“There you go. Yet another colosseum to add to the map,” Hunter said, smirking. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“You and me both,” I replied. “At this rate, they’ll be occupying a planet per day, once they triple their numbers. It’s completely terrifying.”
“We’ll stop them,” he said, trying to reassure me.
I did my best not to make eye contact with Hunter, but I failed in the end, and found myself sinking into those deep blue pools of his. The moonlight made them seem brighter. Or maybe it was just my perception. Either way, it was mesmerizing, and I had no idea how to get myself to look away.
He didn’t move, and my heart crept up in my throat, making it harder to breathe. Despite the dizzying rush of blood coursing through my veins at lightning speed, I set my mind to carrying out my earlier decision. It was now or never, since I didn’t know if or when I’d get another moment alone with Hunter. Privacy was in short supply these days.
I inched closer. Hunter was still, refusing to take his eyes off me.
I felt my lips part, slowly. His gaze then dropped for a second, before moving back to my eyes. There were only a couple of inches left between us, and I could feel the air thicken the closer I got to him.
This is it, Kale. If we do this, you’ll know where you stand.
I took a deep breath, then almost felt my lips touch his. But contact never came.
Hunter pulled back, breathing heavily.
Oh, crap. This is awkward.
I felt as though I’d been set on fire, and not in the good way, but rather the my-dream-of-being-naked-in-class is real kind of way. I would’ve loved for the cliff to just crack open and swallow me whole in that instant.
“Oh-kay…” I murmured, then looked down, fixing my gaze on a lower section of the rock. I had to get away, and fast, before I died of embarrassment.
“Kale, I’m sorry,” Hunter replied, his voice lower than usual. Blue fires burned in his eyes, but his voice felt cold. “I didn’t realize you… I didn’t know you’d want to…”
“Hey, man, it’s cool. Don’t sweat it,” I said, doing my best impression of a cool chick and failing miserably. My entire body was shaking like a leaf in the wind.
“No, I… I’m sorry. I just… I don’t want to do something that would hurt our friendship, Kale. We’ve known each other since we were kids, and we should really think things through before we attempt to take things further. I’m sorry.”
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, now. If he hasn’t, then what’s the point in “taking things further,” anyway?
I nodded briefly, then exhaled. “I told you. No worries. Bad move. Won’t happen again. All cool.”
I sounded like a broken ice machine, the words practically crackling and falling out of me with no emotion whatsoever. I’d put myself in a very vulnerable spot. It was a good thing that I didn’t mention my feelings, though—I was already friend-zoned. Absolutely no point in telling him I’m in love with him now.
The train had already left, and I’d just gotten into the station. The emptiness of losing something I’d never had in the first place, but wholeheartedly wanted hit me hard.
“Kale. You should’ve said something—”
“Dude. It’s fine. Forget it.” I cut him off, then teleported myself the hell out of there.
I found myself standing on a stony ledge about twenty feet above my crew’s campsite. The wind rustled through the trees and brushed my hair with its invisible fingers. I welcomed its coolness, inhaling the fresh, slightly salty air and wondering why my chest hurt so badly.
Maybe I wasn’t good at handling rejection.
Or maybe I’d expected a different reaction. Either way, it didn’t matter. I had to convince myself that it didn’t matter. I had an answer from Hunter, though clearly not the answer I’d been hoping for. It hurt, but I had to keep going.
One less thing to focus on, as the mission and our survival came first.
But still, it hurt.
Elonora
We settled around the small campfire, after I checked the area. There were several Faulties on the northern beachside, but they were moving east, scuttling along the shoreline and nervously looking over their shoulders. They, too, were trying to keep a low profile. Other than that, we were relatively safe on a three-mile radius.
Samael, Rasmus, and Leah warmed up by the fire, while Ben and Rose went over the map to determine the remaining part of our journey. Nevis was sitting next to me, and that made me feel nervous, in a way that made my skin tingle and my heart skip the occasional beat. It made it harder for me to concentrate, especially with Douma sitting on a rock next to Dmitri and watching us intently.
