY: Other Lives

  TWENTY-ONE: Death Rituals

  TWENTY-TWO: Revelations

  TWENTY-THREE: Familiar Face

  TWENTY-FOUR: Pow-Wow

  TWENTY-FIVE: New Digs

  TWENTY-SIX: Marked

  TWENTY-SEVEN: Dante

  TWENTY-EIGHT: Underfoot

  TWENTY-NINE: Training

  THIRTY: Rank 1, Tech

  THIRTY-ONE: Pulling Rank

  THIRTY-TWO: Sacrifice

  THIRTY-THREE: Happy

  THIRTY-FOUR: Meeting

  THIRTY-FIVE: Crossover

  THIRTY-SIX: Clothes

  THIRTY-SEVEN: Compliments

  THIRTY-EIGHT: Date

  THIRTY-NINE: Ritual

  FORTY: Cakes

  FORTY-ONE: Morning After

  FORTY-TWO: A Different Room

  FORTY-THREE: New Plan

  FORTY-FOUR: Offensive

  FORTY-FIVE: Team One

  FORTY-SIX: Quarantine

  FORTY-SEVEN: Fulton Street

  FORTY-EIGHT: House Party

  KNIGHT

  Bridge & Sword Series #5

  “Apocalypse”

  by

  JC Andrijeski

  Copyright © 2017 by JC Andrijeski

  Published by White Sun Press

  Cover Art & Design by Damonza.com

  2017

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an official retailer for the work and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  SYNOPSIS for Knight

  "I thought the two of you were scary individually..."

  Plagued by prescient-seeming nightmares and with hostile seers hot on their trail, Allie sets up camp in New York, along with Revik and the remnants of their seer alliance.

  Not long after they arrive, a human-killing virus strikes San Francisco and Allie's loved ones start to disappear. Fending off attacks by the Lao Hu and the mysterious Shadow, Allie and Revik are forced to make impossible choices as they learn how to work together again.

  Meanwhile, Allie’s brother, Jon, seems to be going through some big changes of his own as he and the ex-rebel, Wreg, work to find humans on a list marking them as important in the coming Displacement.

  Dedicated to Cindy B.

  Prologue

  DAY ONE

  SHE WALKED UP to the night shift guard and flashed her badge, gripping the handle of the leather briefcase she carried. The human glanced up from his portable monitor long enough to give her legs a good, hard stare, but not much longer.

  Giving her photo ID a perfunctory glance, he grunted, hitting the large red button on the console beside his chair to let her through, using the edge of one meaty hand. Even then, he noticed more about the way her cream-colored sweater hugged her upper body than he did the miraged piece of plastic she showed him.

  The door buzzed, unlocking with a click.

  She started to put her hand on the blood prick for the DNA scan, but he waved her off.

  “Go on through, doc.” His eyes returned to the portable monitor. “Thing’s on the fritz.”

  Sometimes these worms made it too easy.

  With a toss of her dyed blonde hair and another small smile, she walked through the open gate. Long, organic, blast-proof but transparent sliding doors opened in the main building ahead of her, letting in two EMTs with a gurney, one of whom paused to speak with an ER doc who came out to meet an ambulance.

  It was four o’clock in the morning.

  For most of the hospital, it was the witching hour, eerie in its silence.

  Wards had only one or two nurses on duty, possibly a tech working several floors at once. Only the ED, ICU and obstetrics had patients and visitors likely to be waiting through the night, most of the latter dozing uncomfortably on wooden-frame chairs or sprawled on the floor, covered in their own jackets.

  The woman in the cream-colored sweater entered through the basement.

  The lab lived down there, as did storage, x-rays, durable medical equipment and physical therapy. Comprised of the odds and ends of maintenance and administration, its mostly daytime staff had emptied a good ten hours before. She passed doors, ticking off areas of the map from her seer’s photographic memory: storage, server room for the hospital’s networked system, generators, janitorial supplies, groundskeeping.

  The floor wasn’t totally deserted. She raised her badge to several desk clerks as she passed through the dimly-lit corridors.

  Most barely glanced at it.

  She wore an organic knife on her inner arm under the lab coat, in case she had to get through by force, but she never came close to needing it.

  The seer slid her badge through a sensor lock to the right of one of the heavier maintenance doors, well past the last security desk. She kept her thoughts light, a feather touch, leaving only the mechanics of her feet moving as she entered through the gray-painted door.

  A turn of her head, the brushing back of her long hair, the concentrated putting on of surgical gloves after she removed them carefully from her pockets, blowing on each opening at the wrists––every movement remained discrete, mindless, unattached to her purpose.

  Despite the protection the construct afforded her, she couldn’t afford to get sloppy.

