New York: Allie's War, Early Years

Again, I tried to let him know through the gag exactly how I felt about that.

He smiled down at me once more, his eyes reflecting firelight.

"Yours is the blood that will aid us the most," he added. "Unfortunately, we have been unable to identify you precisely ...but we have it narrowed to a number of second-tier deities..." He smiled wider, leaning over me once more. "We found more of your people incarnated down here than we expected. We had been told the number would be approximately five first-tier souls prior to the arrival of the Bridge. But the texts we'd been referencing were wrong. We found exactly nine intermediaries with identifiable physiological traits..."

Once more, the smile grew almost affectionate, condescendingly benign.

"...We chose you, Alyson, because you were one of the few we could identify, almost without doubt, as not being one of the Four. In fact, your absence seemed the least likely to cause problems in general. You were isolated from others of your kind. Young. Relatively unattached. Doing nothing of real significance with your life..."

His smile grew a touch colder.

"...And, quite frankly," he added. "You were convenient. We identified only one other intermediary in North America from medical files, and that individual proved to be extremely difficult to track. Most of your kind were living in Asia...understandably, I suppose...and in places we couldn't easily travel. You were in a stationary location, tied into the official network, so easy to monitor and observe. You appeared to be entirely untrained as a seer. Your visit to New York presented as the perfect opportunity..."

Again, I could only stare at him, trying to blink my way past the residuals of the drug he'd pumped into my neck, watching the fire as I tried to make sense of his words, trying to find something in them that might help me.

But I couldn't even talk to him anymore, so all I did was shake my head.

"I'm not a seer!" I said through the gag.

I shook my head harder, maybe because 'no' was the only thing that made sense to me right then, and I doubted he could understand me through the gag.

"For the thousandth, millionth, billionth time," I said. "... I'm not a seer...!"

The man must have understood at least part of this, because he smiled at me benignly again. Something in the joyful spark I saw in his eyes made me flinch. He looked at me like the two of us were sharing some fantastic secret together.

The expression made me want to hurt him. Physically, I mean.

And not only because I was watching tongues of flame work their way slowly down the lighter-fluid soaked logs that led to my skin.