Her aura was surprisingly calm, despite her stern look. She seemed curious and frustrated—the latter mainly because of the extra-charmed cuffs. Kailani had definitely done a number on her, and the Perfect didn’t like it.
“We’ve got another thirty miles left,” Rose said. “So far, it’s been smooth. Better than our previous expeditions, actually.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t hold my breath for the rest of it to be equally uneventful,” Amane replied. “I can sense some Perfects. Not close enough to cause a problem, but there’s a chance we might bump into them at some point.”
“I didn’t see anything,” I said, frowning.
“You wouldn’t,” Amane said. “They’re still miles away, but constantly tickling my senses. They’re either going to inadvertently cross paths with us, or, worst-case scenario, they’re following us.”
Zeriel chuckled softly. “Hey, this is as good as it gets in this place, clearly. Let’s be thankful we got this far without having to fight tooth and nail, and hope we won’t bump into them farther north.”
“I miss the old days.” Samael sighed, poking the glowing embers with a long stick and releasing a puff of amber sparks in the air. “Before the Perfects. Before everything. It was just us and Ta’Zan, and we were enough, you know?”
“Yeah, but, in hindsight, we were pretty limited, don’t you think?” Leah replied. “Frankly, as crappy as this nomadic lifestyle can get, I’m not sure I’d cope with life in one of those glass colosseums. Not with the Perfects breathing down our necks and kicking us in the head every other hour.”
“So, you don’t miss it like Samael does? Living with Ta’Zan, I mean,” I asked.
Leah put on a faint half-smile, exchanging glances with Samael and Rasmus. “I don’t think it’s real—what Samael misses, what we’ve convinced ourselves that we’re also missing. It was just an illusion. The more time I spend out here, the more certain I am that what we had before was not the best, at all. In fact, I find myself siding with Kallisto now. Being around you guys is kind of an eye-opener.”
“That’s a good thing, I hope,” Rose replied, smiling.
Leah nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. Absolutely. I feel as though I’m seeing the entire world with different eyes,” she explained. “You see, life before the Perfects was definitely much simpler. First and foremost, we had a home and a leader. That gave us a sense of balance and structure. Now that we’re out here, we’re tempted to miss it, but we’re forgetting that Ta’Zan was never going to teach us anything. He was never going to give us any kind of independence. He only wanted us to depend on him, for everything.”
Samael let out a long and heavy sigh. “She has a point,” he murmured. “I spent years prior to the stasis convincing myself that what we had was everything, and that we weren’t going to get anything better. It made me feel a little empty on the inside, but I still kept going, because, like I said, there wasn’t anything else for me. Things are different now.”
“At first, I suppose we couldn’t cope with the sudden change,” Rasmus added. “Out of nowhere, we were left behind, aimless and leaderless. Our father abandoned us, and that hurt. The more time we spent out here in the wilderness, the more difficult it felt. We lacked purpose. We didn’t have a home. Then, we did the logical thing:
we tried looking for our father. We tried to get back home.”
“Until we realized, upon meeting you, that we’d never really had a home in the first place,” Leah said. “We might’ve imagined it. We might’ve wanted it so badly from day one, that we convinced ourselves it was there, with Ta’Zan. But it wasn’t. Accepting that conclusion wasn’t easy, but you guys helped us. Right now, I’m just angry to have been under his control for so long. For calling him ‘Father’ when all he saw in us was servitude. For trusting him to teach us anything, when all he did was keep us in the dark. No wonder we were so taken aback by the Perfects. They came out so beautiful and shiny and wonderful that it made us look like worthless worms. And our ‘father’ didn’t do a damn thing to make us feel better or less threatened.”
“He didn’t care, Leah,” Kallisto replied.