  Once the panic started, infiltrators from Seer Containment, or SCARB, would scour every millisecond of the Barrier records before and after the event. Her patrón did not wish to offer any information that might aid them in understanding the motives or means behind the event.

  He certainly did not wish to offer any clues regarding the identity of those behind it––especially since he intended to lay the blame elsewhere.

  Unlocking the vent covering leading to the primary ventilation shaft, she set her briefcase at her feet. It took only a few seconds more to remove the cover itself.

  Three identical-looking shafts stood at the other three corners of the room.

  Two led to the air conditioning system, the other two, to the heater housed in the same sub-basement. She didn’t let herself think consciously about this––nor about the water distribution system, which took up most of the center of the room, looking oddly anachronistic with its turn-wheel hubs and blue and white painted pipes.

  Once she had the vent cover propped against the wall, she squatted smoothly, setting the locked, leather briefcase on the cement floor, the handle facing towards her. The flow of air through the ventilation shaft grew louder without the cover to mute the sound, but given the white-static hums, clicks and gurgles fr
om air ducts and water distribution, the additional noise barely registered in the overall noise of the room.

  Using both a Barrier key and a physical one, she unlocked the leather briefcase.

  Inside sat four vials of midnight blue liquid and what looked like a small bottle of hairspray. Each fit neatly inside a cut-foam indentation matching its exact size and shape. She took out the hairspray-looking bottle and broke the plastic seal.

  Instinctively, she held her breath, although she knew her DNA rendered her immune to the deadly agent.

  Aiming the nozzle into the ventilation shaft, she squeezed off four healthy sprays.

  Replacing the canister inside its foam cut-out, she re-attached the ventilation cover and moved on to the next.

  It was brilliant, really, initiating contamination before the air reached the scrubbers on the higher floors. They would assume contamination occurred elsewhere, if they made a connection with the mechanics of the hospital at all, and didn’t attempt to trace it back to a specific patient or ward. By the time they figured out the scrubbers were useless against the engineered contaminant, it would be too late.

  She moved from corner to corner, working silently.

  In the foreground of her mind, a clutch of song lyrics got caught in a loop. She let them remain, filling her dead-thought space.

  By the time she spun the handle on the first wheel to open the connecting point to three of the main water pipes, the seer hummed along with that recollected tune.

  By the time she closed the valve, placing the first of the empty vials carefully in a plastic bag and locking it back inside the foam indentation at the bottom of the case, she sang aloud, albeit softly and under her breath.

  "Never fire and back to earth…

  We taste it, feel it, pretend we don’t.

  The time has come, and their end, too.

  It comes hard, not soft,

  And She does, too.

  But the wheel has turned, and so’ve I.

  And now we’ll bring the End of Times…”

  “My heart was broken long ago…

  Too far back, the elders know.

  The books are dust, the prophets dead.

  Our time won’t come before the end…”

  1

  BANK JOB

  HE SAID HE’D never robbed a bank before.

  I believed him. For some reason, it still struck me as sort of funny, though.

  After all, my husband, Dehgoies Revik, a.k.a., Syrimne, a.k.a., Syrimne d’Gaos, a.k.a., Sword, was like, public enemy number one to the humans.

  His name and stats held a place of honor on every law enforcement feed in the United States, as well as those in Europe, South America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, Canada. While he’d been active, Seer Containment and the World Court had whole departments devoted to him.

  Luckily, most of those same law enforcement agencies currently thought he was dead.

  They thought I’d killed him.

  “Alyson… d’gaos.”

  He pulled away from my fingers, averting his gaze when I gave him a quizzical look. Seeing the hardness come over his features, I retracted my hands, fighting not to react to his light sparking and sliding behind the shield he’d constructed to keep it from me.

  If we weren’t bonded, I might not have felt it at all. As it was, the shield only served to frustrate me.

  It also made me want to touch him even more.

  “What?” I said, flushing. “What did I do?”

  I lowered my hands to my sides, open-palmed. I didn’t think about it being a seer gesture until I saw his eyes follow my fingers, right before he clenched his jaw.

  “What did I do?” I said, that time in English.

  Looking away from me deliberately, he focused on his reflection in the mirror, shaking his head. “Nothing. You didn’t do anything.”

  My cheeks grew hotter. “Well, I must have done something.”

  Glancing over his shoulder, he clicked at me softly, raising an eyebrow.

  Without speaking, he finished doing what I’d started to do for him. Hooking the straps of his vest on either side of his ribs with his fingers, he tightened them with two quick pulls, bringing the organic armor flush against his body. I couldn’t help but notice he was wearing the ring I’d given him, the one that belonged to my adoptive human father, now deceased.

  He gave both straps an additional tug before he locked them in place around his ribcage on either side.