“Yeah. I know that now,” she said, staring at the fire. “Looking back, I do miss the ignorance and simplicity of life before the stasis. Knowledge doesn’t necessarily make a person happy, that much I’m sure of. I think we all miss the ignorance, the not knowing how crappy Ta’Zan really is as an actual father,” she added, chuckling. “Had it not been for the plague, I think we’d still be in the same place.”
Amane shook her head. “That’s nonsense. The so-called plague didn’t do much but keep Ta’Zan from moving forward faster with his plans. I told you, sooner or later he was going to figure out a way to get out and find more specimens for his experiments. He never stopped looking.”
“What do you mean by ‘so-called plague’?” Ridan asked, frowning slightly. “Wasn’t it an actual plague?”
Amane stilled, then cleared her throat and nodded. “Yes. It was a plague. We just never had a formal name for it, for the disease itself,” she murmured.
Personally, I wasn’t convinced. The streaks of yellow in her aura spoke of fear, but I knew she wouldn’t tell us anything more at this point. She could easily disappear again if we poked her too hard, and we needed her on our side, now more than ever. However, I knew I couldn’t leave her like this. Sooner or later, Amane would tell us everything she’d been hiding—because no one was stupid enough to show all their cards to strangers right away, in the very first game.
And this was a dangerous round we were playing now, where loyalties were delicate and easily broken. Nevertheless, I knew that we just had to keep going at it, had to stay strong and forge ahead until we succeeded. It was either that or death.
I noticed Kallisto standing behind Amane with her arms crossed and her gaze fixed on the Faulty. She’d heard the entire conversation, from what I could tell, and she was definitely suspicious.
“Hey, Kale, I thought you were keeping watch up there,” I said, giving her a faint smile.
“I left Hunter on his own. Not enough room for the both of us up there,” she replied, then took a seat by the fire, next to Ben and Rose. She didn’t take her eyes off Amane, though. She’d definitely caught that “so-called plague” part, and she was as intrigued as I was.
Upon a more thorough analysis of our group, I saw Kallisto’s emotions shifting as well. There was a sliver of doubt flashing through her whenever she looked at Amane. I decided to talk to Kallisto later, preferably when Amane wasn’t around. I had a feeling she suspected something, too, and, from what I could tell, it was related to the viral infection that had wiped the Draenir out completely.
“Leah is right,” Rasmus said. “Life was simpler before the plague. We were just less informed, but still.”
“Ignorance is bliss, huh?” Ben replied, the corner of his mouth twitching.
Rasmus laughed lightly. “That is the perfect way to describe it, yes! It was simple, though! Until the Draenir started coming around, desperate for a cure. It was strange. They got some of our brothers and sisters sick. We couldn’t even bury them. We had to burn the bodies to stop the plague from spreading. It was highly contagious.”
“They got so desperate at one point, they became vicious and violent. We had to kill them on sight,” Leah added. “Rasmus was on the front line there, taking them down and setting them on fire. Our little town was constantly surrounded by hastily built funeral pyres. The skies were black for days on end. I can still smell the burning flesh, sometimes.”
“But why did they think Ta’Zan could cure them?” Rose asked.
“Amal and I were working with Ta’Zan on a cure, but nothing we came up with seemed to help,” Amane replied. “That was before Ta’Zan took us away, though. He said there was no hope for the Draenir, and that the best we could all do was to get as far away from them as possible, so we wouldn’t get infected, too. The virus latched on to the Draenir gene, and we all had that. We were all vulnerable.”
“So, what? The Draenir didn’t take no for an answer?” I asked.
She nodded slowly. “Pretty much. They were convinced that Ta’Zan was keeping something from them. Every night, they banged on the gates of our new village, shouting and begging Ta’Zan to help them. They even accused him of getting them sick in the first place, but that idea didn’t have a leg to stand on. The virus could kill him and us, too. He never would’ve released something that would be lethal to him and his creations.”
She didn’t seem convinced by the last part of that statement, but that was something I was only able to deduce from the threads of doubt in her aura. I became more and more convinced that she was holding something back, and I made it my mission to get it out of her, one way or another.
“Even in our new home, far away from the Draenir cities, we tried to find a cure,” Amane continued. “Amal and I snuck out into the woods, our mouths and noses covered so we wouldn’t inhale anything that could have been released by the Draenir’s corpses. We collected tissue and blood samples, then brought them back to the lab and experimented with a variety of potential cures. Nothing worked. It was actually weird. We’d never come across a strain as resistant as that, ever.”
Kallisto grunted, pursing her lips. “Definitely weird. Even I remember how the Draenir had once been the greatest scientific minds. They developed all kinds of viruses and fungal infections. I remember Father tasked me and a few other Faulties with sneaking into one of the Draenir facilities and stealing as many vials and samples as we could, because he wanted to work with them on his genetic experiments. I didn’t understand why or how he could do that, but I obeyed and retrieved all the samples he needed. Thing is, once I was inside the Draenir labs and had checked their storage freezers, I noticed that they had hundreds of different viruses, each with a cure already designed. Whatever killed the Draenir was not among the strains I saw in there, for sure.”
Ben sucked in a breath, his eyes wide as he looked at Amane. “From your observations, did the Draenir virus behave like a naturally formed single strain, or was it some kind of hybrid?”
“Definitely a hybrid, but I never managed to identify all the strains it had come from. You see, viruses can mix and match in order to survive,” Amane explained. “They don’t need to be tweaked in a lab to become even more powerful. In this case, Amal and I figured it had taken some years for the Draenir virus to get to that level.”
“Anyway, they’re all gone now, other than the four he’s got stashed in his lab,” Samael concluded.
“Whoa! Wait, what?!” I croaked. “Are you telling me there are four Draenir still living?”
Glancing around, I noticed everyone else was as shocked as I was.
Samael sighed. “Despite Ta’Zan’s efforts, despite the pleas and constant harassment, the species is gone. I’m not sure why they matter to you or anyone else now. He won’t even let the four he has reproduce. He sterilized them.”
“They matter to us,” Nevis replied, the sound of his voice warming me up on the inside. “They were a brilliant people, from what we’ve learned so far. It’s always a tragedy when so many creatures are lost. Besides, it’s very important for us to understand everything that happened up to the stasis. The more insight we can get into Ta’Zan, the
better we can prepare and plan to move against him.”
Ta’Zan was different, unlike any other hostile force we’d ever dealt with. Rose was right. The more we knew about him, the better and more accurately we could anticipate his decisions and actions going forward. We were going to delve deep into enemy territory once we got to Raphael. Every little detail about Ta’Zan and his previous tactics could shed light on his future moves and could help us prepare for an infiltration and extraction mission.
The more I thought about it, the more determined I was to save this planet. None of the living creatures of Strava, not even the arrogant and murderous Perfects, deserved to be obliterated by our GASP alliance simply because of Ta’Zan. That was, of course, provided we stopped them from taking flight and attacking nearby planets. Either way, Ta’Zan was the core of the problem, and every piece of information we could gather was going to be useful at some point.
Dmitri
The entire conversation slowly moved into the background for me, as I found myself increasingly hypnotized by Douma’s presence. I was extremely alarmed by the way she made me feel, but I couldn’t control it. It was wrong. She was the enemy, and she wouldn’t have hesitated to bag me up and deliver me to Ta’Zan if she had the chance. Still, I couldn’t get my heart to beat slower.
The best I could do was ride it out and stay focused on what lay ahead. My brother was still missing, and my grandparents were prisoners in Ta’Zan’s compound. Douma wasn’t going to help us find any of them, and we couldn’t leave her behind. So, the only thing we could do was drag her around with us.
For some reason, I was still stuck with guard duty, and no one was in a rush to relieve me. On one hand, I could’ve used a break to clear my head, as physically far away from her as possible. On the other hand, I couldn’t bring myself to leave her side. I was an absolute mess.
A Shade of Vampire 63: A Jungle of Rogues Page 13