  “I can’t exactly deal with you doing that right now,” he said, glancing at me.

  “I was dressing you,” I said, exasperated. “Not un-dressing you.”

  His jaw tightened, but he smiled a little when he glanced back at the mirror.

  “My light can’t always tell the difference, wife.”

  I snorted, but I’m not sure it was a real laugh.

  His eyes remained on the mirror as he donned a black shoulder harness over the armor, putting it on like another vest. I watched him velcro it in place. Glancing back, he looked over my similar outfit, handing me a few more magazines off the metal shelf.

  “Do you have a coat?” he said.

  I patted the one I’d laid on the metal table behind him.

  He looked it over, then gave a single nod of approval.

  I still saw a faint worry in his eyes. It vanished in a matter of seconds. He bounced lightly on his heels then, and I wondered if he even knew he was doing it. My smile stole a bit wider when I saw him going through another pile of ammunition, his eyes concentrated.

  I’d never met anyone who enjoyed field ops as much as he did.

  Not even his first lieutenant, Wreg, another career military infiltrator, got as turned on by the thought of conducting a live op as Revik did. He tried to hide it around me, but I knew the signs. I’d seen them when he was Syrimne, living in those mountains with the Rebels, and I could clearly see them now.

  If anything, it was more obvious now.

  Now, everything I saw was 100% Revik. I could read his subtler expressions again, too, and he looked taut as a bowstring to me, despite the neutral mask he wore.

  What I saw definitely wasn’t fear.

  He looked charged, almost happy, despite our odd back and forths that still seemed to happen whenever we were alone. Seeing him like that, so open and so himself, made it really hard not to touch him. But I’d been having that problem for weeks.

  Forcing my eyes off him, I glanced around the underground storage room.

  We were in the basement of a five-star Manhattan hotel called The House on the Hill. It was named after the Old House in Seertown, India, a relic from pre-First Contact that was one of the oldest known seer-made buildings to have survived the current age. Most humans, however, thought the hotel got its name from its location at the top of Fifth Avenue.

  Then again, most humans didn’t know the hotel was wholly owned and operated by seers, more than half of them living off the grid.

  The House on the Hill had become our home base over the past few months, and while I was pretty comfortable here by now, it still struck me as a strange place to hide, even when hiding in plain sight, like we were now.

  Revik muttered, “He’s going to blame me, you know.”

  I looked over. “Who is?”

  He grunted. “Who do you think?”

  Thinking about this, I snorted a laugh. “You mean Balidor? No… he won’t. Not hardly. Are you kidding me? They already think I’m corrupting you.”

  Revik turned at my words, his face holding an unfeigned surprise. His German accent strengthened. “Corrupting me? What does that mean? Who thinks this?”

  I gestured vaguely, stuffing the magazines he handed me into a zippered pocket on the vest I wore. “All of them.”

  “All of who?”

  I sighed, touching his arm before I’d thought about what I was doing.

  I took my hand away when I felt him flinch.

  “All of them. Balidor. Vash. Wreg even gave me a ‘tal
king to’ the other day.”

  “Wreg did? About what?”

  Revik glanced over as he pulled out another gun, checking the magazine and then the chamber once he’d slammed the full magazine back home. I recognized the gun; it was one of his Desert Eagles. He must have brought that one down from his room.

  When I didn’t answer right away, he nudged me with his shoulder.

  “Allie?”

  I sighed, tightening the band holding back my hair.

  “Both Wreg and ‘Dori told me to lay off you,” I admitted. “They think I’m taking advantage of you… of your ‘condition’ right now, especially given the consort training I got under the Lao Hu. They’ve both said, in different ways, that you’re too vulnerable to me right now, and that what I’ve been doing, even just by hanging around you so much, isn’t cool.” Thinking, I snorted again. “Only with Wreg, I’m not sure what he was telling me to do… if he was telling me to leave you alone, or do something else.”

  Revik continued to look at me, then glanced down at the gun he still held in his hand. Pushing the safety into place with his thumb, he flipped it around with his fingers and passed it to me, handle-first.

  He watched me slide it into a thigh-holster.

  His stare lingered on my legs, even after I had the gun in place.

  Realizing I was watching him look, he glanced away, frowning as he slid his arms into the long coat he’d brought, flipping it around his back. He pulled it over his chest to cover the armor and the holster. I watched him yank it down until it settled on his shoulders.

  “Anyway,” I said, forcing my eyes off him. “My point is, they’ll definitely blame me, not you. Besides, it is my fault. You really think I’d let you take the fall for this?”

  He shrugged, casual. “And what about you? What do you think?”

  I looked over, frowning. “What do I think? Of course it’s my fault. I just said so.”